Sharing these words of late Irish poet John O’Donohue on thresholds—borders, liminal spaces—as we enter into another year. And also because the reality is, we are always at a threshold of some kind, crossing from one place into another, one way of being into another.

From To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (pp.47-50); some emphasis added:

Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges.

The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.

Change arrives in nature when time has ripened. There are no jagged transitions or crude discontinuities. This accounts for the sureness with which one season succeeds another. It is as though they were moving forward in a rhythm set from within a continuum.

To change is one of the great dreams of every heart—to change the limitations, the sameness, the banality, or the pain. So often we look back on patterns of behavior, the kind of decisions we make repeatedly and that have failed to serve us well, and we aim for a new and more successful path or way of living. But change is difficult for us. So often we opt to continue the old pattern, rather than risking the danger of difference. We are also often surprised by change that seems to arrive out of nowhere.

We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated. Like spring secretly at work within the heart of winter, below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation. We never suspect a thing. Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.

At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.

At this threshold a great complexity of emotions comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward.

The time has come to cross.

To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging. This becomes essential when a threshold opens suddenly in front of you, one for which you had no preparation. This could be illness, suffering or loss. Because we are so engaged with the world, we usually forget how fragile life can be and how vulnerable we always are. It takes only a couple of seconds for a life to change irreversibly. Suddenly you stand on completely strange ground and a new course of life has to be embraced. Especially at such times we desperately need blessing and protection. You look back at the life you have lived up to a few hours before, and it suddenly seems so far away. Think for a moment how, across the world, someone’s life has just changed—irrevocably, permanently, and not necessarily for the better—and everything that was once so steady, so reliable, must now find a new way of unfolding.

Though we know one another’s names and recognize one another’s faces, we never know what destiny shapes each life. The script of individual destiny is secret; it is hidden behind and beneath the sequence of happenings that is continually unfolding for us. Each life is a mystery that is never finally available to the mind’s light or questions. That we are here is a huge affirmation; somehow life needed us and wanted us to be. To sense and trust this primeval acceptance can open a vast spring of trust within the heart. It can free us into a natural courage that casts out fear and opens up our lives to become voyages of discovery, creativity, and compassion. No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a promise. Whatever comes, the great sacrament of life will remain faithful to us, blessing us always with visible signs of invisible grace. We merely need to trust.

Photo by Tim Mossholder.

Over the dozen years I’ve been in pastoral ministry, there have been many reasons why people I know have walked away from their faith, from God, from spirituality, joining the ever-growing ranks of ‘nones’ (those who claim no religious affiliation). For many, it is the problem of suffering and evil in the world — how can a good and loving God exist and do nothing?

But one of the biggest reasons that I’ve encountered for folks’ disillusionment with God and faith and Jesus and Christianity is the chasm between what Jesus was like and what his followers — and especially those who claim to speak for him — are like. It is hypocrisy, it is spiritual abuse, it is a lack of integrity, it is misuse of power and platform, it is exclusion and marginalization and oppression. These sins can so undercut the witness and words of Christians that it is no wonder people question whether Jesus actually makes any positive difference, whether Jesus is actually worth following.

A couple of weeks ago, I addressed this in a sermon on the Parable of the Tenants (Mark 12:1-12), because that is what Jesus was addressing — those who claim to speak for God but do what God would not do: engage in religious exclusion, economic oppression, and spiritual abuse.

It led me to share, for the first time in public, my own experience with spiritual abuse. Here’s some of what I said:

In a previous church I was part of, I experienced what I later came to understand as spiritual abuse. As is often the case with abuse, I was made to think I was the problem; I wondered if I was the troublemaker, if I was the one being unfaithful to God. I’m already one who is fairly conflict averse by inclination, so it wasn’t like I was raring to go public and wave a flag in righteous anger.

Like I said, I didn’t even fully know what was happening. So I kept silent about it. Left quietly. Wrestled with my faith and my calling. In the years that followed, especially once I was able to name it, and as I connected with others who’d experienced similar things and similarly not known how to understand their experiences as spiritual abuse — I mean who wants to claim that they’ve been abused? — I continued to wonder if I should’ve spoken up, if I could’ve done more to help keep others safe. Sometimes I still wonder.

