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Dear Folks,

What does it mean to be a member of the Church of the Redeemer? Lots of things, as it turns out! Because the ways and reasons we come here are so varied, we’ve learned that it’s wise to define membership in a variety of ways, too. In fact, maybe it’s better to say that everyone belongs here, and then encourage the dimensions of belonging to be worked out by each individual.

If you are new to Redeemer or to the Episcopal church and would like to consider confirmation or reception by the Bishop this June, please send me an email. We will gather for a few sessions before June 8.

One measure of engagement is showing up, and the Episcopal Church says that to be “regular in attendance” at a parish is to come on Sundays or Saturdays three times a year. (I’d call that a very manageable bar.) The framing of stewardship speaks of being “a contributor of record,” and treasurer Doug Riley has helped us understand that making an annual pledge helps us say, “I am part of this people and place.” We have also learned that the deeper one’s commitment, the greater the impact on your growth and thriving. A clear example is the gift of being a part of a small group, which provides strength and accountability as you navigate whatever life brings.

Here is a dynamic list of what it might mean to you to be a part of Redeemer:

• Wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are welcome.
• Come as you are, however you are. We are all seekers here.
• We need each other, when things are going well and when things fall apart.
• God needs us, too.
• Belonging comes before believing.
• Prayer, study, and worship shape hearts, minds, and action.
• Following the teachings of Jesus transforms us.
• We do what we do, in the ways that we do it, because it seems like that’s what Jesus did.
• The only constant is change. We expect that each of us will grow.
• We practice radical engagement: everything centers on being in relationship.
• We see the world as it is, but strive to make it embody God’s compassion and justice.
• We serve, in a particular way, anyone on the margins—children, teenagers, and seniors, for example, but also folks who are lost or weary or alone.
• We believe that helping someone is more important than being right.
• Our doors are wide open: we hope folks will dig in, but there’s no judgment if this isn’t the right place for you.

It is good to be on the journey with you.

Love,
David

At a recent conference, a colleague shared this insight from 1977 Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine:

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

I invite you to read and “inwardly digest” this insight once again, perhaps even a bit more slowly this time:

When a complex system … is far from equilibrium … small islands of coherence … in a sea of chaos … have the capacity … to shift the entire system … to a higher order.

I invite you, if you can, to close your eyes for a few moments, enjoy several deep nourishing breaths, and pay attention to what arises in your mind-heart-consciousness when you focus on the word-concept of coherence.

What does coherence mean, to you? What images come to mind? How does this insight resonate with your own lived experience? How might it be helpful in what you are experiencing today, individually? In what we are experiencing together, communally and collectively?

Earlier today, I sat in a room with about 20 other clergy and lay leaders at our monthly BUILD caucus. Our round table included several pastors from various denominations, two rabbis and an imam, from various backgrounds and ethnicities. Our hearts, likewise, were weighed with various concerns and heartaches for our congregations.

Some of us are ministering to people who are afraid of losing their jobs; or afraid of not finding jobs, now that they no longer have one. Some are ministering to people who are weary of living in a neighborhood full of vacant and abandoned homes and lots. Some minister to people who worry that if they leave our country to travel abroad, they will have trouble upon reentry.

A focal point of our conversation was the upcoming opportunity for us to gather with people from our different congregations on Sunday, June 8th at 3pm at Greater Harvest Baptist Church, when we will hear updates about and continue our efforts to Build One Baltimore together. June 8th also happens to be our Christian feast day of Pentecost, a celebration of when peoples from different nations all heard God’s word in their native tongue after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. Pentecost is associated with the Jewish feast day of Shavuot, celebrating the revelation of the Torah to God’s people through Moses.

As we talked with one another today, images of “unity amidst diversity,” “home”, “pilgrimage” and “being on the way together” arose. The words of God through the prophet Isaiah, “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7), were offered out loud. We each promised to bring as many people as we can with us, to Greater Harvest on June 8th.

Redeemer has promised that we will show up 70 strong.

Will you come and be part of this growing island of coherence?

Again, from the prophet Isaiah:

See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.

Amen. So it is. So it shall be.

Love,
Cristina

Do you ever wonder what Jesus was like during his teenage years?  Some have speculated that he captured public attention at a young age by performing miracles and was known for healing injured animals, performing tricks to entertain his friends, and perhaps even swaying the outcome of the ancient equivalent to backyard stickball games.  I don’t buy that speculation, though.  The Jesus we encounter in the Gospels is far too familiar with being poor, outcast, and rejected for me to settle for a big kid on campus teenage Jesus.

