If you happen to follow clergy social media—of which there is a lot—you could not have escaped the fact that Ash Wednesday coincides with Valentine’s Day this year. I can’t escape it personally, either, as my dear husband—who generally does Valentine’s Day very well—will be home alone this year. I’m going to have to make it up … Read the rest
Continue reading "VaLENTine's Day" »
My older son Amos is kind of the peacemaker in the family. And if you know my smart-aleck younger son Aaron—which many of you do because he worked as your youth and family minister last year—you’d know why we need a peacemaker in the family! Amos is also a very good designer: he’s done a lot of the … Read the rest
Continue reading "You Do You" »
A priest friend of mine told me a story about visiting a crematorium and peering through the peephole that allowed him to see a human body in the process of becoming ash. The body was luminous, he said. The process seemed to generate more of a glow than a conflagration: my friend described it as something akin … Read the rest
Continue reading "Fire and Ash/Fuego y Cenizas" »
Did you know that the two most common stress dreams for North Americans are showing up unprepared for the test, and being naked in public? I bet just my mention of those dreams makes a few of us feel anxious, because they are such unsettling experiences. I haven’t had a stress dream for a while, because the last … Read the rest
Continue reading "Pass/Fail" »
I came home from my Bay Area sojourn longing for home. It’s the conundrum of an itinerant preacher, which seems to be my identity these days. Like every embodied being, I long for place, for people, for a sense of belonging somewhere. Because I trust the Episcopal Church processes by which I was called to Trinity Cathedral, I know … Read the rest
My iPhone screen is cracked. And people notice, y’know? Its kind of an outward and visible sign of some kind of inward shortcoming: clumsiness, inability to pay for a replacement, not caring. I plead guilty to the first, sorta to the second (it’s the second time I’ve broken the screen in a month and this is adding up) and no … Read the rest
This morning I chanced to hear a fragment of radio advertising from a room at the far end of the house. The phrase caught my attention “Black Fridays in March.” I guess that’s a thing, extending the curse and chaos of post-Thanksgiving sales to the rest of the year. But seriously? Friday sales during Lent?
I haven’t yet decided how … Read the rest
Continue reading "Friday after Ash Wednesday: Business" »
The two post-crash carless days that made up the majority of my Bay Area sojourn meant that I spent time—lots of time—on public transportation. It takes well over an hour to get from Oakland to the San Francisco campus of the UCSF hospital, and since I hadn’t really planned for passenger-hood by bringing extra reading material, I used the travel … Read the rest
While my own Christian community was enacting ancient rituals of mortality, I was in another state attending to a hospitalized parent, and having conversations about his end of life wishes. No worries: dad is fine right now. But there’s nothing quite like brain surgery to remind a person of the finitude of human existence. So I suppose it would have … Read the rest
I was struck by another vehicle today as I was parking my car in San Francisco. Although nobody was hurt, it was a frightening and costly experience, the latter in both financial and relational terms. I had been on my way to visit the hospital where my father at that very moment in surgery, and after the impact I spent … Read the rest