{Originally published in Friends Journal, March 2021} Sprawled on handmade quilts in a grassy orchard, sharing an outdoor, physically distanced visit with my friend Karen under purple pear and transparent apple trees, I am nowhere near a desert. My Willamette Valley farm home is more Edenic than it is barren, devoid, or austere. Yet when [...]
In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell tells of a mid-century Pennsylvania town called Roseto.[1] In the 50s, this town was populated entirely of people who'd come from a single Italian village of the same name. A young medical doctor who got to know the place became baffled by how the village had [...]
{Originally published in the beautifully designed Fall 2020 issue of Rathalla Review} We feel nineteen, I think, kissing, leaning into him as he rests his rear on the island in his light-flooded farmhouse kitchen. Only thing: when he was nineteen, I wasn’t born yet. Wasn’t a sparkle in my mother’s eye until he reached a [...]
I am somewhat haunted by a woman I once passed in Florence, Italy while vacationing in the late 90s. Since my teens I had dreamt of visiting Florence, and then there I was—living out the fantasy. But one day walking down a side street, I saw this woman. She apparently had Hansen’s disease, formerly called [...]
When things are good, we want to shield our eyes from whatever is up ahead. If we do this in an effort to live in the moment, acknowledging impermanence and accepting whatever life offers—wonderful. But most often, not wonderful. Most often we cling to the good like the cat in that 1970s “Hang in There” [...]
For someone whose chosen art form is words, I really prefer silence. Even more so, images. Almost every idea or value I hold is held as a vivid image, including notions of transcendence or God. Of course, to share these images, I resort to words. For example, I like to image God as a “flow,” [...]
Occasionally I go to the mailbox in my nightgown. Or I check our roadside egg-stand in my bathrobe after an evening soak. Living in the country, we don’t see much traffic, but we do see some. And each time I happen to the roadside clad in my night-things, I figure a neighbor or a worker [...]
In the intriguing book Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes the case that homo sapiens dominated all other species and left behind other early-humanoids because—of all things—we were able to pass on shared sacred stories. Basically, we prevailed because we can spin a good yarn. And a good yarn builds group cohesion. Prior to the ability to build [...]
Listening to a talk by JD Crossan, I was recently reminded that in the origin story opening the book of Genesis, Sabbath—not humanity—is creation’s mounting crescendo, creation’s pinnacle. I thought: I must remember this every day—everyday as I struggle against the capitalistic pressures, the personality pressures to push and produce in excess. Often, even as [...]
Have you ever participated in a Maundy Thursday foot washing? I find the ritual amusing. What amuses me is the awkwardness of most people, the squeamishness about touching others, the discomfort with an act so unfamiliar and so intimate. I’ve observed many people (okay, white people) choosing to pair up with a close family member [...]
{This essay, originally published in January 2017 right around the inauguration of Forty-Five, is among my most often read essays. It seems especially timely to re-share.} “Wade in the water. God’s gonna trouble the water.” In the centuries-old spiritual, we’re told to wade into the healing water because God will “trouble” the water. In the [...]
The most recent examples of social-media-captured racist action—most notably George Floyd’s murder, and the many reactions to them, cause perilous sadness. A swirling undertow of grief that is my own, but more so, part of a mammoth, mounting historical undertow of sadness that is nationwide. I add my voice to the call for justice and [...]
{This essay was written in 2017, but in the days of coronavirus seems timely to re-share. The thoughts and questions feel current. "What is the third way, the third stance and synthesis, that might help us ascend from this time having learned and evolved in important ways?"} You could say I am fond of animals; [...]
Much as I appreciate the intentions of those replacing covid-cancelled gatherings with online substitutions, I find myself unmoved by screen-time stand-ins. So many things have gone online: college courses, pub trivia nights, family reunions, dates, happy hours, book clubs, visits with grandparents, and of course, church. I honestly hope these replacements work for many people—that [...]
{Though I wrote this essay in April 2020, it still resonates in 2021. Perhaps even more so.} In quarantine, I’m of normal mood most days; other days I tear up a lot. Part of my Plan For Wellness involves feeling my feelings. Yet some days the feelings are so knotted and complex and all-inclusive I [...]
These days my twenty-eight year old daughter calls me daily, at least once. We are uniquely close, but normally talk by phone just a couple of times per week. Sometimes less. Yet here she is, a single, social-distancing millennial whose world, like that of many, has been upended by COVID-19 economics, and who has discovered [...]
There is something archaeological about moving—the artifacts of past lives and forgotten experiences we unearth, the evidence of emotional layers long since covered over. When I recently moved, I came across a 4x6” piece of paper on which I’d written in large letters, “God is in the obstacle.” The words were likely written four to [...]
{Excerpted from Season of Wonder by Tricia Gates Brown, 2016} “…The mystery of life in its totality is incomprehensible, and what can be understood often speaks in a language so slow that we seldom stick around long enough to hear it.” —Mark Nepo As Mark Nepo states so beautifully, what can be understood of life’s [...]
Among global literature, few narratives are as a baldly subversive and anti-imperial as the Christmas stories, while at the same time so neutralized. The gospel writers of Matthew and Luke (the only canonical gospels with birth narratives) each in their own unique way set up a stark confrontation between Jesus and the Roman Caesars, of [...]
{The following long piece is from a book-in-progress on the subject of 'everyday mysticism.'} When I set out to attend a PhD program in Scotland—in the captivating town of St. Andrews, the stirrings of my imagination went wild. Every fantasy I’d conjured watching Jane Austen movies, or PBS’s Masterpiece, of living in a stone cottage [...]
"Being a Christian involves living within the tradition and letting it shape our lives. It means letting these stories have their way with us.” Marcus Borg (emphasis added) Last week I listened to the book of Genesis on audio. It had been some time since I’d read or listened through it in its entirety. What [...]
When I bumped into a friend at the local bakery, it was the week approaching June 30, 2018. I planned to participate in an ecumenical “liturgy of lament” in my small coastal community in solidarity with protests happening across the country over family separations at the border. I thought this friend, being a sociopolitically-active progressive [...]
Sunday’s lectionary reading from Luke, about Jesus healing on the Sabbath a woman afflicted with illness for eighteen years, illustrates that in the ‘Reign of God’ as Jesus taught it, mercy is to be valued over other concerns. To Jesus, the freedom of this woman ranked so far above any law, that Jesus abraded the [...]
Interesting what sends the past bubbling up and burning. We’re at a soaking pool one evening, my then-husband and I, steeping like leaves of jasmine. A woman enters with a baby, less than two months under his little elastic waistband. My eyes gravitate toward the infant the way my eyes gravitate to all the wrinkly [...]
“Antonio” was visiting a small Oregon Coast tourist town in 1993 when he heard a man shouting to him out of nowhere. Alarmed, he quickly realized the stranger spoke to him in Spanish. “Trabajas? Trabajas?” the man yelled awkwardly, race-walking to catch up with him. “You work? You work?” Antonio, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, lived [...]