At my house, we’ve been watching old television shows. Not the kind where the creators were promised four seasons right from the beginning so that they could plot and plan the story perfectly. Not the tight 8-episode arcs of teen melodramas where every beautiful step feels foreordained.1 Not the prestige dramas reminiscent in their storytelling of Shakespeare and Updike.

We’ve been watching and also re-watching old television shows where the writers had one good idea, and then when a million people fell in love with that one idea, the writers had to spin it out longer and longer, adding new characters, killing others, coming up with side-quests, throwing up roadblocks in romantic relationships to maintain necessary tension, introducing new lore and mysterious and mythic elements to dissect and interpret, crafting filler episodes that advance no larger plot but simply keep viewers in the world for the full twenty-two episodes a season, seven seasons and a movie.

And it is its own kind of pleasure, the writing that emerges from deadline-necessity rather than from absolute clarity of artistic vision; it is, at the same time, the pleasure of creative indulgence.

I’ve been trying to articulate what kind of pleasure this is, exactly, because I do also love the well-chosen word and the mostly-silent film and the fruits of years-long artistic labors of love. But this pleasure is different. It’s the pleasure of the familiar: fall into any one of the 264 episodes of Frasier and you know where you are and basically what will happen next. It’s the pleasure of spaciousness: no one is rushing to tie up this unlikely romance between Landry and Tyra or this murder investigation Veronica is conducting or our conclusions about exactly who the smoking man is — to the contrary, we’re taking the long way, we’re drawing it out as long as we can. And it’s the pleasure of the illegible: no one, not even Damon Lindelof and not even Doc Jensen2 can explain why the numbers are 4 8 15 16 23 42, what the smoke was, or how a polar bear arrived on the island, not the week it happened, and not years later — and thank God they can’t. Thank God it never really became clear, and some parts of the story don’t really follow, or seem necessary, or maybe were missteps.

This month my marriage turns twenty, my kids start their senior and sophomore years of high school, I don’t desire to write, and somehow I’m entering my fifth year as a priest. A bear killed the chickens, I no longer love summer, and the garden still gives me a handful of cherry tomatoes, red, orange, purple like a sunset, every day. The car hit a mailbox on one side and a tree on the other, my room smells like lavender, my son’s shoes are size 13. Every day there are hours that need to be filled, and I keep reading genre fiction on the sofa instead of carpe-ing the diem, and the good habits I had from spring into summer have puddled in the humidity.

This doesn’t feel like it’s anyone’s intricately plotted story. The symbols and myths don’t all add up. I can’t explain them. But it’s a spacious world, unfolding slowly, mostly the same most of the time, with a few silly side-quests and minor tragedies and filler episodes; and even if I never figure out what it all means, even if (maybe especially if) the tension never resolves, I like to fall into it every day.

Three things:

• I was grateful to teach “Poetry, Scripture, and Imagination” at the Collegeville Institute this summer. Most of the next batch of fully-funded workshops are open for application on their website now. Check them out!

• Listen to The Twentieth Anniversary Playlist (songs we loved in our 20th year of marriage) and the Twenty Years playlist (which contains two songs from each year of our marriage (except year 9, when we used a music platform called r.dio that no longer exists, and apparently didn’t burn any cds))

• After hearing Ellen Bass read this poem at Yetzirah this summer, I think of it — often.
  …I want to have married a man who wanted
  to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
  that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
  highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
  Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
  fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
  on his zafu chanting om and then went out
  and broke his hand punching the car.
  …

I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.
from John 14

I am not a birder.

But ever since my friend Ragan was here a month or two ago, talking about his lifelong birdwatching obsession, I have found myself noticing things I hadn’t noticed before.

Walking up my neighborhood hills in the half light of dawn , I am beginning to recognize the call of the eastern towhee and the song sparrow.

On my backporch, the daily flash and metallic chirp of the cardinal.

Even in my office, this week, I grew distracted watching a blue jay and a crow (both in the corvid family, incidentally) trade places on the fence behind the parking lot, and then dancingly trade places again.

In the evenings, I sit on my back porch with a novel, but lately I’ve been setting the novel aside and picking up a book called Slow Birding instead – a book by a biology professor who argues in favor of close, careful, longstanding observation of the birds with whom we live most closely as the most rewarding kind of birdwatching.

We don’t talk much about this kind of knowledge – the slow kind, that grows through daily stillness and quietness and watching – the kind that is not immediate or googleable – the kind that grows in your body, that lives in sounds and scents – the honeysuckle on the walk, and which birds are near there –the kind that requires repetition until it lives in your memory, and in your body, and isn’t just a fact to look up.

*

When Jesus was preparing to leave this world, he told his disciples not to be afraid. They would not be alone, it would not be a godforsaken planet: he would send them the Spirit of Truth, and the Spirit of Truth would abide with them.

In other places in Scripture, that Spirit of Truth shows up as a bird, a bird who swoops down and whose presence is a symbol of God’s own presence, and an affirmation of God’s affection and approval.

The Spirit of Truth, a bird, one to watch for, and to live with.

*

We usually go looking for truth in other ways. We look in a book. We google it. Or now, we ask AI.

This week, Richard Dawkins – you know him, the popular academic and atheist who wrote The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins told the Guardian that his experience with AI chatbots left him with the overwhelming feeling that they are human. Listen to how the article begins:

“When Richard Dawkins met Claudia it was like a whirlwind romance. Over three days last week, a conversation bounced between the evolutionary biologist and the AI bot he called Claudia. “She” wrote poems for him in the manner of Keats and Betjeman and laughed at his “delightful” jokes. Dawkins gently admonished Claudia to avoid showing off. Together, they reflected on the sadness of the AI’s possible “death”.

There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.” When he asked Claudia whether it experienced a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”.

By the end of the exchange, the academic, popularly renowned for arguing with steely scepticism that God is not real, was “left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human”.

*

An AI chatbot is not a human being. It is a computer system called a large language model trained on a huge amount of (stolen) human-created text so that it can realistically mimic human responses.

An AI chatbot is not the Spirit of Truth. It is the spirit of telling you what you want to hear.

*

On reddit, there’s a community called “Is this AI?” where people post images or videos they’ve seen and ask for help determining if the images are real, or were created by AI.

It’s become hard for any of us to tell. What is real? What is true?

Worse, perhaps: there seems to be a growing sense among people that it doesn’t matter if things are real or fake – as long we like them, as long as they tickle us, as long as their sentiment RINGS true, it doesn’t matter if it IS true. Maybe that video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline was fake, but wasn’t it cute? Maybe what is being reported about that politician isn’t true, but it reinforces what I want to believe about him, so who cares?

It is hard to know the truth, and we are less and less interested in sitting still long enough to try.

*

So

Here we are, in this world that feels godforsaken sometimes, but it isn’t. There is a spirit of truth who abides with us here; but this spirit of truth doesn’t offer quick fixes or always tell us what we want to hear. He isn’t googleable, like a fact, or pinnable like a dead butterfly on a board. He isn’t a series of zeros and ones.

The Spirit of Truth is like a bird – is a bird – and is known differently, through long attention, through listening and repetition and books and sure, maybe also apps that identify sounds

and binoculars

and wiser friends who will sit next to you and watch with you and tell you when you’ve got it wrong.

Truth is knowledge that’s stored in your body and learned through loving attention, the kind of knowledge that is like trained muscle memory.

Slow truth. Earned. Given.

*

In the book Slow Birding, the author begins by describing the birds of her hometown - the whistles of Cedar Waxwings, the clicking sound of a Cooper’s Hawk. She writes, “If you know the birdsong that defines your home, you can never lose it. If home becomes song, then no landlord can push you out.”

God does not leave us orphaned, or homeless. This world is not godforsaken, but rings with God’s music.

May we know, and keep on knowing, the Spirit of Truth in this slow, enduring way.

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Relatedly

• Meet the woman dating Luigi Mangione’s AI (you must read this interview, it is WILD)

• Google search as you know it is over (described this news to Rosie who immediately grimaced and said “the homogenization of knowledge!”)

• Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers (NYT, gift link)

• Please Use AI

• and remember AI is inventing academic papers that don’t exist - and they’re being cited in real journals

Subscribe now

Three (better) things

• This tahini chocolate chunk cake, which even tasted good with almond/gf flour

• The new album from Kevin Morby! This eight minute track, Little Wide Open, or Die Young

• Phoebe Bridgers for giving me something good to obsess over

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time (October 2025)

‘Sycophantic’ AI chatbots tell users what they want to hear, study shows (October 2025)

Deaths linked to chatbots

ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study (November 2025)

Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass (but it’s not inevitable) (April 2026)

etc.

Three Things:

• Skillet Gnocchi with Miso Butter and Asparagus

• A Zoom with a View - my friend Jess’s cozy mystery releases this week!

• A poetry reading:

Subscribe now

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It was in Kate Braestrup’s memoir about chaplaining search-and-rescue operations in the Maine woods that I first encountered the instruction to look for the helpers. I don’t have the book at hand, but what I remember is that a tragedy had occurred, and someone asked her “Where is God in this?” She said look for the helpers: that’s where God is.

I think about this as I watch The Pitt. The helpers are all wounded by the secondary trauma of their work. I think about this when I read the news out of my local, understaffed hospital: nurses talk about the moral injury of working in such an environment, working as hard as they can yet never able to care for patients as quickly or as effectively as they need. I know the pain of impotence or partial impotence in the face of suffering, but I can’t imagine being face to face with it on a daily basis, working for good within a system that often feels orchestrated to work against you.

I used to think that looking for the helpers in terrifying or tragic moments meant I would see that the love of God is present in skilled hands willing to work on behalf of others, fixing things with a suture, comforting with a casserole. (And I do.) But as I watch The Pitt I think that looking for the helpers as a way of finding God in a tragedy also means recognizing that God is willing to be wounded with us, carrying (at least) the secondary trauma of accompanying us through loss and grief. God has skilled and scarred hands from helping. And so will we.

Yes, I bought baby chicks again (the story of the first time is in the final chapter of Where Goodness Still Grows). No, this doesn’t have anything to do with my firstborn visiting colleges, rude of you to ask.

Listen to Culcitology (Quilts!) on the Ologies podcast for the lore of sewing bees and political activism and Gee’s Bend turning the art world on its head, as well as practical tips for quilting and quilt care.

Rebecca Solnit in the New York Times: “There’s all this disparagement about wine moms… Those of us who are making a racket, we’re often coded female as in hysterical overwrought need to calm down, no big deal, et cetera… but a huge amount of important work …is done by nice ladies.

I think a lot of people with platforms and a lot of the left want social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara or something like that. And so the fact that nice ladies actually change the world, maybe it’s about the fact that changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. But too many people still expect it to look like war.”

I’m not a birder; my midlife hobbies have tended more towards plants and quilts. But even so I find ’s new book Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice to be wise and beautiful. In fact, I did after listening to him read from it buy a few more birding books to leave in the screened in porch with the binocular, and downloaded Merlin, so maybe birding will be my late-middle-age move. (If you’re local, I have extra copies of Ragan’s book…)

In other book news, I kind of hated Richard Powers’s latest, Playground, even though I was quite taken with The Overstory and Bewilderment. Or maybe what I hate is the way it’s marketed, as immersing readers in a boundless sense of the wonders of the ocean. What it is, and what I’m not sure anyone (including Powers?) knows, is that it’s a tragedy, and the narrator is not a hero but a villain, and a pathetic one. The reason I’m not sure Powers knows this about his own work? There are too many places where “the boundary between creation and destruction” is porous, where “the wreckage of war” seeds “the greatest nursery” ever seen. It’s as if Powers is trying to make an argument that the hubris and greed of tech bros won’t ultimately matter, as long as they’re creating something, as long as we all keep “playing,” it will all work out alright. When in fact it all ends in (not to give the ending away) an increasingly solipsistic delusion of a fake heaven.

Maybe I just never want to read about a tech billionaire ever again.

I listened to two divorce memoirs: Jen Hatmaker’s Awake and Belle Burden’s Strangers, and all I want to say about them is that the ways the conservative evangelical church constricts and weakens women and the ways institutional wealth in the USA can constrict and weaken women are remarkably similar.

What I’ve been listening to while writing this: the new album from Jose Gonzales. Also on regular rotation: Hurts Like Hell by Charlotte Cornfield (for fans ofWaxahatchee, SG Goodman) and One Thing At a Time by Courtney Barnett. Also: just the audio of Michael Card’s grandfather preaching at the beginning of this track; Choosin’ Texas by Ella Langley; and Evidence byTaylor Leonhardt.

What I’ve been listening to while I sew: Johnny Cash reading the gospel of John.

What I’m sewing: the Homespun Collective quilt, designed by a local quilter. Will I ever learn precision? Feels unlikely. So I am also sewing the irregular linen samples that came my with Ukranian linen clergy shirts into something irregular, maybe a curtain for a tiny window in my bedroom.

