It’s hard to feel these things when it feels like the earth has opened and shoved us all into an air fryer for two months and counting. It’s been a busy spring and summer, I managed to help keep a church afloat for a summer (they’re wonderful and honestly perhaps they kept me afloat) while our senior minister went on a summer sabbatical. I took week-long intensive classes that turned my brain to soup but I learned much about Congregational Leadership and the joys of what Queer Theology can do for the ways in which we approach the world. Mom and I finalized our move into a new home - same town, new place. It has a porch with porch furniture that I can sit on in the mornings before the sun’s barely risen and the air fryer hasn’t turned on yet and listen to the sounds of the world around me, and lament over the patio that I need to clean.

I would love to tell you I feel settled, that I feel grounded and rooted and peaceful, and all of the things you might expect a minister to say to you - but the reality is, friends, I often don’t.

When I arrived back in Texas to start at Brite Divinity School in the spring of 2024, I left a much slower pace of life, for the one filled with the busyness and expectation that I had run away from. From people who expected things of me, from family who loved me enough to let me go on a journey far away, but to whom I had not really ever paid much attention to in the ways families should. I left and I found myself in the woods, crying all the time, and then suddenly I found myself back in Texas, still crying all the time (though anyone who knows me knows I just.. well I just cry all the time! I’m soft and unafraid to admit it). But these years returned have been like sliding down a Slip ‘N Slide made out of Brillo pads. The demands of graduate school, the loss of many beloveds in my world, the chaos of learning and entering into an ordination process, all while trying not to sweat on everything has created in me a tiredness I’ve been worried will be hard to heal. You can imagine that finding ways for spiritual growth or spiritual ritual have not been at the top of my ‘to-do’ list next to ‘don’t forget your entire library of books for your two-hour commute to school’.

And friends, for those of you that see me in person, and for those of you that don’t, the truth is that I haven’t had much interest in spiritual practice. Who has time for that in seminary (I’m mostly joking)?? The rate of consumption and thought for each class can be brutal even without a Sunday sermon to write each week. Living on the island of tall trees and birdsong meant that I could escape to a place with no cell service, no email, no learning platform to submit my reflections on my reading. It really was, just myself and trees and animals and rocks and dirt and water. To be so surrounded by the Divine, when you are unable to make words or have energy to express belief in any form, is a soothing balm to the soul. There’s not much time nor place for that where I live now, and I miss it deeply, though the breeze on the porch this morning gives hope that perhaps the air fryer’s temperature has been lowered, even if just for a moment.

One of the challenges of my Supervised Ministry year is to purposefully engage in spiritual practice and ritual. But my trees!!! I cry out. How can I find God again without my trees!!

There is something both endearing and heartbreaking about having to admit that your interest in spiritual practice has waned. Some may say it is young age, some may say it is “this world we live in”, some may scoff and chalk it up to “these kids who want to believe just anything”, and sure, while I’m young, I’m not in my twenties anymore and have lived a little life. I have deeply held beliefs and convictions about the world that are constantly changing and softening and calcifying and transforming. There is some hope in me that things will happen and life will rock along and I do not have to force open every locked door in my life for a pass/fail grade.

But I also often forget I’m not so far removed from a way of belief that defined my life as a child and teen and young adult as I’d like to believe. Really, it’s only been about four years since I made a conscious decision to leave a system of faith and belief that I didn’t find fruitful. It’s only been about four years since I took a good hard look at my life and decided it needed and overhaul and had the privilege to run away from it all.

It’s only been three years since I was basking in the summer sun alongside Cascade Lake and renting a kayak and eating Sugar Shack Ice Cream and going whale watching and seeing this Creation I’d never really gotten to meet before. Which means that I’m also only a few moments free of systems of “spiritual growth” that were laid out for me, that defined my growth by how ardently I talked about Jesus, or how often I went to church and worship night, and hung out only with other “believers” (Insert a Justin Bieber joke here?). I got to emerge from the woods touting that “the God I had always known was still mine” only to get to Divinity School and have even that upended while managing the expectations of others, or even myself, constantly policing the things I’m thinking and saying and learning to believe and also always changing.

I’ve been scared, friends.

Scared to find the emotionality I was trained to believe wasn’t from the Creator.

Scared to feel the emotions I was told were only a detriment to my spiritual practice and ritual in this world.

Scared to express myself in ways other than the carefully laid out instructions from the church I grew up at.

I have been scared to sit with myself because sitting with myself and with God - whoever God is to me right now - means that there is in fact room for me at the Table.

(Y’know, that physical Table I help serve communion at every week and the metaphorical Table I’m always inviting other people to.)

I have been scared to find spiritual practice and ritual again because it is yet another sign that more of the ways of living I have carried with me as gospel my entire life, were (and are) hurting me. Finding ways to believe into God instead of just in God seems like a mountain I haven’t been quite willing to climb.

And yet also, I am not alone. If anything else, this time in my life has given friends and colleagues and professors that can help question and hold steady. The outpouring of love has no end not because I am expecting some invisible God or some all-mighty Jesus to fill me, but because the Creator has filled Creation and all in it with life to carry one another. Which gives me hope that maybe the trees outside my bedroom window were right - that we are never alone in this world because the world exists around us.

I wish I had a perfect answer for you, friends, that I no longer fear spiritual practice, that God has revealed all peace to me, that Jesus just magically heals all wounds, but the thing is, I don’t believe that anymore. God created me, you, us, to do so many things. Spirit dwells within us for mercy, love, and justice, and we do not find ourselves alone because we and this Created World go hand in hand. I believe that because we are Created, and if we say we are Created in the image of the Creator, then it is up to us, as visages of that Creator, with the Spirit of Creation in us and alongside us, that the work of care and growth are ours to do. Together.

I like what Mary Oliver has to say on the matter of living:

“You don’t want to hear the story 
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. 

And anyway it's the same old story -
a few people just trying, 
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind, 
And nobody, of course, is kind, 
or mean, 
for a simple reason. 

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in this world. 

And probably.
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world, 

they can do it." 
-Dogfish, Mary Oliver

May we look for a transformed world, beloveds, not an easier one.

Go in peace.

-H.

This paper is written in a poetic style. It reflects how the poetic I yearn for cannot be found in theory, but in living. How I must somehow find myself in my own body, before I can hope to fulfill anyone else’s needs, before I can hope to step into the leadership that is most natural to me, and that will be the most affective for my purpose of ministry – something I am still wondering (wandering) about. It is mostly about my own resistance, delving into the question of: What complicated what I believe? Where did I feel drawn in, Where did you feel resistance?

Yesterday, I cried tears of release in front of a painting. Today, I cried tears of frustration at words. It’s an odd thing, to have the tears mix together, the salt reminding me that I have skin. That am, in fact, a person on the earth. That I am in a body, this body. That this body does not understand, it feels. All that it knows is sensation, it does not know that I have read Derrida or Tillich or McFague. Understanding the flow of time and the way the flow of time feels are two very different things, you see. Some years feel more weathered than others. Some breaths are beleaguered to the point of wondering if it is breath or the rattle of death. Being in a body that has rarely been given the choice to construct and discover itself on its’ own is a sort of exceptional violence. Root rot at its finest, some terribly oozing Being seeping from every possible place in the soul. It’s like having your ass out on the asphalt, my grandfather might say in a different form of his life. It has become this recurring thing that I cannot seem to lose sight of in the trees or off the edge of the world on Highway 287, the sickening question; child where is your voice?

Even to ask Spirit to do work in me, for me, that is the pinnacle of selfishness, is it not? The sweat behind the backs of my knees is clotting now, starting to run down my calves in a way that makes me so uncomfortable I wish I could tear the skin that carries me off. I’m tired of sitting in this chair, taking notes like I am fully invested and not feeling the touch of bone pressing in too close to my organs and muscles, like the organs and muscles aren’t bursting at the seams of my skin and I want to do anything but be here, in this room. I find something to complain about, to whine about, anything so I don’t cry and face the reality that I feel lost among the brambles of my own existence. What is God breaking open in you?

Is it just a breaking open? A tearing out of? What could it possibly be? Amongst the board meetings, ordination interviews, papers that I tried to get due dates moved on because I hate sitting with myself, it’s still there - the tension I evangelize but can’t name because how could I ever name something I’m not really willing to construct? Is the abhorrence of me really so deep, that I theorize so I can ignore the reality that I cannot recognize the body in the muddy lake water? I am filled with a gruesome unease that I will never know myself.

