The Slow Way

As Ace’s mom, I’ve come to a conviction that the best, truest way of faith is the simplest. If it’s not an inclusive faith, if it demands jumping through belief hoops — rules of what it means to believe correctly — if my faith is not simple enough for my son to claim it as his own, I’ve missed the story. I was recently introduced to the work of E. Stanley Jones, a writer and Christian missionary to India in the early 20th century. I’m reading his book, The Christ of the Mount, published in 1931, and was immediately taken with the first page of Chapter One, in which he articulates something I’ve spent a lot of thought trying to grasp words for: Jesus, he says, is the simplification of God.

In our quest for a slower life and a slower faith, this is a kind of shiny gold gift. Let’s simplify our belief. If we want to know what God is like, can we look at Jesus: Humble, always learning, unafraid to ask questions or grow, embracing those on the margins, bringing in the rejected, including everyone (especially the folks considered immoral), feasting, practicing gentleness, elevating justice, caring for the weakest around him, and pissing off the religious of his day with his inclusive message. He asks this of his followers: Do you believe that God can be this…me? Do you believe that healing is possible? Do you believe that there’s more to being alive than the daily grind of human existence? Do you believe that God is for you?

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. 
• E. Stanley Jones’ book The Christ of the Mount can be found here.
• Find a transcript of this episode here. 
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

Here’s your reminder that doubt is not the thing that should trouble your soul. Fear is. The blessings of Jesus are particularly there for those who wrestle with their fear, hold it up to the light of Truth, and choose to embrace suffering for the sake of joining the good work of God in the world. 

 

Can you imagine with me that in the dark distance a figure is coming. It’s beautiful. And it’s terrifying, because it is somehow the combination of your greatest regrets and failures and fears. It’s the embodiment of your own weaknesses and dread. And who wants to look at that? Take a moment to ask yourself, what do you need to wrestle? And what might be the blessing you need on the other side of your fear? 

 

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. 
• Find a transcript of this episode here. 
• Find The Dream of God by Verna Dozier here.
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

It may not shock you to hear that like the rest of the known world, I can’t get the soundtrack to Encanto out of my head. And, of course, we love “Surface Pressure.” The lyrics hit a little close to home for me, which I imagine might be the case for you as well. Because when Luisa, the superpowered older sister of Maribel, does everything she can to live up to her outward strength, and finds herself incapable of rest, unrelenting in her expectations of herself, we all understand the story she tells herself about her own value. 

There is a reason so many of us feel the pressure that Luisa sings about in Encanto. We live in an empire, in a human-made system of the powerful and the powerless, and since the world began unraveling the truth that was born in us, in our original goodness given by God, we learn to slowly believe the lie of the Empire. It tells us that we can earn our place in the system. It tells us how to divide one another, how to assign value. We learn who is attractive, who is smart, who is capable, and we understand that if we want to have value, there are tasks to accomplish. There are people to please. There is a path toward winning. 

Who am I if I can’t carry it all? Luisa sings. And maybe the question should be bigger: Who are we if any of us thinks we must carry it all? Lean toward beloved community, friend. Start with your own heart. 

 

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. 
• Find a transcript of this episode here. 
• Find The Church Cracked Open by Stephanie Spellers here.
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

Growth is a gangly and uncomfortable season – whether it's the growth of our young teenage bodies, or the growth of our souls. We cannot enter into seasons of growth without instability and volatility. In other words, growth is awkward and uncomfortable. And there’s nothing we can do about that.

 

I have been reading and loving Lisa Colón DeLay’s book, The Wild Land Within. She describes the in-between seasons of growth this way: “God will always call us toward deeper, fuller lives. God beckons us toward more abundant joy and greater relief and solace.” Then she goes on to say, “Healing and spiritual growth, after it happens, look and feel like peace, gracious integration of yourself, and (felt) access to love and grace.”

 

There are so many moments of our spiritual lives when growth is going to force us to experience the discomfort of the in-between. More on the danger of growth in this week’s episode. 

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. 
• Find a transcript of this episode here. 
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

Love is all of it. Love is the force we call God. Love is the feeling. Love is the action between two old friends, and the generosity between you and your waiter at lunch today. And in that broad definition, I think those of us who call ourselves Christian can step toward theology: not the kind that draws lines of who’s in and who’s out, of who gets it and who obviously doesn’t, but to lean toward a theology of God as Love that is moving toward all of us, calling each of us to come close, to experience a Love that transforms everything, and ultimately teaches us what to do with the feelings in our chest: how to turn the feeling of love into a way of living that transforms our relationships, visions of ourselves, and our small worlds. 

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter. 
• Find a transcript of this episode here. 
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold  

As much as it might be difficult to believe, you are not your intellect, your power, your success, your ability to fit in at a party. You are not your ability to be happy, or healthy, or rich. It’s your weaknesses that bring you into the upside down of God’s values.  

When we let go of control, when we open our hands we are, as Richard Rohr writes,”in a very creative and liminal space where God is most free to act in our lives.” And that is faith: letting go of control, believing that the life of weakness is actually the life of the Most Blessed. 

Spend some time today considering Jesus’s words in Matthew 5 and reflecting on what it might mean to tell the truth to yourself. 

