Writings

We are living in a time of prophets, in a time of dictators, tyrants, and yes, saints. And it is loud in our heads. It is loud in my head. The din is unsustainable, and yet it is there day after day – sending out messages of obedience, messages of resistance, threats that your politics and your very existence is enough to get you hunted and killed. Churned into the mix of this theatre of hate and absurdity is the filter of AI, omnipresent through our social media interactions

As a pastor I must confess that in this moment I am not sure how to talk about Easter when we are surrounded by crucifixion. I can hear my Christian clergy colleagues firmly remind me that we must have faith and preach the hope of resurrection to make meaning of the executed body of Christ. The ancient Christian pilgrimage tradition of the Stations of the Cross, or the Via Dolorosa contains 14 steps beginning with Jesus being condemned to death and ending with his body being

The snowpack has melted into the earth, and the brook winding its course across the abbey, through forest and glen, has been resurrected from the drought of last summer and fall. The flow, burble, and constant rolling of the waters is a familiar comfort on the dark evenings when I stand under a shadow sky listening, simply listening for anything the land has to share.

We are told in Genesis that in the beginning the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Do we think that God has stopped – stopped moving upon the face of the waters, stopped moving upon the hills and mountains of the earth, stopped moving through the tree tunnels, and through the sugar sap of those trees? When would God have ever stopped moving upon us all. We were given to the land and gifted an ecology of Union.

This Gospel stuff is not safe, it’s not meant to be respectable, I tell you it’s not tame. But in the words of Yeshua, “what did you go out to the desert to see?” What else could God breaking into the world have looked like? In Yeshua God creates for us a new memory, a new path, a new way. John sees that path from out in the desert, Yeshua walks that path straight to John. They say a dove descended upon Yeshua at his baptism by John, but I think it was a crow...

One of the oldest memories of the church is the memory of the church as sanctuary. By my own theological reckoning, one of the most sacred sacraments is that of sanctuary. It may not be an official sacrament, but some things are holy beyond all official bounds. There are times when providing sanctuary is to provide a way for individuals at risk to survive for one more day. There are few actions more sacred that a church can undertake than to open its doors to shelter the peop

Here we are again, crossing over into the henge-dwelling portal-opening veil-lifting autumn reaching to winter, time of the year. In Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, Samhain marks the New Year when the ever-bursting, blooming, business of life – the seemingly endless promise of always coming forth - finds us at a new dawn, the late dark morning dawn of winter. Now we are reminded that we are the dreams of our ancestors. Samhain, Dios de los Muertos, All Souls, all invi

Beauty, the capacity to seek it and know it, to breathe it in, has never been more important. And by that, I mean the capacity to be struck by the beauty of the absolutely ordinary, and to be rooted in the sacredness of each day, and each night. My own hope lies not in government, or institutions, the academy, or even the church. My hope lies in our innate capacity to experience what Father Pedro Arrupe called a mysticism of open eyes to see more, not less. See the burning in

The gospel of Luke (16:19-31) tells us the story of Lazarus; a poor man covered in sores who lived out his life begging at the gate of a rich man who ignored Lazarus day after day until both of their deaths. The rich man in the story ends up in hell for his failure to extend concern or hospitality toward Lazarus. He ended up in hell because he was blind to the suffering right at his front door. I can’t imagine where the rich man might have ended up if instead of ignoring Laza

As I look at the multi-crisis, one of the things that gives me hope is that, we can't continue living this way. And I mean that literally, we cannot continue living this way. There will be points along the way where collapse makes it impossible, so that we cannot live the same way we have been. Whether we mean politically, economically, socially, or ecologically.