I never expected to ever need to meet my own body, to discover her own curves, her sharp edges, her tacit acceptances, her warning signs. I never expected to know her joy, her pleasure, her gentleness. I have only ever known my body’s tenderness as a byproduct of viciousness. I can say I can only briefly remember the sensation of joy, wrapping around the shoulders as a gentle friend in the June afternoon sun kayaking on Cascade Lake. Joy finds the body in Obstruction Pass, on the curves through the forests and fairy gates, opening wide to the sound where a boat worth more than my life’s work is docked. Joy finds her footing in long rides on Highway 114, past the rest stops, pointing out cows and longhorns and horses, trying to see the end of the road twenty miles away, wondering if perhaps maybe the world really is flat. It sure seems so out there.

Some things in ministry will die.

Some things will be resurrected.

Somethings will be renamed.

Some things will be revealed.^[1]

What is God breaking open in you? The reverend asks again. The tears are back. I am unsure of where they go, what emotion to give them. Do they need one? Or are they simply… a piece of me? Is it dry bones gasping and grasping for rain? Is it the painting ‘The Spirit’, calling out, “Beloved, may you find your body among the streaks of oil on linen.” What is my resistance to resurrection? What will resurrection give to my body?

“May the God who raised Dorcas raise something in you.”^[2]

^[1] Rev. Vizrola Law; Congregational Leadership, May 18, 2026.

^[2] Rev. Vizrola Law; Congregational Leadership, May 18, 2026.

My GPS took me yet another way I didn’t recognize this morning. You see, I live thirty miles from the church I work at. On office days I throw all my things in the car and pray to God that I’ll eat the leftovers I’ve brought with me (and remember to bring the containers home), and then check my GPS to see which way I will be going. Today’s route was through towns, and while not faster than anything else, I didn’t have to pay for the express lane or be sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. I don’t think I would have survived in the pre-Apple Maps age, I’ll freely admit it.

I survived a whole week and a Sunday service - my first week as somebody’s (almost) minister - almost meaning that I’m commissioned to my congregation, so I get a ‘Rev’ in front of my name there, but I’m not ordained quite yet. I joking often say I’m somebody’s minister, though who that may be, who knows, not me. My ministerial mentor and the long-time senior minister of my congregation is on a sabbatical - good for her. It’s more than deserved. It also means I’ve been functionally left at the helm, and so here I am, learning what it is to be somebody's minster.

Having people come up to you and tell you they trust you, that they are willing to put some of their eggs in the shared basket, is terrifying. Why did no one tell me this?? That every time I write a sermon I will think of the prayer requests and the joys, the friends battling cancer and other horrific maladies, the injustice some and sometimes even all are experiencing. I think about their lives and mine, and I won’t be able to preach to them on a Sunday without seeing them in the back of my mind every time I break the loaf of bread and pour grape juice into the cup over a white cloth that I’m terrified of spilling on.

Our Easter sermon series is called ‘In Real Life’, taken from my own days as a Tumblr keyboard warrior and avid fan fiction writer - but it holds this meaning that our lives are meant to be lived, and that includes the pieces we’d rather look away from. That being Easter people, if we so claim, are being people of justice, love, and curiosity. And oh yeah, trust.

I think I still have some essays and reading due for school, an ordination interview, a care committee that insists I actually do things for myself and maybe a therapy appointment in there somewhere. Yet here I sit at my desk (really it’s Deb’s) on a Monday morning, still somebody’s minister in all of this real life. That’s something else if you ask me (please don’t ask to look at my to-do list). I’ve still got a Bible study to plan, and a sermon to write, and people to call. A prayer list or seven to update, and somehow I’ll still call my Mom on the way home, and sit through some zoom meetings and try to feed myself not McDonald’s, and also get some sleep and notice light patterns and pet some cats. Seminary’s taking a weird, real life turn.

One that is helping me start to connect all of these things about mercy, love, and justice with the life of the church. One that is helping me to see that even though I am still raging against the machine, mercy, love, and justice, are not avoidable even within the walls. That conversations can be had and invitations extended and meals can be shared and maybe we can find some kind of hope in the midst - which I will say, often seems bleak and I often feel powerless in my privileged seat at the table. But resistance also resides in the tension of good news that we can lay it all on the Table. Sometimes in pieces, sometimes all at once, but for us to name our real lives as they are, this too, is resistance to systemic sins that suck us in and convince us that we are better off always angry and bitter (righteous answer notwithstanding).

For our good news to be anything, friends, it has to be real. It’s why I like Thomas so much. Thomas is not satisfied with a good news secondhand, or one that he must believe without experiencing it in his real life. Thomas isn’t willing to settle for less because for Thomas’ grief to be understood, he needs Jesus to be more than a ghost. And if you ask me, friends, that’s a fairly reasonable ask. The Gospel that Thomas needs is rooted in real life – it’s deeply embodied and material, it needs to be real because if it isn’t real, then why, why would it give hope for the future of Thomas’ life?

In Thomas’s interaction with Jesus we can perhaps find comfort that living, happens in our bodies. Jesus moves through the world in his humanness, in his body, returns to us from the dead in his body, and encounters Thomas here in his injured, disabled broken body. And isn’t that a justice of its’ own, that our living is ours to do?

In any case, it’s kinda weird to be somebody’s minister, and maybe one day I’ll recognize all the GPS routes.

In all things love, beloveds.

My beloved, what a balm your life is to the world.

For the one whom Easter is not a resurrection,

Your grief, beloved, is whole, and honest, and not to be medicated in the name of ‘he is risen’.

To the one for whom Easter is not a resurrection,

If there is hope at all, any hope to cling to,

Know that the breadth and tenderness and violence and strife and all that makes up who you are, is holy and sacred. There is not one ounce of you and your living that is forgotten in the fray.

To the one for whom Easter is not a resurrection,

To you, beloved, where death is still apparent and imminent, wounds still fresh on skin, holes not healed in hands,

To you, beloved, whose pain is unimaginable, not able to be understood because no one has felt in the way that you have before, where your grief is as fresh as tracks of blood down cheeks,

To the one for whom Easter is not a resurrection,

May there be rest on the hill, in however it arrives to you,

for perhaps this grief is more the work of resurrection than if resurrection could actually happen - may you be surrounded and blanketed by those who will not look away from you.

And you,

the one for whom Easter is not a resurrection,

I have no perfect parting words.

May you go in peace.

And love.

Amen.

The way of breathing that would solve all of my problems, because you see, I had (have) a lot of them. Most of them are due to the fact that I love diner breakfast more than I love breathing sometimes.

But that’s always been it.

The right way.

I started yoga over a decade ago to learn the right way to care for my body.

To be able to breathe the right way so maybe I’d stop snoring like a freight train at night.

I’ve worked in coffee shops learning the right ways to brew coffee in hopes that maybe one day I’ll experience the perfect cup and be able to make it the right way every time after that.

I left the church I grew up at, leaving the right way for them to find the right way for me.

I have left jobs, because they just didn’t do things the right way1.

Each new adventure there is hope that maybe, along the way, I’ll meet someone who just does things the right way.

I beg my therapist to tell me the right way to cure my anxiety, or suddenly heal who I am and replace her with who I think I should be.

I take an overwhelming amount of notes at work to make sure I’m going to do things the right way all the time on a Sunday morning.

I yearn and search and read for the right way to stop feeling so spiritually dry all of the time like I’m not in school and working and commuting and not sleeping, praying that I’ll stumble upon just the right way to rest and dream, and exist.

That’s a lot of right ways.

Except there’s a lot of left ways too. Middle ways, and one lane ways, and one lane but two directions ways, even a roundabout or two thrown in.

Sometimes I lament that I’m not doing things the right way. That maybe I’m not ready, or haven’t prepared enough or sought enough wise counsel or done things in just the right order — oh wait.

I’m still breathing.

Maybe not perfectly and with a little heartburn from too much bacon at breakfast, but I am breathing.

Perhaps the good news all along has been that there isn’t one single, right, perfect, infallible Way.

Maybe it was never about THE RIGHT WAY but just a right way. Maybe a left one, a middle one, one lane with two directions or a roundabout.. way.

I am still looking for the right way to breathe, if you know one.

All of this to say, I’ve spent a whole lot of time doing a whole lot of… well nothing. It’s been nice. I’ve had time and room to read and think, and breathe. I ordered a new yoga mat, one I’ve had my eye on for at least five years. The snow is stating to melt outside and I am praying and hoping it means I can get out soon. To do what… who knows I don’t have the money or business to be trolling around outside. But there’s something about watching other people built for this weather get out in negative temperatures across the country to protest what is going on in the world.