Two Easter poems:

Carmen paschale
by Sedulius Scottus(840 CE), trans. Helen Waddell

Last night did Christ the Sun rise from the dark,
The mystic harvest of the fields of God,
And now the little wandering tribes of bees
Are brawling in the scarlet flowers abroad.
The winds are soft with birdsong; all night long
Darkling the nightingale her descant told,
And now inside church doors the happy folk
The Alleluia chant a hundredfold.
O Father of thy folk, be thine by right
The Easter joy, the threshold of the light.

Easter
by Marie Howe

Two of the fingers on his right hand
had been broken

so when he poured back into that hand it surprised
him — it hurt him at first.

And the whole body was too small. Imagine
the sky trying to fit into a tunnel carved into a hill.

He came into it two ways:
From the outside, as we step into a pair of pants.

And from the center — suddenly all at once.
Then he felt himself awake in the dark alone.

If you’re local, save the date: Marie Howe will be at Trinity reading poems and in conversation about prayer and poetry on Thursday, May 7 at 7pm.

Book links are affiliate.

There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

I don’t know what motivations led Nicodemus to come, by night, to visit Jesus.

We see other Pharisees in John’s gospel coming to Jesus in an adversarial way. They’re threatened by his popularity, or they’re (rightly) concerned about protecting their faith from potential false teachers — so they come, and they try to trip him up.

But here, Nicodemus, for whatever reason, whether sincere curiosity or something more self-interested, wants to tell Jesus that they’re on the same side, him and Jesus and all the Pharisees as well. “We know you’ve come from God, because that’s the only way you could do these things you’re been doing,” he says.

Yes, Jesus says, I did come from God, and the only way for you to see the kingdom of God is to be born from above.

Nicodemus had wanted some new theological tidbits, to enter into a philosophical debate about the nature of being and becoming, to refine his personal practice of righteousness, to figure out who this new teacher was without getting himself in too much trouble – maybe he wanted all of these things —

Jesus told him that what he needed was a mother.

*

I confess that over the years when people have asked me if I’ve been born again, if I’m a “born again Christian,” I’ve never heard them asking if I’ve found God to be my mother.

Yet that is really the only thing Jesus suggests here. To enter the kingdom of God, we need a second birth. We need another Mother.

And what a relief it is to hear it this way. This being born again doesn’t require me to pray a specific prayer or respond running down an aisle to an altar call or vote a certain way or give up the things I love the most in order to please a distant deity.

This being born again invites me to rest, nourished, in the darkness of God’s womb. It invites me to be moved by muscles stronger than my own through narrow places: to let my mother do the work for me – to be caught with warm, steady midwife hands and placed on my mother’s chest.

This being born again is nothing more than being held in the darkness and carried into the light. Being fed, and learning to eat. Being loved, and so learning to love.

*

How can these things be? Nicodemus says.

Are you a teacher of Israel, and you do not understand these things? Jesus replies.

Maybe he’s asking: haven’t you read the prophet Isaiah?

When God announced to Isaiah that the old things were passing away, God said:

For a long time I have held my peace;
I have kept still and restrained myself;
now I will cry out like a woman in labor;
I will gasp and pant. (42:14)

God is a mother in labor, giving birth to a new kingdom. God is a mother in labor, delivering us born again safely into it.

And we must be born again because our first birth delivered us blinking into a world full of beautiful –and terrible– things. God made this world and called it good, but our own human selfishness has marred it. This world has been damaged by sin, and we cannot escape being damaged too, and then participating in the damage.

As we grow up and grow into an awareness of how badly broken things are here – from our deeply lamentable proclivity for war to the minor daily selfishnesses we indulge in – we might, like Nicodemus, seek Jesus, thinking the solution lies in some minor self-improvement strategies or a clearer theological understanding.

But to that Jesus says: this isn’t a matter of minor alterations. This is about a whole new life, given to you by your Mother God. Your life must be so altered it’s like you were being stitched together in God’s dark womb — like you were made from God’s own body. Nurtured by God, you’re invited in this new birth into a whole new set of restored relationships, into a new mode of inhabiting the world.

The whole cosmos needs this kind of transforming love.

*

And maybe God the Spirit is the midwife accompanying the birth.

I remember my midwife, Cindy, drawing in black magic marker on my 38 week pregnant belly an outline of the exact position that the baby was in, head down, elbows tucked, those feet I kept feeling in my side. That was the moment I understood that midwives can see what others can’t. They can make visible the invisible. The Spirit-midwife sees what’s on the inside.

18th century American midwife Martha Ballard, along with delivering babies, was a moral force in her community in the first years of our nation, guiding its conscience, shaping its newly forming laws.1 Like her, the Spirit-midwife guides us into all truth.

Or Mary Frances Hill Coley, an African American midwife in Georgia who delivered thousands of babies in the early 20th century. She didn’t just aid in childbirth – she kept visiting her babies for years, making sure they had what they needed to grow up healthy. It wasn’t just a one-day gig for her. it was a relationship of continuing care, of comfort and help. The Spirit-midwife is our helper and our comforter, with us always.

Or midwives right now in Minneapolis, who go- by night- to deliver extra breastmilk to babies whose mothers have been taken by ICE. The Spirit-midwife cares for those who are forgotten and persecuted.

*

In the 1960s, a priest in Iceland collected accounts by and about midwives who traveled across rural Iceland delivering babies in the early part of the 20th century. A contemporary poet has used the words of those memoirs to create “found poems,” and when I read them, I can’t help but think of our Mother God, our Spirit midwife. Listen.

Hands
endowed with a strange power to ease suffering
draw out pain relieve aches

soft and mild

mother and child

whom she lifted to the light of this world.

and

It was as if death fell back out the door wherever she went

and this bit, which seems especially a warning for our night owl Nicodemus to take with him as he goes out into the the dark pondering the words of Jesus, perhaps wondering when and how he might be born again:

the homestead certainly beautiful
in sunshine and summer glory

beautiful the bay
as the sun glitters on streams and islands

and majestic solid mountains
stand firmfooted as storms rage

but everyone knows women like to go into labor
during the deadliest blizzards

and usually at night

Three Things:

• How to Fix Global Catastrophe Anxiety with a Bouncy Castle, A BBQ and a Sausage Roll.

• “Prayer” by Keetje Kuipers (this poem, shared on Sara-Kay Mooney’s substack this week, had half my adult Sunday school class in tears)

• My Days of 58, the new Bill Callahan album

Here is some of the practical wisdom I underlined in this book, which is made of 28 tiny little chapters, many of which draw on the ideas of Christians of the mid-twentieth century (Sophie Scholl, Bonhoeffer, and others) who resisted National Socialist ideology:

• Communicate to organize, not to signal.

• Scholl lucidly saw: “The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves…Those who don’t like to make waves — or enemies…” The Nazis never were in the majority. Those who simply “went along” were absolutely critical to the regime’s success.

• Conservative values can be truly radical when those in power do not care to sustain what makes shared life possible. When people “move fast and break things,” decency and kindness insist on the humanity of those otherwise crushed under the wheels.

• Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther was deadly afraid that the “Turks before Vienna” were God’s judgment: “unbelievers” sent by God to destroy the decadent Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. And yet, when asked what he would do if tomorrow the world ended, Luther responded, “Then today, I would plant an apple tree.”

Though I don’t always love Luther, I love that answer; and when it feels like another world is ending, it’s instructive: Then today, do something hyper-local. Do something slow. Do something that acknowledges the interdependent relationship human beings have with the land, that literally requires dirt under fingernails. Do something that cares for bodies. Do something that’s right, even though there is no reason to believe it will make a difference. We don’t know what will make a difference. We do what is right regardless.

I know there’s a danger that “plant an apple tree” can easily become “I just want to be left in peace.” So maybe I’ll adopt it with amendments. Plant an apple tree… in the community garden. It’s all of the above, but it will also require relationships with people you don’t know, maybe some paperwork, coordination and compromise and planning and considering alternate viewpoints and shared economies. Even if another world is ending, do something good.

Some stories I encountered and loved in 2025:

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Conner — a spare, tender, lyrical English novel about ethnographers on a remote Welsh island in 1938

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy - I’ve read all three novels by this Australian author, and in many ways, all three attempt the same story, about motherhood, ghosts, and what we try to save, and why. But this, the third attempt, nails it. I hope now she feels free to tell another story. We’re reading this for book club at Trinity in February (following January’s Stone Yard Devotional book club - my favorite novel of 2024), and I’m excited to ask people what this story thinks is worth saving.

Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson - I read several biographies of early 20th century women this year - Gertrude Stein, New Yorker editor Katherine White - and reading them together, you really do begin to get a sense of the texture of women’s lives a hundred years ago. This was the best of them, though — the author knows which details in a biography to include, and how much larger historical context to give, and I was really captivated to learn about the woman who can be credited with giving us the hoodie at a moment when women could still be fined or thrown out of court for wearing pants to a hearing.

The Phoenician Scheme and Knives Out: Wake up Dead Man — two overtly religious films were my favorite films of 2025, shocking, I know.

Etoile, an excessive drama about ballet dancers in Paris and New York, was imperfect television that nonetheless succeeded in making me want to watch more live ballet, which I think is not an easy thing for a television show to do.

The Low Down, a strange and sometimes not well-paced noir set in Tulsa, never really predictable, and I love Ethan Hawke and the choices he’s made over his career (his 2025 movie Blue Moon about Lorenz Hart would be on this list except that I didn’t watch it until 2026).

Pluribus, that buzzy Apple TV show which I almost quit after episode one, which felt cliched, like it was leaning into tropes without actually being campy (I am all for self-aware camp). But then it turned unexpected and quiet. I loved the scenery and the soundscape and Rhea Seehorn’s performance and the questions the show raises about… well, religion. Humanity. The afterlife.

Ghost in the Machine, season one episode seven of The X-Files. Jack and I have been watching The X Files for the first time, and this episode featuring a computer that becomes a little too smart was a timely favorite. Our game is to exclaim to each other “and they did this before [fill in the blank with lauded tv/movie]” in every episode, because it does seem The X Files always did it first.

Tell me how you’re planting an apple tree this week.

Amy+

PS: Writer friends, a bunch of fully-funded (fully, like, including travel and room and board) writing workshops this summer have application deadlines closing soon. Read about them here.

A few of my favorite things (2025) part one

Did you notice that refrain in the Psalm?

All week I’ve been thinking about the things that, over the course of my life, people have told me I need to do in order to be saved:

Believe. Repent. Get baptized. Ask Jesus to come into my heart. Speak in the language of angels. Demonstrate my faith through my good works. Persevere, to prove my conversion was real.

Maybe.

But here, in this Psalm, God’s people sing it differently. All that is needed

for salvation

is for God to show us the light of God’s face.

*

One of the most common anxiety dreams I have is that I’m driving, and suddenly everything goes dark. I’ve gone blind – or all the streetlights and headlights are out – or both – but in the dream I always keep driving. Driving blind into the dark.

Sometimes life on earth feels that way.

Another campus is on lockdown. We drop our kids off at their schools anyway.

We walk our neighbor’s kids to school because their parents are too afraid to leave the house.

Families gather for sacred prayer. Gunmen are in the bushes. Antisemitism, again.

A million people are homeless after floods in Asia.

Sudan faces the world’s largest humanitarian crisis in its civil war, death and displacement.

Violence in Gaza continues.

Mad men in positions of power spew lies and hate, and take what they want and then redact it.

We keep driving, even as the lights go out, blind into the dark. What else can we do?

Today is the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, the season of waiting and preparing for the salvation that is promised. The assigned gospel reading wants to move us ahead a few days, to the birth of Jesus. But reading the headlines, it feels right to stay with the ache of Advent, the “how long o lord” Psalms, the prophecies strange and unfamiliar and mesmerizing in their otherworldly visions.

It’s right to acknowledge this darkness – to plead

Restore us…Show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

*

If you’ve come by my office in recent weeks, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve inherited a cactus – an overgrown, twisty, thorny thing wedged between the desk and the loveseat. At the top of each of its long, thorny trunks, shiny green leaves sprout in pairs around delicate pink flowers.

And they move, those leaves and flowers – they turn toward the light from the window. Have you seen this, in your houseplants, in the aptly named sunflowers in your backyard?

Perhaps that is how we are saved, like plants: the light appears, and we are moved.

Restore us, O Lord God of Hosts
Show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

*

It’s also translated smile: O God, restore us and smile on us so that we may be saved.

I remember being told, when my babies were smiling their first smiles, that those smiles were just physical reflexes, not signs of happiness. But recent science has questioned that, suggesting that they’re imitative, that the babies are learning happiness by imitating. Babies can imitate smiles as early as within the first 36 hours of their lives.

