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Tear/Tear, Seem/Seam, Knew/New
On shrinking cloth The heat of a warm water washing or heated tumble dry or, in the image of today’s poem, a flap out on the sunny line, the stretched out fibers of an unshrunken cloth relax. The individual patch of cloth becomes stronger. The individual fibers become relaxed in the heat. That sounds nice…
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Some Doubts Ought to Be Trusted
Doubt can be bad but it doesn’t have to be In the glut of internet facts we swim in like a trash compactor on the Death Star, doubt is not hard to come by. Slogging through the truthiness spectrum of political speech might make you sick. Yes, you could be sick with doubt. In its…
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Hope From a Couple of Poets
Where is Jesus? Poetry helps me reach into and beyond reality. The news out of Louisville, Kentucky this week hit hard for me and my friends. Breonna Taylor’s murderers are not held accountable and it is all very legal. The worst part for me was that so many Christians I know were running to defend…
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Don’t Forget, Jesus is the Lord of History
Is the Church Just Following Culture? Try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves from the influences that have shaped us personally and the greater forces that have shaped our context. Our ongoing, and longstanding dialogue about antiracism in Circle of Hope has been dialed up in recent months in the wake of police killings…
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What Do I Do With My Kids and the Bible?
Let’s Have a Bible Class Since we’re all basically part time teachers this school year my friend Bryce had the idea that one of the subjects he ought to teach would be the Bible. I was quite taken by the idea. It hit me when I was washing my hands the other day that I…
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Have you sung together on Zoom yet?
Worship Woes Have you sung together on Zoom yet? It’s terrible, impossible, and I love it. I don’t know all the techy bits to tell you why, but Zoom only transmits one audio channel at a time. So if you try to sing together it frenetically bounces from one voice to another trying to figure…
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If I Can Remember My Dreams
On vacation in the woods, I am trying to tune into my dreams. It’s working. I always ask my boys each morning if they had an dreams during the night, so I thought I should point that question at myself more seriously. I sleep very soundly and rarely remember my dreams. I lament the loss…
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What to say to fear
Fear is a big part of everyone’s life in normal times, but in these “quarantimes” it is an even bigger part of our lives. We are sharing our fear in a much bigger way because we are all feeling a common threat. In some ways, this is a good thing because it’s not so lonely…
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What would Paul say to the Church in the Philadelphia Region Today?
At the Getting to Know the Bible event on July 14th, twenty-five of us gathered to have a group project about understanding Paul as he is described in Acts and how he represents himself in his many letters. It was a 90 minute session so it was obviously just scraping the surface. The best part…
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Laughable Abundance: A Story for Your Buoyancy
Dear Friend, Times are tough, right? Sorry, I don’t know how to say anything that doesn’t sound inadequate so I’ll leave that question there. I have a story that really helped me float through a day that started chin deep in the toughness of the times. Spoilers: nothing changes in the times, those of the…
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How does a Christian Celebrate the Fourth of July?
Happy Fourth of July? How does a Christian celebrate the beginning of a nation with such a shaky foundation? Thomas Jefferson wrote about self-evident truths that were so abstract they excluded women and black people from their universality. The land the American Revolutionaries fought for was stolen from the First Nations people. But I don’t…
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Hey (!), White People (!), We Get to Repent!
What an extraordinary moment in American History! A bunch of my friends are getting the day off for Juneteenth. There’s talk of making it a national holiday and I don’t think that sounds far-fetched. Confederate monuments are coming down. Christopher Columbus statues are coming down. It seems like the last vestiges of racism in America…
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A Friday Poem (and an endorsement for the Comfort Retreat)
Some context I wrote this poem at the Comfort Retreat last year. We spent a good part of the day groping inthe spiritual dark for something to hold on to. We found it in each others hands and our own hearts. we found it in shared songs and stories. We found it in showing the…
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The Mental Health Benefits of Circle of Hope
It seems to me that it is common to separate the mental health benefits of participation in our church from the other things we do to gain and maintain our mental health. We go to therapy, we practice mindfulness, we exercise, we do yoga, we journal… oh! and I guess there’s church, too. I don’t…
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How Does a Christian Celebrate Memorial Day?
During the Covid 19 pandemic should we hit the boardwalk or stay at home? Are the CDC and the government our only authorities? What does Jesus say? And in any Memorial Day, how do we relate to those who died in war and their families while also resolving to decry the existence of war? Jesus…
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Forcing It – a Friday sonnet
My poet’s pen is a bit dried up of late. Not sure why. This poem form last year gets at some of the feelings of trying to make something happen that isn’t happening. I like the suggested submission to the concrete shards on the urban beach most. Something about smoothed over brokenness seems to be…
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What if online church sucks?
This is objectively not the same What if online church sucks? I don’t think there is any question that this sucks. I know, I probably shouldn’t say “sucks”, but if you just want to suck your teeth at the prospect of your next zoom cell meeting, or live stream Sunday meeting, trust me; you are…
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Turning to Before and Behind — A Friday Sonnet
There was power in the walking and the making. Maintaining the physical space added a concreteness to my prayer. This is the main feature of walking a labyrinth in the first place, but it was even batter to make the way for future me and future loved ones to walk it, even the grandchildren of…
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Tumbled Open Good Friday Prayer
It’s Good Friday. I wrote us a poem that’s also a prayer. Hope on a death day. Jesus was the first one, but now they are all that for those who are in Christ. One of Circle of Hope’s blogs celebrates death days of those who have gone before — Celebrating Our Transhistorical Body . Today,…
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Today, if you hear his voice 