On 35 years as a single lady

From the ages of approximately 5-25, I desperately wanted a pony for my birthday. This is a partial lie. My legs got too long for ponies by the time I hit eighth grade. But amending "pony" for "Andalusian/Lusitano/Percheron-cross/Arabian-cross wunder-horse" sounds a little pretentious. The point here is that I never got a pony. My loving …

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8 Actions towards AntiRacism

Blackout Tuesday was one week ago, and I confess, I missed the memo. What I did NOT miss was the Facebook post by a brilliant human being I went to Divinity School with, Jamilah. "Dear friends," she wrote, "simply posting a black square WITHOUT ACTION will do very little to progress the Black agenda. In …

Quarantine Fancy

Friends, there are a lot of ways to deal with the stress of isolation as a single person during this social-distancing shindig. There's prayer, work, regular calls with family and friends. There's getting enough sleep and going for a daily long walk with the dog. These are laudable and healthy coping mechanisms. And then there's …

Communion in a time of COVID-19

“Pastor, I’m really missing communion too,” she said to me. (The ‘too’ is because I had just been grumping about it.) “I’m thinking of making bread at home and gathering my boys around me and just doing it. God won’t refuse to show up, right? We let laypeople baptize in an emergency, don’t we?” Oh …

Coronavirus: what should churches be doing?

Like many of the rest of us, I’ve been watching news of the coronavirus outbreak with all the fascination of someone who really enjoys the board game Pandemic. And this morning, lo and behold, that virus was ALL OVER my newsfeed, thanks to a couple of new developments coinciding. It seems like it was a …

Guatemala: Day 5

Monday: Lake Atitlan, the largest lake in Central America. Atitlan is a crater lake reaching depths of 1000 feet in places, and while I'm a little clear on the story of its geologic formation, the most badass version I've heard is that this massive lake was once the crater at the center of a megavolcano, …

Guatemala: Day 4

This is the story of an avocado. It is a fictional avocado, and avocado that exists in potentia, and yet it is also an avocado like many avocadoes you have met before. It is an avocado that will hypothetically grow in some year in the future. It will grow in a small Guatemalan village called …

Guatemala: Day 3

Oh noes, I've fallen a day behind in my updates! You wanna know why? Because I fell asleep early last night. I have no logical reason for this; I spent most of yesterday sitting in a car driving to and then from aset of Mayan ruins, but somehow I got back to David and Jenn's …

Guatemala: Day 2

I need you all to understand that right now, I'm trying to type this entry while a cat wearing a dragon costume stalks the innocent mug of water by my elbow. Frida Katlo, resident feline, has the super-cat ability to leap 8 feet from the garden to land, spread-eagled, on the screen door behind which …

Guatemala: Day 1

Greetings, one and all, from Antigua! I arrived here yesterday after a very, very long journey from the Boston area. I don't think it was actually as long as my body thought it was, but my travels began at 3:30am, and it is a well-established fact that any adventure that starts before the local coffee …