But most of all, in our continuing series of thoughts on gospel and what it could be, I’ve been thinking about surrender. What it is, how it serves us, what it means within the landscape of faith and faith life. Those who have ears, let them hear, yeah? But you see, friends, I’m in a class that is specifically looking at the language of and practice of the language of radicalization in ancient worlds, how the ‘Color of God’ (the class name), perhaps came to be. Because it is important, the ways in which we speak about God, but it’s also important to know that the ways we speak about God are borne of the ways we have learned to speak of one another. I can’t remember where I read it, but in some textbook from another semester, an author wrote that our ability to understand and perceive God is often only as big as our ability to cope with the world around us. Not cope in a bad way (remember, how we use language is just as important as the language itself), but cope as in, the world is in such a way that I am unsure how to create identity in it. I don’t know how to ‘Be’, so I will look to the ways that I can speak, and the ways that my language will help me to see the world around me and the people in it. As a minister, this is particularly important. I’ve been working on an ongoing project on what it means for me to decolonize (a big word, don’t let me lose you) the way that I come to the work of writing a sermon.

To colonize, according to Duke professor Walter Mignolo, “is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation [conquer/enslave] of one people by another1.” To decolonize would be then to separate ourselves from the practice of domination. Today we might call that ‘othering’, or ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric, or even look at the very real divisions in the US today that are occurring moment to moment on our phone screens - a visual reality of what black and brown and all persons of color in this country have known since its’ inception: that for all of our dreaming, the language of surrender has always meant to the way of the one who holds the power.

One of the first steps in decolonizing the work of sermon writing, for me, is understanding the language that I know and use. It is easy, so easy, to use the regular Protestant and Evangelical language of my upbringing and current way of life. Things like, God is always in the midst, God’s hand is in all things, God knows the desires of our hearts. It’s easier to speak polite politics than to say what we mean, to give the illusion that I’ve got it all figured out in this weary world, and that I’ve done enough study to stand before you today and proclaim the good news that we should all surrender to (see what I did there?).

I’ve only been preaching for a little over a calendar year. I’ve only been in my theological education for about two and a half years. I can assure you of one absolute thing, which is that I absolutely do not have all the answers for you. I often, and more regularly these days, don’t have them for myself. And I consider that a good thing. I could say all of those phrases above to you and all it would be doing is signaling to you that I know what to say, and that puts me at the top of a power dynamic I don’t ever want to be in. Because that is the work of decolonizing, friends, divorcing myself from the idea that I want and desire power over someone else.

If you were to look at my computer tabs on any given day, you’d likely see Thesaurus.com open on it. I love words, but don’t know them all, and it’s important to me that I say what I mean. Currently it’s open to the word subjugate, and it’s part of a longer thought I’m having about our word surrender. Because when we say ‘surrender’, what do we mean? What does it do for you? What does it do for your neighbor? What does it mean when an agency that is not law enforcement but claiming it is, is snatching children off the street, separating families, and outright murdering our siblings and friends and families on the streets? It can be a short walk from the word surrender to the word submit, can’t it?

So when we say, surrender ourselves to the gospel, what do we mean?

Do we mean a gospel that only works if you say the magic words?

Do we mean a gospel that only applies if there is a certain level of assimilation - not necessarily acceptance or welcome, because those involve community, but assimilation, in which you are responsible for proving you belong?

Or do we mean a gospel where tables were turned over in temples?

A gospel where people were healed, physically, or had their needs met, or their stomach filled, or experienced joy and community and family, often for the first time in their lives?

What might it mean for us to look at the word surrender as an abandonment of the language and principles that keep only some of us comfortable, and label everyone else as an outside or an enemy?

What if gospel means for us to continually ask, as the Psalmist does in Psalm 15, “Oh God, who may abide in your tent, who may dwell on your holy hill?” with the expectation and hope that the answer is all of us?

What if surrender meant giving up our comfort in and yearning for absolutes, and instead welcoming in life as it is, while it happens?

So then what if gospel still, is the embracing of the tension that things are not as they should be, and that if they are to get better, “if someone like you cares a whole lot”, our friend the Lorax might say, we must surrender the idea that we will be the top of the triangle and flatten it so that we all might tend to the Earth and all who dwell on Her land?

Hopefully this ice melts soon. I want a cheeseburger.

In all things love,

H.

We do not come grasping for certainty but seeking to make our home in mystery. We release the illusion of divisions - the false borders drawn between spirit and flesh, sacred and ordinary. Here, in the space between knowing and unknowing, we open ourselves to the presence that lingers in both.

We release the need for either/or. We embrace both/and1.

As I enter into this third year of seminary, my heart and mind and soul swirling with… more than I could begin to describe here, I keep wondering what it is I think the Gospel and justice really are. I have to write a paper on my idea of the Gospel so maybe it’s a good idea to try it out on you all here first. That is, if you’re willing to be a conversation partner with me.

I could say to you there’s what we call the ‘gospels’, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and sometimes Acts (feel like I’m repeating my vowels). To some of us, it might mean or might have meant ‘good news’. The jumping off point of good message, great and glad tidings. The truth is, everywhere you turn, gospel means a little something different. When we think about the Bible, we think about those multi-episode narratives contained in the pages about Jesus. Who Jesus was, what Jesus did, where Jesus went, ending in Jesus’ trial and death and resurrection2. We might also begin to think about what the Gospel is to us. I’m often told to think of my metaphor for the Gospel - how I might use metaphor to explain to others, or even myself. Truthfully - even that didn’t sit right in my being.

So to tell you the truth, beloveds, I’m wholly unsure of what the gospel means to me. I think in order to answer that, I’d have to begin to articulate who Jesus was to me too. To ask what it means to have my ideas and views of ‘good news’ centered on Jesus and whether or not that’s even a responsible thing to do (You can call me a heretic now, don’t worry, it isn’t the worst thing someone’s said to me). In the stories we tell about our lives and faith and ways of Being, could we consider what the incarnation of Jesus as a living, breathing person might say about us hinging our entire lives on the way that he lived his own life?

Someone recently asked me who Jesus was to me - I gave what I thought was a very pastoral answer. That Jesus is a lot of things to a lot of people, but overall I think that it’s healthy to look at the life and ministry of Jesus and the good news of Jesus being the work of liberation in this life, on this side of living, particularly for the oppressed and the marginalized. To which that friend looked me dead in the eyes and said ‘that isn’t the question I asked. Who is Jesus to you?”

Beloveds, I was stunned. I’d never encountered a Jesus that could be someone or something to me, apart from the doctrine or stories or perfectly packaged Bible studies. I might have said I had a “relationship with Jesus” or given a pre-packaged answer, but I had to answer truthfully.

“I don’t know.”

The table laughed a little, and we moved on with the interview (I got the job).

But it’s stuck with me. I could justify who Jesus is through many methods - but not a one of them really meant something to me, Haley, as a person and human being in the world. I’ll even admit, my language now for who Jesus is messy and unsure because the more I learn and grow and become, the less I feel the need to be certain and perfectly anchored in a particular idea of who I think Jesus is supposed to be. My ideas of who Jesus might be to me are also marred by privilege, and particular ways of believing, that were shaped long before me in frames of supremacy, both Christian and white (sometimes and often both at once), and domination, and I’m not really sure how to hold all of that. I suppose that’s what my therapist is for. Shoutout to my therapist.

Yet there’s something deeper under all of this, beloveds, and it is an understanding of what it means to be a person, a body, an incarnation in the world. Not so that we might have all the answers, but so we may live and “love the questions” as Rilke writes to a young poet3. It is the courage to ask: is my understanding of who I am rooted in the idea that the Spirit was already hovering over the deep, or that the Spirit needed to dominate a darkness that contains only the promise of absence? What does it mean for me, a white minister in this day and age, to color God towards light, and to treat my own body and Being as caught in the middle of a cosmic war that I never asked for nor wanted to be in, but insist exists because it is what I was told made sense?

I have a post a few back called Fairy Gates and the Body of God. At the time I was writing it in the throes of theology paper finals and reading books bigger than my heart and body could probably handle, and in the midst of it all, I began to realize that perhaps the Gospel is hope that my life does not have to be saved or unsaved. That Gospel -whatever that long-sung about good news might be- rooted in the idea that I have all the right answers, and that I must always tell the world my right answers lest they be cast into a bottomless, torturous pit, won’t get us anywhere.

