A month of prayers: week 1

As many people are aware, November is National Novel Writing Month: participants have daily writing goals intended to spur them to complete an entire draft of a novel during the month of November. Not all of us are novel writers, however, but sometimes we like to join in the fun. Rev. Jan Avende challenged her fellow ADF clergy to write a prayer a day, and since then it’s taken off — not just with clergy, but also with bards, liturgists, dedicants; all manner of the folk writing prayers to the Kindreds.

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Something to try: toward the priesthood

Last week I went to see a duo of short plays written by graduate and undergraduate students at the university where I work. The first play, a one-woman show written and performed by a friend, was enjoyable: by turns funny, sobering, and zany. It was also unguardedly honest, even amid its artfulness — I’d expect no less from Sam, a writer of creative nonfiction, but this is worth noting, if only for the way it primed me for the second act. During the intermission, the writer-performers of the second play asked the audience to come forward and write, each on our own brightly-colored construction paper star, something we’d like to try. I wrote “being a priest.”

Lessons from the trees and the gods: accepting limitations and knowing when to commit

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about where I choose to put my time and energy. I have many interests, many passions, and many responsibilities; in a perfect world, many of these pressures would align with each other so that, magically, I could do everything and still have time to sleep. Alas, I live in the real world, where we don’t have Time Turners, or magical spells that do the dishes for us, so some things have to fall by the wayside. I struggle with that necessity, because my impulse is always to say ‘yes’ to opportunities, and to mourn them when I have to decline. Helpfully, the past few days have been full of gentle guidance and correction.