Writings

Let us shift our focus from God’s grand working to a global Western perspective with a 24-hour news cycle that makes everything seem immediate. Our clickbait sound bite culture encourages fragmentation, not integration, thus producing anxiety and alienation. We are all now exposed to the most body breaking, I can’t breathe immediate shattering of pain on a global level, and the truth is, we cannot influence, impact, or change, 99 percent of everything that we are exposed to,

I cannot help but feel so deeply biblically rooted in this time, and I know truly, there is nothing new under the sun. We find ourselves once again hoping that righteous judges will save us from a would be king, and as always, it is a king of our own making, and we must choose to save ourselves for we were surely warned:

I must make a confession, as a pastor I never appreciated the comparison of clergy to a good shepherd, it felt gross. People aren’t sheep, I thought. We aren’t prey animals in need of another to care for us or make decisions for us. We can think for ourselves and chart our own course. And then I got sheep, and I understood...

Blessings upon all of your holiday seasons, be it Hanukkah, Christmas, or the Solstice. I am an observer of the Christ-mass and mark the turning of the year through the Winter Solstice with the fire of a Yule log or two. And while I certainly make merry, it was a more silent contemplative holy day that I sought this year.

We are creatures existing on the brink of transformation, for those of us coming from a Christian tradition, we are called to embrace transformation, to turn around. All Souls, dia de los Muertos, and Samhain, all mark that transitional period when the veil between the departed and our present selves is at its thinnest.

After leaving Atlanta and moving to Nashville in 2007, I continued my pastoral work as a street chaplain and outreach worker. Most of my days were spent in homeless encampments, hospitals, and jails. Extreme poverty has a direct impact on the health and life expectancy of those living in the conditions of extreme poverty, as well as putting a target on one’s back. Marking you for removal because the visual manifestation of extreme poverty is offensive to the dominant culture.

I now live in a valley in Pownal surrounded by Appalachian mountains. In the mornings as I watch the mist roll off the mountains, into our pasture and on to the next ridge, I feel the pull of this haunted place deep in my bones. The first time I stepped foot in the pasture adjacent to my home I swear it shimmered, and in the sacred grove of conifers the ravens and crows tell the stories of all they’ve seen. There could be no finer waters for baptism than the brook back in the

I began the morning in anxious thought. One doesn’t have to read tea leaves or cast bones to see that all signs, historical and immediate, are pointing to the end of our young democracy as we know it. My former home state of Tennessee was recently determined by CNN to be the least democratic state in the country (I can directly attest to the truth of that assertion). A simultaneous study labeled Tennessee the most stressful state in which to live. Nazis, literal neo-Nazis, ma

An issue we have frequently had while discussing what it is we are doing and planning and preparing for, here at the Abbey, has been a lack of understanding of what an Abbey even is and why we would have chosen this model. I hope to clear that up a little bit.

Several weeks ago while driving through North Adams, Mass., my wife and I noticed multiple house shrines. Most were shrines dedicated to Mary, but there were a couple of Jesus shrines scattered in as well. Seeing the shrines, I felt struck and moved by affection and a deep resonance within. She was there in the snow, doing what she always does, watching over her children, regardless of creed.