Monday Thought

Andover, Illinois, where I grew up, is a small farming town settled by the Swedish. Outsiders were not welcome unless you had family already living there. Not many of us left. Leaving was against the rules. I got the hell out of town as soon as I could.

45 percent of teenagers in the United States express a belief that there is truth to be found in multiple religions, even when a majority of the same age group subscribes to the same religious belief system as their parents. A shift is coming.

It has been nearly 20 years since my co-worker Matinal asked me to hang out, with just him and his record player, even though he knew I had a serious boyfriend. Only a year later, I would no longer be in contact with him, and I’d be married to that boyfriend. Still, I remember that night. Its context was nonsensical, but the clarity it offered me on what we hold sacred was indelible.

Throughout my life, I’ve been collecting literature, poetry, and essays that shape my worldview. This personal canon is not carved into stone, but rather it’s fluid, evolving. For myself, I declare these texts important, and so, for me, they are.

While our churches are wildly different in some ways, we always seem to come back to some core agreement when we talk about faith. But in this space we’re doing something new: We’re going to come to some mutual understanding about a Bible verse.

When we open ourselves to the wild in all its radical otherness, we also open ourselves to the divine, whose handiwork nature is and whose character is stamped upon it like a potter’s fingerprint on a clay vessel.