Holy Holy Holy Week
This year Holy Week and Easter overlap with the Jewish Passover and Muslim month of Ramadan. Because Ramadan is on the lunar calendar this is rare. This means about 4.3 billion of the earth’s nearly 8 billion people, well over half, are currently within a sacred time. On Monday Congregation…
The Myth of Return, and Grief
The possibility of return holds a powerful grip on the human psyche and in our mythology (by which I mean foundational stories we tell about ourselves). The two most prominent biblical examples of return I can think of involve The Garden of Eden and Jerusalem. The first portrays a pristine…
Name tags +
These last couple weeks we’ve been wearing name tags during in-person worship services. It’s good to remind each other who we are, or at least what our parents named us. After living most of my life as the only Joel in the room, I now enjoy being one of several…
Turning our attention
We live, as some have observed, in an attention economy. Attention, like time, is a limited resource. Because where we direct our attention impacts what we buy, getting and keeping our attention is a key strategy for those with something to sell. Attention is also a spiritual resource. It is…
Ukraine and Mennonites, war and peace
In the late 1700s the Russian leader Catherine the Great issued a decree inviting Europeans to come settle the newly conquered lands of the Russian Empire in present day Ukraine. German speaking Mennonites answered the call. They had previously fled persecution in the Netherlands and viewed this as an opportunity…
Sanctuary updates: Edith, Pilar, pictures
Tomorrow, February 18, is the one-year anniversary of Edith leaving sanctuary. She lived in our church building for 40 months to avoid deportation. She has been living with her family in Columbus and now has a work permit. Last week a group of us accompanied Edith to an ICE…
Seeing with love
A lot of us spend a good amount of time and energy trying to change the world we see for the better. A recent collection of photos by Columbus photographer Ben Willis called The Home We Know is a good reminder that changing how we see is also vital. The…
Gratitude for Thich Nhat Hanh
In 2002 I was newly married, doing Mennonite Voluntary Service in St. Louis with Abbie, and in the middle stages of theological deconstruction. The collection of beliefs that had guided my youth and early young adulthood no longer made sense. There was no clear indication much of anything made sense. …
Altruistic coping
A recent essay in The Atlantic by Stanford professor of psychology Jamil Zaki highlights my growing unease with the cultural direction self-care has taken. It’s titled “’Self-care’ Isn’t the Fix for Late-Pandemic Malaise.” Zaki upholds the importance of self-care which he defines as “anything pursued for the sake of one’s…
A Christmas prayer
For each of the four births Abbie and I experienced together, including our stillborn daughter Belle, everything else faded into the background for a precious and brief time. During those hours and days, it was unquestionably clear what mattered most. We had a vital role to play, but we were…