To be a Christian in the United States is to experience and have to figure out our faith in a country where certain forms of Christianity have dominated the landscape and our history, many of which have not looked at all like the God—the Jesus—they claimed to speak for. I think of churches and priests and pastors who have committed or covered up abuse of women and children, and disbelieved those who had the courage to speak up. I think of slaveholding and white supremacist forms of Christianity that denied the humanity and freedom of fellow image bearers while preaching so-called good news. I think of patriarchal and misogynistic forms of Christianity that deny the equality of women and the ability of women to lead in God’s church, those who were often the most faithful—last at the cross and first at the tomb, and first to preach the resurrection. I think of homophobic and transphobic forms of Christianity that deny the belovedness of all people, not just depriving the church of opportunities to learn from our queer siblings but even driving them to question if life is worth living.

Healing from spiritual abuse can be so hard to come by. Because it isn’t just an intellectual or rational exercise. It is tied into our emotions and our bodies and our families of origin and our worldview. It is hard to separate our experiences of — and our experiences at the hands of — those claiming to represent God from our experiences of God. In the words of Carol Howard Merritt:

The reason religious wounds can cut so deeply is that they carry the weight of God with them. In some way we have felt that God was behind what wounded us. So the first step in spiritual healing is to learn to love God by separating God from our experience of being wounded.

Carol Howard Merritt, Healing Spiritual Wounds

I would offer three steps on the path toward healing from spiritual abuse — not exhaustive by any means, but intended to be a start.

First, we heal when we look to Jesus. Because when we look to Jesus, we see who God really is. What God looks like. What God says. What God does. We need to be reminded that God did not condone what the pastor of your last church did; God is not like the youth leader who failed to report your abusive situation or who perpetrated it; God actively opposes the self-proclaimed Christian politician who tweets Bible verses while legislating against the very people God defends: the poor, the immigrant, the vulnerable. 

I take so much comfort from what I learn from Jesus here in this parable in Mark: who God stands with and who God stands against. Jesus stands against economic exploitation, Jesus stands against religious exclusion, Jesus stands against spiritual abuse. And by implication, Jesus stands with those who have been made poor, those who have been labeled ‘sinners,’ those who have been hurt and harmed by people in positions of spiritual and religious authority—directly or indirectly.

Second, we heal in community. In her book Sacred Wounds, Teresa Mateus says, plain and simple, “We heal in community. There is no other way.” Just as Dr. King was not alone in his activism. Just as Jesus had his band of disciples. Just as God declared it was not good for humans to be alone. Find your community in which to heal. Find people with whom to heal, people with whom to pursue justice and righteousness and being formed in the likeness of Jesus. Find people who will celebrate your image-of-God-ness, who will cheer you on and challenge you to do the right thing, even when it is hard. Seek healing in community.

And third, we heal by living out a better way. Whatever level of sharing you are able to participate in as part of your healing, whatever you are able to name and wherever you are able to name it, live out a better way. Call out bad tenants. Call out bad stewards. Call out harmful actions. But don’t just be a prophetic voice. Be a prophetic witness too. Live out the better way that God is leading you in.

You may not be a religious leader. But all of us — as Christians — are called to be ministers of the gospel.

All of us are called to be bearers of the good news. All of us are called to look after, to steward that which God has given us: wherever we may have influence or authority — in our workplaces, in our families, in our classes, in our friend groups. In our selves too: with our time and our money, with our energy and our relationships, with our bodies and our minds, with our words and on our screens.

What kind of tenant are you? What kind of steward are you of what God has given you? Of the life God has given you?

We have all been wounded in some way, and I pray we are all healing in some way. We are all invited, to use the words of Dutch author Henri Nouwen, to become wounded healers:

To speak about and to live out God’s better way in whatever place God has us.

To allow God to bring healing to us and to bring healing through us to others.

To learn to live like Jesus in order that others might also experience the healing and liberation of God.

May it be so.

Check out the full sermon below:

Image by Serkan Göktay via Pexels.com.

As a staff, we felt it important to talk more directly about last weekend’s shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay among the Asian American community, and then the release of the videos showing the murder of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers. Tragically, that is not an exhaustive list of the recent violence we’re grieving.

