The Daily Edify

Today's episode is about Ash Wednesday, the official beginning to the season of Lent in the Christian liturgical calendar. This is a day that reminds us of the beauty and preciousness of life and its mystery, a reminder that everything is temporary and we are made of the good elements of God's creation. 

We reflect on a couple of lines from T.S. Eliot's poem, "Ash Wednesday," an invitation "to care and not to care" and "to sit still."

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the spiritual practice of "beginner's mind." This simple practice is about dropping our expectations or preconceived notions about someone, something or someplace, so that we can experience it with fresh eyes, like a beginner would. We can do this with the mundane (eating breakfast, taking a walk, breathing) and the sacred (listening to music, doing yoga, praying). 

It's a posture toward life that is grounded in curiosity and wonder. For me, this practice has helped to deepen my experiences, my relationships and to decrease the low-grade anxiety I often carry around through my day. 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today’s episode is about finding room for lament and constructive anger through the lens of the ancient book of Lamentations, a part of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. It's the third installment in our series on the so-called “Forgotten Books of the Bible.” The context of this poetic, five-chapter book is the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonian army after 586 BCE.

We'll notice the five different voices in Lamentations, each given space to grieve in the way they need to. Lamentations reminds us that we can give each other the space to speak, the space to breathe, the space to protest, without losing our common voice and without forsaking our common humanity.

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is in honor of Valentine's Day, which we celebrate tomorrow. It originated as a Christian feast day to honor the memory of a Christian martyr named Saint Valentine, who lived in Rome in the late third century. But of course today it has become a juggernaut of a cultural celebration of romantic love.

We look at (1) a new definition of love from Jacqui Lewis; (2) a fresh take on the Golden Rule ("In everything, do unto others as you would have them do unto you"); and (3) hear a prayer "For Valentine's Day," written by my spouse and partner, Rev. Arianne Braithwaite Lehn.  

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the book, "Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times," written by the British author of fiction and non-fiction, Katherine May. The book came out in late 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when we are all enduring a vast "wintering" of sorts. 

But she wrote it to make sense of the personal wintering she endured around the time of her 40th birthday. This book came to me at the right time, in spring of 2021, when I was wrestling with my own wintering. The book is a beautiful reflection on the wisdom of the natural world and the power of rest and retreat when life goes sideways.

As she writes in the book, "Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible."

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today’s episode is about the book of Ruth, a part of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament - the second installment in our series on the so-called “Forgotten Books of the Bible.” 

Ruth opens with a famine in Bethlehem. It forces Elimelech and Naomi to flee as refugees to Moab, where there is still food. In direct contradiction to other parts of the Bible (e.g. Ezra and Nehemiah), their sons, Mahlon and Chilion, marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. In a series of tragedies, all three of the men in Naomi's life die - first her husband, and then both of her sons. Naomi is devastated and assumes Ruth and Orpah will not follow her back to Bethlehem, where she hopes to survive by leaning on extended family. But Ruth insists on staying with her.

In the course of the story, Ruth becomes a paragon of faith and courage, a woman-oriented woman who can see possibilities in otherwise grim circumstances. Back in Bethlehem, Ruth marries Boaz, a relative of Naomi's, and they have a son, who would become the grandfather to King David.

One of only two women to have a book of the Bible named after them (the other one is Esther), Ruth is a beautiful and brave example for us today.

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Starting today, I'm going to publish three podcasts per week (on M, W and F) instead of five. Sorry today's is a bit late. Thanks for tuning in, friends!

Today's episode is about two-degree shifts, a view of growth that focuses on small, incremental changes that compound over time. In this conversation, we mention Jesus, the movie "What about Bob?" and the writer, Annie Dillard. 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today’s episode is about the spiritual practice of breath prayer, an ancient and simple practice that helps us be more fully embodied. We breath, on average, 20,000 times a day and we mostly do it by default. 

But ever since the sixth century CE Christians have been wedding prayer to the rhythms of breathing, an echo to the creation story in which God is said to have breathed in us the "breath of life" (Genesis 2). Christine Valters Painter’s book, “Breath Prayer: An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred,” is a recent example of making this practice sing in today's context.

Try on this spiritual practice today, reciting a simple phrase as you inhale and then a simple phrase as you exhale, such as, "Be still and know/that I am God" or "Do not be afraid/I am with you always" or "Jesus/have mercy." 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today’s episode focuses on “The Song of Songs,” a book of the Bible that’s often overlooked. It’s part of a short series we’re going to do on the podcast over the next five weeks. Once a week, we’ll spotlight one of the so-called “forgotten books of the Bible,” using the recent book by the same name by Robert Williamson Jr. I’m teaching a class on this book right now on Sunday mornings at the church I serve, First Pres Wilmette, and it’s been invigorating and fun.

The "Song" is a poem celebrating the love between two people. It's graceful, sensuous and full of erotic imagery, underlining the good gift of sexuality. We touch on a few themes of the book and end by reflecting on some of its closing lines, "Love is as strong as death, passion as fierce as the grieve..."

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today’s episode is about the concept of the 200-year present. It’s an idea from Elise Boulding (that I learned about from Krista Tippett), the Quaker sociologist, poet and peace researcher, who was born in Norway in 1920 and moved to the US with her parents when she was 3 years old. 

It was Germany’s attack on Norway in World War II that shook her and her family deeply: seeing her peaceful homeland violated, she recognized violence as a systemic global concern. At that point she began to engage in building peace, starting with anti-war activities, moving into the academic field, in sociology at Dartmouth College – where she developed the first Peace Studies program in the States.

When we think about the bigness of time, it’s hard to grasp, and so Boulding’s concept is meant to help us reflect on the specific span of time - “the 200 year present” - that each of us  in fact inhabits.

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!