We’re in the third week of the fall semester here, and I’m finally through my start-of-the-school-year jitters. (Regular-grade anxiety remains.) Official protocol and policy dictate that I not write about my students. But I don’t think I’m violating any rules by telling you that they’re thoughtful, creative, eager, and lovely.

The journalism program is unique on campus, I think, in that a significant part of the learning takes place one-on-one, akin to the Oxbridge tutorial system. We have one three-hour seminar as a group each week, but I also meet individually with each student at least six times during the semester. These sessions are scheduled for 30 minutes, but many have gone 45, even an hour. We might talk about their most recent writing assignment or their ideas for an upcoming one, how the semester is going or just life—often, all of the above.

When I’m sitting in these sessions, I sometimes feel as if some of my best teachers are hovering lovingly just over my shoulder. All of them did much more than impart knowledge. They fed me, which is not a metaphor: oatmeal cookies, which I’d never tasted before, in third grade; a lavish, end-of-semester buffet with steak and salmon my freshman year of college; smoked chicken at the end of grad school. Several bolstered my courage with their exhortations. Two forever changed the way I teach; because of one, I had the audacity to tell my students that I expect love to grow in our community of learning, and because of another, I’ve been sharing with the class what I’ve learned from them, reminding them that, while I might be their professor of record, they’re teaching me—and one another—too.

I don’t care if they see me as some unfashionably earnest weirdo. (I think the world could use more unfashionably earnest weirdos.) During our first class session a couple of weeks ago, I told my students that I care about their reporting and writing. But more than that, I care about them as humans—complex humans, humans with histories, humans who come carrying all the invisible baggage collected wherever they’ve been and whatever they’ve experienced.

That’s why I bring snacks to class each week; we all get hungry, and we all can feed others. That’s why we discussed the myth of objectivity and the importance of fairness. And that’s why I’ve been writing them little missives, which I post each week on our course website and which I hope will offer them some encouragement.

Maybe this week’s note to my students might offer you some encouragement too. It’s called “Apprehending the World.”

In 1975, the writer Joan Didion gave a commencement address at the University of California-Riverside. She talked about understanding the world—or, to be more precise, not misunderstanding the world:

I’ve had to struggle all my life against my own misapprehensions, my own false ideas, my own distorted perceptions. I’ve had to work very hard, make myself unhappy, give up ideas that made me comfortable, trying to apprehend social reality. I’ve spent my entire adult life, it seems to me, in a state of profound culture shock. I wish I were unique in this, but I’m not. You may not be afflicted with my misapprehensions, and I may not be afflicted with yours, but none of this starts “tabula rasa.” We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what’s really going on.

Didion had by then already become a literary star and a practitioner of a kind of immersive creative nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. She and other members of her cohort were open about their subjectivity, were unafraid to be present in the story, and blurred the lines between “literary” writing (whatever that is) and the stereotypically journalistic.

In her speech, Didion addressed this question of subjectivity and objectivity. She reported throughout the 1960s, a tumultuous time she described as “a period in which some people began to wonder if the symbols didn’t mean anything and you couldn’t trust the words; if there was any objective reality at all.” It’s one thing to say, as a human and as a writer, that objectivity is impossible—that’s on us and our limited capabilities—and altogether another to assert that objective reality itself doesn’t exist:

What you might be blinded for, what you ought to watch out for, is the habit of saying no, the habit of not believing anybody or anything. You’ve got to watch out for moving into a world where you don’t think there’s any objective reality, where there’s only you and that tree you just planted. There’s an objective reality, there is an objective social reality. Take it on faith. All I want to tell you today, really, is not to do that. Not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your tree. I want to tell you to live in the messy world, throw yourself into the convulsion of the world.

Is it human nature to want order amidst the chaos? The creation myths of so many peoples talk about some higher power spinning something resembling wholeness out of disarray. Is it just how we are wired, to wish for dissonance to resolve into harmony? Certainly a mom of a stereotypically messy teenager with a stereotypically messy room might quibble. But, big picture, it’s not easy to live in the messy world, or to endure its convulsions.

Our own lives will have their own convulsions, too, and nobody should ever blame or shame you for getting motion sickness on this wild ride. Journalism, though, has at times provided its own comfort: Solidarity, perhaps, at the ubiquity of hardship as part of the human condition. Sometimes, to be honest, escapism—escape into another culture, escape into someone else’s story, escape into another’s troubles as a temporary distraction from one’s own.

Reared Episcopalian, Didion had by then become something of a fierce agnostic. Throughout her adult life, she eschewed any belief in gods, or higher powers, or the afterlife, of which she said once, “I don’t disbelieve; I just don’t believe.” At the same time, she did believe in some sort of order to life—“a larger pattern somewhere,” as she put it. Was this some version of existentialism? Secular humanism with a touch of... something else? Hard to say. I think one could make a solid case that she was a realist to her marrow, though:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could only tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

Notice how relational life is through her eyes—connection with other humans, and the earth, and one’s adversaries, and one’s audiences. I don’t think it’s a mistake that the main verb she contrasts with the solitude of the grave is “embrace.”

You will define for yourselves why you bother to do anything, including this thing we are calling journalism. Seeing as I’ve already set any facade of objectivity aside, let me wholeheartedly and subjectively say that I do hope you will make the world better, not just through your writing but also through your being—being kind, being thoughtful, being neighborly, being gracious, being just, being wise, being curious, being complicated, being human.

I also hope you will take what Didion wrote to heart: Extend your embrace. It will be risky. It might sometimes hurt. But that is the good work—and, I’d even say, the good life.

You can read the entirety of Joan Didion’s commencement address here.

Several of you have written to ask for the syllabus. I’m not going to post it in its entirety (it contains a lot of arcane information, including grading rubrics and internal material). But I’ll post what we’re reading, along with links where I have them, so those of you who are interested can follow along.

One note: The course is “Reading and Writing About Religion,” not “Reading and Writing About Christianity,” and it’s a journalism class. My choices of reading material are intentionally wide-ranging but also exclude anything typically classified as “inspirational” or written for the devotees of a particular faith.

Before we even met in person, I asked the students to read the following:
“Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion,” Lauren Jackson, The New York Times
“Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston,” Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker (Sorry, I don’t have a gift link for this one or, indeed, any of the New Yorker pieces)
“The Religion No One Talks About,” Sarah Betancourt, Longreads
“Upon This Rock,” John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

All of these pieces have a first-person element to them, which, for a journalism class, might seem... odd? imbalanced? But here’s the thing: How do you write about other people’s belief (or non-belief) if you haven’t examined your own? So their first writing assignment was to pen a spiritual autobiography, an exercise that, I hoped, would compel them to consider their own biases, stories, and preconceived notions.

Week Two focused on reporting and writing about Christian nationalism, and it included pieces written from a variety of perspectives—first-person essay, immersive reporting, news analysis. What are the different angles from which a reporter can approach a subject? What responsibility does a writer have to disclose personal history? What distinct shapes can a story take?

Chapter 1 from Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
“Confessions of a Former Christian Nationalist,” Rob Schenck, Mother Jones
“How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker
“Islamophobia’s Rise in Texas,” J. David Goodman, Lauren McGaughy, Jesus Jimenez, and Ruth Graham, The New York Times
“The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows,” Stephanie McCrummen, The Atlantic “The New Faces of Christian Nationalism,” Rachel Monroe, The New Yorker

In Week Three, we concentrated on an international-reporting case study: the Buddhist-Muslim conflict in Myanmar. What do local eyes and knowledge bring to a story? How might an outsider perceive or frame things differently?

“Myanmar Burning,” Wa Lone, Kyaw Saw Oe, et al., Reuters
“The Face of Buddhist Terror,” Hannah Beech, Time
“What Happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon?” Hannah Beech, The New Yorker

Leave a comment

More to come… In the meantime, I hope you will be surprised by delight and sideswiped by joy this week.

All my best,
Jeff

Leave a comment

Psalm 103:1-17, as translated by the Rev. Dr. Wilda C. Gafney, in A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year W.

Bless the FOUNT OF WISDOM, O my soul,
and all that is within me, bless her holy Name.
Bless the FOUNT OF WISDOM, O my soul,
and forget not all her benefits.
She forgives all your sins
and heals all your infirmities;
She redeems your life from the grave
and crowns you with mercy and lovingkindness;
She satisfies you with good things,
and your youth is renewed like an eagle’s.
SHE WHO IS WISDOM executes righteousness
and judgment for all who are oppressed.
She made her ways known to Miriam and Moses
and her works to the children of lsrael.
WISDOM’S womb is full of love and faithfulness,
slow to anger and overflowing with faithful love.
She will not always accuse us,
will she keep her anger forever.
She has not dealt with us according to our sins,
nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
indomitable is her faithful love upon those who revere her.
As far as the east is from the west,
so far has she removed our sins from us.
As a mother’s love for her children flows from her womb,
so too does WISDOM’S love for those who revere her flow from her womb.
For she herself knows whereof we are made;
She remembers that we are but dust.
Our days are like the grass;
we flourish like a flower of the field;
When the wind goes over it, it is gone,
and its place shall know it no more.
But the faithful love of SHE WHO IS WISDOM endures forever
on those who revere her,
and her righteousness on children’s children.

As I studied today’s psalm, I wondered how it has been read before. Since we’re in the chapel of an august academic institution, I was curious: How have august academics treated it? Searching the databases, I found countless articles elaborating on the 103rd Psalm’s glories and possibilities. Perhaps you’ve been intrigued by “Parallels Between Ancient Egyptian Religious Literature and the Old Testament Psalms: Psalm 103 and the Great Hymn to the Aten.” Another paper was called “Psalm 103: Design, Boundaries, and Mergers,” as if this poem were, say, a midcentury modern house or a small corporation being targeted in a leveraged buyout. The translation we’re using today is innovative; perhaps you could pair it cross-culturally with the in-depth analysis offered by the paper “Psalm Paraphrases in Latin in Sixteenth Century Hungary.” My personal favorite? The deeply moving “Metrical Psalm-Singing and Emotion in Scottish Protestant Affective Piety, 1560-1650.”

While no doubt that was a crucial and formative 90-year period in affectively pious singing of this psalm in Scotland, and no offense to those fine scholars who lovingly crafted those works, as I plowed ever deeper into the academic archives, I might just have thought: As far as the east is from the west, so far do I hope God will remove these databases from us. I hope you won’t be too disappointed that I will not be summarizing the key arguments of these papers for you today.

I’m teaching a course on reading and writing about religion in the journalism program this semester, and I’m trying to teach my students to read stories closely but to read them against the context of the world in which they were written. A story, a poem, an essay—these are artifacts of a moment, but they don’t contain the entirety of that moment, or a culture, or an era, or a people. To read closely can paradoxically mean to read expansively. What goes unwritten and why? What do other documents and testimonies tell us? What might a commentator be carrying, like near-invisible baggage, into the writing of a text? What was in the air that maybe only tinged the paper?

So I went back to the psalm itself, particularly to this translation, by the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, a Womanist biblical scholar at Brite Divinity School in Texas. I was reared on the psalms, and thought I knew this one. How startling it can be, like cold water splashed on tired eyes, to read a fresh translation of a familiar text. You might know Psalm 103 like I do: Bless the Lord, O my soul. But Gafney makes the implicit explicit, excavating meaning from the original Hebrew poetry: Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Here at the start of this semester, my soul needs that fount of wisdom. Bless it.

As I’ve sat with these words for weeks now, with these lines full of rich imagery, abounding not just in steadfast love but also scriptural provocation, and as I’ve studied the volumes written about it, I’ve struggled with the fact that, not only does this psalm have to have a number slapped on it, which I am guessing the original poet didn’t choose, but commentators also feel the need to classify it, usually either as a psalm of praise or as a psalm of thanksgiving or sometimes as both. But why can’t it just be a psalm, containing the worlds of meaning that come with a poem? Why does it have to be a psalm of something in particular, rather than a psalm in general, a psalm of life, a psalm of complication, sprawling here and there and being messy—in other words, just a psalm of… being human?

Part of my resistance, I think, is that the classification of 103 as a psalm of praise does not exactly meet us where we are right now—as a society, as a country, as a world. Or maybe that’s too bold. I should just speak for myself. I’m not sure it meets me where I am. Praise? I’m not sure I’ve got much of that in me right now.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

You could tell me all day long that that’s a cry of praise. But I can’t get my mouth to make the words come out that way, and that’s not how they hit my ear as a listener.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

I say these words with a hint of weariness. Can you hear the subtext? I can summarize it with one word: Help.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Listen for the gritted teeth, for the shallow breath, for the longing, for the neediness.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Blessed to be a blessing, the cliche goes. I’m on board if you can hear this even like a dare, as if to say to the divine, I’m gonna bless you, so please bless me. You have said you’ll show up, so show up.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Praise? Thanksgiving? My mode right now is more request for assistance, expression of longing, awkward visit to God’s office hours. I can hear an appeal to God to fulfill God’s promises. I can read this psalm as a plea that that fount be less like a dry spring and more like those waters that are pledged to roll down, more like that long-prophesied ever-flowing stream.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Baraki nafshi et Adonai, the Hebrew says. Baraki, from barak, which means “to bless,” yes, but also “to bend the knee” or “to kneel.” I am kneeling! But who can say if I am kneeling in weariness, or if I am kneeling in reverence, or if I am kneeling in need, or if I am kneeling in acknowledgment of human limits?

Yes, and— Yes, and—

So what if we were to reclassify this psalm, at least for today, at least as a thought experiment, at least against the context of the griefs we endure and the injustices that the mighty of this world continue to inflict on the lowly and the realities of our inescapable not-yet? How else might we then understand this poem?

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Maybe this is a psalm of memory. Kneel and remind yourself of the truths you’ve been taught, the psalmist says.

Bless the FOUNT OF WISDOM, O my soul, and forget not all her benefits. She forgives all your sins and heals all your infirmities; She redeems your life from the grave and crowns you with mercy and lovingkindness; She satisfies you with good things, and your youth is renewed like an eagle’s.

Maybe this is a psalm of memory. In your shame and in your sorrow, you’re met by forgiveness and balm. Amid the little deaths that mark this life and in your pain, you’re found with resurrection and salve. In your worry and in your weariness, you’re offered sufficiency and energy.

Maybe this is a psalm of memory of blessing, but it’s crucial to remember too that this song is no solo; it’s a chorus. It’s sung not alone but together, in a congregation, with a people, who help each other remember, who embody healing and forgiveness to one another, who extend hands of mercy and hearts of loving-kindness, who share goodness and orchestrate renewal, together, and who can do so because their ancestors did so before.

Yes, maybe this psalm is a psalm of collective memory. It comes in the midst of a run of psalms all seemingly designed to help the people remember. Once upon a time, what we now know as the Book of Psalms was a collection of five hymnals. Psalm 103 is in the fourth hymnal, which resounds with crashing seas and gushing springs, desert owls hooting their songs and lions roaring their salutes. And surrounding it are insistent accounts of God’s presence to the ancestors—cameos by Moses and Aaron, guest appearances from Abraham and Jacob, all showing up, together, coming alongside, together, to say to their descendants and to us, together: Remember, because you are remembered. Do not forget, because you are not forgotten.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul, I say with all the worries of a new semester and a weighty workload and a faltering country and an aching world.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Maybe this is a psalm of consolation. Rest here for a moment, the psalmist says, and let me tell you what God has done.

SHE WHO IS WISDOM executes righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed. She made her ways known to Miriam and Moses and her works to the children of lsrael. WISDOM’S womb is full of love and faithfulness, slow to anger and overflowing with faithful love. She will not always accuse us, nor will she keep her anger forever. She has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness. For as the heavens are high above the earth, indomitable is her faithful love upon those who revere her. As far as the east is from the west, so far has she removed our sins from us.

Maybe this is a psalm of consolation—consolation for those who bear the brunt of injustice, consolation for those who feel disconnected, consolation for those who have been betrayed, consolation for those who fear they haven’t been good enough, consolation for those who feel beyond God’s embrace, consolation for those who worry they’ve done that thing that can’t be forgiven.

Maybe this is a psalm of consolation and good news—consolation and good news for you and for me and for all the world, insistent about what God has done and—don’t ignore those constantly shifting verb tenses—what God is still doing.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

But what if it is a confused and conflicted soul?

Maybe this is a psalm of solidarity for confused and conflicted souls.

As a mother’s love for her children flows from her womb, so too does WISDOM’S love for those who revere her flow from her womb. For she herself knows whereof we are made; She remembers that we are but dust. Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field; When the wind goes over it, it is gone, and its place shall know it no more. But the faithful love of SHE WHO IS WISDOM endures forever on those who revere her, and her righteousness on children’s children.

Maybe this is a psalm of solidarity. Recall, human, how you have been blessed, with the very gift of life itself, a gorgeous and fragile blossom of a gift, the psalmist says—not just you personally but you as a people, you as humanity, you as a creature among the creatureliness of the world. Sure, you could fixate on the word “gone,” but what if you dwelled for just a bit on “flourish” or “flower”? Would God bring such a thing to life just to deem it hopeless or worthless? Would God expend the energy to orchestrate flourishing and flowering if it meant nothing to God?

Maybe this is a psalm of solidarity and not just a psalm of solidarity but also a psalm of testimony, one that says, Yes, there is hardship but there is also beauty. This is what it means to be human. There is sadness, but there is also joy. This is what it means to be human. There is evil, but there is also good. This is what it means to be human.

By way of testimony, let me tell you about a student who sat in these very pews in a previous century. He arrived on this campus full of possibility and hope but also anxiety and fear. Then he learned he wasn’t all that smart—this place does that to you—and the acquisition of knowledge didn’t go all that well. He also learned there were things within him, things about him, some known, some less known, that marked him as “other.” He learned that there were things that had been done to him that he couldn’t banish from his heart and mind. Did these things also mark him as unlovable? Some afternoons, some evenings, he’d wander into this very space, this empty and quiet space, and wonder.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

This is a psalm of solidarity and testimony—and let me add my own to the poet’s. Wisdom’s love met me here, not all at once, not quickly. But that 18-year-old kid who arrived at Princeton in 1995, hopeful but afraid, closeted but longing for wholeness, hurt at the hands of a stranger but still healing and learning to heal even now, inexplicably and unexpectedly now stands here before you in this pulpit. I am far from perfect—my husband and my family and my friends will testify to that—but maybe the call of this psalm isn’t to perfection but to faithfulness, not to individual overcoming by sheer personal will but collective care and healing, because it really has been the echo and embrace of God through the many that again and again have restored my soul. I’m not all that wise, but thanks to community that I am able, some moments at least, to say, Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul, with gladness.

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

Maybe this psalm is not just a psalm of memory and consolation and solidarity and testimony but also a psalm of call, a psalm of call that invites your response too. The poet doesn’t just look back at what happened. She also looks around, at each beloved child of God, at each yearning spirit and hungry soul, indeed, at this good earth; and she looks forward, to the promised renewal and resurrection, and she subtly points our attention there.

Dust, grass, flower, field—these images carry with them a sense of the ephemeral, yes, but they’re also hopeful images, sustaining images, live images, because dust, grass, flower, and field are all part of a natural world, of God’s economy, where nothing is wasted, where death has no final say, where even in the fading of a blossom, possibility appears in the form of the seed, where an end also brings a beginning.

This psalm of call points to dust and grass, flower and field, as reminders of our real human limits and the wild capaciousness of God’s creation. Any notions we have of being at the center are reframed, our geometry corrected, our very selves reoriented toward others, toward community, toward an expansive us. We are made appropriately small, not to minimize, not to diminish, not to dehumanize, but rather to right-size, to humble, to humanize—to let God be God and to let us be us.

To let God be God and to let us be us is to be nudged out into the great wide open, into the garden, into that many-roomed mansion that has sky as its ceiling and the stars as overhead lighting and prairie as carpet and birdsong as soundtrack and all manner of tree and flowering plant as decor and the grace and care of God marking it all as good. Is all that beauty not an expression of her righteousness? Is all that glory not a sign of her steadfastness? Is it not wisdom to recognize our place in the family of creation, our good company amidst all that God has made, and our call to be just and loving neighbors, empowered by the very source of life?

Bless the fount of wisdom, O my soul.

