“He tried his best to do the right thing, to be kind and gentle, and to treat people fairly.”

These are the words my dad wrote in his living will during the years he suffered from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Anyone who knew his handwriting would know it didn’t look like this—my dad’s handwriting was the textbook version of Catholic school perfection, every “t” crossed on the same plane. But these letters—these letters looked unsteady, each one requiring effort to be legible.

I found this document several months ago, while cleaning out a box from my parents’ old house. And it left me wondering: How do I honor this wish? How do I honor this handwriting, this complex, imperfect life?

A few weeks later, an email arrived in my inbox from an organization with a mission to find better treatments for Lou Gehrig’s Disease (also called ALS). A bill was going through Congress to reauthorize research for the disease, and they were looking for people to share personal stories with their government representatives. Would anyone like to volunteer?

He tried his best to do the right thing, to be kind and gentle, and to treat people fairly.

I volunteered.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was doing something I teach my seminarians about when we discuss trauma and grief recovery—I was finding my way back into a community.

It’s been four years since my dad died. He was an English teacher, a lover of theatre and novels—anything that involved the written word. On weekday mornings, he put on a crisp button-down shirt and scratchy wool vest and drove into Queens to introduce his students to English literature, stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts for black coffee along the way. The kids in his classes were mostly immigrants from India and Korea, many learning English as a second language. I remember visiting his classroom and watching him sit on his desk, reading Tom Sawyer aloud as if it were a dramatic production. He had a following like Mr. Keating’s in Dead Poet’s Society.

A few months after my dad retired, his lower back and legs began to bother him. Doctors initially thought he had sciatica, then spinal stenosis. But the disease kept spreading when it wasn’t supposed to—up to his torso, then into his arms and face. Slowly, over the course of 17 years, Lou Gehrig’s Disease paralyzed him muscle by muscle, taking away the thing my dad loved most—his ability to communicate. There was no way to stop its progression.

Those meetings with government representatives were the first time since my dad died that I heard someone with ALS speak. I listened to the strain in their voices, the slowness, the effort it took to enunciate consonants. I remembered how much work speaking even a sentence became for my dad toward the end of his life. I also heard family members share losses very similar to mine and heard my government representatives promise to support the bill.

I had expected to feel the loss of my dad all over again in a setting like this. But what I experienced instead was a surprising familiarity, a recognition that countered what I knew of this illness. ALS is a rare disease, a solitary and lonely disease, and, as a daughter, I’d experienced it mostly in isolation. Now I was hearing other people describe realities I’d witnessed. And I was learning through their storytelling that speaking gives a chance to be seen, known, and understood. The fact that our government representatives committed to supporting the bill also reminded me how important compassionate witnesses are—without them, the words of the suffering go unheard.

My favorite trauma theorist, Judith Herman, describes three stages of trauma recovery—safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection. Herman developed this framework for trauma recovery, but it can also help with grief. Safety grounds and stabilizes. The remembrance and mourning stage is when meaning making occurs. Reconnection is when we figure out how to be a changed self in the world.

If meaning making changes how we understand ourselves, then reconnection asks how we’ll live as that changed self in the world. Advocacy is one way that we practice reconnection. When we advocate for causes we care about, then we help shape the world through the meaning we’ve made from loss. We’re able to exert agency, stand up for what we believe in, create change. Anyone who’s experienced grief or trauma knows that this doesn’t take away the loss, but it does reconfigure it. It changes what we do in response. It changes who we are, and how we live with the time given to us.

I don’t think people get sick so God can teach us something. I don’t think deaths like my dad’s are “for” anything. But it’s possible to believe everything doesn’t happen for a reason and to honor what’s been lost by altering how we live. Advocacy is one way to make that tribute—a way to honor the grief and the life we’re given, while working to create that world in which sorrow, sighing, and pain are no more.

What has reconnection looked like for you after loss? I’d love to hear your reflections, so please leave a comment before you go.

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I signed up to clean gravestones at an old cemetery a few weeks ago, the kind that belonged on the set of Our Town. It seemed like a time capsule, and one that didn’t belong next to the major road and mixed-use development where it lived. But once upon a time, I imagined, it adjoined a white clapboard church. Adults would send their children off to collect stones and wildflowers to lay on the headstones while they paid their respects after Sunday services. It was that community’s memory, not mine.

There was no clapboard church now, and no one had been buried there in decades. I saw hardly any flowers, not a single tiny stone atop the graves. Some were chipped. Others were so dirty I couldn’t make out the text on them. Many were just flat markers with names like, “Unknown Adult #21,” or “Unknown Child #4.”

A motley crew of about four volunteers had assembled that morning for the cleaning job—an older man with neat, grey hair. A hearty, tall woman dressed for a hike. A younger woman with tattoos up and down her arms who said she worked as a police dispatcher. The director handed us each a scrub brush, a large container that spritzed water, and a cleaning product called “Endurance.”

“Cleaning graves takes some elbow grease,” she said. “Wet the stone and scrub it. Apply the cleaner. Let it sit for ten minutes. Then remove the lichen and dirt. The spray saturates the rock, so it’ll get reactivated every time it rains—the stone will look cleaner in a month than it does today.”

I cleaned three graves that morning. The first was a larger stone with only a last name on it. The second bore the words, “Unknown Adult #109.” And the third was a small, skinny stone covered with so much grime that I couldn’t make out the text on it.

I broke out in a sweat trying to clean that headstone. The heat I generated was a magnet for the humidity in Georgia’s swampy air, and my arms began to glisten. At one point, I sniffed under my shirt while no one was looking to make sure I’d remembered deodorant (I had).

This was not exactly turning out to be a meditative experience.

Earlier that morning, I’d refused a pair of garden gloves that the director offered. This was turning out to be a mistake. The Endurance spray had coated my hands in the kind of oily slime I associated with Windex, and the skin on my left forefinger was now brown, dead along with the headstone detritus.

But I kept at it with the elbow grease, and I did make some progress. Black and orange sludge slid off. A name became visible after I sprayed some water—Green B. Wofford, it said. Dates emerged as after a second round of scrubbing away the lichen and algae, microscopic bacteria and fungi. In sacrificing them, I revealed a memory.

My curiosity about Mr. Green B. Wofford grew along with the dirt that coated my wrists and forearms. He’d died young, at 24. Why? I’d never know. Perhaps he was a baker or a banker. Maybe he liked to play the piano in the evenings. Perhaps he was a wild romantic, writing poetry to the young lady up the road. I imagined her laying stones for him for years after he died (who was turning into a wild romantic now?).

Why did this stranger’s identity matter so much to me? What would have been lost if I hadn’t stopped my Saturday morning chores long enough to volunteer at this graveyard, if I’d traded Endurance for Windex and cleaned my kitchen counter instead? I would have lost a name, an identity, the barest glimpse of one person’s history. But does any of this matter, especially if Mr. Green B. Wofford is off enjoying his heavenly reward?

To get to know someone only through their memory is a misty yet intimate experience. It’s a living relationship that pierces through the lichen and the dirt and the clay, the dust we were and the dust we’ll become. It gave me a chance to say to Mr. Green B. Wofford, “I see you. I know you. I remember you.”

Perhaps this did nothing for Mr. Green B. Wofford, who I hope is off reading poetry to his beloved in the world beyond. But it changed something in me to get to know him, even a little. This, after all, is what relationships do. Why should our relationships with the dead be any different that way?

Lichen endures if we don’t get in the way, and stone endures stoically, outlasting us all.

But being seen and remembered, connecting across time and generations—these things only endure if we’re willing to show up, get our hands a little dirty, and apply a bit of elbow grease.

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I’m delighted to share that a book project I’ve spent the last two years developing has found a home at Fortress Press.

Two years ago, my colleague and I began a project through The that brought theologians, psychologists, chaplains, and musicians together around a single question:

How does trauma shape a person’s calling?

We often think of vocation as a purpose or destiny. But trauma is no one’s destiny, and it has a complex relationship to vocation.

Sometimes trauma propels people toward deeply meaningful new callings.

Sometimes it thwarts them.

We wanted to understand this tension better:
What does it reveal about our world?
About ourselves?
About God?

As our conversations unfolded, we realized something else: Many people preparing for ministry carry unprocessed trauma, yet encounter few models of faith leaders speaking honestly about how trauma has shaped their own sense of call.

This book—co-edited with the incomparable —brings together personal reflections from participants in the project about the ways trauma shaped their vocations. These are not clean stories of triumph over adversity. They’re honest accounts of how suffering, healing, loss, resilience, and meaning-making become intertwined with a sense of call.

Philosopher Susan Brison reminds us that saying something about trauma does something to it.

I’m grateful to have been part of a project that helped people say something about trauma. My hope is that these essays will now do something in the lives of readers who are wondering how trauma has shaped their own vocations.

More to come.

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I didn’t plan to take a pilgrimage.

