Category: God is Love

An Odd Advent Meditation: Is Hardness the Prelude to Brokenness?

An Odd Advent Meditation: Is Hardness the Prelude to Brokenness?

I think a lot about the hardness of human hearts. I feel oppressed, depressed, beaten down by the many examples of “man’s inhumanity to man.” I look in the mirror and see someone looking back at me whom I at times do not know. That face doesn’t tell me anything I don’t read into it. Hardness is not always seen […]

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Confronting the Fundamentalist Within

Confronting the Fundamentalist Within

[Here’s an oldie-goldie from my still-extant but no longer updated blog exploring Christian feminism, “Are Men Really Human?”] Today, a dear friend unintentionally brought me face to face with my own anger. I had sent her links to an article blasting her ministry as unbiblical and “liberal.” Indignant, I was sure she’d enjoy ranting with me about their many logical […]

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A Heart Cry for a Skeptical Friend

A Heart Cry for a Skeptical Friend

[Originally published on Wilson Station June 6, 2011.] I wrote this recently in response to a friend’s self-confident writings about why he had left the Christian faith behind. It was one of many back and forth communications we have had. It is not a perfect argument for God, or some well-crafted Atheist-busting syllogisms. It is, I suspect, more a cry […]

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Personal Pain and Reality Distortion

Personal Pain and Reality Distortion

A few years ago, in response to an illness, a doctor gave me a powerful anti-biotic called Factive. The cure was worse than the disease. I ended up on my bathroom tile floor, racked with pain through my entire gastro-intestinal tract. And in the midst of that pain, the worst physical pain I’ve ever known, I found myself praying that […]

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Healthy and Reverent Fear – by Carol Elaine Durkin-Trott

Healthy and Reverent Fear – by Carol Elaine Durkin-Trott

I, along with other people I’ve been talking with about it, have been reading the book of Revelation (at the end of the Bible). Are these really the ‘end times?’ Is Jesus really coming back, soon? It is a wonderful thing to have a healthy, reverent fear of the living God!! Come on, either God is real, or He’s not. […]

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What Do We Want?

What Do We Want?

“Consider, oh God, that we are without understanding of ourselves; that we do not know what we would have and set ourselves at an infinite distance from our desires.” – St. Teresa of Avila What do we want? Not, as is often done, asking this about a passing bodily appetite of one kind or another… but what do we want? […]

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Porn is the Wallpaper of Our Lives

Porn is the Wallpaper of Our Lives

Up late at night, perusing face book and then a feminist web site and then, these thoughts of my own… I’ve yet again been reading about 2nd Wave Feminism and its (usually) anti-porn stance vs the 3rd Wavers’ usually pro-porn stance. One phrase from Naomi Wolfe (a third-waver with second wave sensibilities) stopped me in my tracks: “Porn is the […]

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Lessons from Carol Elaine

Lessons from Carol Elaine

Today, our twenty-fourth anniversary, I share just a few of the things my Carol Elaine Durkin Trott is to me. Teacher, Teacher I jump out of my skin When you touch me with your existence I cannot learn enough about you And the brilliant gold Of you, completely real, real. History happens, Regardless of philosophy or books Events progress inevitably […]

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Seasons of Life in a Commune

Seasons of Life in a Commune

One of my dearest friends sat in the chair across from me. He’d just verbalized ideas I thought of as the perfect article for this blog. I said so… and his response took me off guard. I’ll paraphrase some of how I remember that conversation. “We’re getting older,” he began, with a half-smile at the obvious comment. “I don’t think […]

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Maggie’s Culottes and My Usefulness to God

Maggie’s Culottes and My Usefulness to God

Maggie huddled on the hallway floor, tears running down her face. Her sobs were audible. As I came around the corner into the small niche formed by a secondary school exit, she seemed to squeeze herself more closely together. “Are you okay,” I said — surely the stupidest question that moment on planet earth. Maggie began turning away from me, […]

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