A Positively Poetic Priest

It is a party! Confetti, music, a disco ball, and a new book! Of course its a party. I'll see y'all later. #jointheradiantrebellion

  Girls are taught far too young to have problems with their age. Facial creams, hiding from the sun, not acknowledging our age, these practices deny the truth and our full lived experience.  (Okay, no one should spend too much time in the sun anyway) I'm in my mid-thirties and people are starting to comment on my new streaks of grey hair as if it was a problem. I'm also going to be considered a young person in the church for another ten years... Too young to lead or have a wise voice, so my relationship to ageism is complex. Grey hair is not the problem. Our cultural refusal to come to terms with the privilege of aging is a problem.  For someone who considered committing suicide earlier in my life, all my laugh lines, frown lines, and grey hairs are trophies. Trophies of days I didn't want live, but kept living. Joys and sorrows weathered.  I can't wait to read Karen Walrond's new book, Radiant Rebellion. I don't know what is in it, yet! I do know Karen will re...

As an Episcopal priest I understand, in mind, body, and heart, the central nature of the Eucharist and the sharing of Jesus' body and blood in bread and wine. For the last five years, every Sunday (barring vacation), and countless times during the week, I have taken, blessed, broken, and shared bread and wine with other followers of Jesus. I have seen the difference it has made in the lives of the lonely, sick, dying, beginning anew, and weary from daily life. I also know what a difference it has made in my own life to be able to share with others in the simple act of blessing and breaking bread. However, I also know what a difference my experience in the five years before my ordination made in my understanding of Eucharist and receiving Communion. For the last ten years I have been on a gluten, dairy, and soy free diet because of health problems. Celiac disease, lactose intolerance, poly cystic ovarian syndrome, all of which can be helped and/or managed by fasting from particul...

I started this year's season of Lent on Ash Wednesday in my sermon  talking about the wisdom in a cup of tea,  or rather, the wisdom in an empty cup of tea.  Since Ash Wednesday,  when I had a cold, until today,  I pretty much have had a cup of tea everyday.  Throat Coat, ginger tea, peppermint tea, I'm an herbal tea girl, I cannot have caffeine. My cold has gotten better, but there is something comforting in having a cup of coffee or tea.  And right now, we all need a little extra comfort in our lives. For some reason,  I always seem to have a different favorite mug for a season and use it everyday for that season, and then move on to another mug.  This spring is this lime green one I picked up for free at a thrift store.  Do you have a mug or cup of something with you this morning?  Is it empty? Full? Somewhere in between? If I were to imagine my mug's life it would look like this:  one of...

"There was an immediacy of communion at St. Gregory's, unmediated by altar rails, the raw physicality of that mystical meal. There was an invitation to jump in rather than official entrance requirements. There was the suggestion that God could be located in experience, sensed through bodies, tasted in food; that my body was connected literally and mysteriously to other bodies and loved without reason." (64) How do you experience God in your life?

The Greek word is Gnosis. It means knowledge or wisdom. In the early church world, the Greek philosophers had great influence. People would walk and travel hundreds of miles to sit at the feet of some of the great philosophers. There were teachers who were all over the spectrum from those who believed that experience through the body was the only way to knowledge all the way to the other end where only internal knowledge from asceticism and denying the bodily experience was accepted. The Gnostic tradition was developing at the same time as the Christian tradition and in many times and places, the two coexisted and co-mingled. Many of the early ascetics of the Christian tradition were under the influence of some of the Gnostic ideas about needing to transcend the body in order to experience the divine. Some of those who were exiled from the church because they went as far as to say that Jesus was not a part of the Trinity, merely a human being who was teaching his disciples how to ...