I am slowly coming to some way of knowing and invitation that Gospel is tension. It is wisdom made full in a hope that body and mind and faith and Being are not all locked in a domineering fight. But they are friends, sitting around a cozy fire on a snow day, drinking their warm beverage of choice, wrapped in a blanket and conversing without fear of domination. And as what I think is supposed to be snow flurries outside my window, beloved, I think I’d rather call the Gospel a paradox. The good news that my body does not have to leave my soul, and that both are indeed created in the image, and I am not the one that has to be responsible for severing them in the name of God, nor do I have to hold myself or others to the expectation of doing so.

We are spirit and flesh, beloveds. Not one or the other, but both. Constant in conversation, and perhaps, the goodness with that wisdom is not an escape from the task of living, but an embrace without end?

So, what is the Gospel?

Beloved I’m still not so sure. But maybe that’s just it - maybe we can discover it together, in the fullness of who we are, in and towards the wholeness of all we might be.

In all things love,

H.

It’s been a long time since we spoke. The last time we met in that busy sandwich shop, I didn’t quite fit in the booth. You were a few minutes late, and we shared joy over the love that comes from a good cup of potato soup. We had sandwiches, though now I can’t remember what kind. It was freezing inside, I ate my sugar cookie before lunch came.

We shared memories of the hell of being in junior high, how our lives have changed since those days. We laughed and I asked questions about your family and kids, excited to hear how your life was going, after all, grad school keeps me busy and I barely have time to keep my head above water. I could tell you wanted to say something to me. I was trying to avoid it, after all, if I could convince myself that you weren’t going to say what so many had said to me before, I wouldn’t lose another relationship.

But you felt compelled. The words were out of your mouth before I could take a breath and try to defend myself, even though I knew you had already decided the outcome for the both of us. “You know that going against God’s word is a sin” - the words pierced me before I had time to process them, and I did what I usually do in those moments - forget everything about myself ever. I’ve been physically punched in the stomach before but this was always worse. The hopeful smile or tone of someone who says they love you. Who says that they want what is best for you, only to turn around and let you know that it isn’t really that way. That their allegiance to the Bible will always outweigh who you are as a person, and no amount of protest can change that.

That lunch ended in tears. You prayed over me, I prayed over you. I knew this would be the last time we spoke for a while. We texted back and forth some, but the lunch invitations stopped, the coming over to your house for hot cocoa and chats stopped. I felt like your plan all along had been to sway me to your side, and beloved, I’m sorry to tell you, I won’t go there anymore. It saddens me, I loved our friendship, and even from afar I thought that you cared for me as a person. I haven’t heard from you since May. I don’t know how your kids are anymore. I don’t get to see them grow. I don’t get to know who you are anymore, you’ve made sure to shut that part off from me. And the thing is, you aren’t the first person to say it to me. To tell me you think I’m denying God, and following the world. To tell me that you think I’m headed towards destruction, making my own god and creating goodness out of a mysterious culture you’ve deemed the ‘other’.

I miss you.

And you know, beloved, seeing your name pop up the other day in my email made me smile, until I read what you had to say. I had assumed we’d merely parted. That we had resigned ourselves to the understanding that we disagreed. You believe I don’t believe in God, and I believe in God so much that I can’t imagine a God who isn’t broad and bright and expansive in Their love. I didn’t cry, this time. All of the words you had to say aren’t new to me, and there is a version of me who might have agreed with you. Who said the same words, trying to convince herself that this life she has, who she is becoming, is sinful, and wrong, and damming, but you know what, Beloved? I’ve taken a few steps forward. I’ve found in this life a faith that is wider and deeper than I ever had when I needed absolutes. I’ve found a love for scripture far more profound than when I read the Bible in only the ways that served me and my privilege. I’ve sat in solitude and tears and weeping and anger and confusion at God, and you know what? God, in all that They are, was still there. And while it’s not a perfect wandering of belief, I find wonder again in the breeze, there is hope again in breath, and there is joy, such sweet joy, in the celebration of all beings, of all shapes and sizes and materialities. The World, in all of her splendor, is God’s body for me now.

I am sorry that we couldn’t find a middle ground. That you couldn’t see me as I am, and listen without needing me to end up where you are. I’m sorry that I don’t see the system of faith and belief you so tightly cling to as viable for me any longer. I’m sorry that my calling and my hope frighten something in you - that was never my intention. It never has been.

I’m in the ordination process now. I have my second interview in the spring. I’m terrified. I’m still learning what it is to be because I am, not because I’m trying to fit the pastoral identity of all the men in my life that told me being unbothered and “above it all” meant spiritual maturity. I’m entering my third year of seminary - isn’t that wild? I’m learning much, but most of all I’m learning that this life is much better without needing to have all the answers. I’m learning that I can have all the knowledge of the Bible in the world, but that if I am not living and loving and doing justice in the face of empires and providing mercy in the face of anger and separation, then really I have no faith at all. Because as much as we learned that faith is because of the dying, I think now I believe faith is mostly for the living. Faith without works is dead, after all, isn’t it?

Beloved, I’m sorry. I miss our friendship. I miss the hope that we might find some sort of place where we could speak and talk and lean in together. I do. You aren’t the first person to be in my comment sections, and you certainly won’t be the last. Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll repent when it’s time. But for now, I think I’m doing okay. I’d love for you to come here me preach sometime.

In all things love,

Haley.

Following is the call to worship given at First Christian Church, in Birmingham, Alabama at Linnea’s ordination service.

Beloveds,

whether it is with a sigh, gulp, or even a wisp of exasperation if you so choose, let us join

—if only for a few moments—

to steady ourselves with a breath,

maybe two:

We gather to enter this time of worship,

contemplation, and celebration together.

We come carrying the density of expectation:

the names we have been given,

the roles we have learned to perform,

the learned utility by which we have measured our worth.

We come having often sacrificed ourselves on the altar of calling as we and others have defined it,

sometimes unsure we have ever truly met ourselves.

Yet still, we gather.

Daring to provoke our comforts.

Knocking on Hope’s door,

Praying between our breaths,

that change will not undo us,

that loss will not have the final word,

that our becoming will not mean tossing ourselves aside.

And in this gathering,

the Poet reaches for us—

not to correct us,

or confine us,

not to tell us who we must be—

but to whisper a deeper wisdom:

We must live everything.

We must love our questions,

We must learn to be stirred by our shared longing for life made new.

Here, together, we remember that calling is not fixed, but ever becoming.

We remember in the middle of moments like these,

in the midst of transitions where we cannot stand still,

our lives cannot be so neatly named or hemmed in.

Here, together, we practice endurance rooted in rest—

loving the questions,

living the mystery,

trusting what cannot yet be said.

So come, beloveds.

Come to live the life you actually have.

Come to honor endings and beginnings intertwined.

Come to celebrate becoming—

again, and again, and again.

Let us worship together.

Amen.

1. A postcard from a bookshop in Durham, North Carolina, in which a cowboy-style family is sitting at a table, being presented a pizza by white Jesus.

2. The program from my grandmother’s funeral.

3. A copy of the poem, ‘The New Speakers’ by Gloria Anzaldúa (click the title of the poem to read).

4. A printed and bound version of a sermon my best friend Linnea gave during the first chapel at Brite Divinity School of 2025 titled ‘A Moment’, which I forced her to sign for me like she was famous (she is to me).

The beginning and ending blank pages of the Bible itself are covered in stickers from my adventures over the last several years. Think of the girls with stickers all over their laptops or water bottles, but I’m so not like other girls and put them in my Bible (this is a joke).

I wish I could tell you I was a good minister who opened her Bible more. These days I feel like I’m more on the kneel at the edge of my bed, flop over, and ask God what is going on, type. Advent is here, as of today, and week one is hope - which I will tell you often feels like something far away and unreachable. After all, what is hope anyway? Where is God when it feels like an endless string of cloudy days and we can’t seem to find my way above water? Why does hope feel like an oasis in a wilderness we’re navigating without a map?

Tucked in the pages of Linnea’s sermon on Isaiah 43:19-211, are some words about wilderness:

“God isn’t promising to change the wilderness; God isn’t even promising a NEW wilderness God isn’t promising a different desert […]. God is promising water. God is promising new paths TO that water. God is promising to carve out ways to nourishment, to provide sustenance to our bodies. To give us new strength, new tools for the struggle that has always been, and might always be. God isn’t promising a different political landscape, or a new administration. God isn’t promising a revolution, nor a resolution. God isn’t promising to struggle FOR us, but to struggle WITH us. God is promising to make us new.[…] WE are the new thing God is doing.” 2

God isn’t promising to change the wilderness.

