Originally published in 2025 here.

I recently touched a bug. And someone else’s car. Both were unexpected and unusual.

The insect was a leaf-looking grasshopper that was drowning in one of the tree-watering troughs I was filling. I scooped it out and dropped it down. Our skin-to-skin contact was limited but it was still big progress for me. Usually I am too heebie-jeebied.

The other was an SUV that I found myself behind in town. As I pulled up behind it on my way to the grocery store, I saw that someone had, in large bubble letters, written the n-word in the dirt on the back window.

My mouth fell open. Like actually dropped.

I decided to follow the car and soon saw it was headed to the same store as me. I parked a couple of spots away and watched to see who would get out. It was two young White people. They did not go around the backside of their car so I don’t know if they saw what was written.

I got out of my own car and, as I walked by theirs, I quickly ran my hand over the dust.

I was shaky.

First, I don’t usually mess with other people's property and there were a lot of people around who could have seen me do it.
Second, I couldn’t understand why that word would be on that car. Was someone calling the White people who drove it the n-word? Or had the drivers put it there as a message to people who saw it?
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And thirdly, what the hell?

I know, obviously, that racism is endemic in the United States. It is the core value on which our nation was founded (see Manifest Destiny, the Indian Wars, and chattel slavery). And I know that MAGA has given back the permission to be overtly racist, which the previous decades had made slightly less acceptable.

And I knew that I couldn’t let that word just drive around town.

Listen (I say to myself), this climate collapse and murderous rise consuming our days needs me to touch a whole lot of things I never would have before. While I look for the professional, official, and most familiarly effective ways to do that, bugs and racists present me with others.
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May I never be afraid to get my hands dirty.

Originally published in 2025 here.

I need to talk about this corn.

It is growing in the field next to my own. The land is owned by one neighbor and farmed by another. Has been for years.

And it upsets me in a way I have never experienced before.

It looks healthy, right? Pretty good considering how very hot and very dry it has been here in downstate Illinois.

And considering the soil. Look at it. I don’t know if you can really tell in the photo, but it is grey. It is grey and nothing grows in it but corn. Not any corn, but this particular brand of corn developed to survive the “applications” (pesticide sprays) that kill everything else.

In her own piece on corn, biologist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that

Conceiving of plants and land as objects, not subjects—as things instead of beings—provides the moral distance that enables exploitation….(it) is slavery. Standing alone in straight lines in poisoned fields, forced to carry genes not their own, today sacred maize is enslaved to an industrial purpose: feeding cars and factories.

Agreed. Yes. YES!

And!

Death!

All I see is death. Death is, of course, a consequence of objectification and enslavement. It is a given.
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But this is like a living death. It is watching a forced laugh, feigned hilarity, that high nervous energy when punishment is possible. It is like the White supremacy of our nation: Some will be allowed to grow at the expense of all others. ALL others.

I recently took a class on healing spiritual hurt. I can pretty easily name the ways my spirit has been hurt by religion: Lon Mabon, Fred Phelps, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America before it decided queer people are equal people, the United Church of Christ as it nationally professes affirmation but locally falls far short. And then there are the spiritual injuries related to being a female pastor: lesser compensation, discussion of my voice, dick jokes from a male clergy supervisor.

But this corn is next-level injury. It is existential. As poet Wendell Berry wrote,

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

And it makes me weep with a powerlessness I never felt from the threats and wounds of church.

As a spiritual director/companion, part of my work is to bear witness to whatever my clients present. I need to talk about this corn not because I think it will heal my spiritual hurt but because I need witness to that hurt. And not mine only, but that of the corn itself, all of the creatures of the soil that, themselves, have been lost but that I have not forgotten.
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In this dying light of humanity—so bright today in the unending heat we could have prevented—may we finally learn to see and speak the languages of the beings that have until now sustained us.

I am nuts about nature. Getting out-of-doors is central to my spirituality.
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I find that somewhat cringey to write.