I believe that during his teenage years, Jesus was a lot like our young people in RYG.  I think there’s a good chance he had acne, that he had to be taught about hygiene and basic self-care, and that he had his fair share of growing pains.  Like our young people, I believe that the teenage Jesus had moments of anxiety about who his friends would be.  It’s clear that Jesus had some experience of formal education, even Luke says in his Gospel that Jesus grew in wisdom and understanding.  So, like our friends in RYG, Jesus must have had to sweat his way through a few tests and exams.  I imagine there were also pressures from working with his Dad in the carpentry shop.  Though we don’t think about them often, Jesus’ teenage years could have been pretty tough.

But however tough those years were, we do know that Jesus had incredibly loving parents.  We know that Mary and Joseph would have been there with and for their son every step of the way.  Just imagine the patience Joseph would have shared with Jesus as he taught him how to carve and hang a door frame.  Imagine the simple acts of love that Mary would have done for her son, maybe even making his bed for him while he was having a particularly hard day out working in the shop.  As uncertain and challenging as Jesus’ teenage years may have been, he had people who loved him.  And I believe that made all the difference.

So too, our young people in RYG have absolutely awesome parents.  These parents really love their kids.  They share countless hours here at church with their kids, volunteering, teaching, cooking, building sets, designing costumes, cleaning, you name it– the RYG parents do it!  We also have Maggie Klaes and Laura Philip who are here every Sunday night leading RYG and sharing their time, energy, gifts, and passions with our young people.  Even beyond that, we have a community filled with people of all ages who are actively praying for, checking in on, and loving up on our young people.  What a gift!

I do think that the teenage Jesus was a lot like our RYG teens.  I think they would get each other.  And I think that even in the midst of some really hard experiences, they know what it means to be loved, held, and on the process of growing into themselves.

Peace,
Josh

Dear Folks,

I have felt palpably this year a desire not to comment on the stories of Holy Week and Easter, but rather to embody them. So often the preacher’s role is to explain, or amplify, or tease out a difficult passage, to ask in so many words, “What does this mean?” This year, it feels more honest to simply walk with you through the shadowy narrative, to see it and feel it for what it is, and to trust that the truth of it speaks for itself.

Our ancestors got that: black and brown and pink, women and men, believers and doubters, and all the rest. They built wooden booths festooned with grapes and wheat to mark a week of harvest, and then they literally sat for seven days in a constructed space of “Thanks.” They ate bitter herbs to digest again their struggles in the wilderness, clenching their throats around the prayer, “Help.” Opening up, they sang “Oh, Freedom!” as lament, marched it as protest, and danced it in celebration, all our layers alive at once. They put honey on their children’s lips to taste life’s sweetness, even when the day was exceptionally hard, maybe especially then. They put on their shoes and walked the roads that Jesus walked, waving palms of resistance and solidarity. They washed each other’s feet. They fed each other bread, “becoming a table where just enough food becomes plenty to share, and everyone is welcome to bring their gifts and their hunger.”

They turned toward whatever was broken within them and around them, inviting even their most lonesome valleys to reveal some light. They put their bodies through the paces of exile and deliverance, knowing before we had language to describe it, that our muscles remember as well as our minds.

Victor Frankl wrote that sometimes a human experience is so stark and consuming, so devastating, and yet still sharing space with an indestructible human dignity, that our only response is to stand in silence and solidarity with the one who has been so wounded and survived. Victim and perpetrator are us, and we know the cost of turning away from either one. Resurrection, then, is to look deeply at each other and ourselves, and to love what we see.

Here’s a signpost for the holy road we are on: In the deep darkness a great light also shines. Jesus has the scars to show for it, and so do we. May we also have the eyes to see that there is no time now for anything but justice, and finally no room in our hearts for anything but love.

Love,
David

Last night a large crowd gathered at a local brewery to hear six individuals share their “Stoop Stories” https://stoopstorytelling.com on the theme of “Battling the Elements: Confronting the Forces of Nature.” One told of how a wall of ocean water washed him off a cliff in Maine, as a teenager. Another recounted her encounter with a bat, who attached itself to her, coiling its wings around her arm, on an afternoon stroll in her hilly, tree-laden neighborhood. There was the woman who survived a hurricane in St. Thomas (only a few months before surviving a fire in her home, I later learned!), and another who survived a wicked storm while hiking up and down a mountain with her husband and 3 year old.

