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Originally published by The BTS Center here.  Myrtle Beach, SC, was a segregated town in the early 1900s. In town was Charlie’s Place: a Black-owned club for Black people in a town where African Americans were not allowed in the ocean for fear of tainting it for the Whites.  Charlie’s Place: Music, Mystery, & Civil Rights In a podcast by the same name, Charlie’s Place, we learn that it also welcomed White people. Host Rhym Ruissé names how art in the form of music “was showing the truth, showing how ridiculous and evil those barriers were.” Years ago, I thought about applying to an art school to study ceramics. I decided not to out of fear of my parents’ reaction and because I had not won my high school’s ceramics prize. I let others and my projections onto others stop me. I don’t believe this happens with true artists. Be it in obscurity or in front of Art Basel and Grammy audiences, artists seem moved to create sound, textures, textiles, images, and compositions with a compulsion to create and speak that cannot be so quickly stopped. I went on to study literature, sociology, and divinity. In literature, I relished the written word, the process of comparing and contrasting themes in fiction, encountering how peoples from different times and geographies understood death and freedom. In sociology, I found language for the world I witnessed: the institutional oppression of queer people through law; the interpersonal oppression of women and children through sexual violence; the power of professions to categorize and claim authority over whole populations. And in divinity, I met the artist’s companions: prophets. I grew up pretty heavily churched, but I would not say the role of prophecy or the work of prophets was ever explained. I just knew prophets were important, and I was supposed to believe Jesus was the best one, and that people who happened to be born in cultures that did not gather around Jesus were outside of holy favor. The prophets I met in seminary, though, often said the same about those who upheld that exclusionary judgment. I also learned that prophets do not necessarily prophesy like a seer or fortune teller. Rather, the dreams of prophets and the truth they tell about our current condition can chart a way out of the no-way of oppression. And they are compelled to do so; they are (except for Jonah the runaway) unrelenting and unflinching voice boxes for the pain of creation and Creator. We may love when a prophet like Amos proclaims justice like a river and righteousness like a never-failing stream; but do we listen when his words are not for our comfort but for our direction?  Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi may have been the highest selling painting to date, but does the subject’s message inspire others to spend the same $450,300,000 on the ones the world-healer adored? With both art and prophets we have to make a choice: to look and to listen or to turn away and decry. Art and prophets also point to the choices we have.  Kara Walker, photograph: Ari Marcopoulos Kara Walker Black American multimedia visual artist, professor In black and white, Walker tells the truth about Black and White. The first time I saw her silhouette installations, I was pinned in place. Part of my response was to the medium. I grew up in a house with a silhouette of my sister’s profile on the wall—an old-fashioned, homey piece. But the bulk of my emotional movement and physical stillness was in response to the content. Through nearly or fully life-sized outlines, with clarity, sarcasm, humor, and horror, Walker depicts American chattel slavery and the debasement of people of African origin and roots. Consider:
Parts remind me of Francisco de Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son and the myth it illustrates: individuals (or a nation) consuming their own children out of the fear of losing power. Today as White people express shock at how depraved a government can be, how quickly the rule of law and social norms have collapsed, Walker’s work illustrates how Black and African American people have always know this to be the rule, not the exception. Just as in the Hebrew Bible book of Isaiah, when the people wonder how God could let God’s own city fall, the prophet turns their attention back to themselves: The effect is your own cause. And a survivable future will not likely come from the hearts and hands of those who have done the harm.  