The Podluck

**CONTENT NOTE**
In this episode Jon and I talk about the gender politics in the Barbie movie, and our conversation touches briefly on eating disorders, body image, sexual violence, harassment, and purity culture. Please be aware of these themes and care for yourself accordingly. Make sure you're in a space where that flow of conversation is something you can navigate at the time, and that you drink water and snuggle your pets afterward.

You can find Jon's work, podcast and written, at cinema faith.com.

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Quotes today from the books The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley.  

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Quotes in this episode taken from I Want You to Be: On the God of Love  by Tomáš Halík and A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church by Dr. Wilda C. Gafney.

You can listen to "The Kingdom is Yours" by Common Hymnal here, and maybe have tissues nearby if you cry during songs. (The last time I tried to lead this in a congregational setting I literally couldn't finish the song because I was weeping. It's fine.)  

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Quotes this week taken from the documentary Crip Camp, which you can stream on Netflix. 

Blessed are you who wait for tomatoes. 
Who water and weed and pray for rain and sun.

Blessed are you building a highway in the wilderness, 
Or at least you were, 
Until you were stopped by the zoning board. 

Since when does the wilderness have a process for proposals and approvals anyway? 

Blessed are you who are unexpectedly, wonderfully filled.
And you who are becoming acquainted with feeling of leaving empty. 

May this cosmic reversal be the fertile ground in which solidarity grows, rather than resentment. 

“Back in the day, things were different.” You’re right. And they needed to change. 

We will always need to change.

Soil becomes deplete if you only grow tomatoes.
Farmers show us the wisdom not only of patience, but of rotation. 

If we don’t change, welcome new in, dedicate our attention and shift our routines and expectations toward what is needed for renewal, we will die. 

Blessed are you who look out on the stark field, wondering if all that effort worked at all. 

Blessed are those, waiting, looking desperately for a crocus to bloom.  

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Quotes and information this week drawn from Anna Case-Winters' commentary on Matthew, part of the Belief Series. 

A Blessing for Advent week 2: 
Blessed are you who escaped from the vipers nest. 

Who found yourself growing up in a world that had so thoroughly forgotten the very-goodness baked into its bones and bark that all it offered were tenuous  pathways of escaping calamity with the smell of fire on your heels. And only if you kept on the straight and narrow. 

Blessed are you who found that the ever-elusive path you were told to stick to is actually a fun house affair, where finding the on ramp may be tricky, but once you are on the whole thing opens up stretching before you until the way you are walking becomes the skyline and the desert and the trees. 

Blessed are you who walked away. Knowing a vipers nest is no place to flourish. Who rejected the familiar numbness a low dose of poison can bring, because at the end of the day it’s still poison and grace doesn’t ask us to numb. 

Blessed are you dreamers. Who live in the tension of hoping and working for a world in which we love our enemies, and lions nap in the meadow with lambs and yet…you cannot bring yourself to even turn toward the snake pit from whence you came. 

Time may heal wounds, but this one is not even scabbed over yet and you cannot imagine a day when the mere thought of where you have been won’t rub you like salt.

Blessed are you who live wild  and free in the deserted places. You who feast on the sweetness and absurdity that find you there. Blessed are the ones who have become spectacles for the respectable, as you show us the way back to life.

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