As a staff, we talked yesterday about how we were feeling. There was a great deal of sadness. There was anger. Exhaustion. Numbness. Maybe you’ve felt the same. Maybe you’re in a place of feeling shock and outrage.

I’ll be honest. I feel a bit of whiplash. I battle the temptation to stick my head in the sand and pretend like nothing’s happened because that doesn’t feel responsible; it doesn’t feel like loving my neighbor — pretending they’re not hurting — or loving myself — pretending I’m not hurting.

But I also haven’t had time to process one tragedy before another one happens. Like I’m stuck in a constant trauma cycle. It’s a lot.

You may feel the pressure of processing your grief or your feelings at the same speed as those we see on social media. Be where you are. Allow God to meet you where you are and to be with you in your processing.

What we can’t do is pretend like nothing’s happening. Make no mistake: the events of the last couple of weekends have reaffirmed the reality of the quintessentially American principalities of gun violence and white supremacy.

When I think of the sheer number of shootings in this country, and particularly of the shootings from last weekend, where elderly Asian men took over fifteen lives, I know it doesn’t have to be this way—I’ve lived in places where it is not the case. Hong Kong, where the last mass shooting was five years ago. In the UK, there have been four shootings that claimed multiple lives since 2000.

Some might ask how these incidents can be chalked up to white supremacy when the perpetrators were people of color: “They were Asian shooters. They were Black cops.”

The how is this: racism and white supremacy are not about individual prejudice or bias or discrimination. Racism and white supremacy are found in narratives about people, taking form in systems and structures, backed up by laws and institutions and practices.

Narratives that say, for example, Black people are more suspicious than white people. Or worth less than white people. Or have to be perfect in order to avoid death.

When we say Black Lives Matter, it is because the history of our country has been an overwhelming denial of that truth.

We believe everyone is created in the image of God, created equal before God.

The problem is that we human beings, in our sin, in our brokenness, have not treated one another that way.

Here at Christ City, this is who we are and who we’re trying to be, however imperfectly: a community that points to and embodies God’s kingdom here on earth — a kingdom of justice and righteousness and shalom. We’re trying to be a people who look like our king, Jesus.

In the face of terrible tragedies and constant reminders of brokenness and sin, that is what we will continue to strive for. That’s what we’re committed to.

If you’re in need of pastoral care, counseling, or prayer, please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of the pastors or staff or elders. We’re here for you and we’re here with you. [go.christcitydc.org/prayer]

So, together, let us pray for:

The Protestant theologian Karl Barth said, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.” In other words, know what’s in Scripture and know what’s happening in the world; and interpret what’s happening in the world through the lens of Scripture. The lens of Jesus.

We try to do that here at Christ City. We aren’t just offering a faith perspective on the news of the day, like a Christian version of late night talk shows. Nor are we simply offering an exposition of the Bible, with no reference to our lives or the world God has placed us in.

We try to be faithful to speak up when we feel led to speak up but also to ensure that our spiritual formation is not just occasional or incidental or simply prompted by the news, but rhythmed and consistent: faithful practice and intentional church policy, conversations in community, protest and advocacy, discipleship in the way of Jesus.

As I’m sure all of us know, this week saw a very controversial decision by the Supreme Court. One which overturned the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade and removed the constitutional right to an abortion.

Let me start by saying abortion is such a hard thing to talk about. There are complexities and nuances and threads that stretch into numerous other areas beyond this hot button issue. Moreover, the Church—and American Christians in general—has not had a good track record in speaking and advocating on this with grace, with kindness, and with justice in mind.

Let me also acknowledge that I’m speaking from a position of privilege as a man. So I have spent much of the last few days just listening, especially to women—in my life, in my friend group, on social media—those who are most affected by this decision.

I know folks who are celebrating this decision. You may too; you may be one of those people. In my understanding and practice of faith, there is something called a “consistent ethic of life,” a valuing of human dignity “from womb to tomb.” That means that even before a child is born, there is something to be defended, protected, safeguarded, mourned if lost—even as we can acknowledge that a zygote is different from a full-term baby. Banning a procedure that ends the potential for life can seem to be a positive thing.

