So in my last blog, I revealed my first tattoo. This blog, I am revealing my second and also very much my last tattoo. People tell me that I’ll come to feel differently about it, but nope: I said what I said. This will do it, though I’m bracing myself for the few planned touch ups to this latest one. Tattoos remind my of my late mother, who, as we pulled in to a station to fill up the car, would say, “I hate getting gas, I love having gotten gas.” Cars need gas, though, and I don’t need another tattoo. But I did want/need this one. This delightful woman rests on my right arm: Mary sings ..read more

In a conversation about process theology with a Spent Dandelioner a spell back, it clicked that process holds to a God always active. This much, actually, I’d managed to grasp for some time, but I hadn’t really ever put it in contrast to more traditional theology, the theology that, short of Pentecost, is generally heard in the Church. The light went on when I found myself singing the table grace I love so much, and wow, can my family and can the Lutheran family sing this baby in harmony: Be present at our table, Lord! Be here and everywhere adored! These mercies bless and grant that we ..read more

When certain words come up in the alphabet, I bet Merrium-Webster’s editors draw straws, or play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets stuck defining it. I thought about that possibility again this morning when I got curious about how a dictionary would define “saint.” You can find their definition here, but the upshot is that every single sub-definition makes purity, perfection, deed-or-virtue-driven worthiness, and a most-certainly earned spot in heaven a pre-req for sainthood. Relatedly, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t many Lutherans on the Merrium-Webster editorial board. ~~~~~~ In t ..read more

Below is a reduxed, modified FB post I made a couple of weeks ago.  Given that tomorrow is Reformation Day, I’d like to share it more widely via this blog, but you are also welcome to visit that post (hyperlinked here) to see the conversation—and there was one!—generated there. ~~~~~ I know I’ve been a bit off grid lately—life has been awfully busy, mostly for wonderful and good reasons (a link to one of them below!). But publicly quiet though I may have been, privately or in smaller corners of my little world, I’ve been actively musing and in conversations about many a thing related ..read more

After a week in this heart-home, my husband and I just left Regensburg, Germany. This place, people, oh this place. Also known as “Ratisbona,” this ancient town, situated on the northern most point of the Danube, essentially preserved from destruction through two world wars, holds within its boundaries tender, breathtaking, complicated histories, certainly personally (both of my children were born there, my doctoral work was done there, and the accident which changed everything occurred there), and on cultural, political, and social terms as well. Marcus Aurelius, for example, meandered u ..read more

He is risen! With this good news, although death has a word, to be sure, it’s no longer the last one. Our perception of everything, therefore, has shifted: ~our concepts of what ought to be treasured, or abandoned, or feared; ~our definitions of power, or status, or the beautiful; ~our trust from our worthiness, to God’s; ~our distrust that we are worthy, to God’s resounding declaration that indeed, we are; ~the way we care for the earth, the creatures within it, ourselves, our enemies; ~whether we bide our time or steward it to love the world as God so ..read more

Anyone who has read or heard my musings on Holy Saturday knows that I embrace it as the most honest day of the Church. On this day, everything touches everything. The devastating truth of Good Friday is fundamentally interlaced with the life-effusive truth of Easter. You can’t, it turns out, live permanently in either day, because each day would eclipse the truth of the other, and that’s no way to live. For that matter, there is no way to live if firmly, exclusively anchored in either day. Left alone, see, each day is a false rendering of life. But on this day, and if we’re honest, o ..read more

Holy Thursday hot take: It’s called ‘Maundy Thursday’. I.e., ‘Commandment Thursday’. Not ‘Suggestion Thursday’. That’s it. That’s the blog. 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 and John 13:1-17, 31b-35       ..read more

God said to Moses, “Remove your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When our first year seminary Old Testament class got to this verse, Exodus 3:5, our professor didn’t pass by it quickly. It’s a rare command in the First Testament, so the exact point of it in the tradition of Moses remains unclear.  Certainly in other cultures the gesture is a sign of reverence: any number of religious customs expect worshippers to remove their shoes before entering a sacred space. Even without heaps of internal reference to the practice, then, most schol ..read more