Share Father Shannon T. L. Kearns grew up in the evangelical church and somehow held onto the story of Jesus as everything around him fell apart. Kearns eventually came out as trans, and in 2013 became the first openly trans man ordained into the North American Old Catholic priesthood. That same year, Father Kearns and Brian Murphy started the Queer Theology podcast and queertheology.com, both of which offer an ever-growing and life-saving body of resources for queer people of faith and spiritual seekers. Kearns founded House of the Transfigura...

Acceptance is not about liking something or agreeing with something—It’s simply about acknowledging what is happening, what is true in this moment. The more we can accept each moment as it is, the less we suffer. Sometimes there are things in our life that we’re not crazy about, that are quite unpleasant, very distressing even—and yet there’s nothing we can do about it. And in those moments acceptance, acknowledging what is true without adding on layers of “I don’t want this to be true,” “It’s not fair,” “I don’t like this,” “Why did this happe...

Share November 1 is All Saints Day. Here are quotes, recommended resources, a practice, and a teaching story for your observances. Teaching Stories The 1984 movie Places in the Heart is set in the Depression. Recently widowed Edna (Sally Field) is trying to support her two young children and pay her mortgage by growing cotton on a small farm. She has two helpers, a black itinerant worker (Danny Glover) and a blind boarder (John Malkovich). Together they weather a sea of troubles, including a disastrous tornado, that teach them the meaning of fr...

Share When Father Shannon Kearns was born, he “was wrapped in pink blankets and swaddled in evangelical theology.” The blankets and the theology both, he writes, “would one day threaten to suffocate me. I needed to be unbound, just like Lazarus when he came out of the tomb (see John 11:44).” Through In the Margins: a Transgender Man’s Journey with Scripture, Kearns tells the story of how he wriggled free of the pink blankets and the evangelical theology to claim the rightness of his body, to find a new name, and to live out his faith. Like many...

Share "I take a lot of comfort in knowing that Jesus had to come out, too. Not about his sexuality or gender identity (at least that we know of), but he still needed to reveal something about his identity to the people in his life. Jesus did so as many queer and trans people do: in stages. "I wonder when Jesus first started to realize that he was different than the people around him. That he was called to do something greater. That his calling was going to require something of him that he might not have been ready to give. Some people believe t...

Share Halloween is celebrated on October 31 in the Western world with such activities as carving pumpkins and dressing up in scary costumes. Children go "trick or treating" house-to-house in their neighborhoods collecting sweets in exchange for not doing any mischief. The observance of this day, though not all its popular culture practices, originated with the Celts' festival of Samhaim that marked the end of the harvest. The name comes from "All Hallow Even," the night before "All Hallows' Day," also known as All Saints Day. In Seeking Enlight...

Share Director Martin Scorsese is known for creating complex portraits of what makes his characters – and by extension, their society – tick. With a few exceptions, he has mostly given us films about mobsters, gang bosses, hustlers, and small-time crooks who are consumed with the quest for power and the money that comes with it. There are white collar criminals, sports stars, and celebrities whose antics have caught the attention of the public. When they appear to be heading to a downfall, they will quickly betray friends and family and resort ...

Share “ 'Even kindergarten staff haven’t learned how to work purposefully with creativity. If you let children draw whatever they want, without any restrictions or objective, they’ll simply draw the same thing over and over again,' says Erik Lerdahl, Norway’s only professor of creativity. He works at Kristiania University College, mainly with students of design and communication. “Lerdahl teaches his students to develop their creativity by giving them clear parameters for a task. For example, he might get his students to mold a piece of clay wh...

Share I hope people who need this book will find it. You may want to suggest it to someone you know. Too often we imbibe notions that creativity is mostly for special people who create special things, and then the rest of us simply consume those things. This book says something different and more basic about what it means to be a human being. Creativity is central to each person, but it often goes unaccessed. Norwegian author Hilde Østby offers practices of daydreaming (can’t every person learn to daydream — or simply allow themselves to do so?...

Share The Hindu festival of lights, Diwali, is celebrated each year in mid-autumn, coinciding with the darkness of a new moon. Based around the holiday's mythology and meaning, Raaga's Song, written for four-to-eight year-old readers, will inspire those newly introduced to these festivities as well as those for whom they are an annual practice. Raaga — a girl who loves to sing and whose name means "melody" — wonders whether she should audition to sing at the Royal Palace on Diwali. Her grandfather, Baba, reassures her by saying, "It doesn't mat...

