The Slow Way

This Christmas, Jesus is making us whole through our longings, our longings for a world of goodness and peace, and also, our longings for things to be put right in our own lives. Find Jonathan Pennington's book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing  here .  Read the Beatitudes here . Find Phillippians 2 here . Read Isaiah 30 here . This reflection and practice were also published this week...

"…at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story," I whispered. It was 2 am. "...which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever." The work of helping my dad into the next story was holy and heavy with love. And the words I spoke lived in the realest part of me. I think that's what it means to believe, even when doubt is ever present. Maybe it's strange to write about death duri...

 Mary sings that God's justice moves us toward liberation for the ones who are discarded by society, allowing a girl like her, pregnant outside of marriage, to overcome the shame and humiliation her culture placed on her, to reverse the rules of who gets discarded, and who gets to matter. I am certain that Jesus's courageous and wise young mother taught him the power of a God who brings hope to th...

Mystery is the core of my faith these days. Because no matter how many people prop a pine tree in water and twist twinkle lights through it, no matter how many Playmobile nativity sets are opened and play-acted by little ones, the story of baby Jesus is wild. When we allow ourselves to sit with it, to ask all the questions there are to ask, we are left with a choice—to either believe in just how m...

This Thanksgiving, can we think about the concept of gratitude beyond lists or feelings? Let's consider gratitude as a practice that begins in our own bodies, in our choice to stop, our choice to quiet our minds. When we learn to stop and get quiet so we can really look, our graittude becomes more than a feeling. It becomes something we carry into our ordinary lives.  Find the Ted Talk from  Bened...

We who believe in the one Breath can either spend our lives demanding it show up where we'd like for it to show up, or we can stand in the open air and let it blow when it pleases. Find Brian Doyle's One Long River of Song here . Find my previous Slow Way Letter inspired by Doyle's book of essays . Find more information on PROMPT speech therapy here .  This reflection and practice were also publis...

We rarely get to finish, do we? Seventy percent. Good enough? Love and apologies and trying again. Hoping for grace to soften the edges of the thirty percent. What else can we do? Find Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautifu l here. This reflection and practice were also published this week in  The Slow Way Newsletter . Find a transcript of this episode  here .  Find  Micha's website and...

But sometimes prayer is the act of moving things around, recognizing what in our lives needs removing, and what in our lives needs transforming. The intricate system of our inner soil can be rich, or it can be lacking. And it can survive on its own for a while. But eventually, if we neglect it, the weeds spring up, the soil loses nutrients. Our lifeforce slumps.  Padraig O'Tuama's new book of pray...

Find Amber Haines' and Seth Haines' new collaborative book,  The Deep Down Things here .  Ivanka Demchuk's icon of young Mary receiving the angel can be found here .   Click here to view Caravaggio's " The Incredulity of St. Thomas ." And see his " Madonna and Child with St. Anne " here . Erin Lane writes extensively about the concept of "mothering" as a verb rather than a noun in her book Someone...

From  Every Moment Holy   by Douglas McKelvey. "We praise you, O Lord, for our limits!  limits you have given us for our good and for your glory."  The subtitle of  Blessed Are the Rest of Us  is "How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole." I love that word "limits." Limits speaks to more than weakness, more than failure, more than the ache in us for justice. Our limits in the presence of the divine is...

How do we live, in all our moments, learning to emulate God's mercy? I can be frustrated with the world's lack of care, the intrinsic ableism in all of us that allows for casual complaints about kids and their need to get with the program of typical development. But, even in that hurt I am invited to curiosity and care. To be a mercy-emulator, to practice the way of Jesus.  To see the dignity and...

Ritual is part of our daily lives. Rituals are the ways we honor moments of significance. The special occasions that bring us into community with loved ones throughout the year. The carols we sing at Christmas, the blowing out of birthday candles, the first dance at a wedding, the pallbearers carrying the casket, the blessing of babies in our places of worship. We need rituals to make sense of the...

