Old friends, new places

Last weekend my wife took a solo camping trip while I hosted one of my oldest friends, Zach, as he visited Chicago. We had quite the weekend, attending a White Sox game and a Second City comedy show, and of course eating some pizza pot pie from Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder. It was a collision of worlds as I showed my new city to my old friend. Between all the fun experiences we spent quite a bit of time reminiscing (perhaps why my wife fled for the wilderness), at one point trying to remember all the cast members in our high school’s 2002 staging of the musical Footloose. (For any musical buffs or 80s movie fans out there, I played Rev. Shaw Moore and Zach was the rough and tumble Willard.)

Something about the weekend seemed to resonate with some of our recent Century content. In our August cover story, Melissa Florer-Bixler faces the ancient practice of communion in a congregation with very real conflict in the present. Isaac Villegas calls for new methods of crisis intervention like those used in his city of Durham. Two new poems also capture something of the intersection of past and present: one about finding a rosary among a late parent’s belongings, and one about nature itself entering into the tradition of evensong. 

No new video this week due to summer travels, but here is an article by my colleague Jess Mesman from last year about the trailblazing activism of Sinéad O’Connor (1966-2023) and the artist’s complicated relationship with the church.

Email me: Which stories from your past do you most often retell?

Jon Mathieu
[email protected]

Discerning the body

“When our community is in agony from church members hurting one another—when a woman in the church suffers abuse at the hands of her partner, when someone is harmed by a fellow church member’s racism or homophobia—we are called to pause, examine, and offer creative and life-giving pathways for repair.”

Nonviolent crisis response in my city

“Early in my pastoral ministry I encountered the devastation of a law enforcement response in a situation where a team of clinicians would have prevented harm. My friend Joe was killed by a police officer while he was suffering a mental health crisis.”

Is Sinéad O’Connor a secular saint?

“It would be many years before the world had to reckon with how right Sinéad O’Connor was to call attention to John Paul II’s complicity in the abuse of thousands of children. In the film, O’Connor says that she was determined to honor the contract she made with the Holy Spirit.”

by Jessica Mesman

In the Lectionary for August 6 (Ordinary 18A)

There are no ideal conditions for a miracle.

Passed away

“You were rummaging in your father’s office,
still full of the living man
and all that fits into files . . .”

poem by Jean-Mark Sens

Evensong

“In the late evening, a mourning dove cries
by the liquid well of hills, near the dipping
throat of a wood thrush close to a nightjar . . .”

poem by Karen An-Hwei Lee