Teaching Me Hope

The day I crossed from green to brown, from chirping birds to revving motorbikes, she wore a pink headband and a faux fur collared coat. She was already waiting on the couch, in between the nursing mama and the wife of our host, one of the 6 women he had summoned to the corrugated metal […]

Rachel Held Evans’ Call to Valor

In Honor of Women’s History Month, our March theme, “Women of Valor,” is dedicated to Rachel Held Evans.   In 2012 Rachel Held Evans published The Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master.” In its pages, she gave us a […]

Welcome to The Mudroom

This is the first-ever post written for The Mudroom, back in February 2015. It’s as relevant now as it was then! Back in the day, I used to write for Cornerstone magazine. The staff was a community inside of a community: artists, proofreaders, marketing, writers, mailroom. It was frantic and insane and glorious. I miss […]

The Mystery of Breaking Bread

I’m sitting on the washing machine, finishing my coffee, waiting for the timer to go off. My Eucharist bread is in the oven. “This cup is the new covenant.” I’ve been hearing pastors and priests say that for thirty years, in little Baptist churches and at fabulous Catholic mass. Priests in robes, holding chalice and […]

When We Don’t Want Others To Belong

  I’m looking for spaces that are a homecoming. I’m realizing it’s not easy to find places of true belonging and it’s even harder to be a person who offers it. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t want to belong, but I know many who want to disconnect, to distance, to separate and […]

From Information to Transformation

I have worked in several organizations where personality tests were a common language, sometimes they became a default for conversation or the butt of many jokes. It was not uncommon to be able to identify strengths, introversion or extroversion or a myriad of other descriptors of one’s work, communication or social style. While this was […]

A Different Kind of Unity

Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn. – Richard Wright   Nestled between the land masses we call Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, […]

Come Eating and Drinking, Come Hungry

In my father’s last days, his hunger vanished.  As he shrunk like a hollowed out husk, his spirit being gathered by the very hand of God, his appetites died within him. The hospice nurse handed me a pamphlet about the stages of death and closed her palm gently over the back of my hand.  “Fluid and food […]