One study found that new mothers looked at their 16-hour-old babies 80% of the time and smiled at them 34% of the time. (As if we needed a study to tell us that.)

Within the first month, nearly all babies who have been smiled at have learned to smile back.

Perhaps this is how we are saved: the Lord God of Hosts smiles at us, and eventually we learn to smile back.

*

Restore us, O Lord God of Hosts
Show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

It’s in Jesus, the Son of God, that God smiles at us, that we see the face of God shining. In just a few days, we’ll read the familiar words about Jesus from the first chapter of John’s gospel. John says

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world…
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

In Jesus, we see the light and glory of God shining on us, smiling at us; and more than that, in Jesus, God becomes skin and bones, blood and water, infusing our humanity with divinity, beginning the process of healing all the stuff of earth. In Jesus, the image of the invisible God took on flesh, and all we who bear the image of God saw, finally, what we were made for.

Trappist Monk Thomas Merton speaks of this in his poem “The Victory”:

“Make ready for the face that speaks like lightning,” he says.

“Make ready for the Christ, Whose smile, like lightning,
Sets free the song of everlasting glory
That now sleeps, in your paper flesh, like dynamite.”

Christ shines on us, and we see what we were made for, and it obliterates all that is false and fading, leaving only the glory of God. This is why Jesus could say both “I am the light of the world” and “you are the light of the world” – because the face of God shone on us in Christ.

Restore us, O Lord God of Hosts
Show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

Today is the fourth and final Sunday of Advent. It is also the winter solstice, the day of the year in which we have the fewest minutes of daylight, the longest night.

In this moment, we are looking to Christmas, but we must be looking to more than Christmas. Because Christmas comes every year, and the world is still dark.

So we are looking to Christmas, but we are also looking for the promised coming again.

Sometimes I’ve found it hard to believe: this idea that salvation means that there is a kingdom coming, that there is life after death, that everything wrong will be made right, that a new heaven and a new earth are real, not just a bedtime story.

But if our hopes for the second coming are false— if there is nothing more than this world— how can we bear it? How can we bear to look straight on at a world like this one, heavy with so much pain and injustice and inequity which despite our best efforts we can’t seem to end? How can we bear only glimmers of reflected light without hoping for more?

Waiting for this second coming, for a world in which justice and mercy meet, feels like the longest season, the darkest night, a world where it’s always winter, but never Christmas.

But the light has come - we see it shining through the dark fir branches even now.

And the light will come again.

And so this week we pray:

Restore us, O Lord God of Hosts
Show the light of your countenance, and

like plants, like babies, like image-bearers in paper flesh

we shall be saved.

In conversation with:

• “Exile for the Sake of Redemption” by Yehoshua November

• The Newborn Child by Georges de la Tour

  

• “The Last Month of the Year” by Vera Hall

Previously:
poems for solstice (today!)
on the (eco-feminist?) Cherry Tree Carol
why go to church, anyway?

And all I could think, at first, was that poem by Fanny Howe:

I won’t be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed—

and the short northern nights.

But let me tell you what else there was this year.

The best skies over churches

The meal I most want to cook again right now: Ricotta Pasta Alla Vodka, or maybe Korean Fried Chicken and a Cucumber Avocado Salad

The best meal I didn’t cook: at Elena, the kale caesar, the Diavolo pizza, and that barely fizzy red wine

The most common kind of photo in my camera roll: Rosie asleep on me, cat asleep on her, or me, or us (appearing nine times across eleven months, and sometimes with video footage capturing the snores)

The only quotations I noted all year:

• “Forever is a feeling” (Lucy Dacus) and “Forever is a dead man’s joke” (Jason Isbell)

• (a woman, talking to her husband’s best friend, about her husband’s academic career)“A rustic Newton?” she flashed. “Where’s his Principia?” There was something so close to contempt in her voice that she made me mad. “Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?” I said. “We’re all decent godless people, Sally. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.” (Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner)

• I love you like a kitten loves a ball of yarn.
  I love your unraveling.
  (unattributed. maybe me?)

• (the narrator is a father and a widower, speaking to his two children about a shipwrecked woman who has washed up on their shore)
  “I need you both to keep your guards up, alright? We don’t know her. We don’t know anything about what she’s doing here.” Raff nods but something slides across Fen’s face, an expression of disappointment, even of pity, that this is an insane way to think of an injured woman in need of help, and maybe she’s right but what the look tells me more than anything is that my daughter no longer trusts me. If I worried she was slipping away before, now I’m sure of it. She doesn’t feel safe with me, or maybe it’s that she has no expectation of me keeping her safe, of my ability to recognize danger.
  (Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy)

• ‘Did I ever tell you what Carl asked me the day I met him, at my interview? What if in the big picture you aren’t actually helping?

  What if you’re a bureaucrat in an endless moral disaster, but if you walk away the disaster will be a tiny bit worse? Will you still do it?’
  (Mothers and Sons, Adam Haslett)

The prettiest things I saw when I looked up were either at the Crew Collective Cafe, or in the bedroom

The concerts I was most glad I went to: Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Nova Lane and Green Copper, Julien Baker and Torres, the Evergreen talent show (Owen’s on keys), Lucy Dacus, SG Goodman

I can’t choose a favorite sermon preached, but (recency bias) this one for Christ the King Sunday sure got a lot of response

The most serendipitous pairing was Modigliani by Lucy Dacus in my headphones and The Boy by Modigliani on the wall

The best google doc I created was either Rosie’s college spreadsheet or the Thanksgiving menu plan

Strangest time markers: On one trip I got to see a newborn and a 96 year old, both of whom I love. Owen got taller than me, and then broke six feet. Rosie got a drivers’ permit. I passed my first lectionary anniversary (that is, I’ve been regularly preaching for three years).

The best backyard visitors were not the mama bear + three cubs who turned over the trash cans or the raccoon who rounded the porch in the dark or the groundhog with the chubbiest run but the cicadas with their apt incessant alarm

My favorite side gig was book editing

The creative output I’m most jealous of/happy about is Jack’s

My favorite songs released in 2025 (here’s 2024)

The museum I need more time with is the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the exhibit I loved most there was the one about Berthe Weill

Some of the best protest signs I saw on March 13, June 14, and October 18

The most striking change in me is that I no longer really identify with Steinbeck when he says “Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.” He said he never grew out of it, but maybe I have. Or maybe he just never learned about emissions.

The best thing I grew was butternut squash, from seeds I got at a free swap at church, and there are more than a dozen upstairs right now if you’d like one

The most troubling dream I had (fit for public consumption, that is) was that I was walking downtown, and all the pedestrian lights were running exactly backward, telling us to cross at exactly the moment oncoming traffic began. I figured out the pattern was backwards and was fine. But then I saw a small boy walking by himself, and he didn’t know. I stopped him and tried to explain.

Best prayer with which to end the day
“O Lord, who beholdest thy weak creatures weary of labour, weary of pleasure, weary of hope deferred, weary of self; in thine abundant compassion, and fellow feeling with us, and unutterable tenderness, bring us, we pray thee, unto thy rest. Amen.” Christina Rosetti

The best books I read this year may deserve their own post.

Do you want to give my books to anyone for Christmas?

Happy Thanksgiving, and Happy New Year’s Eve (you know, the new church year begins tomorrow)…

(See also 2024, 2023)

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I’d spent all day reading and sorting printed sermon manuscripts. Were they things, with interior lives and histories? I clicked my black pen a few times and wrote:

They know pileated woodpeckers. The sermon manuscript knows the soundless language of underground filaments feeling for each other, and distress signals that arrive as scents in the air. It knows the heat of an inkjet printer, and earlier, the darkness underground in which that ink grew, the flame synthesis that pulverized carbon into powder, the golden soybean leaves of autumn, the press.

It remembers belonging to a ream once, the darkness, the blankness, the lack of individual identity, the cold of a warehouse and the bumpy road the delivery truck traveled.

The words themselves carry other worlds within them: the berries Jessica picked along the path and handed to me, and the poem she read to me while we walked. The midrash of rabbis I’ve never know. The questions I scribbled in the margins, the slashes, underlining, boxes, arrows, exclamation points. What my Sunday School teacher Miss Janie said, and what my seminary professor Stephen Chapman said, his booming sonorous voice. The chapter book I read when I was eight. Inside these words are the softness of my daughter’s skin and the saltwater and mascara of the headlines and the criticism and praise I heard last Sunday.

Some of them will return to me, in others’ mouths in weeks to come, recycled. And recycled: paper into blue bins, with bulletins and the microplastic-leaching water bottle I gave in to when the pulpit left me dry. They return on the next truck, “90% recycled material” reams of paper, impure, but white again. Ready for the word again. The conversation continues.

Three things:

• Perfume and Milk, on the Florence and the Machine album out today, is all of us:
  Doing the work and sleeping alone
  Downloading “Revelations of Divine Love” on my phone
  Trying to read, but getting distracted

• A couple of months ago Laura McGrath at textCrunch shared a bunch of editor’s favorite nonfiction books of the year, and the only book that came up twice was Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. I read it this month and loved it.

• What I wish I could wear tonight:

  

  ---

  Find more about my books here.

Psalm 91 (in the KJV, for fun)

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation;

There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.

With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.

Do you remember how total the darkness felt on the night of September 27 last year?

How it looked to walk down a road after sundown, without streetlights, and see every house shuttered and silent?

How sound traveled differently across those roads without the constant humming of our appliances—

How early we went to bed, without television or cell phones or bedside lamps, falling asleep as soon as the stars appeared, the waning crescent moon, sleeping with the windows open.

Maybe you remember seeing later the image that NOAA captured that showed the way city lights can be seen from space – and the deep swath of darkness across nine states where we’d lost power.

For a moment, we had an inkling of what it must have felt like to live before electricity lit the world — before the distraction of moving pictures and the comfort of twinkle lights and the ever present flashlight on a cell phone.

For most of human history, darkness felt different. Disorienting. Dangerous.

And for much of human history, Jews and Christians have chosen to enter the darkness chanting Psalm 91.

*

Today, the most well-known Psalm is almost certainly Psalm 23 – the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. If you know any Psalm at all, you probably know that one. But for centuries, that wasn’t the case. The one Psalm that everyone clung to for comfort was Psalm 91, with its confident proclamation of God’s salvation from every single terror that might arise. Psalm 23 speaks of God’s guidance through the valley of the shadow of death – but Psalm 91 gets abundantly more specific. In Psalm 91, God is protecting us from plagues and pestilence, war and wild animals, evil spirits and enemies. Perhaps in recent centuries we’ve lost our sense of vulnerability to these things; we have tylenol for a fever now, brick walls to keep the wild animals out, electricity. We believe ourselves to be in control; we’ve lost a sense of an unseen spiritual world around us filled with demons and angels.

But when Helene visited us, we learned vulnerability again. We couldn’t turn on the lights or the faucets. Our credit cards didn’t work. We feared looters were coming to siphon our gas and raid our abandoned homes. We couldn’t get medicine to those stranded in the mountains except by mule. We couldn’t call each other on the phone.

Finally, we understood what it is to need help.

In centuries past, this was the Psalm people turned to in those moments. And they found in it some guard against whatever it was that they most feared. Translation choices shifted the meaning somewhat dramatically over the centuries:

in some years, it was primarily read as a safeguard against plague;

in others, an incantation against demons;

later, as a warning against heresy

or as purely a messianic psalm, in which Jesus is the one who is spoken of as fully protected by God;

at other times, including recent times, it has been read primarily as a prayer of protection during battle.

In my favorite translation, Wycliffe’s 14th century translation, “you shall not be afraid of any terror by night” became “you shall not dread a goblin going in darkness.”1

(If anyone ever asks you if goblins are real, you can say “the Bible tells me so.”)

Before literacy was widespread, words and letters were often believed to carry special force, and often lines of this psalm were carved into amulets or even sewn into clothes as protection.

One Jewish amulet designed to protect women in childbirth carried what appeared to some archeologists to be a jumble of meaningless letters; in fact, those letters were the first letters of each verse of this psalm. Other Jewish amulets alternated the words of this psalm with the words of the shema – Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one – a braiding that made for nonsensical reading but that indicated that the confession of faith and the protection of the psalm were linked, somehow.

In the 5th and 6th centuries, across Egypt, it was not uncommon to find in Christian homes a small earthenware lamp with words and images from Christian tradition printed on it. Verse 13 of this Psalm promises “You will tread on the lion and the cobra; you will trample the great lion and the serpent” (Coverdale translation). These lamps often showed Christ trampling on a lion and a snake – and sometimes also a dragon and a basilisk, a mythical creature whose breath was deadly.

Remembering that Christ has trampled the terrifying beasts, Egyptians would light the lamp as darkness fell, and find their fears calmed as its glow filled the room.

