“Incarnation is the overcoming of the gap between God and everything else. It is the synthesis of matter and spirit. Without incarnation, God remains separate from us and from creation. Because of incarnation, we can say, “God is with us!” In fact, God is in us, and in everything else that God created.

How do we hear what we don’t know? How do we take in what we have not experienced?

These questions seem paramount to me in this time and space as we are exposed consistently to new experiences that we never thought would happen.

I have been reading The Message of the Psalms by Walter Brueggemann. I was reading a Psalm of personal lament (Psalm 13). Walter Brueggemann labels it: a psalm of disorientation. Have you felt blind and alone in your need, past or present?

Life is filled with hard experiences and encounters. I recently had to renew my car license plate. I expected it to be difficult as I had recently moved and I didn’t think I had good proof of address if it was needed.

Life is filled with hard experiences and encounters. I recently had to renew my car license plate. I expected it to be difficult as I had recently moved and I didn’t think I had good proof of address if it was needed.

When we were made, curiosity was braided into our being. It invites us into more than what we think we know. Somehow certainty became the goal. Among my regrets in life is asking the question, “If you die tonight, do you know where you would go?”

“Real transformation takes a lifetime, and that is why we have a lifetime.”

—Rabbi Dov Ber Pinson

While I miss the light dancing beneath my feet in a church setting, I am learning that sacred places are everywhere. I hope that we will all search for those sacred spaces; the spaces that we feel secure enough to admit our insecurity yet still see our beauty; the space that we can be honest about our struggles and still feel deeply loved.

Ending racism requires consideration of how to become likeness, equality, and dignity with others who are different. It requires an intimacy that provides presence, vulnerability, and ultimately transformation that is healthy and gives space for others to grow into health.

I have been thinking about the processes that underpin change. Specifically, change as the leaving one way-of-being and arriving at another way-of-being. It is a lived alchemy! So what are the processes that support such radical or even small shifts in us?