But about a week ago, I shared an impromptu dinner with a friend visiting Atlanta, and she mentioned plans to drive to Montgomery and see the Legacy Sites.

“Want to join me tomorrow?” she asked.

“I do,” I said.

Only on the drive home did I realize how irrational this was—I have three kids. I’d need to rearrange who would take who to their weekend activities. My mother recently had surgery. I had papers to grade, and I didn’t even have a hotel reservation….

Yet, the whisper in my mind was this: There’s no rational time to take a pilgrimage.

It’s a call, a summons.

There’s a cost to saying yes.

But it costs more to say no.

Time slowed in the Legacy Museum, just like it slows in the Holocaust Museum and Pearl Harbor. Memorials like these suspend time. They’re the opposite Disney World or Atlantis, escapes that have an addictive ability to remove us from the real and replace it with the pleasurable. Americans spend billions of dollars for those experiences—experiences let us forget.

How much should we pay to remember?

Wandering through the museum, I read advertisements placed by former slaves after the Civil War. They were looking for missing relatives—a child, a parent, a spouse. I wondered if any of them had been reunited. I looked into the eyes of the people photographed—sharecroppers without shoes, young white men holding pro-segregation signs with such confidence—and I pondered what happened to each of them.

Towards the end of the visit, I spoke with a security worker who stood quietly against the wall in one of the exhibition rooms.

“It must be difficult to spend every day here,” I said.

She shifted from one foot to the other. “It gives me hope.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“I watch each person take a moment to remember this history. They can change the future if they’re aware of what happened, every single one of them.”

I thought of my colleague, Stephanie Arel, who spent months visiting memorials around the world and speaking those who work in them. She describes many of these workers as what Henri Nouwen calls“wounded healers,” people who transform their own suffering to “become a source of life for others.” It’s counterintuitive work because we often believe proximity to grief deepens it. But really, it does the opposite.

It clarifies.

It connects.

It restores hope and creates the possibility for change.

I looked around me: How many of the people here were wounded healers? Imagine all they could transform.

Ahead of me was a group of high school students. Retirees walked behind. All of them had chosen to witness this history on a sunny spring day when they could have taken a hike, brunched on avocado toast. Instead, they opted remember the past because it’s one way to breathe hope into the future.

This is the heart of a pilgrimage—it’s a journey that changes by challenging. People might sit in silence at a convent or walk miles along the Camino with blistered feet. Sometimes, they undertake these journeys to make penance for wrongdoing, or they’re trying to become closer to God. Other times, they’re experiencing grief and yearn for the weight of their suffering to ease.

Often, people visit religious sites for pilgrimages, but not always. The pilgrimage might be to a childhood home or a historic place—locations that matter for different reasons. Still, there’s usually something spiritual at stake—to atone or to simply give thanks.

For me, the Legacy Museum was a pilgrimage unplanned. I didn’t expect to be there that morning—I intended to take my daughter to ballet. And yet, there I was, learning about how the world I live in now descended from this history—from the choices some people made and the choices others didn’t have the freedom to decide. Seeing the faces of those individuals and reading their stories of trauma was difficult. It also changed me. I hope I’ll live differently because of what I witnessed.

This morning, I’m remembering the high school students, the retirees, and the people in the photographs. I’m thinking of my friend, who extended that last-minute invitation. I’m reflecting on the security worker keeping watch over every visitor who paused, who looked, who remembered. I’m recalling that pilgrims don’t travel alone, that there’s safety in numbers.

How did each of them say yes?

How will you?

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Easter’s a complex holiday. It offers miracle and hope and a challenge to believe audaciously. I’ve been meditating on some of Easter’s intricacies this year. So instead of a longer reflection today, I’m sharing two shorter ones. These are my literary Easter eggs for you.

Easter Is Audacious

I have a history of crying on Easter. It started when I was 25, back when I was a master’s student studying the intersection of trauma and theology and earning some extra money as an on-call hospital chaplain.

I saw a lot of death in those years and learned much about suffering. At the same time, I’d been hired to sing alto in a brand-new girls’ choir. As I helped the girls line up in the back of the church for Easter morning, I found I couldn’t sing. The organ swelled “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” and my throat clenched. My cheeks reddened. I bit my tongue, hard. Good Friday would have been a fitting day to shed some tears, but no one wants to see a crying chorister on Easter Sunday.

Easter is the Church’s most triumphant day. Jesus rose! Odds are defeated, death and evil vanquished. Trumpets join the organ. Hymns describe victory. Lilies surround the altar, their blossoms emerging from bulbs just as Jesus emerged from the empty tomb. It’s the happiest day of the Christian year. And it should be.

We talk a lot about how difficult Christmas is for people who’ve experienced a loss. Blue Christmas services are common. Everyone knows someone who struggles in December. We talk less about how the same thing can happen at Easter, how the message of joyful triumph over death may clash with the reality of someone who’s treading water in ocean swells of grief.

Maybe you know something of this. Maybe you know the hold of grief, depression, or trauma and find it hard to square the Easter message with the tenderness in your heart. Maybe you remember what you used to believe about Easter back when you were a member of a different church, back when you still held your childhood faith. Maybe you wish you could believe like that again.

Easter is audacious. It makes a claim about death that is logically absurd and wondrous and aching all at the same time: How could the resurrection have happened? How amazing that it did happen. Will I ever see it happen myself?

I am no seer, and I will never pretend to be. But if you’ve known tears on Easter as I have, then you also know that they stop. The lump in your throat relaxes. The organ dims. You go home. You eat. You scrub some dishes. You trade your starched dress for sweats and return a work email.

This return to the ordinary is also part of the audacity of Easter—because Easter Sunday isn’t the end of the story. It isn’t the last day. It’s the start of something, the bringer of change that swirls and ruptures and reconfigures. Like the women standing at the tomb, we don’t really know what lies ahead. We only know that death is real, and that Christians have long insisted something lies beyond it.

So we breathe and endure.

And we wait.

And we wonder.

This Easter, A Woman in Canterbury

A woman holds the Church of England’s most senior role this Easter. Sarah Mullally recently became the first woman to be enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury after walking six days on pilgrimage from London. For an Episcopal priest like me, she is a glass ceiling broken. She’s also making me think about Easter a little differently.

Easter depends on women. Women remained at the crucifixion, witnessing Jesus’ labored breaths and tortured cries. They stayed to the bitter end and then prepared Jesus’ corpse for burial, washing caked dirt and blood from his fingernails, rubbing oil into his skin. On the third day after his death, women were the first to arrive at the empty tomb, the first to be awed, confused, confounded. Had they not shared what they saw, had they not convinced others of a resurrection that seemed utterly preposterous, perhaps Christian history would look very different.

As I watched the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, my first thought was how heavy her vestments were, how heavy her responsibilities. Like the women in Jesus’ time, she has a weighty ministry. The Anglican Communion faces enormous challenges, and in this way, it’s not so different from many other denominations. Membership’s declining. Its constituents don’t agree on how to interpret the Bible or how to respond to a variety of social issues. Scandal runs deep. Divisions and emotions run high. Some people don’t even want a woman in the role. Maybe you know the toll this all takes from your own experience with religion.

But the second thing I noticed was the compassion in her eyes, the marvel and the awe. I was reminded that new life comes when love couples with imagination. Transformation happens while we’re patient, when we wait and watch and witness. It occurs because we remain, because we don’t turn away from a heavy burden, even when we’re not sure what will emerge.

I’d love to hear what Easter is bringing up for you this year. I hope you’ll leave a comment below and subscribe for future posts. I wish you peace, hope, and only good things this Easter.

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Awhile back, I had some genetic testing done to assess my cancer risk. I’d resisted the testing for more than a decade, despite the advice of multiple doctors who knew my family’s history.

“The information will help you,” they said.

“I can’t imagine how,” I said. To me, the knowledge felt aimless—technology had advanced enough to give me information, but not enough to tell me what to do with it.

In the end, the report stated I had no known cancer markers. What I did have were multiple “variants of uncertain significance.” This meant I had mutations in my DNA, but no one knew what they meant. Maybe they caused cancer. Maybe they didn’t. Some mutations are too rare to know, the genetic counselor explained. Some haven’t captured the imagination of scientists yet. The only thing she could say for sure was that these genes weren’t understood.

“Check back every few years,” she said. “The future might bring more clarity.”

I’ve grown accustomed to the luxury of our modern world when it comes to information—I expect answers, and I expect them quickly. I’m also a theologian who believes that what’s most worth knowing is often unquantifiable. Much of what matters most is beyond our understanding. The genetics test fit neither category. The outcome wasn’t clear or opaque. It was a strange combination of precision and ambiguity, and I didn’t know what to make of it.

How do we move forward when the answer is, “We don’t know yet?”

How can we live with information that refuses meaning?

