The Already and Not Yet: On Christmas and Waiting

December 20, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

Today I want to talk about Christmas and waiting. The Christmas season is one of waiting. Advent means, “the arrival,” and for those who celebrate, we wait for the arrival of Jesus into the world—because of all that he represents to us. And at this deep-winter time of year, we wait for the light to return, after months of light decreasing day by day. I feel too that much of the world is currently waiting. People wait to see what... Read more

Celebrating the Small Beauties of Christmas and Letting Go

December 16, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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For decades, I have not been precious about Christmas. This stems from years of having to share my daughter (an only child who’s now a wonderful 33-year-old) with several family gatherings on her father’s side, a gathering with her godfather’s family, and sometimes, her job, and from being a single-mom for many intervening years. Throughout the holiday, my daughter would be so exhausted trying to please everyone that I removed expectations for myself and any notions of an idyllic family... Read more

How Christmas Stories Functioned When They Were Written

December 7, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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Perhaps my favorite thing about the Christmas season—just a few days away—is reminding myself and others how extraordinary are the stories of Christmas. Among global literature, they stand out as baldly subversive and anti-imperial while at the same time being neutralized. The gospel writers of Matthew and Luke (the only canonical gospels with birth narratives) each in their own way set up a stark confrontation between Jesus and the Roman Caesars, of all things—something no first-century reader would have failed... Read more

Upside-Down: Jesus’ Metaphor of ‘King’

November 24, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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Jesus’ metaphor of ‘king’ is a focus this Sunday in my own tradition (Episcopal). And I admit that this is not my favorite metaphor used by Jesus, in part because it is confusing. I don’t like what kings, emperors, rulers, presidents, have done to the weak throughout history. The things they have done and are doing are generally the opposite of what Jesus did and taught. But Jesus used the metaphor of ‘king’ frequently; in fact, ‘the kingdom of God’... Read more

Choosing to Pray Without Worrying About the Form

November 12, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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For many, it has been a hard week. We all must seek deep solace now and for a while to come, and I’m thinking about this most important quest. For my part, I am finding solace in several things—friendship (human and non-human), nature, fiction, late-70s disco, art-making, singer-songwriter tunes, rest. But I’m also finding solace in my tradition. In the stories and scope and prayers that came to us across the eons as people faced precarity and domination in their... Read more

On Feeling Worthy of the Healing and Provision We Need

October 29, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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Have you, at times, longed for a pathway forward—whether a way out of a stuck place or a healing of some kind—but felt unworthy of asking? When I read the lectionary in preparation for last Sunday’s sermon, a story about a blind man healed by Jesus that I have heard dozens of times—it jumped out at me and moved me. First, I was struck by how this man knows who Jesus is, so that when he hears ‘Jesus of Nazareth’... Read more

How Authenticity Awakens Wonder: Living Lives that “Fit”

October 14, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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Recently while watching the film Supernova, I heard this quote: “We will not starve for lack of wonders, but from lack of wonder” (unattributed). I like to think of myself as someone attuned to wonder. Animals imbue my life with wonder—such as when young Eloise looks into my eyes and reaches to stroke my cheek. At times, I experience wonder over my marriage and the unlikelihood of Ed and I finding each other. At times, a certain light strikes me... Read more

A Tale of Provision Mixed With Magic

October 7, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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In 2006, in a time of precarity and despair, some magic happened upon me. Shortly before, as I expressed to a friend heartache about a lost relationship, she said, “Sometimes you don’t get what you want. You get what you need instead.” A few months later, as I was working on building a cottage in the woods, I realized what I needed most was a home. And a home transpired. First, the land. It was the first property I looked... Read more

Seeking Freedom in the Practice of Detachment

September 24, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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As I approach accompanied by crickets, the sky’s palette ranges from turquoise to dark violet; above, a few stars. The temperature of the day reached 90. Growing up in northern California where summer days exceeded 100, I came to love evenings following hot days, when I could walk outside with bare arms, feeling the brush of warmth and smelling night’s incense. Such is the experience this evening in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In the distance, I see a handful of people... Read more

The Gift of Regret: Experiencing Life-Transforming Grace

September 11, 2024 By Tricia Gates Brown

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I recently heard a Vox podcast about regret. The interviewee, Daniel Pink, wrote a book on the subject, reflecting on regret’s transformative power. Regret is an emotion that—if we face it honestly—has the potency to turn us around, to make us go another way. We’ve all been there. When I look back to times I’ve done wrong, it isn’t the stereotypical slip-ups that stand out to me—the sex, lies, or other excesses held up as “the bad sins” in our... Read more