The last Stoop Storyteller of the evening was local artist and open-water swimmer Katie Pumphrey, who used words to illustrate her first experience of swimming the English Channel ten years ago in 14 hours and 19 minutes. Three years ago, she swam from England to France again, taking less than 14 hours to do so.

“It is a beast,” she said, as she described the state of her emotions swimming through water that was 60 degrees and full of jellyfish, her first time swimming the Channel. One sting was so fierce, she remembered, that she was convinced a jellyfish had actually gotten inside her swimsuit and struggled in vain to locate it and get it out. There was a span of hours when she felt so raw and unmoored that she vomited as she swam.

One of the rules in open-water swimming is that the swimmer is not allowed to touch anything (like any part of the boat beside her) or anyone. But someone is allowed to swim alongside, if needed, for support.

At one point, Katie began shouting to her team in the boat beside her, “I’m not sure I can do this.” Just swim another half an hour, she’d hear them say. And then, Try to swim another 15 minutes. So she did as they encouraged her. Another hour or two elapsed in this way.

And then “I’m not sure” turned into “I can’t. I can’t do this.”

Katie’s husband Joe jumped into the water, to swim beside her.

What he said to her next “in only the way he could, because he knows me,” Katie remembered, was this: “That decision is actually not up to you. The people in the boat will decide when you can’t, and at that point, they will get you out of the water. But until that decision is made by them, your job is just to keep putting one arm out in front of the other.”

In some strange way, this helped shift something inside her. She no longer had to struggle in her mind or to worry about whether or not she had it in her, to finish swimming the entire Channel; she just had to focus on the next stroke, and the next, and the next. It was true, that only she could do the actual swimming — this part was “solo”. But she had others, a team beside her, and she could “let go” and “let them” decide when it was time to get out of the water.

Next week is Holy Week. On Sunday morning, we will wave palm branches and shout “Hosanna!” In the afternoon, we will shout “Crucify!” and hear the beating of the drum.

As I imagine once again Jesus walking with the cross on his back, and on his shoulders, I will hear him whisper, “I’m not sure I can do this.” I will see the eyes of some in the crowd, the women of Jerusalem, conveying, “just another few yards … just another 15 minutes.” I will recall his own surrender and prayer in a garden, the evening before, “not my will but Thy will be done.”

You and I may not be swimming the English Channel, or carrying crosses on our backs, on the road to crucifixion. Even so, what lies before us, at least for the foreseeable future, may indeed feel insurmountable, perhaps even impossible, at times.

Perhaps something of the stories of Katie swimming — and of Our Lord walking and suffering, dying and rising — might help light our way, together.

Love,
Cristina

What do you remember about your first visit to the Church of the Redeemer? Is that memory lost because you grew up here? Were you new to Baltimore, or perhaps new to church going altogether? Maybe you’re a cradle Episcopalian, and you felt at home with the liturgical rhythms. Or you may have felt uncertain when you encountered unfamiliar rituals and music. Were you afraid your children were too noisy and fidgety? Did you wonder if you’d meet someone like you, and if you’d be truly welcomed by those who aren’t like you? Perhaps your introduction to Redeemer occurred outside of worship when you came for a speaker or a special music performance.

Though I’d been to Redeemer for a wedding, a funeral and a Parish Day School event, I ventured here for my first worship service in the summer of 2005 with my husband, George, and our two youngest daughters. We’d been seeking a new church for a year. George and I were raised in different Christian denominations (neither of us was Episcopalian), and we were looking for a church community where we felt welcomed and nourished. Sometimes we visited several different congregations in a month; other times we stayed for a while like Goldilocks, looking for a place that was just right. I found that being a newcomer can be exhausting and intimidating, even among folks who are kind. A friend suggested we try Redeemer because she’d heard good things about its Sunday School and youth program, two of our priorities. Happily, Redeemer was our last visit, though we felt “new” for a while.

As David reminds us each week, newcomers help us know the Holy One in new ways. When we embrace new people in the best ways possible, we enrich our experience and theirs. With that knowledge in mind, a small group of parishioners has met to examine and reimagine what it’s like to be new at Redeemer. We’ve looked at how visitors learn about programming, what happens from their perspective during and after a worship service, what they glean from the website, and what compels them to return. Our guiding question has been: how can we help people connect at Redeemer?

