Chapel Talks

This summer, a few classmates and I traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to work on the Joe Biden Presidential Campaign. Having put the trip together at the last minute, two weeks before we intended to go, we were still without a home and without a job. A last-ditch email to a few friends our parents knew connected us with a friend of a friend who offered to put us up. Little did we know, this stranger would share much more than his home with us on our two-week adventure to the Midwest.

We met him when we landed. To our surprise, a cigar-toting, eighties-rock-blasting man well north of sixty came to pick us up. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t my Washington, D.C., boys! Come on in!” he said. I looked at my classmate Aidan, and we both shrugged, not sure if this was our guy or even who this man was. But we got in the car and headed to our temporary home. Read more.

Each September, for the past seven years, I have read the Book of Genesis. Even last year in seminary, I could not escape my annual ritual. It was my first assignment as an Anglican studies student at divinity school.

Like all masterful texts, the Book of Genesis explores what it means to be human. Its insights are shaped by a particular context, the story of ancient Israel, yet rise above this particularity to speak to the shared marrow of living.

But what more could a book offer that I have read dozens of times?

Wisdom does not emerge in the firehose of mastery; it speaks in trickling springs. One must try to collect insight little by little, knowing that each time a great deal will fall through our hands because we are not yet ready to receive it. Read more.

In my May 2019 calendar, I had thirty-six major events marked down for that thirty-one-day month. That included things like tests, projects, AP exams, auditions, and track meets. It was the end of junior year, and as the seniors still fondly remember, it was a struggle.

Back at home, though, my family was going through a different kind of struggle, one that they couldn’t possibly have marked on their calen-dars. In that same month of May, my dad suffered a serious illness. At the time, I was here, in the dorm, drowning in all that work and all those expectations. My parents didn’t want me to bear the news while away from home during such a pivotal time in school, so they decided not to tell me about my dad’s health. For that time period, I lived my life without knowing of the pain that my parents and sister were going through without me. Read more.