As humans, we crave ways to categorize our experiences. We want to know if they’re benign or malignant. We want to know their point. We prefer their significance be stable, not variable, and we’d like to know quickly—thank you very much—because the unresolved makes us uncomfortable.

It haunts our dreams, lurks in our subconscious.

Answers would be easier.

Meaning would provide clarity.

Yet, the experiences that profoundly shape us rarely arrive with a clear explanation. The ones we care most about often take the longest to interpret. Maybe you know something about this. Perhaps the love you once felt for your spouse has changed, and you’re not sure what they mean to you now. Perhaps you’re suffering an overwhelming loss and wonder what the purpose of it was. Maybe you’re waiting to hear about a diagnosis. Maybe you’ve been handed one, and the prognosis is unclear.

Those with active spiritual lives have some wisdom when it comes to living with variants of uncertain significance. After all, God is the greatest mystery of significance we’ll ever encounter. (Not for naught did Augustine say: “If you have understood, what you have understood is not God.”) Expecting to discover God’s will for your life in 24 hours is to grossly mismanage your spiritual calendar.

Sometimes, you must wait for an answer.

Sometimes, you must endure for quite a while, hoping for the hard-earned wisdom that yields from time and persistence.

Many spiritual traditions say there aren’t simple steps—1, 2, 3, 4—that resolve variants of uncertain significance. Instead, there are habits you can practice until they become part of who you are. One of these habits is patience. Recently, I read an article about the Hebrew word for patience—salvanut. The root of this word is the verb “to suffer” or “to carry a burden with patience.” It’s also the basis of other Hebrew words like sablan—meaning a porter who lifts something weighty.

I love the idea that patience and carrying heavy objects have the same root. It takes patience to carry heavy objects, and patience is often a burden all on its own. Both take grit, determination. They’re not for the faint of heart. In the Jewish tradition, one of the takeaways is that, as Beth Kuhen says, “patience is not passive waiting, but the strength to carry suffering with dignity, trusting that there is meaning beyond what we can see.”

If patience is a friend to variants of uncertain significance, then so is curiosity. When meaning isn’t immediately available, curiosity keeps us from collapsing into despair. Curiosity has a bit of a tortured theological reputation, though. Thomas Aquinas warned against it, saying it could lead the faithful away from God. Some denominations advise against too much curiosity, lest it lead to sin. Yet, I cannot help but believe that curiosity is our friend when we’re faced with variants of uncertain significance. It makes us creative. It allows us to wonder. It lets us imagine beyond what’s limiting us. If we never get creative enough to ask, “Why?” then we’ll never pack our bags and begin the journey to move beyond our stuckness.

Conclusions in essays like these are supposed to wrap things up. But variants of uncertain significance resist wrapping paper. They humble us by refusing easy answers. So today, I want to leave us there—with the knowledge that our lives are, in many ways, a variant of uncertain significance. And that is both their burden and their beauty.

Where in your life are you still waiting for clarity? I’d love to hear from you.

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Last Sunday, I preached on Psalm 121 over at Emory University’s chapel. This is an adapted version of that sermon.

I was scrolling on Instagram a few nights ago and landed upon an influencer who wanted to teach me how to take the perfect selfie. She pursed her glossy filler-filled lips, raised her eyebrows. She said the trick was to raise your hand high and look upwards, chin elevated and eyes wide.

Looking upwards had many benefits, she said.

Your eyes appear bigger, and your nose looks smaller. Your wrinkles slide backwards, and you’re graced with an instant face lift.

Up, she insisted.

The secret is to look up.

The well-crafted selfie isn’t the only time we look upwards. We may look up while completing a difficult math equation, thumbing our forefinger against the computer keys. If we have a spare moment to relax, we may lie down, our backs hugged by grass, and watch clouds float across the sky. We believe heaven is upwards—beyond the sun, behind the stars, in this unknown space that defies sight. Even our language reflects the idea that “up” tends to be a good thing:

Cheer up.

Lighten up.

Perk up.

Buck up.

Brighten up.

One of my favorite psalms—psalm 121—begins with the act of looking up. The psalmist is in distress and seeks help from…up.

“I lift my eyes to the hills, from where is my help to come?”

When I was a child, I sang a version of this psalm in my choir, and I believed the psalmist was talking about lifting his eyes to God when he looked to the hills.

Hills are up.

Hope is up.

Good things are up.

God, too, must be up.

But this isn’t quite right.

In the ancient world, hills were sometimes seen as holy and just as often known as dangerous. They existed between towns and cities. They were undeveloped, making them perfect places for thieves or soldiers to ambush travelers.

They were also uninhabitable—too barren, too dry. There wasn’t enough water. The soil couldn’t be tilled. Find yourself on a hill without a sack of snacks and a Yeti, and you find yourself in a right pickle.

And then there were the spiritual perils: Pagans used high spots like hills for their rituals. They built altars there and offered sacrifices to gods that the ancient Jewish people considered false. Anyone asking for help from the hills was asking to be led astray.

I lift my eyes to the hills—from where is my help to come?

Is my help really up there?

For a member of the ancient Jewish community, to look to the hills for help was to misread one’s spiritual compass. Better off looking downwards, becoming friendly with the floorboards or the dust. Better off peering within one’s self or towards Jerusalem.

No, idolatry isn’t always about climbing hills to worship false gods. Sometimes, it’s about becoming too attached to partial revelation. Sometimes it’s about having certainty when we should hold caution. Sometimes, it’s about giving people more power than they’re due, more influence than they deserve.

So who are false faith influencers, both historic and contemporary? Who are the ones we turn into idols? Who have we found atop the hills when we dared look up for help?

Because it’s Women’s Heritage Month, I’ve been reflecting on women’s witness in the church. I’ve been thinking about how Christians often prioritized those leaders who made statements about women that denigrated them, proposed that they are somehow less than.

Christianity isn’t unique in this—other faith traditions and secular organizations have made similar mistakes. But because I’m most familiar with Christianity, I’ll use it as a case study.

Christians have often coopted the church and used it to separate human from human. Some, I believe, were unaware of what they were doing because they were merely reflecting the ideas their culture held—that women were hysterical, unreliable, untrustworthy, that they needed men’s brains and bodies to correct them, teach them how to live in the image of God. Others were—are—quite well aware of what they’re doing.

There’s honor in naming our mistakes, owning that we’ve looked up to those who built their own “hills” around male voices at the expense of the faithful witness of women. These men were elevated, their voices given a platform in worlds both ancient and contemporary. And because history spotlights summits, their voices are what we remember. Their voices are the ones who disproportionately influence how we think about God, ourselves, and this world with which we’re gifted.

Women’s Heritage Month provides an opportunity to remember the important spiritual contributions women have made—women like Margery Kempe, a medieval mystic who wrote the first English autobiography, or Julian of Norwich, whose visions of God’s love were so powerful that she wrote not one but two accounts of them.

Women like Mary Magdalene, whose faith has been maligned throughout the centuries, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose identity has all too often been sanitized.

Women like Joan of Arc, who died for her beliefs and Harriet Tubman, whose faith guided the immense risks she took, and Mahalia Jackson, who spun her spirituality into music.

There are also many more women who chose to live quieter lives—who are brave and noble and good precisely because they never sought glory or public recognition. In exchange, their faith guided them to make sacrifices both fair and unfair, to reconfigure their priorities, to love their neighbor well.

Maybe you know some of these women, those whose faith is practiced without spectacle or respect—in kitchens, at wells, at bedsides, at tombs.

This March, we’re invited to retrain our vision. Where have we mistaken height for holiness? Where have we confused prominence with promise? Whose voices have we assumed were “closer to God” because they seemed to speak from higher ground?

“Your help comes from the Lord,” the Psalmist says.

So, look around.

Take a minute to listen to those who lack power, who have no influence—to the victims, the discredited, the truth tellers. Become friends with the floorboards, wiggle your toenails into the ground of your being. And seek the God who does not dwell in atop a hill, who reminds you that your place is in the oxygen rich air at its base.

If this reflection resonates, feel free to share or restack. I’m grateful for thoughtful readers wherever they find themselves. And if you’d like to leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

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Share Around the Fireplace

As a child, the hardest part of Ash Wednesday wasn’t death. It was being seen.

I remember the priest leaning down to reach my child forehead on Ash Wednesday. I don’t know how old I was—seven? eight?—but I recall the smell of melting wax, the pressure of his thumb on my skin. Some priests gently apply ashes, and they barely leave a trace. But not this one. This one meant business.

“You are dust and to dust you shall return.”

As I walked back to my pew, death wasn’t the most pressing issue on my mind. I worried about death as a kid—I even had a recurring dream where I was locked in a coffin. But on Ash Wednesday, I wasn’t too concerned with my dust-ness. I was more worried that the ash on my forehead was visible. My faith had been outed, and I was afraid of being seen.

