Thursday, September 27, 2018 | Reflections
A few years ago, I spent a week in the Taizé ecumenical monastic community in France. Brother Roger, an incredible peacemaker, started the community in 1940, and thousands of people visit each year, seeking spiritual solace. The worship style of Taizé features a...
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 | Reflections
I often wonder how much has changed since the time of the psalmist. We are still asking the same questions of God and our neighbor. In the psalms of lament, the poetry nearly always turns toward faith in God, trust in God’s goodness, and a call for spiritual...
Tuesday, September 25, 2018 | Reflections
God chooses to come into the world through a body and into a body. Mary grows and eventually groans another human body into the world. Today, we see the Holy Spirit coming to earth in physical form. Jesus’ ministry is so deeply tactile—he is touching and eating...
Monday, September 24, 2018 | Reflections
I live in an intentional community in a house on eight acres of land. There are five humans in our house. We pray, eat, and do social justice work together alongside fifteen chickens, a beehive, and the inhabitants of the surrounding forest. We have a vegetable...
Sunday, September 23, 2018 | Reflections
Once upon a time, I lived in an Episcopal Service Corps volunteer community. This was a high-commitment, high-emotional-stakes endeavor. We purposely entered into tender conversations and tried to work through immense differences in an effort to build a caring...
Saturday, September 22, 2018 | Reflections
What an honor to receive such a critique: to be turning the powers upside down, to be following Jesus and not the empire! Historically, this was the day when the fool was a king and the king a fool, when masked tricksters roved the streets and criticized the...
Friday, September 21, 2018 | Reflections
In La Teológia de Liberación, Gustavo Gutierrez, a Roman Catholic priest writing in the 1970’s in Peru, explains the central tenet of Catholic social teaching: the “preferential option for the poor.” This teaching helps us understand that the poor among us hear the...
Thursday, September 20, 2018 | Reflections
I’m a part of a Christian arts troupe called Carnival de Resistance. For one month each year, thirty artist/activists live together in a sustainable eco-village. We perform liturgical theater productions under a circus big top, animating the voices of ancient prophets...
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 | Reflections
My Korean great-grandmother immigrated to Hawaii as a “picture bride” and was married to a stranger in a Maui sugarcane camp. She settled with her family in central Oahu and had a legendary garden behind her house. When she visited Korea, she always smuggled seeds...
Tuesday, September 18, 2018 | Reflections
It is audacious for the chief priests to threaten Lazarus with death, a man who has already been there and back again. But this overarching audacity is also part and parcel of the ways those in power work against Jesus—trying to stamp out all signs of hope, to...
Monday, September 17, 2018 | Reflections
The darkness of the world threatens to overwhelm me sometimes. From individual encounters with people who disappoint me to large-scale global tragedies, the darkness can feel like more than the human heart was wired to hold. Notably, Psalm 56 makes no distinction...
Sunday, September 16, 2018 | Reflections
This passage from Proverbs reminds me that wisdom is often gained by direct experience in the wide world rather than from being buried in a book. I was a self-proclaimed pacifist for the first eighteen years of my life. Then I traveled to the Holy Land with a group of...
Saturday, September 15, 2018 | Reflections
God is so sassy in this passage, and I love it. Like a mother taking her own child to task, here we see God reminding Job about exactly who Job is and who God is: “Remember this planet you’re standing on? Yeah, I did that. And where were you?”This passage...
Friday, September 14, 2018 | Reflections
One of the many revolutionary gospel ideals—one that deeply moves me—is downward mobility, the idea of choosing to forsake power rather than grow it. So many societal problems would be solved if this ideal were ingrained in our collective consciousness. Radical folk...
Thursday, September 13, 2018 | Reflections
Job is describing how our personal behavior can be affected and changed depending upon the audience. It is much easier to take radical action amongst allies and people who share the same beliefs than it is amongst dissenters. Inciting conflict is not something most of...
