Dear One, We have received your letter and we hate to tell you— not hate so much, but are a bit afraid to say— we cannot grant your requests as stated, but can only remind you of familiar things: First, faith. Faith in yourself and trust in others. We know it can be terrifying to be vulnerable,...

Yesterday, there were fewer cars at the Arrivals dock at the Portland airport than there were dogs being walked on my block. Yesterday, a friend reported a clandestine meeting—a walk with her elderly mother—careful to keep a six-foot distance as they strolled together in the sunshine. Yesterday,...

“Game” is no longer the proper metaphor to guide my thoughts and actions. We are—all of us—in liminal space, at a threshold confronting immediacy, shrouded in fog.

The church is not a place; it is a people… it is a people proclaiming to the world that we are here for the work of healing and of justice.

Years ago, I did one of those mud run obstacle races. There were eight physical obstacles on the course, but my biggest learning was that we all had a ninth obstacle.

What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your...

Know that we are connected / in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

In this community, we hold hope close. We don’t always know what comes next, but that cannot dissuade us. We don’t always know just what to do, but that will not mean that we are lost in the wilderness. We rely on the certainty beneath, the foundation of our values and ethics. —Rev. Theresa I.

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”...

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we...

We all have our foibles; pieces of ourselves that we both admire and occasionally revile. These gifts and struggles exist in tandem.

Pearls of catkins / illumine the willow’s branches

who are we the people to keep people / from cropping the ‘amber waves of grain’

Before I birthed my baby, he was a possibility, a kick against my insides. With that first cry, first breath, he became a person in the world.

If we aren’t willing to ask the important, uncomfortable, and even scary questions, we won’t get to larger and deeper truths.

Pleasure reminds us to enjoy being alive and on purpose... Pleasure—embodied, connected pleasure—is one of the way we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to co-create the world. Pleasure helps us move through the times that are unfair, through grief and...

A lot of us feel like our lives should have come with instructions. Or maybe they did, but we lost the only copy a long time ago.

We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen.

I come from a long line of strong Black women. My grandmother used to share stories about how she caused “trouble” in town when a white man hired her to put up the displays in his store window. At that time, all the Black women in town worked as domestics in the homes of white ladies, or in the...