The Slow Way

On the Southern Baptist Convention's vote to expel churches with women pastors, my calling to pastor (and the complicated denial of that call by my community and by me), and why I left the Southern Baptist church when I was twenty two, but still find myself brokenhearted for what could have been. Links: Read about the Southern Baptist Convention's recent vote here . Find Martin Laird's book Into t...

For years I've told myself that the Jesus I saw mass produced in mega churches, political stages, and trotted out as social capital by the Church-As-Corporation was just a confused version of Jesus. That somewhere along the line leaders had gotten their eyes all fuzzy when they read scripture so they missed some massive portions of teachings from the Son of God who started the whole shebang. But,...

I've thought a lot about the way that water heals us, how we need its power. There've been scientific studies that show how even the sight and sound of bodies of water can increase neurochemicals in the brain, increase blood flow, which ultimately leads to relaxation. So maybe the ocean is talking to Ace, or maybe my child is uniquely designed to be more in touch (this is my suspicion) with the wa...

Our desire whispers how the world is not as it should be, even as we move through our daily rhythms of work and dinner-making and dish-washing and Netflix-binging. What will we do with our unrest?   Links: This reflection and practice were also published this week in  The Slow Way Newsletter . Find a transcript of this episode  here .  Read  The Holy Longing: The Search For Christian Spirituality...

I don't always live this value, but I hope that when my boys look back at their childhoods they will remember that we taught them to show up for people they love. When we have the opportunity to love someone in action, we do it. Even if it means braving the Holland Tunnel on a Friday night, dealing with two hours of Jersey traffic heading toward New York, driving my eight year old minivan through...

I am curious lately -- my hands pulling worm after worm out of my compost as I move the new soil from bin to vegetable garden -- about a God who might love the world enough to call plants and worms "kin." What if we did the same? How do we gain tenderness toward the earth we live in, becoming those most passionate about seeing the earth cared for, nourished and returned to what's right?  Perhaps t...

This Christmas Eve, despite the challenge we can feel to believe this story of God coming to us through a boy in ancient Palestine, I invite you to imagine it afresh with me. It may not be easy to believe, but the gift of the story is in its humanity. A God who knows what it is to sit with a mother in the quiet. A God who knows the sweet slowness of a sunset. A God who has had to learn some manner...

In the midst of her joy, perhaps Mary also knew a certain kind of darkness. Maybe she knew that the particular love she shared with her baby in those nine months would always be different from that time on. And that was all mixed in with the utter relief of holding him, of being on the other side of the suffering. I wonder about Mary's fragility. How weak and uncertain and terrified she must have...

Elizabeth and Mary held each other up, carried each other through their seasons of pregnancy, and their faithfulness to this turbulent moment in one another's lives set the foundation for the work of their little boys: John the Baptist who would go wild in the woods, eating locusts, preaching repentance, making baptism the sacred marker it is, and clearing a path for the ministry of his cousin, Je...

As we move closer to Christmas, I'm sharing with you a meditation on a poem about Glory. What if "glory"--that word we in the Church tend to overuse and undersell-- What if glory is actually the realest thing about Christmas. What if the angelic song is beyond our comprehension, because all of it a mystery of love, a mystery that changes the world. Sometimes prayer is simply sitting with the myste...

This Advent we'll be spending time with some of my original poems, considering the story of Christmas in a way that digs down deep into the thing underneath the thing, the story underneath the story. Let's imagine a Mary we haven't quite gotten to know. Let's ask some questions that we may not answer, but which might help us live a little deeper into her story, and in doing so, into our own storie...

Thanksgiving is a ritual we practice with others. The great thing about ritual is that it comes over and over, whether or not we're ready for it. So each year we're given another chance to do more than skirt above the surface of the day. After all, anyone can eat a meal. It takes intention to feast, though. It takes courage to celebrate the good in our lives, especially when the days that led to t...