This psalm of memory, of consolation, of solidarity and testimony, of call that invites a worthy response—it’s a psalm of love, isn’t it? It sings of a love that is with you and for you, a love that promises to heal everything in this aching world, a love that won’t leave you or forsake you, a love that creates and redeems and sustains, a gritty and tenacious and resilient love, a love beyond all other loves.

And if this really is a love song, about the God who is steadfast love embodied for us, then what can I say, except that this must be a psalm of praise and a psalm of thanksgiving too.

Amen.

Leave a comment

Earlier this year, I read a book I didn’t like much. It wasn’t fun.

Sometimes it was a slog. Sometimes it felt voyeuristic. Sometimes it seemed insightful about the human condition. Sometimes it was tiresome. Sometimes I wanted to stop.

This book had so, so, so many chapters, and in an especially exhausting one, every single sentence began with the word “sometimes.” Though I skimmed that chapter, it felt as if it went on forever.

Still, I kept reading. Why?

The Museum of Innocence was written by Orhan Pamuk, the only Turkish author ever to win the Nobel Prize. It’s set mostly in Istanbul, and my friend Laura chose it for us to read together ahead of and during our trip to Istanbul in April.

Years ago, I read My Name Is Red, perhaps Pamuk’s most acclaimed novel; I remember nothing about it, except that I found it boring. The Museum of Innocence was (mostly) not boring. Published in 2008, it chronicles the life of Kemal Basmacı, a scion of a wealthy industrialist family, and his impossible, irritating, at times obsessive love for Füsun Keskin, a younger, poorer distant relation. As the reader learns about Kemal’s inner turmoil to an excruciating degree, Pamuk depicts his country during decades of socioeconomic and political tumult. Turkish society and culture change. People struggle to adjust. Fortunes rise and fall; relationships and regimes blossom, then fade.

When Nedret, a concierge at our hotel, learned we were reading The Museum of Innocence, she immediately wrinkled her nose and said that she didn’t care for Pamuk’s writing. She didn’t want to say much more, beyond one simple fact: “I do not like his ideology.” As we talked more with Nedret and her colleagues, we learned that many Turkish readers object to how Pamuk portrays their country.

Pamuk depicts human longing—irrationality, passion, tenderness, perseverance—with rich complexity. His utterly unlikeable protagonist bewildered and at times infuriated me. It was altogether a lot, but I didn’t grasp Pamuk’s boundless commitment to his project until Laura and I visited the Istanbul museum he painstakingly created to bring his novel to life.

Throughout the book, Kemal pilfers innumerable objects belonging to Füsun or discarded by Füsun. Treasures, trinkets, detritus: They’re now all on display, along with other relics from Kemal’s life and the handwritten pages of Pamuk’s manuscript. (As Laura and I wandered the museum, I found myself Googling, “Was Kemal Bey a real person?” He was not, except in Pamuk’s realized imagination.) Kemal’s admission that he surreptitiously retrieved and kept more than 4,000 cigarette butts from Füsun’s ashtrays disgusted me. Seeing those cigarette butts neatly pinned to a wall in the museum, complete with lipstick smears and documentation, was a “wow” moment.

During the trip, Laura and I talked some about the book, by which I mean I mostly whined about how it was making me feel. Later, I realized I’d enjoyed the conversations about Pamuk—with Laura, with Nedret—more than I enjoyed reading Pamuk. I didn’t like The Museum of Innocence, but I respected it.

--

One summer in my late teens, I bought a bootleg copy of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from a bookseller in Shenzhen, China. On the train back to Hong Kong, I started reading.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...

Back then, Hong Kong still had plenty of sweatshops. In the street markets, you could buy seconds from the factories. One of my favorite T shirts read, “OANDY POUSE.” (Should have been “Candy House.”) After reading a few pages of my new book, I shoved it into my backpack, convinced I’d bought the literary equivalent of a misprinted T shirt. What a scam.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was, I worked for an editor who venerated Joyce, adored Ulysses, and thought that any properly educated person should not only read Ulysses but also find it hilarious. I’ve never read Ulysses. But while writing for this editor, I visited the James Joyce House in Dublin. There, I learned that, during revisions, Joyce often reworked his text to be less clear and more difficult. My copy wasn’t misprinted; he was trying to disorient the reader. This annoyed me so much that I was inspired to read Portrait again.

This time, after enduring a few pages, I was somehow disarmed and drawn in. Sometimes Portrait still irked me, but by the end—it isn’t a long book—I decided I quite liked it. “Like” or “dislike” seemed secondary, though. The novel immersed me in a life and a world not my own—and it made me feel something, whether that was irritation or delight or maybe the delight of irritation. Have you ever considered how alive you can feel when you’re irritated?

I’m glad I read Portrait, and I’m glad I read The Museum of Innocence. Neither was particularly relatable. Both demanded work—patience, longsuffering, surrender of expectation, a willingness to be taken somewhere unfamiliar. Both books moved me.

--

Not long ago I asked a friend what he was reading. He mentioned that his book group was discussing a recently published nonfiction book. “It’s not saying anything that hasn’t been said before,” I said. “Absolutely not,” he said, but the people in his reading group needed to be affirmed in what they already knew and believed.

I kept thinking about that: They needed to be affirmed in what they already knew and believed. It brought to mind the questions and comments I’ve often heard about books, whether my own or others’: “But what are the clear takeaways?” “Why do I care?” “I couldn’t relate.” Or conversely and more affirmingly: “It’s like he read my mind.” “I felt less alone.” And “I felt like she was writing about me.”

None of these is inherently wrong. But they all leave me wondering whether we’ve come to want from books what we get from a Doordash order—quick satisfaction, effortless convenience, easy calories—or even the almighty algorithm—something tailored to my already evident tastes, relentless focus on the delivery of expected pleasure. If the main critique of a book is that it isn’t relatable, is that necessarily the author’s failure, or could it sometimes be the reader’s? Honestly, it might be a collaboration.

Look, I’m not immune to wanting what I want when I want it. Another dog video or ten? Yes, please. But this need to have one’s existing views affirmed, the emphasis on relatability, the centering of the self—these all demand examination. I wonder what’s behind the seemingly insatiable appetite for having one’s own views validated, one’s convictions and opinions and experiences and reactions reinforced. Surely something has happened to our relational muscles. Is this yet more evidence that empathy has atrophied, or were we always so weak?

I’ve participated in lectio divina Bible studies several times, and it has always struck me as odd that participants are often asked, “Where do you see yourself in the story?” I understand the attempt to ignite imagination or build relevance. But maybe we also risk inserting ourselves where we don’t need to be. Surely we can appreciate a story without being in it. It’s possible, even valuable, to bear witness to another’s experience, and to say, My goodness, this is how someone else has moved through this world.

Books and stories can be mirrors in which we see ourselves. (For all our talk of diversity, it turns out that many of us just adore reading about ourselves.) I think I prefer them as windows, through which we see another—another life, another worldview, another perspective, another way of being human. So many stories aren’t easy or fun, but they nourish by stretching, questioning, challenging, goading.

When I was coming up in journalism, I was taught to use the word “I” rarely, if at all, except, of course, in quotes. The stories I was assigned to write weren’t about me; I think I wrote one first-person essay in my entire first decade as a reporter. The stories I most like to read—and the stories that teach me the most, if I’m doing my part as a reader—aren’t about me either.

I’m currently reading the Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Kitchen. It tells the story of a young woman named Mikage Sakurai. After her grandmother dies, Mikage finds solace and shelter with a young man named Yuichi and his mother, Eriko, a transgender nightclub owner.

Kitchen is wonderfully weird, and what I appreciate most about it is the way Yoshimoto transports me into intimate spaces to which I wouldn’t otherwise have access. I’m about two-thirds of the way through, and I have no idea where this book is going, yet somehow its pages are exactly where I want to be. Hanging out late at night in Yuichi and Eriko’s dimly lit Tokyo kitchen as Mikage makes a snack, I sense a strange and generous hospitality, one that reminds me: Sometimes the best, most special place for the reader is just off the page, invited simply to pay attention and to try to understand.

What have you read lately that has moved you? What have been the highlights and low points of your summer reading, and why? I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

Where I’m Going: How we read is on my mind because, in a couple of weeks, I head to New Jersey, where I’ll be a visiting professor in Princeton University’s journalism program. I’ll be teaching a course called Reading and Writing about Religion.

I’m not sure how it will feel to be back at my alma mater. Undoubtedly it will stir up some memories—and particularly as I remember how hard college was, especially during those first couple of years, I hope I will be able to encounter my students with empathy and gentleness.

I became a journalist because of a visiting professor in that same program, Charlotte Grimes of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The only journalism class I’ve ever taken was hers, called “Politics and the Press,” in the fall of my sophomore year. Her markings and notes all over my drafts, all in bright red pen, at first shocked me; nobody had ever gone at my writing like that before. Slowly, over the course of that semester, I came to see the respect and affection they represented. She told me she believed I could do better. She was the first person who believed I could tell stories for a living.

Princeton’s journalism program has had classes about all kinds of subjects—immigration, race, science, place, economic upheaval, climate change, sports, trauma. But despite the importance and influence of religion in the life of the world, it has never had a course on religion reporting and writing.

My syllabus is mostly done. I’m planning to have the students read a wide range of work, including in-depth reporting on Christian nationalism, some excellent interviews that touch on spirituality, personal essays about belief (or lack thereof), and thoughtful pieces that illuminate religiosity outside the traditional precincts of religion (what are the chants and songs at a football game in England if not liturgy, and is not a Taylor Swift concert a spiritual experience for her fans?). But I still have room and time to make some changes. If you’ve read an excellent piece of writing that somehow sheds light on the manifestations of faith in the contemporary world, I’d love to hear about it.

Leave a comment

What I’m Listening to: I’m in a sad-song season, and here’s one for those who, like me, find themselves betwixt and between. Earlier this year, I was watching How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, which was created by Derry Girls mastermind Lisa McGee, and I had to stop and rewind when I heard the song “I Don’t Want to Go to You,” co-written by Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol and Iain Archer. It so perfectly captures the complicated reality of wanting to hide and also longing to be known, stepping out bravely and then running back to one’s cave—which is to say, life (for many of us anyway): “Don’t forgive me, I’ll forgive myself/ Don’t believe a word I say/ So when I tell you I don’t need you here/ It means lots of things, but also you should stay.”

Where to Find Me: The rest of this year will be focused largely on that Princeton class as well as on my seemingly endless PhD dissertating, so I have just a few preaching and speaking dates scheduled. Come say hello!

September 13, 11 a.m.: Princeton University Chapel, Princeton, N.J.
September 20, 10 a.m.: Crosspointe Church, Cary, N.C.
October 11, worship at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., talk and Q&A at 6 p.m: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Louisville, Ky.
November 1, 10 a.m.: First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, Calif.
November 8, 10 a.m.: Crosspointe Church, Cary, N.C.

That’s all for this week, other than a quick hello from the zinnias in my garden plot. Today, for the first time ever, I saw a hummingbird sipping nectar from one of my blooms, but alas, it did not consent to a photo. May these blossoms be for you a reminder that, amidst the tumult of these times, there is still resilient beauty all around us.

With gratitude and in hope,
Jeff

A few days ago, as I was getting ready to drive north from Atlanta to visit my friends Barbara and Ed in rural Georgia, Facebook delivered a six-year-old photo to my phone.

I have mixed feelings about how the machine surfaces memories; my restless brain does just fine on its own, without these extra inputs. But Barbara and I have bonded in part over our love of dogs and in particular for Jack Russells. My Fozzie and her Canty were Jack Russells, though Fozz was probably more of a mix than Canty. Somewhere, I want to believe, they’re now romping in peace and terrifying rabbits together.

I texted her the photo, along with my estimated arrival time. Time—what a strange thing: How can it have been six years since that photo, and more than two since we bid farewell to the Fozz? Sometimes I think about him and the grief still feels fresh. I’d like it to have softened more, but this is one of sorrow’s annoying attributes: It keeps to its own timetable.

As I drove north, the land began to rise gently, as if testing out the idea of making mountains. Its subtle rolls mirrored my emotions—anticipatory gladness at the thought of being among friends, sadness at things that have happened in the years since my last visit, a sudden worry (did I remember to get that sauce at H Mart? yes, I think I did), surprise as other memories sprang to mind.

When I first began working on Good Soil, one agent told me the story didn’t work, because there was too much death at the end. He urged me to move the death to about a third of the way through the narrative and resolve the grief for the reader by the end of the book.

I protested that I’m a nonfiction writer; he said that memoirists move things around all the time. What I actually wanted to say was that I didn’t want to lie; it happened when it happened, and how exactly does one “resolve” grief anyway? To write an impossible resolution, to give the reader a pretend picture of an easy out, would have been to bear false witness to a hard truth.

--

I arrived on schedule. When I pulled to the end of Barbara and Ed’s long, gravel driveway, I saw no humans. But the welcoming committee was ready. Their dogs, Sadie and Ellie, rushed up to the open car door, their bodies quivering with excitement, bobbing heads ready for scratches behind the ears.

After I greeted the humans, dragged my suitcase to the guest room, and began unpacking, I grabbed the bag of dog treats that I often travel with and went to find Sadie and Ellie to reward them for such a show of hospitality.

Then I returned inside to get my wok out of my suitcase, went to the kitchen, and began cooking. I am my mother’s child in many ways, chief among them that I’m not always fluent in the spoken language of human emotion. What we can’t say in words, though, we can say through food.

I see Barbara maybe once a year, twice at most—not often. Sometimes a text pops up from her, with a random memory or a dog video. Her timing is always right. Her ready laughter applies balm to my aches. She’s an expert at companionable silence. I’ve lost count of how many times she has held my sadness with tender hands, though I will never forget the first time it happened: In an extended conversation on a sofa in some stranger’s home, years ago in Tennessee, she asked and listened and asked and listened, waving away every single person who tried to interrupt.

How does one show gratitude to a friend who shows up like that? That night, my thanks came in the form of halibut with soy, ginger, and scallion; braised mushrooms with abalone on a bed of blanched romaine lettuce from our Grand Rapids garden; a mild curry of homegrown potatoes along with Japanese yam, carrot, and sweet potato; chicken stir-fried with peppers and onion; pan-fried tofu and zucchini with chili crisp; egg and tomato; Chinese greens with garlic; and plenty of jasmine rice to absorb all the goodness of the spices and sauces.

You could say it was way too much food for three people. I think it wasn’t enough.

--

Just after 8:30 p.m. on my last evening at Barbara and Ed’s, my phone started shrieking: A tornado warning.

Thunderstorms had erupted just to the north. Barbara put on the local radio, which reported that a tornado had been spotted to our northwest and the whole storm system was barreling southward. We debated what to do for a few minutes. Then Ed’s phone blared with another warning, and the local tornado sirens wailed outside.

We decided to head down to the basement. The rain was coming down in sheets as we exited the kitchen to access the outdoor stairwell. Sadie was already waiting at the bottom of the steps. How did she know?

As we waited out the storm, Ed puttered around the basement, while Barbara and I sat and chatted about this and that. The lights flickered occasionally. I don’t know why my brain is wired to imagine worst-case scenarios, but it does. Maybe this is how it ends, I thought. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go. Then Ellie came and sat right in front of me, nestling her head against my knee. How did she know?

The storm passed.

--

Not too long ago, a friend gave me an odd and marvelous little book called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the writer John Koenig’s collection of words he made up to describe emotions and states of being that haven’t previously been named in English. In Koenig’s dictionary, tiris describes “the bittersweet awareness that all things must end.” “The impermanence of everything around us,” Koenig writes, is “a certain kinship shared by all things. The stars and the tombstones, the family dog and the honeybees.”

What some might understand to be grief and loss, though, can also be possibility and freedom, love enduring and treasure held dear. Consider the honeybees, he suggests: “To the honeybees, summer never ends. They live for a few months at most, barely long enough to feel the seasons change.... You can hear them buzzing deep in their hives, trading bits of sweetness they’ve gathered out in the world. How easily they pass the nectar back and forth between their bodies, freely mixing it all together as if none of it made a difference, knowing they’ll never live long enough to taste it all.”

Memories, stories, the afterglow of love—these are all bits of sweetness, I suppose. Do bees ever get indigestion? Do they ever tire of sweetness or crave something savory? What’s the apiarian equivalent of a potato chip? Anyway— “To decide for ourselves which fleeting, precious, interminable moments we’ll carry with us right to the end,” Koenig writes, is “an honor reserved for mortals.”

As I packed up to return home, Ed and Barbara kept handing me bits they’d gathered out in their corner of the world—okra, cucumbers, summer squash, chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms we’d foraged together—to take to Tristan. I thanked and hugged Ed, then Barbara. But before I went to my car, I returned to the packet of dog treats I’d left on the kitchen counter and took one each for Sadie and Ellie. I could see them waiting just outside.

Sadie and Ellie sat without being asked. I popped the treats into their open mouths, and I expressed my gratitude to them for their hospitality. “Good girls,” I said, scratching them behind the ears one more time. “Thanks for being my friend.”

Leave a comment

Barbara Brown Taylor’s next book, Coming Down to Earth, will be published next March, but it’s available for preorders now. I had the honor of reading a pre-publication version of the manuscript, and, as anyone who has read her work before will expect, this book is a gem, glimmering with wisdom and wit. I’ll have more to say about it in the coming months. Her Substack, though, gives a glimpse of the kind of writing you’ll find in its sumptuous pages.

Coming Down to Earth with Barbara Brown Taylor

There is a portal right here on earth that opens every single day with a little breeze of solace coming through, a little slant of light shining on some beauty you might otherwise have missed. That’s where I want to meet you in this column.

What I’m Growing: I’ve been neglecting my garden plot, as is my midsummer habit, and the bindweed and bean beetles have been delighted. Still, the tomatoes are coming on strong. The gladioli I never planted are blossoming, the tomatillos that grew up on their own are getting plump, and the sunflowers have come back beautifully, even though I haven’t put seeds in the ground in several years.

Grace upon grace upon grace.

Thank you, as always, for reading my ramblings—and extra-special thanks to those of you who have chosen to back my work in the world by being paid subscribers. I know I have not written to you as often this year because I’ve been trying to finish my PhD dissertation. (Prayers and good vibes are especially welcome as I wrestle with Paul Ricoeur, whose philosophy of writing seems to be “Why say in concise and easy prose what could instead be expressed with extreme wordiness and density?”) So your support has been particularly appreciated, not least because those health-insurance premiums keep going up.

If you have something you’d like me to remember in my prayers, and if there’s anything in your life that could also use some good vibes, know that I always welcome the opportunity to be alongside you in these ways. Post a comment, email me, or send me a note at P.O. Box 68565, Grand Rapids, MI, 49516.

Leave a comment

Yours,
Jeff

Why do you travel?

For a long time, I traveled because I was trying to escape.

Immersed in another culture, surrounded by the unfamiliar, I somehow found more peace than I could at “home.” Whether being taught to eat with my hand by my host family in Ghana (“not that hand—that’s for dirty things!” my host mom yelled when she saw me approach the fufu with my left), or clambering over ancient ruins on the West Bank, or backpacking across Zimbabwe, I never felt out of place—or perhaps I should say I felt appropriately out of place.

With no expectation of belonging, no pretense of home, I told myself I was liberated from any need to fit in. Especially as a young reporter, working at a magazine where writing in the first person was largely forbidden, I chased new adventures and others’ stories.

Except that those turned out to be narcotics—and I became a cliche: No matter how lightly I packed, I always had the same baggage. “No matter where you go,” the great philosopher Buckaroo Banzai said, “there you are.”

--

Earlier this week I was in New York City, for Travel+Leisure’s annual industry conference, the World’s Best Summit. On Tuesday afternoon, I moderated a panel about the place of spirituality in travel. The session was entitled “Seeking More.”

“Enduring hope, profound longing, the possibility of flashes of beauty, the reality of grief and disappointment and pain,” I said, introducing the panel. It was the day before England’s World Cup semi-final against Argentina, and I was wearing my England jersey. “This is what it means to be an England supporter,” I said. “But it’s also the reality of the human experience.”

