How Christmas Stories Functioned When They Were Written

Last updated on: February 24, 2025 at 7:10 am By Tricia Gates Brown

Perhaps my favorite thing about the Christmas season—just a few days away—is reminding myself and others how extraordinary are the stories of Christmas. Among global literature, they stand out as baldly subversive and anti-imperial while at the same time being neutralized. The gospel writers of Matthew and Luke (the only canonical gospels with birth narratives) each in their own way set up a stark confrontation between Jesus and the Roman Caesars, of all things—something no first-century reader would have failed... Read more

Upside-Down: Jesus’ Metaphor of ‘King’

Last updated on: November 25, 2024 at 8:13 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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Jesus’ metaphor of ‘king’ is a focus this Sunday in my own tradition (Episcopal). And I admit that this is not my favorite metaphor used by Jesus, in part because it is confusing. I don’t like what kings, emperors, rulers, presidents, have done to the weak throughout history. The things they have done and are doing are generally the opposite of what Jesus did and taught. But Jesus used the metaphor of ‘king’ frequently; in fact, ‘the kingdom of God’... Read more

Choosing to Pray Without Worrying About the Form

Last updated on: November 12, 2024 at 8:19 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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For many, it has been a hard week. We all must seek deep solace now and for a while to come, and I’m thinking about this most important quest. For my part, I am finding solace in several things—friendship (human and non-human), nature, fiction, late-70s disco, art-making, singer-songwriter tunes, rest. But I’m also finding solace in my tradition. In the stories and scope and prayers that came to us across the eons as people faced precarity and domination in their... Read more

On Feeling Worthy of the Healing and Provision We Need

Last updated on: October 29, 2024 at 7:23 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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Have you, at times, longed for a pathway forward—whether a way out of a stuck place or a healing of some kind—but felt unworthy of asking? When I read the lectionary in preparation for last Sunday’s sermon, a story about a blind man healed by Jesus that I have heard dozens of times—it jumped out at me and moved me. First, I was struck by how this man knows who Jesus is, so that when he hears ‘Jesus of Nazareth’... Read more

How Authenticity Awakens Wonder: Living Lives that “Fit”

Last updated on: October 14, 2024 at 9:58 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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Recently while watching the film Supernova, I heard this quote: “We will not starve for lack of wonders, but from lack of wonder” (unattributed). I like to think of myself as someone attuned to wonder. Animals imbue my life with wonder—such as when young Eloise looks into my eyes and reaches to stroke my cheek. At times, I experience wonder over my marriage and the unlikelihood of Ed and I finding each other. At times, a certain light strikes me... Read more

A Tale of Provision Mixed With Magic

Last updated on: October 7, 2024 at 6:14 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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In 2006, in a time of precarity and despair, some magic happened upon me. Shortly before, as I expressed to a friend heartache about a lost relationship, she said, “Sometimes you don’t get what you want. You get what you need instead.” A few months later, as I was working on building a cottage in the woods, I realized what I needed most was a home. And a home transpired. First, the land. It was the first property I looked... Read more

Seeking Freedom in the Practice of Detachment

Last updated on: September 24, 2024 at 8:54 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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As I approach accompanied by crickets, the sky’s palette ranges from turquoise to dark violet; above, a few stars. The temperature of the day reached 90. Growing up in northern California where summer days exceeded 100, I came to love evenings following hot days, when I could walk outside with bare arms, feeling the brush of warmth and smelling night’s incense. Such is the experience this evening in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In the distance, I see a handful of people... Read more

The Gift of Regret: Experiencing Life-Transforming Grace

Last updated on: September 11, 2024 at 7:34 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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I recently heard a Vox podcast about regret. The interviewee, Daniel Pink, wrote a book on the subject, reflecting on regret’s transformative power. Regret is an emotion that—if we face it honestly—has the potency to turn us around, to make us go another way. We’ve all been there. When I look back to times I’ve done wrong, it isn’t the stereotypical slip-ups that stand out to me—the sex, lies, or other excesses held up as “the bad sins” in our... Read more

What Do Spiritual Communities Provide Kids?

Last updated on: September 11, 2024 at 6:52 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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It is one of those weeks where everywhere I turn, folks are talking about the “epidemic of loneliness,” including an excellent recent interview of Robert Putnam, author of the book Bowling Alone (published in 2000), who said: “…what we’ve seen over the last 25 years since the book was published is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet of our lives.” The breakdown of connections to traditional... Read more

When I Encountered the Spirit of a Loved One

Last updated on: August 27, 2024 at 8:24 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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Roughly seven years ago; late-summer day under a New Mexico sky, the blue of which rivals all sky. Blue like taffeta. Like a French painter’s dream of sky—which is what lured painters to Taos in the 20th century to eventually become the “Taos School,” setting stage for an influx of artists and intellectuals including the likes of Georgia O’Keefe and D. H. Lawrence. I drove out of Taos where I’d retreated to an adobe, pond-side casita on a farm, attempting... Read more