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.

As though

Repent! the echoes ricochet off the bible.
I will require a reckoning for your lifeblood,
says the Lord. Continue reading

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Bruising God

Just before setting the bow in the sky as a sign of the covenant of mercy between God and all flesh, God tells Noah that since humanity was made in God’s image, God will require a reckoning for our lifeblood. God considers violence against any one of us violence against God’s own self. Continue reading

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We came here after Columbine

Let’s paint them
red, white, and blue
have some clergyman
compose a pledge
teach our children to recite it
hand on heart Continue reading

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Do not give your heart to the ashes

The landscape within which we live is littered with sin, from the scars we inflict upon the earth on up through the twisted veins of hearts that would burn down a church built in the image of God’s mercy. And it is impossible to stand here in an attitude of repentance tonight without acknowledging the complicity of our common life in the deaths of 17 students, children, at a high school in Florida this afternoon. Our participation in systems of sin, as its priests and as its victims, is as inevitable as the ice of winter. Continue reading

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A fleeting vision of glory

If Epiphany is about its revealing, then Lent is about our looking for it; but we have the assurance, as we enter the search, the forty days of wilderness wandering, that it has already been found, and that God, the God of Abraham and Hagar, of Ismael, Moses, and Elijah, the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ will not let us wander alone, nor fail if we falter. Continue reading

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This is not Sunday’s sermon

On Sunday, I may speak of mountaintop miracles, the art of the divine fuller, bleaching all blemishes out of our vision of God Incarnate, revealing glory. But today is Friday. The week was long and the mountain high and hard. … Continue reading

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Transfigured

I saw the sun glow white, clothed in winter’s glory, the cold light of distance, diffidence; for once it shone so pale that my eyes could look upon it and live.

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Good news!

A sermon for Annual Meeting Sunday at the Church of the Epiphany, and the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany.   “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” The good news of the gospel is bursting out of today’s readings. … Continue reading

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The Feast of the Presentation

Simeon has been dismissed. Anna shed her widow’s weeds, went dancing with the turtle doves, snowing feathers; all that remains is dust and the rubble of a memory, the echo of a prayer, and a child, caught by his woven … Continue reading

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Marking time

The action of turning the calendar page is a challenge to understand how each day anchors us in that moment between the gravity of time and the weightlessness of eternity. Continue reading

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