The Slow Way

We're back! Episode 33 is fresh and new at The Slow Way.  As we lean into the end of summer, some of us eking the last few weeks out of the sunshine and late nights on the porch, some already back in the motion of school and schedules, I hope we'll practice a simple but transformative slow way: Listening to the stomach aches, the tight muscles, the sensations of joy or pleasure, and reminding ours...

Last month I spent ten days on the campus of a Benedictine monastery, where there is an incredible pottery studio that seeks to embody the Benedictine values of stability, community, and hospitality. And I was re-reminded of this instruction from Saint Benedict. That all the utensils of our lives can be sacred.  Our hands are holy, and they are invited by the Life-Peace-Grace-Maker to create meani...

Here's your reminder that doubt is not the thing that should trouble your soul. Fear is. The blessings of Jesus are particularly there for those who wrestle with their fear, hold it up to the light of Truth, and choose to embrace suffering for the sake of joining the good work of God in the world. Can you imagine with me that in the dark distance a figure is coming. It's beautiful. And it's terrif...

Growth is a gangly and uncomfortable season – whether it's the growth of our young teenage bodies, or the growth of our souls. We cannot enter into seasons of growth without instability and volatility. In other words, growth is awkward and uncomfortable. And there's nothing we can do about that. I have been reading and loving Lisa Colón DeLay's book, The Wild Land Within. She describes the in-betw...

We live in an empire, in a human-made system of the powerful and the powerless, and since the world began unraveling the truth that was born in us, in our original goodness given by God, we learn to slowly believe the lie of the Empire. It tells us that we can earn our place in the system. It tells us how to divide one another, how to assign value. We learn who is attractive, who is smart, who is...

As much as it might be difficult to believe, you are not your intellect, your power, your success, your ability to fit in at a party. You are not your ability to be happy, or healthy, or rich. It's your weaknesses that bring you into the upside down of God's values. When we let go of control, when we open our hands we are, as Richard Rohr writes,"in a very creative and liminal space where God is m...

I've been thinking recently that prayer is a returning to love. And maybe if that's the case, we can get rid of the upward image we often carry with us about what life is supposed to be. That we are moving up a line on a graph, moving from Point A (birth, at the left-side base of the graph) and ending up at the right hand corner. Complete. Final. Having checked off our big life dreams as we went....

One of the greatest gifts I was given in my childhood in the Church was the idea that God wants to speak to me, that God could "lay" something "on our hearts" or "lead" us to a decision. That God cares about the state of our internal consciousness. And not just that, God actually moves within that consciousness to act and guide us if we learn to listen. That idea has shaped my life in ways I can't...

I have spent my life feeling somewhat outside of normal, experiencing my feelings in a way that felt unacceptable to the culture I was raised in. I cried too much as a kid, spent too much time alone in my room writing in my journal as a teen, or listening to sad, meaningful music as a young twenty-something. I often felt like my sadness didn't measure up with the story of God I wanted to live into...

Today I'm reflecting on the recent events in our world and wondering what to do next. This is a question I ask myself, and that I asked that day when I got the news about the school shooting. What is the appropriate way to respond? Is there a moment when the suffering around us becomes too much? When we can't hold it all anymore, and we retreat into our small circles of relationships and focus on...

Love is all of it. Love is the force we call God. Love is the feeling. Love is the action between two old friends, and the generosity between you and your waiter at lunch today. And in that broad definition, I think those of us who call ourselves Christian can step toward theology: not the kind that draws lines of who's in and who's out, of who gets it and who obviously doesn't, but to lean toward...

When I started writing my newsletter, I wanted to explore the "breathless pace" of our culture. I wanted to offer an alternative way of living that taps into our soul's need for rest, meaning, and authentic connection with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. What I didn't expect is how much my personal journey of grief would help me understand a core truth: that the hectic pace of our...

