Thoughts Along the Journey

  Mark 4:35-41     Lectionary 12, Proper 7     June 20, 2021 St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, Virginia                 My niece and her wife live on a boat.   A few weeks ago, they were docked in Portsmouth and, one night, Patty and I took dinner to them on their boat.   Of course, we had to enter into the negotiations that we’re engaged in, these days: masks or no masks?   According to the CDC, since Patty and I are vaccinated, we don’t need to wear masks around other adults.   But would Rachel and Sarah be comfortable with that?   There was only a moment of awkwardness.   To interject some lightness, I said, “Well, we’re all in the same boat, having to negotiate this every time we get together with someone new!” “In the same boat.”   Heh, heh.   (Get it?   We were, literally, in the same boat!   I wish I could say I was witty enough to have used that phrase on purpose, in that situation …) In the story we read this morning, from the gospel of Mark, the discipl

In a recent “Poetry Unbound” podcast, Padraig O’Tuama featured Molly McCully Brown’s poem, “Transubstantiation.”   I had never heard of this remarkable young woman.   But our amazing Williamsburg Regional Library has her single volume of poetry and her single collection of essays, and I have been reading what she has written, expressions arising from her experience of living in a body disabled by cerebral palsy. In some of her essays, she reveals that she has been on a religious pilgrimage.   I was struck by this sentence in her essay, “Bent Body, Lamb”: “I grew up twenty-five miles from Jerry Falwell’s Baptist mega-church, in the heartland of what often feels like the worst religion has to offer: bigotry and prejudice, rabid anti-intellectualism, the inability to yield even a single hard-edged certainty up to kindness, questioning, or complication.” I am struck by the fact that I read this sentence the day before the Sunday of The Holy Trinity (this past Sunday).   I think it is