I also know many folks who are lamenting this decision. Not just because it removes a woman’s agency and ability to choose what happens to—and inside—her body. But also because of the cascading consequences.

This week I have read far too many friends’ stories about sexual assaults that left them fearful about what would happen if they were to get pregnant. I have read as friends shared their anxiety or their trauma about pregnancy-related emergencies, situations other than unwanted pregnancies in which the abortion procedure is utilized.

And we know that a disproportionate burden of the consequences of this decision will fall on women with less resources, women who are less educated, and women of color. Those already vulnerable will face further disenfranchisement, potentially even criminalization. And all of this without sufficient safety nets for those women and their children.

I’ve said before that one way I think about what the gospel of Jesus means for us is that where the image of God in human beings is most ground down, most threatened, most in need, we are called to listen all the more attentively to their pain, to act all the more decisively for their liberation, and to speak up all the more boldly against those in power.

I believe God is a God of life. Of every life and every sphere of life. What I think that means is that, if we really value every life and every sphere of life, we should do just as much for these little ones once they get out of the womb as before:

Universal healthcare.

Paid family leave.

Free preschool.

Comprehensive sex education.

Investing in better education for all.

Easy access to contraception.

Just immigration systems.

Addressing Black maternal mortality.

Holding sexual assailants and rapists more accountable and taking violence against women more seriously.

Better supporting foster and adoptive families.

School meals.

Disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline and eradicating mass incarceration.

Countering wealth inequality.

A minimum wage that folks can actually live on.

Affordable housing.

Prioritizing and uplifting the poor.

Strengthening civil rights and gun restrictions (not the opposite, as the Supreme Court did earlier in the week).

Now, it’s okay for you to not agree with every policy proposal I’ve named or have concerns or questions. I’m simply sharing with you some of what I think it looks like for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven.

We (at Christ City) already advocate for some of these. We already work toward some of them. And our engagement is driven by our faith, by our theology, by our vision of the kingdom of God that Jesus came to inaugurate, by our commitment to the gospel that is good news of liberation for the least of these. And that will continue to be the case as long as Christ is at the beginning of our name and at the center of our church.

I’d been debating this week whether to ask one of our women elders or staff to share, being more affected by this decision than I will ever be. But I felt called to bear the weight of the responsibility of standing before you as the lead pastor of Christ City and saying all of this to you.

However, I did ask Pastor Lisa to offer a prayer in response to the events of this week. As she comes up, please know that if any of you want to talk or pray with any of the pastors about any of this, we are ready and willing.

The pastoral response begins at 36:35 of the video below.

I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two—
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.

Langston Hughes

When hard things happen, when suffering shows up, when loss lingers, when we wrestle with gun violence (again) and white supremacy (again) (and again and again and again), what do we do? We have so many options now. We can rage. We can doom scroll. We can numb. We can distract ourselves. What do you do?

A healthy response modeled for us in the Bible is the practice of lament. Almost one third of the one hundred and fifty psalms we have are psalms of lament, but pastor and author Eugene Peterson notes that up to seventy percent of the psalms contain some lament. You may be familiar with some of them: Psalm 22—which begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, the words Jesus cried out from the cross; or Psalm 13—“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” There’s an entire book of the Bible called Lamentations, written by the prophet Jeremiah. The prophet Habakkuk begins his writings with words that may resonate with us:

God, how long do I have to cry out for help before you listen?
How many times do I have to yell before you come to the rescue?
Why do you force me to look at evil, stare trouble in the face day after day?
Anarchy and violence break out, quarrels and fights all over the place.
… Justice is a joke.
The wicked have the righteous hamstrung and stand justice on its head.

Habakkuk 1:2-4

We don’t spend a lot of time in grief. And understandably so. It’s uncomfortable and overwhelming; there is so much of it to deal with—the last two weeks with Buffalo and Laguna Woods and Uvalde have felt like a perfect storm of suffering, not to mention the ongoing conflict in Ukraine or the violence in our city, or even what’s going on in our lives. It can feel like we actually don’t have the capacity to properly process it all. Let me say: we don’t; we weren’t meant to be exposed to this much suffering and tragedy, any time and all the time. And so it’s okay to not know what to do with all of it. Some of us need to hear that—especially in this city (DC) or in your line of work, where you’re paid to know what to do—but really all of us, who find it hard not knowing, not being in control—we need to hear that.