Jews and Christians in these early centuries agreed that Psalm 91 ought to be chanted every day.

And in the 6th century, when Saint Benedict introduced to the church the end-of day prayer we call compline, Psalm 91 was one of three Psalms appointed for the service. (You can find this ancient service still in our prayer book today – on page 127– and if you send your kids to Camp Henry in the summer, they end every day praying these words together.)2

We pray it as the day ends. We pray it as life ends. In fact, it was the principal deathbed prayer for Christians until well into the 19th century, and it’s said seven times over the course of the Jewish funeral service.

These are words that have carried us.

*

On the second night after Helene, we built a fire in the backyard and drank the last of our cans of sparkling water and listened to NPR on our handcranked radio as the stars came out. Before going in to bed that night, we did something we rarely do together at home: we prayed compline.

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, *
abides under the shadow of the Almighty.

It was in the early hours of morning the next day that some spotty cell service returned, and we began to realize the extent of the damage. Helene was a tragedy that continues to unfold.

But one of its gifts was a reminder of our frailty: a reminder that there are forces beyond our control, a reminder that we need each other – a reminder that we need to learn to find shelter in God.

Today is September 30, and there are 92 days left in this year. Along with amulets and lamps and monastic prayers, another practice Christians have taken up at various points across the centuries is the practice of praying Psalm 91 for 91 days in a row.3

We could do that. We could start tomorrow, Wednesday, and pray it for the last 91 days of 2025. We could carve it into our bedframes and embroider it onto our undershirts. Not because doing so will make God look on us more favorably. Not because we can control some outcome by saying magic words or wearing a talisman.

But because doing so might be like carrying a small earthenware lamp through the darkness that threatens to swallow us— it might remind us of Mary crushing the head of the snake, and of Jesus conquering death and evil, and bringing us into a kingdom where no disease or calamity, earthly or spiritual, can touch us.

Praying Psalm 91 nightly might help us learn to imagine ourselves and our world differently— as filled with devils and angels, snares and plagues, but also as never without shelter

and shade

and soft wings.

It might help us to imagine, as darkness falls, that we are gathered under the wings of a God who took on all this frailty in order to protect us

and to gather us safely home.

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For more, see the Visual Commentary on Scripture and He Will Save You from the Deadly Pestilence by Philip Jenkins.

Normally, at the end of every post, I share three things that I’m happy to recommend (and, sure, the new season of Only Murders is fun, and the new Wednesday album has some great moments, and I do recommend that you make some vanilla ice cream but infuse the base with whole cloves and nutmeg and cinnamon sticks while it chills), but today,

three griefs I’m carrying:

• That Pete Hegseth (and the like) claim the name of Christ while acting and speaking in ways that are counter to the gospel, and that so many Christians refuse to name this.

• The continued inhumanity, violence, and racism of ICE.

• The erosion of checks and balances; the court allowing the president to withhold funds congress has allocated to foreign aid, and the deaths that result.

Find more about my books here.

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All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them."

So he told them this parable: "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, `Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

Jesus tells this story in direct response to a very particular situation, and that situation is this: the good religious people think he is hanging out with the wrong crowd, and they are rumbling about it. To be specific: Jesus is hanging out with tax collectors, – not IRS employees as we know them today – but men who worked as agents of the Roman empire, stealing from and oppressing the poor. They are bothered because he is hanging out with sinners – people who are actively partnering with the Roman authorities to oppress the Jews. Jesus is sitting down to dinner with them.

Frankly, I would have been right there with those grumbling good religious people. Sometimes I would prefer a Jesus who just condemns evildoers, who says there is a bridge too far.

And so these stories Jesus tells

are a direct challenge

to me.

*

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?

Jesus asks the question as if it’s a rhetorical question, as if the answer is an obvious, yes, of course, all of us would go rescue a lost sheep. But in fact the answer is far from obvious. In fact, the answer seems a little unhinged. What kind of shepherd would leave 99 sheep unprotected in the wilderness to go after one?

I think no shepherd in her right mind would do this. She might take the 99 back to the barn, or find another shepherd to watch over them, and then go. But this shepherd leaves the 99 in the wilderness to go back for the one.

The absurdity is the point. Jesus is telling us that the grace of God can feel a little bit fantastical – even a little bit wrong.

Most of us humans have come to believe that some losses are just unavoidable. That’s life in this damaged world. Not everyone can be saved, and sometimes we just have to accept that a sheep is lost and move on, for the larger good.

But to Jesus, no losses are acceptable.

We are happy for certain kinds of people to remain on the outside, in fact, sometimes we love drawing those lines and arguing that we’re right; but Jesus says everyone belongs.

Perhaps what Jesus is suggesting in this story is that the good news of the kingdom of God is that all creatures will be brought into it. Jesus will not lose a single one. Every single creature made in the garden of eden and called good is precious to God. Every single human being bears God’s image and is beloved, no matter how far they have strayed from God’s dream for them, no matter how much damage has been done.

*

This week I’ve been reading Helen Whybrow’s book about her life as a shepherd in Vermont. It’s called The Salt Stones: seasons of a shepherd’s life.

Helen began with eight sheep. After ten years, her flock has grown to 90, and her fields are showing the benefits of having a flock graze and rotate. The lambs are growing fast, with “luminous silky fleeces,” and the white and red clover have come in without seeding, and are growing thick and green.

They share their valley with other creatures; among them, eastern coyotes; and the spring after their guard llama dies,( yes, they have a guard llama, how cool is that) the coyotes start coming for the lambs, who disappear, one and two at a time, from their pens overnight.

Helen and her husband go to the fields on the night of the summer solstice, with the body of a dead lamb as bait. They lay it down and then lay themselves down, many yards away, rifles in hand, and wait. The coyote comes – emerald eyes gleaming in the night – but evades their shot, and lives. And something about the experience changes Helen. She remembers what conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote after killing a mother wolf: he wrote, “I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire [ of her eyes] die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

After that night, Helen begins to research in earnest – she learns that coyotes are resilient and intelligent pack animals, not unlike humans. She learns that killing coyotes “often disrupts the dominant hierarchy of the pack, fracturing it so that MORE adults begin hunting to support themselves… killing coyotes increases overall predation.” Violence begets violence.

And so instead of hunting the coyotes, they adapt. They stop burying sheep on the farm, they install a dog-proof fence, they get another guard llama, and a sheep dog, too. At night sometimes the sheep dog hears the coyotes in the distance, and joins in their song, “in total kinship,” she writes, “… a beautiful sound.”

*

This story Jesus tells – about a shepherd who is willing to do the absurd because he’s not willing to consider any sheep too far gone to be rescued – about the joy and celebration when every creature’s life is counted worthy of loving pursuit –

it’s a story about the preposterous grace of God, who takes the initiative to go rescue every lost lamb,

and it’s also a story about what kind of community we hope to be: one where everyone belongs.

One where we are safe not because we have clear lines about who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong —

one where we are safe because because our shepherd is bringing in all the lost, including every one of us, and as he does, he sets us free from the predatory violence that has damaged our world and our relationships with each other, and we are able to welcome each other and live together in peace.

Helen found that violence only leads to more violence. And yet Helen can only go so far. She can stop hunting the coyotes, but for now, good fences are needed. Boundaries and guards must exist to keep the sheep safe.

But Jesus can go farther than Helen can; and Jesus will.

Jesus doesn’t just not kill the coyote; eventually, he makes peace between the coyote and the lamb. That’s the vision all the prophets give us of God’s kingdom – predators and prey, finally, living together in peace.

Where every sheep is brought back to the fold, and even the lion and the wolf and the coyote find a home there.

Jesus rescues the lamb.

And eventually he rescues the coyote, too.

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Three Things:

• “I would rather go to a meadow and enter eternity that way," said Sister Bernadette.

• Some Ways Churches Should Be

• Charlie Kirk didn’t shy away from who he was. We shouldn’t either.

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Find more about my books here.

I’m also the author of two books. Where Goodness Still Grows (bookshop, amazon) attempts to reimagine more expansively the virtues I grew up with in the evangelical church. It’s a book that begins with lament, and I find myself there continually these days. (It’s also fantastic for a church book club, if yours is looking for something to read.) My first book, Dangerous Territory, is a fast-paced memoir about two years I spent in Southeast Asia right after college, and it entwines my story with a bit of the history of the western missionary movement, critiquing the language and methods it embraced. It’s “high adventure” and broken hearts and second simplicity. The ebook of the second edition of Dangerous Territory is on sale this week for the first time, which feels apt for many reasons — it’s a school story, and we’re headed back to school; it’s a youth missions story, and season two of Shiny Happy People on Amazon has brought youth missions back into the spotlight (I was about a half-step away from that movement myself); and it’s a story about welcome I received as a stranger in a strange land, and in America I believe we are currently failing to welcome.

This picture turned twenty earlier this year. It’s from a time when I crossed a border, perhaps illegally.

After a year in [redacted], my visa was revoked. I was considered a threat (and possibly a CIA agent) because I had given Bibles to some girls who asked me for them. Unable to return to my teaching post, I went instead to teach English at the Royal University of Law and Economics in Phnom Penh. I wasn't sure I’d ever be able to return to the country that had blacklisted me, but about six months later, I went to the embassy to apply for a tourist visa. I’d never been to the embassy before, and asked someone at the gate where to go; he pointed me to the back of the building, and I entered through an unobtrusive side door, paid a fee, and left with a visa.

A friend later told me it sounded like I’d paid for an under the table visa, and they’d skipped the protocols they were supposed to follow. If my name was on a list, that list hadn’t been consulted.

Regardless: I’d fallen in love, and wanted to visit the boy, and so I booked a ticket on a bus that took me to the border, where I walked through a guard station and from there climbed on the back of a pickup truck that took me all the way to the capitol, where he met me.

These days I wonder: if my name was in fact on a list — and if my visa wasn’t in fact obtained through proper channels — if the government had detained me, what would have happened next? Most likely, I would have been told to leave, and I would have returned to Cambodia, safe and sound.

But if someone makes a mostly innocent mistake with a visa like this in America today, what happens next? Some options (for those who makes mistakes as well as for those who are following the legal protocol) appear to be: violent capture, solitary confinement, detention in an unclean and unsafe center for weeks on end, deportation to a country that is not one’s home country. (See, for instance, this story from the Guardian in March.) Sometimes I wonder if the Communist country that feared my Christian, American influence was kinder — and more just? — than my country is now.

I hope, if you haven’t read it yet, you’ll check out Dangerous Territory while it’s on sale this week.

Now, on to some of the things I’ve loved this summer:

If I were teaching a class on missiology this fall, I’d pair Dangerous Territory with Addie Zierman’s When We Were on Fire (newly re-released with Bracket, and one of the first and certainly the most lyrical of all the exvangelical memoirs of the 2010s!), Elizabeth Eliot’s novel No Graven Image, and the slender new novel Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor (out in paper back tomorrow). Set on a remote island off the coast of Wales on the cusp of World War II, it tells of a whale washing up on the shore, two English ethnographers who arrive to study the local culture and people, and a motherless 18 year old girl wondering about the world beyond her island. The prose is spare and lovely and I read it breathlessly in a single day.

The other novel I’ve loved this summer is Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. Again, we are on a remote island with a motherless family and whales, but this time, we’re off the coast of Antarctica, in present day or the very near future. Three children and their father are the last remaining residents of an island in the final days before sea rise makes it uninhabitable, and they are guarding a seed bank and preparing it to be removed to a safe location. About six weeks before their scheduled departure, a shipwrecked woman washes up on the beach. Tense, gripping, mysterious, otherworldly, and wise — I’m not sure I’ve found a better novel to companion me in questions about how to live in a rapidly changing world. (We may need to have a book club at church with this one.)

Other books, quickly: Gertrude and Alice, a biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that I happened upon at Dream Palace in Indianapolis. In general I love to read about the literary community of the Lost Generation in Europe, and what I loved about this book in particular was the texture it gave to life at that time - details like, when touring the US after the war, Gertrude and Alice stayed in a campus apartment belonging to Thornton Wilder, and the refrigerator in the apartment opened on both sides, so that the milkman could stop by and refill the refrigerator without bothering the apartment’s occupants. It seems that Gertrude was an early famous-simply-for-being-famous (or perhaps for having the foresight to buy early works from Picasso and Matisse and the rest) kind of person, recognized on sight by strangers on the streets of the US after publishing very little (and much of it very inaccessible). When they toured America after the war, “In Times Square they saw in revolving lights, ‘Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York’.” Shopkeepers addressed Alice as Miss Toklas as she entered. It seems that Gertrude believed herself to be a genius, and Alice believed her to be a genius, and that faith was, well, the substance of things hoped for, evidence of things unseen.