 We think we have some good ideas, we’d like to hear yours, and we hope you’ll join us.

Please become a member of Redeemer’s new Connect Team. If you’ve been here for decades, if you’re new and if you’re somewhere in between, we need you! A few initiatives we have in mind include:

• Connect Team members will be available after each service to meet briefly with visitors
• Connect Team members will coordinate (not have to bring all the food!) monthly Connect Coffees for all parishioners after the 10:00 a.m. service
• Connect Team members will follow up with newcomers
• Connect Team members will be available for speakers and special events

We will host a Connect Coffee after the 10:00 a.m. service on Palm Sunday, April 13. Please email me before then about your interest in joining the Connect Team, or see me there to sign up.

 Lucy Neale Duke
lnealeduke@gmail.com

Dear Folks,

The contemplative mind offers a stark contrast to the ego-centric mind. The small mind, in the words of Richard Rohr, seeks its own advantage, putting its singular good over and against the common good. And as long as one reads reality from this small self, it is impossible to see the whole. The spiritual mind, on the other hand, re-frames existence and offers a different starting point, and because “no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it,” (Albert Einstein) seeing from this different vantage point offers balance and a path toward our healing. Significantly, this different way of seeing is the promise of religion, and for me the particular promise of Christianity, which I am learning to distinguish from the frame of Christendom.

Christianity is a way of being that conjures the person and teachings of Jesus; Christendom, on the other hand, is a social and political construct. Christendom is, to be frank, materialistic. In a sense it cannot be spiritual, because the concern of Christendom is to shape reality into its image—doctrine, form, belief, institution—rather than to discover in reality the divine that is always and everywhere present, in multiple forms and features and faces. To believe that the holy is everywhere present is to deconstruct the sacred/secular duality, while to insist on that duality is part of the business model of Christendom. It is a kind of prison when one way insists that it is right, but the radical freedom of spirit sets us free.

The non-contemplative mind is mired in dualism: male vs. female, light vs. dark, right vs. wrong, Democrat vs. Republican, good vs. bad. And so we make choices—this is better than that—but we are often making false choices that we then spend loads of energy defending. These false choices and their impact exhaust us, make us defensive and angry, and have a lot to do with where we are in our country today. The false choices of dualism lead us to hate the other, rather than seeing him as someone to be curious about. And we do the same thing to ourselves internally. We demonize or marginalize the parts of ourselves that we reject or are troubled by, instead of engaging our shadow with curiosity.

What if we turn to the part we hate (or most fear) and engage it? Imagine a world in which we welcome the “enemy”… Who are you? What do you most care about? What do you have to teach me? This alternative way is to rediscover the contemplative, the mystical, the non-dual mind, which Rohr calls a “long, loving look at the real.” Love what you see. Don’t analyze it up or down, in or out. This frame invites adoration, thanksgiving, joy, presence: to be a witness to the glory of what or who you encounter.

Love,
David

What follows is a string of recent emails to me and other BUILD leaders, that I have permission to share with you. Fr. Ako is the pastor at Sacred Heart of Jesus in Highlandtown, a sister congregation in BUILD. Elizabeth is lay co-chair of BUILD and member at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, another sister congregation. Alisa is an organizer with BUILD. Mohamed is a middle-aged man who has lived in the U.S. since he was 4 years old. A refugee from Western Sahara https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/the-western-sahara-conflict-a-fragile-path-to-negotiations/ , Mohamed has always kept his yearly check-in meeting at the Baltimore City office of U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement. For the last 15 years, he has worked with children with special needs, driving them to where they need to go, is married, and has a son.

***

Mar 15, 2025, at 7:47 AM

Good morning. Father Ako will be away next week and he asked if we could find someone who could accompany Mohamed to his ICE appointment at Mohamed’s request. If you or someone from your institution could do so please let [me] know. This could be an interesting experience for someone as well as a mitzvah (good deed) …. Fr. Ako does not know Mohamed. He is not from his church but he receives these kinds of requests from organizations who work with immigrants. Fr. Ako is working on getting Mohamed’s phone number so it is easier to connect.

DETAILS

8am on Tuesday March 18th

ICE office

31 Hopkins Plaza

Suite 630

Baltimore, MD 21201

Thank you, Alisa

***

Mar 15, 2025, at 11:31 AM

I can do it. I will reach out to him.

Elizabeth

Sent from my iPhone

***

Mar 15, 2025, at 11:34 AM

Hi Elizabeth

Thank you very much. I appreciate you.