Over the next 35 minutes, six of us onstage—a hotelier, a writer specializing in wellness, a reporter who studies the contours of belief in our times, a human-rights lawyer turned travel adviser, a doctor, and me—explored our propensity to seek transcendence and our quest to find connection. We chose to define “spirituality” broadly, including, but not restricted to, religion. While pilgrimage is one of the most venerable genres of travel, you might find your mecca outside of Mecca, and your camino might not necessarily be the Camino. You might nurture your spirit at a wellness retreat or at a concert. Your cathedral might have the redwoods’ canopy as its roof, or maybe it’s a stadium, as you chant and sing your football team’s liturgy with 50,000 others.

I started the session by asking them each to name a trip that had been transformative for them.

Tom Rowntree, an executive at IHG Hotels & Resorts, recalled traveling to Poland as a teenager, not longer after communism’s fall; the generosity he experienced from his host family changed the course of his career and his life. New York Times reporter Lauren Jackson, who writes its (mostly) weekly “Believing” newsletter, spoke of studying abroad in Jerusalem; reared in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, she had an unexpectedly clarifying encounter with an Orthodox Jew, during which they confessed to each other that they no longer held the beliefs of their families of origin. Travel adviser Mark Lakin discussed a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, an atypical tourist destination usually described as “war-torn” or “dangerous”; there, he found that flattened narrative complicated by resilient life, soul-expanding generosity, and extraordinary welcome in Congolese homes and kitchens.

In all these instances, someone else’s hospitality opened up something new—growth, respect, even something approaching wisdom. That seems fitting for the word “hospitality,” which has the same Latin root as “hospital,” “hospice,” and “hotel.” Hospes can mean both “guest” and ”host.” Taken together, all this hints at not just a dance between giver and receiver but also the possibility of healing through relationship.

--

Because I was moderating, I didn’t answer my own question onstage. If I had, I might have told a story from my own study-abroad experience, in Brussels, when I was 19. During spring break, my friend and housemate Sara, who was in the same program, and I used our Eurail passes to head east.

We arrived in Prague with no place to stay and not a word of Czech between us. This was before the era of mobile phones or Google, and we figured we’d find some tourist-information booth where we could ask for help. But we arrived after dark. Everything was closed.

An elderly woman approached us in the central station. “Hotel?” she said. For reasons still unknown to me—maybe call it exhaustion or foolishness or desperation—we went with her.

Her apartment, right on Wenceslas Square, in the heart of the city, might once have been described as gracious, even elegant. She motioned for us to drop our backpacks and sit on the sofa. Then she asked, in broken English, if we wanted some tea and something to eat. While she was in the kitchen, Sara and I launched into a furious but whispered conversation: Was this safe? Were we insane? What was happening?

The lady emerged a few minutes later, setting cups of chipped china, along with some biscuits, on the coffee table. I sniffed the tea; it smelled like strawberries. She smiled at us, and waved, urging us to drink and eat.

My lizard brain has always slithered to the nearest, most ridiculous worst-case scenario: Doesn’t cyanide smell like strawberries? I took the tiniest sip. As soon as the lady left the room again, I said to Sara: “Doesn’t cyanide smell like strawberries? What if she’s trying to kill us?”

Cyanide does not smell like strawberries—it smells like almonds—but again, this was pre-Google. Marie Svoboda was not out to kill us. She was just trying to survive.

Over the next couple of days, we learned she was a widow. Her husband had been an actor—a handsome one, we could see, from the framed portrait she pointed out on the wall. The tenderness on her face when she spoke of him told us that theirs had been a great love story, even if we didn’t have the shared language to receive all the details.

Her pension and the remnants of his didn’t provide enough to live on. When money ran low, she’d walk over to the train station to study the waves of backpackers disgorged by the trains. She read their faces as quickly but carefully as she could, trusting her intuition to identify someone who seemed trustworthy enough to invite into her home.

Vulnerability, openheartedness, the capacity to walk through discomfort, the patience to listen, the willingness to learn: Perhaps these are prerequisites for hospitality that transforms, no matter whether you’re guest or host.

It also wouldn’t hurt to assume that not everyone is out to kill you. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that “hostility” also shares the same root as “hospitality,” which is to say, we do have some choices to make.

--

My favorite travel writer of all time might be the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. In his book Travels with Herodotus, he muses on what compelled the ancient Greek historian to crisscross the ancient world, gathering myths and stories. Eventually, Kapuściński concludes that it must have been some insatiable longing to know both the world and himself better. “The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart,” he writes. “If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him—the delight in life.”

I used to travel because I was trying to escape. Now I think I travel because I want to keep being astonished by the world. And while I know there is still so much to see, and to feel, and to taste, and to learn, I also think my desire goes beyond the delight that Kapuściński describes: I want to know how to love the world more fully, and those who love always want to know more about those they love.

I love the world in all its gorgeous diversity, and I want to know more about that world. I want to know its sorrows as well as its joys, its struggles and its triumphs. That’s undoubtedly why I feel so lucky to be a travel writer, because I get to write love letters about the places I go and the people I meet and the things I eat.

My religion teaches that we know how to love because we have already been loved. To let yourself be loved—by anyone, by the world, even and especially by a stranger!—might be the hardest thing to do. Anyone who has loved and been loved knows that love is risky. It opens you up to disappointment, and sometimes you might even get hurt. Ultimately, though, I suspect it’s the only way we’ll ever find the “more” we seek—fulfillment, flourishing, wellness that becomes wholeness.

No matter where you go, there you are, it’s true. But where there’s love, we’ll find home.

I’d love to hear about your summer travels. Where have you found astonishment? Where have you felt loved, perhaps unexpectedly? Who has shown you some sense of home? Let me be clear, too: “Travel” doesn’t require getting on an airplane or going very far. Curious travelers can make quite the journey even while staying in the city where they live.

Leave a comment

My latest story for Travel+Leisure, about Saarland, Germany’s least-visited state in Germany, is in the magazine’s August issue, on newsstands now. (You can read a version of the story online here, but because I am old-school, I will always believe it’s better in print.)

That’s all for this week.

I’m writing you a little less often as I push to finish my PhD dissertation this autumn. Thanks for your patience—and, as always, for walking alongside me on this journey.

Yours,
Jeff

Everywhere I go to speak or to preach, I get some version of the same question. Sometimes it’s quietly whispered amidst a story shared. Sometimes it’s asked in full voice, in a crowd or a congregation, with longing and, occasionally, exasperation: How do you hold onto hope?

I’m never sure how to answer. Usually I just blurt something out, trusting that something in the particular will inspire universal recognition. Truth is, I don’t think I do a good job of “holding onto hope.” My grip isn’t that strong. More often, hope holds me, not the other way around. It finds me. It surprises me.

Most of us don’t lack the desire to hope. But do we have the curiosity and openness to welcome hope and nurture it? If, like the travelers on the road to Emmaus, or those of us who support the England football team, you can say, “But we had hoped...,” are you still willing, even amid disappointment, to help hope do its work?

--

On Sunday, I preached at my beloved First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. One of the texts was from Romans 6. Paul urges the faithful to “walk in newness of life.” In other words, dare to embody hope. I wrestled with that instruction, and I told the congregation about a recent visit with dear friends who had just welcomed their first child into the world:

Earlier this year, I was in Philadelphia for some denominational meetings not long after my seminary friends Hana and Wes welcomed their first child. One afternoon, I stopped by their home for a visit, and I got to hold this two-week-old little girl. Nothing bad had yet happened to her, nothing worse than a dirty diaper, and even then, there was an adult on hand to clean it up. Always someone wanted to hold her. Anytime she was hungry her mother’s milk awaited, and sometimes she seemed annoyed at how she felt a little gassy after a meal—don’t we all know that feeling?—but most of us don’t have someone to gently pat us on the back until we burp.

Was she not newness of life embodied? Every possibility was still ahead of her. Grace abounded in her very being. And her parents boldly named her Pacita—a Filipino name with Spanish roots. It means “little peace” or “dear peace.” Let it be true.

Walk in newness of life, Paul writes—and I think of Pacita—this dear and little picture of peace, so precious, so fragile, so unblemished by the state of this world, so young she can’t even really walk in the newness of her life. What do you think of when you think of newness of life?

Walk in newness of life.

I confess it took me a minute to get back to Pacita, because I find this phrase at once alluring and alien. I contrast this baby’s possibility-blessed existence with mine, with this body that isn’t quite what it once was. “Newness of life” isn’t exactly what I’m feeling, which is probably closer to “oldness of joint” or “tiredness of muscle.” Perhaps because we’re surrounded by so many reminders of our fragility—a tough diagnosis, a doubtful prognosis, yet another funeral, a family’s polarization, a community’s struggle—“newness of life” can sometimes seem like a fantasy. Perhaps because the news is what it is—war, political shenanigans, something peeling off the bottom of a pool, tragedy, geopolitical recrimination, algae—many of us feel weariness in our spirits, and “newness of life” can appear like a spiritual mirage. Perhaps because of our daily reality, “newness of life” might sound like a message for someone else, not us.

(If you like, you can watch the whole sermon here on YouTube. The Scripture readings and sermon start at around the 27-minute mark, but don’t miss the choir’s beautiful anthem, “Steal Away,” which comes before.)

Whenever I think of Pacita, and remember the serene weight of her tiny body in my arms, and contemplate the full range of possibilities still before her, I feel it again. How can anyone who has held a two-week-old baby say that they are not acquainted with hope?

--

A few days before that sermon, Tristan and I went hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco. We were headed for the Central Coast, and I wanted to see some redwoods en route. In the Sam McDonald County Park, we visited a small cluster of old-growth redwoods called the Heritage Grove.

Some of the Heritage Grove’s redwoods are 1,200, even 1,500, years old. For centuries, they have harvested the fog that sweeps in from the Pacific, and they have sheltered and nourished all manner of creature—moss and lichen, bird and bug, salamander and slug. Some of them rise more than 250 feet toward the sky, and to stand in the redwoods’ shadow is to feel wonderfully, awe-inducingly tiny. Their presence slows me down, shifts my breath, recalibrates my inner barometer, remind me of my appropriate smallness—and then the things that preoccupied me before suddenly seem less significant.

Their survival testifies to hope, all the more so if you know some of their story: The park is named for a man named Sam McDonald. He was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1884. All his grandparents had been born enslaved. In the early 1890s, the McDonalds headed west, to try their hand at sugar-beet farming in Southern California. After Sam’s mother died while he was still a child, they trekked north, in a wagon with three horses, to Santa Clara County. Sam quit school in 7th grade and learned to milk cows.

Eventually, Sam found work at Stanford University, as a teamster hauling gravel. Over his 51 years at the university, he rose to become superintendent of Stanford’s sports facilities—and the university’s first Black administrator.

In 1919, half a century before redlining was banned in California, McDonald quietly made history in yet another way: He became the first Black person to purchase property in the redwoods. He built a cabin on his acreage, “where the redwoods reign supreme,” he writes in his memoir, Sam McDonald’s Farm. “Truly, these lords are among the most glorious things the Creator hath wrought.” It became the place he would regularly go “after my day’s work that I might rest and work and meditate and pray in the seclusion of nature’s sanctuary.”

In his memoir, McDonald recalls a visit from Leland Cutler, a businessman who served for years on Stanford’s board. “You radiate joy,” Cutler said to him. “See my surroundings,” McDonald replied. “Living waters flow, vegetation grows, creatures walk, fly, and creep about. Gaze upon these lords of the redwoods in their heavenly ascent. You become possessed to feel as majestic as they when your vision rests upon their lofty pinnacles.”

McDonald never married or had children. He bequeathed his land to the Stanford School of Medicine’s convalescent home for children (now the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital). Some years later, Stanford sold the acreage to San Mateo County, which, in 1970, turned it into a park. Not long after, locals rallied and raised enough money to buy an adjoining parcel of about the same size was about to be logged. The purchase doubled the size of what’s now the Sam McDonald County Park.

As I read McDonald’s memoir, I marveled at his capacity for gratitude as well as his contagious sense of hope. In the last chapter, which he entitled “My Cup Runneth Over,” he reflected on the faith that sustained him throughout life. Again and again, he cited the witness and support of others—“blessings guised as raindrops,” he writes, “in cloudburst proportions.” I thought again of the fronds of the redwoods collecting fog and dew and saving it for the sustenance of a community. “I trust,” he says, “that the overflow has gone into the lives of others.”

--

Three days later, Tristan and I hiked Point Lobos, a state park just south of Carmel. It’s one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever been, a wonderland of crashing surf, coastal forest, and teeming tidepools.

Point Lobos is a haven for rare species. The waters offshore were set aside in 1960 as the nation’s first marine reserve, protecting sea otters and endangered black abalone. The threatened western snowy plover nests on the beaches. It’s one of just two places in the world where the Monterey cypress tree survives in the wild.

It’s so tempting to see Point Lobos as static, not dynamic, a thing preserved rather than an ecosystem restored, if still threatened. Its past tells another story: In ancient times, the Ohlone visited to harvest shellfish. During Spanish colonial rule, it became a cattle ranch. A group of Chinese fishermen and their families survived a shipwreck here in 1851; they built pine and redwood cabins, just one of which remains, and stayed until they were ejected during a wave of anti-immigrant agitation in the late 1870s. At various times, the land was used as payment for a gambling debt; a mine and quarry; the site of an abalone cannery; a dairy farm; a U.S. Army station; and a residential subdivision.

In the 1920s, the Save the Redwoods League hired famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to survey Point Lobos. He described it as “the most outstanding example on the coast of California of picturesque rock and surf scenery in combination with unique vegetation.”

In 1933, the State of California bought 348 acres for $631,000 (about $12.5 million now). It set about rehabbing the land, demolishing structures, and restoring its ecological health. The park as it now exists is a remarkable work of resurrection, in part for the public benefit.

Nearly 1 million people visit each year to hike its trails and marvel at its beauty, yet because so many visitors don’t keep to the marked paths, the very thing set aside for our wonder is also threatened by our presence. California law says that improvements “shall be for the purpose of making the areas available for public enjoyment and education,” but only “in a manner consistent with the preservation of natural, scenic, cultural, and ecological values for present and future generations.”

--

As with the land, so too with our spirits, I suppose.

In his memoir, Sam McDonald points the reader to Matthew 6. “In my journeying along life’s highway I have endeavored to conform to the scriptural relate of Christ’s sermon,” he writes, describing the teachings as “great in wisdom.” He urges us to keep reading through Matthew 7:12: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

Why do we do what we do? “Just to be seen by men?” McDonald asks. “Nay, not in any manner for exhibition.... My efforts I would forever consecrate that, even in their minuteness as a drop of water added to the millions emanating to form a stream, others may drink and receive benefits of the outpouring.”

Where do we find hope? How do we embody it? Ultimately, I think what I have learned is that none of us can do it alone, and the pursuit of hope is unsustainable if it’s a solo venture. Hope is not a personal possession. It’s not a private good to be exploited; it’s a public grace, to be nurtured and shared. If we do it right, we cultivate hope together, not for ourselves but for the sake of the world.

Leave a comment

A few calendar items!

On Thursday, July 9, at 6:30 p.m., I’ll be at Schuler Books here in Grand Rapids to talk with about her book The Place Between Our Pains. I hope you’ll join us!

On July 12, I’ll be preaching at First UMC in Holland, Mich., at 10 a.m. At 2 p.m., I’ll be at the Bookman in Grand Haven, Mich., to talk about (and sign copies of) Good Soil. Then, at 7 p.m., I’ll be back at First UMC to deliver a talk and do a book signing.

Most of the rest of the summer, I’ll be working on my dissertation, fighting the bindweed in the garden, and preparing for the fall semester, when I’ll be teaching at Princeton University. I’ve intentionally cut back on preaching and speaking this autumn so that I can focus on that course. But I will be preaching at the Princeton University Chapel on September 13th and at Crosspointe in Cary, N.C., on September 20th. And on Sunday, October 11th, I’ll be at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Louisville, Ky., to deliver the Fall 2026 “Dimensions of Faith” lecture.

I hope to see you somewhere along the way.

Yours,
Jeff

I haven’t written you lately because I am trying to use all my adult words for my PhD dissertation, which I hope to complete later this year. (My working title is “Bring Some of the Fish: Toward a Constructive Theology of the Kitchen.”) I submitted a draft chapter to my adviser last weekend, and I am pleased to report that it was deemed not terrible. I continue to accept all the thoughts, prayers, and good vibes you are willing to send my way.

A quick hello from San Francisco—beloved of my heart, lovely and complicated, sui generis. Where else in the entire universe can you find a city that has such good food, such strict composting rules, and so much human feces on the sidewalks? Truly peerless.

We’re back in the Bay Area—never “the Bay,” please and thank you—for just over a week. I was born in Hayward, went to elementary school in Berkeley, and, feral child that I was at times, roamed all over as a teenager. I’ll be preaching at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley the next two Sundays. Please do join us, whether in person or via the Interwebs, at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

Our bodies, still on Eastern time, awoke early this morning. So Tristan and I got to the Ferry Building farmers market just as the stalls were opening. I love a good farmers market no matter where we are—and this is one of my favorites anywhere.

Here are some glimpses of the beauty we saw.

What I’m Growing: Speaking of farmers: Too few of us know the stories or even the names of the people who nourish us.

I planted my tomato and pepper seedlings two weeks ago—some in our community-garden plot, a few in our backyard raised beds. For the past several summers, those seedlings have come from Clear Bottom Lake Farm, a small operation run by farmer Elizabeth Kempinski. Fozzie and I went to visit her at her farm three years ago. In that interview, she laid bare the realities of trying to make it as a young farmer.

Access to land and capital remain the biggest challenges for young farmers. (The current administration recently canceled a $300 million government program devised to address this problem.) In 2024, Kempinski and her aunt joined forces to buy a 3.2-acre property next door to her grandmother’s house. She knows she’s lucky. Unlike her previous growing area, she doesn’t have to deal with excess phosphorus—and the new space has full sun. “The things you can do with full sun! What a shock,” she says. “And having more space was the jump to saying, Okay, this could be sustainable.”

Last season, her fourth bringing produce to our local farmers’ market, she was finally able to hire part-time help—one farmhand, two days a week. This season, she has three team members, still two days a week. She pays $15.50 an hour—13% above minimum wage—plus a weekly share of produce. “My mom is around more and helps out; my aunt too,” she says. All these extra hands have made a tremendous difference. “Weird how it works when you’re not working alone.”

Let’s be clear, though, about what “could be sustainable” means in the context of Clear Bottom Lake Farm. Kempinski still can’t make ends meet without a winter job; she bartends at a local restaurant. She thinks she’s technically still eligible for food stamps. “It’s hard to farm full-time in Michigan without a lot of infrastructure, but during the summer, it’s livable.” And she’s worried about rising prices for pretty much every input: “My soil went up, all the seeds across the board have gone up at least 25 cents a pack, compost has gone up every year, and then there’s gas, since I’m driving to market three or four times a week.” She has tried to hold the line on prices. “I’ve always sold bok choy for $2; those are still $2,” she says. She’s reluctant to sell tomatoes for more than $4.50 a pound ($5 poses something of a psychological barrier). “But the plant starts, I’ve had to go up to $6. Two years ago, they were $5.”

Every time I go to the garden to weed my tomatoes and peppers, I remember that Kempinski and other farmers have the skills, land, and perseverance that I don’t. I lament the gulf between rural and urban communities in the U.S. I worry about how easily we take farmers for granted. And I’m so thankful they help keep us alive.

Those of you who are in West Michigan can find Clear Bottom Lake Farm at the Ada Farmers Market on Tuesdays and the Fulton Street Farmers Market most Wednesdays and Fridays as well as every Saturday.

What I’m Grieving: Last month I wrote you about the robin’s nest atop the light on our back deck. Well, I was up late in the middle of the night recently—it was 3:30, maybe 4 a.m., and this dissertation thing, coupled with aging, has really done a number on my sleep routine—and I heard a thump outside our house. I went downstairs to investigate, and as soon as I looked out at our back deck, I saw it: the robin’s nest that I wrote about last month had fallen.

All the eggs broke. I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t a windy night.

This is nature, and this is life: Things happen. Eggs shatter. Attempts fail.

What I’m Grateful for: I did mean to send a note of thanks and an update a couple of weeks ago. Alas, the dissertation-writing abyss is real.

