The Slow Way

I find that Jesus is always in the business of calling us to his way, a way that will totally ruin our comfort seeking, surface level naval gazing. He demands a bigger, truer pleasure. The kind that wakes up our whole selves — our desires, our bodies, our moral courage, our self-giving love.  This is the final The Slow Way Podcast episode. I have delighted in recording these episodes, in sharing m...

Celebrating all the stories, all the practices, all my attempts to tell the truth.  Here's a link to Micha's new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole.  Find it at  Target ,  Barnes and Noble ,  Amazon , and  Bookshop.org Blessed  on Amazon  here ! It's availble at 40% off the price of other booksellers at  BakerBookHouse . Just use the code  SLOWWAY  at checkout. L...

It's true that the world is beautiful. And it's also true that the beauty and goodness in the world can dissolve in front of us. Life is unpredictable, like the author of Ecclesiastes says, it's a "chasing after the wind."   Click here for Robert Siegel's book A Pentecost of Finches . Here's a link to his poem " Aubade ."  I love the Bible Project. Here's their summary of the book of Ecclesiastes...

How we make meaning is how we live. And the gift of the spiritual life is that it teaches us to make meaning, to find our story in a bigger story. * I'm looking for stories from YOU about what The Slow Way means to you. Here's how to help! Record a video or voice memo of you sharing one or more of the following: Where do you listen to The Slow Way? How do you use the Slow Practices? How has The Sl...

I've been working out how to offer the young people I love a vibrant faith that insists on their own goodness, their own original spark, and  I am still fumbling a bit to give them language for encountering God. I believe that the long-way of conversion is a good way. And that Jesus's invitation to move toward wholeness is the kind of faith I want for the kids I love.  I'm not sure if there's an a...

When we pray, when we practice holding tight to the vision God has for the world, it makes sense that we might begin to make eye contact as a form of prayer.  You are important. You matter. I see you. What is the life of loving our neighbor if it isn't the overflow of sacred love? Jonathan spent the day waiting to be seen. And my gift was that I had the longing of Holy Spirit in me, allowing me to...

The work of God is not just slow, it's remarkable. It's intricate. It's miraculous, precisely because it takes so much time. As I wrote last week, we are unlearning the ways of an anxious culture. When I first began this process of unlearning, I hoped it wouldn't ache to release the anxious ways I had followed all of my life. But it did ache, and it still does. Slowing our work and bodies, and att...

Those unlearning the ways of an anxious culture are leaning into queerness as a metaphor for approaching the sacred: We are leaning into "possibilities beyond"...We're learning a new path.   Find Jonathan Merritt's children's book My Guncle and Me here . Find Queering Contemplation by Cassidy Hall here . Find the Contemplating Now podcast episode I quoted from with Therese Taylor-Stinson here . Th...

This past week I made it home for good after a wild month of traveling and speaking about my book, just in time to sit down with my toughest reader, my life companion, and my favorite guy around, Chris Hohorst, on his experience of  Blessed Are The Rest of Us . We've never done this sort of thing before, and it was a delight.  A few more links! Find out more about Suzanne Stabile here . Here's a l...

Last Wednesday night, I had the opportunity to gather with friends, family, and readers in the beautiful General Theological Seminary Chapel of the Good Shepherd, to talk about my new book, Blessed Are the Rest of Us . I was honored to have my friend, the beloved author Shauna Niequist, with me to chat about the process of writing the book, some of the books major themes, and even what I hope the...

Today my newest book Blessed Are The Rest of Us comes into the world! Today's episode is going to be a little different. I'm sharing a bit about how I came to write this book and what the big ideas are underneath the story I tell of loving and raising my son, Ace.  How did I come to realize that this wasn't just a story about my son, but a story about all of us in Jesus's poem in Matthew 5? How di...

As Jeff Chu says, "A robust theology of the compost reminds us that death and the things of death, our sin, our suffering, the ways we hurt each other, the ways we harm ourselves— These things are never the end of God's story." What a thing: to choose to believe that God can redeem our slow-transforming lives, to believe that the Divine slammed God's own heart back into a dead body, waking it up,...