Fr Ako

***

Mar 18, 2025, at 9:51 AM

We request prayers for Mohamed. He was just detained by ICE. Elizabeth is in touch with a lawyer for help. And we know that prayers can help as well. Thank you.

Here is all that we know so far (from Elizabeth who accompanied Mohamed)—

“I volunteered to accompany Mohamed … to his ICE appointment at the Baltimore ICE office. I was not allowed to sit in the same room with Mohamed while he waited for them to review his papers. But we were able to communicate via text. He informed me he has been detained. That is the last communication I received from him. BUILD is seeking legal guidance for next steps.”

Alisa

***

Mar 18, 2025, at 11:03 AM

Thank you everyone for your prayers.

And thank you to Alisa for leveraging her legal relationships. We now have local attorneys from CASA talking to the attorney from United Stateless, the organization that has been supporting Mohamed and that had requested accompaniment for him today.

Continued prayers for Mohamed and his wife Yvonne and son Saiid and the attorneys working on his case are appreciated.

Elizabeth

Sent from my iPhone

***

Mar 18, 2025, at 11:15 AM

I just got a text from Mohamed that he is being released now!!

Elizabeth

***

Mar 18, 2025, at  4:48pm

Below is the message from the lawyer that got in touch with Mohamed.

“I just spoke to Mohamed who was finally released. He explained that he was briefly detained at the ERO office, then told that he cannot be deported because he is stateless (which, of course, we already know). Then the ICE Officer Johnson sent him to the building next door to enroll in ISAP. He now has an ankle monitor and is under a very strict supervision program with calls every 2 weeks, home visits every 8 weeks, and office check-ins every 16 weeks.

I’m relieved that he is out but it is baffling and frustrating that he is on ISAP now. He has no future court hearings. His final removal order is from 2001. He is a homeowner with a steady job and long-time ties to his community. I plan to immediately reach out and do what I can to de-escalate and ideally unenroll from ISAP.

Mohamed told me that I can share this information with you all. He is also willing to speak publicly if that is an option and would be helpful.”

***

I spoke with Mohamed on the phone this morning. He was very emotional and asked me, “What have I done? Why is this happening?” He said he is close to the edge and seriously considering going back to the Baltimore office of Immigration & Customs Enforcement to ask them to put him back in detention, as he has to wear his ankle monitor 24 hours a day and people are assuming the worst about him; it keeps him up at night so he has not been sleeping, and he is afraid he is going to lose his job. He is going to talk about all this with his lawyer. He is not sure life is worth living this way. I invited him to pray and to breathe with me. And we cried on the phone, together.

Cristina

 

Our next meeting of “Care for the Stranger” is Monday, April 14 at 4pm in our Parish Hall.

 

Dear Folks,

Carl Jung divided life into two phases, calling them our “morning” and “afternoon.” The work of the first phase is the development of the ego, the soul’s morning reserved for relating to the outer world and orienting by it. The second phase is for engaging with the inner world and adapting to it, as the soul develops wholeness, her integrated self. The transition between the two phases occurs at “midlife,” which is discovered at different times by different individuals, and Jung likened the shift to a difficult birth. The masks and personas that have served one well in the past no longer fit, and so in a sometimes painful awakening, the old skin is shed. “There is a self within each one of us aching to be born,” says theologian Alan Jones.

In her book When the Heart Waits, Sue Monk Kidd finds herself in this spiritual labor. Her children were healthy, her marriage was solid, her work was rewarding, and yet she felt hollow and startled by the noise of her unlived voices inside her. She had always been consistent, dependable, hardworking, but increasingly those well-trod patterns didn’t feel like her anymore, or enough of her.

Fear of changing and of how her family, friends, and colleagues would respond was somehow both enticing and daunting, at once. She writes, “What happens when the Pleaser stops pleasing… when Rapunzel stops looking to everyone else to rescue her and begins to climb out of the tower on her own? How do people respond when their favorite martyr ceases to sacrifice her life on the altar of duty? What happens when the Tin Woodman recovers her heart and her real feelings and embraces her body and her sexuality? What happens when Chicken Little decides not to hide from life or truth but takes up her courage and goes out to meet it? When the dawn of a fuller spirituality appears and a new aspect of the true self pushes its way up into the light, (how will we and) the people around us respond? Will they like our new wings?”