Share “I am God’s Wonder, fully made.” “Through the erotic, I find how far God’s pleasure can take me.” “I am the endlessly knowable Mystery.” “When I breathe, the earth breathes with me.” “I open myself to Love’s presence now.” —Kevin Miguel Garcia in What Makes You Bloom

Share We here at Spirituality & Practice are great cat lovers! Frederic and Mary Ann have fostered countless cats through the years, finding loving and nurturing homes for them. Others became permanent residents and members of the Brussat family. Currently they live with Rumi, a brown tabby Maine Coon, and Shams, a red and white tabby Maine Coon. Cats are our teachers, companions, playmates, and so much more. What better way to celebrate them and all their feline relatives than with their own special day (though they most likely think every...

Share Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919), the 26th President of the United States, was ambitious, aggressive, occasionally contradictory, always dynamic. He was a physical fitness enthusiast, soldier, cowboy, politician, explorer, conservationist, big game hunter, and writer. His unusual blend of talents and commitments resulted in a life of action which mirrored the emergence of America on the world scene in the twentieth century. Attending Harvard University, this go-getter competed as a boxer and graduated at the top of his class. He was elect...

Share “The gospel imagines that we are bodily creatures, all of us, held in the palm of the hand of the creator (the one who has the whole world in his hands). The more we focus on shared bodily reality (and away from distorting ideology), the more important are those bonds. It is the work of the gospel community to expose the phony force of ideology (Right or Left!) and to celebrate the common human requirements of compassion, mercy, and justice without which we cannot live.”

Share Walter Brueggemann is still writing books. More precisely, he’s writing in blog form, and a publisher has compiled these into a book. We might not have thought it important enough to review that book here, except that it contains some marvelously important reflections. Not to mention that Brueggemann, who is now 90 years old, is probably the most recognized Protestant Christian biblical scholar in the world today. There is an opening prayer that is worth the price of the book. Written in poetic lines, Brueggemann tells us that it is a ref...

Share 1. Recall one interior movement – a powerful emotion, a persistent inner voice, a compelling impulse to behave in some way – that has been a frequent companion in your life recently or one that you have found difficult to be with. 2. Take a few minutes and personify this interior movement, perhaps imagining it as a child or some creature that embodies the feelings of this movement. You can do this in your imagination, draw it, or find a picture on the internet. 3. Spend some time paying attention to this personified emotion. Extend it a n...

Did you just blow your stack? That’s OK! Even the most calm, cool, and collected among us can lose their temper once in a while. You can’t avoid angry feelings all the time, and for those moments when you let anger get the best of you, there are ways you can cool down more quickly and minimize the damage, both to yourself and to others. Mindfulness is amazing for this—it can be deployed in any moment, offering a fresh start, a return to equanimity, and even creative solutions to problems that seemed impossible in the heat of the emotion. Mindfu...

Share "Lying on my back on that padded floor, every molecule of tension and turmoil within me drained from my body. I gave myself to the gravitational pull of a profound peace that pervaded my being. I became absolutely still and intensely present. It was like a new 'me' had emerged, one acutely alert to my inner world. I was aware of the tamed energy of rage on the edge of my consciousness, and of the wounded boy slumbering before me. But the 'I' that was aware of them was qualitatively different. It was unshakably grounded, infinitely calm, a...

Share Sitting in a car on a bluff overlooking the Pacific ocean, Frank Rogers’ recently-institutionalized sister Linda turned to him for help. “You were like this once,” she said. “What did you do to get better?” Rogers gave what answer he could. Weeks later, his sister took her life. Cradled in the Arms of Compassion is the answer he wished he could have given her. It tells the story of a beloved professor of spiritual practices whose unmetabolized trauma almost undid him. As Rogers struggles not to come undone, he discovers the movements of w...

Share Often wonder is composed of questions — questions not meant to be answered but rather to evoke an awestruck response in the heart. This poetic book offers just this kind of question, accompanied by the beautiful and evocative illustrations of Helen Cann, whose work has appeared in exhibitions around the world. Two girls travel through the seasons together, from the tail end of winter until its return. Most often we see the two on or near their bikes, which lean against their tents as the girls sit on blankets under a starry summer sky: "C...