You all have really stepped up to help send Linda Macktaby funds for her relief efforts in Lebanon. In just the first 10 days, you gave more than $3,400 to the cause. Amazing. The money has already been dispatched to Linda, who sends her gratitude. She also sent a photo of her team preparing meals for distribution on Thursday.

The need has not diminished. The Israeli military continues to strike Lebanon pretty much every single day. While the attacks have been concentrated on the southern part of the country, there was also an airstrike on the Beirut suburbs last weekend.

If you’d like to join me in sending Linda some love, contributions can be made through Ponds Reformed Church in New Jersey, which supports her ongoing ministry.

That’s all from me today—other than to say that if there’s anything I can be remembering on your behalf, feel free to send me an email or leave a comment. It’s always an honor to pray for you.

Leave a comment

Much love,
Jeff

A few weeks ago, pieces of dried grass began piling up atop the light outside our kitchen door, on the back deck. It didn’t take me long to clock what was happening, and my heart thrilled: A bird was trying to build a nest.

Honestly she didn’t seem gifted in the construction arts. Almost as soon as she’d bundle some grass atop the light, the wind would begin to unravel it, until it looked as if our light had grown a long, unruly mullet. One strong gust, and it all fell to the deck. Day after day, the grass kept appearing; again and again, it kept falling. Soon, part of our deck had a thick carpet of dried grass.

It wasn’t all the wind’s fault. One afternoon, I saw the bird perched on a fencepost. She was an American robin, and her beak clutched yet more building materials. She flew to the light and carefully began arranging it. Apparently content with her progress, she turned to resume her scavenging, and as she took flight, her tail feathers knocked her whole collection to the deck.

Maybe it’s her first time, I thought. Maybe she’s never done this before.

Robins need mud as mortar for their nests, but the first half of May was very dry here in West Michigan. Overnight last Wednesday, though, we got a thunderstorm. Two days later, I peeked out at the deck. There was a complete nest! She’d even found some green—a little cluster of ground-ivy leaves—for decoration. And there she was, tail feathers sticking up and out, like a flag to say she was home.

The American robin is not an uncommon bird; there are more of them in the U.S. than there are humans. But the one nesting on our deck? She’s a rare bird—one of one.

She is our new neighbor. We’re trying to be good neighbors.

--

I texted my friend Husain Alhabib in Bahrain the other day. Iran is one of its nearest neighbors, just across the water, fewer than 200 miles away.

“No tourists,” he said, which means no income. Yet he insisted he and his family were fine. Last week he drove to Mecca to pray; it’s about 14 hours from home, west-southwest across the Arabian Peninsula, if you’re not driving too fast. Husain told me he remembered me in his prayers while in the holy city. At first, I thought this touching but weird. After all, he is the one who is living near a warzone—and then I realized that we are all living in warzones of different kinds, and a good neighbor recognizes that and feels no need to rank.

Husain went to Mecca because “I felt my soul thirsting for its Creator,” he told me. “In the midst of the painful events and difficult circumstances our region is going through, my heart could not bear anything except to go to the House of God—to pour out its burdens, to find stillness, and to draw strength from Him.” When he put on the ihram garments—the two seamless white pieces of cloth one wears in Mecca—they reminded him that, before God, there is “no title, no rank, no difference between one person and another. A king and a beggar stand before God in the same cloth. The ihram reminds you that yo ucame into this world with nothing, and you will return to Him with nothing—except what lives in your heart.”

One ritual performed by pilgrims in Mecca is a walk between a hill called Safa and a hill called Marwa. It’s not a long walk—about a third of a mile—but the full ritual, called Sa’i, requires seven trips along the route. Sa’i commemorates Hagar’s search for water for young Ishmael—and on this walk, consolation comes from across the generations. “With every step I took, I felt I was not alone in my struggles,” Husain said. “God did not abandon her, and He will not abandon me.”

--

Linda Macktaby, the Lebanese pastor I wrote about a couple of years ago, messaged me a couple of days ago to report that things continue to deteriorate in Lebanon. The ceasefire exists in rhetoric only; Hezbollah continues to deploy drones to Israel, and the Israeli military continues to bombard communities Lebanon. “They’re attacking Beirut from time to time,” Linda told me.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees occupy encampments scattered across the Beirut area. Almost every day, Linda and her friends make hundreds of sandwiches to distribute to the many who have no kitchens. Nothing fancy—cold cuts, sliced cucumber, some greens, some cheese. “it’s not enough, but I’m doing as much as I can,” she said. She loves her neighbors.

“We need to keep praying,” Linda told me. Prayers don’t feel like enough, but what else can we do? “We need peace. It’s been too long now. People are drained. Things are so hard. Very difficult.”

(If you would like to join me in buying some sandwiches for the refugees in Beirut, you can make a donation here, through Ponds Reformed Church in New Jersey. Any amount, no matter how small, is received with gratitude. The fund was originally set up to help reconstruction of a village in Lebanon’s south; right now any money donated is being sent to Linda to support her immediate relief work.)

--

The community garden is open for the season now, and on Tuesday, I was out in the drizzle planting potatoes.

Dyanna, who lives a few houses down from us, came by my plot to say that she had some extra straw for mulch. Did I want some? Yes, please.

Roger has his fence up in the plot next to mine, and he told me to use his hose to water whenever I like.

The twine that the organizing committee uses to demarcate the plots is mostly still up. It will go slack and probably disappear over the weeks and months to come. The land and the birds and the butterflies and the worms and the beetles don’t care about our lines or our categories.

I have been thinking a lot about that—how I declare something “mine,” what it means when we refer to someone else with a heavily loaded “them,” why it’s so hard to remain openhearted. I suppose it must have to do with vulnerability, or maybe perceived protection. Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend about how many of us cosset ourselves in fortresses of our own making, telling ourselves a story about safety or ownership or boundaries to rationalize selfish behavior.

Frankly, the robin’s presence on our deck is not that convenient. We’ve never been interested in outdoor carpeting, the nest doesn’t go with our aesthetic, and we weren’t looking for another housemate, however temporary. (Same goes for the groundhogs who have begun to treat our yard like a buffet.) But then I realized I might also think of her as a teacher for a season. She reminds me that “mine” might well be “ours.” She urges me with her steady presence to remember that we were made for community, challenging as relationship might be sometimes.

She’s our neighbor. We’re trying to be good neighbors.

Leave a comment

What I’m Reading: This stunning little vignette about a rare Sardinian pasta called filindeu—“the threads of God”... what a beautiful word. It comes with gorgeous images and video, and it does a wondrous job of contextualizing food in a place, a people, a very specific cultural history.

What I’m Growing: Most of our tulips are done, but the irises and peonies have arrived, the thyme is blossoming and the bok choy is coming up. The garden is the place that reminds me, more than any other, of what I can control and what I can’t.

What I’m Listening to: Unlike many evangelical kids who came of age in the 1990s, I didn’t listen to much contemporary Christian music. Even if we attended an evangelical church, my parents weren’t immersed in the culture, they weren’t strict at all about music, and the soundtrack in our house tended more toward Carole King and the Carpenters as well as Suzuki violin recordings and whatever happened to be on Y100, the Top 40 station in Miami. But some things managed to percolate through, in part because I went to a Christian high school. There was the chapel every year when there was a dramatic performance of Carman’s “The Champion,” DC Talk came to perform one year, and did you even know Jesus in the 1990s if you didn’t shout to the Lord or lift the Lord’s name on high?

I suppose I never really listened to the words all that carefully, though, because it wasn’t until this week that I really understood how liberating the lyrics of that Avalon classic “Testify to Love” are. It was re-released, this time sung by Ty Herndon, Michael Passons, and my friend Melissa Greene. Michael and Melissa were both members of Avalon, and Michael was forced out of the group in 2003 for being gay.

Melissa’s brief account of the meaning of the song’s re-release is worth a read.

Melissa Greene's Substack

TESTIFY TO LOVE

Today, a song I’ve sung a thousand times gets to mean what it always said.Melissa Greene's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

Read more

5 months ago · 390 likes · 58 comments · Melissa Greene

The world can feel so overwhelming right now. Not one of us can fix it all. But every one of us can do some small thing, whether it’s making a donation or telling someone we remember them or cooking a meal or planting some milkweed or sending a card or calling a legislator or saying a prayer or doing a volunteer shift or listening to someone who needs to be heard.

Every one of us can do some small thing today, both to remind ourselves of love and to embody love to someone else.

If you need some gentle, thoughtful inspiration, you might consider listening to (or watching) Kate Bowler’s podcast conversation with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. I found them both so encouraging.

“We don’t love things in general,” she says.

What—or whom—can you love specifically right now?

“Let the self rise up and be held by God with truthfulness,” he says.

What do you need to tell God right now—what do you need to let God hold right now—that is true?

Leave a comment

Grace abounds. Go out into the world, dear ones, to be loved and to love.

Yours,
Jeff

Last week, I was in Hong Kong to celebrate my Uncle Lawrence’s 90th birthday. Thirteen of us traveled from the U.S. to mark the occasion. We brought with us so much baggage—the residue of past struggles, the debris of ongoing conflicts, barely suppressed longing as well as questions of belonging—yet we still showed up. And gathered around that banqueting table, there was also so much obvious affection.

In other words, we were—we are—just another ordinary family.

My cousin’s daughter Sharon, a gregarious medical student with a beautifully ready smile, channels some of her love for our family into endless questions about heritage and history. As the servers brought course after delicious course—stuffed morels, braised goose feet and abalone, a gorgeous grouper bathed in ginger, scallion, and soy—she asked and asked and asked. I and other relatives answered as best we could. But even as I did, I considered some of the things I left unsaid, including my own ambivalence about having left part of my heart at home in Michigan with my husband.

Tristan is also my family. I wished he could be with me. I wanted him—us—to be welcome at that table. I have prayed that circumstances and convictions might shift in my relatives.

I, I, I— This trip was about my Uncle Lawrence, was it not?

Yes, and— Simply by referring to him as my Uncle Lawrence, I’ve hinted at the complicated both/and. It was about him, but it was also about us. I am who I am and he is who he is only because we are who we are, which is to say, family.

--

Let me tell you a little bit about us.

When I was 12, my grandmother, my sister, and I boarded a plane in San Francisco to go to Hong Kong. Uncle Lawrence had invited us to stay with him and his wife for the summer. He is the one from whom I learned to love stamp collecting. He is the one who impressed upon me the importance of receiving stories from my elders. An eldest son, he is the one who instilled in me, also an eldest son, the particular responsibilities we have in the context of a Chinese family. An ordained minister, he is the one who baptized me on a hot, humid Sunday that August.

When I came out in my 20s, he made his disapproval clear, but he also reiterated his care for me. When I entered seminary, he expressed concern about the “liberal” theology at Princeton, yet he also slipped me a sizable amount of money to pay for books.

Whatever our theological differences, he still teaches me. He is long past the age when he could deservedly just do the easy thing—say, sit at home amidst his beloved books, listening to classical music. While he recently decided to stop preaching, he continues to serve a unique congregation in Hong Kong, as he has for the past 16 years. This English-speaking Baptist gathering is almost all women and almost entirely made up of Filipino domestic workers.

Last Sunday, my family worshiped with them, and afterward, at a luncheon celebrating him, we heard testimonies of his faithfulness. They spoke of how he has proclaimed good news to them, encouraged them, listened to them, reminded them that they are loved.

“The Honorable Lawrence Chu,” the icing on his birthday cake said. That seems right to me.

--

My family is obviously not the only one that finds itself divided over matters apparently too difficult, or inconvenient, or uncomfortable, to discuss. Maybe it has always been this way, but nowadays, particularly with social media, everything seems strangely and simultaneously out in the open yet unspeakable still.

We are, as I said, just another ordinary family.

I can control only my own decisions, and, let me be honest, there are times when I’ve wondered whether I’ve been too compliant, too quiescent. Is my willingness to stay in relationship—with my family, with friends of differing convictions, with a denomination that has not been clearly affirming—courage or is it actually cowardice?

I’ve occasionally been told it’s the latter. Once, I had a preaching invitation rescinded because the pastor of that (progressive) church decided that, because of my posture, I couldn’t be trusted with LGBTQ+ congregants.

This is description, not prescription. Others might make different choices, with good reason, and I don’t tell others what to do when it comes to the boundaries they set with others. But I do wonder whether we sometimes mistake discomfort for danger while also underestimating the power of our presence. I still believe what I said when it comes to my place in the order of things: I am who I am only because we are who we are, which is to say, family. And I refuse to live life by litmus test. Anyway, I can’t reconcile that way of being with my understanding of the call to love. It also occurs to me that it is precisely because of the love of my family, specifically my ever-patient and gracious Tristan, that I’m able to love my family, including those who do not affirm our marriage.

“Love bears all things,” Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians. I suspect he knew that love wasn’t some giant cosmic cushion that can absorb anything and everything. I think he understood that it has to be embodied, that it can be incredibly challenging to live out, and that it is real only when incarnated through our actions. If love bears all things, someone has to be willing to do the carrying.

I say that even as I insist on believing my uncle shoulders his burden the best way he knows how. You might ask how I know. I don’t. But I do believe. Love, after all, “does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking,” Paul wrote. “It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Leave a comment

What I’m Growing: I came home to a yard full of blossoming tulips.

Recently, reflecting on a hike in the UK she took with her husband in the wake of a cancer diagnosis, Nadia Bolz-Weber talked on Kate Bowler’s podcast about the importance of noticing beauty even amidst struggle and devastation. The landscapes they walked through, in the north of England, were spectacular. “It was so beautiful and I kept telling myself, This is the world. This is also the world,” she said. “Despair is not going to save us.”

What I’m Watching: Over a month ago, a humpback whale somehow made its way into the Baltic Sea, off Germany’s coast, where humpbacks are not normally found. It got stranded. Earlier this week, an audacious attempt began to try to return Timmy, as he has been named, to the open ocean. Rescuers managed to nudge Timmy onto a ginormous barge, which is now slowly making its way toward the whale-friendlier waters of the North Sea. Live tracking is available online.

What I’m Thinking About: Last year, I read Gary Shteyngart’s entertaining love letter to the capybara in The New Yorker. En route to Hong Kong, my nephew Caleb and I stopped for a few days in Tokyo, and Caleb eagerly agreed when I asked if he might like to visit a capybara cafe. So off we went to Cappiness, in Shinjuku.

Folks, I fell in love a little bit. These creatures are so weird. They like to be (gently) poked! They purr! They are not as soft as they look!

Punch and Vanilla were inside the cafe (not really a cafe, because you can’t actually drink anything while hanging out with the capybaras), while Yanbo was kept out on the patio. I really felt for Yanbo—the literal outsider, the marginalized one. Punch and Vanilla were lolling on mattresses indoors while Yanbo was out there, exposed to the elements. He even tried to open the sliding-glass door with his teeth.

But then the humans at Cappiness told us that Yanbo can be a bit of a bully and a biter and a jerk, in particular toward his brother, Punch. Relatable. Just another ordinary family.

Programming notes: This Sunday, I will be preaching at Westminster Presbyterian Church here in Grand Rapids. All are welcome, in person or online, at 10 a.m. ET.

After a season of intense travel, I am pleased to report that I have no plane tickets booked for an entire month. I am less pleased to note that I’m way behind on my PhD dissertation, so the bulk of May will be devoted to that work. I won’t be traveling again until the very end of the month, when I fly to North Carolina to preach at my beloved Crosspointe, on May 31st.

The following Sunday, June 7th, I’ll be at West End UMC in Nashville, Tennessee. Then, on June 14th and 21st, I’ll be preaching at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, Calif. If you’re in or near any of those places, please mark your calendar and gather with us for worship (or join online).

On a recent long airplane ride, I watched the entirety of the first season of the wondrous emergency-room drama The Pitt. (We don’t have HBO at home.) One line, spoken by Dr. Robby, has stuck with me. “This place will break your heart,” he said to his gathered crew of exhausted doctors and nurses. “But it is also full of miracles.”

That’s true of the wider world too. And even as we bear witness to heartbreak, we also have to keep looking for the miracles.

That’s it from me this week. As ever, I’m so grateful for your presence here with me.

Leave a comment

All my best,
Jeff

In 324 CE, Byzantium was renamed Constantinople, to honor the emperor Constantine. A few years later, work began on a new church outside the city walls. It was named for the Holy Savior of the Countryside (in Greek, Ἁγίου Σωτῆρος ἐν τῇ Χώρᾳ—Hagiou Soteros en tei Chora).

The church was the centerpiece of a monastic complex and a sign of the Roman Empire’s Christianization under Constantine. Earthquakes hit. The empire expanded and contracted, and the church was built and rebuilt. About a thousand years later, Theodore Metochites came along. A preacher’s kid, he grew up to become a scholar and ascended the ladder of imperial service. Under Emperor Andronicus II, Theodore oversaw imperial estates that bred warhorses. He then became treasury chief and eventually was appointed foreign minister.

All the while, he grew fabulously wealthy. With some of that money and in his free time, he orchestrated a radical redecoration of the Chora Church, commissioning the creation of dazzling frescos and mosaics.

After the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Chora Church became the Kariye Mosque. A minaret replaced the belfry. Some faces on the frescos and mosaics were erased to align with Islamic teaching about imagery, and eventually, nearly all the artwork was covered by plaster. Following the secular Turkish republic’s establishment in 1923, the Kariye Mosque was desacralized and made into a museum. In 1948, art historians and archaeologists began stripping away the plaster, revealing all that had been hidden for centuries.

A few days ago, while in Byzantium, my friend Laura and I visited the Chora Church. (Yes, I know it’s called Istanbul now, but it makes me feel like a time traveler to call it Byzantium.) The images from Christ’s life, the portraits of apostles and saints, the Gospel stories—what remains of these ancient paintings and mosaics is stunning.

A series of depictions of Mary’s life has a sweet scene of her taking her first steps.

So many of the saints are giving tremendous side-eye, in particular St. Pegasius, a Persian martyr.

One favorite among the many Jesuses, in a side chapel, is a depiction of a resplendent Christ with his arms and legs out wide, as if dancing.

In the main prayer hall, I watched an imam sit in silent prayer, facing Mecca. Only later did I learn that the clergyman’s presence signaled another change: In 2024, the Turkish government reopened the Chora Church as a mosque.

--

The day before our visit to the Chora Church, Laura and I had visited the present-day countryside—the Gallipoli Peninsula, a finger of land poking southwestward from European Türkiye.

Our first stop was an empty beach on the Aegean Sea called Arı Burnu. Along the road, a line of Judas trees bloomed, branches thick with pink flowers. On a small rise, spring wildflowers blossomed—the Mediterranean catchfly in shades of purple, the hartwort in white, and one lone red poppy.

Across the water, we could see the cloud-veiled island of Samothrace. In ancient times, people made long journeys to worship at Samothrace’s holy sanctuary. These pilgrims sought initiation into Samothrace’s mysterious cult, which was believed to offer divine protection and spiritual succor. “The fame has travelled wide of how these gods⁠ appear to mankind and bring unexpected aid to those initiates of theirs who call upon them in the midst of perils,” the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote. The pilgrims “become both more pious and more just and better in every respect than they were before.”

In April 1915, thousands of troops who had made even longer journeys landed at Arı Burnu. Allied forces were attempting an amphibious invasion of Gallipoli, part of an effort to seize the Dardanelles straits, on the other side of this peninsula. This beach was the designated landing spot for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—the ANZACs. But the Allies seriously underestimated Ottoman strength. Within a day, hundreds of ANZAC troops had died. By the end of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, more than 10,000 were dead.

Some 250 Commonwealth soldiers and sailors are buried in the Arı Burnu cemetery. The gravestone of Queenslander Henry Kimber, who was 19, says, “Thy will be done.” George Seager, whose grandfather had been part of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, lied about his age to enlist; he was 17. Henry Burton was 18; for his grave, his parents chose an inscription that reads, in part, “Only a boy.”

--

From Arı Burnu, we drove about thirty minutes southwest to Cape Helles, at the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. We looked out to the churning seas where the Dardanelles’ waters greet those of the Aegean. In 1924, a 30-meter-tall obelisk was erected at Cape Helles to honor the 21,000 fallen Commonwealth soldiers and sailors—mostly British but also Indian, Australian, and New Zealander—buried in unmarked graves.

