We pray for those with power to create peace

love is your song and you are fully loved in turn

How can I be love instead of being anger and fear?

Slavery is made to sound as if it happened in a prehistoric age instead of only a few generations ago.

White supremacy illuminates the exceptional instead of blaming the system.

We are broken, O God. We are broken. We gather in vigil again to mourn the death of school children and school teachers. Death and violence are the reasons that draw us together in sorrow, in anger, in anxious grief and loss....

It has been a difficult week in the news, and as always, we have silent personal struggles in the midst of everything else. And so I invite you into a spirit of prayer....

I trusted the woman at the pharmacy to be capable of hearing hard truth. Bless her wounded heart with its internalized misogyny. She just wants women to love and support each other. Thank you. Me too.

We come this day, called by war By the suffering we inflict and endure When minds across borders fail to reason and compromise. We come this day, called by loss, The deaths of those who serve in our name, Those whose lives end before their natural course In service to a cause greater than their own.

Being faithful doesn’t mean endless work. It also means attention to the movement of spirit that can appear as an hour of sleep, the truth of a toddler, or a donut in the middle of the day.

Gracious God, the week was filled with moments when words escaped me. They would not come. Forgive me, Holy One —I know it is the preacher’s job, but there were moments when I just did not know how to pray. First, at the hospital, labor and delivery, to see the new parents. The overnight bag sat...

"We want our children back. There are too many gone too soon." In December 2017, Rev. Jason Shelton was invited to lead singing at the fifth anniversary of the Newtown massacre, at a vigil in front of the headquarters of the NRA. He wrote this song of lament for the occasion, because he couldn’t...

"How complicated it is to break silence: to open all of the secrets in all of our broken hearts. But silence does break; truth seeks the light. We're unraveling silence because we have determined that our power with one another is greater than the power someone once had over us."

We, the willing, follow the threads to one another; past rightness and quips and tweets. We will find one another and persist past sunrise.

What DO we do in the face of evil? Anything. Everything. Pray, protest, bake, hug, grieve, wail, laugh, explain, linger, research, fight, cry. What we absolutely must not do is ignore it.

Blessed are the homeless and those who beg for spare change, for they will inherit the house of the Lord. Blessed are the black mothers who lament the deaths of their sons at the hands of the state, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex,...

“Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we kept fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.” —John Updike, “Tuesday, and After,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2001 We sat on the back steps watching transfixed as hundreds of rust-red spiders, big as thumbs, dropped...

Oh God of the black, the white, the brown and . . . the blue, Oh God of Keith Lamont Scott*, of Justin Carr*, and . . . of Brently Vinson* and of their grieving, troubled families, Oh God of those in our streets bearing the oppressive weight of armor and armaments, and of those in our streets...

Today, and forever, I grieve the loss of life. I grieve for the people who died in [name of most recent shooting]. I grieve for their families, friends, and co-workers. I grieve for those who were there and feel both lucky and guilty that they survived while others died. We have witnessed another...

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more. ~ Matthew 2:18 I read those words aloud from the pulpit once a year, on Christmas Eve: a night when we celebrate the birth of hope and possibility and...