By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Our bodies are a portable sanctuary, a holy of holies, a place in which we can know and meet and be in the presence beyond God who is beyond all knowing and yet who seeks to know us. Try a meditation exercise called “palms up, palms down.” [...]
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster What hymns live inside you these days? Can you summon tune and text to mind without a bulletin in your hand or a hymnal by your side? I find myself humming “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,” which might be proof of my church-nerd status, but I also think [...]
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster If you let me, I’d just quote the whole book. I’d just read the whole thing aloud to you, page by page. It’s beautiful. John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings is a stunning work of art, a litany of connection to [...]
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster The southeast stained glass window in our sanctuary is the Swedenborgian window, which includes a little picture of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed. Chapman is affectionately called the “American St. Francis of Assisi” because of his animal rights activism, vegetarian diet, and spiritual mysticism connected [...]
Frequently Asked Questions. As we are commanded to love God and our neighbor, let us demonstrate that by taking safe, healthy precautions upon gathering.
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Back in late April (feels like a million years ago), Kiley Urban read Psalm 16 for our youth psalm study. She reflected that it is a psalm about trust and security, two things that we need in these COVID-shaped days. She notices that you can tell the person [...]
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster I’m pretty sure that if I had taken Geology 101 before Theology 101, I’d be a hydrologist instead of a pastor, so maybe I am drawn to Teilhard de Chardin because he was a geologist-theologian. When I walk through the ravines, I think of the long years of [...]
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster I came across this prayer in “The Oxford Book of Prayer” edited by George Appleton in 1985. Appleton gives us no more context than this: prayer of 11-year-old child on hearing the Sino-Indian border fighting. We don’t know which side of the border the child was on. We [...]
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper wrestled with the relationship between the worship liturgy and a sincere posture of prayer. He says that the liturgy—our worship service—is like “a husk around a seed, a riverbank cradling a current, clothes that dress the body, an institution that supports an organism.” [...]
By The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster A 1,500 pound bell hangs at Harvard’s Memorial Church with an inscription, “in memory of the voices that are hushed.” It’s weighty call rings out every morning across the now-hushed closed-due-to-COVID campus and rang out across campus through the years to mark celebration and sorrow. The inscription [...]