Barefoot & Preaching is a syndicated monthly column in The Catholic Register.
I (Still) Do! A Catholic Marriage Event
For years, I’ve been dreaming about hosting a marriage preparation and retreat event, and I’ve finally had the chance to make it happen. I would love to see you there. Please register by clicking here and filling out the form: https://forms.gle/S3xfK9ypU6dxBSqLA
For now, it’s happening in person. If I get ten couples interested, I would repeat it at a later date online. So if that appeals to you, please click on the Contact page and send me a note. We will see if we can make that happen.
Undone & Remade: Three Years & a Lifetime Ever After
The thing is, there is no happily ever after. There is only ever happy moments, gifts for receiving in the midst of whatever is right now. I am undone fairly often when the illusion of happily ever after falls apart – again.
Feelings, fault lines and faith – in the world and in my heart
My feelings come in waves, both fleeting and relentless. They find their way to the fault lines of life’s previous earthquakes.
Staying the course, or what third winter reveals about me…
Both physical courses and spiritual paths have things to teach us with every step. Any medal awarded at the end is only a symbol of the wins along the way. In this way, staying the course is its own reward.
When I need to remember there is beauty here…
I want to practice curating beauty, participating in its fleeting possibilities, being carried away by the impossibility of it.
Resistance as choosing death, not life
At different seasons in my life, I needed the protection Resistance offered because I wasn’t ready to face reality. She sheltered me from greater pain and gave me space and time to grow. Having grown and healed, however, I am recognizing that I have outgrown my friendship with Resistance because she brings more pain that she shelters me from now. It just took me awhile to see because the resistance has become an insidious habit.
He comes as he is to the world as we are
As I prepare to celebrate the God who comes to us where we are, again and again, I am delighting that who God is always exceeds my experience and understanding.
Adjusting to anchors in another world
Photo Credit: Jon Hansen, CsSROriginally Published in Living with Christ, Wisdom from our friends For most of my life, Advent was a time of preparing for Jesus’ coming, a joyful and prayerful time. We baked cookies and froze them, eagerly anticipating when it would be...
The power and possibility of remembering
I got to spend two beautiful evenings with my Grandma in the week before she died last month. While I held her hand and listened to her stories, and then to her breathing when she couldn’t speak anymore, I was flooded with memories. Picking raspberries and eating more than we put in the bucket. Sitting on the swing in her garden. Watching parades and going camping. Crawling into bed on Saturday morning after Friday night sleepovers. Sometimes, remembering is effortless.
Gratitude and a Thanksgiving Litany
Thanks acknowledges what is as well as my need. Gratitude pours me out so I can be filled. Thanksgiving pushes me toward the next right thing.
When the light shifts: sitting here alone with you…
I am convinced there is no moving on from the wounds that break our hearts; there are only shifts.
On Being Barefoot…
Before the burning bush, God asks Moses to take off his sandals, to notice and reverence that he walks on holy land. This holy land continues to burn before me, before us, signaling God’s presence before we arrived rather than because we did. This life we are living was holy before we existed in it. This land and creation we call home is the first book of revelation, God’s love letter to us, bearing witness to the Creator of it all.Our lives and the moments that make them up are the stuff of sainthood, our invitations to participate in Divine life to be swallowed up and fulfilled by God. At the grocery store, in the false solitude of our cars and commutes, in our laundry rooms, and over text messages. My shoes run the risk of “protecting” me from the sacredness of this naked moment. And how I love shoes, and how my sensitive toes resist the prickles of grass and the mess of sand. But barefoot is how my spirituality works, daring to live an embodied and earthy love of Jesus who took on flesh. I’m wandering through this life, yearning to let go of my shoes, to walk reverently and with deep attention to what passes under my feet and to what isn’t yet my path. Barefoot is how I write, how I speak, how I work. Experience shored up against an insatiable thirst for knowledge; direct honesty honed by sensitivity; and vulnerability chained to a commitment to competency. And an unapologetically barefoot tendency to speak it as I feel it, which leads me to…
…and Preaching
I’m a preacher without a pulpit, with words that burn until they are spoken ~ aloud or on a page.
My ministry is one of colliding words and ideas, reaching out to find a connection with God’s amazing people.
The world seems to me to be spilling over with grace and we seem to be people who, all too quickly forget that all of this is pure gift.
When I’m driving, eating, visiting, resting, cleaning, working, playing, and almost everything else, I’m frequently stunned by the pure miracle of what simply is.
It’s not all promised joy and ease, but it is all presenced and remembered by the One who gives it. And I can’t stop talking about it, proclaiming it, preaching this good news that we have not been forgotten or forsaken in any moment of this life.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, my words seem to be given to encourage and inspire. In a world where women and girls are still too-often silenced or secondary, I’m barefoot and preaching because my soul won’t rest any other way. If my words can be a gift to you, then that is a gift for me.