Long Story Short is a series of conversations and snapshot clips of defining moments (struggle, growth, healing, discernment, direction, or purpose) shaping people's lives and faith. We all experience and love God in a diversity of beautiful ways. Everyone’s faith is enriched when we can trust our unique path and experiences of God while recognizing the truth and beauty of another’s.

Sarah Huffman is the Healing Arts Coordinator at Monthaven Arts and Cultural Center.

She is an expressive therapist and clinical chaplain who has worked in the environments of residential addiction treatment, inpatient psychiatric treatment, medical hospitalization, and hospice care. Sarah strongly believes that creativity helps the process of mental, emotional, and spiritual recovery.

Long Story Short is a series of conversations and snapshot clips of defining moments (struggle, growth, healing, discernment, direction, or purpose) shaping people's lives and faith. We all experience and love God in a diversity of beautiful ways. Everyone’s faith is enriched when we can trust our unique path and experiences of God while recognizing the truth and beauty of another’s.

What is a church? It is a community of people held together not by power but by love. Simply put, any notion of a church must be a fully practical church that is concerned about getting the job of love done—and done better and better.

A church is made up of genuinely good people who are, from the deepest levels of their understanding and motivation, committed to promoting the good of everyone.

What is a church? Jarrod Morris-How can you talk about the beauty of the church without talking about the women of the church? For Mother's Day, Jarrod did just that, talked to us about the role of women in the church.

What is a church? The book of Acts is the very first story of the church. What is the big story of these texts and how do they still matter to us in the modern world?

SLIDES GEORGE READ IN OUR GATHERING

“When we claim and constantly reclaim the truth of being the chosen ones, we soon discover within ourselves a deep desire to reveal to others their own chosen-ness. Instead of making us feel that we are better, more precious or valuable than others, our awareness of being chosen opens our eyes to the chosen-ness of others. That is the great joy of being chosen: the discovery that others are chosen as well. There is a place for everyone – a unique, special place. Once we deeply trust that we ourselves are precious in God’s eyes, we are able to recognize the preciousness of others and their unique places in God’s heart.”

-Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved

What is a church? The book of Acts is the very first story of the church. What is the big story of these texts and how do they still matter to us in the modern world?

SLIDES GEORGE READ IN OUR GATHERING

The great gift of Christianity is to be united while remaining oneself. - Teilhard De Chardin

The Eucharist invites us to gather as family.

Nothing is an island, not even a molecule or an atom. Everything is meant to be in relationship. The Eucharist honors that. The Eucharist is meant to form us into one body in a way that takes us beyond the differences of personality, ideology, theology, gender, ethnicity, history, social status, preoccupation, privatized agenda, and jealousy. Often, it alone has the power to do this. God gives us something we couldn’t give to ourselves: a common heart and spirit. The Eucharist is, therefore, both the sacrament that celebrates unity and the sacrament that cleanses us for it.  

—Ronald Rolheiser, Our One Great Act of Fidelity

What is a church? The book of Acts is the very first story of the church. What is the big story of these texts and how do they still matter to us in the modern world?

SLIDES GEORGE READ IN OUR GATHERING

How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you! How you have made me suffer much and yet owe much to you. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. Never in this world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, and yet never in this world have I touched anything more pure, more generous, and more beautiful.  

Carlo Caretto, An Ode to the Church

“I will put together my church, a church so expansive with love and energy that nothing can stop it.” Jesus

The task of the Church is "to be the irrefutable demonstration and proof of the fact that God is love,”  Steve Chalke

'As St. John of the Cross said: "Mission is putting love where love is not.”

What is a church? It is people who are sensitive to the idols in their world…

-the ones we bow down to

-and the ones destroying the people we love

And it is people who are discerning…

-where in the midst of all the idolatry is there an earnest seeking for God?

-where in the midst of those misplaced trusts, is there something we can celebrate and affirm to help people reach out to the God who made them and loves them?

What is a church? The book of Acts is the very first story of the church. What is the big story of these texts and how do they still matter to us in the modern world?

Waiting in hope is open-ended. Much of our waiting is filled with wishes; we want the future to go in a very specific direction. Hope is something very different. Waiting open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God's love and not according to our fear. —Henri Nouwen, Seeds of Hope

To say “we believe” is to say you are part of a community learning to trust and carry this story together. It’s people saying we are becoming a family of people who root our lives and hope in the reality that after evil has done everything it can, love has more to say. 

Palm Sunday- Where do we find God's physical presence in the world? In the historical Jesus, the body of Christ (his church and people), and in the Eucharist.

SLIDES GEORGE READ IN THE GATHERING

Christianity is without doubt the earthiest of all religions. It doesn't call you out of the physical, out of the body, or out of the world. Rather it tells you that God enters the physical, becomes one with it, blesses it, redeems it, and that there is no reason to escape from it. —Ronald Rolheiser, Our One Great Act Of Fidelity

How separate and divided is our world! We look around us, watch the world news, watch the local news, look at our places of work, our social circles, and even our churches, and we see tension and division everywhere. We are far from being one…

We cannot heal ourselves and find the key to overcome our wounds and divisions all on our own. So we must turn our helplessness into silence, a Eucharistic prayer that asks God to come and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. 

—Ronald Rolheiser, Our One Great Act Of Fidelity

We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, “My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.”  —Richard Rohr