YOKED

I embarked upon my trip to Boston or the New World, as it were, in search of a great adventure. I dreamed of old buildings, laced in ivy and finding three Irish pubs in one square block. I dreamed of autumn colors, charming footbridges and the glow of the city on the bay. And all of this has come true. But nowhere in my great adventure did I map out, in much detail, the part about it being 29 icy degrees with a wind chill and ever shortening days. “Isn’t that part of your adventure?” my mom asks from cushy California. “Well,” I reply, “I suppose I better relocate my notion of an adventure.” Navigating the Venetian canals with a bottle of vino? Adventure. Trekking the snow-encrusted gorges of Mt. Everest? Not so much. Bundling up with warm woolen-mittens and a cute periwinkle knit beanie? Adventure. Wearing a “gator neck” that covers my face like a bandit or a burka? A new, but necessary fashion low for me. I am sure that many of the thick-blooded New Englander...

The morning light licks the corners of my face, repeatedly, until I consent to opening my eyes. She makes her gradual way across the bed, nudging her most promising sign of hope unto the tossled ivory. The sun is far more gentle than any alarm clock I’ve ever fought, though no less insistent. In such radiant self-giving, how many times can I roll over? So we strike a compromise: I will flip my pillow and “rest” my head, but promise to keep my eyes a flutter, little windows parted slightly for the streams of her still light. Sometimes I up the bargain, telling her that there is really no better way to receive her glory, no greater praise of her warmth, than to surrender consciousness upon her lap, just a little. She will often reply by shedding new light upon the floor, warming a most suggestive path out into the kitchen. My stomach grumbles. Are you sure you don’t want to try freezing time again? I ask. You, me and the sheets, forever curled in our secret morning splendor...

She was entering her senior year, at “the college,” shorthand for Harvard University’s undergraduate school. But already she was planning to take her postgraduate career across the country to golden California. This much I overheard from a stranger, riding on the “T.” With one hand gripping a side rail and two feet spread upon the shifting floor, I stood, balancing the East Coast ride as if I were surfing the Pacific ocean. I laughed to myself about the irony of the ride and the Harvard student’s remarks: my home state was becoming her adventure destination, just as Boston has become mine. As I listened to her muse about the unique California culture and its endless sunshine, everything about her dreaming was immediately familiar. The wonder, the excitement, the stereotypical assumptions-all that goes along with moving into the unknown, it was all there, but written in the opposite direction of my own great move. California is as exotic to her, I thought, as Boston...

When the subject of religion pops up at the dinner table, or a cocktail party, or a first date, most people will hold their breathe in hopes that it will quietly pass or nervously fold the topic into their lap napkin. It is flagged as a source of political controversy, or worse yet, a volatile time bomb of people’s most emotional, subjective, and inflexible beliefs. And you just don’t tamper with belief if you want to keep things civil. As a student of ministry and theology, however, that is exactly where I am asked to begin. Temperamental religious perspectives are my occupational hazards. Religion is the burning building that I am bursting into as everyone else is running out. I am running into the flames for a living, because religion has been the source of my most luminous joy and singeing discomfort. Some of it has breathed wisdom and consolation into my life, while other statements of belief have left me injured from the fierce licks of patriarchal language, ...

Walking around Cambridge, it is impossible to say where Harvard University begins and ends. The town is full of the redbrick, white framed Georgian buildings that so distinguish Harvard architecture. These dignified walls and buildings line the edges of Harvard square, a tourist hub and central pulse of transportation. They extend outward, down the forked web of avenues to the 9 graduate schools connected to the University- schools of medicine, dentistry, divinity, law, business, design, education, public health, and government. It is unmistakably a center of learning, with a graduate student population double the size of its undergraduate students. I do not mean to rhapsodize the university for its grandeur and prestige, or even to place it at the center of the Cantabrigian universe. In fact, I have not yet developed any particular intimacy, or personal bias for the institution, apart from the fact that I am just entering its divinity program. I am but a stranger in a ...

In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out on the high seas in search of a better trade route to India. Instead, he landed upon the shores of the Americas, which for his people was truly a new world. With that said, my appreciation of American history has evolved since the fourth grade. The binding of my Elementary school textbooks and the narrow, Eurocentric story contained there within has been busted open by the knowledge that thousands of Native American tribes populated this continent before the European arrival and were flourishing in ways that European society could not measure. Disease, violence, deceit, and arrogance were heaved like cargo unto this “discovered” land and that only approximates the real story of the New World. And yet, as I prepare to move to Boston, I can not help but feel the tingling excitement and naïve optimism of moving to a place that is, for me, a new world. I have lived in California my whole life. Actually, my recent sojourn in Northern Cal...