Cannupa Hanska Luger, photograph by Shayla Blatchford (Diné), 2025 Cannupa Hanska Luger Lakota, Enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold, multimedia visual artist and writer One of Luger’s major ongoing projects is called Future Ancestral Technologies. In it, Luger often uses stereotypes of Indigenous people, as well as myth, science fiction, old technologies, and the trash of capitalism to create beings (and billboards) that proclaim, “We Survive You.” This is not art made for me or for the White Western billionaire class to collect and store as investment, for ego. Luger’s art is for survivors of machines of hate and disregard: a perspective that cannot be found among the owner class but that speaks the language of the owned into a new reality. Consider: People who have already survived ecological devastation, cultural decimation, and the highest rates of poverty in this colonial state know something about survival that I cannot. Fortunately, blessedly, any of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, as Jesus liked to say, can learn from artists and prophets. Back to Jonah, the runaway. Jonah’s story is not only about surviving being swallowed by a big fish. It’s also about his initial refusal to prophecy (prophets are not a kind apart but regular people who choose to participate) and the big fit he pitches when God so easily accepted those heathen Ninevites into the holy fold. Jonah did not want to hear or see either. I often feel I cannot bear to hear or see the realities of climate change. I know that the real threat to oceans, what lives in them, and those who make a living from them is White Western capitalism, not Black people at South Carolina beaches. Racism and my role in it, as well as homophobia and poverty, have been where I learn and work. But the death of Lonesome George, the last of the giant Pinta Island tortoises, and the pending collapse of our food system have felt like more than my body can hold. Maybe you can relate. Through encounters with the more-than-human world, invitations from trees and bees, I now track what climate change has wrought on my little part of southeast Illinois. I now sit weekly in companionship with others who are navigating climate grief. And I invite you to do the same with me, Rev. Ash Temin, and the notions of prophetic tasks and imagination as formulated by Walter Brueggemann and with poetry collected by Ada Limón. Next week, we will begin to play with the art of poets and the work of prophets. We will also receive from their imaginations possible futures. And as we hear the ugly truth of what our species has done to our one-and-only planet, we will bring into dialogue what prophets and poets have asked people to do through every age: grieve, hope, be neighborly, walk into newness no matter how unfamiliar or scary. I resisted a call to artistry a long time ago, but I have always known the power of the arts to bring us together to move, to mourn, to meditate. So, I do not want to be like Jonah, all angry that things do not work out the way that makes me comfortable and affirms my specialness. I want to be like the Magdalene, who went to the places of deepest loss and pain but returned with a future complicated but not yet dead. How about you?  Poetry + The Prophetic Voice: A Book Study
5 Tuesdays • May 5 – June 9, 2026 4:00 – 5:30pm ET • Zoom • $55 Price includes registration for a virtual event with poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, comic artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito, and musician Aly Halpert. Scholarships are also available if finances are a barrier to your participation. Learn more or register here.
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Sign up on Substack to receive posts directly. During a staff meet at church once I asked my colleagues how they would feel if they were congregants on a Sunday morning and heard the story of Apollonius. The historical record of 15–100 CE describes Apollonius of Tyana as a famous Roman teacher and leader. He tried to reform Roman worship practices, he resurrected a child in an upper room, cast out demons, and lived very simply. Eventually Roman authorities arrested Apollonius. During his trial, Apollonius ascended in a cloud. He then taught from the heavens. In other words, a contemporary of Jesus (if he was an historical figure) had a story with a striking number of similarities with the story of Jesus. The staff was quiet until one person said, “I wouldn’t want to go to that church.” In other words, please do not tell stories that undermine the primacy and specialness of Christ, do not weaken the foundation on which we lay grasping.  I understood that. I understood quickly in parish ministry how many people needed church, particularly worship, to be the one part of life that does not change. This contrasted with my understanding of communal faith life as being one in which we practiced change and deepened our resilience in the face of change. But I did not understand wanting a god who is so narrow and, frankly, boring. Do people really want a divinity who is so uncreative and non-creating that they could only come up with one worldly intervention and then would be petulant if everyone did not understand that intervention in the exact same way? Not even the committee that decided on which of the many gospels that became canon felt that way: God moves differently across Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Christian tradition itself tells us that we cannot have one testament to the divine.  In a few weeks I’ll be co-teaching a class on the prophetic imagination and poetry, with Rev. Ash Temin at The BTS Center. It will be online and have a special event with real, live poets. Details here.