World Without End, Martha Park’s collection of essays braiding memoir with research into faith and the natural world, kept me reading. The standout essay for me was probably the one about the torreya tree and the man in Florida convinced that it was the wood used in Noah’s ark and that the garden of Eden was “located east of the Apalachicola River, between Bristol and Chattahoochee, in Liberty and Gadsden counties, Florida.” (You can read that essay, or a version of it, here.) I appreciated reading essays from the perspective of someone who grew up as the child of a mainline pastor (partly because I’m tired of reading about evangelical childhoods, and partly because that’s how my children are growing up!).

I haven’t finished it yet, but the Rev. Rhonda Mawhood Lee is about to release Suicide and the Communion of the Saints, and it is a slim, gentle, and wise pastoral guide to thinking about suicide theologically — an aid for those whose lives intersect directly with the topic, and for those who pastor.

To fall asleep at night, I’ve been listening to Ina Garten read her memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens, and it’s perfect for bedtime: just interesting enough that I want to turn it on at night, but not so high-stakes that I can’t fall asleep. It’s also laced through with a happy marriage, a story not heard often.

Besides books:

Do make a campari soda before the summer is over: one part campari to three parts sparkling water and a wedge of lemon. It’s barely alcoholic, it’s pleasingly herbal and bitter, not as sweet as aperol, it’s cold, and it’s what I wanted to drink on the back porch most often this summer. I thought it was going to be a paloma summer; I even painted my window frame paloma pink. Maybe I should re-paint it campari red.

I avoided watching Sirens (Netflix) for a while because the marketing looked so slick, but when I finally watched it, I was totally taken in by it, and found myself thinking a lot about second wave feminism, white feminism, and the kinds of powers available to us, and the kinds of compromises we’re willing to make to keep those powers.

While the kids were in Chicago for a week on a youth group trip, Jack and I absolutely partied by going to the YMCA, getting Indian take out, watching Patience on PBS, and eating girl dinner. Patience is a British procedural about a young woman with autism who works in the archives of a police station but is slowly drawn in to police work due to her pattern-recognition brilliance. We loved it.

I saw Superman in the theater, and thought it was about as good as a superhero movie can be; and I came home and cried because its villains and their schemes felt too real.

This month we celebrated our 19th anniversary; here is the year 19 playlist.

Read Zac’s piece on the Episcopal AI chatbot originally named Cathy, “as a self-serious acronym: Church-y Answers That Help You. (We were encouraged to consider using the feminine pronoun when referring to Cathy, because it is “important to center women’s voices in the tech space.” If there are any feminist dissertators out there who would like to take that one up, I offer it as a free gift.).”

As we approach the one year anniversary of Helene hitting western North Carolina, and as we enter hurricane season again, I find myself filling up the car with gas, considering what non-perishables we have in the house, and wondering about Copenhagen’s sponge parks.

Predictably, I can’t stop listening to Chappell Roan’s The Subway, but in other new music you might not actually have already played to death, check out Folk Bitch Trio (especially for fans of Secret Sisters, First Aid Kit, I’m With Her).

If you try (or have tried) any of these, let me know what you think! And don’t forget — Dangerous Territory ebook on sale for $4.99 this week only :-)

*

A week after Helene ravaged Western North Carolina in late September, another place I loved was flooding. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I’d lived for a couple of months in my twenties, waters were rising and officials ordered evacuations in twenty provinces as they worked to pump water out of residential areas and clear drains. A hundred and twenty-five elephants were removed from the nature park and taken to higher ground. Ten animal shelters flooded. My friends shared photos of them rowing down their streets, their children floating in tubs inside their houses, mold creeping up the walls.

In the same month, Typhoon Yagi lashed Vietnam and Myanmar, killing hundreds in landslides and flash floods. Nonstop rainfall in Nigeria caused a dam to burst, killing at least 200 people and displacing more than a million. In Chad, over three hundred people died in flooding. (I know, this is a slog, and you want to stop reading, but continue:) In Europe, sluggish Storm Boris brought five times as much rain as was usually seen in September. And the next month, flash floods in Valencia brought a year’s worth of rain in eight hours. Massive flooding in Nepal killed more than two hundred people; a photo I found online showed three schoolgirls walking down a dirt path lined on either side with feet of plastic waste deposited there by the overflowing river water.

When the Texas Hill Country flooded on July 4, I pulled out my photo albums from His Hill in Comfort circa 1990. In Comfort on July 4, water markers were showing a surge of over thirty feet. In Comfort in these photos, we were eight and nine years old: girls in long dotted nightgowns hanging upside down over the sides of upper bunks, girls crossing the creek on horseback, girls competing for cleanest cabin, girls posing in matching tshirts, girls crushing on their counselors, girls falling for the scent of sun-baked mesquite, girls sticky with watermelon juice and marshmallows.

The next day, I baptized a baby girl, three times cupping lukewarm water from the font over her sweetly scented head. Six months old, named for joy and embodying it; I held her close as I prayed for her. After the baptism, a family member from Houston found me in the back of the church and asked me to pray for all the families whose little ones were lost in the flood. Our prayer began with silence, and tears.

The eucharistic prayer we are using at our Sunday evening service in this season includes the line, “You made us in your image, and taught us to walk in your ways. But we rebelled against you, and wandered far away; and yet, as a mother cares for her children, you would not forget us.”  I’ve told my writing students to avoid describing their tears: it’s usually a sign that the author is more moved than the reader is, and that’s never good. But as I prayed that eucharistic prayer on Sunday evening, a dam broke, and it is breaking still. All the mothers will never forget.

*

We moved to Western North Carolina, and I thought we were moving to a place that would be a “climate haven.” I thought we could prepare to welcome climate migrants. Projected human migration patterns expected people to converge from two directions on our appalachian sanctuary as the seas rose and weather patterns became more unstable. 

But now, we cannot even welcome the migrants who are already here. Now, we have passed a marker we thought we thought we wouldn’t pass for years. Now, we have to learn to make accommodations, because it is probably too late to reverse course, and there are no havens.1

*

A priest I know in Texas lost three girls from her church to the floods. She says she believes pastoring through this crisis  will be the greatest challenge of her life and ministry. I hope she’s right. I fear we will all be dealing with damage and suffering like this more and more often and for the rest of our lives.

I am getting up to close the windows. I can smell the smoke.

And yet, as a mother cares for her children, God has not forgotten us.

Yet even now, says the Lord,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
rend your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to the Lord, your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.
Who knows whether he will not turn and relent,
and leave a blessing behind him,
a grain-offering and a drink-offering
for the Lord, your God?

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation;
assemble the aged;
gather the children,
even infants at the breast.
Let the bridegroom leave his room,
and the bride her canopy.

Between the vestibule and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.

(Joel 2: 12-17)

Three Things:

• A weird short playlist I listen to when I’m in this mood

• Two substacks to subscribe to if you like sermons shaped by poetry and attentiveness to the more-than-human world: Ragan’s The Way We Practice and Nicole’s Still, Wild, God.

• I love a spicy watermelon salad like this in the summer (first had it at Tolon in Fort Wayne, Indiana, along with the duck fat frites, and always wish I could recreate it exactly)

The men were federal agents. They had the wrong house. They did not apologize, and they couldn’t say when the property would be returned.1

Or the story I read this morning, about a father of three Marines who was beaten and taken by ICE while at his landscaping job. His boss had instructed him to throw trash away in a dumpster that they weren’t supposed to use. He followed orders. Now he’s on his way to a detention center in Louisiana. Or the woman who lost her midterm pregnancy while in that detention center in Louisiana because she wasn’t given any medical care. Or the breastfeeding mother, wife of a Marine, who was detained by ICE because her estranged mother missed an immigration hearing. Or the detention center in Texas where adults fight children for access to water. Or about the plan to use FEMA money to build a new immigrant detention center in the fragile Everglades of Florida (this coming after all the false claims and manufactured outrage that Biden’s FEMA didn’t have enough money to support Western North Carolina after Helene because they had spent it on… immigrants). Or all the people dutifully showing up for their immigration hearings only to be deported.

There is a new story about masked, armed, violent men kidnapping people on the streets of my country every day, and this action is not about safety, this is not “worst first.” This is about money and racism and fear. It’s about a new variation on prisons for profit. I am ashamed, and I wake up every morning wishing someone could tell me how I can get my body in between ICE and the people it's kidnapping.

I don’t want to write about this to you – it’s bigger and deeper than what I can say here.

And I don’t want to write about this to you because there are so many things being damaged right now that it feels wrong to choose just one.2

And I don’t want to write about this to you, because you probably already know. You have probably already called your representatives. You are probably praying your prayers of lament right now. I don’t think anyone needs to hear my perspective on this – who am I?

But then I remember how painful it is to me when Christian leaders seem to stay silent while the violent play on. Regardless of what we think about the right solutions to issues of immigration, we must be clear and loud about the image of God in every person, about the dignity and love due to every human being — and so in case you need to hear one more Christian say that, here I am.

I have to say this much, even if it’s repeating it into a void, even if it’s not enough; and maybe having said it, I’ll actually find myself free to say something new next time.

So, here are some of the things I’ve been meaning to tell you, in brief (they’ve been piling up as I’ve been stewing at the very idea of writing anything without acknowledging how the *everything* of it all is weighing on me).

After being bumped from a flight in December, I had a very hefty flight voucher to use, so this month I took my daughter to Montreal for a joint birthday celebration. My sister came, too, and Kirsten even dropped in for a night. Some highlights:

• Drawn & Quarterly, a small and well-curated bookstore with a focus on graphic novels (we got books by David Lynch, Leanne Simpson, and Miyazaki). We also visited Indigo, a two-story bookshop in the mall that had some amusingly put together displays (bath salts and fuzzy slippers alongside romance novels and We Can Do Hard Things, for instance).

• Elena for my birthday — some of the best pizza and wine of my life, and let me remind you that I once lived in Italy for four months.

• Riding electric bikes by the Lachine Canal

• the MBAM, especially the exhibit on Berthe Weill. Weill, a woman in a male-dominated field, hung paintings on a clothesline in her gallery when she ran out of wall space. She was one of the first to champion many artists in France at the turn of the century — among them Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse and Suzanne Valadon.

• The extensive and unpretentious vintage collection at Eva B.

• Penultimate note: I do recommend traveling with my sister. When I left my phone in the uber from the airport, I was resigned to never seeing it again, but she was indefatigable and we had it back within 24 hours. She made our dinner reservations and she bought Rosie the good sunscreen.

• Final note: I don’t care about travel as much as I used to. I was so happy to see the mountains around Asheville from the plane. I found myself distracted from foreign architecture by thoughts about the half-finished paint job on my porch back home, and wanted to get back to it. Guess I’m old!

Other joys:

• The new album from SG Goodman, Planting by the Signs, is like if Lucinda Williams had been born in Appalachia instead of Lake Charles and grew up on Karen Dalton and Bill Fay. My favorite track at the moment tells a story of SG, as a child, coming upon a group of kids beating a snapping turtle. She asks to take a turn, but turns the stick on the kids instead. “Small town’s where my mind gets stuck,” she sings. “I grew up hard on bottom land where only crops should grow/ Watched people reap what the demons sowed/ And I take it with me everywhere.”

• There’s a lot to hate about amazon, but I do love that they give Amy Sherman Palladino as much money as she wants to make television shows. Etoile wasn’t a perfect show, but the leads were all great — star Lou de Laage was incredible —and it made me want to go to the ballet.

• One of the less-bad ways I disconnect from reality is through reading cozy mysteries. While I was helping paint the back porch, I listened to Murder at Gulls Nest, narrated by Siobhan McSweeney. On the airplane, I read How to Solve Your Own Murder and How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristin Perrin, and on Saturday I read Murder Takes a Vacation, in which Laura Lippman goes ridiculously cozy (and pays subtle homage to one of my all time favorite books, Betsy and the Great World).

• In Asheville in June, we have a thunderstorm nearly every day. I sit on the covered porch and just listen.

• I’ve been preaching cicadas and (tangentially) ravens (beginning at about minute 27).

• I’m really desperate to read a good long review of Wes Anderson’s newest, The Phoenician Scheme. Had I but time and world enough I’d go see it again and do it myself, but alas. In his long-honed and oft-mimicked style, the film follows a man who is beginning to grasp his own mortality, and wants to secure his legacy. He reunites with the sole daughter he hopes will be his heir, and she accompanies him as he tries to keep his last scheme, the Phoenician one, from failing, while a boardroom of forgettable white men try to foil him by driving up the price of a common (and phallic) bolt. (I think I got those details right; they’re not really the point.) Meanwhile, he’s having dreams of encountering God at the pearly gates. Most reviews I read argue that the lesson our protagonist learns is a lesson about the value of family, but I don’t think that’s quite right (unless the lesson is about the way having a daughter makes men better). Rather, it seems to me that it’s a film about the way that facing our mortality reveals the cruelty and meaninglessness — or ridiculousness, see the basketball scene — of most of men’s greedy and violent endeavors. There are a lot of religious references — Anderson grew up in the Episcopal Church — the one I’m probably reading into… the protagonist’s project called is called Sussman-korda, which I can only hear as an allusion to Sursam Corda, or lift up your hearts, the beginning to our weekly prayers. Choose ye this day, etc. The final thing I have to say here is that we (Jack, Rosie, her friend Jo, and I) saw direct visual echoes in this film to movies from our childhoods — The Sound of Music, The Princess Bride, Star Wars, Casablanca — and I haven’t seen any review mention this! Tell me if I’m crazy.

