It’s with profound heartache that I must announce that my father, Alfred Clement Bell, died last Wednesday afternoon…
Finally, we come to the last and longest season of the Christian year – Ordinary Time.
Even though most of us think of heaven and earth as distinct places, we also believe there can be “thin places” where the two are very close, overlapping even.
Easy, triumphant declarations like “Jesus is the Reason for the Season!” or campaigns to “Keep Christ In Christmas” will not do. We are invited to much more than that. We are encouraged to attend deeply to the pulse of this season, to enter into it quietly, penitently, patiently and expectantly, allowing it to penetrate and…
While modernity mostly conceives of success as the art of getting ahead, an archaic understanding would think of it as the art of staying closely behind. In this light, the more interesting questions isn’t how does one succeed, but rather who does one succeed. To echo Robert Frost, the distinction can make all the difference.
What we often don’t fully appreciate is that Jesus’ baptism not only reveals his divinity, but from this symbolic gesture of an individual death arises the revelation of God’s tri-unity. From here, then, we begin to apprehend the significance of the death of our own egocentric individuality, and resurrection into the altrocentric com-unity that is…
Treaty people know from history The path of freedom teaches them this wisdom: Ironically, we’re only free to be When we’ve committed to another’s freedom
Could it be that Jesus taught us to pray “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” precisely because that has been God’s plan all along? His intent was not the earth’s destruction and our escape to an immaterial bliss, but rather the marriage of heaven and earth, of which Jesus is the…
The Feast of the Ascension of our Lord has traditionally been celebrated on a Thursday, the fortieth day after Easter.
Christians have a foundational story that for thousands of years has fashioned our social ethic towards vigorous compassion and social engagement in solidarity with marginalized and oppressed peoples…
From a young age, I was taught that the ascension of Jesus meant that Jesus was the first human to ascend to heaven, and that we, his followers, would one day go to be with him there.
In Ezekiel’s dream, the breath of God awakens and reconnects the bones of the fragmented selves, renews their flesh and returns to them their own life’s breath before placing them back on their own soil.
Perhaps our perennial instinct to share food, drink and story as a response to grief and loss points to a gospel mystery in which we are all caught up.
In the resurrection of Jesus, we perceive what could be considered the big bang of God’s new creation exploding, as it were, as a renewing, recreating power in the midst of the old…
I distinctly remember the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday as a strange day.
“Now is the time to loosen, cast away The useless weight of everything but love.” -Malcolm Guite
“Grace is revealed in suffering, power is displayed through weakness, glory is disguised in humiliation.”