As I walked the tidy rows of the small cemetery between the memorial and the sea, I noticed the words “believed to be buried in this cemetery” on most of the gravestones. At the bottom, many of the markers said, “Their glory shall not be blotted out.” What impossible hope! But also, what glory?

My eye landed on a snail that had sheltered inside the cross on a gravestone honoring Private William Murphy. An Irishman who fought for the Royal Munster Fusiliers, he died on the Gallipoli campaign’s first day. He was 25.

When I got home, I pored over British military records online to learn more about Murphy and his regiment. A Cork native, he was the son of John and Elizabeth Burton, who lived in Brandon, a town on the Assiniboine River in Manitoba that sprang up as a junction on Canada’s transcontinental railway. I wondered how long it took for news of Murphy’s death to reach his parents, thousands of miles away. When had they last seen him or heard from him?

Murphy’s unit was descended from the Bengal European Regiment. Formed in 1652, this group of mercenaries worked to protect and expand the domain of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. In other words, it was a commercial paramilitary. Two centuries later, the Bengal European Regiment was folded into the British Army, and in a military reorganization in the 1880s, the regiment became based in Tralee, in Ireland’s southwest, drawing its recruits from the counties of Munster. Its soldiers fought, and died, in the Second Boer War and then in the First World War. It’s an age-old story, this intermingling of corporate lust and military might, imperial expansion and epic fury.

After Ireland achieved independence from Britain in 1922, the Royal Munster Fusiliers were disbanded. The regimental motto was Spectamur agendo—“let us be judged by our acts.”

--

What are we fighting for?

It’s both wrong and right to say “we.” I want nothing to do with the war the current administration has ignited, and polls consistently show that a majority of Americans don’t back it. Yet as much as it grieves me to acknowledge it, the conflict with Iran has been instigated by our elected government, orchestrated with our tax dollars, and executed with our warplanes, our weaponry, our soldiers and sailors.

We still fight in the same old ways, with the same stale motives, but new, ever more devastating technology. The young still die; 120 schoolchildren in an errant U.S. airstrike in southern Iran on February 28, then Sgt. Declan Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Ia., killed by an Iranian drone in Kuwait the next day. We find ourselves in similar straits, if different locations—then the Dardanelles, now Hormuz.

Where has all the fighting gotten us?

Late in his political career, Theodore Metochites wrote a wide-ranging series of philosophical essays reflecting on life together, which I found unexpectedly relevant even now. In one essay, he writes, for instance, about a prototypical leader who “takes aim and shoots at others from a distance and surreptitiously does evil... while feigning sincere benevolence and an interest in the public weal”; he insisted that “Fate most conspicuously will make him reap the benefit of his wickedness and artfulness and evil mind.” In another, he notes that the world will always be plagued by those “who entertain a disastrous love for low and useless things, and who either speak contemptuously or disregard what is judicious and the love of what is good.”

Of all his counsel, this moved me most: “It is absolutely necessary to keep to the rules of the good.” He believed such faithfulness was embodied through “true reverence and belief in Christ.” “You must believe that the good life lies in this and that you should not live in any other way,” he wrote. “Even though it is difficult to do good, one should never try to avoid this, nor despair in the view of all the toil which the good involves and which is inevitable in order to acquire it.”

The depiction in the Chora Church of Dancing Jesus is called the Anastasis, meaning resurrection. Beneath his feet are two broken pieces of wood, representing the gates of hell. On either side of him are sarcophagi, from which two people emerge—Adam on Jesus’s right, Eve on his left. They represent all of humankind. He’s grasping their hands and pulling them out of death.

I love the fresco because it reminds me of how we, too, are held as beloveds, and compelled toward good, and lifted into life. Oh, how I want this story to be true! And I suppose I believe that if there is to be renewal, we cannot and will not fight our way to life, at least not in the old ways. We will have to be lifted by love—and perhaps we might dance, but only because Jesus did so first, and then held us by hand and called us to join him.

A postscript on Theodore Metochites: After his patron-emperor was deposed by his own grandson, Theodore was stripped of his power and wealth. He became a monk at Chora. As his new name, he chose Theoleptos, which means “apprehended by God.”

Leave a comment

Quick programming note: If you are in or near Grand Rapids, tonight, Friday, April 17th, I’ll be in conversation with the philosopher and all-around-great human . We’ll be discussing his new book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, which I commend to you. Those of you who are familiar with Jamie’s work will know that I tell no lies when I say that he’s learned and incredibly thoughtful. The trait that most marks this book—and what sets it apart from so much philosophical writing these days—is that it radiates love. The event is at 7 p.m. at Sherman Street Church. Please come! It’s free. More information can be found here.

With gratitude and in hope,
Jeff

As I was writing you, I learned that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 8-1 decision, struck down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. I’m typically hesitant to offer anything resembling a hot take, but this matters immensely.

I was lucky. When I came out in my mid-20s, my college chaplains, with whom I’d stayed in touch, urged me to go to conversion therapy, prayed over me, and gave me some literature about programs. I remember Googling various therapists too, but I never made an appointment. Maybe it was one of those rare moments where I felt wise enough to trust my gut. Or maybe the correct phrasing is “lazy enough”—I just somehow never got around to it. Either way, it didn’t happen.

Many, many young people aren’t so lucky. They’re compelled by their churches, their families, their circumstances, to enter treatment that can be devastating, even ultimately deadly.

Today, we learned once again the limits of the law. Truth is, the change will have to come from within the church. The American legal system is fundamentally based on principles of “freedom from”—freedom from excess regulation, freedom from governmental interference. But Christian teaching is grounded in an understanding of “freedom for”—freedom for the sake of wholeness and flourishing, freedom for the cause of love and justice. These are fundamentally different things.

The first person who had any inkling that I was wrestling with my sexuality was my friend Sara, with whom I shared a house while we were studying abroad in Belgium. I was 19. One night, I got a little drunk and kissed our classmate Antoine, who was very French and very cute. When I told her the next morning, I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I do remember how she made me feel: It was okay. I was okay.

It’s not an understatement to say that, to this day, I consider Sara, who is not a Christian, a godsend. It still took me years to come out, and even longer to reconcile my faith and my sexuality. I can’t help but wonder, though: What if I’d heard the message of unconditional love from within the church? Would it have saved me some anguish? Might I have a bit less spiritual scar tissue than I do now?

I did have one relatively mild experience of conversion therapy, which is also called reparative therapy, the assumption being that something in LGBTQ+ people is broken and in need of repair. It came in the form of a couple of excruciatingly tedious conversations with one of those chaplains. He probed my feelings about God, wondered about childhood trauma, and asked about my relationship with my dad (I will never forget the deployment of the horrific phrase “father wound”). I remember insisting that, whatever happened in any of those departments, none of it explained my sexuality.

Our last session ended when he stated that I was “in rebellion.” It took me a long time to realize that, in a way, he wasn’t wrong. I was rebelling—against my belovedness. I was rebelling against God’s invitation into wholeness and belonging. And if I could really hear Jesus saying, “Go and sin no more,” I could understand it as an instruction to stop lying, to stop trying to be something I am not, to stop hating this important aspect of who I am and who I was made to be.

That soul work happened with the help of my own great cloud of witnesses over many years, including Sara; Tristan, whom I met not long afterward; other friends, including Beth and T and Reema, some of them Christian but many not—names that might mean nothing to you but represent life and possibility to me; our pastor, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Meeter, the first clergyperson I ever met who insistently reiterated God’s unsurpassed grace and unconditional love. Thank God for their voices. And notably, none of them did what they did or said what they said because of what the law of the land instructed. Rather, it was because of their convictions, because of what they believed in their hearts to be true.

Perhaps this Supreme Court decision reveals that, whatever our beliefs, we’ve often expected our government to do work that it can never fully do. In the first few centuries of the church, the faithful were never tempted to believe the authorities could be on their side. Their call, their community, was countercultural. There was no expectation of external backing.

This is why I’m convinced that some of us have a calling to stay in complicated spaces of disagreement, whether it’s a family of origin or a family of faith. No, it’s not for everyone. But if you can stomach the discomfort and muster the courage to show up in places where the majority might disagree, you have the potential to be a source of solidarity and consolation for those who desperately need it. If you can remain in relationship, whether in a family or in a congregation, you might be a conversation partner for those who are wondering about their own convictions or even a friend to a young queer person who longs for care. You get to embody good news where all someone might be hearing is the bad. You get to offer a life-giving antidote to condemnation. You get to plant a mustard seed of possibility and love amidst the fields of judgment and shame.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that laws don’t matter; I’m grateful, for instance, that my marriage has legal recognition. I am saying that laws are inadequate. Even if conversion therapy were banned—and I would be so glad if that happened—it still would not be enough to guarantee human flourishing. We can’t mandate our way to full belonging.

Perhaps this Supreme Court decision clarifies that we can’t rely on others to do our labor of love.

Leave a comment

What I’m Thankful for: Last week marked the first anniversary of Good Soil’s publication—and come to think of it, I am indeed a broken person in need of some repair, because I spent the better part of the past year on book tour.

Now I can tell you the truth: I wasn’t ready. Of course I’d prepared; I’m the type who imagines worst-case scenarios, games out possibilities, rehearses everything in my head. Ahead of publication, I met with my spiritual director, spent plenty of time in thought and prayer about what was to come, and sought the counsel and support of friends. But there was no way I was ever actually going to be ready.

A few months after Good Soil came out, Elizabeth Gilbert released her latest memoir, All the Way to the River. It received mixed reviews, from professional critics and armchair ones alike. At her Los Angeles book-tour stop, an audience member noted that “a lot of people really hated” the book and asked how she felt about the negative critiques: “What have you learned from this reaction to the book?”

“I’ve never learned anything from someone who hates me,” Gilbert replied.

Her statement ignited rapturous cheering in the room, and I certainly saw the same on the Internet. But beyond the fact that she conflated those who hated the book and those who hated her, I have to say that I vehemently disagree. I’ve learned plenty over the past year from those who didn’t like Good Soil as well as from those who did. The lessons might not have been new to me, but every student knows you sometimes have to re-learn things you already know. And things you already know can take time and effort and practice and care to become things you believe.

I knew I’d written the best, most truthful book I could. I learned once again something I already knew: Not every book is for every reader, and not every reader will understand what you’re trying to do.

I knew I’d written about my faith as carefully as I could, and that many readers might not be comfortable with that, but it’s a part of my story, not least because much of the story happens at a seminary. I learned that, for some people, any discussion of Christianity in a non-negative light is probably too much—and the Church has plenty of remedial work to do. Anyway, many people don’t even know what “seminary” means, so reading comprehension might merit some attention too.

I knew the Internet was a wild place where people say wild things, particularly about people they’ve never met. I have learned, again and again and again and again, that the Internet is a wild place where people say wild things, particularly about people they’ve never met.

I knew you sometimes have to admit when you need help. I learned how friends and even strangers will show up in beautiful and unexpected ways if you’re just brave enough to ask.

I knew I had a supportive husband. I have learned, and kept learning, and kept learning, how faithful Tristan is, and how encouraging, and how genuinely happy he is at every sign of success.

I knew I had to let go. As I have said again and again, a book is completed in the hands of a reader. I have little to no control over how they receive the story I tell. I am still learning to let go.

Thanks to every single reader who has chosen to spend time with Good Soil, whether you loved it or loathed it. Thanks to all the bookstores and libraries that have found space for me on their shelves as well as on their calendars; what a gift to be in your good company and to have your support. Thanks to all the loving people in my life, particularly Tristan, for knowing me and caring about me beyond the printed page.

To slightly tweak what I said up top, I am lucky.

If you would like a signed (and personalized, if you wish) copy of Good Soil, they’re available from Schuler Books, which ships all over the world.

Leave a comment

That’s it from me on this Fig Tuesday. (Yes, Fig Tuesday. Today we remember that wonderfully human and immensely challenging little story about Jesus getting hangry and cursing a fig tree even though it wasn’t fig season. According to the Gospel of Mark, it unfolded in the two days after Jesus’s donkeyback ride into Jerusalem.) To all who are commemorating Holy Week, may your journey through these days be rich with reflection and abounding in gratitude.

Yours,
Jeff

If you knew your time on this earth was drawing to an end, what would you do? What choices would you make? How would you spend the rest of your days?

My friend Tony Vis, a retired pastor in Iowa, is dying. For the past few months, he has been in hospice care. Recently, I asked if he might be willing to talk—to share some wisdom and offer some reflections about walking through this stage of life.

—

Some backstory: Tony was diagnosed with lymphoma five years ago. His doctor prescribed six rounds of chemotherapy. “The third round almost killed me,” he said. An MRI showed a surprise: The cancer was gone.

Then, last summer, he started feeling unwell—tired, a little breathless. Scans and a biopsy confirmed that the cancer was back.

Option 1 was to retry the chemo regimen that had sent the cancer into remission the last time, but given that the treatment nearly ended his life, it seemed unappealing. Option 2 was another type of chemotherapy, though one that had been shown to be less effective against this type of cancer. Option 3: no treatment and hospice care. His doctors guesstimated that would give him six months, “but it’s all a guessing game, and six months, I’ve learned, is a standard one for them.”

“I was ready to go with hospice immediately,” Tony told me. “I was there, but we weren’t there.” His family wasn’t ready to let go. “Their voices mattered to me, and their needs matttered to me.” So he said yes to Option 2.

A turning point came one night last fall, when Tony woke up vomiting blood. He fell almost immediately after getting out of bed. His son Andy was staying with him that night. “He had to pick me up. And then my daughter—she’s a doctor—she came over, and they called 911,” he said. “We had to go on that journey together. We had to accept it together.”

Turns out it was mainly the chemo, not the cancer, that was hurting him at that point. His body rallied after a few touch-and-go weeks of recovery: “I’m feeling good now. Wondering when that will change, of course. The cancer is still there, and sooner or later, it’ll start to bite me.”

I asked if he was planning to pull a Jimmy Carter and be in hospice for years.

“I’m open to that,” he said, laughing. “I’ve said to God that I don’t expect a miracle, but I’ll take one. You’ve just gotta be open to these things.”

—

Some more backstory: Tony and I first met in 2014. The question of LGBTQ+ inclusion was roiling our denomination, and a small group of people with diverse convictions gathered in Grand Rapids for a couple of days of candid conversation and facilitated listening.

In 2015, a larger group convened, tasked with mapping out a way forward for the denomination. I was one of the few queer representatives. Tony, a past president of our General Synod, served as one of the conveners.

That same year, I’d started to think about the possibility of attending seminary. Though I still didn’t know exactly where Tony stood on LGBTQ+ inclusion, I asked him to be one of the five members on a discernment team, helping me to talk through my sense of call. He said yes, and over the subsequent months, we spoke regularly. He brought his decades of pastoral experience to our conversations, probing and questioning and giving me plenty to consider.

When we spoke last month, I told Tony I’d suspected when we first met that he was more conservative than me—and he hadn’t said anything back then to convince me otherwise. Only years later did I understand him to be on the side of full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the Church. “You know, I was then pretty much where I am now. But I hadn’t come out and said it as vocally and publicly,” he said. “Even before retirement, I was there. I’d been there, for a long time.”

He’d never been a biblical literalist. “My method of interpreting the Bible was always that it needed context,” he said. He’d been taught that in seminary. “But understanding the ancient culture and the ancient context—that became more and more important to me. And I knew that what was happening to the LGBTQ community was wrong. Paul didn’t know then what we know now. But I probably knew what I believed for twenty years before I really opened up.”

But why didn’t I know? Why wasn’t it clear? “I lacked the courage,” he said bluntly. “I just lacked the courage.”

While he was still serving as a pastor, he feared splitting his congregation. He feared losing his job too. “I wish I’d had the balls to do it,” he said, not least because he recognizes how his choices must have caused pain to queer people in his congregation. “I was late to this. I don’t hide that. And I repent of what I’ve done. I’m sorry.”

—

Tony’s body is failing him now, and I wondered how he regards his body, given the cancer. How do you love a body that is letting you down? “I’ve had to remember that I’ve had 79 years in this body, That’s pretty good,” he said. “Also, the best weight-loss program out there is chemotherapy.”

“That’s really dark, Tony,” I said.

“We’re okay with gallows humor around here—and it happens to be true,” he said. “I look at the inevitability of where this journey is leading, and that is to the end of life.”

He has accepted this ever since his first round of chemo, in 2021, when the side effects were keeping him up at night. “I just looked up at the ceiling, and I remember saying to God, I’m going to die—and I want to die. I actually said it twice. I want to die.” Then a portrait of his entire family came into focus in his mind. “And I immediately said, I don’t want to die.”

I wondered whether, as a longtime pastor, his convictions about the afterlife were any comfort. “This Jesus story has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. So I live with that story, with the hope of resurrection. But, you know, I don’t know that for certain anymore—and that’s why we call it faith. I don’t know if there’s anything I know with certainty about what’s beyond this life. Maybe I’m supposed to as a Christian, but I don’t.”

His candor about his lack of certainty surprised me.

“I have faith there is something beyond this. I look at this amazing universe, and it’s so beautiful; when we get to see it through the telescopes they’ve got out there, it’s so beautiful,” he said. “There’s got to be love behind that beauty. So I just see death as a surrender to that love.”

Over the decades of his ministry, he lost count of how many babies he baptized. Every single time, after sprinkling the water on the baby’s head, he would say the child’s name aloud and declare, “You belong to Jesus. He will never let you down and never let you go.” “I believe that, and I’ve had to remind parents from time to time, God hasn’t given up,” he said. “I don’t know what that looks like. And we all sometimes feel let down from time to time, but I have to look back and believe that somehow, God was there. And I go into this part of the journey believing the same thing. This isn’t a letdown. It’s a ‘let-go,’ but it’s not a letdown. Death is a part of life.”

Tony reiterated that he was not and is not afraid of death. “You know, dying isn’t a problem for me—leaving is the problem,” he said. “Leaving is the issue. Leaving my wife of 57 years behind. Leaving my children. Leaving my grandchildren and not being able to see them grow up.”

In November, when the family thought he had little time left, one of his granddaughters moved her wedding up so that he’d be able to preside. “I was there in a wheelchair, I was not doing well, and I can tell you, it’s the first and only wedding I’ve ever done wearing a diaper. That’s how it was,” he said. “But we did it, and that was so, so good.”

He also got to see one of his sons open a new restaurant recently. “That’s been a beautiful thing to watch,” he said. The restaurant, Zeke’s, in Johnston, Iowa, serves pizza, among other things. Some years ago, Tony and his kids and grandkids were on vacation in St. Joseph, on the Lake Michigan shore, and they stumbled across a kiosk that had an oddity on the menu: pot roast pizza. Tony’s dad, Peter, had always loved pot roast—“he always said, ‘Just give me pot roast, mashed potatoes, and corn, and I’m fine”—so when Zeke’s opened, there it was on the menu: Peter P’s Pot Roast Pizza.” (The pizza has all those toppings as well as another called jalapeño tater kegs, which is an arrangement of words I do not understand.)

“By the way,” Tony added, “I get a discount at the restaurant. A really big discount.”

—

Something of a three-point sermon emerged in our conversation, because a retired pastor is still a pastor. First, hope—not certainty, but hope. (“How many Easters did I preach? How many resurrection sermons? How many funerals where I spoke words of comfort to a family and reminded them of the resurrection as we stood at a gravesite?”) Then acceptance. Finally, gratitude.

The gratitude in particular has inspired a strange freedom over the past few months of extended farewell. Before Christmas, Tony had at least one visitor almost every day. “Everybody figured I’d be gone soon,” he said, “so they thought they were saying goodbye.” It’s been a little awkward to see some of those same folks since. “It’s like, What’s he doing here still?”

What he’s doing is planning for the future. “I really planned on living to 90,” he said, “but the engine doesn’t seem to want to go that long.”

He did make it to his 79th birthday, on February 26th.

He has his funeral all planned out. The congregation will sing “Be Thou My Vision.” One of the readings will be Psalm 46 (“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble...”), just as it was at his grandfather’s funeral in 1970 and his dad’s funeral in 2007.