I have often been put off by people who profess a nature spirituality. Too often it felt like they put on a mask or “spiritual” demeanor. Kind of woo-woo, you know? (Not that I don’t have plenty of woo-woo of my own.)

What I mean is that, for myself, without being outside, my spirit shrivels. My spirit hungers and thirsts for trees and air and deer poop. Fashion and style pioneer Andre Leon Talley once said his eyes were starved for beauty; so does my spirit.

This is relatively new for me. Although I grew up skiing and camping and hiking in the Pacfic Northwest, those trips were more irregular than not. Plus I was kind of a lost kid and not able to root my being. Then, while on sabbatical from my church work, I took a course with Confluence Formation’s Aram Mitchell , Spiritual Formation in the Wild.

Bam! I was hooked. I was entangled. I learned I was entangled.

Three months later I left parish ministry altogether.

Six months later I began the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy’s training to be a forest therapy guide.

Previously I wrote about my experience of “call.” Though there was an element of being drawn out of human institutions, what I experience now is a welcome. Certainly I can get myself injured clambering over a nurse log or stung by a wasp or saddened by a dead deer. Wilderness isn’t any safer than church, I just have a lot more respect for its risks. I may get eat up by mosquitos but they are just trying to survive – church members who make stinging comments about my body are not.
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This morning when I walked the dogs I had a stiff wind right into my face. I was irritated for a full 20 minutes, until we turned back. In that instant I felt so glad to have made it to another morning. I didn’t have any epiphanic encounters, simply felt alive. And in this world that is both dying and that wants so many people dead, that is the most powerful spiritual practice of all.

I don’t remember the first time I learned the concept of ministerial call. It was probably in my childhood. I attended church on Sundays with my family and went to a parochial school with chapel during the week. Knowing my mom, who was good at being in charge of things and had been a hardcore churchgoer since her teens, she was probably on a “call committee” for new pastors at our church.

In what are known as “mainline” Protestant (which I pronounce protest-ant as a reminder of our collective call to protest), call processes involve a lot of paperwork and middlemen (yes, generally men) and interviews. For the branch of the Christian family tree that ordained me, I could create a profile within three months of graduating for seminary, complete with faith statements and personal details. I also went through an ordination process that involved papers and interviews and open events for the church public. (At the last I was asked how I felt about only ordained clergy being allowed to preside over Holy Communion. I said something like, “You mean how do I feel about the guild retaining power?”) Whole congregations vote on whether to hire the pastor, usually with them in the other room, and then negotiations for pay and benefits package begin.
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But my personal experience of call began during a time of drunkenness, loss, and confusion. And no one was involved but me. And my mom, inevitably.

​I was in a doctoral program on the sociology of scientific knowledge. I’d earned a Master’s, writing a paper on sick infants in NICUs and how they have agency. But I was stalled. I didn’t have the right doctoral committee, I didn’t know how to advocate for myself, and I was drinking a lot. My girlfriend and I were broken up again. I had no sense of self but I did have a lot of shame.
Surprisingly, I opened up to my mom about leaving the doctoral program. Surprising because I didn’t understand that to be anything other than a failure. She asked lightheartedly what I would do instead. Without though, similar to the Communion moment, I said, “I’ll become a nurse or a pastor.”

The first made sense. Mom was a nurse, two of my three aunts were nurses, nursing was a big topic in my family.

But pastor? I hadn’t been in worship in, oh, a dozen years. And I had lived through the first wave of Christian hate laws against us queers.

Over time this became a story I shared to prove myself to humans and their institutions: Yes! I, a woman, a gay, heard a big “get over here” from God! I know – shocking! But true!

In spite of that, once I scape away the corrupting barnacles of processes and papers, that remains one of my most sacred moments. In the Christian testament Jesus says that wherever two of more people gathered in his name, God is there. Although I’m confident there is no place the divine is not, in that moment it took the one person to ask the question that would let sacredness come in – come into the conversation, come into my awareness.

However churches hire pastors, the call to serve all comes to us all. Some of us just need partners to hear it.