The more I explore rest, slowness, and the remarkable idea that we can't hustle enough to overcome our humanity (which is to say, our mortality), the more I feel drawn to a reality underneath these invitations toward slowness: our finitude. I'm talking about our limits, our inability to live a multitude of lives in this one. We are contained here, to the careers we've chosen or that have chosen us...

Long before my dad got sick I had left behind (mostly) the notion of God making some divine plan out of our most horrible realities. I didn't want to be part of a divine will that left babies dead at birth, or that allowed 3-year-olds to get cancer. Not a divine will that determines who gets born into a dangerous family environment, allows children to be abused, or intends for an entire community...

When women are encouraged to find purpose and value wherever their gifts and desires lead them, whether toward traditional mothering or outside of it, the world thrives. When women are released from tired scripts about their purpose, they're able to make meaning in a way that serves us all. As we move toward Mother's Day, I hope all of us, men, women, and gender non conforming, mothers and non-mot...

I've spent the past decade pushing back on what I would now call the "toxic positivity" of evangelical Christian culture, pushing from within at first, and now speaking from outside, about the dangers of soul-crushing theology dressed up as personal transformation, and that culture's tendency to bury the ones who are crushed in the process. What if the way toward Easter life is found in the wisdom...

How do we talk about Easter? The truth is, listener, I have a much easier time talking about the sad days: the Ash Wednesdays, the Good Fridays. I'm a melancholy type all the way through. Celebrating is something I've learned to do, but dang. Sometimes it's hard for me. Today we're supposed to wake up and remember (believe, even!) that all things are being made new. That the Holy One who was kille...

Today is Good Friday, one of the days of the Christian calendar that I've always connected most deeply to. Not because I love thinking about crucifixion or because I think I can possibly grasp what happened on the cross. But because it's a day we're all allowed to be sad and mad and heartbroken and quiet at church. And if you ask me, we could do with a lot more of those kind of days. I hope you ca...

What comes to mind when you consider your own ballooning faith — the life moments when your faith felt wild and out of your control, and perhaps also alive in a way that feels far off now? What do you do when faith feels like it floated so high you can no longer reach it? What does it look like to settle your faith into the earth, ground yourself in humility, in the recognition that you don't have...

So much of the life of faith is a steady nourishment of ritual. We do the thing over and over, not because every spiritual practice *feels* particularly powerful, or because prayer is a switch we turn on or off in order to get to the presence of God. But because the ritual is like healthy food and exercise and sleep. It demands something of us. It requires us to pursue the long-term good over the...

What if we treated all the utensils of our lives as if they were sacred? What if we blessed the kitchens where we throw together our twenty minute meals, and make the bed we will sleep in as if we were cozying up our space for the divine? What if the computer keys where we tap out messages on Slack are an invitation to love? What if the meeting we lead for our team of colleagues matters, not just...

The last massive migraine I had was in December, a handful of days before my dad died. He had stopped eating on a Thursday and that Friday I bought a flight, finished pre-Christmas tasks, and packed so I could make it to my parents in time to be with him for as long as he needed. That Saturday I was hit with a migraine and, as I was used to at that point, spent the afternoon in bed, medicated, wit...

I've been thinking about light and darkness and waiting. This season of Lent is meant to be a season of darkness, an intentional time outside of feasting, outside of usual comforts. That intentionality is there as a way of pushing ourselves to notice that we are already living in a shadowed world, so used to dimness that we mistake the vague grayscale of our lives for color. Lent is a season to re...

This week I said something on Instagram about how fasting doesn't need to equal suffering. What I meant was that there is enough suffering already in our lives. In the past ten years I've walked through a lost pregnancy, several terrifying diagnoses of my children, the death of a handful of beloved friends, the split of a church community I adored (caused by leadership decisions I had a hand in)....

This past Thursday I was a wreck. Maybe some of you felt that way as well. Russia had invaded Ukraine and the seriousness of a war like this in Europe and what it means for all of us was heavy on me. I ache for my kids and the world they're inheriting.  Sometimes it feels like men grasping for power is still the very thing that just might kill us all. Or as my friend D.L. Mayfield wrote on Twitter...