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...

  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...