[First posted in March 2014 on www.deepeningcommunity.ca]

Life can change quickly. Christmas a year ago, I wrote a blog about the challenges of being single. This past Christmas, I got married. I moved out of the tiny house I had lived in for four years on a farm I shared with friends, and I began the journey of creating community with a partner.

At the heart of our home is a round dining room table, six feet in diameter, made of restored barn wood, with a large Lazy Susan in the middle—our wedding gift to each other. I first encountered such a table last July, when Bill invited me to join him and his extended family at a “camp meeting” in Salem, Georgia—a weeklong revival that has convened every year since 1828.

After the Sunday morning preaching, a dozen of us had gathered at his cousins’ “tent”—an open wood structure with a floor of pounded earth covered in wood shavings. We sat around their round dining room table for a feast and some lively conversation. I loved the Lazy Susan at the table’s center. Whenever Aunt Betty was out of potato salad, or cousin Martha wanted another piece of caramel cake, all we had to do was spin it on over to them. Continue reading →

[First posted in August 2010 on www.deepeningcommunity.ca]

My mother was notorious in our family for buying cheap paintings of landscapes and bouquets and hanging them on the walls of our home. Over time, splashes of bright purple, pink, and orange would appear in these paintings—odd flowers suddenly dotting subtly green trees or popping up in pastel bouquets, where Mom thought a little more color was needed.

For most of us, family is our first experience of community—with all its delights and sorrows, its gifts and idiosyncrasies. Family is the community that, for better or worse, most of us are stuck with.

My mother can no longer wield a paintbrush. She has believed at various times recently that I am her grandmother, that a 12-foot-long albino alligator with blue eyes is prowling around her assisted-living facility, and that a famous astronaut lives next door to her—“but he’s very down-to-earth about it,” she declared, totally missing the irony. Sometimes we experience a tear in the fabric of community, and sometimes it’s a total rupture. Continue reading →

[First posted in January 2011 on www.deepeningcommunity.ca]

I’m guessing that Circle of Mercy, the congregation I co-pastor, is the only church in existence with an annual prom in the dead of winter. The tradition came about like this. A few of us were talking after the worship service at one of our weekly potluck dinners about how we seem to be a “last-chance church” for a lot of people. We tend to attract folks wounded in one way or another by previous religious experiences.

Somebody piped up, “Well, I was wounded by my prom.” That launched a barrage of embarrassing stories about adolescent trauma in the high school gym. Someone suggested that we should have a Circle of Mercy prom, for laughs and healing. Everybody agreed that it would be good to have something other than Groundhog Day to look forward to in the bleak lull after the busy holiday season.

Last year’s theme was The Beach Ball. The children decorated with fake flowers and, of course, beach balls. The host family hung a disco ball on the ceiling that threw colorful shards of circling light everywhere. People showed up in tacky polyester suits, gaudy tropical shirts, and Goodwill gowns, some pinned with plastic corsages. Mark, our musician, arrived wearing half-tuxedo and half-wetsuit, carrying his surfboard.

It didn’t matter if you showed up with your children, a spouse, a partner, a date, or alone. It didn’t matter if you were 8 or 80, had Down syndrome or wore hearing aids, danced like Big Bird or one of The Three Stooges. Nobody was going to insist that you stand in the corner feeling bad about yourself. Continue reading →

[First posted in January 2013 on www.deepeningcommunity.ca]

As 2012 was drawing to a close, I noticed how many holiday events included discounts for couples and special rates for people with children. Sometimes it feels like those of us who are single and childless are doubly punished in a culture that rewards romance and caters to families.

The phrase that often trudges through my mind when I’m trying to decide how to spend the holidays—or with whom to take a vacation—is “I don’t belong to anybody.” I mean “belong” not in the negative sense of being owned like property—as women and slaves were for centuries in this society, and still are in several parts of the world. I mean it in the positive way of deep mutual connection: “belonging.”

I ended up spending Thanksgiving with my sisters and their families, savoring my first taste of fried turkey, reading books and playing games with a growing circle of active great-nieces and -nephews. Two weeks later I treated two dear friends, former church colleagues in Atlanta, to a wonderful stage production of The Gifts of the Magi, based on the beloved O. Henry story. On my way back home to North Carolina, I made my annual Christmas visit to a friend who has spent forty years imprisoned on Georgia’s death row.

Christmas Eve brought Circle of Mercy, the congregation that I co-pastor, out for a candlelit service in the barn at the small mountain farm where I live with a community of friends. It was magical, with a live newborn in the manger, singing sheep, and delighted young angels floating down from the hayloft.

A few hours later we launched Christmas Day at the farm with a breakfast of omelets and sweet homemade pastries, and then exchanged gifts. The youngest among us had made fragrant soap and brightly beaded earrings; the oldest had crafted beautiful wooden spoons from maple and oak trees that had fallen on our property during a windstorm. Continue reading →

[First posted in December 2010 on www.deepeningcommunity.ca]

North Carolina is a state of exquisite natural splendor, a state of beautiful human diversity, and, today, a state of emergency. Close to a foot of snow blankets the mountain farm that I call home, and more is falling fast, piling up for the 40-mile-per-hour winds predicted for tonight.