So then, what is hope? What on earth do we spend a whole week of Advent reflecting on hope for? Beloved, I wish I could tell you I had the answers.

If you ever get to meet or spend anytime with the one and only Dr. Namsoon Kang, she’ll likely say to you that she believes in de-romaticizing things. At first it sounds silly and if you’re anything at all like me you might deny that you romanticize your life in order to cope with it, or say ‘well Dr. Kang, of course I see reality!” But after the fourth or fifth time of her saying it, you’ll start to wonder a little about what hope really is - do you force optimism and absolute truth that there is a resolution to all things in order to feel in control and call it hope? Do you make your favorite coffee at home or buy it at the local shop and take a few sips and ‘have hope’ again, because you fulfilled an instant comfort?

Is how we define hope a sustainable way of being or is it confined to our ceramic depictions of the Nativity collecting dust on our mantlepieces?

The poem that’s tucked in my Bible, The New Speakers, digs deep into the idea that we often think hope can be found only in our words, but in truth, it must also be felt within our bodies and being. We cannot only be immortalized in our words - not really. We must be living, breathing, moving doing people, otherwise hope becomes, in the words of Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “a destructive illusion.”3

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Some of us are still hung up
substituting words for relationships
substituting writing for living.

But what we want
–what we presume to want–
is to see our words engraved
on the people’s faces,
feel our words catalyze
emotions in their lives.
What we want is to become
part of the common consumption
like coffee with morning paper.

We don’t want to be
Stars but parts
of constellations.

4

When we speak of Advent in this first week, we talk about the hope of arrival of the Messiah - Jesus, and the hope he brings with him for salvation. It’s this large, outsized hope, that when Jesus is born suddenly hope has arrived back into the world because we know how the story begins and ends because all stories must have beginnings and it just makes it easier if we know the endings, doesn’t it? But what is hope if it ends with the death of Jesus? Has it only begun with the announcement of Jesus coming birth from Mary?

But this hope of Jesus isn’t a promise for a perfect resolution, like Linnea reminds us about God in Isaiah. It’s hope towards something new, someone new, not in place of us, but with us. It is hope that will be sustainable because it has been born of a woman, brought forth by a woman, who did not get a free pass from the horrors and hardship of pregnancy and birth because she was carrying Jesus in her womb. It is the hope that God has begun to speak through this particular womb, that Jesus’ story will be deeply intertwined with all of ours. It is hope that will be covered in every bodily fluid that comes with the birth of a baby to the tune of a mother’s cry as she pushes forth her baby into the world. It is a hope covered in blood, that if in this world we can afford to build weapons and fund genocides, that we can afford to feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Heal the sick and comfort the hurting. Give home and house to those without. Hope is the longing that if we can choose weapons or WIC benefits, we will choose what feeds and gives life to us all.

Happy Advent, friends.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the need to write, or even the desire to. Somewhere between discussion posts and real life, my soul has been weary. I’ve been searching for absolutes even when I absolutely insist I am not, and after a few sessions with a new therapist, I told her I wish I could start seminary over or that my program was longer, because I’m finally ready to admit I was never made for the Christianity I grew up in, and that it’s finally time for me to divest from it.

Many of you met me when this substack was called something else - Divine Between Us. That title meant much to me, and I’m not sure I ever explained it. It was born of long walks in the woods, by ponds that I knew nothing about, and from whale sightings from the local ferries when I lived out on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Those islands taught me much about the earth - that she is living and breathing and growing and changing with every moment. That God, the Divine, whatever they may be, is first felt within me, not “doctrined” into a corner. That the connection is most often felt between us as people, between us and animal life, between us and the earth Herself. Those days in the woods were the closest I had felt to my first inkling of belief that I’d clung to as a chid.

You see, I felt God from a very early age. I knew that the world was more grand than I could ever imagine it to be, not just because I was a person in it, but because it existed at all. Because books and pictures and poetry and song filled my being with excitement to live. That God and the world were made for being, breathing, flourishing.

Yet somewhere in the middle of then and now I learned that humanity is in charge. That we are the only acceptable stewards, with hearts and souls and understanding of how things worked (though anyone in adulthood would likely tell you they rarely have any idea of what they’re doing other than just ‘the best they can’), that we, humans, were the Divinely appointed ones to rule the earth, to dominate and use it for our purposes, so that we could live.

But my own body and mind seemed to tug and pull against this - I tell people often and again that I think I was born a theologian. Not because I’m good at theory or love philosophy, but because my being has always been attuned to the poetry and music of the world. I didn’t want perfect answers, just some, to know why birds sang and why sitting in sunbeams always felt so healing, or why certain patches of grass never grew back, or why some people, like my mother were so good at caring for plants, and some people, like me, were so seemingly unable to listen to what the plants needed. And after a lifetime of religious absolutes in the name of God, beloveds I think I am too tired for them anymore.

On the very first page of the introduction of The Body of God, Sallie McFague quotes another of her books, Models of God, saying “the world is our meeting place with God . . . as the body of God, it is wondrously, awesomely, divinely mysterious.”1

The world as the body of God. Not necessarily the body as in the physical body, although that is an aspect of the book, but also the body as in the wholeness of being. God’s Being as whole - the world making up the whole body. A world in which bodies and their concepts matter. Interconnection is deeply important, it asks us to consider more than just our own human physical being in the world, but to consistently be considering and practicing what it means to be part of the whole Being of God. Not because it will give us absolute answers or convince us that we are not traveling to some pit of death in the beyond of our deaths, but because when we are curious and able to recognize one another within the body, then it will become all the more important to develop an ethic and practice of care for all Beings in this world - not just humanity.

On one of the farthest tips of Orcas Island away from the ferry landing, is a place called Obstruction Pass State Park. One can camp there, there are rentable spots, but with a park pass hang tag and some light gumption, there’s a looped trail. There’s not set direction but my personal choice was always to meet the trail and take a left into the forest, letting the trail rise and then fall around the loop towards East Sound, the ocean coming perfectly into view on the final long stretch of the walk. But just before the trail loop began to turn towards the ocean, there were two trees stretched above the trail. They were not fused together when I first encountered them, but rather appeared to be barely teenaged, grasping towards one another in some high school production of Romeo and Juliet. As the time passed and I returned to the trail, they had begun the process of inosculation, a phenomenon where trees began to grow and fuse together. A friend on the trail called it a fairy gate - to be careful, that passing through the gate would change the forest, and in the process, me.

I am unsure of whether or not I believe it was truly some sort of portal, but I found comfort in the idea that once I passed through the “gate”, that I could forget everything I’d been trying to kick rocks at one the trail thus far. It was also where the trail began to slope and curve more erratically, and yet somehow time seemed to slow too, my cares gone with it. Usually out of respect for the trees I took my AirPods out and listened to the forest then, the distant music of the Sound slapping against the rocky beach not far off, the trees and brush rustling all around me. It was here that I felt again like I had when I first believed in something. I could feel God, and I’m almost ashamed to admit how many times I cried on the other side of the fairy gate.

All of this to say, beloveds, I think that the world of a church that taught me to question within boundary lines wasn’t actually serving me in the way I thought it was. I don’t know that I can defend my attempts to make it work, even after leaving. It’s not a losing of faith, and it isn’t calling those I know and have called beloved from that place wrong either - but their way of faith was never mine. I was never made for such a world where I can only feel God on command and through a book narrowly interpreted. It’s a scary place to sit, sometimes. To know that I preach in churches to friends and beloveds often looking for absolutes. To try and figure out how to preach in such a way that invites us into deep and responsible consideration and understanding of our texts but also to to be invited into the hope that those texts are not the only way - that our bodies can be trusted, that our desires and love for Being together in the world God has created in indeed good. But really, friends and beloveds, to consider what it is to preach to a world as God’s body that sees our justice work towards the care of one another as our primary goal. That we would walk humbly together, love mercy together, and care for one another and this world so that it and we may flourish, together. Gives new meaning to ‘do this in remembrance of me’, don’t you think?

Until next time, beloveds.

I won’t lie to you, this feedback on a recent essay of mine made me cry. It was true - I didn’t correctly engage the text that my professor had given me (and accidentally misread the topic/purpose of the essay). I interpreted and conversed in bad faith with a text I knew little to nothing about, and had strong opinions. It happens from time to time. I’m not above being unkind, even as a minister every now and again. It’s less than it was in my younger(ish) years, but you know what? My professor was right. And it made me think a lot about community and how I engage in it.