 

Links:

• “The Beatitudes” is a list of blessings Jesus bestows in his Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5. You can read the Message translation that Micha reads in the slow practice here. 
• Find Richard Rohr’s book Jesus’s Plan For a New World here.
• This essay originally appeared in The Slow Way Newsletter this past June
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

As I've been studying the Beatitudes I've begun to notice a circular pattern of generosity that begins with curiosity. When Jesus says blessed are the meek, or blessed are the poor in spirit, it's an invitation to those of us who don't see ourselves as meek or poor in spirit to be curious. Who are the meek? Where are they? And what does Jesus mean when he says they are blessed?

 

And as we become curious about the stranger---the one who makes inappropriate sounds in the back of the room, the child at the pool who doesn't act like other kids---that curiosity we practice is going to lead us to listen. Listening leads to knowing. And knowing leads to love. And once you begin to love the stranger you start to understand what Jesus means when he pronounces blessings upon the weak. 

 

The supremely blessed, the ones Jesus invites all of us to know and love, are most often the ones the world tries to hide. Hush the noise maker in the back of the church. Move the child who's distracting out of the General Ed class and into the segregated classroom. Move out of the city and into a neighborhood where you no longer have to confront the suffering reality of homelessness. (Looking at myself here.) 

 

It's a slow way, this business of listening, of searching for the blessed ones in the world. But I'm pretty certain that those who look for the ones Jesus blesses also end up finding Jesus along the way. 

 

Links:

• “The Beatitudes” is a list of blessings Jesus bestows in his Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5. You can read it here. 
• If you’d like to know about my life with Ace, who has a dual diagnosis of Down syndrome and autism, you can find our instagram account here. 
• Find a link to Suzanne Stabile’s interview with Brian McClaren
• This essay originally appeared in The Slow Way Newsletter this past June
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

We have moved into a new year, but love remains in last year. Everything that happened last year stretches its fingers into this one. What you loved and lost is still with you. And love doesn’t need the presence of a loved one to persevere.

Love is a gift we humans know and crave because it is the utter stuff of the divine. God is love, and when we love, we engage in the work of God. That means we do the same when our love perseveres as grief. The work of God.

When we sing "Auld Lang Syne" we're singing a story about love persevering, as Vision explained grief to Wanda in "WandaVision." When we grieve, we are a keeper of something true and beautiful.

Today, we consider what we may have lost in 2021, whether it's a person, a relationship, a community, a belief, our health, or even a sense of ourselves. Auld Lang Syne is an invitation to acknowledge the loss, and hold onto the goodness of love persevering. Because, after all, Love is the work of God. 

Links:

• I found some helpful info on "Auld Lang Syne" from this article in USAToday.
• Find Tow'rs beautiful version of "Auld Lang Syne" on Spotify.
• Here's my Melancholy Christmas playlist on Spotify if you want to listen to continue the sad Christmas music into the new year. :)
• If you missed the phenomenon that was WandaVision last year, you can still watch it here.
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

One gift of the last several years of my learning to hold both the beauty and the brokenness, the light and the dark, the faith and the doubt–all in one hand, is the knowing that Christmas, just like everything else in life, doesn’t have to be bruised forever by my own sorrow. It’s never one or the other, it’s always both. We are never asked to either celebrate or get off the Christmas train, though it may feel like that in our shiny-positive, instagram-curated culture. 

 

The truth is that the Christmas story actually can hold all of it. There is a brokenness there in the giving of a child to humanity, the future knowledge of that child’s own suffering. There is a sorrow in the dirt and chill of his birth in a barn: his mother’s fear, his father’s angst. 

 

On this Christmas Eve whatever you’ve lost this year, whatever you’re losing. Whatever you’re holding tight to. Whatever you’re celebrating. This is a reminder that Christmas is a both/and. God has made Godself known, through the coming of human child. God is here among us, in our broken spaces and our joy. In our hunger and our feasting. In the darkness, and in the light that shines.

 

• Find "You Took Your Own Heart" by The Brilliance on Spotify.  
• "Both can be true," is a phrase I learned from Cara Meredith. Find her here and here.
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold   

What about Mary? What did she know? What did she tell Jesus about the truth of his divinity? When scripture says he grew in wisdom and stature and favor, this is what I hear: His mama taught him to think deeply. His mama fed him and forced him to exercise. AND…his mama made sure he kept his manners, especially when arguing in the synagogue with the religious leaders of his day. 

 

Today, as we near Christmas, I invite you to come close to this story in a fresh way. To consider what Mary witnessed as her son grew. To consider how much she was asked to sacrifice.

 

• Find Micha's poem "Christ's Mother Reflects: His Childhood" as well a transcript of the episode here. Note: Micha's poem is available for us with attribution to any group or person who wants to use it. 
• Here's a link to Lucy Shaw's poem "Mary's Song," which is an epigraph in the beginning of Micha's poem.
• Find Micha's website and sign up for her weekly newsletter here
• Find Micha on Instagram
• Find Micha on Twitter
• Micha's other podcast, The Lucky Few, is all about Down syndrome advocacy. She cohosts it with Heather Avis and Mercedes Lara.
• Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is available everywhere books are sold