The Corners

For those who may not know, The Moth is an organization that hosts storytelling events all over the world - true stories told live, without notes, in front of a live audience. You may have caught their Moth Radio hour on NPR! I love these guys, and have told stories for them for years now. Well, just last week The Moth Radio Hour released a story I told on stage in Portland in 2021, The Holy Ghost B*tch Slap.

Scott Erickson is an author, artist and performance speaker creating a visual vocabulary for the spiritual journey. I love his art so much. Here’s his Substack! More than once in my life, I’ve had a new pastor or seminarian come up to me at a public appearance and say something well-meaning but awkwardly worded like: “I always assumed I wasn’t good enough to go to seminary and be a pastor….but then I read your memoirs!” That’s me. Lowering the bar for ministry since 2006. And the beat goes on.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash (Sermons are a spoken art form…a great deal of the meaning comes from how they are preached, please consider listening along if possible - sermon starts at 17:45) Matthew 13 The Parable of The Sower My very favorite things I heard about during Covidtide was that in May 2020, a couple of months into the stay-at-home order, millions of people asked Google, Are birds getting louder? I’m pretty sure birds were exactly as loud as they’ve always been.

Those of you who have watched each of these conversations may have noticed a theme. Each of my guests have talked about making stuff. Using our bodies to create. Painting. Knitting. Woodworking. Baking. Writing. Singing. I’ve loved every minute. Thanks for being a part of this, I hope it’s helpful. My guest is Elizabeth Crane, the author of the memoir This Story Will Change as well as numerous works of fiction,most recently a new collection of short stories That May Not Mean What You Think.

This is part 2 of my Keeping It Together series in which every Wednesday morning a friend comes on Substack Live to give me a 15-minute-long pep talk. Learn more here I am not able to keep a schedule of public appearances this year due to … life. So I’m offering these instead.

"...your nervous system was not designed to take in every piece of bad news happening to every human across the globe every minute of the day." Oh yes... this. It seems like the fire hose of bad news is happening everywhere to everyone and all at once. I feel like I am using the "red phone" to utter a prayer of urgency all the time and wonder if any of those pleas actually work or if it even helps.

Thanks to everyone who tuned into my Substack Live Conversation with the formidable Kelly Corrigan! I loved everything she had to say. What a great start to the series. The video of the entire 15 minutes is above for you viewing pleasure. Kelly Corrigan is the author of 4 New York Times bestsellers about family life and host of the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders. She has the kind of emotional intelligence that makes me basically trust anything she has to say. That’s pretty rare.

(Disclaimer: The last 10 months of my life have been pretty intense: breast cancer, a double mastectomy, and the death of my father. And soon I’ll be undergoing a second reconstruction surgery. I promise you I am OK. Truly, I am. I’m just sort of… subdued by it all. Which is why, apart from preaching, I only have one public appearance this year. Yet … I still want to offer something.

AND EVEN THEN And if, say, one day you reach the summit of the holy mount and are there shattered utterly by light, even then, you must go on not like a saint spiraling upward, delicate feet barely tracing invisible arcs of air, but back once more at the granite foot, the rubbled start of it all where you join again the str…

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash “Dear God, help me set aside everything I think I know, so that I might have a soft heart and an open mind.” At first I was unwilling to accept that there’s any meaningful difference between what I know and what I THINK I know. Then I was unwilling to accept that there’d be any benefit to setting aside what I know. I mean, if I “know” something, then it must be true, right?