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Ella Baker, the Anti-celebrity
My kids attend The Ella Baker School, a progressive un-zoned public school in midtown Manhattan. For all the years we’ve been in this school community, I’ve only had a vague understanding of the school’s namesake. At one point, someone had described her as the wise grandmotherly figure behind much of the Civil Rights Movement, and…
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Hurry outside ourselves
“How have you been doing?” –“That’s a difficult question to answer” –“I’ve been as good as I can be with all that’s happened.” –“I don’t know how to answer that question right now.” For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to tune into my soul and how I’ve been working through the loss of…
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Rest and watch. Don’t be in a hurry.
It’s been almost 2 months since I wasn’t allowed to stay at my former church of almost 11 years. It’s been difficult. I’ve been writing about it since early October but I don’t know when I’ll finish. So taking a break from writing my story so that I could let other ideas out while that…
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My Story at King’s Cross Church
A note from the future (January 2025). One of the promises I made to myself as a commitment to processing this grief is to return to this post, but no sooner than one year later. It’s taken me just as long to read through this as it took to write it. Whatever hopes that I…
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dead gods and the living god
There’s a chapter from a book by Justo Gonzalez that I often come back to called, “Let the Dead Gods Bury Their Dead.” Here’s an excerpt from one of the early paragraphs: Some gods are better dead than alive. Humankind did not lose a great deal when Huitzilopochtli and his cohorts lost their power to…
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pastor and congregation
I sit here writing this reflection with about 5 weeks before my final day at the church, and I don’t know if I’ll ever put this out into the public. But in this moment, I’m pondering, What is the pastor’s relationship to the congregation? And in these final months, I’m ever aware that my time…
