God's love is stronger than your anxiety, your pain, and your anger. Find times to tap into that sense of belonging and connection. I know it is hard to make time to pray and meditate, but this is such an important part of our flourishing.

Just as unconsecrated oil can illuminate a room when lit, so the oil of gladness can illuminate your creation and make your presence known in our deepest places.

Christ, your anointed one, illuminates your creation and enlivens us.

We are bad at making the space to shut out the ‘visual noise’ of television, advertising, and busyness to pay attention to the small graces that God is speaking through. Practices like centering prayer, meditation, or even doing some form of art like painting or poetry create space to hear from an eternal God who speaks to us in much different ways that we speak to each other.

With this in mind, the church must be a place that does not make judgments on others but seeks to be a place where relationships can be mended and grace be given. To a certain extent, we can only empathize with our neighbors at the level of temptation broadly, but not specifically. I know what it is like to be tempted, but not tempted to certain activities that might be enticing to others. This makes temptation actually pretty isolating, and can lead to a sense of loneliness in our temptations.

God put a little something of Godself in the work of creation so that when we experience those breathtaking moments, we long to obtain the beautiful one. Beauty gives the soul wings and begins our flight back to God, culminating in union with our beloved.

This idea of ‘openness’ as a prerequisite for learning is something that goes back at least to medieval spirituality. The virtue of docilitas (the Latin word where we get our word docile), is a posture of being open to learn. It is a recognition that there are things that I need to learn, and that other people play a large role in our education. One who is ‘closed’ cannot learn.

St. Augustine once wrote, “Why are you tossed about by the billowing waves of the lake and the storm? Because Jesus is asleep; that is, because the faith that derives from Jesus has gone to sleep in your heart.”

The Church has done some pretty amazing things since its beginning in that upper room on the first Pentecost. It has also done some atrocious things as well. There are also a lot of ways that our modern Episcopal church looks like the early church (e.g. the prominence of the eucharist, the way that we read scripture during our services, the high view of baptism), but there are also some important ways that we have veered from how the first Christians lived and did ministry.

As we are coming up to the Fourth of July, we will be hearing a lot of talk about ‘freedom.’ I’ll be honest, the way that we as Americans talk about this always makes me feel a little uncomfortable.

The much harder question for us to consider as 21st Century Christians in an overwhelmingly individualist culture is, “What must a community that places scripture at the center of its life look like?”

A couple of years ago I was invited to contribute a chapter to an edited volume on a Netflix series called Black Mirror. Each episode of Black Mirror is a stand-alone story of speculative fiction that is set in a near-future dystopia and utilizes science fiction technology.

Scripture and tradition are not just two approaches to interpreting the world as Episcopal Christians; they are deeply intertwined.