“As my fingers speed across the keyboard, I am awed by the dexterity of these small digits. I look at a stack of my prayer cards and am awed by the continuing creativity with which God blesses me. Wow, wow, wow. So much to be awed by, and I have not mentioned my neighbourhood awe and wonder walk which is once more a part of my daily exercise.”
“I’m pretty sure curiosity about Jesus was one of the main reasons people journeyed, sometimes long distances, to find out who this person was that they had heard about through word of mouth from others. Perhaps they heard someone quote one of Jesus’s teachings, or maybe it was the recounting of a miracle he had performed that caused them to want to hear and see more.”
“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.”
“Because who we say HE is is also who we say we are if we are to bear his name in truth.”
“Who do you say that I am?” he asks us,
and it is not enough to recognize,
to idolize,
to pay homage with forked tongue and fractured loyalties…
“Show your children that time with pen, paper, and books is never wasted.”
The idea is simple, but ideas by themselves are incomplete. To come alive and reach their fullness, Episcopal schools are centered in the conviction that ideas and ideals like goodness must take on flesh and become part of our everyday lives and practices. In the language of faith, goodness must become incarnational.
We forget how sharp the pain of grief is until we suffer a beloved’s death again.
Sorrow so deep we are certain we can’t sustain it and survive. We can’t breathe, or eat or sleep. Our bodies curl upon themselves, teeth clench, lungs and limbs quiver when we try to move. We can’t speak or listen or think. We sometimes feel we want to go down to the grave with our loved one.
Last week during our spiritual direction supervision meeting, one of my colleagues read a confession. She talked about feeling totally listless, gray. About how she cannot force herself to pray, how her exercise program has gone out the window and she finds herself turning on the TV too often, watching too much “news” and other empty programming. At several points as I listened I found myself silently affirming, “I do that, too.”
The story of Jesus going through the cornfield reminded me of September, even though I’m a few miles from the nearest cornfield, which will soon be a Halloween maze. Corn is always a welcome food, boiled, grilled, creamed, or used in succotash or cottage pie. It’s best when it’s fresh, and people in the store rummage through the bins of unshucked corn, checking for readiness. The disciples must have found ripe corn or even corn beginning to dry on the stalk because they rubbed the ears in their hands to loosen the corn for eating.