Category: Speaking to the Soul

“There I sat, opening, emptying, and resting. In that 30-minute ferry ride and while fully awake, I felt as though I had a deep, soul-cleansing nap.”

“Open my eyes, Lord, to your goodness.
I want to see love between neighbors
kindness to strangers
forgiveness after wrongdoing…”

“Being with my mother after her surgery encouraged me to reflect on my own beliefs and write my own personal creed. It provides a statement that I can return to whenever I feel insecure in my faith. It’s a little like a calling statement but with a little more detail about what I believe rather than what I want to do with my live.”

“So begins the Plague Quilt. Measure, cut, feed squares and strips through the sewing machine. My mind busy, less busy, quieter, quiet. Examining a wonky corner of a 9-patch quilt square the thought occurs: this pandemic has revealed all the wonky corners of our world, our country, our lives, and relationships; where are my wonky corners?”

“The thing is, if we are offspring of a living God in Whom we live and move and have our being, then we should be able to be very concrete and clear about where we see God moving in the world around us. In our parish life, for sure, but also in the world at large; we should not be able to pick up a newspaper without seeing God at work in its pages.”

“Thus, we saw three kinds of gaps: one that is the better for being joyfully and playfully filled; one that was once been filled but now testifies to and lamented an absence; and one that makes visible a gap and an opportunity for growth that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.”

“Too many times, though, I’ve tried to capture God – using this methodology or some other. Capture, like the disciples tried to capture eternity at the Transfiguration, promising to  erect tents as though experience with God could be possessed. Intellectually, we know experience cannot be possessed, I know it cannot be owned.”

“I want words filled with love
dripping with grace
overflowing with kindness.”

“Merry-making can be a way for us to take the joy and excitement that is bursting from inside us and express it externally within these frameworks of tradition. It is like a sacrament with a small ‘s’ – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace—joy that is a gift from God.”

“God does not take care of Grandma and Grandpa in the way that I as a small child expected.  After all, Grandma and Grandpa died.  God takes care of them in a more essential way.  God stands in a never-ending relationship with us, a relationship in which we are one with everything that exists.”