Let me be set free by love, O God. Let me be set free to love. What if that's the thing? Settling into the reality of our lives, receiving it as it is. And being set free by love—the love of ourselves, the love of this season of our lives, the love of ones we're charged to care for, and the love of God?  Discerning the law of love in our hearts, and being set free by it.    Links:  Click here to f...

Are we paying close enough attention to look with the eyes of reverence, to make space in our imaginations for an image of God that stretches beyond our small experiences and into the "eternal current" of God at work in the world?   Links:  Click here to find the article " The Feminine Way to Wisdom " by David Brooks. This reflection and practice were also published this week in  The Slow Way News...

Wholeness is not asking for an entirely new way. It's simply asking us to take what's already there and press out the creases, a little at a time.   Links:  Find the full poem by Antonio Machado and Translated by Robert Bly  here. Find   Radical Acceptance: Embracing your Life with the Heart of a Buddha , by Tara Branch here . Find my instagram posts about the brain treatment Ace and I recieved he...

Today's replay is from Episode 18, in which I shared about how, after my dad died, I went months without the debilitating migraines that defined my two years before his death. How, when I recorded that episode, I hoped those months of lightness without pain were a true healing. I had been worried to share that story, because what if I called myself "healed" and then the migraines came back?    Lis...

This replay of Episode 34 from August 2022 considers the language we use when we talk about "seeking God." What is authentic faith? And what does it mean for it to 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 k...

May the last late light of summer glow spread wide enough to stir your longing for whatever it is your body, your soul, your heart is asking you to notice. May you walk slower this week into the end of the summer so you can listen to the stirring. May you notice the nudge of the Spirit pointing to love even in the close of one story and the opening sentence of another.    Links:  I announced my ne...

"Inasmuch as we are dying," Shannon K. Evans writes in her book  Rewilding Motherhood , "we are also creating. Inasmuch as old things are passing away, we are also being made new. We are less of who we were and so much more of who we will be. . . God is all in all."  For something to become new, the old thing must let go—a shadow lengthening, a leaf releasing from the branch, the earth tilting eve...

We only get two billion heartbeats. We can hummingbird them, or tortoise them. The faster we zoom, the more our souls—our engines—burn. That doesn't always have to be a terrible thing. But it does matter.   Links:  Here's a link to Marjorie J. Thompson's Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life And here's a link to One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle. I announced my new book and...

What does it mean to let our grief shape us into elders, choosing wisdom over bitterness? I'm certain the answer is in the circle of welcome: the magic of our fragile hearts holding one another's fragile hearts, and how, somehow, in this uncertain carrying we honor each other's experiences, loves, and sufferings. We learn to be vulnerable together, which just might be the hardest thing of all.   L...

Much of life is a choice to fling or not to fling. Will we be extravagant with the love we've been given, or will we hold ourselves back because of fear, the chance that all our flinging might not make a difference, or that we'll be hurt in the process? "An abundant imagination feeds us courage," my pastor Michael Rudzena said. "There is more than just one shot. There are seeds showering down all...

In his longest recorded sermon,  Jesus taught about the importance of the process . "Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened."  Asking, I've learned, isn't a one and done process. Just as searching is a thing that keeps...

I have a lot of regrets from my younger years of loving a God who seemed both demanding of sacrifice and somehow, simultaneously, filled with mercy. I didn't know how to reconcile the two. So I preached a message of both to myself. Struggling with how one might turn one's heart around without Love in the first place. Not knowing how, when I was most afraid, I leaned into the hollow how-tos, forgoi...

I haven't written much about how I became LGBTQ+ affirming almost a decade ago. It was a slow process, one that was born of relationships with dear-to-me queer folks, revelations of the high percentage of LGBTQ+ people who have suffered deeply in the often abusive hand of the Church, and it was the work of Jesus in me, revealing the way of transforming love in a world where we cling to rules, even...