A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. But marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it’s a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you’re giving, you’re not giving to...
We, of the majority caste, are largely innocents. By "innocent" I mean clueless about the way history has privileged some and impoverished others. If we are to move toward a future beyond the fatal consequence of our transgressions, we must lose our innocence. We have...
Blessed are the agnostics. Blessed are they who doubt. Those who aren’t sure, who can still be surprised. Blessed are they who are spiritually impoverished and therefore not so certain about everything that they no longer take in new information. Blessed are those who...
We are all hypocrites to some degree — passionately promoting ideas we have not ourselves fully lived, taking others to task for frailties and failures not that dissimilar from our own. Knowing this, we should all be more gentle, more hopeful, more merciful with one...
Most biblical stories are descriptive, not prescriptive. They show what it looks like to wrestle with trying to live a moral life—recording success and failure. But here's the thing: That makes the Bible more holy, not less. Treating spiritual texts like a recipe book...
You are the God who makes a way when there is no way. Free us from our anxious intransigence and our impoverished imaginations. Open us to your newness, the gospel gift given over and over and over again. Amen. from Devotions for Lent: A Way Other Than Our Own