One of the most well-known types of “going out” is when people leave church for a period of years and then they come back to find that it’s not as they remembered at all. Maybe they even wonder why they left.
God covers a multitude of our sins, that’s a given. Our asking for forgiveness from God is not so much for God as it is for us. We need to acknowledge and ask for forgiveness, not because it’s going to change anything except us.
Why, then, do we cling so desperately to control and certainty? Well, if control and certainty are the first two legs of the three-legged stool of arrogance, fear is the third.
The Feast Day of Prudence Crandall As I was reading about Prudence Crandall, the Holy Woman we honor today, a memory floated into my consciousness.
The idea that one could take a garment, or a person, wash them in blood, and have them come out clean says to me that these are people who have suffered and lost, who have been immersed in suffering, who have had pain stick to them like dried blood; and yet, they have come though the other side of suffering clean and dry, their robes made white, their pain relieved.
To the cynical, the distracted, the bored, Jesus commands: Ephphata… Be opened! Open your hearts. Open your minds. Open your senses. Open your will to believe.
the martyr’s wheel rises
the break beatified
by a fragrant halo
silvery traces of the soul’s flight
toward paradise
What “gift that is in you” might be a bit neglected, buried in the grass in the flowerbed that is your life, and how can it re-emerge to be a part of the church in the world? What is your stake in the world, where grace calls you to be more fully present?
Reading from the Commemoration of John Bunyan ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the
I wondered in what way I could offer myself as a priest. Laura told me to make sure I brought holy water. That invited me to think how I could bless people.