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.

Thaw

Create in me a new heart, O God (Psalm 51:11a) Wind trills taughtly-anchored telegraph wires. A stave of birds compose an arpeggio, ready for flight. Hedges shrug off the gusts and hold the line, but Something is trying to stir … Continue reading

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Book Review: Outlandish, by Derek Penwell

I appreciated the extended argument for the use of sarcasm as a discipleship tool. Skewering broods of vipers, after all, is quite biblical. Continue reading

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What the world needs now

“Don’t be afraid,” says Jesus, “From now on you will be catching people.” Simon, James, and John looked at the great crowd gathered on the sea shore to hear Jesus, to see Jesus, to find Jesus. And they put down their nets, and followed Jesus into the country, into the crowd, who needed more than anything to know the presence of the living God among them. Continue reading

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Wednesday Morning Prayer

Reposted from the Episcopal Cafe. The recommended Canticle for use after the first testament reading at Morning Prayer on a Wednesday is Surge, illuminare: Rise and shine. On a day like any other buses ran, some on time buskers sang, … Continue reading

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Love all the way down

A sermon for the fourth Sunday after the Epiphany in Year C, the annual meeting of Epiphany parish, Euclid, and the Solemn Sung Eucharist at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland. The main text for this sermon is Paul’s ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13. Continue reading

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Falling

Precipitated by clever argument between gravity, ice, and the presumption of free will, bruised as creation, blue and green, concussed like goatskin stretched and pounding – the serpent, sliding snidely by, hisses something about pride, a fig leaf, and the … Continue reading

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Winter prayer

Snow has fallen, slurring my footsteps, skewing my pathway to prayer. Only become as a child, you say: trade caution for the headlong hurtle; build snowmen, not as idols but monument to the meeting of flesh and raw air.

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Water, wine, and justice like an ever-flowing stream

On sabbatical, I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I can’t begin to describe briefly the impact of walking that history of inhumanity and human dignity set up in opposition to one another, the weight of those ceilings, each one a century, and the heaviness of your footsteps as you climb closer to our own day of reckoning. Continue reading

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How cats answer prayers

I know that I have a weakness for whimsy, but there was something about that cat. She had a flash on her forehead that was the exact colour of the sand in the Jordan desert. Continue reading

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Unquiet centre

not the absence of sound but
footprints on the ceiling and
the waltz of a three-legged cat Continue reading

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