Even though I am currently outside of church, I still love the Bible. I know it is full of horrors and cruelty, just like humanity ourselves. For me, that is an invitation to learn not about holy absolutes but human choices. I did decide to preach on Apollonius, right at the end of an Easter season—after Jesus’s own resurrection and ascension story. I suggested that the presence of Apollonius’s stories helps us to stay nimble and continue to refine again and again what we know of the holy, to gain clarity about the nature of the divine. Both stories describe divine power as supernatural, as capable of bending or ignoring the laws of land and physics as we know them. Sure, Jesus looked like a regular right-on community-oriented guy. But wait, no, that capacity came from something more than simple human will. Jesus was special, tapped into specialness. So the walking, talking, teaching, feeding, resting, and resisting were special, too. The Jesus story asks us to do counter-cultural and counterintuitive things: kindness to strangers and generosity of purse. They assert that humans need the power of God, a power of that magnitude, to help us transcend the power mongering and machinations of human society. The cruelties of this day, be they at home or abroad, in nature preserves or cities, certainly cry out for a powerful response. But it won’t be God, however interestingly and specifically any of us have defined that word. It will be from those who have the capacity to imagine a different outcome and a different way than the attention economy oligarchic hellscape we have allowed to emerge. Reference Valantasis, Richard, Bleyle, Douglas K., and Haugh, Dennis C. 2009. The Gospels and Christian Life in History and Practice. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Our older dog is stretched out on the grass. Black, struggling to cool down after walks, nothing will stop Maggie from baking in the sun and this is the first hot day of the year. It is too soon in the year for this heat but the planet doesn’t care about what we want, only what we have created. I am drawn to what it has created. The dirt and the grass next to my dog invites lounging and looking up, ticks be damned. So I lay down next to Maggie, not too close, but able to rest my hand on her side. I put my straw hat on my face, bright light still coming through the holes. At first my knees are up because my feet are on the ground, but then I stretch my legs out. My right backside kind of roaches up like part of me is trying to slide down a hill. This grass is not on that kind of hill. Before I can adjust, the other dog, Jealousy (not her real name, but her emotion in the moment), squeezes between me and her elder. She licks my hat, she licks my chest, she pants and wiggles with the need for reassurance.  Maggie leaves with a moan. She just wanted some time to herself. Jealously presses against me. As my limbs relax and my eyes close, I am jealous, too. Jealous of the child me who did not know how good the evergreens and rain and slugs around her were. Jealous of my wife as a child, hiking and birdwatching and wonder-wandering before the first hole in the ozone was identified.  I am also grateful. I am also joyful. Unlike the women being assaulted in ICE facilities, I get to lay on the ground. Unlike the children in Iran, I get to see a safe sky. Unlike the people of Cuba, I can take five minutes off from regime-raging. A congregant, raised on Nebraska prairie and a graduate of a one-room schoolhouse and devoted caregiver of a gone-too-soon spouse, once asked as part of a relationship-building effort on a leadership team, if joy and happiness are the same thing. We all agreed they are not. Happiness is fleeting but joy can exist alongside grief. Joy exists not in spite of, not to spite, grief, but as its own presence and present.  My back is starting to hurt. I think my ankles might be burning. Sitting back up is surprisingly awkward and heavy. I do not have any insects on me that I can see. I am grateful for this time that I got to just be.  Also published here. I have never been a scriptural literalist. I was a comp lit major and I receive the Hebrew and Christian stories, myths, poems, hymns, and poems as expressions of truths rather than facts. As one of my seminary profs would say, you have to break a lot to make it all fit together. As a gay woman, I have certainly seen that play out both ideologically and materially. So many people have died because others could not handle the invitations offered by the contradictions inherent in the collection.  Anyway, when I was teaching the Christian testament to churchgoers, I would point out that the full gospel titles are The Good News of Jesus Christ According to (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). And, the existence of multiple versions of good news suggests room for even more, even a request for more. I would ask people what their lived good news of encountering Jesus would be. Or, more in line with the traditioning process of the canonical gospels, wherein the books were not written by the named individuals but their whole communities, what would the good news of our community be?  