Quest Blog
A People of Promise
2013-06-10 We are all in this together, beloveds. All of creation is ultimately and intimately relational. Our faith is grounded in and continuously points us toward relationship. Covenants, promises about how we will be in relationship, cannot be made by one’s self. There are no solitary covenants – only communal ones. It may surprise a…
Read MoreOur Place in the Alhambra
2013-06-06 1. Go ahead, climb up the Alhambra brick– taxis can’t come here, and the effort it takes is only as much as you have in mind. 2. How often we’ve fallen for another algorithm for bliss, the snake oil shill of camphor shadows. Enough. The book is there now, a shining blossom, big as…
Read MoreHere, In This Flow
2013-06-13 The turtles go out of their water this time of year, slow on roadways, slow to mating somewhere, or slow to dates with car tires. No, there’s no enlightenment– there’s no one there. (That’s Buddhism 101 each day teaches.) No, there’s no virtue– there’s no one there. Only being. Lost in this movement I…
Read MoreDoing It All…A Little Bit.
2013-06-14 I am going to have to go back to work eventually. I mean, two women and a baby can’t make ends meet on one part-time income in Washington D.C. forever, even with a lot of family and denominational support. I’ve been aware of this since before R was born, thinking about it, trying to…
Read MoreFor You Were a Stranger in Egypt
2013-05-01 There are many biblical passages calling people to offer hospitality to the stranger. Here is one from the 19th chapter of the book of Leviticus: When strangers sojourn with you in your land, you shall do them no wrong, the strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as natives among you, and…
Read MoreA Former Member Asks the Minister for a Favor
2013-05-09 She says her family shuns her. She says it has something to do with God. She says the cancer has gone way too far. She says when her brother died the family pastor said he went straight to hell and “Let that be a lesson.” She says, “Will you do my funeral?” A light…
Read MorePrayers for the Possible
2013-05-04 In 1854, Rev. Theodore Parker prayed: “Help us to grow stronger and nobler by this world’s varying good and ill, and while we enlarge the quantity of our being by continual life, may we improve its kind and quality not less, and become fairer, and tenderer, and heavenlier too, as we leave behind us…
Read MoreA is for…Afebrile.
2013-04-06 I was braced for a strange and challenging week with my partner out-of-state for a work trip, but then our little babe was hospitalized for an infected (and previously undetected) cyst at her throat, and things really got surreal. Somewhere in the midst of the past five days (only five?!), we started making some…
Read MoreWho Decides What Is “Value-Added?”
2013-05-10 For whatever reasons having to do with time but also interest, I am the one in our family who sits down and pays the bills. I like doing it. I get a feeling of satisfaction from being able to pay the bills, a sense of security and peace of mind, however ephemeral, that we…
Read MoreThe People’s Work
2013-04-06 In The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice, Rev. Richard Gilbert lays out a Unitarian Universalist interpretation of worship. He wrote: The church is a worshipping community, a religious community that deliberately and regularly gathers together to celebrate life in all its dimensions. Worship understood as the celebration of life is the…
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