vocation

  • Essential

    Essential

    In this time of crisis, we’re being stripped of quite a lot.  Roles, practices, relational habits and interaction, labels, even jobs or our health.  In addition, the way we practice our faith has completely changed.  Within my own church tradition, Catholics are being told we can confess our sins directly to God without a priest…

  • Normal

    Normal

    “I just can’t wait until this is all over and things can go back to normal.” I felt the fatigue and worry in my friend’s voice as she spoke these words, and I feel it, too.  I want to see my preschool music students face-to-face, want to gather with my friends and family.  I want…

  • Real

    Real

    I remember one morning from a few years ago.  It was very early, before the sun was even up, and I was driving my high school daughter to a waiting bus for her Washington DC class trip. I hugged her and watched the bus pull away, and on the way home, saw the sun was…

  • Four Words

    Four Words

    One of my favorite authors featured a short video on her Instagram last week and I cannot stop thinking about it.  In an interview, Kate Bowler speaks about her initial steps into the bewildering and scary journey of stage four cancer and she highlights an interaction with one of her nurses, Meg.  At the time,…

  • Cradle

    Cradle

    I’m a Catholic music minister, and I’m wearing gray as I stand at the front of the church and sing the opening notes of the entrance song.  A gentleman from the funeral home leads pallbearers with the casket down the aisle, and following them are a group of tearful mourners, wearing black and clinging to…

  • Walk – 2020

    Walk – 2020

    For the past several years on New Year’s Eve, our sweet hosts have pulled out a sheet of cardboard on which everyone writes their goals for the year ahead in permanent sharpie.  One year I wrote that I would find our dog, Bailey, and I did. Another year I wrote that I would run a…

  • Gravity

    Gravity

    In April of 1970, a team of engineers, astronauts, and support personnel put the finishing touches on the Apollo XIII mission.  Their aim was to be the third crew to land on the moon, but the lunar landing was aborted when, two days into the mission, an oxygen tank failed due to the ignition of…

  • Wheel

    Wheel

    I used to think that God worked in details, orchestrating events and people in time like a tapestry. Then I didn’t believe it.  Then for a long time, I hoped it was true. Yesterday, God showed off in a hatful of ways about the veracity of that belief: even if we can’t always see it, God is…

  • Unfold

    Unfold

    I’ll just say it: like so many of you who came before, I’m now obsessed with The Great British Baking Show.  I didn’t think I’d like it because I’m much more cook than baker. I aim toward flavor, texture and contrast and away from precision, but there’s something about the tone of the show, the…

  • Breath

    Breath

    As I settled on my yoga mat before class, the room echoed the static dissonance in my head. One classmate had just moved her only child into college and was trying to make sense of her own new landscape, another had a friend suffering deeply the loss of two grandchildren and was facing the reality…