Jules squirted some sunscreen onto her palms before massaging it into her shoulders and the hard to reach blades of her back.   As the thick, white lotion spread, its scent drifted through the salty ocean air and I recognized it immediately.   Bonne Bell cotton candy lip balm.   I wore it religiously throughout seventh grade, convinced that icy pink was a good look for me.   It was the kind of silvery shade that older, high school girls were wearing.   I had a sparkly pink mini-skirt to match—one that received loads of compliments.   I do not miss the goopy feeling of synthetic gloss smacked across my lips, but the smell, oh God is it delicious!   It’s sinfully sweet, even better than real cotton candy, with an aftertaste of some inscrutable, tingling mint.   After all this time, more than a decade, the scent still moves me and I have to control the urge to reach over and smear Jules’ Ocean Potion’s SPF 30 all over my lips, just for old time’s sake.

There are times when just looking out at the world is too much. With impeccable self-possession, she flaunts color, texture, pattern, dimension, and flickering foils of light.    All cascade through my gossamer lens and I am overtaken by the presence of these things.   Only then do I see why photos and video recordings are so widely cherished—they hold the focus, which hurried eyes that have seen-it-all can not grasp.   Yes, much is required to give pause, to linger longer and let all that in. Oh, but how I long to receive the world, to be daily engorged with streams of color, shapely spectacles or just plain matter.   All of my patience and attention I will exchange for one glimpse of that deep-down presence in things.   Yet, after my eyes roam the rolling country, tracing every verdant dip and golden contour, they fall upon him – a glorious human face – and I do not know if I can bear it any longer.   I must look away.   All that beauty looking back at me. 


 The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love,
for your dream,
for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me
what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain. I want to know
if you can sit with pain,
mine or your own,
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it. I want to know
if you can be with joy,
mine or your own,
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful,
to be realistic,
to remember the limitations
of being human. It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is t...

In a recent conversation with a perfect stranger, I mentioned that I would be starting my Masters of Divinity at Harvard this fall, to which the perfect stranger replied, “That’s great, I just hope you don’t lose your faith there.” Lose my faith?   What a funny expression.   Is that akin to losing your marbles, mind, hair, virginity or orthodontic retainer (I have personally lost 8 retainers, mostly because I forgot them in the napkins I threw away).    The way he said “lose your faith” implied that it’s here one minute and then, whoops, gone the next, as if I have little agency in the matter. Of course, I know what is meant by the expression.   Critical questions and religious diversity, both hallmarks of a graduate education at Harvard, are viewed by some as potential threats to one’s faith- a slippery slope of reasoning, casuistry, and uncensored exposure that can lead to the total unraveling of a person’s faith.   I am continually shocked by the white-knuckled inflexibility...

“When I think of heaven (Deliver me in a black-winged bird) I think of dying Lay me down in a field of flame and heather Render up my body into the burning heart of God in the belly of a black-winged bird” - “Rain King” by Counting Crows If you want to spark a really interesting conversation, ask someone what they imagine heaven to be like.   In a flash, it leads one to consider the sometimes anxiety-ridden reality of death and whatever profound hope they have for the other side of it.   It is awash with fear and precious longings, longings that reveal a lot about the current struggle and sense of meaning in one’s life.   Some have standard, predictable musings on the landscape of heaven, replete with golden gates, St. Peter’s ominous book, and cherubim-shaped hedges that are always fully grown and perfectly manicured (unlike the dolphin bush people grow by their pool that is never quite finished and often resembles a cage of leaves with a only one distinct flipper). This...

After months of attempting to clearly articulate my sense of ministry for a handful of graduate school applications, I have arrived at a few running definitions that satisfy me- for the moment.   They are all purposefully abstract, intimating that the underlying gospel dynamic is one of liberation that leads to abundant, joyful self-giving. But if the refrain is that simple, that adaptable, how could I begin to put parameters on when and where “ministry” takes place? Throughout my life I have encountered exquisitely refined ministry from the people you would expect- keen professors, embracing campus ministers, and doting Jesuit priests who have made the title “father” more fitting than a pair of worn-in jeans.   But I’ve also seen a different variety of ministry flourish outside of the Catholic mileau.   For instance, ministry was unwaveringly honest and direct for the alcohol and drug counselors I worked beside at Friendship House.   There, they had different names for God (a po...

“Faith should not make your life simple.   It should make it even more complex,” a friend once said to me.   It is a statement I have been wrestling with for some time.   On the one hand, I am tempted to reply that life is already dizzyingly complex, full of existential and interpersonal puzzles to sort through; shouldn’t one’s faith help to ease this complicated frenzy?   Simultaneously, I am relieved to hear my friend speak these words, because they acknowledge and do not attempt to reduce the complexity I confront daily in this world.   If, in the words of Jon Sobrino, we “must be faithful to reality,” then we are also compelled to admit that reality does not always play into theological paradigms as neatly as one might hope.   To cram them into religious narratives uncritically, would be to violate truth as it impinges upon us in the varied, situational contexts of our lives.   It would mean denying, or short-circuiting some aspect of our humanity, a humanity within which God ...