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Resurrection is not a shortcut around grief

  Resurrection is not a shortcut around grief. Teri McDowell Ott And there is was: a relatively brief sentence which exploded my Lenten moroseness. For one of my many growing edges is that I too often look for shortcuts, the easiest most expeditious way out. I am learning to pause and reflect on this long cultivated reaction; I am learning that sometimes the long way is the greatest teacher, of dear value. When I have paused and thought twice about the easy way and reconsidered the road not taken, I have learned valuable lessons albeit difficult ones. Like Jacob I have accepted wounds from the wrestling while being blessed by an angel in adversarial disguise.   Lent offers an entire season of reconsideration of shortcuts, easy answers, and non stop flights. Lent invites us to linger, to ponder choices, to engage in discernment which is different from mere decision making. Discernment, like Lent, is a prayerful process, not a moment of action, though action may result in due ti...
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The Next Faithful Thing

  “May your eyes be attuned to the good already happening. And may you do the next faithful thing, even when no one notices and nothing feels resolved.” Kate Bowler May you do the next faithful thing… This has become my prayer during this season of Lent when my fear or grandiosity oversteps my capabilities and reality. As I learn to be present and not fix (as though I could?!), as I learn to pause and not hurl myself into the void, I can feel my lens adjust to the simple next step. Somehow I feel a gentle liberation, not the fireworks kind we celebrate, but the quiet kind we too often forget. The next faithful thing then becomes exciting and energizing. What might it look like? The next faithful thing might be recommitting to a deeper practice of prayer. I pause before hitting play on the Netflix series I have been binging and pour a cup of tea as I settle for a long afternoon gaze at the ocean. I think of God and all whom I love.   The next faithful thing might be to call a f...
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Reprise

  Lent begins on Wednesday with the imposition of ashes and the reminder that we are but dust. I have come to understand this as a call to humility and a return to our true home, our true selves. Accordingly, this Lent I am returning to the 800plus emails I have sent into the world since the Covid pandemic of March 2020 and rethinking them as I look for kernels of hope and truth.   March, 2020, I think we all remember where we were when en masse we entered the wilderness of pandemic. It was a wilderness at once confining and vast in its uncertainty. Since then it seems we may have emerged from some isolation due to virus, even though many are still suffering and contagion continues, but we have been assaulted by multiple pandemics, racial violence, oppression, poverty, guns, forms of weaponization and fascism. The wilderness continues or expands; fear and uncertainty have become now 6 years later quotidian.   Below is the first of my posts labeled “liturgeemails” begun in...
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blessing in a bottle

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  As I began to slip into the despair of these times, feeling like circling a drain, obsessed with news feeds and horrific images, I came across entirely different images for which I hadn’t known I was looking. I had fallen into the desperate habit of scrolling on social media. I usually justified this by telling myself I was looking for beauty and I would pause on photographs of owls sending out wisdom or paintings of the sea inviting me to immerse myself in grace.   Something different happened this time. A group of pedestrian monks were walking…just walking. Something about their faces, their pace, their commitment and their witness caught me up short. I opened their page, Walk For Peace, and started reading their posts. Peace, mindfulness, well-being. Image after image emoted these qualities. They were peace. And they were just walking. Yet peace seemed to emit from their bodies.  Then there were crowds of people including children who seemed not only to anticipate th...
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outbursts of hope

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  Outburst of hope A great armored machine gnaws toward us on cruel tractor treads, venting fumes of sorrow and dread, a friendly logo of terror painted on its side, boasting invincibility. We stand in its path, naked and fragile. But not helpless. Not afraid. We don't await heroic intervention. Our flesh is Word made flesh. We love courageously. We tell truth. Make noise. Sing lustily. We give wildly. Take every hand extended. We impede the wheels. We don't stop. Our joy is disturbing, our peace unsettling, our confidence reorienting. We live every day as an outburst of hope. Every day we rise.                                 Steve Garnaas-Holmes Outburst…starburst; explosive, powerful, surprising. Explosive and powerful are words which trigger these days and not all of us like surprises. Trigger murder, violence, capture, and corruption. Hard to see the hope in any of those bursts of physical power. ...
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We Love By Grace

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  Savior       by Steve Garnaas Holmes           To you is born this day           in the city of David           a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Holy One.                        —Luke 2.11 On a cold night, bundled in our fears, tired from taking care of ourselves, we come, curious: maybe there's something here for us. Angels promised a savior, but this is no one who could bail us out: a mere infant, who could never fight for us, or overwhelm our enemies, sneak us out of the trouble we're in or take for us the lashes we have coming. This is no one who could strike a bargain for us. How could this one save us from the failure of the lives we were meant to live? He gazes up at us serenely with utter trust, ...
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Relax Into Radiance

  So Soon  An hour after we light the tree, it’s hard to remember how the room used to be — so soon we relax into radiance. It makes me want to whisper luminous words, string kindnesses together like twinkling garlands, hang them wherever it’s dim. If we all spoke in light, imagine that glow — how quickly even the darkest spaces inside and between us could become welcoming, warm, even, imagine, incandescent.               Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer While the proem above’s point of reference is a tree lighting, I am wondering, as I sit here on Christmas eve in a darkness interrupted by a radiance human made and divine, whether it is also a metaphor for the birth of light and love. After a long Advent sprinkled with tiny points of light in a darkness of violence and deceit, fear and random cruelty, “it’s hard to remember how the room used to be.” From wilderness to cave we emerge witnesses to a magnanimous glow -“so soon we relax into radia...
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Advent Made New Again

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    Be ready by Steve Garnaas Holmes               You must be ready,              for the Human One is coming              at an hour you do not expect.                                —Matthew 24.44 Grace flits in, a butterfly in winter. Forgiveness dismantles gallows. A child, frightened, stands anyway. The minds of the dulled are on other things. Heaven passes unnoticed. The naive keep waiting for the white horse, the sword. Foggy opera glasses. Cynics, fearing the mystery, can always prove otherwise. The lock snaps shut. The faithful are not sure but open, watching for the luminous. A spirit, wholly given, emerges like a song...
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