Today I received some Good News of Creation According to the Soil. The crawdads are digging their way back to the surface from under the grass. Earth-moving land lobsters are as imaginative and wild as the deranged goat in Revelations, at least to me. And despite being driven over a bunch and being in iffy soil with no tending, the bulbs I planted two years ago are also reaching out to the sun and air. Just as the Biblical texts encompass times of ecological collapse and harrowing human cruelty, yet still says we have reason for and tools to build hope, these more-than-human neighbors on the land I steward point toward life even as humanity rains down military death and prefers rivers of data to that of clean water.  Good news does not mean rescue or fix or resolution. Nothing in the Bible promises human experience without pain or a divorce from reality. It requires an honest assessment of our material realities. In Jesus’s time that was Roman imperialism, in ours it is Trumpian fascism. And then it asks us to acknowledge what we already know: In order to all survive, we have to be modest in our wants, generous in our giving, and respectful of others’ business, and go into the wilderness to make sure ours are not the only voices we hear. When the prophets in scripture share their good news, their audience is other humans. They speak the language of the people to the people and for the people, even if the people don’t want to hear any part of their message. I do not know what the crawdads or bulbs are saying. I do not think they are saying it to me; they have much nearer conversation partners in the crumb of soil and movement of worms. The good news of the soil around my home is that I am not the main character and there are some parts of the story being told on this planet that I am not meant to make fit. I am simply grateful to know that they are there, that they are alive, and I am lucky enough to be alive with them.  Originally published 2/25/26 here. A lot of my work as a gay lady priest was translation—of old, patriarchal, coopted by White Christian imperialist, scripture and tradition—back into (forward into) a living, vital vision. I was helped by attending a seminary that had a strong African American tradition and presence, a growing Korean-born student body, and a rabbi on faculty. I told her (Rabbi Dr. Rachel Mikva) that learning from her was like learning I had been lied to all of my Christian life. And I didn’t want to perpetuate those lies once I was in the pulpit.  My aunties gave me that stole. It was made by gay Episcopalians. One of the stories I preached about annually was that of Jesus going from the human-built environment and into a wilderness, just as the self-liberating slaves and Moses and then Elijah did before him. Wilderness in the Bible is where all of the good stuff happens because out on the land we cannot rely on our false narratives of how we have made the world; we are confronted by the raw truth of our vulnerability and interdependence. In this particular wilderness story Jesus is confronted with three opportunities to betray his faith and commitments. Those opportunities, framed as temptations, are given by what Christian translations of the word call Satan. So, capital S devil guy. Going deeper into our inherited/stolen Hebrew tradition, a better understanding is hasatan, a kind of function or role in the cosmos rather than a full character. In order to really distance the word from Christian imagination, I started calling that character in the story “the forces of nonbeing.” The forces of nonbeing tried to persuade Jesus to ignore the laws of physics, claim a regal role, and betray the good neighbor promises of the ten invitations. Obviously, those forces of nonbeing are alive and well in houses of power and the internet to this day. But will they survive what they have set in motion: The end of a planet habitable for humans?  My dad (R) and his dad in a desert east of Los Angeles in the 1960s. I doubt there is still so much plant life now. Not with all of the drought and aquifer depletion. In a book I am studying with The BTS Center, Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You (Pilgrim Press, 2022), author Daniel Cooperrider encourages the reader to bring the more-than-human world back into Christian awareness of the divine. He makes a strong case about early Christian thinkers insisting that there is no Word/word separate from caterpillar and wind. But for all the reasons that institutions like to control, the Roman and Protestant traditions benefited from our alienation from soil and snow and our own mammalian reality. And now the forces of nonbeing may successfully end our being altogether. Jesus modeled staying true to core values when confronted with ends. I think my work is a little different: I need to encounter our shared core. I need to learn to read the fields and voles with as much attention and passion as I once did the written Word. I need to become converted by the quails that I hear but never see and the masses of cabbage white butterflies clinging to the narrow strips of undeveloped land around my neighborhood farms each summer. I need to begin to translate the depth and breadth of life around me into the choices I make with my small allotment of days and years.  