In the midst of these questions, Kidd walked over a bridge on the campus of a nearby college, and something on a tree limb caught her eye. At first she goes by the grey protuberance, but is pulled back to consider it: a cocoon. Spirit seemed to be speaking to her about transformation, about the descent of the soul, and of hope. She broke the twig from the limb and carried it home with her, carefully taping the chrysalis to the branch of a crab-apple tree in her backyard.

It occurs to Kidd that the old caterpillar within the cocoon is slowly dissolving and becoming what she will one day be, and that image serves her through her own shadowy waiting. She writes, “The fullness of one’s soul evolves slowly,’ and we go within to gestate the newness forming. We are asked “to collaborate with grace.” This process involves listening to the “disinherited voices within” us, “facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and the undiscovered” parts of ourselves, and opening up the places where one lives falsely. The waiting becomes sacramental, “struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.” She discovers in a Thoreau poem the gift of the “long way round”:

Among the worst of men that ever lived,
However we did seriously attend,
A little space we let our thoughts ascend,
Experienced our religion and confessed
Twas good for us to be there-be anywhere:
Then to a heap of apples we addressed
And cleared the topmost rider sine care,
But our Icarian thoughts returned to ground
And we went on to heaven the long way round

“There is nothing instant or automatic” in spiritual development,” writes Alan Jones. So a call to the long way round is the saving way, Kidd realizes, not the quick and easy religion we sometimes hope for, but the deep and difficult slog of the wilderness.

In one particularly dark night, she takes her flashlight and journal, and sitting on the grass she writes: “God, I don’t want to live falsely, in self-imposed prisons and fixed, comfortable patterns that confine my soul and diminish the truth in me. So much of me has gone underground. I want to let my soul out. I want to be free to risk what’s true… Lead me into the enormous spaces of becoming. Help me cease the small, tedious work of maintaining and protecting so that I can break the masks that obscure your face shining in the night of my own soul. Help me to green my soul and risk becoming the person you created me to be.”

So this is our work: to recognize the false selves within us, to hear their voices at last… and then to let them die. The holy one within us is aching to be born.

Love,
David

Death—as overwhelming as the loss of a loved one and as unconscious as our next exhale—is a part of our shared human experience, yet it is something we have a difficult time facing. I avoided it quite nicely until grief around the death of my father snowballed into a mid-life loss of identities and culminated in a head-on crash with my own mortality through a cancer diagnosis. I was mired in melancholy with the question Is this it? swirling in my head.

While this was unfamiliar territory, my response was predictable: don’t think, march! For answers, I looked outside myself—a grief group, books about dying well, a psychiatrist, a Bible Study, and a Zen center. And as much as I resisted—and continue to resist—every one of them pushed me in the same direction—inward.

I picture my soul as an iridescent tear-drop shaped pearl ringed with little rays of light encased in a warm, golden glow. I think this image came from a painting of Jesus, dressed in red with a little “soul patch” over his heart, that hung outside my first-grade classroom. That’s around the time the forces that shape our lives—families, religious traditions, society—take hold and we start trying to fit in, get approval or simply survive. We adopt personas and abandon the curious, insightful, child-like spirit that is our soul force.

My ordered, surface-skimming life had dulled—as if the flames around my soul weren’t getting the oxygen they needed to stay lit. It turns out Is this it? was the first of many questions I needed to ask to understand the internal deadening I felt in the midst of a very vibrant life. It freed me to ask deeper questions: What animates my spirit? When do I feel most alive and what has to die to make room for it? How do I want to be remembered by the people I love the most? A willingness to examine and accept agency in our life is, I believe, the medicine of mortality.

Mortality reignited a sense of curiosity, wonder, and agency around how I show up for myself and others. I am trying—and failing daily—to surrender my illusion of control, to release the myth of arrival, and to lower my fists and open my arms in order to expose my soul, rather than bury it. Each time I’m brave enough to listen to my inner voice, I discover enlivening moments of light-heartedness and joy—as if some of those little soul lights have been turned back on.

Facing our impermanence is uncomfortable because it means we accept death as a part of life. It is also liberating. We get to decide, with intention, how to spend each moment of our limited time on earth—what a gift! It’s an invitation to discover how to be the light we are meant to be in the world.

Please join us to hear the transformative stories of people who have questioned, grappled with, and surrendered to the beauty and pain of mortality.

~Karen McGee

Karen McGee is a vestry member and is co-organizer along with David Ware of this year’s VOICES Lenten series.