Most days, I lived my life as a young Christian unmarked. I didn’t wear a cross. I didn’t talk much about what I learned in Sunday School. Kids in my class knew I was Episcopalian. Then again, I knew most of them were Catholic, and the rest had active lives in one of the many Jewish synagogues in our town. In our little corner of Long Island, it seemed like every family had a faith tradition, and we believed that faith was honorable.

So it wasn’t that I came from a culture where religion was seen as weird. What was weird was my reaction, the way I wanted to hide when a grocery clerk or teacher saw the ashes on my forehead. It was as if the vulnerability of being publicly marked for something deeply private shrunk me. And my own discomfort with that shrunken feeling made me confused.

Wasn’t I supposed to be proud of being a Christian?

So, why did I feel exposed?

Christianity offers mixed messages about visibility. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his followers to give in secret, not letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing Don’t boast. Never gloat.

But also this: Don’t hide your light under a bushel. And please make disciples of all nations.

Ashes on our forehead aren’t a sign of gift or talent. They’re a symbol of endurance. Those with ashes showed up. They did the hard work of worship. They owned their relationship to the dust, their tiny, heart-beating precarity pitted against this vast, mysterious God who made them. It’s one of the boldest, most countercultural things a Christian does in the liturgical year. It’s also the most public. It’s an act in which the left hand must know what the right hand is doing.

A few days ago, a chaplain at one of my children’s schools sent home a note about Ash Wednesday. It said that the children would have a chance to receive the ashes if they wanted. The note also said that parents shouldn’t worry if kids came home with ashes on their clothing—the dust washes out.

I appreciated this chaplain’s tone. She made a serious ritual accessible for children. Still, I kept thinking about the value of participating in a liturgy designed to mark us for life. Ashes may be as washable as Crayola markers, but they’re supposed to stick to the soul like Super Glue. They’re meant to instill a spiritual habit that reminds us of our mortality, and that we are also so lucky to have this day, this sun, this oxygen, this knowledge that we belong—and will always belong—within God’s beating heart.

To see one’s self in the mirror with that cross smudged on a greasy forehead doesn’t just remind others of that.

It reminds us.

As a child, I would come home at night and try to scrub the ash off. I’d rinse a washcloth in warm water, rub it against my forehead and watch the ash begin to smear. Some would slide down my cheeks like tears. Some adhered to the washcloth. But no matter how hard I rubbed, I always felt like I could still see the outline of the mark. Perhaps it was a trick of the eyes. Perhaps the ash was stubborn. Or perhaps what we believe in is always visible, whether we publicly mark it or not.

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Valentine’s Day was the perfect holiday for an unpopular kid like me.

Back when I was in elementary school, there were favorites on the playground, but there were none on February 14. It was the one day when everyone received the same: a single Hershey’s Kiss or a heart-shaped lollipop glued to a prefabricated note card with their name written in careful print or, in later years, cursive.

I realized even then that my bounty didn’t signal long-term affection—I didn’t expect that the kid who stole my Statue of Liberty pencil sharpener the day before was now going to be my best friend.

But those little cards still represented something: When we looked beyond the playground and the playdates—when we got down to the serious business of being human—all of us were equally valuable.

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I thought about these memories as I prepared my own kids for Valentine’s Day this year. Now it’s their turn to carry a decorated shoebox into class, their turn to pass out gifts. I’ve graduated from gift receiver to tradition enforcer, and my job is to make sure my kids know the rules of this game. Everyone gets a gift. Everyone’s included.

They may only pass out Valentine’s one day a year, but it’s supposed to make a mark, instill a habit.

It’s supposed to teach them there’s a baseline love we all deserve.

St. Paul writes to the Corinthians that, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). Left to their own devices, my children might, well, act like children. They might only give Valentine’s to their best friends. They might keep all the chocolate treats for themselves.

This is developmentally appropriate—if we want to go all Freudian, we could say they’re strong in the Id, the pleasure principle. It takes them time to develop compassion, to see from another’s perspective, to realize the hurt they can cause. They need to build those skills the same way they build their physical muscles—through exercise, practice. challenge.

But here’s the irony: We adults who so carefully make sure our children have one Valentine for every kid in class don’t prioritize equality on this day. We don’t give out gifts to every coworker on February 14. We snag a coveted dinner reservation for ourselves and our spouse. We splurge on a nice cut of steak or a choice filet of salmon and serve it over candlelight on our finest china. We buy jewelry—an heirloom diamond, one of a kind—to show that the person we’ve chosen to love is indeed our favorite.

Valentine’s Day insulates us adults, highlighting how we love one neighbor more than others.

So perhaps we haven’t put an end to childish things. Perhaps we’re giving ourselves permission to indulge in them.

This Valentine’s Day, I’m wondering what it means for us grownups to celebrate in ways that align with the values we teach our children—what’s the adult equivalent of sharing a small gift with every kid in class? What’s the grown-up way of passing everyone a Hershey’s Kiss or a card with their name carefully written on it?

As I pass the frosted cookie cakes at Publix, decorated with pink buttercream hearts, I find myself wondering what our world might look like if we made humbler choices for our favorite loves and instead flexed those other, slightly atrophied muscles—the ones that remember love is meant to be shared with all our neighbors.

Maybe that’s the real work of putting away childish things—not abandoning the rituals of love but widening them.

How might you practice that kind of love today?

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Our society is obsessed with big reveals. We binge on true crime podcasts. We turn juicy tell-all memoirs into bestsellers. We can’t resist documentaries that make us gasp with surprising revelations.

Perhaps this is part of why we’re obsessed with the Epstein files. Every trove of documents discloses another name, pulls another lauded figure down from the celebrity rafters. These files, photos, and emails—they’re supposed to reveal facts that impart truth. And knowing the truth is what we need, right?

Yes, and….

The Epstein files may contain names, dates, photographs, sordid details of abuse, misogynistic descriptions of women, parts of personalities that are abhorrent to recognize. Yet, there’s one thing they don’t contain that’s sorely needed: Repentance.

One of the things I’ve learned from researching trauma is that revealing the truth is an important step, but it’s only the first step to make things right. Facts matter because they ground. They identify harm. They’re a check and balance against wrongdoers twisting the truth. But making things right for victims isn’t just about naming illegalities. It’s also about undertaking some kind of meaningful accountability rooted in repentance and restitution. Facts serve this end.

Religious traditions have quite a lot to say about repentance and restitution. Repentance, for instance, has a long history in both Judaism and Christianity. It’s a theme in the biblical texts. The Jewish and Christian scriptures routinely portray the powerful as avoiding confession and the prophets as demanding not just acknowledgment but also reform. These stories help us understand what repentance is and what it’s not.

In the Jewish tradition, repentance is also strongly connected to the Hebrew word teshuvah (תְּשׁוּבָה), which means “to return.” It’s the act of returning to God, to righteousness and moral purity, to one’s spiritual baseline. In Judaism, victims are under no obligation to forgive someone who hasn’t done teshuvah. Their anger is justified if no repentance occurred. There is, in other words, no reason to forgive someone who hasn’t shown they want to be forgiven.

The Christian tradition places similar value on repentance. The practice of confession emerges from the belief that it’s important to acknowledge wrongdoing and then do something meaningful to make restitution. This process of naming and then acting is supposed to make things right. It’s also supposed to convert the soul, make it more mindful of the damage it can do and orient it towards healthier, life-giving habits.

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Without honest, authentic repentance and restitution, truth circulates like a viral meme. It’s a spectacle, something to be gawked at. This, I fear, is what we’re doing with the Epstein files. With every revelation, it seems as if one more cohort of men winds up trying to distance themselves from Epstein, attempting to justify their words and behaviors despite the evidence that emails and photographs provide.

Very few of the individuals named in the Epstein files have apologized for the ways they’ve spoken about women, touched them, treated them. The rare apology that does occur tends to be perfunctory, the whitewashed words of lawyers. There’s often a deflection thrown in—I didn’t know the extent of what Epstein was doing, so don’t blame me. None seem to include a meaningful attempt to make things right. Teshuvah is nowhere in sight.

The Epstein Files have produced an abundance of truth-telling documents and truth-dodging responses, ranging from carefully crafted PR statements to the incredibly convenient, “I have no recollection.” They have rarely produced repentance on the part of wrongdoers, and equally as rarely have they brought about restitution.

The absence of these practices is a moral failure. For victims, it’s another wound inflicted. For those who enacted the harm—whether they trafficked women or spoke ill of them—it’s a missed chance to repent, to be honest, to make things right. For society at large, it’s a lost chance to observe the power of confession and conversion.

In the end, it’s a loss for us all.

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**Spoiler Alert: This article discusses key plot points from both Wicked films.

When Elphaba arrives at Shiz University in the first half of Wicked, she’s self-possessed, confident despite the tax of her green skin. She’s immune to most jabs. She’s out to protect her sister. She couldn’t care less about being popular.

Or so it seems.

