It is a gift to be able to create. As human beings, we have been given the ability to imitate our Creator by exercising and developing our creativity. God creates from the beginning, bringing out of what is formless and void, giving it design, structure, function, and purpose. We create out of what God has made and entrusted to us, ordering our little worlds after the order, or logos, by which He made the heavens and the earth.
Read MoreThe recap of our Old Testament Lessons from Morning Prayer continues with the final chapters of 2 Samuel. But don’t worry, David’s story will continue next week in 1 Kings.
Read MoreWe continue our recap of our Morning Prayer lessons from 2 Samuel. This week features the sad tale of Tamar, the tragic response of Absalom, and the fecklessness of David.
Read MoreAh, here it comes, David’s Babyface to Heel turn. This is always a sad week for my wife, because it represents a turning point in David’s story as well as indicating that we are moving headlong towards the end of Trinity Season and rushing towards Advent and the end of the year. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our recap of 2 Samuel chapters 9-12.
Read MoreOur look at 1 and 2 Samuel continues this week with the end of one and the start of the other. That’s right, you get two weeks of recaps for the price of one! You may notice that recaps of chapters get shorter and shorter as it goes on. I assure you, dear reader, that this is merely a technique of good storytelling, allowing our narrative to build momentum and urgency, driving us to the end (and is not in any way an indication that I wrote this in a couple of hours).
Read MoreWhen I was eighteen, my home life and family of origin underwent a sudden change from which it never really recovered. I still remember the lurch of what I thought was permanent and untouchable suddenly shifting under my feet. Like Lewis, I felt afraid. I felt cut off, even when surrounded by people. I felt deaf to the words they were trying to say to make me feel better, and even when their words got through, part of me still wanted their kind words to just go away. Yet I was terrified of being alone. Starting to sound familiar?
Read MoreWe continue our recap of our reading of 1 Samuel from Morning Prayer this week. In this installment, David is in his wilderness years. As Bela Lugosi says in ‘Ed Wood’, “Home? I have no home. Hunted. Despised. Living like an animal!”
Read MoreWe continue our recap of 1 Samuel, which we’ve been reading during Morning Prayer. This week we are introduced to a hick from the sticks, David, son of Jesse. Slayer of lions, slinger of stones, shredder of lyres, and apparently not a chore to look at.
Read MorePreviously in 1 Samuel, chapters 1-9, we were introduced to Samuel, last of the Judges. The people began carping about having a king like all the grown up nations surrounding them, kind of like when I was a wee lad and everyone showed up after Christmas break with a brand new, diecast metal General Lee from ‘The Dukes of Hazard,’ so I started whining to my parents for one. Anyway, this week we continue our exploration of 1 Samuel with chapters 10-15, where we are introduced to Samuel’s pick for the crown, Saul.
Read MoreAh, summer… a time of barbeques, sandals, and mosquito bites. For those of us living into the church Kalendar (the ‘K’ makes it extra churchy), it is also the time when we renew our relationship with 1st and 2nd Samuel during the Daily Office of Morning Prayer. Here’s a brief recap of what happened this week.
Read MoreLast weekend, we celebrated the feast day of St. Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus said, in Matthew 16:18-9, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah … you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Before these prophetic words came true, though, St. Peter had to face Gethsemane.
Read MoreWe have considered what it means to make our artistic vocations, as Evelyn Underhill puts it, “an oblation from the first.” As we consider how to do this in our own lives, I want to put the example of a specific artist before you.
Read MoreWe’ve considered the necessity of self-death through Christ in the life of the Christian artist. What’s next? What is the point of this self-death? Where does it go? Does my story, my particular identity, matter at all in my artistic practice?
Read MoreToday, I wish to consider the self-death necessary to the vocation of the artist. This is an essential topic for creative people to consider. I suspect an unhealthy self-preoccupation haunts current dialogue around the question of what it means, and why it matters, to be an artist. Many contemporary creatives seem frequently, if not constantly, concerned with using their art to create or define themselves, and often get lauded for this work.
Read MoreIn our first morning prayer reading with Deuteronomy 34, we mark the end of the life of Moses. As we do every year in the Daily Office, this is a story that began in Lent 12 weeks ago, with Baby Moses, a basket and the Bulrushes in Exodus 2. Except for two breaks, we have followed the story of Moses and the Exodus through the Easter and Trinity seasons. To mark this ending, this morning I offer a eulogy for the great prophet Moses—one as I imagine Joshua might have given upon the death of his mentor and teacher.
Read MoreIn the first verses of Isaiah 40, God declares, “Comfort, yes, comfort My people! … Speak comfort to Jerusalem.” These first verses frame the chapter to follow as an extended meditation on comfort as God understands and offers it to his people.
Read MoreOne of the great questions in the Church’s understanding of Christ concerns the properties of His resurrected Body. From the time Jesus exits the tomb, there is something evidently different about His embodied life from how it existed prior to His Resurrection. The Evangelists take special care to demonstrate that Jesus continues to have a body, that His body is continuous in some ways with the body the disciples had known before the Passion; yet His body now possesses new properties that begin to reveal and oblige a new relationship that Christ will have with His disciples as He ascends to the Father and the Spirit comes upon them. For the final entry in our series on mystagogy, then, we turn to the sense of ‘touch’ and its place in our worship of the risen Lord.
Read MoreOnce, as a day fell into evening on the edge of the Salish Sea, I sat under a cold wind and watched sunlight burn pink over the horizon. A pale haze made the Olympic Range look ghostly. Five minutes into my solitary reflection, I was startled by movement—an enormous bald eagle, who had been resting on the rough asphalt of an old basketball court, stirred. I watched as it stepped a few paces forward and raised its wings, then flew over the field past a friend of mine, who was wending her way back to our camp cabin. The eagle alighted above her on an old barracks roof and proceeded to survey the scene.
Read MoreOne of my favorite aspects of icons is how they meet and include the viewer. When I look at an icon, I’m always reminded that these saints and stories are real, and that they happened, and of my part and place in the story of the Church. One of the ways icons meet the viewer is through symbols and structure. Let’s unpack an example of how icons meet us by using the image of the Ascension.
Read MoreI remember the first time I received Holy Communion in an Anglican Church. It was after a long season of participation in non-denominational churches, for which communion was infrequent, instrumental to the point of a sermon, and individualized as a private devotional response to the pious atmosphere of the day. This was different from my childhood experience of Sunday mornings in a traditional and conservative Methodist church, at which communion was a regular movement of the liturgy. As I went searching in early adulthood for those Wesleyan roots, I entered a beautiful a-frame church near my college and knew that I had come home.
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