“To this day I can’t tell you how it happened.
All I can tell you
is that I saw that bag
with the five loaves and two fish
get swallowed up into the night and the crowd,
and I never saw it again,
and twelve baskets of bread came back to us.”
“I know he told us (pretty sternly, in fact)
Not to tell anyone how we got our sight back…
Yet we can tell you beyond the shadow of a doubt
We have no problems telling you how he taught us to believe again.”
Readings for the feast of Anna Ellison Butler Alexander, Friday, September 24, 2021: Psalm 78; Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Matthew 11:25-30 Our Gospel reading for the feast
“Crummell’s greatest light, though, was that through all these changes, all these moves, all these convolutions in his own life, he remained a lifelong scholar, author, and teacher of moral philosophy in a number of academic posts during his career. His work in moral philosophy would be the foundation of other great African-American thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Henry P, Slaughter. He was able to stake a moral foundation for the equality of all races despite all the barriers slavery and Jim Crow threw at him.”
“The story of Thomas Gallaudet and Henry Winter Syle stands as a living testimonial of how a single relationship, like a pebble tossed into a lake–creates ripples that spread further outward.”
“But…you know…
Here’s the part I can’t get out of my head.
‘Your faith has made you well.’ Your faith.
And, in all honesty,
I was one of the people thinking, ‘Shut up, dude.'”
“Wait–He still wants to come?
I’m not sure it will make a difference.
They will probably chide me even more now
and sit in their circles over wine and dinner
and debate the particulars
of whether I let an unclean man in my house,
but I no longer care.”
“I wonder…
I really do…
if we could buttonhole Mark
in a corner of the café
where the company of saints
sips espresso”
“(Author’s Note: Officially, the feast day of James Weldon Johnson is still a bit in limbo, since General Convention has not yet approved the calendar of feast days in A Great Cloud of Witnesses. That said, Johnson’s life is such an amazing display of God’s gifts and talents shining through one person, he deserves “off-label” mention, in my opinion.–M. Evans.)”
“Receiving a new name is a common theme in the Bible, a name that always seems to match the new role. I have to wonder about the yin-yang of that. Does the name come from who we are to begin with, personality-wise, or is it something to hold up as an icon for inspiration? Or is it a little of both? “