Author Archives: Rosalind C Hughes

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About Rosalind C Hughes

Rosalind C Hughes is an Episcopal priest, poet, and author living near the shores of Lake Erie. After growing up in England and Wales, and living briefly in Singapore, she is now settled in Ohio. Rosalind is the author of A Family Like Mine: Biblical Stories of Love, Loss, and Longing , and Whom Shall I Fear? Urgent Questions for Christians in an Age of Violence, both from Upper Room Books. She loves the lake, misses the ocean, and is finally coming to terms with snow.

Let justice roll like a river; still waters can wait

There is no way of praying Psalm 23 truthfully, honestly, lovingly, in this time and place that does not acknowledge that there are no still waters, there can be no resting in meadows, when violence threatens to break in at any moment. There is no peace while injustice holds sway anywhere among us. Continue reading

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Sore wounded

First purple, then green new leaves unfurl as though winter had never been; veined and vain, they bear no marks of last year’s deer, no signs of decay. This is not the resurrection of the dead; this is a conjuring … Continue reading

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Call to prayer

It was only a minute and a half into that Palm Sunday service that I heard it for the first time: a single, swift, unmistakably electronic “beep”. Continue reading

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Called into question

There is a chapter in Whom Shall I Fear? that asks questions about the relationship between the church and the police. It is evident already that it has made some of my early readers uncomfortable. I understand that: it makes me uncomfortable, … Continue reading

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The midwives

Afterwards, whenthey found you again,did they use their ointments, spices, clothto bandage your wounds? Hairline scratches from the halo of thorns; how did you bear the grass beneath your feet? Midwives of the body,did they wipe your hands with aloe,wash … Continue reading

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Balance

Picking my way across the wrongend of the beach, avoidingrocks that rock beneath my weight,overhead branches that claw at my head,empty bottles, remnants of some illicit picnic,metal rope, remnant of some construction project,sea glass and sharp plastic shards,the frigid, opaque … Continue reading

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What is the meaning of this?

Resurrected, Jesus came back to his people, and he loved them out of their grief and his suffering. He remained true, in his resurrection, to the calling of his incarnation: to use his humanity for healing, his relationships for grace, his life for love. Continue reading

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Good Friday: a pieta

He died with the cry crushed from his chest,calling out from the cross to his mother.They crucified him on a stolen hill.They gambled away his clothes.He called out to his mother, shecould not swaddle his naked pain. When he was … Continue reading

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Maundy Thursday: washing Judas’ feet

The devil had already sown the seeds of betrayal in Judas’ heart, and Jesus knew it full well. He let Judas know that he knew it. And he washed Judas’ feet. Continue reading

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Washed in the word

Beside a lake melted into being by glaciers I bathe my feet in your word made water – the fluidity of creation – dry them in the sand, scourings of the land eroded, as all flesh, remade asa million grains … Continue reading

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