Maggie Bixby in Iowa with a tree felled by the neighbor beavers on our land. In the coming months I will get to co-teach a class with The BTS Center about poetry and prophecy. I think we are going to talk about the prophetic imagination and the three urgent prophetic tasks, per Walter Brueggemann: naming reality, expressing grief, and embracing hope (and not the sunshine denial kind). We will not, as I always say to participants in my group spiritual companioning around climate change, solve climate collapse. I do believe, though, we will take one more step away from the systems and institutions that profit from lies and ecological disconnect. I believe we will take one more step toward where the good stuff happens, a rewilding of our lives and our living.  Walking the Wild Edges
Group Spiritual Accompaniment for Challenging Times March–October 2026 • Various days and times available • Online We live in and love a broken and beautiful world, and we are not meant to carry that love alone. We find ourselves at the edges of systems—religious, political, and ecological—that are beleaguered but could be lifegiving. Walking these wild edges, we find like-spirited seekers, and together we hold the big questions of vocation, calling, and journey. Learn more and register here: https://thebtscenter.org/wildedges-2026/ Originally published 2/17/26 here. I went to seminary, did a parish and a clinical internship, and spent 10 years in pulpits. But for all of that work and sincere investment, my study of and teaching about the Hebrew Bible and Christian testaments never had anything to do with salvation unless it is in the sense of the root word: a salve. It is a balm, for me at least, to read about other humans making a mad mess and the potential for holiness in the midst. And we are in a mad mess. America’s tyrannical cult of personality has once again made legal and brazen the worst in us. Ours does not feel like a united state but one splintered, angry, afraid, paranoid, and bloodied. Nothing new under the sun, I know. And yet these particular detention camps are new. This wave of legislation against trans people is, too. So what wisdom might we receive from this weird old collection of myth, poetry, and prose? What, for example, does the story of the prophet Elijah, as preserved for all these years, tell us about holiness in hard times? A raven will feed us.  We don’t know anything about Elijah when he shows up in the book of 1 Kings. He has no reels, no grid, no followers. All we know is that Elijah travelled from the outskirts of a nation to announce to the ruler the coming of a punishing drought. Then he leaves for the wilderness. In the wilderness Elijah has water from a creek, for a time. But he has to rely on a raven for food while waiting for creation’s next invitation. He is not girl-bossing or looksmaxxing or performing leadership. He is waiting, he has made himself wholly dependent on the more-than-human world. Later in the story there’s a widow who uses the last of her flour and oil to prepare what she thinks will be the final meal for her and her son and Elijah. Instead, because of her generosity, neither run out. This has echoes of Sarah cooking for strangers who are actually angels and the divorced woman at the well who becomes Jesus’ disciple and the widow who gave her last pennies in offering. We are accustomed to poor women showing us the way. It is common for holiness-hearers to point to how little we need in order to heal the world. But a raven? Ravens are shiny, big carrion-eaters. During the Exodus the people had little quails with their goofy head feathers to eat plus and manna from on high. Elijah gets a big, noisy, maybe even creepy bird delivering roadkill. So hope and survival in hard times is like waiting on vermin for dinner? No.  Elijah and Jesus and all of the prophets and all of the saints just wanted the kings and the priests and the people to remember the greatest commandment: love creation with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. Care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Set the table for friends and enemies alike. Everything else is commentary, anything else is a distraction. The divisions that are being so fully reinforced in this time are not the fault of our leaders. Unlike the people of Elijah’s time, we do not live in a monarchy or a fully-formed dictatorship. More than any group of people in human history, we have power. What we get is what we ask for–or what we allow. Whether Earth becomes as it is in heaven or as in a hell, is in all ways up to us. Us with the raven.  The raven is the surviving, scavenging sacred to which we are blind most of the time. The paucity of our imaginations leaves us describing divinity in human terms, but, truly, the divine is to us as a raven: watching and weird.
