Seeking Authentic Voice

I was baptized when I was nine years old. I have vivid memories of the baptism itself, of being terrified, as I was fully immersed three times in a deep pool of water, and my relief that I did not drown. But I have no memory of any preparation for that baptism. I don’t recall anyone talking to me that morning or the day before about the meaning of baptism and how it would impact my life. In the early church people spent two years preparing for baptism. Then, only adults were baptized and the two years were spent unlearning one way of understanding the world - particularly that the emperor was God - and replacing that worldview with an understanding of who Jesus was and the Christian understanding of God. Now, when I meet with parents and Godparents of an infant who is to be baptized, I spend about an hour in conversation with them followed by a rehearsal.  Baptism is the beginning of one’s journey of faith. The first thing baptism does is “name” us. In baptism we all s...

I’m tired.  I’m tired of the onslaught of violence in the world: guns and mass murders; abuse of people of color; abuse of women; abuse of children; abuse of money; and on top of all of it, the seemingly endless hypocrisy. I’m tired of being in a rut and feeling stuck. I’m tired of the world as it is and yearn for what the world could be. I’m tired of feeling like I try, but I am just spinning my wheels, like tires stuck in mud. I use to spend the month of November and the days leading up to Thanksgiving thinking about gratitude and those things that I could be thankful for in life. And, although there are things that I am truly, deeply grateful for, the effort to list them feels false and trite to be as if I were trying to hide my head in the sand and pretend that all is well. Last week I asked us to consider the state of our souls. If I really look deeply, I can only say, my soul is agitated because I want to make a difference in the world, I want the world to be a less agitat...

I have a good friend who is always late for everything. Whenever my friend and I schedule a date to get together I plan to arrive 15 minutes to a half hour later because inevitably she will call and say she’s just leaving. At first brush, the Gospel story of the bridesmaids seems very critical of those who tend to be late. Unusually harsh because the story says that none of them knows the day or the hour that the bridegroom will come. However, if you don’t know the day and the hour how are you supposed to know when to be ready? Under those conditions even the most conscientious of us could be late and unprepared. Perhaps the reading is not about promptness at all, but about what it means to be  awake, attentive, preparing? Specifically, in our context, what if it is speaking of spiritual preparedness? Jim Wallis, one of the founders of the Sojourners community, tells a story about a colleague living in a village in Central America. She worked in a community that was marginal...

I did this exercise with us a few years ago, but I want to do it again. How many of you have your cell phones on you? If your cell phone has a camera, take out your cell phone and take a picture of your self. If you don’t have smart phone close your eyes and imagine seeing yourself in your mind’s eye. Now look at the picture and notice what your see. Notice the color of your eyes and their shape. Notice the shape of your face and your skin tone. What are your thoughts as you do this? Now looking at your face imagine that the face you are looking at is the face of God. It’s your face - but it’s also God’s face. Does that change the image you see? Are you able to see that the image in the selfie is you and is also an image of God? God has your eye color, your skin tone, and the same shaped face as you.  God looks like each one of us and all of us at the same time. God reveals God’s self in and through every human being. God is black and brown, pink, and white, oliv...

Like most people, when I was in my twenties,  I was focused on trying to figure out my life. I struggled to figure out what I was going to do to make a living, what I valued and what was important to me. Along with some friends of mine I found my way into practicing a form of Buddhism that focused on chanting. The idea was that the chanting had a harmonic resonance with the universe and would literally align one’s entire being, like a magnetic field aligning electrons, with the spiritual pulse of creation. One chanted every day with an intention held in one’s mind, something that one wanted. My chanting was grounded in the hope of finding a deeper relationship with the divine and aligning my life with the creator. I suppose, then, that it was really no surprise when one day while chanting, I realized that I was not a Buddhist, but a Christian. At the time this was actually a startling realization because I thought I had left Christianity behind when I was 15. I thought that Chris...

The summer I was 19 years old was they first time I visited my father in Puerto Rico where he had just moved to work for Goya foods. My dad lived in Puerto Rico for about 20 years and I visited him several times. Puerto Rico is a beautiful island and distinctively different from one side to the other. San Juan is a large metropolitan city with an historic district known as Old San Juan. El Morro, an old stone fort built in the late 1500’s guards one end of the city. The fort is high on the cliffs and looks out across the Atlantic Ocean toward Spain. The rest of the city is a mix of gorgeous white sand beaches and ritzy hotels intermingled with extreme poverty. Driving across the island one encounters industry, like the canning factory of Goya foods, mountains with thick rain forests and waterfalls, and the Arecibo Observatory on the western end. From its construction in the 1960s until 2011, the observatory was managed by Cornell University . The observatory's 1,000-foot (305-met...

When I was a new mom I read every book and magazine article I could find on parenting. I felt a need to be the perfect parent raising perfectly healthy children. I’ve shared enough stories about my childhood that you can probably understand why I was worried about my ability to be a good parent. Likewise when I became a priest and a Rector I had a similar drive to be the perfect priest. I have read countless books on church leadership, church growth, stewardship, conflict, vision and mission, pastoral care, you name it, if it applies to church leadership I have read it, gone to a conference on it, and applied it in my ministry. Not to mention that I am a licensed social worker trained in family systems, group facilitation and group dynamics, and individual and couple therapy. And, I am a trained Spiritual Director, educated in the ways of listening for God and helping others listen for God.  But the one thing I have learned through thirty years of parenting and twenty ye...