As we move toward the holidays, what does it mean to gather with people you love and attend to them? What could it look like to move toward the complicated and sometimes difficult relationships in your life and find gratitude around the table? Wine certainly isn't the only way to practice slowness and gratitude. But wine can teach us how to savor, how to notice what we enjoy, and how to find delig...

In one month we'll mark my dad's death day. I bought my flight this week and will head to my mom's house and spend that week with my siblings, nieces and nephews. Winter is not my favorite season, even with the delights of Christmas. As soon as the holidays move through us, we are left with months of ice and darkness. And Little Mikey will have to stay strong to survive the winter. I know trees kn...

The spiritual life has to begin with a premise that God can be experienced, encountered. Starting from here is harder than it seems. Faith is not an unmovable feature inside us. It is less a mountain, and more an ocean, always moving, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow. Sometimes the places on the shore the water used to reach are now dried up. But the work of the spiritual life is to receive that...

This is the story of so many who have found wealth and power in our world. We feel small. So we climb sycamore trees. We climb ladders. We climb power structures.  And we can convince ourselves from way up there that we have somehow saved ourselves. But really, we're dangling above what's real. We're unsafe, lonely, unknown to our people and to ourselves.  And Jesus is down at the base of the thin...

When we make space in our days and in our bodies to practice prayer, or silence, or sacred reading, we are actually doing rest. Hersey talks so beautifully about dreaming, but there is something sacred about the kind of sleep she is inviting all of us into. In her vision of rest, dreaming becomes its own kind of prayer practice. We allow ourselves to stop so our brains can be restored, coated in r...

The life of faith is recognizing that we are each a seed planted, and helping one another stay close to the sustaining water that will help us grow and become the flourishing plant we were always meant to be. Community is believing that we all have something important to give, and that our Source has placed in each of us something valuable. Caring for each other begins with believing that the seed...

What does it mean to give our lives to more than an idea? What does it mean for faith to coexist with doubt but not be squishy or easily shaken? For us to allow it to settle in the deepest parts of us, so that it lives there sturdy and true, without pretense, without anything false? How do we hold a faith robust enough to reach the parts of us that are hardest to know, most painful to explore?  If...

There is a blessing to be found in the naming of God. To name God is a grace we have been given, an invitation to connect with the unnamable, unfathomable Divine.  What and how we name God is the story we're telling ourselves and the world. What would you name God? More in this week's #theslowwaypodcast Links: This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter ....

Lately I've been reclaiming blessing, not as something we get if we're lucky or pious enough. But blessing as a gift by which we honor one another. It is taking something ordinary and pronouncing it remarkable, sacred. Barbara Brown Taylor says the act of blessing is not so much the work of conferring holiness as it is the hope-filled task of recognizing and acknowledging the holiness already ther...

I don't think sin is a birthright. I don't think it is original to us at all. Don't get me wrong, this world is a dumpster fire of hate and violence, greed and arrogance, exclusion and self-harm. Evil is in the air we breathe. But, that's the thing. It's in the air, not in us . God made us and called us good. Everything else — the evil, the hatred — is a lie we buy into from our earliest moments....

It's almost fall. The wind moves through and we shiver. The boy in the pool who leaned back and moved his arms across the surface, a brief lifespan of gold across the water. He will get his back-to-school hair cut, throw on his backpack, and grow out of his hand-me-down jeans. And the world will shift on its axis, drawing us gently into a cool sunshine, apples in our u-pick bags. There's no fighti...

When we release ourselves from the burden of proving our value by what we make of time, we can learn slowness for the sake of our whole selves – our minds, bodies and souls—and for the sake of those in our world who are most vulnerable. But this is spiritual work. If we want to value the lives of those who will never produce enough to be considered good , we have to first value ourselves outside o...

Today we're considering the language we use when we talk about "seeking God." How authentic faith must be a long-term, whole-hearted pursuit that involves the world around us, our stories, and our particular ways of being. Healthy spirituality needs the body. It can never be a mind-trick. It involves the kind of integration required in knowing our habits and motives and weaknesses, and connecting...