By Shannon Schaefer

• Belonging to Christ by Shannon Schaefer (2/9/2017)
  ...tched beyond the boundaries of family, to friends, and even neighbors. As a good friend said that first week, “I don’t know who my neighbors are, and I’m pretty sure they don’t know who I am either.” Others said they couldn’t understand why some were so distraught. Finding themselves confused by the depths of anguish they witnessed in their beloved ones, and wanting to “get it,” they felt they cou...
• Embracing Place by Shannon Schaefer (10/7/2016)
  ... we are arguably a culture of non-places. With mobility a marker supposedly for our freedom, we fall too often for the lie that transience is the path to transcendence. We have perhaps embraced the nomadic as a symbol of what it means to be successful. What is the old adage we use about our gain of influence? We say that we’re “going places,” or “on our way to the top.” Ambition feeds the lure...
• The Beginning of a Heavenly Sowing by Shannon Schaefer (7/27/2016)
  ...the humidity, I was overwhelmed by the pungent aroma of soil and onions. Instead of the usual black trays of infant plants getting a good start on growth, before me were long rows of drying tables, heaped with onions - such an abundance that the metal tables had begun to tip and sink into the ground from the weight. Soon I was told the story: the garden interns, knowing this planting of onions ...
• A Morsel From Your Hand by Shannon Schaefer (6/1/2016)
  .... Half through her explanation, feeling awkward and wanting to end her humiliation, I gently cut her off and said, “Do you need money?” Her answer was, “Yes, $26,” an amount so exact, so without explanation, and so more than what I was expecting and yet still modest, that I startled. As I looked in my bag to see what I had, she said, “and also I really need a ride just over there,” gesturing t...
• Becoming Home by Shannon Schaefer (3/2/2016)
  ...ot of bravery.” A friend and I had spent the afternoon in the sun and the breeze talking about relationships, and after, I’d had this dawning vision that perhaps she was worthy of more love than she was allowing herself to hope for. So hours later, through a bit of trembling, I told her so. And her response was one so resonant with my own experience, so human, so all of us. Sometimes to hope...
• Who Is This? by Shannon Schaefer (8/19/2015)
  ...ved this story long, we hear bread and think body, body and think bread – a mingling of symbols and referents that comes as a hard-won accomplishment of good formation. Add to our formations the distance most of us typically experience between our food and its source. The realities of eating the body of another being are somewhat muted by a food industry that does the hard work for us, and conv...
• Storm of the Spirit by Shannon Schaefer (6/17/2015)
  ...ctions among those I know varied widely, from alarm, to those who met the findings with resignation and acceptance, or frankly as old news. As a divinity school student, preparing for perhaps a lifetime of full-time Christian service to the church, I have wondered at my curious position as someone apparently hoping against the odds. Am I tying myself to the bow of a sinking ship?<!--more--> ...
• Transfigured in Him by Shannon Schaefer (2/11/2015)
  ...cation for how to live in light of the disciples’ witness. Instead, the transfiguration account is fluent in mystery, begging us to place ourselves in the narrative and walk around inside of it - climb the mountain, see the glory, fumble out our own dumbstruck words laced with terror, and in the end, be brought back to the resurrection.<!--more--> Carver’s Gap on Roan Mountain, straddling the T...
• Like Those Who Dream by Shannon Schaefer (12/12/2014)
  ...challenge of entering into Advent as a season of waiting and crying out for the presence of God in our midst. The first Sunday of this season came just days after the most recent occasion for protests in Ferguson, MO and with those waiting for justice, we could stand in solidarity and cry like the first line from the Isaiah text for that week, “O that you would rend the heavens and come down, s...
• Fruit of the Vine, Work of Human Hands by Shannon Schaefer (10/1/2014)
  ... parable and interpretation raises a number of compelling questions for the church. Knowing the story as we do, it is perhaps understandable for us to look at Jesus’ interpretation of the parable of the wicked tenants as a prophecy foretelling the opening of the kingdom of God to the Gentiles. While this isn’t perhaps an invalid interpretation, it is one that allows us, as the church, to be bystan...
• Junk-yard Dog by Shannon Schaefer (8/13/2014)
  ...ccer for all of three weeks, eight year olds, and her mom had struggled to consistently get her to practices and games. So my assistant, a dear man and veteran coach, but living in a place where such ignorant terms of endearment (or not) were still somewhat culturally accepted, had offered to give her rides to practices and games. She was from the “wrong” side of town, he told me. He worried a...
• A Glory that Breathes Life by Shannon Schaefer (5/23/2014)
  ...s learning. “What baby?” you ask. There is a fountain, a passion circulating. I’m not saying this well, because I’m too much in the scatterbrain sweetness. Listen anyway. It must be said. There are eyes that see into eternity. A presence beyond the power and magic of shamans. Let that in. Sink to the floor, full prostration.</em> - Rumi ("Scatterbrain Sweetness" i...
• The Womb of the Church by Shannon Schaefer (3/11/2014)
  ...ssover, after all, and the temple at that. A repeat of such antics would be deeply shaming. Or perhaps the dark is more than simple night, and Nicodemus wants in, closer to the power he sees in the signs. Something real is at work in Jesus, something light, something that looks like God. Perhaps, he comes for a little of both.<!--more--> Nicodemus begins, "We know that you’re from God, be...
• Body Matters by Shannon Schaefer (1/1/2014)
  ...ed all through with yearning and will. The creator inhabits created form. There is no room for metaphor here; flesh on God is no parable, no allegory. Make no mistake: this is body, like yours, like mine, mystery as intimate as your own face. What difference does it make for flesh to mean flesh? How much would it matter if the scriptures said instead, “the Word became soul and lived among us?”...
• To Sweet Impossible Blossom by Shannon Schaefer (11/7/2013)
  ...he still answers the question. They’ve come up with the perfect quandary for Jesus. A woman marries seven brothers, gives not one of them a child to carry his name and tether her to him. In the resurrection, whose will she be? It occurs to me that because of their denial of the resurrection they’re asking about, they mean their question to be purely a matter of theory. It does seem a little ...
• To Rest in Requiring Hands by Shannon Schaefer (9/4/2013)
  ... that in my life. The first day at the wheel, I held my newly kneaded lump of clay, eager for peaceful art-making, when my friend instructed me to raise up my clay in both hands and slam it down on the wheel. “Slam?” I asked, perplexed. “Slam,” she answered.<!--more--> It took a few tries and her vigorous convincing that I should put some power into it, but eventually my clay was forcef...