He has chosen as the closing hymn “God of Grace and God of Glory.” It was written during the Great Depression by Harry Emerson Fosdick, who had been a chaplain during World War I and then became the first senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York City.

The third stanza of the hymn, which was written for the dedication of the Riverside Church’s Rockefeller-funded building in 1931, goes like this:

Cure Your children’s warring madness;
Bend our pride to Your control;
Shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
Lest we miss Your kingdom’s goal,
Lest we miss Your kingdom’s goal.

“It speaks to the time we’re in, and I’m not going to leave without making this point,” Tony said. “We’re at the messiest that our culture, our society, our government, the Church—the big-c Church in America—has been in my lifetime. And I would say to the Church: You’ve lost your way. You think the way of the kingdom is just to get people to pray the Sinner’s Prayer and that’s the end of it? That is not the way of the kingdom.”

He’s currently reading one of James Patterson’s Alex Cross books (“it’s just fun”). He quit taking his heart medication (“one of them is really freaking expensive, so why spend the money?”).

Next week, he’ll fly to Arizona with his wife, their daughter, and their daughter’s family for spring break. “First time ever I bought the insurance for the flights,” he said. “Without the insurance, if we didn’t go, I’d get credit, but the credit wouldn’t do me much good.”

There they are again—hope and acceptance, quickly followed by gratitude. “Every day I get is a gift,” Tony said. “I’m grateful for it, and I’m trying to live it with joy.”

Leave a comment

Calendar notes: This Saturday, March 14th, I’ll be speaking at the public library in Cranbury, N.J. And on Sunday the 15th, I’ll be preaching both services at Burke Presbyterian Church, in Burke, Va., then speaking at the church in the evening.

Next Sunday, March 22nd, I’ll be preaching at Second Reformed Church in Zeeland, Mich., and we’ll talk about Good Soil during the adult-education hour.

And on Palm Sunday, March 29th, I’ll be back in North Carolina, at Crosspointe Church.

Hope to see your friendly faces somewhere on the road.

In closing, here’s a glimpse of glory, from Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where I whiled away a good hour yesterday afternoon.

I’d love to know where you’re finding beauty and goodness in the midst of the mess of the world.

Leave a comment

With hope and in gratitude (still working on that “acceptance” part),
Jeff

I’m on a reporting trip to Okinawa, and one afternoon last week, Tristan and I visited three memorials to those who died during the Battle of Okinawa.

The twelve-week battle was the most devastating of World War II in the Pacific theater. More than 240,000 people were killed, including one-quarter of Okinawa’s civilian population. Some died in battle. Many starved; the Japanese military regularly seized provisions from civilians. Some were executed. Some killed themselves, because they’d been told to fear what American soldiers might do to them if captured.

Imagine one of every four of your neighbors dying over the course of three months. One of every four relatives. One of every four friends.

Our guide, Seiko, said that when she moved to Okinawa about 25 years ago, she’d occasionally stumble across empty homes that had been abandoned and were never reoccupied. During that spring of 1945, amidst the ferocious, unrelenting American bombardment that came to be known as tetsu no bofu—“iron hurricane”—entire households were wiped out.

At the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial, built atop the limestone ridge where the Japanese Army made its last stand, those who died in the Battle of Okinawa are remembered. Soldiers, civilians, elders, schoolchildren—all their names are inscribed on slabs of black granite. Though the names are grouped by nationality, all who died are included, together in death even if they fought one another in life: In addition to the Okinawans and the Japanese, 14,000 Americans, 82 Britons, 34 Taiwanese, and 463 Koreans. Names are still being added as remains are found and identified.

Notice how Okinawans are listed separately from Japanese, a subtle but significant differentiation. “A lot of Okinawan people have complicated feelings about the Japanese military,” Seiko told us. Until 1872, these islands had been an independent kingdom. Then Japan abolished the Ryukyu monarchy, absorbed its much smaller neighbor, and began suppressing its unique culture. Okinawans were conscripted into the Japanese military. Textbooks were edited to emphasize patriotism. Questioning the government’s narrative was seen as seditious. Glorification of the emperor became de rigueur, loyalty and obedience became paramount.

After 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, the official propaganda machine claimed that the country was essentially deploying a freedom force. The government insisted that Japan’s military “was saving Asian people from Western colonial powers,” Seiko explained. At the same time, though, Japan was exerting its own cultural supremacy in Okinawa. For instance, the use of Okinawan, a language related to but distinct from Japanese, became punishable as an act of espionage. During the war, numerous Okinawans were executed simply for speaking their mother tongue.

Seiko told me she usually doesn’t bring Chinese or Korean visitors to the war memorials and museums in Okinawa. When she has, they’ve often bristled at the characterization of Okinawan civilians as victims of the war. I get that. As Seiko and I talked, I also heard another faint but unmistakable voice in the conversation: that of my late maternal grandmother. She was 19 when the Japanese Army invaded Hong Kong. Whenever she told me the stories, her anger felt to me like a long-simmering pot of soup, salty and bitter, which every once in a while boiled over. I can still feel the venom with which she always said, “The Japanese.” She never forgave.

Yet as I walked through the exhibits at the museum and memorial to the Himeyuri Student Corps, I wondered how my grandmother would have understood some of these students’ stories. They were not all that different from her—teenagers in the midst of a war that had almost nothing to do with them, orchestrated by leaders who had little care for their welfare. The Himeyuri corps was a group of teens studying at two high schools in Okinawa’s capital, Naha, in the early 1940s. A few days before the Battle of Okinawa began, the Japanese Army forced the students into service, mostly as untrained army nurses.

That my grandma found herself on a nominally British island and these students on a Japanese one—wasn’t it just chance? Walking the rooms of the Himeyuri museum, gazing at the portraits of teenagers who were killed during the war, hearing the filmed testimonies of some who survived, reading the written accounts of others, I was reminded of how the humble so often suffer the consequences of decisions made by the arrogant. Proclamations and decrees go out from palaces and fortresses; commoners carry the water and take the bullets.

“We went on the battlefield without knowing the truth,” the English words on one wall read. “War kills everything.”

We’ve experienced plenty of “lost in translation” moments in Japan, and later, I wondered what the original Japanese said and what it meant. Then I realized it didn’t really matter. Of course they went on the battlefield without knowing the truth. Surely nobody would ever go to war if they knew the truth—the truth of the gorgeous fullness of human life and the incalculable costs of such destruction, the truth of the love of ten thousand families, the truth of a baby’s laughter and an elder’s wisdom, the truth of ancestral knowledge and stories passed from generation to generation until the storytellers are silenced, the truth carried in the fertile soils and the ancient stones, the truth of so much goodness being bombed to oblivion under the guise of the word “enemy.”

Of course we still go on the battlefield without knowing the truth. Often we rationalize, because we have to make it make sense. Sometimes “not knowing” means choosing not to know. Otherwise, wouldn’t our hearts shatter? War still kills everything.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.

Leave a comment

Anyone can visit the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial and search the listed names online through this remarkable digital rendering.

From the main island of Okinawa, we traveled to Zamami, in the Kerama Islands, about an hour’s ferry ride to the west. Perhaps I’ll write next week about the awe and wonder of seeing humpback whales in the wild. There’s a wonderful story about resilience and care there—and God knows we could use stories of resilient beauty and life-sustaining care right now.

Leave a comment

Reminder: I’ll be at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley next Sunday, March 8; at Cranbury Public Library in Cranbury, N.J., on Saturday, March 14; and at Burke Presbyterian Church in Burke, Va., on Sunday, March 15 (morning and evening!). Hope to see you then and there.

All my best,
Jeff

There’s a stage in life when it feels as if you’re attending weddings all the time. Then, nearly imperceptibly, a shift happens, and suddenly, funerals begin crowding the calendar.

Last week, I dragged my jetlagged self onto a Texas-bound airplane to bid farewell to Claudia Springer. The mom of a childhood friend, she was also the high-school teacher who had the most significant effect on me.

Mrs. Springer embodied an ethos of lifelong learning. A scholar of both French and English, she received her PhD in English literature from the University of Miami at the age of 55. (Her dissertation was entitled “Hearts Knit Together: Models of Friendship in the Novels of Charles Williams.”)

But like all the best teachers, Mrs. Springer taught more than mere knowledge. Some afternoons, I’d linger in her classroom long after the last bell had rung, and we’d talk. One day, I confessed my deep loneliness, which I linked to my weirdness. She chided me, somehow in a way that didn’t make me feel small or ashamed. She said I needed to get used to being weird. “You are,” she said. She also wondered what was so great about being normal. What if, rather than trying to conform, I could find the goodness in being different, in being me? Could I recognize God’s delight in me and love for me? “That,” she said, “is where you’ll find your belonging.”

From another person, those words might have felt like some annoying platitude. From her, they pierced the armor I’d put on and lodged somewhere tender in my heart, though I didn’t entirely understand what she was saying immediately.

To be honest, I’m still learning. I know now that finding belonging—really, forging belonging, not just for myself but for others, because it isn’t a personal possession—is the work of a lifetime. In my writing, I can glimpse something that goes beyond reluctant acceptance and might even approach gladness. You can see it in how I write with gratitude about my heritage and in the Chinese narrative techniques I often use in my writing. Though the silken threads might be invisible to those from other cultures, foreigners’ understanding isn’t the main goal. I weave my “weirdness” into how I try to honor my parents despite our vast disagreements, in the way I cook, in how I try to feed others.

I thought back to Mrs. Springer’s counsel as I flew home from her funeral. A day later, it came back to mind as I reflected on Bad Bunny’s mesmerizing Super Bowl halftime show. It’s not that I understood all his words—I took a year of Spanish in high school, but I’ve forgotten most of it (lo siento mucho, Señora Fraser). But I think I got the vibes: Celebration of heritage, culture, and story. Creating belonging, not attempting conformity. Above all, joy.

Others received Bad Bunny’s performance as “protest” and “resistance.” Ahead of the show, though, he emphasized different goals. “I want people to feel happiness and joy,” he said. “I want to make people dance. I want to make them feel proud and think that everything is possible.”

In other words, his purpose was not to react to others’ ugliness; it was to honor the beauty of Puerto Rican culture, his people’s rich traditions, and their homeland’s complicated history. If you know, you really know. He emphasized the hearts that need lifting up, not the egos that deserve bringing down. He didn’t shy from hard things: Humans costumed as grass brought to life the fields in which bitter and sweet coexisted, and flickering lights and electric poles alluded to Puerto Rico’s neglected infrastructure. All these served to magnify the moving truth of his people’s perseverance.

“Seguimos aquí,” he said. We are still here.

In that phrase, spoken in Spanish, not English, I heard a fierce determination that reinforced the resilient rhythm of the drums and the insistent shimmies of the dancers. Rebuke was implicit. And the joy? It wasn’t mainly joy as resistance, which still centers the powers that be in the narrative, but joy for joy’s own life-giving sake—joy in and for his people, and radiating through their story, and resounding in their music, and come alive in their dance, and resplendent in their inherent worth.

Bad Bunny stood on that stage as his people’s cheerleader, as their friend. He was our teacher too, because in the particular, there’s also something universal. From the communal revelry to his trust fall from a rooftop, he demonstrated how to forge belonging. Then he widened the welcome. He deployed the flags of many nations, and he underscored his expansive vision with the words printed on a football he spiked at the end of the show: “Together, we are America.”

In a season of grief and anger in our country and in the world, and in the face of a culture of death, Bad Bunny spoke healing and sang life. Amidst it all, there was even a wedding, to which he bore witness.

Loathing, however righteous, will never be our salvation. Only love.

I’d love to hear a story about one of your teachers or your reflections on who is teaching you now about hope, possibility, and belonging.

Leave a comment

What I’m Listening to: After I wrote you last month about the psalms, my friend Chris sent me a link to a Tom Waits song called “Mr. Siegal.” I didn’t know the song. I’m not a Tom Waits fan (I find his voice grating). Unlike any psalm I know, “Mr. Siegal” begins with a visit to “a Mexican whorehouse.” Ignore that part. Another section of the song goes like this:

You got to tell me brave captain,
Why are the wicked so strong,
How do the angels get to sleep,
When the devil leaves the porch light on.

“Why are the wicked so strong,” Chris told me. “That is what I will remember from 2025.”

Me too—and that wondering persists into 2026. But I will tell you that the testimonies I’ve heard and the work I’ve seen recently, particularly from friends in Minnesota who are rising up to help their neighbors, testify that the good are pretty strong too.

What I’m Thinking About: We just returned from Australia last week. In a first, I was there both to work on a story for Travel+Leisure as well as to preach and teach, at the invitation of my friend Jeremy Greaves, the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane. It was a wonderful trip, but confess I felt both guilty and conflicted as the news unfolded back home. And as I told a group gathered at Baroona Farm, which is basically the Farminary’s Australian cousin, “Hasn’t the world had enough of Americans bigfooting their way in and offering opinions?”

Again and again, the Australians Tristan and I met brought up the news before we did, offering their solidarity and condolences. So much kindness and hospitality!

Then, partway through the trip, I got a note from a friend: “Flowers and birds are calling your name right now,” she said. “Flowers and birds.” Well, and koalas.

When I saw this koala, on Raymond Island, my heart swelled with wonder. I’d never seen a koala in the wild before, and the sight of one boosted my spirits. So much beauty exists alongside devastation, and we’ll need plenty of reminders of the former if we are to navigate the latter with courage and care.

What I’m Grateful for: A special note of thanks to Library Journal for naming Good Soil one of its best audiobooks of the year. Editor Sarah Hashimoto picked just four nonfiction audiobooks, so it’s a little wild to me that Good Soil made the cut.

A reminder that if you’d like a signed and personalized copy of Good Soil, they’re available to order online from Schuler Books here in Grand Rapids. Just put a note in the comments box when you place your order, and I’ll swing by the bookstore to take care of that for you. The folks there are happy to send them anywhere.

Housekeeping notes: You might be wondering why I’m not writing to you every single week. 1. Life happens. 2. I’d rather not write you unless I have something half-decent and potentially useful to say. Nobody needs more content just for the sake of content. I do my best to write you regularly, but I won’t send something out just to maintain a schedule. I don’t want to waste your time.

This Sunday, I’ll be preaching at Crosspointe in Cary, N.C. On March 8, I’ll be at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley in California. On March 14, I’ll be visiting the Cranbury Public Library in Cranbury, N.J. And on March 15, I’ll be at Burke Presbyterian Church in Burke Centre, Va., just outside Washington—both preaching in the morning and doing a talk in the evening. All are welcome! Hope to see you somewhere on the road.

As always, I’m glad to remember you in my prayers. Feel free to send me a note or put your requests in the comments.

Leave a comment

May you find rest as dreamy and shelter as secure today as that of this koala.

With gratitude and in hope,
Jeff

The great British nature writer Robert Macfarlane published a book last year called Is a River Alive? It’s essentially a biography of watercourses, a documentation and an exploration of the features that, in some cultures, are called the veins of the earth.

Macfarlane describes a spring of fresh water—“a sleepless flutter of silver movement, rippling the pool it has made with its whispers and mutters.” The water itself, he says, “is transparent as glass,” filtered and clarified as it has made its steady way through gravel and rock. It is a slow process, thousands upon thousands of years in the making—glacial movement, the sun’s steady warmth, gravity’s pull. “History runs both fleet and slow, eddying back upon itself to shape spirals where flow meets counterflow,” Macfarlane writes. “Life and death rise and fall—and the spring, as it has always done, organizes existence around itself, exerting something like will upon the land.”

Is a River Alive? is a remarkable and deeply contemplative work, one I commend to you. But the thing I want most to draw your attention to is the title: Is a River Alive? Macfarlane is concerned with how we treat the rivers of the earth—whether we comprehend them, whether we care for them, whether we recognize the ways in which our lives are intertwined with their steady labor, whether we honor them. Inspired by him, the question that preoccupies me today is a variant on the question he asks. My question: Is the river still alive?

Is the river of life into which John first baptized Jesus, the river of life in whose waters we have then likewise been baptized, alive in us and in our world?

I am also embarrassed to remind you of the reality in which we live, because all you have to do is to read the news or tap on an app on your phone or turn on the TV to be reminded of things of ugliness and death: befouled waters and an ailing earth, war and violence, bigotry and dehumanization, people snatched from the streets and others killed in their cars. You know intimately the pain of God’s gathered people battling over questions of inclusion, purity, and belonging. You have witnessed for yourselves, in the concentric circles of your communities, all the ways in which we are struggling in our life together.

Is the river of life still alive?

If it were mainly about us, about our care, about our labor, about our love, it would not be outlandish to say that the river of life is a pathetic trickle—its waters redirected and deployed for industrial purposes, befouled by pollution and tainted by our waste.

Thank God it is not mainly about us and about our care and about our labor and about our love, though. Because our Scriptures tell us a story in which God is the central actor, in which God’s love is the driving force, and in which God, God with us in the embodied form of Jesus and God sent down to us through the presence of a fluttering dove, is the primary mover and the giver of grace.

And it is because of our conviction that God is still alive, that God is still gracious, that God is still acting, that God is still loving that we can still say: Yes, the river of life is still alive. But what then?

The church returns year after year to the story of Jesus’s baptism because it is also about our baptisms. In re-reading this text, we are reminded in an essential way of our belonging to God, who made us, who loves us, and who is always with us.

Look more closely at the story for some profound truths.

For instance, this story is the first time we see Adult Jesus. It comes right after the flight from Egypt in Matthew’s telling, nearly all of a childhood—all the times he wailed, all the times he was daydreaming instead of studying the scrolls, all the times he fell asleep counting the stars, all the times he didn’t listen to Joseph and Mary—just edited out. Luke gives us one story about Jesus as an awkward adolescent who befuddles his parents by ditching them when he should have been journeying home. For Luke, too, though, the baptism is Jesus’s first appearance after coming of age. And before he does any apparent ministry at all, he receives a blessing from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Pure grace.

Another truth, this one perhaps more uncomfortable: When I consider the passage’s various characters, the one I am most like isn’t Jesus. It’s not John the Baptist either; despite my love of growing things, I am much less bold, less outdoorsy, and certainly more introverted than that proto-hipster campground preacher, with his homemade clothes and his foraged diet. I suspect I’m not as pure of heart as those many who came to confess their sins and be washed by the river’s waters. Maybe you are. But to my chagrin, I have to admit I’m most like the ones for whom John has the strongest words—the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the overeducated types who have the strongest opinions, perhaps more knowledge than wisdom, and the likeliest odds of entering into a conversation with those time-honored, super-annoying words: “Well, actually….” And the beautiful thing tucked into this story is that, even as he unleashes fierce words on them, John doesn’t withhold the gift of baptism. Again, pure grace.

A third truth: Baptism comes with no condition but it does extend an invitation. “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” John says.

The word “repentance” can be so loaded in our culture, especially for those of us who grew up in churches where the term felt almost like a bludgeon. But the Greek word metanoia is actually so lovely and so hospitable. It means repentance, yes, but it isn’t a demand. Because true repentance is not something that can really be coerced or ordered or forced. Think of it more as a turning, as a change of heart. The word is a compound of two parts—meta, which means “after,” and noia, which comes from noeo, which means “to understand.” After understanding. After soul-deep understanding, our hearts are changed. After life-changing understanding, we see the world differently. After paradigm-shifting understanding, we bear fruit. Again, pure grace, which leads to gratitude.

Really, the story of the baptism of our Lord is the story of grace upon grace upon grace. And the pattern it establishes—being washed clean; having our gratitude stirred for God’s grace; repenting, which is to say acting in line with our gratitude; and then cultivating the fruit that can grow plump and full only through the miracle of God’s work in our flesh through that water— This pattern is the one to which we are invited to return, again and again, day after day, year after year, throughout our lives of faith.

John deploys so much imagery to make his point. The guy clearly likes his metaphors. Packed into a tight span, no doubt in part with Matthew’s editing, we’ve got wheat and chaff, and fire and water, and an ax and a tree, and even some snakes. And in the midst of it, we get that fruit.

