Rodeo and the Church Calendar

March 15, 2013 By 5 Comments

Despite my Christian upbringing, I didn’t grow up with the church calendar. Easter was a single day affair involving plastic eggs hidden in hill country pastures and Sunday school handouts with coppery brads to swing a construction paper stone away from an empty tomb. The graphic was always neat and tidy—flowers and grass and “He is Risen!” written alongside.

I knew the story of the suffering, but the celebration made more of an impact.

So between Valentines Day and Easter when my elementary school started serving fish sticks at the end of each week, I asked my reluctant classmates, “Why do you eat fish on Fridays?”

“It’s bad to eat meat on Fridays,” my friend Adrian told me.

“Why?” I asked. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Jessica Eddings-Roeser Tagged With: , , , , 5 Comments

The Hobbit, the Holy Spirit, and Calculus

March 12, 2013 By 1 Comment

It was my eleven-year-old’s turn to pick a movie, and he chose The Hobbit, just as his thirteen-year-old brother had done a few weeks before. The full title of the movie is: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and believe me, I never expected I’d be journeying to the theater to watch it a second time.

I’m very impatient with people who take a long time to tell a story, because I believe my time belongs to me. My aesthetic sense, further, favors an economy of verbiage, excepting, of course, my own pretty, pretty words.

More than once I’ve groaned inwardly, while listening to someone recount some event that matters far more to him than to me, thinking it would have taken less time to live through it myself than to suffer through his interminable telling.

This is petty and selfish of me, and so perhaps, in my Hobbit odyssey, God is teaching me patience for epic recountings. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Film, Tony Woodlief, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , 1 Comment

The Preacher’s Kid Returns

March 11, 2013 By 2 Comments

My sister my brother and I are right now, from three separate states, trying to put together a reception for our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.  In addition to the normal stress these things bring, we are feeling a dark ambivalence about the whole affair. It’s not the celebration itself that gives us pause. It’s where we are compelled to hold it.

We will be going back to the church of our childhood.

I think of the movie Junebug, in which our hapless protagonist, simply home for a visit, is called out to sing a hymn for everyone. The fact that we are the preacher’s kids, and expected to be involved every time we return is only part of the problem. That would be easy enough to deal with if there weren’t so many conflicted emotions going on under the surface.

We will go of course. And we will stand and sing. Church members will smile at us, tell us it’s good to see us, and wonder why the last time they saw us was seven years ago, at dad’s retirement from the pastorate there.

There are two related reasons. We were part of this family of hundreds of people who met three times a week, none of whom we knew intimately.

Dad took this church when I was one, my sister was three, and our little brother was just an infant. He stayed at that same ministry until his retirement, thirty-eight years later—something anyone familiar with fundamentalist Baptists knows is quite a feat. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Relationships, Vic Sizemore Tagged With: , , , 2 Comments

Can I Offer Up My Suffering?

March 8, 2013 By 12 Comments

“Pain is an evil, suffering is an evil. We mustn’t desire it. We don’t desire it for others, so why should we for ourselves?”

These were the words of my spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon, early in our twenty-five year relationship. (For background on our relationship, see this post.) I’d come to our monthly session after a couple days of a migraine. “I’m not good at accepting pain,” I told him.

“I’m not either,” he said, continuing with the words above, then adding: “We have to admit that there are some things we can’t handle, and accept our inability to accept!”

He went on: “Christ’s suffering on the cross is a mystery. Why is suffering necessary for redemption? And how is suffering redemptive? We don’t know. Jesus’s agony in the garden is passed over too quickly in most theology. Probably Christ prayed ‘let this cup pass’ for a very long time; he didn’t slip right into ‘Thy will be done.’ He didn’t desire this suffering; he didn’t see it as redemptive.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Peggy Rosenthal, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , 12 Comments

Feeling the Questions: A Serious Man and Footnote

March 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

“Why does he make us feel the questions if he won’t give us the answers?” I don’t know that I’ve heard an existential cry as eloquent as that in all my born days, at least not one that sounded as though it might have risen from my own chest. It forms the theme of two films based in Judaism that sit high on my list of essential modern films.

In 2009’s A Serious Man, one of Joel and Ethan Coen’s greatest films (which is saying something), Larry Gropnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a 1960s physics professor at a Midwestern university. Up for tenure, with a son about to undergo his bar mitzvah, he is met with at first a drop, then a stream, then a torrent, then a typhoon of ill fate.

That complication—Job in the throes—has been dramatized before, often and well; the Coen’s could have settled for their unique turn as well. Where they profoundly distinguish themselves is in the fastidious care and unflinching honesty they bring to a good man’s confrontation with God’s horrible quiet. [Read more...]

Filed Under: A. G. Harmon, Faith, Film Tagged With: , , Leave a Comment

We Are All Immigrants

February 26, 2013 By 4 Comments

Several years ago I had the humbling honor of sharing my journey as a convert to the Orthodox Church with former my parish, a large cathedral in Washington DC. Here are some of my remarks:

Being a part of this family, and having the Orthodox Church as my spiritual home, comes at the end of a long road of hope and longing for me. For so many of you, the depth of your faith and your commitment to the Church—indeed, your experience of the grace of Jesus Christ—are closely tied to the stories of your immigrant ancestors and how they came to this country: the yia yia who was once a scared little girl crossing the Atlantic, the uncle who swept diner floors from dawn until dark and managed to squirrel away millions.

As a child growing up in a little Southern town, I was always fascinated with the stories of immigrants who came to the United States in big ships and then lived in close-knit neighborhoods where houses, churches and synagogues, and stores all were in one block, and everything, I imagined, smelled like hot sweet bread from the bakery down the street.

I realize a lot of what I just mentioned about Greeks and immigrants is cliché, and that your own family stories are entirely distinctive. But there are some elements common to all immigrant stories, that explain why they have such a powerful hold on us: the experience of losing a homeland, the need to go to a new place and to find a new way to live, the experience of pain, uncertainty, and fear about the future, and the reliance upon faith and tradition to navigate difficult times.

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Filed Under: Caroline Langston, Faith, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , , , 4 Comments

A Story More Durable Than Flesh and Stone

May 23, 2012 By 6 Comments


Yom Rishon (l’Shabbat): the first day toward the coming Shabbat: Sunday on the Gregorian calendar.

And the psalmist asks, “Who may ascend the mountain of Y-H-V-H?” And the psalmist asks, “Who may rise in God’s sanctuary?”

Yom Sheni (l’Shabbat): the second day toward the coming Shabbat: Monday on the Western calendar.

And the psalmist says, “In your temple, God, we meditate upon your kindness.”

Thus, we progress, from day to day, from psalm to psalm, from below to above, from mundane to sacred. Stitching together the liturgy the rabbis create, or receive, a story and pass it on. A story to counter the story of loss, ruin, extinction.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Richard Chess Tagged With: , , 6 Comments