In many parts of the world that might prompt a “So what?” But the state of North Carolina owns about three snowplows, and the farm I inhabit rests in an isolated mountain cove on the edge of a wilderness. So I’m not going anywhere for days.

It’s the day after Christmas. Early yesterday morning I borrowed a neighbor’s 4-wheel-drive truck in an effort to make it to the hospice center where my mother has lived for the past month. I fishtailed down the driveway on a sheet of ice through blinding snow. The radio’s Christmas carols were interrupted by a warning from the Highway Patrol, urging everyone to stay home, drive only in dire emergencies, and carry blankets and food, since it may be Easter by the time they get around to digging everyone out of icy ditches. I turned around. Continue reading →

[First posted in July 2012 on www.deepeningcommunity.ca]

At 3 o’clock in the morning, outside an ancient monastery in the vast Egyptian wilderness, I clambered up on a camel named Whiskey. He carried me up Mt. Sinai under an eyelash of a moon and a sky strewn with stars to catch the sunrise. That magical moment was a highlight of a 1997 trip to the Middle East, which also included mosques, mosaics, and markets—an immersion in both holy history and current political reality.

On that trip, at the bustling souk in the heart of Damascus, I bought a large tablecloth, exquisitely embroidered in the renowned style of Syrian artisans. It caught my eye as the gift to myself that I wanted to carry home as a reminder of this amazing sojourn. I showed it to friends as I related my trip stories, and then I put it into a drawer.

It stayed there for almost a decade. The tablecloth seemed far too beautiful to actually put on my dining room table. But then one day I decided it was a shame to keep it hidden away just so that it could remain perfect. Continue reading →

[First posted in November 2013 on www.deepeningcommunity.ca]

I walk through the opening as the steel door clangs open and head toward the vending machines with my fistfuls of quarters. Nothing new, unfortunately. The same sugary, neon-colored sodas, salt-laden chips, and dry, mystery-meat sandwiches on bread as thin and tasteless as cardboard, wrapped in cellophane. But these will be my friend Wiley’s only chance at lunch. The prison doesn’t serve lunch on Saturdays.

I’ve been visiting Wiley for 16 years. He’s been on death row for 41. I have a hard time sometimes getting my head around that. He went to prison the year I graduated from high school. That was long before email and the Internet, when TV came in three channels and phones were the size of a bread box. Wiley has lived in a very small cell for a very long time.

He has, in his words, “been on death row longer than anyone in the world.” I believe him. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out his death sentence a decade ago when they uncovered the racism and incompetence of the public defender who had been assigned to his case. Despite multiple efforts by his friends and legal advocates to move things along, Wiley has never been resentenced. So he languishes on death row, caught in an unending legal morass. Continue reading →

[First posted in November 2015 on www.radicaldiscipleship.net]

Once again…still…our eyes and hearts are riveted on tragedies afar and close at hand: terrorized families in flimsy boats on the other side of the globe fleeing desperately toward what they hope is safety; a tide of killings at home brought into sharp focus by young people demanding that black lives matter. We hunger and thirst for a world in which peace, dignity, and justice prevail.

When I’m tempted to despair, I remember the spring of 1991. It was a time that seemed hopeless to me. Three teenagers I knew were senselessly killed—one stabbed, two shot—on the deadly streets of the Washington, DC neighborhood where I lived. Hundreds of women and children died when U.S. forces bombed the Amariya shelter in Iraq on Ash Wednesday.

That night, while we at Sojourners Community were gathered for a service to begin the journey into Lent, a civil defense siren malfunctioned, causing many of our neighbors to fear that we were being attacked and to flood the local police station with calls. I went to sleep thinking of the children in Iraq for whom the attacks are real, and hearing other sirens, from another shooting or stabbing or drug bust in the neighborhood. The world was not at all the way I wanted it to be. Too many children were dying—in Washington as well as Baghdad. Continue reading →

My dogs barked from somewhere deep—a throaty, primal sound I’d never heard from them before—and bolted off the bed. I could feel the bristling of their fur as the two of them leapt down and lunged toward the door. Whatever was outside was no ordinary night visitor, no standard-fare raccoon or opossum. I checked the clock. It was just shy of 4 a.m.

I had been asleep for only two hours, having driven home that April night in 2006 from Birmingham, Alabama, where I was the storyteller at a national church conference. I’m often invited to preach and teach and lead retreats—but this had been my first request to tell stories. I was working on embracing this new vocation. I was just weeks away from leaving nine years of regional ministry, feeling some anxiety about giving up a regular salary with health benefits, but knowing that I needed to take this leap of faith to write the stories and the novel that had been marinating in me for some time.

I opened the sliding-glass door and walked out onto my upper deck, where I came face to face with the source of the dogs’ agitation. The black bear was medium-sized, clinging to a tree trunk and staring me in the eyes. I was close enough to feel the musky heaviness of its smell and to hear its breathing. After a while, it began snorting at me, blowing air in sustained puffs that made its lips flap in and out. Continue reading →