In a moment when his life was fading, when his suffering was at its height, I believe Jesus was responding to our suffering with his own suffering. Acknowledging our grief with his own. Today I'm sharing an orginal poem by me, along with a practice of sacred listening to a bit of the Good Friday story.  This reflection and practice were also published this week in  The Slow Way Letter on Substack...

This Holy Week, we will be reminded that Jesus's answer to the reality of human pain and suffering was to suffer. It ws to gather all of us up and live out the dream of God. Find   Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most  here.  Learn more about Micha's other podcast The Lucky Few at their  website  and  instagram .   Micha will be hosting a weekly virtual book club for paid subscribers th...

This week, I want to remind us that the movement toward wholeness doesn't have to be that complicated. Sometimes it's simply allowing ourselves to recognize that we're loved.    Find Savannah Guthrie's book Mostly What God Does here.  Here's a link to A Celtic Primer: The Complete Celtic Worship Resource and Collection . Learn more about Micha's other podcast The Lucky Few at their  website  and ...

When we see the world as it really is we get to live in such a way that our vulnerabilities are exposed. Vulnerability is the way we give and receive love. Vulnerability is also the way toward pain.  This is not anything new in the world. It's simply love—sharing our lives, being honest about our pain, and allowing ourselves to be decentered and recentered. We don't do it so we can be an example....

We always have an invitation to learn from the wise ones among us, and the turtles and tortoises of the world may not be sexy, but they carry a knowing that just might settle our souls. When we're tempted to speed up simply because everything around us says to hurry, let's remind ourselves that this Lent we're living in Turtle Time. Slowing ourselves so that we can explore the questions that matte...

Repentance is the acknowledgment of our missteps, and the adjustment of our stance so we are in line with Divine Love. And this, according to Sarah Bessey, requires vulnerability and grief.  Can we get serious this week? Serious enough to acknowledge to ourselves, to God, and to one another how we have missed the path of Love? May we carry the weight of God's transformative kindness, believing Sar...

What makes Lent powerful is its insistence on not celebrating, on demanding a season of restraint. What makes Lent powerful is that it invites us to make a choice toward honesty with God and ourselves, a choice to get solemn about what we discover in our core, and live that restraint on the outside. It's a forty day invitation to move from the edges of our lives to the deep, heavy center of us.  ...

Ash Wednesday sounds morbid to some, but it exists to tell us the truth, to ask us to come close to the reality of this life: we are always transforming, growing toward wisdom. And it will end. But I love that in the Christian tradition death is understood as a both/and. It is a result of brokenness in the world and  it is also a threshold, a transition to fullness of life. As the Apostle Paul wro...

Surrender is sometimes the work of naming my weaknesses and allowing them to drag me to the love of God, where I am fully known, and fully myself, with or without my abilities, usefulness, or performance. . Find " Lake Coatepeque " on The Brilliance's newest album  Feel It. Read For the Life of the World by Alexander Shmemann Find Psalm 104 here Micha is offering a zoom workshop for her Substack p...

Prayer is an act of intention where I don't deny the micro and macro ache of this life. The hurts that arrive in our lives or the lives of those we love, and the Greater Pain that lives in our societies and systems. And still we choose the thorny, winding path of hope. We choose it with eyes wide open, so we may see when we bump into God.   Find  Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. Read  Hunting M...

Glory somehow shows up when we suffer, not because suffering is a payment, but because it's a truth-teller, a revealer. We need winter—for all its ache and ice and clarity—where Love has more space in all the sparseness to reach us.    Find Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr Read Psalm 27 here . If you're interested in more on Epiphany a link to Good Shepherd New York's Epiphany Guide . Micha is o...

There is no boundary around holiness: all of this world is worthy of God's holy smudge. In fact, the act of blessing is simply recognizing and marking what is already true. This is the task of Epiphany for us. We show up like the wise men, carrying our gifts. What we're invited to bring the Christ is almost always what we love. Blessing the people and things around us is just another way of saying...

Can we allow ourselves to cease the relentless pursuit of doing enough, and instead choose to be kind to ourselves and one another—to make warm and generous meals, to sit with people we love under blankets, to dream, and to ask ourselves who we are if we're not proving ourselves? These are the spiritual practices of Epiphany, to be still long enough to see the revelation for all that is. Find Wint...