St. John’s Abbey church is an amazing cavern with a multi-story wall of honeycomb shaped windows. Each pane is filled with abstract shapes and color. They grow more beautiful as morning light rises. However, this morning the beauty cannot outweigh the exclusivity and harm of the words and deeds of the tradition itself.
Read MoreOrdinary Time XXXIII
This post is especially for the many of you who are also writers, or aspiring writers, sermon writers, devotional writers, academic writers, bloggers, and journal-keepers. This week I took steps to solidify one of my most central habits. I have a habit of writing. It has been slow coming.
Read MoreOrdinary Time XX
One of the central metaphors for my work and sense of vocation is a bridge. This summer I saw one of the most iconic bridges of the American imagination: Golden Gate in San Francisco, California. Both days we got close to the bridge it was shrouded partially in fog. Not unusual in the Bay area. Not unusual for the work of bridge building and walking.
Read MoreOrdinary Time II
I spent the summer of 1990 in Birmingham, Alabama. Like most summers in the deep South, it was hot, sweltering and sticky that summer. I had completed my first semester of seminary, and wanted to get some “field work” under my belt. So I applied to be an editorial assistant at Woman’s Missionary Union. I’d grown up on a steady diet of missions literature and practice which came out of Birmingham, so this was a bit like going to the holy city for me. Like most pilgrimages it had its moments of awe and its moments of disillusionment. It also held moments of learning and friendship, which have deepened across the years.
Read MoreEaster IX
Tomorrow Pentecost begins. The birthday of the church! At my church we’ll wear red and celebrate the coming of the Spirit with wind and fire and bells. But right now it is the last day of Eastertide. On Good Friday, April 2, our family and some friends spent a good portion of the day putting in a quarter acre garden. The Great Flood of Nashville hit a month later May 1-3. We suffered very little damage to personal property. With the exception of the garden. It was under eight-to-ten feet of water for most of two days. And it was pretty well destroyed.
Read MoreLent III
“On practicing Our Faith” On practice. On practicing our faith. On practicing our faith with the Jesus story.
Where exactly are we in the Jesus story, right about now? Let’s try to locate ourselves on our journey through the Jesus story. The lectionary. You recall what that is: the list of scriptures that reaches out across the Christian landscape and leads us week by week and season by season through each church year. Each year we follow the Jesus story in the Gospel readings . . .
Epiphany IX
Embodied Practice: Three Crashes from the Past Week
I stood looking at my things for the Prayer and Pastoral Care class: papers, books, chime. I was missing my water and one book. My watch said I had about three minutes before it was time to start the class. Just enough time to run up to my office and back down to the classroom. I turned quickly to my left and headed for the door. Half way there: Crash.
Christmas II
Pastors don’t pray much it seems. They are busy. But they are not filling their time with prayer, meditation or personal devotion. At least a study that came out this week says this is the case. Seems to me that more than families are likely hurting if pastoral leaders are spending so little time attending to their own spiritual lives. But lest I sound too judgmental, I remember well the struggle to care for my own spiritual well-being while also attending to the spiritual well-being of those I served in the years when I was full-time on a church staff. Even when I was doing what I knew to do to care for my own soul, it was not always the most effective or spiritually nourishing thing I could be doing.
Read MoreChristmas I
Christmas has finally come and gone and the night is deepening around me. Silent but for the tapping of keys on my computer and the distant whine of a train whistle. A few cracks and pops say that my in-laws’ house is still settling in for a long winter’s nap. Family Christmas celebrations are complete. Scraps of wrapping paper litter the floor and the bare-bottom tree seems a little spent.
Christmastide, being one of the shortest seasons of the liturgical year, celebrates the revealing of God in the world, the inbreaking of a Living Word into the mundane and daily routines of our lives. But how does the season live on through the year? Or should it?
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