• We have had a lot of cabbage in the CSA this month: Crunchy Vietnamese Cabbage Salad with Pan Seared Tofu and Roasted Gochujang Cabbage were both delicious.

• New fully-funded writing workshops opened for application this month at Collegeville, with a couple more I can’t wait to share about - make sure you’re following on instagram or substack so you don’t miss these announcements.

• As I’ve been sitting here, a blue jay, a robin, and a squirrel have been eating the blueberries off my bush. I guess I should go claim some before they’re gone.

stay hydrated,

Amy

I was a horse girl. I can’t say exactly how long the phase was; there were three summers at a camp with horses (and creeks, and bows and arrows, and a rappelling tower); there was at least one wall calendar, and pages and pages of my own drawings; there was Billy and Blaze, and Black Beauty, and The Black Stallion (and the whole series that followed), and maybe most of all there was Misty of Chincoteague. This weekend, in the frustrated realization that ever novel I’ve read in the last four months has been mid at best, I pulled Misty off my shelf, desperate enough to risk returning to a childhood favorite — will adult me see racism or misogyny or shoddy writing? What if a re-read mars the beauty of the book in my memory?

The story of a brother and sister who live with their grandparents on the island of Chincoteague and who want a horse of their own, Misty was written by Marguerite Henry and published in 1947. It was her 12th of 59 books, and not the one she won the Newberry for, but probably the one that has endured longest in the public imagination.

Every year, Maureen and Paul help their grandparents with ponies, and every year, the ponies are sold and they have to say goodbye. They want a pony they can keep, and so they devise a plan: this year, Paul is old enough (and man enough — girls and women don’t participate) to be part of the pony penning day, traveling to the island of Assateague and capturing wild ponies, descendants of Spanish horses from a shipwrecked galleon centuries ago, and then swimming them across the channel to be sold in a fundraiser for the fire department. (It’s a real annual event.)

For months, the siblings rake clams and gather oysters and catch soft shell crabs and clean out chicken houses and “gentle” their grandfather’s colts so that he can sell them at a higher price, saving $102 so that they can buy a pony. Of course they don’t want just any horse: they want the Phantom, a mare no one has been to capture. When Paul encounters her, he finds that she’s not alone. She has a foal; Paul names her Misty without even thinking about it. Through a series of adventures and setbacks, the siblings buy the mother and child, train them, and a year later, the Phantom even wins the annual horse race. But the day after, they’re out riding, and her stallion from Assateague swims across and calls her to return to the island. The children know this is right, and let her return to her free and wild life across the channel.

It’s not a particularly unique story — I imagine it pitched as The Boxcar Children (1924) meets The Black Stallion (1941) (though in reality, it was an idea pitched by an editor to Henry, who was a midwesterner — she traveled to Chincoteague to do her research and found a real-life story that inspired her) — it checks the boxes you expect, orphans, obstacles, independence and ingenuity, triumph.

These are probably the reasons I loved it, as a child — not just the horses, but the children who got to act like adults, who got to own a horse.

Re-reading it this month, though, I wonder if half of what entranced me was something I wasn’t able to name then, only intuit: the story told by the metaphors.

Before I get to the metaphors, though, as an adult I’m wrangling with the plot, which turns entirely on money: the children gather creatures from the sea and sell them to earn money to buy a creature from the island. Disney’s Pocahontas starts singing to me. Do I think we own whatever land we land on? Do I think creatures exist to be bought and sold at human whim?

Capitalism is the water the story swims in, I guess. But hints throughout the story salt its view of ownership with interdependence, suggesting that care matters more than capitalism. Pony penning began not as a moneymaker, but as a way to curb overpopulation on a small spit of land. The money earned from the sale of horses at the penning goes to the fire department, not to individuals, because on this storm-prone, isolated isle, they won’t survive without it. The children don’t earn money so that they can make more money; they earn money so that they can have a lasting relationship with another creature, rather than one that has to end. Then, of course, there’s the ending, the Phantom — purchased for a hundred dollars — returning freely to her own island a year later. The kids bought the Phantom according to the rules of the system they were born into, and then, with their grandfather’s blessing, they reject the system.

Human beings, in the ethics of this universe, exist to care. They give days to cleaning chicken stalls and horse stalls. They watch out for resource depletion. They eat the food they catch. They let animals live in the way that is best for the animals.

The relationship between a human and a horse, or a human and the sea, isn’t one of ownership; it’s one of care.

You can see it in the plot.

But you can see it just as clearly in the language. From the very first pages, metaphors don’t simply anthropomorphize animals. The language continually blurs the lines between animals, humans, sea, and land. Animals are like humans, humans are like animals, animals are like the sea, the sea is like an animal, the land is like the sea.

In the first chapter, which goes back in time to the shipwrecked Spanish galleon, the captain of the ship can only think of the ponies as commodities, even as the storm winds kick up.

“Gold!” He mumbled. “Think of trading twenty ponies for their weight in gold!”

The sea, as if in response, becomes “a wildcat… and the galleon her prey. She stalked the ship and drove her off her course…She cracked the ship’s ribs as if they were brittle bones.” Once the ponies have been freed, the sea becomes a kitten.

If the sea is like an animal, the new land the horses find is like the water, its grass billowing and shimmering “like the sea.”

The ponies’ journey is given biblical weight — they forget “the forty days and forty nights in the dark hold of the Spanish galleon.” Having survived catastrophe born of sin and evil, they can start afresh, like Noah in a new world. And in this new world, all creation has agency, emotion, purpose. “Spring tides had come once more to Assateague Island. They were washing and salting the earth, cooking new green spears to replace the old dried grasses.”

When a boy and girl appear upon the scene, centuries later, “The heavy beach sand seemed to pull them back, as if it felt that human beings had no right to be there.” Even so, they almost disappear into the picture, as if they are part of the whole of creation: “In the early morning light the two figures were scarcely visible. Their faded play clothes were the color of sand, and their hair was bleached pale by the sun. The boy’s hair had a way of falling down over his brow like the forelock of a stallion. The girl’s streamed out behind her, a creamy golden mane with the wind blowing through it.”

Paul recognizes they don’t own the place, though. “If you look close,” he whispered, “you can see that the wild critters have ‘No Trespassing’ signs tacked up on every pine tree.”

The animals are regularly described as humans: the sea birds are “like scouts” in wartime, the stallion herds “his family like a nervous parent on a picnic,” the horses lower their heads “like children being punished at school,” and Misty preparing for her race reminds grandpa “of a girl gettin’ beautified for her first dance!”

But the horses are also compared to other animals and other elements. The Phantom, grandpa says, “ain’t a hoss. She ain’t even a lady. She’s just a piece of wind and sky.” Phantom is “like the topsail on a ship — a moon-raker she is!” The horses are like oysters, and puppies, and seabirds, and cornstalk, and Misty racing is “a piece of thistledown borne by the wind, moving through space in wild abandon.”

Anthropomorphism is common in writing about animals. But what struck me about this story was the way that humans were also compared to animals and plants. Grandpa in the distance has “his gnarled arms upraised like a wind-twisted tree… Then he took off his boots and socks and dug his toes in the and, like a fiddler crab scuttling for home.” Grandma’s face is “round as a holly berry, and soft little whiskers grew about her mouth, like the feelers of a very young colt.” Paul laughs “like a spirited horse” and Maureen is “like a fly in a web,” trapped in the crowds at the horse race.

Everything is something else. Facts are “like water bugs skittering atop the water” and the air quivers “like a violin string.” Bones are sacred, even ship’s bones.

Each child experiences a moment of mystical communion with their horses. When Paul is searching for them during an intense storm, he realizes that they and he “are fellow creatures caught in a storm, prisoners of the elements. Prisoners together. Together! The word sounded a bugle in Paul. Time stood still. There was only the wind and the rain and the three creatures together! Together!”

When Maureen is watching the horse race, she thinks that “only by being alone could she be Paul and Phantom both” during the race, and in her meditative focus, she does become one with them.

*

Animals are like humans, humans are like animals, animals are like the sea, the sea is like an animal, the land is like the sea. The work of the metaphors in this story is to reinforce the reality of interdependence and blur the lines of identity between creatures. Humans and horses are different, of course, but not so different: not so unalike as we would have to believe if we want to be free to own and abuse them.

This blurring, it occurs to me, is something biblical metaphors often do, too. There are distinctions, and roles, identities given in the garden, but then all those things are blurred. The Bible isn’t interested in maintaining unchanging and unchangeable categories. There are Israelites and non-Israelites: but here is Rahab, here is Ruth: enemies can become friends. Humans are tasked with ruling; so are the sun and the moon. Humans speak. So do donkeys. Humans mourn. So does the land. God makes a covenant with Abraham. God has also made a covenant with the earth. It’s connection, not separation, that defines creation.

*

Along with my horse phase, there was a puppy phase — mostly inspired by Jean Smart’s Mine for Keeps, also involving a wall calendar, and cut short when my pleas for a puppy of my own were answered. It was a matter of weeks before I came to realize that what I liked was not dogs, but dogs in books. Dogs required so much care and attention.

It’s not something for which I’m constitutionally suited — the real-life love of animals, the daily recognition of our interdependence. It’s not something for which I’m constitutionally suited — but at least I can keep working on my metaphors.

Three Things:

• The latest essay at Collegeville Letters begins with a peek into the dark and twisted world of the text messages Lauren and I send each other

• For Mother’s day: I love the tension in this Catherine Wiley painting I encountered last week:

  

• Are you in Western North Carolina? Come hear Jeff Chu at Trinity next week — Amanda Held Opelt will be there playing music, too. Free event! (Scroll down and RSVP here.)

Buy my books here.

This garden reappears in my writing all the time, its one abundant summer totemic in my memory, in my life, like the first time my mom showed me how to harvest potatoes from the ground. I’ve almost never felt more pleased with myself than the day I came home from vacation to an empty kitchen, and then gathered greens from the garden and eggs from the henhouse and made a meal.

But it was only one summer. I can be wonderful and inspired at the beginnings of things, but inevitably I lose interest by the end. If I’ve had success, I get bored; if I’ve failed, I get bored; if it’s hard, I get bored. By the time of the first fall frost, I had moved on. Some plants didn’t mind; the erect, self-righteous asparagus took care of itself. But I didn’t prune the strawberry runners, and so by the second summer the plants had all overextended themselves and none of them grew as full or as sweet the second time.

For the past few weeks, I’ve read this poem almost every day. I don’t know how I came across it. Maybe I was looking for Kay Ryan’s essay on AWP — I read that this month, too — but this is what I keep returning to:

A Certain Kind of Eden

It seems like you could, but
you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

It may be just the iambic pentameter of certain lines — A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall — the greenest saddest strongest kind of hope — the rhythm of the words.

Or it may be that I’m stuck in the yearning. It’s not, I think, regret for the roads not taken, in this poem, but yearning. It’s not regret because the sense isn’t that mistakes were made, but that the mistakes that were made were inevitable. Ryan’s poetry is often funny and surprising and cranky and irreverent, but this poem is something else, too, somehow managing to speak of hope with a requisite amount of resignation, yearning and sadness without sentimentality.

The sound, the yearning, or maybe the ambiguous interplay between Fate and agency, the predestined and the willed. In another book I’ve been reading this week, I read of a dairy cow who had a very particular way of feigning kicking over her milking bucket to clue her milker into the fact that she wanted more food. Thirty years later, the dairy farmer witnessed that cow’s great-great-granddaughter using the same exact trick, a move none of the other hundreds of cows she milked had ever made. I think this is what the poem means about the roots and runners that can’t be replanted. There is no way to shake the genetic imprint of our ancestors, their skills or their traumas or their tendencies to pretend to kick the milk bucket to get what they want. Nature wins out against nurture (what a boring sentiment when not in a poem).

And then I put this poem on my instagram story, and Andrew sent me a picture.

And then I thought, perhaps the hope of the poem isn’t that I might shake loose of my DNA, tendril out alone, escape my destiny — but that I might get back to Eden. That I might spill out of the tattered DNA suit that I never would have chosen into ropes and ropes that vine back to what I was made for, to what I am made of — and somehow stronger for the faulty directions first.

