I sit to write about divorce and feel the twist of it in my belly, the prolonged smoldering. For after two and a half years of fighting to get back my marriage—like I’ve fought for nothing else in my life, I acknowledge it was never mine to keep. On the nearly deafening day two and [...]
“In the new humanity which is begotten today, the Word prolongs the unending act of [his/her] own birth.” ~ Pierre Tielhard de Chardin As Christians, we uphold a fully en-fleshed theological worldview. This is not just because incarnation of the Divine is a key part of our spiritual imagination (and by incarnation, I mean divinity [...]
“Sometimes the best map will not guide you; You can't see what's round the bend. Sometimes the road leads through dark places; Sometimes the darkness is your friend.” ~ Bruce Cockburn You could say I am fond of animals; I have loved many as pets and close companions. But never have I loved an animal [...]
Acts 17:26-28 …[Paul:] “God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” [...]
“…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 mystery is revealed so quietly, so unexpectedly, we must slow [...]
Matthew 12:41-42: “The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. 42 The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the [...]
I live along a country road that winds through a coastal river valley starting at one bay and reaching another. At one end of this idyllic road sits a shingled cottage with a hand-built stone wall out front covered each summer in tiny magenta flowers, and a large camellia bush presently blooming, dropping pink petals [...]
It is my daughter’s nineteenth birthday. I drive to her small Oregon college in the sorrel glow of ill-defined weather, feeling the strangeness of going to visit my one child at her new home, to share her dorm bathroom and sleep on her crusty dorm floor. We are unnatural in our separation, Madison and I, [...]
{Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA and the LEGUS Team Acknowledgement: R. Gendler. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0} When late fourth-century Christian theologians intuited a construct of God as multi-faceted and called that construct “trinity,” they had intuited something essential about reality. Trinity is the Christian philosophy of the nature of being, and it is proving more insightful [...]
I occasionally see a massage-therapist/healer with strong intuitive gifts—a gentle but powerful person of faith with astounding insights. Once in early 2015, after I’d seen her a few months, she shared something she had “seen” in the course of an appointment. She was massaging my feet and in a straight-forward, unassuming voice, said, “I saw [...]
John 8:7 “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.” Let’s talk about undocumented immigration. Misinformation and ignorance of our country’s immigration system abound, even among the well-read and generally informed. And the implications of wide-spread naivete by Americans about the US immigration system are heightened as the [...]
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” [...]
“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 song, “to trouble” is an old word meaning “to stir up,” and doesn’t necessarily have the modern meaning of trouble as “distress or pain.” But my [...]
A friend recently complained, “I wish Christianity wasn’t such a wimpy religion!” Turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, blessed are the meek—you know the drill. She is tired of it. She is angry and she wants fighting words. I countered that Christianity is not, in fact, wimpy (though I contend it is inherently [...]
For six years, I left church. And until the day I wandered back in 2010—mainly to accompany a friend, I didn’t expect to return. I needed time to learn what religion actually does when done well. Not only did I find a great church in the end, but I made peace with religion. I came [...]
I have been thinking about power, that squirrely thing, that trickster that hobbles its most infatuated suitors. Power, which we both fear and need. Specifically, I ponder: how are progressive Christians and other people of faith to approach change-making when the avenues of democratic engagement seem increasingly barricaded? How are we to speak out when [...]
(Photo Credit: Lindsey Norton, Facebook) “It is always darkest before the dawn,” a friend reminds me, the remark in reference to the presidential election. It is all about the long view these days—a sentence I write not dismissively, not to make myself feel better or assuage my disquiet, but amidst grief and disgust. Never have [...]
Oh the relief I found first studying apocalyptic literature as a 20-something undergrad theology student. The role it had played in my youth, when I knew nothing of symbolism, numerology, the veiled anti-languages of the beleaguered, was to drive me from my childhood bed in tears, fearing the figurative lapping flames, the “sign of the [...]
Again You are no different than asters that fall dead in sleep, reemerge each year strong and new. By midlife, you had fallen twice. First, watched the pieces leveled one by one, left to ask what remains when no one calls, when accolades fester into gossip, when all our proud self-sacrifice, clever deeds feed the [...]
It is the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Out the window of my day room at the Trappist Abbey in Lafayette, Oregon, an abbey named in her honor, I watch rain bear down, the jostling of giant firs. Back home in Tillamook County, the week’s torrents brought floods, landslides and road collapse, cutting [...]
“As a man dies many times before he’s dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.” —Godric (Frederick Buechner) Holding a friend’s newborn, a sacred ritual becomes more sacred. Marco’s mother rises to exit the sanctuary and fetch a bottle, baby crying, and I gladly offer [...]
It has been years since I had a shower. By this I mean a shower enclosure in my home. When I built my little house in the big woods, I installed a 100-year-old clawfoot with a cranberry-red exterior. Found on Craigslist, it's provenance was a Victorian house in north Portland. [...]
I recently participated in an event called Word & Image. Writers were randomly paired with artists. The artist selected a piece by the writer and created an artwork in response to it; and the writer selected an image by the artist, creating an artwork in response. I was paired with a talented photographer named Juleen Johnson. She [...]
{First published in Upper Left Edge, Spring 2015} A writer friend told me I was passed over for a recent book-signing because the organizer finds my book title “scary.” This wasn’t the first time I learned of such a reaction to Jesus Loves Women: A Memoir of Body and Spirit, and from readers who’d likely [...]
What makes a great life if not the interweaving of a million small threads? Small things add up. Small things matter. They are, in fact, the only things that matters. Since great accomplishments are nothing but the sum total of countless steps that appear insignificant in themselves, one does well to mind the details. This [...]