Skip to main content

Contemplative Writing Prompts for Lent: 2

If you’d like an explanation for this series of posts, peruse this introductory post. Otherwise, feel free to take the next twenty minutes and write on the prompt: Take five minutes and make a list of compromises you’ve made in life. Now take the next fifteen minutes and write on one of these compromises. Was it within yourself...

Continue reading

Contemplative Writing Prompts for Lent

Mardi Gras is over. Lent has come upon us. For the next forty days (or so), those of us who follow the Lenten tradition will be focusing on practices designed to bring us closer to God. The goal is to prepare for Easter’s hallelujah moment of rebirth. This year, I will prepare by using Contemplative Writing Prompts for Lent. Lent and Contemplative...

Continue reading

March of the Marys

Each day for three weeks a new Mary appeared on the table. A 3D Advent calendar. A march toward Christmas. You think I like Mary? On this the last day of Advent, I still have Marys left scattered around the house. Tomorrow, they will burst forth and scurry to the table to join their sisters in Christ in their jubilant March of the Marys. Mary...

Continue reading

The Comfort of Winter

I am thinking today about how I’ve always hated fall for being the death of summer, but I’ve never split that from my love of winter. In a short story, I gave the narrator the sentiment that he loved Mississippi best in winter when color kicked in. Yellow grass, orange sage, black limbs against the clarified sky. In summer, Mississippi...

Continue reading

The Howard Thurman Walk

I started this July the 4th morning with a walk. A join virtual walk. My Contemplative Justice group yesterday decided to walk together wherever we were at eight o’clock this morning. We’ve been reading the work of the mystic Howard Thurman, whose original entry to God was leaning against the trunk of an oak. This morning, we would do...

Continue reading

Releasing Those We Love to God

We read the “Abraham almost kills Isaac” story in church today, and I have thoughts. Mostly on what this Genesis story says about releasing those we love to God. Mother, her children, and God When my mother was a young widow, she had her children baptized. She had returned to her native Mississippi where she’d given birth...

Continue reading

White Christian Fear of Racism

I’ve hit a conundrum I can’t understand. I’ve been Christian since the moment my mother hit her knees and, against every fiber in her being, gave up her motherly control over me to have me baptized as “God’s own forever.” As such, I know sin as separation of God. I also know the good news that repentance leads...

Continue reading

The Bishop Came to Our House

Yesterday, in church, the Bishop came to our house. She wore her gold hat and white robes. She carried a carved shepherd’s crook, because she is the shepherd of our souls here on earth. At her side stood a tiny woman called the Bishop’s chaplain, as if the Bishop gets to travel with her BFF spiritual friend always. The Bishop was...

Continue reading

Where Do We Go Now?

Where do we go now? The Guns and Roses refrain keeps traveling through my brain. I’m in flux. We’re re-establishing a presence in Memphis, renting an apartment downtown until we can hopefully find a condo. I’m so place oriented, y’all. This splitting back into three parts—New Orleans, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Memphis—has...

Continue reading