There are as many ways to be a ‘guru’ as there are people. And, true to form, us Westerners have coopted the word guru to simply mean someone who is good at something. We’ve got tech gurus, food gurus, exercise gurus, and pedophile gurus (sorry, couldn’t help myself). These are just kind of a trendy way to refer to experts. Then there are the gurus who actually have some spiritual power, if not the spiritual maturity.

How can they call themselves Christians and yet act so very un-Christian? How can they insist that the Gospels are the literal word of God then celebrate when the foreigner is imprisoned instead of welcomed, when the children are sexually abused instead of treasured as our greatest teachers, when women are denied life-saving health care instead of healed of all that ails them?

John isn’t a story book telling us what happened. This Gospel is a map of our own spiritual awakening with one of the most sarcastic, anti-BS, powerful healers at the guiding helm. But in John, these healings aren’t called ‘miracles’. They’re called ‘signs’. Signs of what you ask? Signs of what each and every one of us is becoming.

The first thing I ever learned in my psychic training was to stay amused. This is exactly the opposite of how I usually like to approach the world. It’s very serious business to be a minister, after all. There’s so many people’s pain to be faced, so many cultural traumas to unwind, and so many prayers to say. No time for fun!

Where to even begin with this smorgasbord of joy? First, the non-stop political commentary highlighting resilience and the kind of justice people make for themselves when legal justice is denied. And then we have Ricky Martin with a skin care routine for the ages singing about what happened in Hawai'i, and to him.

A big part of my final semester at seminary was spent at Black Lives Matter protests, arm in arm with religious professionals trying to be a buffer between the police line and the student line. There were Franciscan and Dominican monks in brown robes, Jesuit sisters in crisp habits, Catholic priests and novitiates with black buttons neck to toe, and all of us Protestant folks in our clergy collars…

I had the rare pleasure of sitting up all night with a sacred fire this last weekend. Over the course of the night, the fire tender raked the coals into different shapes. The one shape I saw over and over was a flaming heart. It reminded me of the one I often see shining out from the center of Mary, Jesus, and many a saint.

As Minneapolis is being overrun by ICE (KKK Gestapo née Jim Crow), I keep thinking of this one man. He was a former Sheriff on our hospice service for 6 or 7 months. He had done everything by the book, obeyed his own law, raised a family as best as he was able, and was still terrified at the end…

There’s a section of my pantry full of good intentions. You know the one. It’s full of herbal teas meant to balance my various cycles and fluids that I’m definitely going to drink one day. There are those really fancy organic lentils I bought at the trendy farm store last fall that I’m going to cook for really special guests…

The Jesus liftetime was pretty much that soul’s final lifetime in a physical body. I say ‘pretty much’ because I have it on good authority that he came back one more time as a Greek sailor, just for a little vacay before jetting off to the fully realized messianic realm of consciouness….

I’ve realized over time that I’m usually the one who most needs to hear my sermons. The funny thing is, I don’t remember this until I’m literally in a pulpit halfway through the message I think you need to hear. If you watch carefully, you’ll always see a little moment when I realize mid-sentence that this one is for me…

The last alcohol I drank was gin and tonics at a Valerie June concert in San Francisco on December 4th, 2017. I had “quit” drinking earlier that summer but then started drinking again on my birthday in September. I mean, Adam was in town and there was a great rooftop party at Vinyl and honestly I was feeling really good and wanted to go out. To like, celebrate my not drinking.

I’m usually verrrrrry skeptical of new fad-like spiritual practices. They’re usually not that new and often stripped of their ancient lineage and context. Or they’re extremely dramatic and have a lot of blame pictures in them that people use to justify their own bad behavior. Or they’re a quick fix for an uncomfortable problem that actually needs deep work. Or they’re just a common human experience sold to you in a $333, $444, or $555 dollar package…

I remember my first conscious encounter with a spiritual waiting room. I was very in love with the man who is now my husband but at the time he was very very unavailable. I couldn’t goddam believe it. I spent months cursing the vision board in my office filled with my most romantic ideas that seemed to perfectly match this unavailable dream boat…

In case you haven’t heard, we’re in a crisis of stolen attention. This is like, old news, but it’s having big effects right now. Or rather, the culmination of stolen attention came to pretty gruesome fulfillment on January 20th this year. There are a lot of reasons we have the president we have. One of the big ones is the cresting wave of people whose attention has been devoted to rage-bait rhetoric spoon fed through social media…

There are five Christian churches within four blocks of my new house. Two of them are actually diretly adjacent to the property, a fact which I find amusingly ironic. Some of the more religious neighbors have already begun putting Christmas decorations up, including the now-classic sign “Remember the Reason for the Season.” They mean Jesus, of course, but as we step into the great cloud of witnesses, spirits, and creatures of the dark I’m realizing Jesus isn't the reason for the season at all.

Long before I discovered seminary and that whole world of theological nerdery, I had the 200s section (religion and philosophy!) of the Denver Public Library. On summer breaks in college I would down to the central branch at 13th and Broadway and spend hours browsing the shelves, pulling piles of books into my basket, and finding a cozy corner to spread out.

Mary loves to make an apparition. Since her incarnation as the physical mother of the Christed Jesus, she has appeared hundreds of times through the centuries. When she appears she calls herself the Queen of Heaven, the Lady of Divine Indwelling, the Immaculate Conception made manifest, Our Lady of Good Success, and the Virgin of the Golden Heart…

One of the most extravagant miracles in the Hebrew Scriptures is the parting of the Red Sea. For those not familiar, this is when Moses leads the Hebrew peoples out of slavery in Egypt. After 10 Biblical plagues (including rivers of blood, frogs falling from the sky, and dead firstborns) Pharoah relents and tells the Hebrews to get out of town.

What are my current addictions? Screens of all kinds. I want to turn off the TV, put down the phone, look away from the tablet and I literally can’t. Fast foods, processed foods, sugars of all kinds. Inertia and being sedentary. Isolation; oh my Jesus I am addicted to isolation. And my current biggest addiction of all; the news…