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A Family Like Mine: Biblical Stories of Love, Loss, and Longing
https://bookstore.upperroom.org/Products/1921/a-family-like-mine.aspxWhom Shall I Fear: Urgent Questions for Christians in an Age of Violence
https://www.amazon.com/Whom-Shall-Fear-Questions-Christians/dp/0835819671-
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Author Archives: Rosalind C Hughes
Gilroy, guns, and White anger
Red Letter Christians published a piece I wrote reflecting on the uncivil war simmering in the soul of America, one that breaks out all too often in acts of violence like last weekend’s tragedy in Gilroy, California. Continue reading
Posted in current events, gun violence, lectionary reflection
Tagged #Gilroystrong, gun violence, Herod, Jeremiah 31:15, Matthew 2:18, racism, White supremacism
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When you pray
This was the prayer that first made me fall for Jesus, when I was a child. Of course, I learnt the expanded form that we use in worship; the one that we prayed, hands together, eyes closed, every morning at school assembly time (never at home). But even in its stripped down, barest form, as Luke presents Jesus teaching it, the world which this prayer conjures into being is enough to set my spirit on fire. Continue reading
Go back home
On my better days, I might take the time to explain that it would be more appropriate not to choose any person’s story for them, assuming a whole lot about their history, their identity, their family, their future. Continue reading
Prophets and privateers: by their fruits shall ye know them
There is a hardness to the grapes, and a waxiness to the skin of the pear. There is sawdust at the bottom of the bowl, instead of the dusting of peach fuzz that we expected to find. We have been fooled. The fruit is a fake. It is plastic and wood, made only to decorate the room. It is not even a still life. There is no nurture or nutrition in it. It is lifeless. It is a scam. Continue reading
Morning meditation
I squeezed in a swim before work; the lake was grumpy, turning its shoulder to the shore. Now, traffic shimmers the road like fish, still, something within me flexes her wings, soaring among the shrill gulls, over the water.
Do good. Don’t stop.
The seventy returned to Jesus excited and amped up, saying, “You should see how we owned the forces of evil! How we slayed in the name of the Spirit! We are on fire!” And Jesus said, “Yesss. Awesome. You are amazing. You are undefeatable. I know, I know that the way of love wins (because, ahem, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life). I know that you have it in you to do great things. But, not to rain on your parade or anything, but … Do not become distracted, even by your own indisputable awesomeness, from the way of love.” Continue reading
The cathedral
Entering a slanted cathedral, pilgrim feet sheathed in tourist shoes, watching for the Spirit’s tell between the illustrated tombs; some unquiet air consecrated to the sighs of an unquiet world. If our hearts remain stone, and cold, at least, let … Continue reading
Stronghold
On a mountain of modest height, rendered in verse for its appetite for irony and steadfastness, they found the man, the poets say, guarding his skeleton where it lay. The way to the summit is strewn with the rubble of … Continue reading
Birdsong
Birdsong drizzles through evergreens, soaking earth with sweetness and alarm.
Posted in haiku, poetry
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Trinity Sunday, 2019
Within God’s perfect being is the reconciliation of relationship, the interplay of love, the communication of difference and solidarity. Those aspects of God promise that we are understood, that we are accepted in all of our difference, diversity, struggle, and longing; that within the heart of a God who knows all about it from experience, we are healed. Within the heart of a God who knows even brokenness, betrayal, the shadow sides of love, we are recognized, accepted, restored. Continue reading
Posted in holy days, sermon
Tagged baptism, connecting communities, hope, Trinity Sunday
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over the water 