Mother Claire's Sermons

  Last June, my head was in a constant state of fog. Nothing I did would make the fog lift. I tried everything. The internet suggested an ice cold shower, which I tried despite my preferred shower temperature being so hot that my husband likes to say we could put some pasta in there with me and have dinner when I get out. Nothing worked. On top of the constant fogginess, I was having debilitating panic attacks, even in the middle of the night. I would look back on my Fitbit the next morning and you could see on the heart rate monitor where it jumped to 120 from a dead sleep. When I brought it up to my therapist, I felt like a failure. People have been existing forever in much higher stress situations than mine. Why couldn’t I fix this myself? No matter how many times I say “we’re not meant to do this alone”, I expected myself to do it alone. When I went to the doctor, I described my symptoms and he immediately had a plan. He said, “if there was something wrong with your leg, we’d f...

  When I was a tween, the TV show 7th Heaven was popular among my peers. It’s a show about a generically protestant pastor’s family - there was an afternoon when I was in seminary and my classmates and I spent an inordinate amount of time discussing what denomination the family was, and we didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. At one point in the show, their oldest son marries a Jewish woman and so his parents have hers over for dinner. And they’re having some kind of meat dish and her mother asks his mother something about the sauce. And she commented that to smooth it out she added a little bit of cream. And her Jewish mother freaks out and runs off like she’s going to be sick. I knew probably just as much as the writers did about eating Kosher - that you can’t mix meat and dairy - which his mother, as a minister’s wife for 25 years at this point, should have known. But they apparently didn’t go any deeper than that, because now I know it’s not that simple. There’s more to it ...

One July, we were visiting family for our summer vacation. And I had had it. I was getting more and more annoyed and my pot of anger was about to boil over. And I didn’t want to let it boil over. Partially because losing it would accomplish nothing but to make me instantly the bad guy and partially because that wasn’t the person who I wanted to be, the one who gets mad and explodes. So I found the Episcopal church in town and I went to church. Saturday night rolled around and I said to my husband, “I need to go to church tomorrow.” Not “I’d like to”. Not “it would be really nice if I could”. “I need to”. Because I did. I needed to go into a church building surrounded by my siblings in Christ, kneel on a kneeler, take a deep breath, and pray for these people who I loved but who were infuriating me. And so I did. And when I made it back, they hadn’t changed. But I had. And the pot was no longer in danger of boiling over. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives steps to follow “if another member o...