The Wilderness Journal

While most Mother’s Day celebrations include things like cards, brunch or carnations, there are other, more tangible ways to embrace the more non-commercial aspects of appreciating mothers. What would it look like to connect daily gratitude with the small moments of mothering? How might it transform us?

It’s often intimidating to walk into a new space filled with strangers. It’s hard to be the stranger but it’s also sometimes intimidating to be the one charged with welcoming the stranger. How does “coffee hour” or “fellowship” after Liturgy remind us, as William Butler Yeats wrote, “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”

How we care for and nurture our bodies has implications for all areas of our development—physical, emotional, and even spiritual. The body is a living and organic revelation of the unseen spirit inside—a kind of garden. Garden in the East is a poetic exploration of how the care of the body can lead us to wholeness and wellness in every area of our lives. In this podcast, Angela reads an excerpt from the book.

The prayer of St. Ephraim is a familiar one for Orthodox Christians, especially during Lent. This season offers us the chance to practice the prayer and to come face to face with our own inner “construction” as we come closer to Pascha. What roads are we paving? What bridges are we building?

Parenting is a sacred and daunting task at every stage of their development but parenting teenagers has its own set of challenges and its own joys as well. When do when the time is right to let them start “adulting” and how does our prayer life support us as we venture into new territory?

We’ve all heard about helicopter parents. I’m more of a lawnmower parent. I want to make straight the paths before my kids. I do not want to see them hurt. And of course, that’s natural– no parent wants to see their child injured– but when I make the path so straight and the field so even that they do not seem to engage the “struggle” then I’ve gone too far. How do we teach our children to embrace the struggles of life, to see the beauty and the reward in it?

The start of Great Lent begins with preparation. We prepare our refrigerators, freezers and pantry for the fast, emptying it of meat and dairy. But we prepare our hearts as well, emptying it of resentments or grudges, wrongs we have done or wrongs done to us in our community. On navigating Forgiveness Vespers as an introvert.

In this episode of The Wilderness Journal Angela continues her conversation with Summer Kinard, Jamey Bennett and Geoff Thompson about things we wish we had known about Orthodoxy before entering into the faith, including talk of Spiritual Fathers and people made of cheese.

From the outside, the practice of Orthodoxy seems rigid, complicated and intimidating. In this episode, Angela explores how Orthodoxy cannot be fully understood until it is fully experienced. Like a spiritual Tardis, it’s bigger on the inside.

What does it say about a person who has a collection of barely used daily planners stashed under her bedside table? It is a sign of a disorganized mind and an unwilling spirit, or maybe just never finding the right thing? Angela and fellow author, Katherine Bolger Hyde explore the intricacies of day planner addiction, cabinets from Ikea, and phone alarms ringing at inopportune moments.