Mother Claire's Sermons

When I was a senior in high school, for my English class we each had to write a paper analyzing a poem. We were given a packet of choices full of enough options that our teacher wasn’t going to have to read 10 papers on the same poem. I made my choice in the quintessential high school senior way: which one I thought would mean I had to do the least amount of work; which poem seemed the most straightforward. The fact that I was choosing from a collection provided by the teacher was totally lost in my quest for a black and white, say what you mean text. Even though I thought I found one, writing that assignment taught me something important about language and about how we express ourselves. How even when we do say what we mean, there are implications in the choices of how we phrase anything. And how I learned at 17 that digging deep into something like poetry can reveal the true depths of our feelings and expose truths in a way prose is not equipped to do. When we think of poetry and scr

A couple of times in my career, now, I’ve had the experience of being the go-to remaining staff person when a rector had left the parish and we were waiting for an interim. At the beginning of this year, my rector moved on to a new call and I remained as a solo priest in a parish that was definitely a two full-time priest parish. For a good portion of the time waiting for an interim, we weren’t sure who the interim would be yet and so I was limited in my ability to plan too far out, as I didn’t want to tie the hands of whoever would be coming in as interim rector. During this time, my colleague Mother Jean was in an accident where she was hospitalized. She posted to social media from her hospital bed that she was binge watching Forensic Files and I had a moment where I thought, “Man, that sounds nice, to just not do anything for a day.” Which really told me how burnt out I was getting. Because Jean was “getting” to watch Forensic Files all day because she was in the hospital. She had

  When you read my educational background on my resume, my bachelor’s degree looks like a grab bag of programs. I hold a bachelor of arts in political science with minors in music and math. And usually, in job interviews, the seemingly unconnected programs are one of the first things interviewers ask me about. It’s very common for political science students to have minors in fields like English or history, but a benefit I didn’t anticipate in choosing those programs that were so outside of the norm was that it made my resume interesting. Sometimes our different fields, our “ologies”, mix in good ways; ways in which they build on one another. Systematic Theologian Rev. Dr. Ian Markham has his students say at the beginning of every semester, “Jesus is our epistemology” - which is a mix of theology and epistemology - the study of how we know things. And teams in fields such as engineering are often interdisciplinary, requiring expertise from several different specialties to bring a projec