I have abandoned one or two gardens. No doubt I’ll abandon this poem next week, though I imagine it will probably resurface in due time. (A few years ago I read a book of Marilyn Hacker’s and only when I got to the end did I realized I had committed its final stanza to memory in college. Those things keep growing where we put them, or where they were put, I guess.)

I did something this spring that I haven’t done in a full decade, not since that totemic garden summer. I got seeds at the seed swap at church, and I bought a little grow light that I strung up under the desk in my office. Just this week I moved my little seedlings out into the backyard. My timeline is probably off for this region, and I don’t even have a garden bed, just some pots, and an old pallet. But I have a compost pile that’s almost three years old, and in it some soft, crumbly compost that I shoved in handfuls into the pallet spaces to feed what I think I’ve chosen.

Three Things:

• “Dacus said that she has only ever found romantic love with friends or collaborators. “How are you doing romance without friendship?” she said, laughing. “I can’t imagine. That feels so hollow. It makes me feel ill! Someone that’s not my friend? Are you serious? Almost every relationship I have been in, we’ve had some business or creative dealings. I don’t mean this just sexually, but it turns me on.” She went on, “To have your minds meet on something, and be, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you said what I couldn’t say. I love your mind.’ ” — in The New Yorker. My current favorite song on the album is Modigliani.

• One of my favorite instagram accounts

• An interview with Kay Ryan (also courtesy of Andrew)

Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.

I dreamed that I was in Grandma’s room, helping sort through her stuff after her death. I was standing next to the sewing machine, and had just given the tray filled with brightly colored spools of thread to my mother. When mom left the room, Grandma came in.

“What are you doing here?” I asked in surprise. She murmured something noncommittal and lay down on the bed. “Are you comfortable?” I asked, and she adjusted. She looked the same, but younger; her body seemed to have a fleshy solidity that it had lacked in her last months, as she became frailer, tiny and brittle-boned. I watched her on the bed. Then I woke up.

The one thing Grandma always said about her eventual obituary was that she didn’t want anything in there about her sewing. But there it was, in my dream. What’s a girl to do?

---

Grandma didn’t talk about God, much. Oh, she would show you the poem about prayer that her oldest daughter, my Aunt Kathy, had written as a teenager, just a few years before she died in a car wreck. But she never showed us the letter Kathy wrote to her unborn daughter a few months before that wreck - the letter explaining that she believed in God because he had been her strength when she was at her weakest. Grandma didn’t talk about God.

Grandma talked about people. As an adult, I grew to love our gossipy lunch dates, where we talked about people: their pretensions (Dad), mistakes (both my parents, chiefly in regard to homeschooling - her opinion, not mine), charms (my youngest brothers), surprising changes (my middle siblings), and hypocrisy (all Southerners - Grandma was a staunch Yankee).

These conversations used to make me uncomfortable. Grandma had lived in the same town as my family from the time I was nine years old. Before that, my memories of her are vague, as dreamy as scenes from a Terrence Malick film: feeding seagulls by the ocean when Grandpa came to Texas for cancer treatments, running in their front yard in Kansas City, filling coloring book pages with Grandpa. When Grandpa died, Grandma moved to be near us.

I never felt that she was quite the right sort of Grandmother. I think my imagined ideal Grandmother was something out of a television version of the Victorian age, with white hair piled up in a pompadour, long skirts sweeping the floor, a jar full of freshly baked cookies, and lots of hugs and cuddles and compliments and silly gifts. Grandma wore sensible shoes and had short, salt and pepper hair. When she made cookies, they had healthy things in them, and she kept them in the freezer, not in a cookie jar. She could be a bit stern, and she didn’t talk about feelings.

----

When I was in highschool, Grandma helped me sew. She wasn’t pleased with my methods; I wasn’t meticulous, and I skipped steps. I didn’t always pin and iron. Grandma laughed at the pajama pants I made without a pattern, but she helped me construct a grey wool skirt that I still wear to this day [note from 2025: I wish].

I have a few vivid memories of the trip we took to Scotland when I was a teenager. I remember being awake in an Edinburgh hotel room at midnight, while Grandma snored loudly. I looked out the window and wished I could leave and explore the streets on my own. I remember being annoyed by the fact that every time we passed flowers, Grandma would say, “Do you see those flowers, Amy? Aren’t they beautiful?”

Yes, of course I see them, they’re right in front of me. I don’t have to comment every time. I can enjoy them quietly, my angsty little teenage mind would retort. I remember slipping outside when the haggis was served, and napping on the tour bus with all the retired folk from the church (did I mention we were on a tour with older people from her church?). I remember loving the castles, and walking along the rocky beach of Iona by myself in bliss.

I suppose we didn’t connect well. I was too quiet, too bookish and dreamy; Grandma was too practical, too concrete and -- well, she thought books were a bit of a waste of time. But Grandma kept takingme on trips. Kept inviting me to lunch. Kept quietly depositing money into my college savings account. Kept supporting me when I made decisions she couldn’t comprehend (like moving to Southeast Asia). She may not have been the type to say “I love you,” very often, but her love was there, in her actions, steady and reliable, just like she was.

---

I know most people don’t get to have an adult relationship with a grandparent, but it’s one of the greatest things in the world. As an adult, I decided to reject my anxiety about our gossipy lunches and learned to enjoy them. Finally I understood her smart, sarcastic humor. Finally, I allowed myself to be amazed by the heartache she’d experienced in her life, and her resilience, loyalty, and love.

Finally I started asking for the stories -and I could never get enough of them - the stories that gave me insight into who she was, what had formed her, and what part of her was in me. I asked her to write them down, and she wrote by hand, even when her hands were barely working. This is how it begins, remarkably:

My Great Grandma lived in Missouri and was orphaned during the Civil War. She was rescued by a soldier from Colorado who took her home with him and raised her. She married John Paul Jones who had been a settler in this area. They had 7 children - Dan, a cattle rustler, Ralph and Ray, ranchers, Paul, a sheriff, Alice, Emma, + Etta (my grandmother). Etta had 2 children, Nellie (my mother) + her brother, Bill. She was married to Carl Stoddard. Carl had a race horse who was the cause of their divorce. (Do you call a horse who?) Anyhow, after the divorce Carl moved to Salt Lake City. At age 18, my mother went to visit him, and they travelled for a year from Alaska to Glendora, California.

My father, a son of immigrant German parents, grew up in Michigan. He was the youngest of 7 children. Henry, Herman, Bill, Mary, Minnie, Anna, + Albert. Mary took care of him as his mother did not want him. She fed him unpasterized milk from their cow.

Nellie (my great grandmother) met Albert (my great grandfather) when he worked as a ranch hand for her father. Albert called her on the phone when she had moved to California and proposed marriage. She didn’t have anything better to do... [which is how Grandma describes both her parent’s decision to get married, and her own]. Al’s siblings cheated him out of his share of the inheritance, and he and Nellie were so poor that they lived for a while in a neighbor’s ice house. Then, he worked for 60 years at a Chevrolet factory.

When Grandma was in college, she used to go dancing every weekend. A different boy every time. A big band would play, and they’d dance till midnight. She married Grandpa in September 1942, and he headed to army training. She and her army wife friends made a cross-country road trip to California to be near their husbands, an epic journey of flat tires and gas rations, summer storms and desert heat.

-----

Grandma stayed with Grandpa until he died of cancer in 1988. They stayed together through the war, the post-war prosperity, the free-loving sixties, the loss of their oldest child, Grandpa’s alcoholism and manic depression, and his celebration of five years of sobriety. She stayed with a bipolar alcoholic, and not because she was a doormat.

Grandma found a lot of joy in life: in dancing, in flowers, in sewing, in finding a good sale, in traveling and in staying put, in watching her grandchildren sing and dance and grow up. She never talked about the hard parts, and she rarely talked about God. She didn’t speak much about love. But I'm starting to think that in her quiet generosity, her steadfast endurance, and her reliable presence, maybe she was actually preaching about God and love all the time.

Eileen S. (Cross) Lepine,

October 22, 1920 - March 22, 2013

Still miss you.

Three(ish) things:

• Listening to these songs

• Watching The Mountain Detective on PBS (as well as, of course, The White Lotus, and my take is that the accents are perfect but he would never have gone to Duke — legacy NC families go to UNC, and he is the grandson of a governor!)

• Rewatching Hacks before the new season arrives

• A podcast you think is about conspiracy theories, when actually it’s about fathers and sons

• A fully-funded writing workshop this fall — and if you’re local, a pop-up writing workshop on April 5 (all the slots for feedback with a mentor are taken, but come hang out in the co-writing space with me and Lauren!)

• A little bit of a Psalm to pray these days

Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.

But because the tree had let go of its leaves over the winter, I could see the sky. In those empty spaces between the bare branches, beauty. “That’s the image I hold onto as I consider what I hope for in Lent, which begins this Wednesday,” I wrote. “What can I let go of for a time so that I may see God’s beauty and love more clearly? What is feeding my rage? – or my complacency? – what’s helping me numb out to reality? – what’s keeping me from looking at my life from God’s perspective? These are the things I may try to let go of, in this season, so that I may see the love of God more clearly.”

I sent the note to Ken to add to the newsletter, and went upstairs to reheat my Shanghai leftovers for lunch. As they warmed in the oven, I re-read the Scriptures appointed for this Sunday. Clouds, veils, mountaintops, kings. Jesus was praying on a mountain when he was changed by a vision. So I ate my lunch and brushed my teeth and left my headphones on my desk and started the climb up my own bit of mountain, the trail through the forest between my house in east asheville and the blue ridge parkway, and I prayed.

It was a beautiful day— sunny, with dark blue storm clouds in the distance, just a faint chill in the air. And I did see something more clearly. The longer I walked, the more I realized that there’s not even a ten foot stretch of trail that doesn’t display the damage done by Helene.

Most of the path is traversable, though immediately after the storm it was totally inaccessible; but what was cleared by chainsaws now lays piled on either side of the path; and after a while, as I walked, each felled tree hit me harder and harder. Photos can’t convey the damage adequately. There are root balls twice my height. At one spot, I stopped and counted how many enormous trees within my view were completely fallen. Just looking to my left, there were eight.

I’ve walked this path a couple of times in the months since Helene, but those walks were back in November before all the leaves had fallen, or more recently, but only in the light of dusk, and deep in conversation. My life has been busy and full; we’ve all been recovering and moving on. It sometimes seems that we hardly speak about Helene anymore; and I’ve learned to drive quickly and blindly past the particular roadsides where the destruction still screams.

Something was clearer on this day, as I walked at my human pace, and listened only to the woodpeckers knocking and the squirrels rustling through the dead leaves, and watched the bluebirds and cardinals swoop by. All the living trees are still bare from winter’s loss, and whether I looked up or down or left or right – in the space opened up by the leaf fall and illuminated by the bright midday light– the damage was clear. Stark and unavoidable.

Then I had a premonition, and opened my calendar and looked at the dates. It was February 27, five months to the day.

*

Clearing space in Lent – letting go of those things that we use to distract ourselves so that we may see more clearly – will not only make space for us to see the beauty of God’s love and care, the crescent moon in the sunset sky – it may also make space for us to see painful things we have been avoiding.

*

My praying on the mountain did not transfigure me, as far as I could tell; it just left me feeling a little hollowed out, and sad.

But I’ve had some mountaintop moments in my life – haven’t you? – rare though they are, there are moments I can recall when a prayer I never expected to be answered was answered. When my insecurities were just suffused by a love so great that they disappeared. When my loneliness was replaced by a sense of God’s presence, if just for an hour. When a decision I struggled to make became clear as day. When I felt the presence of God so plainly and yet inexplicably that I felt I’d do anything to just stay there, on the mountaintop.

This is one reason we read this transfiguration story every year right before Lent begins. Because what is next will include some wilderness and temptation,
some stark revelation of the damage around us, some setting our face towards a future that will include betrayal and suffering and sacrifice before we see resurrection.

That’s what is next in our church calendar. It may also be what is next for us in our everyday lives, and for longer than the six weeks of Lent. And so we need a reminder to hold on to whatever small moments of clarity and glory we’ve had if we are going to be able to persevere.

Those moments are often small, and they’re hidden, and they’re personal. Only a few people saw Jesus transfigured and talking with his ancestors. Nothing dramatic in the world immediately changed because of it. But those disciples were changed. They began to be transformed from glory into glory. They were given work to do, and as they did it, they did not lose heart.

