Fear not, the angels would text me. Hallelujah, I’d write back.

What’s your most memorable story about getting lost? What do you remember about finding your way home?

We have a holy obligation to bring about paradise on this earth; each generation helps us do that.

May we be with one another in solidarity and struggle.

The stories remind us there is still and always joy in this world, but it usually comes right alongside the struggle.

This year, the Advent season seems particularly seized by a spirit of the expected, the longing.

I hope that this Great Silence, which has come alongside the suffering, holds the beginnings of our healing.

Jesus had no political power. He lived his whole life in the shadow of the Roman empire, and that empire killed him. Yet Jesus healed the sick, he listened, he moved among the ordinary people, in the lowly places.

I’m confident in our human ability to together muscle our way into renewing our world.

We are never numbers to be tallied for turnout. We are more than a sum. Together, we are the hope and courage.

This is the beauty and sparkle of spiritual communities: needs arise and beloveds appear to ask, “How can I help?” There’s no fixed timeline, just the spiritual practices of generosity and stewardship.

What I do know for sure is that hope matters. One of the best things we can do is to hold hope for someone when that person cannot hold it for themselves.

What could you accomplish this week if you knew you had a ground team wishing you well? Who are the other explorers around you, needing a word of encouragement that would mean so much coming from you?

Emotional tempests aren’t always easy to weather — pain, grief, disappointment, even love — but the flatness of life without such currents is the slow silence of drowning.

This is a story of in-the-middle for those wondering how their story ends.

In real life, we can only place the pieces, one by one, and see what kind of picture we create. Sometimes we turn out to have chosen the wrong piece. Sometimes the picture is wildly unexpected.

We, the willing, follow the threads to one another; past rightness and quips and tweets. We will find one another and persist past sunrise.

Spirit that runs through us all, help me to remember all the ways in which I am connected to others.

I am not alone. I don’t have to face the world alone and I don’t have to fix the world alone. When I need hope, I find it in on the faces of my people. All we need is hope... and for that, we have each other.

Believe that further shore
 Is reachable from here. 
Believe in miracle 
And cures and healing wells. —Seamus Heaney, “The Cure at Troy” With a name like mine, it’s easy to guess I’m Irish. My forebears were among the millions who struggled to escape Ireland’s disastrous Potato...