The imagery of the fruit that John chooses is especially striking, and it underscores something I’ve learned as a gardener: Fruit is produced in community. A seed must be sown, yes, but that seed can do nothing on its own. Its flourishing depends on forces beyond it—the water that helps to crack its hard exterior open, the nutrients in the soil, the life-nourishing warmth of sunshine. Eventually the plant grows, unfurling leaves, reaching toward light, branching and stretching. Then it flowers, and almost always, it needs something beyond itself to fruit—someone in the form of a pollinator. The fig needs wasps, the avocado depends on bats, apples and cherries count on the bees. The production of fruit is actually a team effort.

Nor can the fruit of one plant feed, heal, or nourish many. For sustenance, we need orchards and groves.

John’s metaphor is a subtle but significant invitation to recognize life’s dependence on community upon community upon community, divine and creaturely, heaven-sent and earth-nourished. And I wonder whether for us, in our individualistic culture, part of our metanoia—part of our after understanding, part of our repentance—is to invest ever more deeply in countercultural community, fed throughout by the water of life, without which none of this is possible at all.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages from another prophet, one of the weirdest of them all—a wild dreamer named Ezekiel, who recorded absurdly fantastic visions. He tells us about one of them, a journey during Israel’s exile, when he set down on a high mountain, where he was greeted by a resplendent messenger. “Mortal, look closely and listen attentively,” the man said to Ezekiel.

One of the things the man showed him was an expansive river that flowed from the Temple of God. “Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. Everything will live where the river goes. Its fish will be of a great many kinds. On both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.”

Nowhere does the man say to Ezekiel that any of the living creatures invigorated by this sacred river earned their access or owned water rights. He doesn’t speak of private property, or of the market price of the fruit, or of the copays due for those healing leaves. This is, after all, God’s economy. It’s a picture of grace.

So, too, with Isaiah’s vision and the invitation to that same mountain of the Lord, from which the life-giving waters of that sacred river flow. “Come, let us go to the house of God,” the people say in chorus. There is labor to be done, the work of the holy transformation of the weapons of war and violence into the tools of peace and flourishing. This is, after all, God’s economy. It’s a picture of invitational grace.

So, too, with John’s ministry in those ancient river waters and the example of Jesus, who was baptized in them. All righteousness has been fulfilled, the Scriptures tell us, not through our work but through God’s. This is, after all, God’s economy. It’s a picture of expansive and all-covering grace.

Mortal, look closely and listen attentively: All around you is grace upon grace upon grace. How then will we respond?

—

I don’t think it’s giving much away to tell you that Robert Macfarlane’s title question, “Is a river alive?”, eventually leads to another, perhaps more poignant one: What does the river say?

So, too, for those of us who are concerned with the river of life. What does the river of life say, to us and through us?

“Water speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied,” Macfarlane continues. It does its steady and relentless work in a way that perhaps fickle and feckless humanity will never entirely be able to comprehend or emulate. It wears down rock and it nourishes the soil, it gives the body form and it provides shelter and home. Sometimes it’s a raindrop. Sometimes it’s a deluge. It rises to the heavens and it showers back down to earth.

Water is a funny thing: You can pool it artificially, you can use it, and you can abuse it, but ultimately it also has a life of its own, one that invites human collaboration but that also eludes total human control. You can try to tame it or to harness its powers, but eventually you’ll be reminded, some way, somehow, whether by snowstorm or hurricane, flood or drought, that it is beyond us.

The love of God is like this too. Through the waters of baptism, the river of life, which is to say God’s love, greets us in a particular and personal way. God’s love, too, speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied. God’s love, too, is a force that sometimes works subtly and might even seem absent; other times, it moves on an awe-inspiring scale. God’s love, too, can be taken for granted until a time when, so desperate for it, so thirsty for it, we cry out to have just a taste of it to parch our dry spirits. God’s love, too, can be treated by us as if it were a scarce resource, guarded and hoarded, when in fact it’s never mine or yours alone. God’s love, too, is everywhere, waiting to be recognized, ready to be shared.

You have chosen to call yourselves the Church of the Savior. That’s a bold claim. For seventy years, you have come together here in South Bend to proclaim God’s love as embodied by Jesus and to bear witness to good news to one another and to your neighbors. You’ve wrestled mightily with what that love demands and how the lack of that love has cost so many, and I’m here today to remind you to keep going, keep loving, keep returning to the testimonies of your baptisms—that you and every other child of God belong to a love so much greater and more gracious and merciful than you can even imagine. Through Jesus, you are God’s children, the beloveds, with whom God is well pleased.

Is the river of life still alive? God, I hope so.

Can we find a way not just to honor it but also to share its good news? Only through and by God’s grace.

What does the river say to you and through you? You tell me.

Leave a comment

I’ve been wandering among the psalms this week. A few passages I found:

May the creditor seize all that he has;
   may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil.
May there be no one to do him a kindness,
   nor anyone to pity his orphaned children.
May his posterity be cut off;
   may his name be blotted out in the second generation.
May the iniquity of his father be remembered before the Lord,
   and do not let the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the Lord continually,
   and may his memory be cut off from the earth.
For he did not remember to show kindness,
   but pursued the poor and needy
   and the brokenhearted to their death.
He loved to curse; let curses come on him.
   He did not like blessing; may it be far from him.
He clothed himself with cursing as his coat,
   may it soak into his body like water,
   like oil into his bones.
May it be like a garment that he wraps around himself,
   like a belt that he wears every day.
...
With my mouth I will give great thanks to the Lord;
   I will praise him in the midst of the throng.
For he stands at the right hand of the needy,
   to save them from those who would condemn them to death.

—From Psalm 109, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition

O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongs—
   O God, to whom vengeance belongs, shine forth!
Rise up, O Judge of the earth;
   Render punishment to the proud.
Lord, how long will the wicked,
   How long will the wicked triumph?
They utter speech, and speak insolent things;
   All the workers of iniquity boast in themselves.
They break in pieces Your people, O Lord,
   And afflict Your heritage.
They slay the widow and the stranger,
   And murder the fatherless.
...
Shall the throne of iniquity, which devises evil by law,
   Have fellowship with You?
They gather together against the life of the righteous,
   And condemn innocent blood.
But the Lord has been my defense,
   And my God the rock of my refuge.
He has brought on them their own iniquity,
   And shall cut them off in their own wickedness;
The Lord our God shall cut them off.

—From Psalm 94, New King James Version

O God, no silence for You!
   Do not be mute and do not be quiet, God.
For, look, Your enemies rage,
   and those who hate You lift their heads.
Against Your people they devise cunning counsel
   and conspire against Your protected ones.
...
O God, make them like the thistledown,
   like straw before the wind.
As fire burns down forests
   and as flame ignites the mountains,
so shall You pursue them with Your storm
   and with Your tempest dismay them.
Fill their faces with infamy
   that they may seek Your name, O Lord.
May they be shamed and dismayed forever;
   may they be disgraced and may they perish.
And may they know that You, Your name is the Lord.
   You alone are most high over all the earth.

—From Psalm 83, as translated by Robert Alter in The Hebrew Bible

Why, Compassionate One, do you stand afar?
Why do you hide yourself in hard times?
in arrogance the wicked harass the poor;
let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.
For the wicked praise their [every] inmost desire,
extort gain and bless those who despise the Creator of All.
The wicked turn up their nose and do not seek [God];
There is no God in all their thought.
Their ways prosper all the time;
your judgements are on high, beyond them;
all their foes scoff at them.
They say in their heart, “We shall not be shaken;
nor [see] evil down through the generations.”
Cursing fills their mouths along with deceit and oppression;
under their tongues are trouble and iniquity.
They sit in ambush in the villages;
in hiding places they murder the innocent.
Their eyes surveil the vulnerable.
They lie-in-wait in secret like a lion in its den;
they lie-in-wait that they may snatch the poor;
they snatch the poor and drag them off in their net.
They stoop, they crouch,
and the vulnerable fall prey through their might.
They say in their heart, “God has forgotten,
she has hidden her face, she will never see it.”
Rise up, Faithful God; dear God, lift up your hand;
forget not the oppressed.
Why do the wicked despise God,
and say in their hearts you shall not find out?
You see, you regard trouble and grief,
to take [it] into your hands.
Upon you the vulnerable entrust themselves;
to the orphan you have ever [only] been their helper.

—From Psalm 10, as translated by Wilda C. Gafney in A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year W

I’ve seen the video from Minneapolis too many times already. Even if I hadn’t seen it once, it wouldn’t matter: A young woman—wife, mother of three, volunteer, poet—is still dead. (Whether Renee Good was wonderful or horrible also shouldn’t matter, by the way. She still shouldn’t have been killed that day.) Meanwhile, the lies and the doublespeak continue from the most powerful: Let the investigation continue, they say with one breath, and then with the next, they call her “a domestic terrorist.”

Even as I say that to you, though, the truth is that the world does not need my take on what exactly happened or my analysis of the political ramifications . Yet another social-media post is not going to add clarity. Yet another armchair expert just makes for a really cluttered room.

Instead, I’ve been sitting with these psalms. They give words to my swirling emotions. They pull me away from my Facebook and Instagram feeds, recalibrating my timeline. As I wrestle with sadness and anger, overwhelm and frustration—I’m sure you can add to that list of feelings even better than an A.I. predictive-text tool—I borrow solidarity and hope from the psalmists. They offer companionship across the millennia, as if to say, Other generations have known grave injustice too, and they persevered in the midst of it. They ground me in a tradition that’s unafraid of brave honesty and bold truth-telling. They remind me of God’s steadfast love.

So, with my pastor hat on, I write you to remind you too: We are accompanied by the ancestors, who, through their poetry, testified that so much was beyond them, beyond their power, beyond their capacity to fix. They sought strength and solace in someone greater, and they left us this beautiful gift. Whether we see these texts as sacred or read them simply as old poems, their words of candid outcry to the divine offer hospitality for us and our own thoughts, however polite or profane. They tell me again of God’s promises. They help me remember that humanity can always choose a better way. And they urge me to do my small part to be a helper.

Then, with my aspiring Chinese-grandma hat on, I write you to remind you: Have you eaten? Yes, there’s much work to be done, but unless you’ve eaten, you won’t have strength for the journey. Make yourself some comfort food (I had fried rice for lunch yesterday) and offer someone else some too.

Then, let us offer our hands for God to lift up, and let our spirits be open for God to rouse to merciful action. We can keep watch and bear witness, protest and pray, donate and vote, offer an unexpected kindness and speak a gentle word, rebuke a lie and proclaim a truth, receive a story and give our time, plant a seed (not a metaphor!) and deliver provisions, extend a hand and offer an embrace, share a meal and show up for a neighbor.

Through all these acts of love, we can be voices who say aloud: God has not forgotten—and we haven’t either.

What have you read or listened to that isn’t just another hot take and that has been helpful to you? I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

Follow-up: Last time I wrote, I said I had a few copies of Good Soil to send out, and I asked you to suggest recipients for those books—people in your lives who might not just enjoy the book but also appreciate a bit of encouragement right now. Twenty-four of you wrote me with names—and twenty-three honored my request to have the suggested recipient be someone other than yourself. (Thank you.) I asked you to tell me just a bit about the person too; many of you told me a lot—tender accounts of heartache, resilience, sorrow, and hope, which moved me deeply. I’m so grateful you trusted me with these stories, and I’m so thankful for your living testimonies of deep friendship and enduring love.

I’m sending books to everyone you nominated. I don’t know how long the ones bound for New Zealand and Bahrain will take to get there, but trust me, they’re coming. Six books have gone out already, and I’ll get the others in the mail as soon as I can. (By the way, if you ever want a signed and/or personalized copy of Good Soil to be sent to someone, you can always order online from Schuler Books in Grand Rapids. Just be sure to make a note in the comments box on your order, and I’ll go sign it for you before it’s sent out.)

Coming up: A reminder that I’ll be preaching at Church of the Savior in South Bend, Ind., tomorrow (Sunday, January 11th). Come say hi.

Yours,
Jeff

I got home late last night from a reporting trip in Bahrain for Travel+Leisure. My suitcase, however, has apparently decided it prefers Middle Eastern warmth to West Michigan’s cold and snow; it’s still in Dubai, though I hope for a reunion at some point in the near future.

Among the things I managed to bring home with me: Dubai chocolate (never had it, so I’m curious whether it will live up to the hype) and fond memories of conversations with wonderfully hospitable Bahrainis. Never have I experienced such welcome. At one coffee shop, the proprietor refused payment, because it was my first visit to Bahrain. At lunch one day, I went to pay, only to learn that a stranger had bought my lunch; she recognized me from an Instagram post by my tour guide, the inimitable Husain Alhabib.

My two-and-a-half days with Husain were rich and unforgettable. While the story I’m working on isn’t about religion, I’ve learned that, especially when reporting outside the U.S. or Europe, if I spend enough time with someone, faith inevitably comes up. In Bahrain, as elsewhere in the Middle East, conversation is peppered with the phrases inshallah (“if God wills”), mashallah (“as God has willed”), and alhamdulillah (“Praise be to God”). Sometimes things go deeper, as they did with Husain.

Somehow he intuited my interest in matters of faith and spirituality. Last Saturday, he took me to the synagogue in Manama, Bahrain’s capital, even though it wasn’t on our itinerary. But before we went in, he stood me on a street corner outside. “There is the Jewish synagogue,” he said. He slowly shifted my gaze, pointing out minarets: here, a Shiite mosque with elaborate tilework on its facade, with a mainly Iranian congregation; there, another Shiite mosque, plainer, more for Bahrainis. At the end of the road was a grand Sunni mosque. Around the corner, we’d passed a Hindu temple. A short walk away, the Anglican cathedral and a Catholic church. “Nobody can stop anything or anyone from God,” he says. “Religion—any religion—is a practice guiding you to God.”

Inside the synagogue, we found more signs of ecumenism. Husain greeted the caretaker, a Christian with Indian roots, and asked if there had been enough Jews to make a minyan at that morning’s services. “Just one,” the man said. “I don’t know why.” Jews have played a prominent role in Bahraini society—Houda Nonoo, who hails from a prominent Jewish Bahraini family, served as Bahrain’s ambassador to the U.S. during the Obama administration, the first Jew from an Arab country in such a role—but only a few dozen remain in the country.

Husain grew up in Samahij, in the north of Bahrain. Samahij has millennia of history buried in its soils. Try to dig a foundation to build something new and you’ll inevitably hit something old. Some years ago, residents decided to construct a new mosque on a site where the old folks in town said there had once been one. As soon as work began, pieces of coral stone, detritus from some fallen building, were found. The builders called the Ministry of Culture, which sent archaeologists. Their dig uncovered the foundation of that old mosque—not a surprise—but then “they went deeper,” Husain said. “They found a Christian church.”

Dating of wood remnants and ceramic shards found that the church had been in use in the pre-Islamic era, roughly from the mid-400s. Plaster crosses suggested that the church was Nestorian. Other finds—carnelian beads, wine glasses, copper coins—hinted at wealth, leading the archaeologists to hypothesize that this complex might have included a bishop’s palace, because ancient documents record a bishopric in Mashmahig, an old name for Samahij. None of this surprised the locals. “We’re proud we were Christian before we were Muslim,” Husain said. “So, no need to build a new mosque there.” The archaeological site is now being preserved and a museum planned.

Husain always had a string of prayer beads with him, and later that day, as we were in the car riding around town, I asked about them. They were golden agate, from Yemen. He bought them online. Out of curiosity, he took them to a jeweler in Bahrain one day and was quickly offered a price 50% higher than he’d paid. Of course he said no. He just wanted to know.

To him, the prayer beads carry so much meaning. They remind him of how his father taught him to pray when he was 7. And whenever he holds them in his hands, which is most of the day, every day, he feels more connected to God. I asked whether he heard anything from God in reply. “I don’t hear, but I feel something, like God is talking to me,” he said. I asked what he prayed about. “I don’t complain to my wife, I don’t complain to my friends, but I complain to God. Why would I rely on humans? Everything is in God’s hands,” he said. “I tell him what I want, what I feel, what I wish. It’s a practice, but it’s not just a practice—it’s connection.”

The Arabic word salah means “prayer,” but its root, silah, means “link” or “connection.” The five daily prayers mandated by Islam are meant to maintain regular communication. For Husain, his beads augment the practice.

I thought about my own inconsistent prayer life. Last month, I led a Bible study on prayer, because I know I’m not alone in my struggles to find the right words to talk with God. But let us not even speak of how often I think I hear from God, except to say that the download speeds seem slow. Maybe, though, God can still reach me through unexpected teachers.

Islam teaches a particular humility that confesses the ultimate inability of the human to fully understand God. The churches I grew up in never acknowledged that kind of divine mystery. Instead, we were taught to act with the certainty of insight into the divine, which we then had to use to persuade others. It struck me that Husain seemed uninterested in evangelism or persuasion, though he was glad to give testimony.

“Our religion asks us to be good, which I think is the same whatever your religion. The practice may be different, but it is the same,” he said. “God is for everybody.” He paused, then looked at me and smiled. “We will meet again in paradise, me and you, inshallah.”

Here’s a prayer I can say wholeheartedly: God, I hope that happens.

It’s the time of year when list after list comes out declaring which books were the “best.” Honestly it makes me cranky. I bristle every time I see a headline that says “best books.” What does “best” even mean? Did the judges really read every single published book? Impossible.

Some honest reviewers have made lists of their favorite books of the year. That feels more honest to me. So here are my favorites—not all of them are new—with very short reviews, in no particular order, because it’s a fool’s errand to try to rank.

All These Ghosts (2025), Silas House - poignant poetry, exuding love for land and people

Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage (2025), Kelly Foster Lundquist - the funny, honest, brave recounting of a marriage to a gay man

Kitchen Hymns (2025), Pádraig Ó Tuama- enchanting, thoughtful poems about life, belief (or unbelief), and meaning-making

Qui a tué mon père? (Who Killed My Father?) (2019), Edouard Louis - the story of a father and a son, social inequality, fracture and healing

In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden (2021), Niall Williams and Christine Breen - gentle and gorgeous

The Place of Tides (2025), James Rebanks - a transporting and revelatory book about a dying way of life (I wrote a longer piece about my love for this book)

The Cooking Gene (2017), Michael Twitty - moving memoir + rich culinary history

Little Mercy (2025), Robin Walter - graceful poetry—who knew I’d ever read so much poetry?—about nature, grief, and love

The Cook’s Garden (2025), Kevin West - a lush wonderland of recipes and gardening advice

For the most part, these are relatively quiet books, written with restraint. Every one of these writers is awesomely curious and perceptive, exploring both the inner life and the outer world with thoughtfulness and care. I don’t think I’ve seen the 2025 publications on many “best books” list. Why?

Tell me about your most memorable reads of the year, whether old or new.

Leave a comment

A package came from my publisher recently. Turns out they had a few leftover promo boxes with copies of Good Soil. So I thought I’d do a little giveaway. If you know someone who would enjoy Good Soil—someone who is not yourself, please—send me an email at makebelievefarmer@gmail.com, tell me a little about them, and let me know why they’d welcome a surprise gift in the mail. Deadline: December 31st. I’ll pick five recipients and send the books off to them with a note of encouragement.

I got some quibbles in response to my last letter, in which I said that every human is a beloved child of God. While these folks would concede that every human is made in God’s image, some literalists argue that, in the New Testament, “child of God” refers to the believer, to the faithful, to the one who walks in the ways of God.

I’m no literalist. I also believe all human language, even the biblical, which is to say the God-inspired sort, can only partially explain divine things. The phrase “child of God” deploys metaphor for the sake of mapping relationship. It’s imperfect. It’s figurative. But even if one holds to a more restrictive view of the family of God, it still doesn’t justify calling another human “garbage.” To say who is or isn’t a child of God seems a compelling activity to many, but it’s uninteresting to me—and even potentially dangerous, tempting us to claim to know things we can’t know. Beyond that, another’s spiritual status has no bearing on our call to love.

Then there were those who said something along the lines of, But you didn’t say anything when Joe Biden called millions of people garbage. Anyone who knows me knows that I am fiercely nonpartisan, and a critique of a not-good thing stands whether or not the critic critiqued a previous not-good thing. But such whataboutistic rebuttal makes me curious: What bubbles from the deep well that compels someone to respond this way? Is it hurt? Is it anger? Is it something else?