It turns out that Elphaba’s elated after Madame Morrible suggests she has a special talent that could curry the Wizard’s favor. Uninterested in popularity with her peers, she’s very interested in being popular with the Wizard. She’s what we might call a true believer—she’s sure of the Wizard’s goodness and power. She doesn’t question his omniscience. She knows he’s worthy of worship.

Basically, he’s God to her.

As the first installment closes, we learn that Elphaba and other Ozians have been worshipping a false god, and a selfish one at that. The Wizard has no real power. He’s not worthy of respect. He hides his impotence behind curtains, literal smoke screens, and other people’s talent, and he’ll do anything to protect the illusion of his own power, including scapegoating a young green woman.

Once Elphaba meets the Wizard, the scales fall from her eyes. But they don’t fall from Ozians’, who would rather keep on and carry on than reconsider who and what deserves their reverence. They blindly follow. They sell their souls. Either way, they fall for a false god.

Years ago, back when I taught courses on the intersection of religion and popular culture, I used stories like this to help students understand belief, betrayal, and revelation in their own lives. Wicked rocks at this, whether in film or musical form. Wicked’s certainly about friendship, love, oppression, power, and what it means to be a woman. But it’s also about how blind faith corrupts our souls and our societies.

This is where the film’s fiction elides with our reality because we’re no strangers to charismatic leaders making false promises. So, the question isn’t whether we can avoid them. The question is how we respond. Are you Elphaba, a prophet willing to risk everything to speak the truth? Are you Glinda, a master manipulator with an ultimately good heart who works for transformation inside the system? Are you Madame Morrible, willing to trade your morals for power? Or are you the chorus, the citizens of Oz, victims of false news and false gods?

Perhaps you’re a bit like all these characters.

We know this storyline well—not only from the grand failures of politics and religion but also from the plot line of our own lives. We ought to know by now that when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. That’s true of Black Friday deals as much as it is of love, politics, and faith. Whether you live in an American city, an Asian city, or the Emerald City, there are false gods everywhere who lure us with promises—shiny, glitzy promises—to pacify our most primal desires.

Don’t want to be green?

You don’t have to be!

Want to be beautiful, rich, happy, powerful, popular?

Not a problem!

One thing I’ve learned in my career as a theologian is that it’s disorienting when the scales fall, when the false idols get crushed and the glitz and the gold turn out to be a mirage. It’s quiet at best, isolating at worst. Relationships change. Community shrinks. If we learn anything from Elphaba’s journey, it’s that walking away from blind faith brings no guarantee of comfort, ease, or fame. But in exchange for some vulnerability, you may find a community where you actually belong, instead of one where you have to pretend. You might also discover new ways of knowing yourself, God, and your world—ways that are enlivening and soulful, that don’t crumble in tough times, that do no harm.

When given the opportunity to surrender to undesirable truths, to a faith whose rewards aren’t always obvious, it’s tempting to flick a hand and walk the other way. It’s tempting to live your life as first-act-Glinda or Fiyero before he meets Elphaba, dancing a hedonistic waltz through life.

Because blind faith can be fun—at least at first.

It lets your brain hit cruise control. It’s carefree and convenient. But you’ll also miss out on so much. And while you might never know if you were changed for the better, at least as far as I’m concerned, you’ll have been changed for good.

How has blind faith affected your life? When have you been brave enough to leave a false god for an honest one? I’d love to hear your stories, so please consider leaving a comment below.

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Old journals line a bookshelf in my office.

The cover is torn from one; I hold it together with red silk string.

Another has photos that fall out whenever I pick it up.

Several are full, and some are close to empty.

I wrote in one from back to front.

Many are composed in the same blue gel pen I used throughout my teens and twenties, the penmanship neat but the ink smeared across the page because I’m left-handed.

These journals hold a quiet record of my life, a way to track my sense of self across time. They’re not meant for public consumption. Sometimes, I’ve even felt transgressive re-reading them, as if I were digging through the graveyard of my own memories. Because the point was for me to write the entries, not to return to them, right?

Or maybe that’s not right.

Because the act of writing matters.

So does laying eyes on ink that remembers.

When I run my fingertips across those journal covers—some hard, some soft—I see how each blank page gave me space to record milestones, to process difficult events, to create a narrative, to reflect upon my relationship to God. When I’ve been exposed to trauma, journaling helped me regain a sense of control. Through writing, I’ve carved meaning out of events that seemed to lack any.

It may seem strange to say that faith and trauma share anything in common, but when it comes to journaling, I think they do. One thing I’ve learned from the time I’ve spent studying both is that they benefit from writing for the same reasons. Each defies logic. Each is liminal. Each exists outside the expectations of daily life. And while traumas cause distress that faith (hopefully) doesn’t, both can confound.

In the past decade, trauma theorists like Bessel van der Kolk have spent a lot of time thinking about how body-based practices like yoga can help trauma survivors return to their baseline. Less attention has been given to written practices like journaling, but these can help too. Writing provides a chance to reflect, to pause from conversation’s rapid pace, to cross out and erase until we say what we mean.

At its core, trauma deprives people of agency, including narrative agency.

Writing reclaims it.

So journaling can be an important tool in one’s spiritual life when traumas haunt, when we’re trying to send the ghosts on their way. But it can also be transformative in less charged times. When it comes to spirituality, journaling requires that we slow down and quietly meditate on what’s happening on our faith journey. Through it, we can record the peaks and troughs. It also lets us incorporate divine mysteries into the story of our lives in a way that makes sense, even if that’s by letting the mystery remain numinous. Journaling also pushes us to notice more, because if we’re going to write about our relationship to God, then we’d better be paying attention.

The practice of keeping a journal is one of the most important spiritual disciplines I know of, both in charged times and in stable ones. It’s also one that’s stood the test of time: Some think of Augustine’s Confessions as a retrospective journal. Jonathan Edwards, Teresa of Avila, John Wesley and his wife Susanna, Joseph Smith, Thomas Merton, and Søren Kierkegaard all kept private journals in addition to their published work.

All this is to say that journaling is one of the great spiritual practices for a reason. It gives flesh to words. It’s got staying power. It physically manifests what we truly believe, even if seeing what we truly believe makes us cringe. Journaling may make us proud, or it may make us want to change. But either way, it allows us to see—in ballpoint or pencil or blue gel ink—what grounds our being today.

In recent years, I’ve traded my physical journals for a digital file on my laptop. I miss seeing my handwriting on the page, but I know I can say more with keystrokes. Also, I got tired of that blue gel pen exploding on my knuckles. Technology aside, every time I add an additional entry to that journal file, I sense myself joining a stream of writers who have reflected on their life in faith for millennia, in all its transcendence and all its struggles. I can think of no nobler spiritual discipline than that.

How has writing in a journal or in another form helped you make sense of your spiritual life? How has it helped you cope with trauma? I’d love to hear more about your experiences, so please feel free to leave a comment or join the chat!

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My grandmother left me a small vial of her perfume when she died. Twenty years later, it sits on my bathroom counter, about half full, the dark brown liquid still smelling like her hugs.

I’ve never used a drop of this little bottle. I rarely open it because I’m afraid of a spill. Irrational though it is, I imagine that what remains will evaporate the moment I pull the top off, that it’ll become as ephemeral as she is.

This perfume is one of the few tangible connections I have to my grandma, aside from her wedding ring, which I wear as my own. But as I see it, there’s a difference between the ring and the perfume—I remember the wedding band on my grandma’s finger. But the scent feels unmediated, conjuring my grandma as I directly experienced her.

If I opened that bottle, could I honor her memory more fully?

Or is the highest honor to keep it closed?

Honoring the dead is central to many faiths. In the Jewish tradition, family members observe the yahrzeit of their deceased loved one; on the eve of the anniversary of their passing, they light a candle that burns for 24+ hours. While there are no formal prayers offered, they may go to synagogue to recite the mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that makes no mention of death, but rather praises God. In Japan, Buddhists celebrate the Obon, where it’s believed that ancestors briefly return to earth to visit loved ones and are guided back to their eternal home via lanterns. It’s one of three major holiday periods in the country. In Mexico, local tradition and Catholicism blends into Dia de los Muertos.

As far as I know, smell isn’t a central part of any of these traditions, even though smell has a long history of connecting humans to God, of bridging this world with the next. The ancient Jewish people burnt spices in the Temple—saffron, balsam, cinnamon and frankincense. God instructed Moses on the proper way to prepare burnt offerings of animals and grains in the early chapters of Leviticus. Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus have long histories of setting incense aflame. In the second chapter of Genesis, God breathed spirit (ruah) into Adam’s nostrils to give him life—that breath must have had a scent. Was it fresh like pine trees? Sweet as grass after a rain?

Somehow, I can’t believe it was sour.

