“What are the new challenges people in your congregation and your neighborhood are facing as we race into the fall of 2021? What are creative and compassionate ways you and your church can reach out to those that are still struggling with the ongoing challenges of this troubled time?”
“This is life in slow motion with God in all things. Summer’s abundance also abundant in grace. How can this be?”
“Yet Jesus wants to speak healing in our lives. He wants to help us experience the world in a bigger, more textured, and, yes, messier way. So how might we be opened …”
“Once again, real power showed up, against the “prize” of doing it the right way. Instead, she finished in the spirit of Sant Yago, or St. James as we know him. Lesson learned; being great by being humble. I heard the message, too.”
“So begins the Plague Quilt. Measure, cut, feed squares and strips through the sewing machine. My mind busy, less busy, quieter, quiet. Examining a wonky corner of a 9-patch quilt square the thought occurs: this pandemic has revealed all the wonky corners of our world, our country, our lives, and relationships; where are my wonky corners?”
“Merry-making can be a way for us to take the joy and excitement that is bursting from inside us and express it externally within these frameworks of tradition. It is like a sacrament with a small ‘s’ – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace—joy that is a gift from God.”
Some—perhaps even most—baptized Christians might find the sacrament’s irreversibility reassuring, a source of hope during the darkest hours of the night. Nothing they do, nothing done to them, will ever separate them from Christ, into whose death and resurrection they were baptized. Nor will anything separate them from Christ’s body—the Church universal—of which the baptized are individual members.
Imagine surviving a shipwreck. Imagine yourself feeling the fear of seeing the waves break apart pieces of ship, along with the sensation of sinking, of panic, and of gasping for air. Imagine losing not only your belongings, but also watching other people fight for their lives. Imagine nearly drowning, being washed ashore, or being rescued with barely an ounce of strength left. You’re traumatized, weather-beaten, and exhausted to the point of semi-consciousness.
by Tom Sine An Unprecedented Housing Crisis President Biden extended housing eviction for more than 7 million households in the United States until the end
Few have had a closer view of the ministry’s evolution than Sister Pamela Clare Magers of the Community of St. Francis, who has worked at the School for Deacons in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1982 and started teaching a course on “contemporary social issues” in 1984. Prior to the introduction of that course, the curriculum for the school focused on the educational topics required of priests, and the liturgical role of deacons serving at the altar.
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