If we so choose, what could distinguish us from other do-gooders is our willingness, like Elijah, to receive that mysterious metaphysics. What we might allow to sustain us in the counter-cultural work of love is not a good and rational argument about the social consequences of social neglect but the shimmering deep dark tehom of Genesis that agreed to partner with holy light, the divine well of life that we can never really see except as sunshine glints off black feathers. So we need not go mad, no matter the circumstances. We can be ravenous.[i] We can become as hungry as that widow to live for the kin-dom of creation rather than merely existing in the kingdoms humanity. We can daily choose for ourselves and our families how we will as a balm, how we will respond to this great wounding . As we move together through this wilderness, for there is nowhere else to go, remember that our own strength and our own success depends on our willingness to see the eye of the raven and accept the strange nourishment that is reciprocal life. + + + + [i] Thank you to The Rev. Debbie Blue and her book Consider the Birds for inspiration. Originally published 1/30/26 here. In one of the groups I host for spiritual companionship around climate change, I offered a series of questions from Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. They were designed to help us get in touch with our emotions about this changing planet so that we are not shut down by them. The following is part of my reflection. If you are interested in these kinds of conversations, see details at the end on the new group I am forming. The “age of overwhelm” is real but so is our breath, our bone, and our might. Eileen + + + + I did not know I was part of nature until about five years ago. Nature was outside, it was recreation, it was weather. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest during the spotted owl crisis, nature was a place for animals or a resource for capitalism. Living outside of Los Angeles during drought and fires, nature was trying to kill us. Living in the Midwest, nature is the property of big agribusiness and their corn for cattle in China. Until five years ago, nature was something to protect from me or for our food supply. And I need that food supply; I cannot survive outside of human systems. I do not know what I can eat, what seed I would need to grow would look like, and I have never killed or dressed an animal for food. Evolutionarily, I am so specialized in my skills and existence that I cannot depend on the natural world for survival without the mediation of western capitalist systems. Nature has been a picture, not a place.  And a small minority of other humans benefitted from that disconnect: gas and oil and row croppers. Salmon and bees and I all paid a price. Which I knew. I came up in the early days of the recycling movement, during Hanford Nuclear’s pollution of my watershed, before Al Gore’s warnings. And it terrified me. My feeling of overwhelm shaped my lack of engagement for a long time. It was too big so I checked out. I told myself that racism was a more manageable problem to address—classic White lady hubris. Then I got to move to an acreage. I was outside more than ever, walking the dogs in all weather but also learning from my wife how to steward the land. I took a friend’s class on ecospirituality and learned about forest therapy and my imagination came alive. I received invitations to sit with the outdoors, to be of the outdoors. I learned to remove ticks without a glove and pull deer bones from the mouths of my dogs. I learned that just as I am seeing the trees and the birds and the deer and the alfalfa butterflies, they are seeing me. So I have transitioned from living in one narrative about nature to another. I have at times felt angry at the first for not having the second sooner. But then I rejoice that I did, that I heard the call. Sometimes my feelings get hijacked and I have to protect them so I can function without fear, with love and hope and gratitude. I do have the capacity to learn and I did see an owl last night. I am not alone. I have partners who are adapting and still present. Still here and moving and birthing. There will be life after us and a new version of us. The feelings I need to keep tending to all of my world—my neighbors terrorized by ICE, my neighbors needing the feeders refilled—are peace, joy, gratitude. I left one of my jade plants, below, facing in one direction for so long that it became very lopsided and started to tip over in its pot. But, just as it is now becoming more balanced through a slight turn, so am I.  + + + + +
