The Slow Way

This Advent we'll be spending time with some of my original poems, considering the story of Christmas in a way that digs down deep into the thing underneath the thing, the story underneath the story. Let's imagine a Mary we haven't quite gotten to know. Let's ask some questions that we may not answer, but which might help us live a little deeper into her story, and in doing so, into our own stories. Will you join me?

• 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

Thanksgiving is a ritual we practice with others. The great thing about ritual is that it comes over and over, whether or not we're ready for it. So each year we're given another chance to do more than skirt above the surface of the day. After all, anyone can eat a meal. It takes intention to feast, though. It takes courage to celebrate the good in our lives, especially when the days that led to this one have been painful.

So this is my question for you: Where do you find yourself this Thanksgiving? Are you ready to reach below the sorrow of your life in order to find the gift underneath?

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Find a transcript of this episode here.
• Read The Celtic Vision by Esther De Waal
• 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 we move toward the holidays, what does it mean to gather with people you love and attend to them? What could it look like to move toward the complicated and sometimes difficult relationships in your life and find gratitude around the table? Wine certainly isn't the only way to practice slowness and gratitude. But wine can teach us how to savor, how to notice what we enjoy, and how to find delight in the small gifts of this life. It can help us learn to practice joy together.

Today's episode ponders what it might mean to attend to goodness, and why wine just might be a Christian response to the pain of this world.

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Find a transcript of this episode here.
• Read Blood From a Stone by Adam McHugh
• Listen to This Good Word by Steve Wiens
• 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

In one month we'll mark my dad's death day. I bought my flight this week and will head to my mom's house and spend that week with my siblings, nieces and nephews. Winter is not my favorite season, even with the delights of Christmas. As soon as the holidays move through us, we are left with months of ice and darkness. And Little Mikey will have to stay strong to survive the winter. I know trees know what to do with snow, but I can't help feeling protective, as if in an ideal world I might dig his little roots up and bring him into my warm house.

I read a remarkable passage from St. John of the Cross yesterday morning. It was about the soul and its union with God: "So the understanding of the soul is now the understanding of God; and its will is the will of God; and its memory is the memory of God; and its delight is the delight of God."

I like to think that somehow, all the ones we love are gathered up into the mind of God, so close to the Divine that their memories are God's memory, their delights are God's delights.

You're invited to reflect on this with me.

--

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Find a transcript of this episode here.
• Read The Cure For Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief, by Jan Richardson
• Follow Richardson's instagram account
• 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

The spiritual life has to begin with a premise that God can be experienced, encountered. Starting from here is harder than it seems. Faith is not an unmovable feature inside us. It is less a mountain, and more an ocean, always moving, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow. Sometimes the places on the shore the water used to reach are now dried up. But the work of the spiritual life is to receive that constant shifting, not as failure of belief, but as part of the process.

When we think of faith as practice we move beyond ideas into spiritual connection. Our lives become lived with God, deepening beyond the intellect. And when that with-God-ness settles in the places that can't be touched by the arguments or proofs or certainties of those who believe or don't believe, there becomes room for knowing and resting in Reality.

Let's talk about the idea of deepening our understanding of God in this episode of The Slow Way.

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Find a transcript of this episode here.
• Read Spiritual Disciplines for Everyday Living by Ronald V. Wells
• Read The School of Charity by Evelyn Underhill
• 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

This is the story of so many who have found wealth and power in our world. We feel small. So we climb sycamore trees. We climb ladders. We climb power structures.

And we can convince ourselves from way up there that we have somehow saved ourselves. But really, we're dangling above what's real. We're unsafe, lonely, unknown to our people and to ourselves.

And Jesus is down at the base of the things we've used to save ourselves, saying: "Come down from there and face the reality of who you are."

Let's return to our realest selves. Join me in this episode of The Slow Way.

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Find a transcript of this episode here.
• Read "Exposing Zacchaeus" by Victor Westhelle
• Read about what Stephanie Spellers calls, "the Dream of God"
• 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

When we make space in our days and in our bodies to practice prayer, or silence, or sacred reading, we are actually doing rest. Hersey talks so beautifully about dreaming, but there is something sacred about the kind of sleep she is inviting all of us into. In her vision of rest, dreaming becomes its own kind of prayer practice. We allow ourselves to stop so our brains can be restored, coated in restorative fluid, flushed of toxins. And the presence of the Divine meets us there in that restoration. "To slow down is to allow the portal to open, the antenna to open, to link in, to allow you to get some information, to allow you to see your way out, to heal your way out, to create a new world."

--

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Find a transcript of this episode here.
• Listen to Glennon Doyle's interview with Tricia Hersey here.
• Read Hersey's new book, Rest is Resistance.
• Follow The Nap Ministry
• Read the research article I mentioned here.
• Read The Church Cracked Open by Stephanie Sellers
• 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

The life of faith is recognizing that we are each a seed planted, and helping one another stay close to the sustaining water that will help us grow and become the flourishing plant we were always meant to be. Community is believing that we all have something important to give, and that our Source has placed in each of us something valuable. Caring for each other begins with believing that the seed can grow into a tree, and believing that there is enough water available for us and for our neighbor, so we can all thrive.

It's simple, and complicated. It's magic and ordinary. It's the Way of Jesus. Which is never as tidy as we'd often like it to be, and is always sparkling, always alive.

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

What does it mean to give our lives to more than an idea? What does it mean for faith to coexist with doubt but not be squishy or easily shaken? For us to allow it to settle in the deepest parts of us, so that it lives there sturdy and true, without pretense, without anything false? How do we hold a faith robust enough to reach the parts of us that are hardest to know, most painful to explore?

If your life belongs to the Loving Creator, it still belongs, there, where everything else has been lost.

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Read Parker Palmer's, Let Your Life Speak
• Read Psalms For Young Children
• 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

There is a blessing to be found in the naming of God. To name God is a grace we have been given, an invitation to connect with the unnamable, unfathomable Divine.

What and how we name God is the story we're telling ourselves and the world.

What would you name God?

More in this week's #theslowwaypodcast

Links:

• This reflection and practice were also published this week in The Slow Way Newsletter.
• Read Macrina Wiederkehr's, The Flowing Grace of Now
• Read "Naming Objects Is the Opposite of Thoughtless Consumption" from The Atlantic, here
• Read "Why People Name Their Machines" from The Atlantic, here
• Read "Entering the Dark Cloud of God," a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor, 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