It’s the middle of the semester. Group projects are going on. Essays and discussion posts are due about every five minutes alongside the two hundred (sometimes not a joke) pages of reading you forgot to do and are behind three weeks on are starting to catch up to you. But you’re determined not to pull all nighters. But sometimes, teaching yourself what you haven’t learned in real life and did actually miss receiving education on takes up all of the waking hours. Did I mention you have a sermon to write? That’s not just a sermon, but prayers, and more reading, and lots of consideration about where you are in the world and what you and your community can hear in these moments. You just need five more minutes.

Five more minutes.

I clack away on the keyboard I bought myself as a little treat. I wonder if maybe I pound on the keys a little too hard. The sound seems to get louder the more passionate I become. I click submit on yet another application for something I’m pretty sure I have time for, and am so excited about, wondering what the next couple of months will hold. Seminary is a liminal space, you see. Where you enter the work of intentional destablization of faith, so that something new, and strong, and profound can be forged from whatever is left of what you had the chance to burn down. It’s not a bad thing. It isn’t where your faith goes to die, though that can happen. And I think a form of your faith does die - the one that you need to be something. The one that you need to cling to because you aren’t sure who you are without it. The one that was threatened by the question you’re asking about Jesus in that essay for your theology class. You lose touch with religion and learn to look at the people around you. To hold convictions a little less tightly, and say, if we could just have five more minutes together. Can we find five minutes to be more charitable? To be less critical? To understand that critical thinking and constructive conversations are not the end of us, but the chance for us to see one another. To see ourselves as actually a part of something that follows us out of the classroom and into the world.

Five more minutes.

Just a little more charity.

Don’t hear me say this in a ‘we should be less critical of bad systems’. Burn those down, whenever possible. Name them, dismantle them, build better ways of being, even if it seems like you are the only one willing to do so. Sometimes the offending of our sensibilities will leads us to people and places in our community that we might never have seen. Five more minutes and just a little charity actually gives us room to see where we have been so committed to what we think serves us that we’ve turned into the oppressors we say we despise.

I haven’t been out of the house much lately. I needed to protect what has been left of my sanity and ability to interact with others, for the moments when I really needed it. I lost a relationship that was very important to me, one that’s lasted nearly two decades. I too am reeling from the state of the world. I too am finding healing from things that happened long ago in my life but that still flare up when I least expect (and want) them too. The world grieves me right now, and being the place where some people feel safe to ask hard questions can be exhausting. I’m learning better boundaries, I promise. I’m learning what it looks like to treat myself with the respect and care that I give those who come to me for that same help and care. I too am part of the community.

I feel like my keystrokes are getting lighter. I’m not pressing in so hard. I can’t wait for my wrist rest to get here. I’m starting a new book tonight, maybe.

I’m praying to be a lot more charitable, to find five more minutes, to take a few more breaths, to make a little more room.

Thank goodness it’s reading week.

Part of me thinks maybe all of my study problems would be solved if I had a gothic library near to me in Texas to study in, but I know that’s not true. The only other student in this room is humming along to whatever is playing in her AirPods. It’s sacred, in its’ own way, echoing off the stone and wood panelling, and I’m glad to be here, in this moment, waiting on a friend.

I’ve been in a little Virginian mountain town for a month now. In another month, I will be getting ready to trek all the way back to Texas and I am finding myself grounded in ways I am unsure would have been possible without those who are beloved to me. Even the hard moments, and the tears, and the worry, and the ‘I don’t know that I can handle going right now’, I made a brave choice, and friends, I’m not sure who I’ll be when I return home, but the Divine has been doing some work. Also preaching every week is exhausting. I’m a full believer that as much as I am asking God to do something in the text for my congregation… I am also in a way, asking God to do something for me. I am, if nothing else, a minister that believes we’re all included, that a Sunday sermon is just as much for my soul in the pulpit as it is for yours in the pew. It’s surely something to be included in the priesthood of believers.

Hillsville is the sort of place you often see on a map but don’t pass through. It’s making me a believer in pulling over to the roadside stands, to buy the local produce, to make conversation with someone wholly unlike you. To be able to transport ourselves into people’s worlds as we do when we travel is such a gift and an honor. We will always be carrying them with us, so why not be delayed for just a moment to see the face of God in someone we’ve never met before? It’s one of the most sacred of gifts, I think, to carry others with us on our journeys.

This summer we are doing a series where before each sermon, a poem is read. This last week’s was ‘The Chance to Love Everything1’ by Mary Oliver, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. The chance to love everything is a sacred command, an invitation into a life in which holy memory combines with sacred prospect, and the lines of Hope herself are visible to us. The chance to love everything for us is this beckoning into lament and joy in all that they give to us, not succumbing to them, but rather allowing them to roam and to be part of us instead of us desiring their accessibility when it suits our needs and Google Calendars. How might we love our doubt, I can still hear my own voice booming in the sanctuary, and I become weepy even in this moment.

Faith is such a fascinating and funny language, isn’t it? We speak out of some assertion based in a reality in which, even in our disparity, we find some root in Hope. Faith makes these deeply intimate friends of human experience: vulnerability, love, loss, ecstasy, anguish, and everything in between. Our life with the Divine is declaration that faith is not an escape or cure but rather a witness to new world where love and life, rather than suffering and death, have ultimate power.

Anyway, these summer sermons are something sacred. Found in gothic reading rooms and up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, on some scrap of the Appalachian Trail, I am finding sermons in the wild again. Ones that soothe the soul and that settle themselves into our very way of being. Because the Texts We Preach2 are hymns within themselves, and we require one another to even remotely begin to understand them.

I should get back to sermon writing. Sunday comes every week, after all.

𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘴𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬.

because the condition of Truth is not tucking our lament and fear and grief into our bodies and smiling to keep the peace while pain ravages us.

the condition of Truth is not telling ourselves that we and those around us would be better off if we kept those emotions in the locked room, even when Hope has appeared to them to say ‘Peace be with you’.

The condition of Truth is not made whole when we push ourselves to remain comfortable instead of touch the holes in Hope’s hands to say ‘I am still hurting, but I have to believe that there is something more than this’.

The condition of Truth is to allow suffering to speak.

The condition of Truth is to allow suffering to speak without it needing to do something for us, or for it to make everything better, or to convince us beyond belief that everything will be okay.

Because the condition of Truth is, for the disciples, Jesus has still died. And I don’t know about you but I would have a much more difficult time believing in in the Truth of what resurrection is and can be if my experience of death was that the dead stayed that way.

𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘴𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬.

God of the Ashes,

We hold so much in tension. From deep losses in our communities, to the fear and real threat of loss and exploitation and evil that the world beyond these doors holds. There is no shortage of reminders that we are, painfully human, and that other humans in this world seek to take our lives from us and that to dust we will return. But we are not alone. You have made us for one another. We see it seeped in through the bricks of this building, through the stories we tell, the sermons we preach, the friendships we make, and even in the ways we show up for the least of us in our moments of need, more than just words and thoughts and prayers, but hope into action. May we find resistance in our joy. May this season of Lent not only remind us that we are, indeed, painfully human, but are also hopefully so. Let us look together towards the anticipation that there is freedom of so many kinds when the stone is rolled away. May we push back against evil that seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. May our season of Lent produce in us a rest rooted in the disruptions of systems of exploitation, injustice, and oppression. Let us bear our ashes together in solidarity and hope.

Amen.

It’s been over a week now since we embarked on the journey of Lent together by marking our foreheads with ashes in remembrance that from dust we have come and to dust we will return. Hopefully you have showered since Ash Wednesday, but before we really get going, I want us to take a moment and meditate on the ashes. And as we bring ourselves into a moment of meditation on what the ashes might make us feel about ourselves, where we find ourselves in the world, and even how we find ourselves in this room, let’s see the Lord’s Prayer in a new way together:

Eternal Spirit, Earthmaker, Pain bearer, Life giver, Source of all that shall be. Father and Mother of us all. Loving God, in whom is heaven; May the hallowing of your name echo through the Universe! May the way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world! May your heavenly will be done by all created beings! May your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and may it come on earth.

With the bread that we need for today, feed us. In the hurts that we cause and absorb from one another, forgive us. In times of temptation and test, strengthen us. From trials too great to endure, spare us. From the grip that is evil, free us. For you reign in the glory of the power that is love. Now and forever, now and forevermore.