Back at my high school graduation party, a friend of my father’s gave me a partially used bottle of Chanel No. 5 that belonged to his recently deceased wife. It was a curious gift to give to a teenager, especially since I’d never met the wife and didn’t have much in the way of a relationship with my father’s friend. Still, I understood the logic behind it—he wanted the perfume to go to use, and he wanted his wife’s memory to live on through someone who had a fighting shot at longevity.

As I sit here now, with my grandma’s perfume bottle beside me—still corked—I’m left wondering how the smells we inherit shape us: The heartiness of that parent’s sauce bubbling on the stove, the chlorine in the community pool where an older friend taught you to dive, the musty scent of that childhood church, that one with the old widow who meant well but frightened you just a little.

Perhaps those smells are the most intimate way to remember who we were and what we once had the privilege of adoring. Perhaps they distill us down to our essence. Perhaps this sense, more than the other four, is the most direct way to recall how much we loved—and were loved by—those who no longer dwell among us.

What scents remind you of loved ones who have died? What objects make you feel closest to them? I’d love to hear more of your reflections and memories, so I hope you’ll consider leaving a comment below.

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A few weeks ago, I told a friend it was a pity I wasn’t born in the early 20^th century. I would have made a terrific Rosie the Riveter, I said, although maybe I was just channeling my grandma, who worked in a bottle cap factory during the war. I added that I could imagine myself as a medieval nun, forsaking marriage for the books and freedom of monastic life. Or a wife and mother in the Italian Renaissance who wrote poetry under a pseudonym—that would have been enlivening.

The point was, I wasn’t sure I was made for today—for this era of AI and self-driving cars and polarization. Some days, I feel like a galumphing dinosaur, lobbing along in search of grass while everyone else is asking Siri to DoorDash dinner.

The time we live in impacts every facet of our lives. It shapes the opportunities available to us. It molds how other people think about who we are and why we matter. Example: Imagine that, instead of being the child of two schoolteachers in the late 1900s, I was born in the 1700s in England to a father who was a school teacher and a mother who didn’t work. As a young woman, I would have been expected to marry, but I likely wouldn’t have married for love. I would have married for money. If my father had any property, I probably wouldn’t have inherited it. My parents would have saved for a dowry, but they might have been resentful about it, wished they had a boy who could earn his keep. I probably wouldn’t have had much in the way of formal education. Then again, I probably would have had better sewing skills.

Many of us, including people of faith, don’t spend enough time thinking about how time shapes our lives—both the time we live in and how we spend the time we have. The way we understand our own selves, who we’re called to be and what it’s possible for us to imagine are all impacted by the time period in which we live, how much time we have in our past and future, how we understand time itself. Teenagers make irrational decisions, believing time is on their side. Older people may be cautious, worried that time will run out. Traumatized individuals often have a sense of being stuck in time or have trouble imagining a future.

Time impacts faith as well. If you’re sure your beliefs will land you in heaven or hell, then the endpoint of your timeline—God’s judgment in the afterlife—dictates your choices here on earth. Consider those who recently believed the Rapture was coming, thanks to a combination of YouTube and TikTok videos. They made concrete choices about their relationships, professional lives, and finances all due to their shrinking timeline. One woman spent eight days in jail because she didn’t pay thousands of dollars in traffic tickets—she thought there was no point because the world was about to end.

Time impacts our interpretation of the Bible as well. Many people read Scripture through the lens of their own era, interpreting texts through the framework of their contemporary world. Even those who advocate for a plain, common sense reading of the Bible have to be careful not to assume that what appears plain and common sense to them isn’t just a product of their own unexamined beliefs and desires. This is why self-awareness and knowledge of the time period when the biblical stories take place matters so much—it contextualizes. It’s a counterbalance to interpretations that may seem clear but are really just a cloudy byproduct of the way time has shaped us.

Time is the ultimate influencer. And while we ultimately have no control over it, I like to believe there’s value to observing how it affects us. Just noticing makes our decisions more intentional. It helps us understand why we hold certain beliefs, make certain choices, perceive ourselves a certain way. Perhaps most importantly, it makes us more fully aware of what we’re living for.

What kind of relationship do you have with time? How does it impact your faith, your understanding of the world or yourself? Is there another time period you wish you lived in? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please do leave a comment or join the chat!

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I’ve been craving real things recently—in-person conversations and homemade bread.

My artistic skills match my four-year-old’s; still, making handmade cards appeal.

Instead of reading on a screen, I want to feel a book’s rough pages between my fingers.

And when it comes to music, I’ve turned to old recordings by Judy Collins and Peter, Paul, and Mary. I watch this guy play the harp. I seek out anything that’s not autotuned, that doesn’t rely on a synth.

Last week, I came across this recording by Yo-Yo Ma. For 90 minutes, the famed cellist told me stories about his childhood, his friendships and voyages, and he alternated each vignette with a piece of music—just him and his cello, sometimes a pianist too.

Two hands creating vibrations that shake my inner ear cells and tickle my brain—is there anything more real than that?

Woven throughout was the theme of “beginner’s mind,” a Zen Buddhist concept that encourages us to live as if we were only just at the start. Babies and young children are beginner mind experts—they’re curious and eager, willing to take risks and delighted to try new things. They lack apathy; they don’t let assumptions get in the way.

Listening to Yo-Yo Ma talk about the beginner’s mind made me realize that it’s tempting, as an adult, to be pleased that you’re no longer a beginner. You survived that mean teacher in elementary school; you made it past the catty girls and acne and goodness knows what else was part of your fiery furnace of puberty.

Now, you are competent. You are an adulting authority. You pay taxes. You know what “escrow” means, and people who know what “escrow” means are anything but beginners.

Isn’t that something?

But really—do either of us want to talk about our escrow accounts?

As a theologian and faith leader, cultivating a beginner’s mind feels even more important for me now than ever. It’s tempting to rely on what I’ve already learned and believe it’s enough. It’s tempting to sink into certainty. I don’t want to give into that temptation because, too often, it’s the gateway to idolatry, to worshipping the God that I want to worship instead of acknowledging the divine—the beating heart of the real—for what really it is.

What seems important to me now is seeking out what I don’t know, not just about the mechanics of this world but also about the transcendent that transfuses it. Certainty becomes my enemy, a shiny little thing that captures my attention so fully that I remain unaware of everything else in my line of sight. Maybe it’s your enemy as well. Maybe it’s keeping you from understanding what you long to know; maybe it’s blocking you from glimpsing meaningful truths, from touching the real, from glimpsing God’s presence.

Over the course of my professional life, I’ve observed how people of faith of all ages and at all levels of authority are apt to rely too heavily on their expert mind in ways that aren’t helpful to them or the people they care about. Sometimes, they’re students who want to study theology because they want to deepen their connection with God and their community, but only if they don’t have to change too much. Some of them are leaders who become so busy telling everyone who God should be that they miss glimpses of God’s presence. They trip over their own two spiritual feet, and in some cases, they run the risk of tripping others as well.

A philosopher once told me that she’s always a student first and an expert second. That sounds right to me because the greatest artists, philosophers, theologians, and faith leaders—they never stop digging, even if dirt gets stuck in their fingernails and they can’t quite see their way out of the tunnel they’ve dug. A little muck doesn’t stop their discovering. They can always wash it off.

Perhaps my recent desire for the real and the tangible has been a way to practice beginner’s mind. Maybe it’s a way to return to the ground of our being, to create space for the profound simplicities that show themselves only if we dare to sit still long enough to notice. Maybe for you, the beginner’s mind looks different. Whatever your experience with it, I’d love to hear. So please leave a comment or join the chat!

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On a Wednesday night last fall, I sat next to my daughter in an Atlanta theatre, waiting for Jane Goodall to step on stage.

“I waited for this moment my whole life,” she said, squeezing my arm.

My daughter became fascinated by animals as a toddler, and not because of anything she inherited from me or my husband. I was afraid of dogs as a kid. My husband spent his childhood immersed in sports and musical theatre. How to nurture a child who peppered us with questions about kangaroos and kookaburras?

Eventually, we became indebted to the Kratt brothers and the makers of animal-themed trivia games. We also stocked our bookcases with everything we could find about Jane Goodall, the famed scientist who revolutionized our understanding of how connected to animals we really are.

My daughter soaked all this up. She memorized every episode the Kratt brothers ever recorded. She mastered the games. And she learned everything she could about Jane Goodall—she memorized facts about her life. She dressed as her for a third grade living museum project. And when it turned out other kids wanted to be Jane Goodall for that project, my daughter quietly figured out the teacher’s ranking system to make sure she got chosen.

No one messes with my daughter when comes to Jane Goodall.

When Dr. Goodall stepped onto the stage, the applause from the audience had the same effervescence as my daughter’s eyes. This crowd, I thought, were her people—the other folks who would subvert a teacher’s ranking system, the other strangers who knew obtuse facts about platypuses.

What a wonderful thing that they were all here.