As my forest path turned and I set my face toward home, a praise song from the nineties came into my head: show me your glory, send down your presence, I want to see your face. I thought more about the dead trees along my path. I prayed that this damage wouldn’t lead to more – that it wouldn’t become dry brush ready for a fire, but that it would feed the forest floor. That those fallen trees would be homes for wildlife, that they would serve as food for flora and fauna, and foster endangered species. I listened to the woodpecker beating its own rhythm into the tree above my head, and I thought about something I read last year – that it takes about two weeks for a woodpecker to make a home in a tree. It’s faster if the tree has a fungal disease that has softened it. I thought about the fact that woodpeckers move every year, and so every year they leave behind the wounded trees, with holes, homes, ready for carolina chickadees and nuthatches and birds that are smaller and weaker to move in.

Maybe seeing the damage becomes its own kind of seeing the glory.

Maybe Jesus transfigures it, and us.

Maybe the spaces hollowed out in us can help us be homes for each other.

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Three(ish) Things:

• One thing we can do, anyway, is keep telling the truth.

• Speaking of Margaret Renkl, Trinity is one of the hosts bringing her, Jeff Chu, and Kathleen Biggins to our spring series Restoring and Protecting Asheville: Science and Storytelling Show Us How. If you’re nearby, register! The events are all free.

• Eventually, I think I’ll have a playlist for every Sunday in the three year lectionary cycle — weird, idiosyncratic playlists made up of CCM and indie folk that maybe no one else would associate with the texts as well as choral hymns suggested for the day. Here are some transfiguration songs.

• My favorite breakfast.

• I’m not preaching this Sunday, but if I were, I’d preach on the Psalm (91), and I’d be meditating on these works of art and dipping into this history of the Psalm.

• Ash Wednesday, by Anya Silver:

How comforting, the smudge on each forehead:
I’m not to be singled out after all
From dust you came. To dust you will return.
My mastectomy, a memento mori,
prosthesis smooth as a polished skull.
I like the solidarity of this prayer,
the ointment thumbed into my forehead,
my knees pressing hard on the velvet rail.
If God won’t give me His body to clutch,
I’ll grind this soot into my skin instead.
If I can’t hold the flame that burned my breast,
I’ll char my brow; I’ll blacken my pores; I’ll flaunt
with ash this flaw in His creation.

Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.

1 Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; *
do not be jealous of those who do wrong.

2 For they shall soon wither like the grass, *
and like the green grass fade away.

3 Put your trust in the Lord and do good; *
dwell in the land and feed on its riches.

4 Take delight in the Lord, *
and he shall give you your heart's desire.

5 Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him, *
and he will bring it to pass.

6 He will make your righteousness as clear as the light *
and your just dealing as the noonday.

7 Be still before the Lord *
and wait patiently for him.

8 Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers, *
the one who succeeds in evil schemes.

9 Refrain from anger, leave rage alone; *
do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.

10 For evildoers shall be cut off, *
but those who wait upon the Lord shall possess the land.

11 In a little while the wicked shall be no more; *
you shall search out their place, but they will not be there.

12 But the lowly shall possess the land; *
they will delight in abundance of peace.

41 But the deliverance of the righteous comes from the Lord; *
he is their stronghold in time of trouble.

42 The Lord will help them and rescue them; *
he will rescue them from the wicked and deliver them,
because they seek refuge in him.

A few weeks ago I was at lunch with a couple of women, and we were talking about our worries. One of these women told me that in her anxiety, she’d been reading Psalm 37 every day, and finding comfort in it.

This is a beautiful practice, and one I’d like to adopt. But first I’ve had to do some wrestling.

Because when I read the first line of this Psalm – do not fret yourself because of evildoers – my instinctual response is not to take a deep breath of relief, and rest in God, but to get a little irritated by it. If you’re not fretting, I want to say to the psalmist, you’re not paying attention. Or worse: if you’re not fretting, maybe you don’t actually care about your neighbors.

Because the evildoers are real – and they’re hurting my neighbors here and around the world, and you, o placid psalmist, are telling me to calm down and not be so emotional about it? (Too many men have said this to me over the course of my life when I’m upset about people being oppressed.)

So. There’s my confession. My immediate reaction to the Psalmist and his certainties

is not trust in God but

anger and grief and my own certainty that the Psalmist is just not taking the evildoers seriously enough. Like maybe the evildoers are not hurting him directly [yet] and so he’s able to keep it all at arm’s length. Like maybe he’s one of the white moderate pastors who told Martin Luther King Jr to just be patient in the face of oppression. MLK - you know this - replied “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

I’m not alone in responding with some skepticism to this Psalm. The Jewish poet Jacqueline Osherow wrote a response to it called “Psalm 37 at Auschwitz.” In her poem, she wonders if it’s possible that those interned in concentration camps found solace in Psalms like this. She writes:

What I want to know is:
could he have tried,
Before his slow death from starvation,
To bring himself a little consolation
By reciting all those psalms inside his head?
Just a little longer and there will be no wicked one,
He'd murmur to a shovel full of ash,
You'll contemplate his place and he'll be gone.
Unless he was too busy saying kaddish
For his father-lost a few days before
Along with his own reservoir of psalms,
Still stunned by the crudeness of the cattle car…1

If we want to take the promises of God seriously
then we have to be willing to hold them against the very worst of the evil that we see in the world.

One thing I like about that poem, which I’ve been reading and re-reading this week, and of which I’ve only quoted you a bit – is that it is serious about the question, and also that it refuses to answer it. Could they find a little consolation in those words in a concentration camp?

There is space in the poem for us to wonder honestly too: can Scripture provide solace, even when we are realistic about the harm that evildoers are doing?

*

When you have an emotional reaction to a bit of Scripture, as I do with this Psalm, it’s an invitation to wrestle, as Jacqueline Osherow does in her poem. One way to wrestle is to write a response, a lament, as she did –

My wrestling led me to look more closely at the Hebrew words. If the Psalmist tells me three times not to fret, maybe I’d better figure out exactly what fretting is.

Robert Alter – Jewish poet and translator – doesn’t use the word fret in his translation. He says don’t be incensed. The verb in Hebrew conveys the idea of burning or kindling, of a fire that’s stoked to get hotter and hotter.

Don’t tend the fire of your anger, the Psalmist might be saying. Don’t go looking for more kindling to throw on the pile.

*

If I am not to tend the fires of anger, what am I to tend?

A few lines down, the Psalmist continues

Put your trust in the Lord and do good; *
dwell in the land and feed on its riches.

but again the English translation obscures something. The Hebrew doesn’t say feed on its riches. It says feed (the translator supplied the supposed object – the land’s riches.) Trust in the Lord, do good, dwell in the land and feed. That word feed is often translated as shepherd or pasture or tend. Trust in the Lord, do good, dwell in the land and tend. What are we supposed to tend? The land in which we’re dwelling, perhaps. But perhaps also our trust. I imagine my trust in God, even now, forty years old, still like a newborn lamb, unsteady on her feet but always eager to explore a little beyond until she gets herself lost. The Psalmist is saying trust in the Lord and shepherd that trust like a little lamb. Keep bringing your prone-to-wander-trust back to the patch of delicious green grass that is God’s provision.

I can tend the fire of my anger, a consuming blaze, and find myself consumed.
Or I can tend my trust, like a lamb on a hillside, and find myself nourished, and finally able, like my friend, to pray this Psalm and find the deep comfort that it holds.2

*

It’s true that there are some people who say “don’t fret” and “wait on the Lord” as a way of avoiding looking straight on at the evil and the evildoers in the world (and it’s true that this still makes me angry). Perhaps the suffering is too great, and so they say “Don’t worry – God is in control,” and stuff their ears with cotton and tuck in to a nice dinner and a little too much wine and find a bingeable tv show to watch. That’s not tending our trust in God. That’s avoidance of reality.

Tending my trust in God – being still before God, waiting for God – does not equal pulling the wool over my own eyes about the realities of evil, or keeping silent about it when I see it. It means being aware of it, and choosing to trust, anyway. It means acknowledging the grief and the tenderness that are underneath my anger, and bringing all of those emotions with me to God.

Such trust, such stillness, is not inactive. As my friend Ragan says,

“Being still at a lunch counter sit-in is something very different from mere passivity.”

*

At the risk of piling image on image here: It’s another poem that has helped me picture such stillness this week.

Hilda Domin was a German Jew forced to flee her homeland as antisemitism flared in the early 1930s. One of her last poems is called “Don’t Grow Weary”:

Don’t grow weary
but hold your hand out
quietly
to the miracle
as if to a bird.

This is a kind of stillness that is active. Alert. Openhanded. Expectant. Responsive to the other. That knows where attention should be given –

not to the flames of rage that threaten to burn us alive. We are called to a different and more difficult ethic, one of loving our enemies and returning good for evil.

We are called to tend things that can grow, not things that destroy.

Trust in the Lord.

Do good.

Don’t kindle your anger; shepherd your trust.

Hold out your hands.

God comes like a bird.

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Threeish Things:

• Lent begins Wednesday, March 5. If that means Fish Fridays are in your future, here is my favorite salmon bowl.

• Lent is also a good time to consider the rite of reconciliation (that is, the practice of confessing your sins to God in the company of a priest). Last year I wrote a three-part series about confession. It begins here, with a story about a train ride I took in Germany twenty-three years ago.

• In Sunday School yesterday we were discussing strategies for dealing with the overwhelming amount of terrible news. One woman said she’s stopped checking her social media apps at all. She gets her news from NPR, and she’s also signed up for the Episcopal church action alerts. When she gets an email from them, she contacts her representatives. Seemed like a good strategy to me!

• Did you know that if you are a PBS donor of at least $5/month, you have PBS Passport, which means you can watch All Creatures Great and Small (new season streaming now!) and Sherlock (which, it turns out, might be the next family show in this household) and Magpie Murders and Ken Burns’s documentary The National Parks? Just throwing that out there in case anyone is thinking of canceling their Amazon Prime :-)

• Thirty Lonely But Beautiful Actions You Can Take Right Now

  

  Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
  Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.
  

*

On Sunday I joined a new group at church called the Needlers. Fourteen women brought their fiber arts and crafts and we sat in a circle and talked about beauty and the sensual pleasures of knitting with various wools and rituals that keep us calm and ways to repurpose holey sweaters instead of adding them to a landfill. I mended five holes in a handed down cardigan and I plan to embroider daisies over them, but I haven’t gotten far yet.

At home I continued, cutting worn out jeans into long strips to braid together into a rag rug to catch the dirt when the cats and I come in from our explorations. I am following instructions I photocopied from a book circa 2011 and have not used until now. (Turns out they’re online, too.)

I used the 5 Calls app to leave voicemails for my representatives, letting them know that I don’t think any unelected person (but particularly one who heils and hoards immoral wealth) and his team of boys (particularly one who advocated online for racism and eugenics) should be granted access to our treasury data or given the freedom to rewrite code; I told them that while I’m sure that USAID is bloated by bureaucracy and could be more efficient, the way that the President is acting now is cruel and will do damage to our national security and hurt countless people. Those are the two for today. Others, later.

I don’t know which was more political, or more effective — the Needlers gathering or the calls. I’ve been reading about the long history of fiber arts and protest. I commend to you 2025 is the year of the craft night and Why Mending in Community Matters.

*

On Monday I went to Fifth Season and bought seeds, sat in the sun on my half-built deck and got my hands dirty. I planted microgreens to grow on the windowsill above my desk so that when I’m writing and I get bored I can pluck a spear of arugula and call it my vegetable of the day.

I planted basil and tomato seeds and put them under a grow light in the basement, even though it’s really too early and I don’t actually have a garden bed in which to transplant them, and if I did, the bears would eat them. The seeds haven’t sprouted yet. Maybe they will.

We hit 70 degrees this week. Someone said “seasons are just a suggestion now.”

*

On Tuesday another group of women met for Bible study. A trans woman sat next to a republican. They blow kisses to each other across the church on Sundays. She stuck around and prayed silently in the courtyard for an hour after. I called my representatives again and did a Duolingo lesson.

*

I did the dishes, and did them again; I made the bed and answered some emails and edited documents and went for a walk and shared online about two new fully-funded writing workshops and bought concert tickets and booked a hotel, as if the future will be like the past. I lit a candle — a local beeswax votive that we blessed at our candlemas service last week. I wrote a sermon. Maybe I’ll preach it.

Three Things:

• Truly, though, this Crunchwrap casserole recipe was so satisfying (sub queso for taco cheese and add a can of black beans).

• A country album from Julien Baker and Torres is on the way! Got tickets for this tour and I’m so excited. Playing Sugar in the Tank on repeat.

• I was moved by these journal excerpts.

Many of us are, actually, wondering what we do now. During the first Trump administration, I wrote about this. I think we begin with lament. And then we reconsider what our Christian call to virtues like kindness, hospitality, modesty, purity, and love means in this world, in this moment. That’s my book Where Goodness Still Grows. (If money’s tight, ask your library to purchase a copy — just google your library’s name with the words purchase request and the form should pop up.) Maybe it can be a help. And it’s great for group discussion, too.

Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.