Amen. (New Zealand Prayer Book)

The Lord’s Prayer in Luke’s Gospel is usually preached during Ordinary Time in the lectionary calendar, which occurs over the summer after Pentecost ends in the spring. It’s settled in those endless days of summer when it’s much easier to forget our worries, and we have time to spread out and pray and prepare a place where we feel safe and cradled in the presence of God. Where we lay out picnic blankets and go on road trips and listen to our music a little too loudly and visit our friends and family with a sense of freedom that we didn’t know we had during the rest of the year. Where we can drink a cup of coffee on a slow morning and do a devotional while the sun rises and all feels well.

Yet here we are, definitely not in the summer and definitely not in any time I would call Ordinary. Don’t get me wrong - I love Lent. It’s actually my favorite section of time on the liturgical calendar. Maybe it’s because I love a little melancholy, and maybe there’s just nothing quite like the constant remembrance of our sins. I’m kidding. Mostly.

Lent, or the Lenten season, is a designated time for us during the year that is set aside for prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving in anticipation of Jesus’ death and resurrection on the cross. It ends on Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday during the Easter season. For forty days we commit to centering our lives around the act of praying – not praying apart from our lives, but praying in our hoarder houses of worry, in the wildernesses of our discomfort, and with all the weariness of our aching. During these forty days we come to our knees and clasp our hands together at the edge of our beds our parents taught us as kids and prepare to diagnose our souls with the ways of living that we long for more than liberation for us all. We learn to bless the wilderness and say: “May we receive the losing of our religion as the gift it will be to us in the end.” Lent is time designed for us to lose our religion a little, where we can shed what we think makes us free for what God says will actually liberate us. When we can consider that even though we say from dust we have come and to dust we will return, life still happens between the dust, and it matters what we do with it.

It's why we have forms of communion like the receiving of the ashes on Ash Wednesday. The ashes give us an anchor to remember the chains of our sins that break our relationships with God and one another. “We,” as one modern prophet writes, “…make our home in the wilderness—in the liminal spaces where liberation has begun, but sorrow and hunger remain. In this season, we choose solidarity with all who are suffering—the displaced, the abused, the oppressed and neglected.” We remember that we are a community where there are real people experiencing very real life. Who are hurting. Who feel broken. Who are fearful and angry, spurred on by the fear of loss and the very human need for survival in this world.

We also remember that we too may sometimes be the least of these, feeling as if and sometimes literally struggling to stand. Because how dare we be well together in this world that sells sickness and isolation disguised as wholeness. Lent brings us into solidarity with God, where God gives us a vision of liberation from systemic exploitation through the resurrection. Where our souls, like it is written in Romans 12:2, will be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that our desires become aligned with God’s desires for us to be well in this world we inhabit. Lent invites us to see one another, to be honest with each other, to help one another, to destroy oppression and injustice as we can, and to also take all these things to God and lay them at God’s feet.

Which is when it’s really great to know how to pray together in the wilderness, isn’t it? Because the Lord’s prayer is not just a prayer for us. It was more than that for Jesus, too. It’s a poem of hope, a declaration of need, and a petition for care.

Jesus in the text is praying as he tends to do, and his disciples notice. They want to know what he’s praying about. The prayer guide Jesus gives is short, and I wonder that if this is really how Jesus prayed on a regular basis, shouldn’t the disciples already know it by heart? If this is THE prayer Jesus prays, then why on earth would they need to know howJesus prayed? What is it they are hungering so ardently for that they cannot hear the Teacher’s words?

Jesus’ response to their question is with a prayer that pleas with God for five things:

1. May God’s name be proclaimed as the source of Life.

2. May God’s communal kingdom come.

3. Give us all what we need each day to be well.

4. May we be unbound from sins that keep us from God and one another.

5. Spare us from the evil that seeks to steal, kill, and destroy.

Five really small asks, aren’t they? Jesus follows the prayer in the next section of the text with a parable and really strange set of metaphors around asking for what you need. In both the parable and the continuing text, there is this running theme that more often than not, when we pray and appeal to God for what we need, want or what we are wrestling with, those needs are often met in more tangible ways by the humans around us. In verse eight of our text, Jesus even emphasizes through a cultural metaphor of giving out of obligation to the disciples that this help is not given only by heart or friendship or sentimentality, but by the necessity of being neighbors.

A friend of mine is an RN at an HIV & infectious disease clinic at a county hospital Fort Worth. This is a clinic where you will find those who are weary and wandering, those diagnosed with HIV, the venereal disease ridden, the addicted and dependent, the mentally ill, and the incarcerated. This is a clinic where it might be easy for some of us to walk in and wrinkle our noses. This is the type of clinic you go to when no one else will see you, and you cannot afford anywhere else. She told me the story recently of a seemingly normal day in the clinic in which there suddenly was loud shouting from the waiting room. She rushed out to find an incarcerated black man, in literal chains, having a seizure on the waiting room floor. While he was being cared for by other staff, my friend held the man’s head in her lap and arms so that he didn’t give himself a concussion on the tile floor. And with all of his might, he asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer with her.

Father, may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

This black man, incarcerated, shackled, at the mercy of a system that is built to harm him, in a position where even in a clinic like this one, statics say that Black patients are 26% more likely to receive less time for revival efforts than white patients, asked for communion in a moment in which he could feel nothing but pain and fear. He was later taken to the ER, shackled to his gurney. In one of his deepest moments of need, in a moment commanded that his life was in danger, at the hands and at the mercy of other people, what he asked for was freedom.

“So, I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

Just over seven and a half weeks ago, we heard a plea for mercy on a national stage. Not for mercy from God, but for mercy from the humans elected to a place of leadership in this country that will affect all of us. And in that plea, we heard a different form of the Lord’s Prayer. That our use of the name of God would be a source of Life. That our communities be given the opportunities to flourish and not be starved of the programs the least of us need to just survive another day, and not just to survive, but to be well. That all of these things in the name of God might unbind us from our sins against one another, and in the process recuse us and bring justice, and liberation, and mercy to all of us. What a plea for mercy for the weary.

Jesus telling the disciples how to pray is not just about the act of praying. Because praying can be a lot of things, but what Jesus is doing here is letting the disciples in on the hope that prayer that actually does something in their lives. Jesus is telling us that this work and act of praying leads to a response that will play out in their lives. Because our prayers don’t happen in a vacuum, no matter how hard we try to make it be so. Our prayers can close the gap between us and God, or they can make the gap between us and God a whole lot wider. So, it’s a good thing we only need to ask.

I wonder what it is, Beloveds, that you need to ask God for in prayer. In the next thirty-one days of Lent we have left, what might it look like to ask for what you really need from God and from those around you? As you remember that from dust you have come and to dust you shall return, what is it that you need to be well?

Beloveds, bow your heads with me for a moment.

God of the Ashes,

We hold so much in tension. From deep losses in our community, to the fear and real threat of loss and exploitation and evil that the world beyond and even within these doors holds, there is no shortage of reminders that we are, painfully human, and that other humans in this world seek to take our lives from us and that to dust we will return. But we are not alone. You have made us for one another. We see it seeped in through the bricks, through the stories we tell, and the ways in which we show up for the least of us in moments of needs, more than just words and thoughts and prayers, but action into hope. May we find resistance in our joy. May this season of Lent not only remind us that we are, indeed, painfully human, but are also hopefully so. Let us look together towards the anticipation that there is freedom of so many kinds when the stone gets rolled away. May we push back against evil that seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. May our season of Lent produce in us a rest rooted in the disruptions of systems of exploitation, and injustice, and oppression. And as we carry the reminder of the ashes through the Lenten season, may we name how we’ve been and are being complicit in the ashes of those that burn down. Let us bear these ashes together in solidarity and hope.

Amen.

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man who was blind from birth. Jesus’ disciples asked, “Rabbi, who sinned so that he was born blind, this man or his parents?” Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents. This happened so that God’s mighty works might be displayed in him. While it’s daytime, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” After he said this, he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and smeared the mud on the man’s eyes. Jesus said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (this word means sent). So the man went away and washed. When he returned, he could see. The man’s neighbors and those who used to see him when he was a beggar said, “Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?” Some said, “It is,” and others said, “No, it’s someone who looks like him.” But the man said, “Yes, it’s me!” So they asked him, “How are you now able to see?” He answered, “The man they call Jesus made mud, smeared it on my eyes, and said, ‘Go to the pool of Siloam and wash.’ So I went and washed, and then I could see.” They asked, “Where is this man?” He replied, “I don’t know.”

Then they led the man who had been born blind to the Pharisees. Now Jesus made the mud and smeared it on the man’s eyes on a Sabbath day. So Pharisees also asked him how he was able to see. The man told them, “He put mud on my eyes, I washed, and now I see.”