For the next hour, Dr. Goodall talked to us without notes, sharing stories about her work with chimpanzees, the importance of hope, and how even the smallest of us can make a difference. She was slight, soft spoken, yet she commanded our attention. There must have been 2,000 people in that audience, and she made us each feel like we were the only person in the theatre, like her message was intended just for us.

And I was certain she was speaking just to me when she got to the tale of the chicken coop.

“This story is the best,” my daughter whispered to me as Dr. Goodall launched in. I raised an eyebrow. How did she ever know about this?

Apparently, Jane Goodall visited her grandma’s farm often as a child, where her job was to fetch eggs from the chicken coop. But as a four-year old, she couldn’t make heads or tails of where the eggs came from. How did they get out of the hen? Confused and curious, she climbed into an empty henhouse and quietly waited, sitting still for hours until a hen ducked in and, not noticing Jane in the corner, laid an egg.

Unfortunately, while Jane was conducting her science experiment, everyone at the farm was worried about her disappearance. They searched the property. Someone called the police. They had no idea where she went.

Any mother would have been terrified; most of us would understand if that terror turned to anger. But Jane Goodall’s mother didn’t yell when saw her little girl running back from the chicken coup after her four-hour absence. Instead, she sat down to hear the story of what her daughter had learned, so she could better understand who her daughter was.

Dr. Goodall went on to describe how, over the years, her mother never said, “Why don’t you get serious about what you’re going to do with your life,” or “How do you expect that interest in animals to turn into a job?” Instead, she followed her daughter’s lead. At one point, she even spent five months sharing a tent with Jane during her first expedition to Gombe National Park (apparently they had a blast).

The chicken coop story has stuck with me because it helps me remember what it means to be a good mother. It also reminds me, more broadly, what it means to be a good companion to other humans. Because it’s a lot more rewarding to build a relationship than to crash down in judgment.

It’s a lot healthier to nurture our children’s wonder instead of trying to make them in our own image.

And we see the goodness of creation far more clearly when we accept people for who they are, rather than twisting them into who they will never be.

Jane Goodall made it her life’s work to remind us that our interconnections run deep and precious. So we don’t need to share the same interests as our children to support them. We don’t need to be like our friends to be curious about them. And we can’t afford to set up hierarchies in creation because there is ‘no least of these,’ only the perception of it. Instead, we have an obligation to listen, to wonder, to ask questions, to gather under the same tent and try, as best we can, to comprehend this gift that is creation.

Who inspires you to think differently about your relationships and the natural world? How has Jane Goodall impacted your life? I’d love to hear your reflections, so I hope you’ll consider leaving a message or joining the chat.

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Erika Kirk made news headlines this week when she forgave the person who murdered her husband: “That man—I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did. It is was what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love, and always love.”

I’ve spent a lot of time studying forgiveness in the research I’ve done on trauma and theology. I’ve thought about its relevance to my own life; I learned a ton about it as I trained to be a restorative justice practitioner.

So, what is forgiveness?

How did Jesus understand forgiveness, and how should we understand it today?

And, maybe most importantly, should we be practicing forgiveness in our lives?

What forgiveness is…and what it isn’t

There are two Greek words for “forgiveness” in the New Testament. The first, “charidzomai” is related to the Greek word “charis” which means “grace.” Charidzomai is the act of pardoning or giving something that the person doesn’t deserve. The second word, “aphiemi,” describes the act of letting go or releasing someone from a debt they owe. It’s the second of these that shows up in the biblical passage Erika Kirk quoted at her husband’s memorial—Luke 23:34. In that section of the Gospel, Jesus hangs on the cross and prays, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Today, most of us think of forgiveness less in terms of extending grace or canceling a debt and more in terms of “letting go” or accepting what happened so you can move on from it. So, there’s a difference between what Jesus meant and how we casually use the term. Still, there are overlaps—all these definitions describe a kind of generosity that the harmed person extends to the wrongdoer.

Because there’s so much misunderstanding about forgiveness, it’s important to describe not only what it is, but also what it’s not. People often conflate forgiveness with reconciliation, but these aren’t the same. Just because you forgive doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to become besties with the person who inflicted the harm. Forgiving also doesn’t mean foregoing justice. It certainly doesn’t mean letting someone off the hook. True forgiveness still demands accountability. It requires that the perpetrator take active steps to repair what they’ve done.

Forgiveness Across Traditions

The Christian tradition has been pretty clear that forgiveness is something its adherents ought to practice in their lives. This is something that Christianity shares with other religious traditions and with the psychological community. In fact, studies show that forgiveness helps us psychologically. It can result in lower stress, blood pressure, depressive symptoms, and anger. It can also improve our immune system, the quality of our relationships, and our self-esteem levels. These are all great practical reasons for each of us to practice forgiveness—who doesn’t want lower stress and higher self-esteem?

However, the Christian tradition has never practiced forgiveness for these practical reasons. Christians practice forgiveness because it models what Jesus did. Ideologically, this is correct. Realistically, it’s more complicated because church leaders have often used this teaching to encourage people to practice forgiveness for the wrong reasons. They have advised wives in abusive marriages to forgive their husbands and stay in the relationship. They have told survivors of clergy sexual abuse to forgive the priests who hurt them, allowing those priests to continue to exercise their ministry. When leaders use forgiveness in this way, they’re not motivated by compassion, empathy, and understanding but by selfishness. They’re not protecting the most vulnerable (which Jesus also taught followers to do); they’re protecting themselves.

Examples like this show that those with power can use forgiveness as a weapon instead of a pastoral tool. It also shows that forgiveness needs to be a choice and not a coercion. (The Jewish tradition has a lot of wisdom on this—if you want to read a short article to learn more, click here.)

How to practice forgiveness

Forgiveness is a spiritual muscle. Each of us needs exercises to develop its strength and flexibility. Psychologists believe that active involvement in any faith tradition can help, because forgiveness is central to world religions on the whole. That said, there are other ways to strengthen the forgiveness muscle. Here are three small steps you can take:

1. Develop awareness: Awareness is the first step to change. You can develop your awareness about forgiveness by acknowledging that forgiveness can be helpful in your life. You can also reflect on the beliefs you currently have about forgiveness—are these helping you? Are they serving a positive role in your life? Do they align with your worldview? How’s that worldview going for you?

2. Make a choice: If forgiveness is important to you, make a choice to practice it in less challenging situations before tackling more complex ones. Even if you don’t always succeed, your intentionality puts you on the right track.

3. Develop empathy: Research shows that empathy is essential to forgiveness. Remember, you’re not empathizing to let someone off the hook. You’re empathizing to understand. That understanding can be the key that gives you the answers you need to finally release what happened.

Forgiveness is a central practice in the Christian tradition. It’s also central to many other world religions, and psychological research shows it’s good for our health. No matter which framework you use to define forgiveness, the practice has significant benefits when used well.

How have you met the challenge to forgive in your own life? What struggles have you encountered? When have you been on the receiving end of forgiveness, and what was that experience like? I’d love to hear your reflections on the benefits and challenges of forgiveness, so feel free to leave a message, comment, or join the subscriber chat.

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Last night at dinner, my kids were talking about a quirky cartoon featuring a ukulele-playing girl and her sidekick cat. In one particularly surreal episode, Beethoven makes a guest appearance. He’s been paralyzed by writer’s block and can’t seem to compose that dratted fifth symphony. He needs their help.

Curious what Beethoven’s music actually sounded like, my kids asked Alexa to play some of it. Then they ditched eating to dance around the kitchen.

I like to think Beethoven would have smiled at this scene, that he would have been surprised young kids in 21^st-century Georgia were bopping to his compositions, his legacy alive around a southern dinner table. I say that because 25 years before Beethoven died, he wrote a now-famous letter to his brothers known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. There, he wrestles with the cruel irony of being a composer who’s losing his hearing:

What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce.

What Beethoven faced must have been terrifying. To be a composer who cannot hear is like being a painter who cannot see or a writer with no hands. Anyone who has lost a part of themselves—physical, spiritual, or psychological—can empathize with Beethoven’s sense of helplessness, his lack of control, his desire for meaning, his pull towards despair.

But solidarity isn’t the only reason I wanted to share Beethoven’s struggles with you today. The real reason I wanted to tell you about him is that when Beethoven wrote that letter, he didn’t know he’d live another 25 years. He didn’t know that most of the music for which he’s remembered—like the symphony my kids danced to—were in his future. This isn’t to say the rest of his life was easy. It wasn’t; he was often sick, poor, and desperately lonely. But it is to say that he didn’t know what lay ahead, and that at least one of his hopes would be realized—this man who desperately wanted a musical legacy would get one so vast that children with smart speakers would one day summon “Ode to Joy” into their kitchens.

The takeaway, in other words, has to do with time.

We tend to experience time as straightforward—sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, tick, tick, tick, onwards we march.

But time isn’t always so neat, and our perspective from within it isn’t always so clear.

Sometimes, as the biblical writer Paul says, we see through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12).