Walking the Wild Edges Group Spiritual Accompaniment for Challenging Times March–October 2026 • Various days and times available • Online We live in and love a broken and beautiful world, and we are not meant to carry that love alone. We find ourselves at the edges of systems—religious, political, and ecological—that are beleaguered but could be lifegiving. Walking these wild edges, we find like-spirited seekers, and together we hold the big questions of vocation, calling, and journey. Learn more and register here: https://thebtscenter.org/wildedges-2026/ Originally published 1/26/26 here. Hello, fellow seekers, mourners, and fighters. It was unseasonably warm and now it is desperately cold. And in some cities, horrendously ICE-y.  Climate change offers us a lesson in impermanence. It also provides an opportunity to learn who we are, how we want to learn, and where we might best use the energy we must steward in order to endure these fascistic, violent times. We cannot solve all of the problems on our own but in conversation with the more-than-human world we might access the imagination we need to work together. If this sounds interesting to you, I will have another small companioning group starting in March (via Zoom) through The BTS Center: We live in and love a broken and beautiful world, and we are not meant to carry that love alone. We find ourselves at the edges of systems—religious, political, and ecological—that are beleaguered but could be lifegiving. Walking these wild edges, we find like-spirited seekers, and together we hold the big questions of vocation, calling, and journey. Learn more and register here: https://thebtscenter.org/wildedges-2026/ I will also be co-teaching a class on poetry and the Biblical prophets but that is still in the works. Thank you for all that each of you are doing to feed and nurture the great web of all life so that all may live.  Recent reading:
A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet by Sarah Jaquette Ray The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis Palaver by Bryan Washington Big Chief by Jon Hickey The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel Broken Fields by Marcie R. Rendon Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley Should “Unearthed” be italicized? Queering Contemplation by Cassidy Hall Originally published 8/28/25 here. I wish I had been told the truth. The truth that we are one among many but unique in our need to resist our own impulses. Our ability to invent doesn't mean we have to invent. Our ability to bend earth and seed to our will doesn't mean we have to dominate them that way.  I would like a parable that instills in me conservation, preservation, and humility. Let the stars be the monarchs who travel so far with so little on their natural course.  Make them the gods of awe and us the servants of their nectar and protectors of their corridor. Let us make a festival of their weeds - butterfly and milk - and altars of the blazing stars on which they feast. In that story size does not matter, nor opposable thumbs and frontal lobes. No, it if beauty in antennae and wing, it is the cycle of borning and dying without hoarding or colonization.  Tell me a story where we give thanks at each meal not to a big daddy sky god but to soil and seed and the neighbors who we get to help feed. Tell me a story I can trust, one I can stake not only my life on but one that won't leave anyone staked through the heart. Tell me the truth and give me the tools to do right by it.  Originally published 8/1/25 here. I miss pastoring so much. I miss being in a storytelling community. I miss officiating rituals. I miss being an official, institutional voice against White supremacy and transphobia—and for transformative love.  I have missed it so much that I actually applied for another pastorate last winter. The congregation could barely afford a pastor and they weren’t open and affirming, but it was so nearby that I felt I had to try. And the process was like going back to a well I thought had dried up. Mythologist Martin Shaw describes how, during the pandemic, he stopped being able to tell stories out loud. When he resumed, he writes, The stories had fled. The stories had hurt feelings . . . They often require an elaborate and concerted courtship to return. My stories—my interpretations, my capacity—were still there, despite being unspoken for three years. I felt flooded. Flooded with connection. Flooded with love. Then the stories told me to stop. I was asked to preach on a passage where disciples do not recognize Jesus after his death. The question for the preacher and the reader is obvious: How are we not seeing love beyond death today? And so the story asked me to recognize who I was in conversation with: people who had not yet chosen to recognize my full humanity because I am queer. Damn, the church did it again. I withdrew from the process. I remembered that the call to ministry is not a call to an employment structure. Just like the movements of the divine are not constrained by any human-uttered doctrine. When I was testifying at the trial of the man who committed an antiqueer hate crime against my last church, the prosecutor asked me about how it made me feel. The judge was to my left, the jury to my right, and the accused right in front of me. Only four congregants had shown up for the trial. I could have felt very alone.  Instead, I was flooded again. I was filled, I was buoyed, I was gifted by presence not of our making or control.
I miss pastoring. I miss being in a storytelling community. I miss officiating rituals. I miss being an official, institutional voice against White supremacy and transphobia—and for transformative love. But I have never had to miss God. |