From Your Minister
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The older I get, the crankier I am about fear. My own fear, other people’s fear. I can see back across decades to all of the times when I have stood moving my lips soundlessly like the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz while some disembodied voice thundered, “QUIET!” And, way too many times, I have obeyed that formless voice. Read more →
From Your Minister
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Before I had the good fortune to serve the Church of the Larger Fellowship as senior minister, I was part of a team that designed and launched the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign at the Unitarian Universalist Association. Read more →
From Your Minister
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For the past several years, I’ve been part of a group called Transforming Families, in which families that include trans* kids come together for support, information sharing, and fun. Read more →
From Your Minister
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When I was a kid, I pictured the part of the Christmas story about “no room at the inn” as a kind of neon no vacancy sign, blinking from the ancient motels of Biblical days. Read more →
Coming and Going
Eight years ago, my mother died from ovarian cancer. It was one of the greatest blessings of my life to be able to spend the last few weeks of her life caring for her as tenderly as she had cared for me in my earliest, most vulnerable time on earth. Read more →
From Your Minister
From Your Minister
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It was not a surprise when my mother died. Survival rates for ovarian cancer are not high, and hers was in stage four by the time it was diagnosed. Against those odds, she lived three years with a high quality of life.
Finally, when the experimental treatments could not stave it off any longer, she refused any more chemo and radiation, quit eating, and slowly let go.
From Your Minister – September 2014
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One of the ways that we create spiritual or theological common ground is so simple it’s almost embarrassing: We agree to do so. We make a commitment to each other to create a space that is held in common. In religious language, these commitments are called covenants. In the Bible, covenants are between people and God.
Covenants, if they are to truly hold us, need to be large enough to contain the whole selves of the people who make them (including both what is holy and what is unholy). The place we are most likely to see covenants being created is at weddings. Two people commit to one another before their loved ones and what they name as holy. I have seen people make some pretty unlikely promises over the years—promises that are romantic and beautiful, but in my mind fairly unsustainable.
My Grandparents are from Ferguson….
chool in the early 1930’s. My grandfather’s childhood home was in Ferguson which back then was a bedroom community with a train stop leading to downtown St. Louis. After my grandparents married they bought a house close to Ferguson. This is where their four children were raised, my mother, my uncles and aunt.
The houses on the street are all beautiful. However, my guess is that the current residents most likely don’t have much money to maintain these century old homes. Like so many urban stories, most of the white people with the extra money to maintain the neighborhood have moved away. Some families left like my grandparents saying they wanted a safer neighborhood. Some probably left to buy cheap farmland and build their dream home on the ever expanding suburban frontier of West County.
We look at Ferguson today and we see how real and unsettling these questions are. We see how easy it is for most of us white people to just move away from these questions if we want to. But not today. Even if you have never stepped foot in Missouri, for today at least, Ferguson is your messy ancestral home too.
From Your Minister – July 2014
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I love acknowledgments pages, and award acceptance speeches, and other public expressions of gratitude where people spell out how their individual success is interconnected with the gifts of other people. And it occurs to me that, rather than going through all of the struggle of writing a book or making a film or performing a song, I can use this column right now for my own acceptance speech, to offer thanks.
For what? You ask. For my life!