Some Pharisees said, “This man isn’t from God, because he breaks the Sabbath law.” Others said, “How can a sinner do miraculous signs like these?” So, they were divided. Some of the Pharisees questioned the man who had been born blind again: “What do you have to say about him, since he healed your eyes?” He replied, “He’s a prophet.”

The Jewish leaders didn’t believe the man had been blind and received his sight until they called for his parents. The Jewish leaders asked them, “Is this your son? Are you saying he was born blind? How can he now see?” His parents answered, “We know he is our son. We know he was born blind. But we don’t know how he now sees, and we don’t know who healed his eyes. Ask him. He’s old enough to speak for himself.” His parents said this because they feared the Jewish authorities. This is because the Jewish authorities had already decided that whoever confessed Jesus to be the Christ would be expelled from the synagogue. That’s why his parents said, “He’s old enough. Ask him.”

Therefore, they called a second time for the man who had been born blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know this man is a sinner.” The man answered, “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see.” They questioned him: “What did he do to you? How did he heal your eyes?” He replied, “I already told you, and you didn’t listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”

They insulted him: “You are his disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses, but we don’t know where this man is from.” The man answered, “This is incredible! You don’t know where he is from, yet he healed my eyes! We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners. God listens to anyone who is devout and does God’s will. No one has ever heard of a healing of the eyes of someone born blind. If this man wasn’t from God, he couldn’t do this.” They responded, “You were born completely in sin! How is it that you dare to teach us?” Then they expelled him.

Jesus heard they had expelled the man born blind. Finding him, Jesus said, “Do you believe in the Human One?” He answered, “Who is he, sir? I want to believe in him.” Jesus said, “You have seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking with you.” The man said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshipped Jesus. Jesus said, “I have come into the world to exercise judgment so that those who don’t see can see and those who see will become blind.”

Some Pharisees who were with him heard what he said and asked, “Surely we aren’t blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you wouldn’t have any sin, but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

John 9 (CEB)

Fear of loss and even loss itself does a number on us, doesn’t it?

Loss ambles with us in this disgustingly concrete way, repeatedly asking us what we think it means to be human. I’m sure that every single one of us can name a list of things we’ve lost in this life. That’s the funny thing about living, isn’t it? In the end, there is loss. Death and taxes, right? Loss is terrifying, and whether we want to admit it or not, we often live in fear of losing a lot of things: our loved ones, our communities, our safety, our faith, and probably what little sense of self and identity and stability we’ve managed to create and control in this world. Which means it can be deeply frightening to dream of anything new, can’t it?

Dreaming is risky. Dreaming together is riskier. Dreaming requires Sight that desires for us to look past ourselves and into the lived experiences of those we are in community with. Dreaming isn’t going to fit within our mission statements or perfectly lined out core beliefs webpage. Dreaming won’t fit in our papers about call and vocation and ministry and leadership. It will be reflected in the lives of the people sitting around us. The professors whose classes we take. The sermons we hear and the sermons we preach. The community that you will build here – that is where dreaming resides. In the way we live together.

Dreaming also asks us to confront our shared fear of loss, together.

And I know we’re talking about a miracle here that seems like it happens in isolation – because who is there to witness the blind man’s healing at the waters? But what I want us to imagine is that this miracle of giving sight may be less about the physical miracle itself, and more about the debate and dreaming it sparks within a community. What if this miracle of gaining sight is meant to lead us to the question of how we have constructed the community in which we reside? What if this miracle about seeing anew is meant to help us ask what it is that we have come to worship at the expense of the lived experiences of those who are beside us? I think of trans poet Jay Hulme’s, The Only Shop Still Open:

“The funeral parlor’s busy these days.
the undertaker, still dressed in black,
slips in and out of the side.
				
Sometimes he spots a stranger,
a couple or two in the street
as he heads to the hearse.
				
Each time he looks up
and nods politely,
as they smile and wave in return.

     We’ll take care of you, too,
				
his eyes seem to say;
soft, and sad,
and seamed at the edges,
				
     we’ll take care of you, too,
    when the time comes.”

Beloved, are we listening?

Can we see those around us?

Can we dream together, or are we so wed to our ideals of what should be that we cannot look past ourselves?

The miracle of seeing anew is pleading with us to see one another.

Will we care for one another when the time comes?

I don’t have many words today. I’ve just started my second year of seminary. Nothing makes sense. Everything is a little bit tiring. The last year ran me a little bit too ragged. I still don’t get enough sleep, and no, I’m still not drinking enough water. I turn 29 in a little over a month, which is basically 30 and I don’t know how to feel about it. I’m trying to be more intentional about my life. I still drive two hours one way each way for classes (except for when I get the gift or staying over). Things are chaos. I’m in search of rest this semester - as per usual. Anyway, I’ve been able to form coherent thoughts lately, so keep on the lookout for some posts soon. But for now, be well, Beloveds.

-H.

As we find ourselves wrestling with questions of love, justice and meaning making, as we find ourselves living out who we say we are, and as we show up to our polling booths, may we be people who take risks for one another.

May we be people who seek the flourishing of neighbor + community. As we pursue a Kindom, not a kingdom, may we rejoice that the flawed, selfish. and oppressive ways of men cower in fear in the face of Love. Of Presence. Of Hope and Holy Spirit.

May our bodies recognise the humanity of one another over doctrines and policies that harm us all.

May our humanity feel familiar today, Beloveds.

May you go in peace.

I will reflect and converse with 1 Samuel 3:1-9 using the Jewish Publication Society (1985) Tanakh. In this portion of the text, young Samuel hears the voice of Indwelling Presence, and listens to the Voice, mistaking it multiple times for his teacher, Eli. I have chosen the name Indwelling Presence, inspired by the text by a poem titled for embodied knowing^[1] that fits with the guide to use female language for the Holy One in the reading. The poem was open on my desk as I was doing the reading, and alongside the introduction of Samuel’s relationship with Presence even before he knew Her, I was struck by the ways it is possible to hear the voice of Indwelling before we recognize Her by name, and how precious it can be when we have others who can help us recognize when She is speaking.

There is profound Knowing within Samuel. One that Samuel does not even recognize. He is in service for the Indwelling Presence. The first two verses set up interesting imagery – stating that words from Presence are in rare form. Prophetic conversation is in short supply. And then, in verse two, the author states that Eli, Samuel’s teacher, was advanced in age and could not see well. What other sense might the author be asking the reader to rely on in this passage? Is there a form of trust being established through the text between author and reader, implying that what is about to come to pass in the story requires a much deeper understanding than simply seeing? Verse three continues the lack of literal sight, the lamp had not yet gone out, but it is still burning, if only just. It is interesting that the Indwelling Presence speaks but has no dialogue within the passage. This is important, there is power in speaking through other mediums. A picture is worth a thousand words, but in this, there is only the body and an unknown voice. Each time there is a calling, Samuel responds, assuming it is Eli. Eli says repeatedly, no not I! Who could the voice be that speaks to Eli? I wonder what Eli was thinking. Was the Indwelling Presence felt? Did she sit somewhere in his stomach? Was She a whisper in the back of his mind, or a shout in one of his ears? Each time he is called, Samuel responds without wavering.

Finally, when Eli realizes who is speaking to Samuel, he puts no prescription on the boy. He doesn’t set him aside for anything special. He doesn’t elevate or even say much at all, other than an instruction to return to his bed, and to rise once more without pause, and say ‘Speak, Indwelling Presence, for Your servant is listening.” I wonder what it must be like to be so encouraged into Divine annunciation. It is no small thing to listen and respond. What good it might do for us to say to one another who feels the Indwelling Presence, ‘Go lie down. When Presence calls, respond with; I’m listening.

This kind of invitation to rest can bring deep hope often in spaces seeking to create community. Prophetic imagination and conversation are necessary to the life of a faith community – both when we listen and respond like Samuel, and when we give breathing room for Being, like Eli. What might become of us if we don’t seek to exploit the Indwelling of those around us, but rather live together with the instruction of ‘Go lie down’. There is deep resistance to division in simply resting. What kind of Presence might ask of us to rest before She tugs us into annunciation? What might it look like for church spaces to not glorify ‘serving’ but instead make room for rest? I wonder what transformation we might see – even in places like Brite Divinity School. What community might we find on the other side of rigid doctrines and absolute truths, where we listen to the calling of the Indwelling through our bodies, the ones we say she has so lovingly crafted?

^[1]Evans, Shannon K., Feminist Prayers for My Daughter: Powerful Petitions for Every Stage of Her Life, 1st ed (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023).