Finally, one person asked, “Who are the enemies you’re talking about?” I’ve thought a lot about who my enemies are. In Good Soil, I write about my struggles with my body—and I recognize that sometimes I’m my own worst enemy. I also don’t know the guy, and this was on Facebook. So I responded by saying, “I don’t know you, so I’m not sure I’m comfortable naming them, except for one. Sometimes I consider myself my own worst enemy and I struggle with loving myself, so there’s that.” It wasn’t the answer he was looking for. “If that’s the case,” he replied, “then I definitely think I am your enemy.”

OK, I guess?

Anyway, I can’t believe God would chide us for an overly lavish welcome, and I don’t think we’re anywhere near erring on the side of excessive generosity. If God is disappointed in us because our arms are too wide-open, then let me run risk that disappointment. God knows I’ve disappointed God in much less noble ways.

Programming notes: I’ll be preaching this Sunday, the last of Advent, at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, where I serve as parish associate for storytelling and witness. I haven’t finished the sermon, but the texts—on Bathsheba, as part of an Advent series on the women in Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew—are something else. Nothing like a little murder, patriarchal erasure, and predatory behavior to usher in Christmas cheer.

On the morning of January 11th, I’ll be at Church of the Savior in South Bend, Indiana. I’ll be preaching, and during the adult-education hour, I’ll give a talk entitled “Here I Raise My Ebenezer: On Beauty, Recognition, and Piles of Rocks.”

Next month: Brisbane, Australia! I’ll be visiting Baroona Farm, a wonderful little project on the grounds of St. Francis College that exudes Farminary vibes. On Saturday, January 31, there will be workshops—one on composting, one on recycling, another that I’m told involves Champagne?—and a potluck meal and a little talk that I’ll give at some point about Good Soil. On Sunday, February 1, I’ll be preaching at Kenmore Church. We’ll have brunch together afterward, and then there will be a live recording of the “On the Way” podcast, which is produced by the team at St. John’s Cathedral in Brisbane; recent guests have included Iain McGilchrist, Wil Gafney, and Pádraig Ó Tuama, so I really need to think of something helpful and intelligent to say.

Thanks to the lovely Jeremy Greaves, Archbishop of Brisbane, for the invitation. And if you’re in or around Brisbane then, I’d love to see you there.

Well, I think that’s more than enough for one letter.

I send this with my best wishes for a meaningful Christmas. Whatever you carry into the holiday, may you be met with good news and may you find hope and possibility in the strange old story of a squawking baby.

Leave a comment

Yours,
Jeff

It’s hard to say, in this age of rampant cruelty, why one bad thing hits harder than any other. For me, watching the American president sit in a Cabinet meeting and hearing him call a group of immigrants “garbage” broke something in me. I was on a call with church colleagues this morning, doing some planning for this Sunday’s service1 and as we discussed the week’s news and this particular circumstance, I surprised myself when I began to cry.

No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

This simple truth should transcend partisan affiliation or ideological divides.

No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

It should not be difficult for those of us who claim to be Christian to stand by these convictions. Anything else is heresy.

No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

This should not be a radical statement, and it seems absurd that a self-declared “very proud Christian” should assert otherwise.2

Yet here we are.

--

But what good is my righteous indignation, and how righteous is it really in the end?

“Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted,” Rowan Williams writes in a majestic essay called “The Body’s Grace.”3 “The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.”

God loves us as God loves God.

This is the bewildering love on which the entirety of the gospel rests.

For those of us who align ourselves with Jesus, this raises some challenging questions: If God loves us as God loves God, then who are we to deny that belovedness in a fellow creature? If God loves us as God loves God, how dare we diminish that which God has called significant and wanted, desirable and cherished? If God loves us as God loves God, and if God does so lavishly and graciously, then who are we to withhold grace?

Which is why, when I say that no human is garbage, and that every person is a beloved child of God, I am compelled to extend that conviction even to those who would deem others garbage, even to those who spew heresy and lies, even to those I find unbearable and dangerous.

I have no power to control what anyone else says or doesn’t say, believes or doesn’t believe. But I do get to choose whether I will recognize another’s inherent dignity or opt instead for dehumanization. To dehumanize the one who dehumanizes is still to participate in dehumanization—and the gospel of grace calls us to a different, perhaps more difficult way.

So I have to hope for the other’s healing, whoever “the other” might be. I have to pray for grace to abound. I have to act for the sake of justice.4 I have to labor on love’s behalf, doing my ridiculously tiny part to grow love, in the hopes that love will so flourish that it becomes too overwhelming, too obvious, to choose anything other than its winsome way.

Love your neighbor, Jesus said, without qualification.

Love your enemies, Jesus said, even more annoyingly.

I’ve looked for the asterisk, for the exception. I haven’t found it.

--

No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.

And the only thing that can heal us is love itself—a love that knows no bounds, a love that can melt even the hardest heart, a love that is beyond any one of us individually but which we might just begin to glimpse together.

Yours,
Jeff

Nugget the Blue Silkie Bantam was born in Iowa at the end of April 2019 and moved to New Jersey, via the U.S. Postal Service, two days later. She and the other fifteen Silkie chicks were an answer to prayer—really, an answer to pleas and nagging, mainly from Pearl and me. While we were (mostly) fine with the Cornish Cross chickens that we’d been raising at the Farminary, why, we asked Nate, the Farminary’s director, did we not have chickens of color?

On the first Sunday in May, I met the flock of baby Silkies—sixteen chirping fluffballs perfectly primed for Instagram awwwww. That night, a fox unleashed a devastating massacre on Nugget’s flock. The lone survivor, she moved indoors to live with the Stucky family, who named her. Nate’s kids cannily predicted that their father would never allow a chicken called Nugget to become an actual chicken nugget.

I wrote about Nugget in Good Soil. It’s foolish, I know, to anthropomorphize a chicken, but I did it anyway. Somehow she felt like a kindred spirit—or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I selfishly wanted to regard her as a kindred spirit. We were both of Chinese descent. We had both been through hard things. We both seemed somewhat lonely, even at the Farminary, where everyone was supposed to belong. After I graduated, I thought of her often, checked in with Nate to see if he had any updates about her welfare, and occasionally sent up a prayer on her behalf.

On Monday night, Nugget died. She was killed, along with a number of other chickens, in an attack by a mystery predator—maybe a weasel, given that her humans had taken care to make sure that the openings to the chicken coop were too small for, say, a fox. She was six years and seven months old.

--

After spending her chickhood in the Stucky home, Nugget moved to the grounds of the Farminary, where she contentedly roamed whenever anyone came by to let her out of her coop. She desperately wanted to belong with the Barred Rocks, who were three weeks older and much bigger, but it quickly became clear they would never accept her as their own. Still, she’d put herself as close to their coop as possible, nestling right up against the fencing.

Perhaps it was her nature, or perhaps it was the lingering effect of that traumatic event—who can say?—but she was always a bit of a weirdo, awkward even beyond her adolescence, into adulthood. Most hens start laying eggs by the time they are six months old, though those of heritage breeds like Nugget occasionally mature more slowly. Nugget waited a very long time, as if to remind everyone that she was not there for productivity’s sake. For a while, we joked that her pronouns might be they/them. Then, one day, she popped out a little egg that could have been mistaken for that of a quail. She always lived on her own terms.

Affection for a feathered, modern-age dinosaur is such a strange, even befuddling thing. The essayist Ivan Kreilkamp has wondered whether we can really call it love. “We surely can extend those kinds of feelings beyond the human—but can we do so all the way to a chicken?” he asks in a 2020 reflection on keeping backyard birds. “It may in fact be impossible to ‘love’ an individual chicken, I came to feel, as that word is so loaded with species-specific associations that presume a being defined as single and autonomous.”

Except that Nugget was both single and singular. And though she was perhaps never entirely autonomous, who among us actually is? Nugget eventually left the Farminary to move into town, where she lived under the stewardship and care of the Rounds family. By all accounts, it was as happy an existence as Nugget could have, until the end, when she died much as her original flock had.

I’ll always be grateful for the time I had with Nugget. Sometimes I’d go by the farm for no other reason than to sit with her, to watch her, to wonder what might be going through her little chicken brain. She’d perch on my lap and scan the terrain. I told myself she enjoyed the elevated vantage point. Perhaps it spoke to something in her dinosaur genes. In her own quirky way, Nugget certainly spoke to something in my human ones.

Rest in peace and roam in glory, dear Nugget.

Leave a comment

I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples, and I will sing praises to you among the nations. —Psalm 108:3

I give thanks for my neighbors—
for the monarchs who visit when the weather is warm,
for the maple tree outside my window, which helps me mark the seasons,
for the woodpecker who hammers the side of our house to remind us it’s his territory,
for the goldenrod and its testimony to hospitality,
for even the fat squirrels that take just one bite from our ripening tomatoes,
for the rabbits and the groundhogs,
for the humans too (mostly).

I give thanks for the garden—
for the gladioli I didn’t plant but did harvest, gladly,
for the Jerusalem artichokes that volunteered too,
for the tomatoes and potatoes and beans, ready for winter meals,
for the fertile soil and the hardworking worms,
for the sun and the rain,
for all that is beyond my control,
for serendipity and grace.

I give thanks for life and breath—
for words,
for conscience,
for this body that, though it often vexes me, still carries goodness,
for friendship and belonging,
for long meals around the table,
for those who share laughter and tears,
for love.

I give thanks for the ability to learn again and again how to give thanks.
So what now will I do with my gratitude?

Leave a comment

Thanks especially, by the way, to those who are paid subscribers to “Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer.” You help keep me fed, housed, and insured—and as we’re looking at our health-insurance premiums for next year... wheeeew. That is no small thing. So thank you for valuing me and my work in the world enough to support me in this way.

To all who celebrate Thanksgiving, may your feast be meaningful, may you taste delight, and may your heart be filled with recognition of the grace that abounds.

Yours,
Jeff

“It is out of love and understanding that any building is born to bless or curse those it is built to serve,” the architect Frank Lloyd Wright once wrote. “Bless them if they will see, understand, and aid. Curse them as it will be cursed by them if either they or the architect fail to understand each other.”

Over the past few weeks, Tristan and I have had the special opportunity to experience the blessing and the curse of Wright’s architecture—first, at Taliesin West, his winter home and studio in Scottsdale, Ariz., and then at the Martin House, in Buffalo, N.Y.

We both geek out about architecture. Tristan is more erudite about the field, while I see buildings more through the lenses of hospitality, theology, and whether I just feel good in the space. These weren’t our first exposures to Wright’s work. At home in Grand Rapids, we often pass by the Meyer May House, which we once explored inside. We’ve been to Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania; the Guggenheim Museum, in New York; and to the Robie House, in Chicago.

Both Taliesin West and the Martin House display, in quite different ways, Wright’s pioneering perspective and idiosyncratic manner. But it was the Martin House, with its luminous spaces and its gorgeous detail, Roman brick and glittering mortar, that wowed me. Plus, we got to stay in a Wright-designed house for the first time.

All of it made me want to know more about the stories mixed into that mortar.

--

Frank Lloyd Wright was the son of a preacher and a teacher. His dad’s work as a Baptist circuit rider and musician made for a peripatetic, impoverished childhood. Born in Wisconsin, Frank had lived in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island by the time he was 7.

When Frank was 10, the Wrights returned to Wisconsin. In his autobiography, he writes rapturously of Wisconsin’s countryside, where he found solace and sustenance: “Milkweed blossoming to scatter its snowy fleece on every breeze. Sorrel reddening on the hills, far and wide. The world of daylight gold would go through violet passing to the deep blue of the night.” Young Frank roamed all over that land, finding companionship with the lady-slippers—he knew, he said, “where those rare ones, white and purple, were hidden”—and the Jack-in-the-Pulpit, the wild strawberries and the watercress, which grew “in the cool streams flowing from hillside springs.”

Nature’s consolation became even more profound in his teens, when his father left the family. His ambitious mother had long before decided her eldest child would be an architect—it’s said that she posted images of great British cathedrals in his childhood bedroom. Frank’s love of the land, and in particular the Midwestern prairie, eventually came to define his style of architecture. “The horizontal planes in buildings, those planes parallel to earth, identify themselves with the ground—make the building belong to the ground,” he wrote. After moving to Chicago to apprentice in the studio of the great Louis Sullivan, he lamented the tendency he saw to build ever taller structures, with chimneys reaching upward, “sooty fingers threatening the sky.” “A little height on the prairie was enough to look like much more,” he argued, critiquing “a mean tendency to tip everything in the way of human habitation up edgewise instead of letting it lie comfortably and naturally flat with the ground.”

He hated almost everything about the homes then being built—the dormers, the basements, the array of rooms. Such houses, he said, “lied about everything,” meaning they ignored their Midwestern surroundings. He wanted layouts evoking the expansive outdoors. So Wright emphasized breadth and drew wide-open spaces, breaking the standard boxes of traditionally small rooms, which he described as “cellular sequestration that implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions.” More windows brought in more light, with fewer walls and doors to inhibit its passage. He pioneered a style of architecture that came to be called the Prairie School.

The Martin House was commissioned by the businessman Darwin D. Martin. After his mother died when he was 5, his father remarried and split up his five kids, taking Darwin, the youngest, and his brother Frank with him to his new home in Nebraska. Darwin hated it. When he was 12, he and Frank moved back east, where Darwin became a door-to-door soap salesman for the Larkin Company. His acumen for numbers drew the attention of company president John Larkin, who brought him to headquarters in Buffalo. By age 25, Martin had become a wealthy executive at the Larkin Company, which had grown into a mail-order empire selling not just soap but everything else a household might need, including furniture, cutlery, and clothes.

Martin originally commissioned Wright to build a new office building for the Larkin Company. But he also asked Wright to build him a home—really, a compound—for his family. “I never ceased mourning of a broken home,” Martin said. “The sweetest song on earth is home, sweet home.”

The first building, a house for Martin’s sister and her family, completed in 1904, was essentially proof of concept for the rest of the complex. The 15,000-square-foot main house was finished the following year. By 1907, there was also a carriage house, a pergola, and a conservatory, designed to house rare plants and a replica of Winged Victory. Two years later, a final building, a cottage for the resident gardener, was added. In total, the compound’s construction cost at least $175,000—about $6.5 million today.

Funnily enough for a kid who’d hated his time in Nebraska, the Martin House came to be recognized as a Prairie School masterpiece. Miles of rift-cut white oak embellish the Martin House, most notably on the trim that, unlike crown molding, sits about a foot below ceiling height, emphasizing horizontality and creating coziness. The rooms flow, one into the next—a precocious example of open-plan living.

Light flows through the house too. Fewer than 10% of American homes had electricity in the first decade of the 20th century; though the Martin house did, Wright amplified the still-dim light with subtle, ingenious touches like gilded mortar, infused with bronze. Still more sunlight, as well as views of the landscaped outdoors, came in through the numerous art-glass windows, some of which had as many as 750 individual pieces of glass. Darwin Martin’s wife, Isabelle, suffered from a degenerative eye condition that made it difficult to see clearly without sufficient light. So in the areas of the living space where Wright knew she would spend the most time, he drew in yet more sunshine through art-glass skylights.

We toured the Martin House on a gray Buffalo day. Still, every room glowed.

--

As it stands now, the Martin House is the product of a decades-long labor of love and architectural resurrection orchestrated by the nonprofit Martin House Restoration Corporation, founded in 1992 to honor Wright’s legacy in Buffalo.

Much of Martin’s wealth evaporated in the stock-market collapse of 1929. He died in 1935. Two years later, his family abandoned the property. Eventually, the City of Buffalo seized it in lieu of unpaid taxes. The property was broken up and sold, and the carriage house and conservatory were demolished so that apartments could rise in their place. Over the past 30 years, the compound has been pieced back together, the main house restored, and the destroyed structures rebuilt to Wright’s original plans.

Throughout our visit, what struck me most was not the property’s beauty, though it was indeed beautiful. It was the deep and imperfect humanity inscribed into its design and embodied in its inhabitants’ stories: dramatic rises, stunning declines, extraordinary yet ephemeral wealth, the enduring and priceless inspiration of nature, such specific care but also such enormous ego.

Wright’s attentiveness to the house’s occupants extended beyond the Martin family. The kitchen, for instance, is no less luminous than the rest of the house, with a wall of windows that afforded the staff generous views of the gardens.

Yet in other areas, Wright seemed to betray his stated commitment to love and understanding—or, perhaps, to suggest that the client’s love and understanding should be self-sacrificial. For the main bedroom, he designed a bed whose foot aligned just so with the corners of the built-in cabinetry. The geometry might have been perfect, but the function was not; the bed was too short to sleep in comfortably. For two years, Martin asked Wright for a bed more suitable for sleeping. For two years, his architect ignored him. Finally, the Martins ripped out the bed Wright had designed. (Curses.)

Wright was famously controlling. He chose two dozen pieces of Japanese art, then sent his clients instructions on where each was to be hung, along with the bill. Though Martin adored books, Wright didn’t want them seen, so all the bookshelves are hidden, save for one rack that allowed volumes of the encyclopedia to be displayed—horizontally, to honor the lines of the house. Our docent also told us that, even after the project was complete, Wright retained keys. Occasionally, he’d visit and rearrange the furniture to his liking.

When I read a biography of Wright, I learned Wright had probably inherited his stubborn spirit from his mother’s Welsh-immigrant side. One of his forebears, a Baptist-turned-Unitarian minister named Jenkin Jones, was considered heretical enough that he was banned from the pulpit in his own church in Cardiganshire. Rather than repent, he went a few miles down the road, built a chapel of his own on family land, and kept on preaching.

--

We stayed overnight in the Gardener’s Cottage. (The Martin House has a creative-residency program, and artists and writers are occasionally invited to visit.) It is the most modest of the structures on the 1.5-acre complex. But “cottage” is relative. At nearly 1,700 square feet, it’s bigger than our house.

Even in an outbuilding, Wright was set on breaking the standard box. Tall panels on the house’s corners mimic piers—I say “mimic,” because they’re not structural—to create dimension. Inside, niches in the corners of the living room serve the same purpose. In both the living room and the main bedroom, windows on three sides draw in light. And while those windows are nowhere near as elaborate as those in the main house, Wright still insisted on art glass with geometric designs inspired by nature.

Much of the cottage’s furniture, though not original, was Wright-designed. I sat in one of his “barrel” chairs for about ten seconds; it was ridiculously uncomfortable. But I happily tucked myself into the built-in nook in the kitchen—a perfect temporary workspace. And fortunately, the bed was not Wright’s; we slept well.

The next morning, I looked out the windows to see sullen skies and falling snow, the grayscale broken by the remaining autumn leaves. For the entire Martin House complex, Wright chose an autumnal color palette—amber and gold, terra cotta and muted green—complementing the wood, radiating warmth, and honoring nature.

“Bless them if they will see, understand, and aid,” Wright wrote. He was referring to a building’s occupants, but the same could be said of all of us who inhabit this good earth.

Docent-led tours of the Martin House complex are available Thursdays through Mondays. You can read more about the Martin House and book tickets at martinhouse.org.

Leave a comment

What I’m Eating and Cooking: Southern Junction, chef Ryan Fernandez’s outstanding fusion-barbecue joint, is our favorite restaurant in Buffalo. I think it’s also the only place outside of Texas where we’ll regularly eat barbecue.

Fernandez, who was born in India and grew up in Texas, smokes an excellent brisket. It especially shines in his brisket biryani, a dish of serendipity. When he first started experimenting with smoking meat, “the first brisket I cooked was awful. So overcooked. Terrible,” he told me. “I was pretty broke, and I had to figure out a way to turn it into something. I was really getting into cooking family recipes, and I was making some biryani, so I thought, I can chop this meat up and see where it goes.”

Fernandez’s brisket biryani is so good that, on our last two visits, I bought an extra quart to take home. It reheats superbly. For lunch today, I made saag paneer to accompany, using Aarti Sequeira’s easy recipe. A perfect meal for a cold day.

Thanks, as always, for coming along on this ride. I’d love to know what you’re cooking on these late-autumn days to bring comfort and warmth.

Leave a comment

Yours,
Jeff

p.s. Last month, I wrote about my own experience of the prairie. If you missed it, you can read that essay here: