I have found my high holy days, in the womb of darkness—Solstice, the darkest days of the year. I rejoice in the deep, with its chaos and blindness, its promise of the unknown thing ahead. I have meditated on Mary all year, beginning last Advent when I began to contemplate each of the words given…
In the semester after 911, my most important teachers were hobbits. I met Frodo Baggins for the first time in the months after the twin towers were hit on September 11, 2001. My family was living in Alaska, and I was attending seminary in Seattle, so I had to be away from my young son…
When I was growing up, the afterlife was a big place with four distinct areas: Heaven, hell, purgatory, and limbo. I completely understood hell. Hell was all the bad things you could imagine, forever. Very impressive. Purgatory was simply hell with a time limit. And limbo was just fair; babies couldn’t help it if they…
My sacred journey on the river recently (McKenzie River Prayer link) turned out to be an invitation to a new level of relationship with the Divine. For days I wandered, dazed with wonder, and completely unable to adequately express the depth of my feeling. I dreamt repeatedly of being caught in the flow of something…
My friend Dan lives on the McKenzie River. The front of his house is filled with windows overlooking a sweetly sloping yard with lovely landscaping and magnificent trees, but my eyes are drawn always to the water, which moves in one direction at a constant and mesmerizing pace. Wherever I stand in the house or…
Several Sundays ago, when I was presiding as priest at an Episcopal service, something snapped in me. I was joyfully reading the text of the Eucharist, my hands uplifted and spread in the gesture called Orans, where the priest prays on behalf of the people. I say “joyfully” because, as a Catholic female, I never…
Saturday at dusk at a women’s retreat, twenty-five women gathered into a healing circle. Each held an unlit candle. The retreat centered on Blessed Mother, Mary, and on the floor in the middle of the circle burned a tall prayer candle with an image Our Lady of Guadalupe. The first woman lit her candle from…
The first time I spoke in church, I was around three years old. The priest processed down the aisle wearing a rose-colored chasuble, which they wear only once or twice each year. My mother says that I remarked loudly enough for the whole church to hear: “My, God is wearing a pretty dress today!” Everyone…
I have been in the final month of pregnancy with a child twice. I can assure you that time is unusual during that last month. The birthing never comes. Minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, it does not come. It is an impossible time, a time out of time. This is the…
Become a circle. Have no beginning, and no end. Embrace emptiness. Lose yourself in silence. Die here, and wait. Be an open place where love wants to live.
I went looking for a teacher, roaming far and wide and calling: “Teacher? Teacher? Who am I to be?” I found a prophet, tattered and bruised, with lightening thunder eyes. He stripped the fat from my tender hopes and fed it to the hungry ghosts beneath the bridge. I found a nanny with leaking teats. She watered the thistles with her…
My first response to the most recent wave of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, was numbness. When I began to thaw, the next wave of emotion was terror. Then fury. Grief is the last to hit me, and the hardest to bear. My heart breaks as I watch video clips of white supremacists and white…
The prophet Isaiah admonished the people to unlearn the ways of war and beat swords into plowshares, to transform weapons designed to kill people into useful tools for sustaining them. At Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, my son and I explored an enormous bunker that has become a bizarre, enchanted playground for…
The first time Matthew Cuthbert drives orphan Anne Shirley down the “Avenue” of flowering trees on the way to Green Gables, Anne is enraptured. She describes the sight as “the first thing I ever saw that couldn’t be improved by the imagination.” This is fine praise indeed from Canadian author L.M. Montgomery’s young character; Anne…
I had a brother-in-law who was a carrot farmer. He had acres and acres of carrots. He showed me one of his fields once. There were only carrots as far as the eye could see. I asked him, how do you keep it just carrots? He explained that there are herbicides designed to kill everything…
SisterMosaic 