The strangeness of time is particularly evident in trauma. Time loses its normal steadiness. It becomes difficult to imagine a future. The past seems hazy. Flashbacks collapse the boundary between then and now.

As I observe our world today, I see how many of us live in frozen time, what trauma theorists sometimes refer to as a “perpetual present.” Like Beethoven, truth feels both visceral and elusive and ugly. Like Beethoven, we have no idea what’s ahead, but it’s tempting to believe that the reality of now is the reality of forever.

It is not.

The perpetual present persuades us that all is lost, that the symphony will never get written, the legacy never made, hope never realized. One thing that helps me out of ruts like this is to remember that my perspective is bound within time, this moment—tick, tick, tick—all-encompassing yet incomplete. So while I may see through glass darkly, and what I see is very real, there’s also a future I can’t see that lies ahead. That future will color what we know now.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, it will even contain an ode to joy.

I’d love to hear more about how time has changed the way you think about your life and our world. Feel free to leave your reflections in the comments or join the subscriber chat!

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In the aftermath of the gun massacre in Minneapolis, I read an article about the complicated feelings religious leaders have about “sending thoughts and prayers.” They understood that many people think of the phrase as empty, a platitude and a copout. They also recognized that prayer can be deeply meaningful to people who are struggling and can provide a chance for communities to come together in lament and mourning. All of them agreed that thoughts and prayers should be combined with action.

The article left me thinking about what we really mean when we say that we’re sending thoughts and prayers. It also left me wondering how we can speak more authentically in the aftermath of tragedies and traumas so that words don’t fall flat.

What’s Sending “Thoughts and Prayers” Really All About?

We’ve all seen the phrase tossed about—on a text chain when a friend has COVID, in a list of condolences after someone shared the death of a loved one on social media.

“Sending thoughts and prayers.”

Sometimes, there’s an emoji at the end—praying hands, a red heart, a pink heart, a blue heart, a rainbow.

I see four reasons why people say, text, or type this message onto a social media post. The first is that they’re at a loss for words. They might be shocked by the news that was shared or emotionally overwhelmed. They haven’t had time to process what they’re hearing, they want to show they care, and they feel it would be rude not to respond immediately. The words “sending thoughts and prayers” is an attempt to show care, empathy, and love at a time when they feel at a loss to say anything else.

The second reason is that tragedies and traumas can make the well-meaning person afraid of exacerbating an already awful situation. They don’t want to make things worse, and they’re not sure that there’s anything they could do to make things better. So, how to show you care when you can’t fix the problem, and you don’t want to offend the person who’s suffering? This fear is a common occurrence in our culture, because we’ve got a track record of being uncomfortable with uncomfortable emotions, especially when they relate to death, illness, or trauma. In these cases, “sending thoughts and prayers” is a verbal safety mechanism, a fallback onto language that may not be profound but at least is socially acceptable.

The third reason people use the phrase is that they know they have to say something, but they’re not emotionally invested, and at any rate, the sentiment isn’t heartfelt. Public figures do this, but so does the average Joe that has annoyed you on social media since you were in high school. These kinds of displays are performative, a verbal escape from authenticity or a way to deflect responsibility. They’re also the reason why this phrase is now seen as cliché, emptied of meaning. (Remember: Most of us can spot authenticity from a mile away.)

And the final reason is this: Sometimes, people aren’t just sending thoughts and prayers. They actually are thinking of you and praying for you. In this case, the sentiment is literally a reflection of what the person means.

Alternatives to “Sending Thoughts and Prayers”

If the phrase “sending thoughts and prayers” makes you bristle, but you don’t have a better idea for showing you care during difficult times, here are two ideas that might help:

First, if you don’t know what to say but want to make sure your friend or loved one knows they’re not alone, then it’s okay to say that. You can acknowledge that you don’t know what to say, and you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, but you want to be present and connected. That kind of admission isn’t likely to frighten the person you’re talking or writing to. It will show that you’re genuine and doing the best you can to support them. (Remember: Most of us can spot authenticity from a mile away.)

Second, you can say a little more. This makes the most sense in a situation where you’re personally connected to the event—for instance, if your friend loses a parent or your cousin loses their house in a hurricane. Sharing a warm memory of the person who died or the house that was decimated is a way to connect and show you’re trying to empathize. And remember, honestly naming what was lost likely isn’t going to hurt the person more, but ignoring the loss or superficially commenting on it is.

Unless you literally want to communicate that you’re “sending thoughts and prayers,” chances are that there are other ways to respond that would be more personal, more authentic to the moment.

When have you heard someone say, “Sending thoughts and prayers?” What was your reaction, and why? I’d love to hear more of your reflections, so please send a comment or weigh in on the chat!

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I was teaching a grad student course on trauma and theology back at the height of the #MeToo movement, and it became one of those classes where we covered what was on the syllabus, and we also covered what was on students’ hearts. Many of my students were struggling during that time—news stories triggered their own memories. Some were reassessing revered public figures. Others scrolled through post after post on social media, bearing witness to friends who were sharing their stories for the first time. Each was realizing the scope of harm was much bigger than they imagined, even as they—who were training to be ministers and chaplains—felt helpless in the face of it all.

“Hopefully things will change,” one of them said, “Now that all of this is out in the open.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “Because I’m not so sure.”

I went to the board and wrote the words, “Dialectic of Trauma” on it, and then I explained what it meant.

The dialectic of trauma is the idea that survivors face an internal struggle between remembering and forgetting. That struggle results in two types of symptoms. One set are intrusive symptoms—unwanted, recurring memories, nightmares, and flashbacks. The other set are avoidance symptoms—forgetting certain parts of the trauma, and avoiding places, people, and feelings associated with it. In both the courtroom and public sphere, the dialectic is frequently misunderstood, especially when it comes to survivor memory. Lawyers and the public court of opinion often penalize survivors for remembering some parts of the trauma vividly while forgetting others—the survivor must be lying if they can only remember sections of the event, right?

Well, no. Because that’s not how trauma memories work.

Psychologists have spent years studying how the dialectic works within the brains of individual trauma survivors. But that’s not what I want to focus on in this post. Instead, I want to talk about how I see the dialectic operating at a large-scale level within societies.

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Here’s what I mean: I believe that we collectively alternate between focusing on traumas and turning away from them, between remembering and forgetting. The struggles faced by members of the military provides a clear example. World War I brought public attention to PTSD among veterans. (At the time, PTSD was known as “shell shock.”) After the war ended, public attention faded, even though the problem persisted. Then during the Vietnam War, interest resurged because so many veterans returned with symptoms of PTSD that it became impossible to ignore. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, attention again waned, only to renew again during the War in Afghanistan.

We could make a very similar argument about violence against women—societal interest surged during the 1970s, as feminists raised awareness about the pervasiveness of domestic violence. Then it gradually declined, as post-feminism gained traction in the 1980s. Society was again open to focusing on the problem with the rise of the #MeToo movement, though, I think it’s fair to say, public willingness to accept the continued reality of these traumas is now slipping away. During these periods of muted attention, it’s not that violence against women suddenly disappeared; it’s that the public’s capacity to witness it diminished.

Why should Christians care about any of this—why should they care about how their society alternates between remembering and forgetting trauma? The simple answer is that remembering is part of the Christian tradition. Christians remember Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross through yearly Holy Week services; we also use a Greek word, anamnesis, to signify how the Eucharist is an act of remembering Jesus’ last meal. Even the act of reading the Bible is an act of remembering how the stories and traumas of the past shape our identity and understanding of the world today. (The Jewish tradition places a similar emphasis upon remembering—holidays like Yom HaShoah and Tisha B’Av are set apart for the Jewish people to remember critical and traumatic parts of their history.)

There are many reasons why people ignore or forget traumas. Some want to distance themselves because the trauma is too uncomfortable. Others may believe that exposure to the memory of a trauma makes them vulnerable to it, as if traumas are communicable diseases. These are all forms of self-protection. The problem is that self-protection comes at the cost of reality. And for Christians, it also comes at the cost of discipleship, because we’re called to love our neighbor. Nowhere did Jesus say to turn away when things get uncomfortable.

As some who identify as Christians wield increasing power in the United States, I’m concerned by their inability to practice this kind of discipleship, a discipleship that listens without turning away, that remembers the struggles of one’s most vulnerable neighbors and makes choices with that memory in mind. Perhaps these leaders are in the avoidance stage of the dialectic, though I think it’s more likely that the motive is the golden calf of power.

What gives me hope is that the actions of leaders like these doesn’t change what Jesus says, which is that to remember is an act of love and an act of resistance. It’s also an act that bears witness, that offers solidarity and provides hope.

Remembering, in other words, is what the Christian tradition calls its followers to do in the wake of trauma.

What do you notice American society remembering and forgetting right now? I’d love to hear what you think, so I hope you’ll leave a comment, send a message, or join the chat.

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