Category Archives: Essays

Prayers of the People: In us there is darkness

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This week the liturgical church remembers Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Christian theologian hanged on April 9, 1945 by the Nazis for his work of resistance. In addition to referencing images and phrases from the lectionary, these prayers rely heavily on Bonhoeffer’s sermons and writings, including a prayer written and shared with other convicts while he was in Tegel prison over Christmas 1943.

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Our God, where your church is troubled, homesick, ill, like a bird in a cage, give us vital urge for vital actions so we may be a living rebuke to forces of oppression.
In us there is darkness…

With Thee there is light.

Our God, where we quiver with anger at despotism and petty insults, and anxiously wait for great events, remind us and our leaders that truth is born only in freedom and give us courage to dare peace.
We are feeble of heart…

You leave us not.

Our God, we hunger for colors, for flowers, for songs of birds. Restore your creation again in soul and soil, making a way for rivers in the desert and new things that spring forth.
We are restless…

With Thee there is peace.

Our God, remembering that life is rich and short, help us throw out the rubbish of our false identities and accomplishments to accept, bear, and celebrate one another as we are.
In us there is often bitterness…

With Thee there is patience.

Our God, for those thirsting for kind words, for human company, release to them life’s enjoyment and its good sunshine. Let what they’ve learned from sorrow increase them.
So much is past our understanding…

You know the way for us.

Our God, where the old year torments our hearts, unhastening, and long days of sorrow still endure, grant every power for good to stay and guide us, comforted and inspired beyond all fear.

You, our God, make the way for us.

Prayers of the People

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Today the liturgical Christian church recognizes John Donne, a sixteenth-century English poet and priest, and reads together scriptures that peer into dark and mess to see what’s beneath. It’s also the first time I participate in the church universal through composing the Prayers of the People.

In the dark and humble season, blessings to you listeners and slow seekers, to whom this place doesn’t often feel like home.

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In the dark and humble season, Our Sustainer, grow the roots of your church to a strong, entwined foundation.

Three-personed God, be our true bread;
knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

In the dark and humble season, Our Father, squelch our grumbling and squandering, that all in power may serve as ambassadors of Christ.

Three-personed God, be our true bread;
knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

In the dark and humble season, Our Mother, bless the soil: seed, womb, resurrections gathering in tombs, that we may be nourished by the produce of the land.

Three-personed God, be our true bread;
knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

In the dark and humble season, Our Healer, where we are betrayed, abandoned, neglected, and where we have betrayed, abandoned, and neglected, let what was lost be found.

Three-personed God, be our true bread;
knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

In the dark and humble season, O Silence, release our tongues that our bones not wither away. Make for those in disgrace, those unheard, and those held down a new creation.

Three-personed God, be our true bread;
knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

In the dark and humble season, Our Redeemer, swaddle those we have lost, those absent from us, in the warmth of your love until you gather us again together in the home of your grace.

Three-personed God, be our true bread;
knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

Magnificat

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candles“Beside us sit all the loves we’ve lost, by our own devices or those of others. It’s why we sit a space or two apart from one another, the open cushions spelling our SOS to whomever might watch from above. I have arrived here without a single idea what love is.”

Learning to sing with Mary in this advent’s Ruminate post.

Pursuing the Intersections: How to Be Published; How to Be Real.

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Header-Ruminate-Logo

“Part of the trouble with real is there’s no authenticity without contact with shit. Think of farming or gardening: No fruit without compost. In many creative endeavors we recognize the authentic practitioners by the marks the work leaves on their bodies. So what’s the stigmata of writing?”

Exploring the intersections of the public and the real in this month’s Ruminate post.

Chewing on Faith & Art: Facing embarrassment to display love

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Ruminate is like your grandmother: willing to face embarrassment to display love.

In an issue on pilgrimage, Ruminate shared my piece on visiting the ecumenical monastery Taizé— one of the most formative experiences of my spiritual life. That piece became key in the narrative of Triptych largely because it’s everything my usual spiritual experience is not: tender, emotional, childlike.

While I appreciate Ruminate’s willingness to look unblinkingly at struggle, they are also willing to print the most scandalous words. Words like Jesus, please, and love.

You can read the original Taize piece here.

 

 

Chewing on Faith & Art: Experiments in light

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Ruminate is an experiment in light. The work they publish asks if we can wince without blinking, if we can gaze without squinting, how the terror of lightening and warmth of dawn can meet in the soul.

Ruminate was the first journal to publish work that became part of Triptych, and they have continued to share my words on their blog and in print. Now, the book has arrived and Ruminate is celebrating a tenth anniversary. This week, we’ll celebrate both with parallel serial blog posts. I’ll share work from the book that began as work for Ruminate, and they’ll spotlight portraits from Triptych that show people in everyday life speckled with sparks of faith.

The first piece Ruminate accepted from me proved their willingness to look hard at struggle. “40 Days” ran in their issue on confession and stares point-blank at the temptations, deserts, and floods in marriage.

Revisiting the piece now brings its own struggle. And also proves it’s worth looking hard at temptations, deserts and floods. They persist. They sometimes overtake us. Maybe we keep writing and reading to make way for the light– taking the risk it may arrive in storm or sunrise– believing, somehow, it exists in both.

Via Dolorosa

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Header-Ruminate-Logo“If you know no other prayer this year, know this one: Sunlight in a place you never meant to live. Contents of the safe deposit box stacked on the castoff table, red files in plastic bags, knowing the names of none of your neighbors, the mailbox empty each day—nothing forwarded—because you don’t know how long you’ll stay: the prayer of Where does one go next, anyway?

Walking along the way of suffering with Jesus, Nina Simone, D.H. Lawrence, Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, Joy Davidman, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the dark day before Easter.

The Crystalline Palace of ‘Should’

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Header-Ruminate-LogoThese are easy to see—these clear, smooth planes. These fixed glass gates. These pop-up bastions. The crystalline palace of “should.”

We can see right through it, right?

We can see this palace is no shelter: that glass has no foundation, can’t be bolted to bedrock.

More on the brittle, floating palace in this week’s Ruminate post.