“So who mothers the motherswho tend the hallways of mothers, the spill of mothers, the smell of mothers, who mend the eyes of mothers” –Catherine Barnett, “Chorus” On Easter, I go to my son’s father’s house—Sundays are one of his days—and watch my son enjoy his basket, which I spun from thin air the night…

I used to steal away into the sanctuary of Community United Methodist Church when I was a kid—this is fifth, maybe sixth grade—and lay on my back in the cool wooden pews, staring up at the ceiling with nothing short of wonder. (Note: this wasn’t on Sunday morning or Wednesday evening or any other time…

I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. The voice was low, lifeless. He just got out of jail, and the guys in there told him to call me. I function as a volunteer chaplain in Washington State’s Skagit County Jail, and I’m the closest thing to a pastor most gang members in…

Holy Week, if I’m being completely honest, was never more than a blip on my radar until I became a staff member of a church and it affected my calendar. It wasn’t that I didn’t care or failed to understand the significance of the narrative in the liturgical season. Instead, I’d become desensitized to the…

I used to find Easter a letdown. Lent is so full of the self-improvement activities of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I typically add a midday prayer to my usual Morning and Evening Prayer. I decide what organizations I want to give alms to: a different one each week of Lent. And fasting: not from food…

Rays of midmorning sun shone through the window and fell in molten pools across the white sheets of our bed. Lying back on my two feather pillows, I could hear and smell the burgeoning sounds of spring through my open windows—birds chirping, the scent of sweet olive, the soft susurration of car wheels on the…

My daughter held the palm frond as if she’d never seen such a thing. I gave mine a perfunctory wave. We were both visitors, standing in the foyer of an elementary school turned church. The pastor was a friend, but in the ten minutes before a worship service—especially during Holy Week—I wasn’t going to latch…

As my husband prepared for an Easter sermon a few weeks ago, our dinnertime conversations during Lent turned to Jesus’s appearance to the disciples after his resurrection, to the episode where poor Thomas is saddled with his unfortunate moniker. Carravaggio painted a terribly potent picture of Thomas probing Jesus’s wounds, his lord’s flesh curving over…

American culture, at this late and plural hour, seems to have pretty well normalized the notion of the interfaith family, to the extent that if your environs are urban and/or coastal, and your circles revolve around the ranks of top- and second-tier universities, then the multiple-faith union is almost a given, and certainly not a…

On Holy Saturday, I woke up at my sister’s house in northern Minnesota with a visual migraine, an aura with no consequent pain. They happen occasionally, and mine are always pretty textbook: wavy sparkling spirals and shimmering crystalline lamellae. The aura is technically termed a scintillating scotoma, a result of a sudden tidal wave of…