How Stories Change Us: A Palm Sunday Reflection

Last updated on: March 20, 2024 at 7:11 am By Tricia Gates Brown

A courageous woman dousing a man’s head with perfume; a conniving betrayer; a feast; jealous officials; an angry mob and disappointing friends; the appearance of law enforcement; a streaker; a humiliation ritual and taunting soldiers; brave women; a crucifixion and mysterious tomb. The Palm Sunday lectionary passage (Mark 14:1-15:47) is thick with drama. The long narrative stands out among ancient tales for its detail and cohesiveness. Before anything else, it is great storytelling. Why have we humans always told stories?... Read more

Revelation Beyond the Pages: The Divine in the Everyday

Last updated on: March 22, 2024 at 11:10 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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What is revelation? My definition broadens almost by the day. Sometimes I hear measures of a song so searingly truthful or beautiful they seem like prayer. Or I see a swallow swooping across a dawn-lit sky and the moment of perfection professes to me more than any sacred text. Other times, I read a passage in a book—maybe by George Eliot or Toni Morrison or Henry David Thoreau—that seems as laden with insight as any scripture, and I see the... Read more

Seeing the Beauty in Small Congregations

Last updated on: March 5, 2024 at 10:52 pm By Tricia Gates Brown

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Serving threshold congregations is my subject today. By this, I mean small congregations on the cusp of change amid a wider period of ecclesial change in our country. Ecclesial change is just one facet of transition in a time when almost every aspect of our country is in upheaval—cultural, technological, political, environmental. By this point, those of us affiliated with religion are familiar with declining interest in organized religion. Most of us who attend religious services likely notice declining numbers.... Read more

When Forgiveness is Slow: A Story for Lent

Last updated on: February 19, 2024 at 6:03 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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Forgiveness is slow. Have you tried to forgive someone who devastated you with no real regrets? How can we whip up forgiveness like the gods, my fellow mortals, when such things take time? How can we expect forgiveness from others when we apologize with no real regret? In the months following my own devastation by someone I loved, on the heels of a stealthy betrayal, I played with forgiveness. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do when someone apologizes? And... Read more

How an Alternative Practice of Lent Inspires

Last updated on: February 13, 2024 at 10:20 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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A few years ago, I created a practice that brought Lent to life for me—a new way to commemorate or practice the season. You see, for me, Lenten imagery is strikingly about the darkness and dormancy preceding Easter, like the darkness and dormancy of winter that precedes Spring. A plant goes dormant in wintertime, but it does not die. In fact, the nourishment of winter is essential to its growth. Winter is when roots are strengthened, made ready for the... Read more

How God’s Presence is Incarnated Among Us

Last updated on: February 6, 2024 at 1:26 pm By Tricia Gates Brown

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“Many things occur between God and [humans] which escape the attention even of those to whom they happen.” —Abraham Joshua Heschel Consider this: If we compressed creation history down to one year, with the Big Bang occurring on January 1, Homo sapiens would not arrive until 11:59 PM on December 31st. We are but a blip in the history of this universe. To my mind, it is crazy to think God was not present in—incarnated in—our world until the last... Read more

Understanding the Moment We Are In

Last updated on: January 29, 2024 at 6:51 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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We are in a time. Long before the pandemic, separation and polarization had come to characterize American society—the result of many factors, not least being the media-/now-social-media landscape of the past thirty years. But surely our physical separation from one another since March 2020 has accelerated divisions and suspicions. How on earth did we get here? As an “everyday theologian,” I try to wrap my head around what I see, to give contour to a problem in order to understand,... Read more

How Belonging is Good for Our Health

Last updated on: January 23, 2024 at 10:44 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell tells about a mid-century Pennsylvania town called Roseto.[1] In the 50s, this town was populated entirely of people who’d come from a single Italian village. A young medical doctor who came to know this Pennsylvania community was baffled by the low incidence of disease in the village—including heart disease, which at the time was rampant in the US. He arranged to have researchers study the town. They were surprised... Read more

Building Bridges to the Inner World

Last updated on: January 9, 2024 at 5:27 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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For a period eight years ago, my dreams grew loud. I would awaken to fragments of imagery that felt important; so I started writing them down. For over a year, I gleaned volumes from my dreams. Shadowy guidance, windows into my inner world, spiritual illumination, messages from guides. Then, I grew tired. Recording and analyzing dreams requires dedication and sometimes disrupts sleep. If I’m to remember my dreams, I must force myself to scribble notes in the middle of the... Read more

How Might Christians Invest in Peace Instead of War?

Last updated on: January 2, 2024 at 6:48 am By Tricia Gates Brown

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These days have me remembering a book from the early 2000s that impacted me—a book about war’s devastations and seductiveness. It is called: War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002). The author Chris Hedges had worked for years as a war correspondent from El Salvador to Bosnia; and in this book, he recounts those wars as a survivor who was also an outsider. As he sees it, war is indescribably vile and destructive. It... Read more