A Positively Poetic Priest

2/2/18 "Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life's problems." - Sadness, Disney Pixar's Inside Out Jesus sets a great precedent in the Bible for being sad. He recognizes the condition of the people, he recognizes his own place in what is happening, he emphasizes with people in their pain, and when he needs to, he cries. Many people know the story of Jesus crying because it is famous as the shortest verse in the King James Version of the Bible, Jesus wept. Jesus displays his humanity in this very physical act of releasing emotion through crying. Through his example, we know that God is with us in our sadness, in our times of loneliness, sorrow, and loss. We all need to cry sometimes. We all need to be sad sometimes. There are situations which should make us sad. When we experience loss or disappointment, it is natural to experience sadness. Of course, there are extremes, sometimes we are too sad for too long, and then we need to get...

Sara Miles experiences her first communion, un-baptized, unprepared, unsuspecting.  “Early one winter morning, when Katie was sleeping at her father’s house, I walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. I had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian – or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut. But on other long walks, I’d passed the beautiful wooden building, with its shingled steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse, with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity.” (57) “There was no organ, no choir, no pulpit: just the unadorned voices of the people, and long silences framed by the ringing of deep Tibetan bowls. I sang, too. It crossed my mind that this is ridiculous. We sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang, and it was all pretty peaceful and sort of i...