Guest Post By Chris Hoke I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. The voice was low, lifeless. He just got out of jail, and the guys in there told him to call me. I function as a volunteer chaplain in Washington State’s Skagit County Jail, and I’m the closest thing to a pastor most gang members in my valley have known. Jail-tier referrals like these are how my tiny congregation grows. The next day, I picked this... Read more
To celebrate Image’s twenty-fifth anniversary we are posting a series of essays by people who have encountered our programs over the years. Read the earlier installments, Stumbling into the Waterfall, Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out, and The Notecards of Paradise. I’m at lunch in a college cafeteria. At my table, the conversation goes like this: “Have you heard John Tavener’s Protecting Veil?” “Yeah, it’s like icon painting in music.” “Icon writing, you mean.” “When I listen to Tavener, I feel I could be immersed in... Read more
I almost passed it by. When the offer came in January, I was too busy teaching college writing. Too busy mentoring a student group. Too busy reading for three book clubs. Too busy writing for a blog. Too busy marketing my memoir. Too busy caring for my family, cat, and home. Maybe I could do it in the summer. More realistically, maybe in the fall. But the director of the Mental Health Ministry persisted. She described the new program she... Read more
As I write this, Passover is just a little more than a week away. This year, the first night of Passover coincides with our son’s twenty-first birthday. I suspect that, instead of attending a seder (we floated the idea of his coming home from school to be with us for the first seder), he’ll be drinking a beer, his first…legal beer. That’s one loss for halakhah, Jewish ritual law (beer is clearly not kosher for Passover), and one gain for... Read more
When I was a soccer-obsessed fifteen-year-old, I had no use for poetry. I endured my school hours like a crated dog, waiting to get out on the field. One afternoon in the library, I picked up a random book of English verse and flipped through it. Eventually I landed on a song from Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, offered most often now with the title “Old and Young.” The first stanza goes like this: When all the world is young,... Read more
By the time this post runs, I’ll be in Grand Rapids at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. Since I am now a mid-careerish, spiritually mature woman attending the event for the fourth time, I will certainly not embarrass myself by committing the following rookie atrocities*: Forgetting Michigan is on Eastern Standard Time and becoming self-righteously flustered when I find out I’m late for the opening session because who does Michigan think she is, New York? Introducing myself with... Read more
My last communion was during a brief suspension of my former church’s policy of forbidding it to children. I was already halfway out Protestantism’s door, and three-quarters out of my marriage, but on this their mother and I agreed: we should seize the opportunity to have communion alongside our children. The table was soon blocked again, after much pastoral consultation of texts. Communion remained accessible for hard-drinking adulterers like me, but not for my four year-old. I lingered at the... Read more
In the first part of my post yesterday, I lamented our contemporary lack of risk, our incuriosity, our resistance to extend ourselves outside the ideological boundaries we have constructed for ourselves. And at the bottom of all our own self-congratulatory opinions and social purity tests (Obama, the Koch Brothers, Pop Tarts) is our own fear. That’s bad for everyone all around, I think—and I wish my secular-minded friends, who are worried only about justice here on earth, not the beyond,... Read more
Listen up, brothers and sisters—what follows here is the only sermon I know how to give: Sometime in the late summer of 1975, when I was seven, my father took the blade off a John Deere riding mower, and in a moment of whimsical decision, drove out of the yard, and onto the asphalt street where we lived. He rounded the corner, went a block, then proceeded out onto Grand Avenue, the wide main boulevard that cut through town, and... Read more
To celebrate Image’s twenty-fifth anniversary we are posting a series of essays from people who have encountered our programs over the years. Read the earlier installments, Stumbling into the Waterfall and Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out. Guest post By Linda Wendling A Tuesday evening in Seattle. A cozy, one-room apartment on Queen Anne Hill overlooking bustling Nickerson and the shipping yards. If I step onto the balcony, I can see the Ballard Bridge and down the steps I can almost believe I see... Read more
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