Biblical lament is grief carried to God.

What we learn from the brutal honesty of words like those in Psalm 13 or Psalm 22; or in Psalm 44, when the psalmist accuses God of walking away from the people he promised to protect and yells, “Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day?”; or in Psalm 88—”Why, God, do you turn a deaf ear? Why do you make yourself scarce?”—what we learn from the example of our forefathers and foremothers of faith is that nothing is off limits with God; no prayer is inappropriate. Our God is big enough to handle anything and everything we have to throw at God.

We might think that Christians aren’t supposed to feel a particular way. Especially all the feelings that we have felt these last few weeks.

Devastating despair.

Absolute anger or agony.

Riotous rage.

Helpless and hamstrung.

But we do feel that way sometimes, so the question is, “When we feel that way, what do we do?” We could act it out (which often leads to destruction and perpetuates the cycle of violence); we could deny it (which is often repression—and we all know it’ll come out somewhere else and someplace else); or we can carry it to God, choosing to lay it all before the only one who can handle it all and handle it rightly.

Don’t get me wrong, therapists and counselors and spiritual directors can help—I say that from experience—but no human being was ever meant to carry the full weight of another’s soul … none but Jesus.

Anger isn’t bad per se; it tells us something about ourselves. Same with desperation, despair, and rage. But note where the psalms tell us to take it all: to the one who stays with us even as we beat our fists in helpless rage, the one who holds us close and says, “I can take it. Tell me everything.” In her book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown created a manifesto for wholehearted parenting, and I think it reflects well the heart of God for us, God’s children, especially a line that says:

Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it.

To live the resurrection is not to live in a fake world, a world where we have to pretend, but to live fully in this world, to live the eternal kind of life now and then into eternity.

Psalm 13 is one of the examples of biblical lament I mentioned earlier and it’s short—only six verses. But in the course of six verses, it goes from pain (in verses 1-2) to prayer (in verses 3-4) to:

But I have trusted in your faithful love.
My heart will rejoice in your salvation.
Yes, I will sing to the Lord
because he has been good to me.

As much as we would love for our pain and our grief to be transformed into praise within the span of six verses, we know it isn’t that easy. I would be surprised if everything was suddenly better for the psalmist, David—I don’t know that life works like that … or that God works like that. At least most of the time.

Instead, what happens—what’s possible—when we practice lament, when we name our pain and bring it in prayer to God is that we gain perspective from God. We find focus and fuel in the struggle for justice and restoration. We are strengthened for the setting right of those things we are crying out against.

Grief can make us more empathetic, more gracious, and more compassionate. Anger, when focused into righteous action, can bring lasting change for others. In our despair and our darkness, God can—and often does—surround us with the very people we need to not grow weary in well-doing.

I saw resurrection echoes this week in how many responded, including here in our own church community, coming around one another with texts and calls and prayers and donations, recommitting to the hard work of anti-racism and ending gun violence. I was inspired by a piece written by poet Amanda Gorman in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, entitled “Hymn for the Hurting,” which, though it may not name God explicitly, stirs in me through lament and hope a vision of God’s kingdom on earth:

Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

Amanda Gorman, “Hymn for the Hurting”

Somewhere to call home. Somewhere we’re known. Somewhere we can be ourselves. Somewhere we can invite those we love and care about.  Belonging is not solely about church, obviously, but the Church needs to consider belonging and community, because community is one of the things churches overpromise and underdeliver on.

In the kind of multi- church that we are and that we are trying to become—multiethnic, multiclass, multicultural, multigenerational—everyone feels a little bit out of place. No one feels completely at home. (I don’t even always feel completely at home and I’ve been around since the beginning!) Everyone has wondered whether they belong, whether they’re truly seen, whether they can express themselves fully and authentically.

But what keeps me at Christ City is that enough parts of myself—especially the parts that I know God wants to stretch and grow—find resonance with the people here, and with the shared mission and commitments, including that of identifying and removing barriers to God’s liberation for all. That, to me, is what the inclusion of God’s kingdom is about, that as many as want to will be welcomed home.

