{Four years ago at this time, I was at Walden Pond. Before the trip, I wrote this reflection. While in Concord, I saw handwritten, original drafts of Thoreau manuscripts, pictured above.} When I moved from Oregon’s Willamette Valley to the north Oregon coast in 2004, it was a leap. I parachuted out of a life that no longer accommodated into a 10-month sojourn of dis-illusionment, dismantling, and radiant transformation in a tiny Oceanside, Oregon duplex on a cliff overhanging the... Read more
For well over a year, the tree has been silent. But at first, it was noisy. The incense cedar sits next to the path I walk most days, a band around our hayfield trampled by foot falls—mine and my husband’s and the dog’s. At the time of the noise, I walked early most days, around dawn. I’d just lost my best friend, a Trappist monk I met twenty years earlier. Martin and I were like family, though closer than family,... Read more
The parable in this Sunday’s lectionary reading (Luke 18:1-8) about a widow’s persistence before an unjust judge is one of a few parables in which Jesus uses a story-snapshot—which is what a parable is—to portray and commend faith-persistence. The snapshot seems to be saying: No matter what happens, no matter how grim things look, don’t despair, don’t give up hope. This past weekend I participated in a gathering of clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon in which we talked... Read more
These days, many in the US and globally see our collective, national waters as troubled. We seem to be entering a period of tearing down on a high level that will (eventually) proceed some kind of high-level rebuilding. Legal protections for people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants, are being threatened, as are protections for the environment and for non-human species. Shared social mores are being torn apart that in the past put a damper on certain abuses of... Read more
“Wade in the water. God’s gonna trouble the water.” In the centuries-old spiritual, we’re told to wade into the healing water because God will “trouble” the water. In the song, “to trouble” is an old word meaning “to stir up,” and doesn’t necessarily have the modern meaning of trouble as “distress or pain.” But my ears hear a double meaning. I wonder if the double-meaning was intended all along and suspect the people who wrote the song fully appreciated the... Read more
The good thing about the lectionary—or the bad thing, if you see it that way—is that we must read together and grapple with scripture we don’t like, with passages that make us uncomfortable. For me, this week’s gospel reading (Luke 17:3-10) is one of those; a passage I personally find strange at first glance. In the parable it includes, Jesus seems to advocate domination of the slave or servant in the story, advocating a power structure in which some people... Read more
In the earliest photo of us, I am concealed behind the bloom of Wren’s baptismal gown while they are ruby-faced, captured mid-scream. It’s an inauspicious snapshot of the relationship to follow. But leap-frog four years. I wait outside Wren’s preschool to pick them up. They’re travelling home with me and godfather Gilberto, my then husband, for their first sleepover. Wren spots me, hunches their shoulders and grins the way they might look at a baby bird. They’re so elated they... Read more
Learning to kneel took me decades. It was not something I did in my upbringing; and before I could kneel, I needed to know why. Then I learned to kneel at a communion rail each Sunday, taking into my hands a small wafer and drinking a swallow of wine from a common silver chalice. The kneeling was part of the ritual’s grounding, of the receiving. Then I learned to kneel as I said the ritual “prayer of repentance”: I have... Read more
I am somewhat haunted by a woman I passed in Florence, Italy while vacationing in the late 90s. Since my teens I had dreamt of visiting Florence, and then there I was—living out the fantasy. But one day walking down a side street, I saw this woman. She apparently had Hansen’s disease, formerly called leprosy. Draped in black tatters from head to toe, she appeared to beg as she quickly passed—her bandaged hand perpetually holding out some kind of sign.... Read more
A close friend is going through a time. Many of us have been there: that place where old habits catch up to us and we are shunted onto new pathways—if we are to survive, and most certainly if we are to thrive. These crossroad experiences are painful, but they are also what transformations are made of; they are what turn us wise. Looking back, most of us wouldn’t trade them though they involved humiliating mistakes, costly failures, wear and tear... Read more
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