Susan Pitchford

One of the symptoms of my current insanity is that, in spite of having no discretionary time at all, I’ve agreed to participate in no less than three reading groups. One of these is reading “In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers,” by John Chryssavgis. The desert abbas and ammas were those strange third and fourth century men and women who fled civilization, with all its comforts and distractions, and went into the Egyptian desert to be stripped bare before God. The book, which is a collection of their sayings grouped around a set of key themes, begins with a fourth century Eucharistic prayer to God: “We entreat you, make us truly alive.” (more…)

“When the time bind catches me, it seems impossible to come out ahead. I have gotten too little done, or I have done so very much that I failed to share time with people I love. Anger at myself contends against anger at others, whether they be fritterers or workaholics or simply people who need me more than I can afford to be needed. Time becomes an arena of anguish, and the genuine hardships I face in trying to juggle the demands take on an added dimension of pain. When this is so, I arise weary each day, trying once again to pull together enough energy to earn the air I breathe.”
Dorothy C. Bass, “Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time”

Today is the first day of Winter Quarter, and I woke up thinking about time. (more…)

This autumn, I included a unit on slavery in both of my sociology courses. After the presentation in my Intro Soc course, a student made an appointment with me. She sat across my desk from me and demanded to know what could be done – what could she do? I suggested that she consider doing an independent study with me this winter to find some answers to that question, and she signed up. And so have nine others so far including, as of yesterday, a student I taught two years ago. These young people want to learn more, and they want to act. Winter quarter is three weeks away, but they are already planning their part of the antislavery movement, and I’m in awe of them, honored to be included. (more…)

We tend to think of slavery as the legal ownership of one person by another. But that definition belongs to the past, as does our “Gone With the Wind” image of plantation slavery. Slavery today takes multiple forms, but all slaves are people who are forced to work without compensation, who are kept at it by violence or the threat of violence, who are unfree, controlled through physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual coercion. (more…)

Did you know that there are something like 27 million slaves in the world today? Not sweatshop laborers, not people working in “slave-like conditions,” but actual slaves. Free the Slaves, an anti-slavery organization, defines a “slave” as:

A person held against his or her will and controlled physically or psychologically by violence or its threat for the purpose of appropriating their labor. (more…)

At the end of his little book on the Eucharist, renowned theologian and Bishop of Durham Tom Wright lists a number of things that are negotiable, a matter of spiritual taste, if you will: what vestments, if any, should be worn; whether particular postures (such as kneeling, or crossing oneself) should be used, whether to have incense, and so on. He then acknowledges that although there is a case to be made for offering communion to anyone who shows up, most churches have required recipients to have demonstrated at least the basic level of connection to Christ, shown by baptism and perhaps confirmation. Wright then continues to that which, in his view, is non-negotiable: (more…)

The first, from Evelyn Underhill, “The Spiritual Life”:

“So many Christians are like deaf people at a concert. They study the program carefully, believe every statement made in it, speak respectfully of the quality of the music, but only really hear a phrase now and again. So they have no notion at all of the mighty symphony which fills the universe, to which our lives are destined to make their tiny contribution, and which is the self-expression of the eternal God.”

The second is from Thomas Merton, “New Seeds of Contemplation”:

“Interior solitude is impossible for them. They fear it. They do everything they can to escape it. What is worse, they try to draw everyone else into activities as senseless and as devouring as their own. They are great promoters of useless work. They love to organize meetings and banquets and conferences and lectures. They print circulars, write letters, talk for hours on the telephone in order that they may gather a hundred people together in a large room where they will all fill the air with smoke and make a great deal of noise and roar at one another and clap their hands and stagger home at last patting one another on the back with the assurance that they have all done great things to spread the Kingdom of God.”

There are lots more ways to get it wrong, of course, (more…)

“A single misery suffices to condemn a society. It suffices that a single man be kept or knowingly left in need for the entire civil contract to be null and void. As long as there is one man outside, the door which is closed in his face encloses a city of injustice and hatred.”

Charles Péguy (1873-1914), French socialist, nationalist and Christian, quoted in Louis Evely’s classic “Suffering” (1967)

I remember the first time I realized the injustice of the U.S. health care system. (more…)

Everyone knows the classic symptoms of a heart attack: squeezing pain in the chest, radiating down the left arm or to the jaw, shortness of breath and so on. But medical researchers are now discovering that women often experience heart attacks differently; the list of “classic” symptoms we’ve all been taught is the result of research focusing on men, and neglecting women.

And everyone knows that pride is the deadliest of deadly sins, but perhaps this is another example of how “what everyone knows” is mainly true for men, because of theologians’ tendency to ignore women. (more…)

Remember that you have only one soul,
that you have only one death to die;
that you have only one life, which is short,
and has to be lived by you alone, and that there is only one glory,
which is eternal.
If you do this,
there will be many things
about which you care nothing.
~Teresa of Avila

“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
~Søren Kierkegaard

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
~Jesus of Nazareth

People who are nearsighted know that squinting sharpens your focus. (more…)