This morning, I woke up to the horrific news of another mass shooting, this time at several Atlanta-area spas, this time stealing eight lives, including at least four Asian women. I’ve spent the day praying and processing — that makes it sound more tidy and put-together than it’s been. It was a messy mix of emotion of numbness, of rage, of frustration; texting with friends, trying to acknowledge and sit with my own feelings while trying to care for other friends and loved ones affected; of letting myself cry and feel the grief in my own body.

This hit home in a particular way today. I was supposed to be spending time in prayer as Carolyn and I prepare to welcome a biracial baby girl into the world soon. And it was: I was faced with the stark reality my Asian American kids have been and will be born into. Where a toxic mix of white supremacy, misogyny, purity culture, and gun culture can claim multiple lives and devastate multiple families, friend groups, and communities. Where we can be as committed to peace and justice and loving our neighbors as we can — and still be laid low by a complete stranger “having a bad day.”

It was also a reminder to me of the work I am called to: as a pastor, as a Christian, my prayer is — as we were just talking about this week at Christ City — for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done. One thing that looks like for me is for every person to be seen and loved and honored as one made in the image of God. It is to do whatever is in my power, in whatever sphere God has given me to steward, to leave the world a better place than I found it, especially for those who will come after me — that includes dismantling systems of “white supremacy, misogyny, male hegemony, fetishization of Asian women, anti-Asian hate crime and violent racism” (per my friend Pastor Aaron Cho) and living a better alternative.

A couple more thoughts (that I’ll share): First, words matter. The anti-Asian violence did not start this last year (as any Asian American or anyone who knows anything about Asian American history can attest), but it was undoubtedly exacerbated by words from the previous occupant of the White House, who treated Asians as a punch line, referring to COVID-19 as “the Kung Flu” and “the China Virus” even as recently as  … the night of the shooting. Per Stop AAPI Hate, nearly 3,800 incidents were reported between March 2020 and February 2021, higher than the previous year’s tally of 2,800. Moreover, women made up 68 percent of reports.

Second, for my AAPI family: I hope you’re able to find your spaces and communities of healing, if you haven’t already. We experience and imbibe these traumas, often without fully being aware of it, often feeling the need to just keep being productive. But we weren’t made to skip past deep communal pain. If I can be a resource or a connection in any way, please let me know.

I’m grateful for the texts and messages I received during the day from friends. I was able to spend some time tonight processing with some AAPI members of my church family. We shared inchoate, incomplete, and sometimes incoherent thoughts, feelings, and experiences. We prayed for the families and loved ones of those whose lives had been stolen. And, as it is St. Patrick’s Day, I closed with an adaptation of the Breastplate of St. Patrick, a prayer that hit a different way today, a prayer applied today for our community:

 Christ shield us today against wounding.
Christ with us, Christ before us, Christ behind us,
Christ in us, Christ beneath us, Christ above us,
Christ on our right, Christ on our left,
Christ when we lie down, Christ when we sit down,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of us,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of us,
Christ in the eye that sees us,
Christ in the ear that hears us. 

#StopAsianHate #StopAAPIHate #HateisaVirus

Today is Epiphany, or Día de los Reyes, the day we remember the magi’s visit to Jesus. I came across this poem yesterday by Jan Richardson, whose work I love (see her Ash Wednesday poem “Blessing the Dust” or her “Blessing for Waiting“, which I used during Advent).

Wise women also came.
The fire burned in their wombs long before they saw the flaming star in the sky.
They walked in shadows, trusting the path would open under the light of the moon.

Wise women also came, seeking no directions, no permission from any king.
They came by their own authority, their own desire, their own longing.
They came in quiet, spreading no rumours, sparking no fears to lead to innocents’ slaughter,
to their sister Rachel’s inconsolable lamentations.

Wise women also came, and they brought useful gifts:
water for labour’s washing, fire for warm illumination, a blanket for swaddling.

Wise women also came, at least three of them,
holding Mary in the labour,
crying out with her in the birth pangs,
breathing ancient blessings into her ear.

Wise women also came, and they went, as wise women always do, home a different way.

—

The art piece above was also done by Jan Richardson, and you can order the print (and see more of her work) by clicking on it.