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Lent Devotional: The Magic of the Return

Thinking about our Lent theme of Turn/Return has me reflecting back on one of my favorite movies, The Prestige. It is a movie about rival magicians played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, set in late 19th century London. Explained by one of the characters, the movie takes its title from a convention in magic that holds that any magic trick consists of three acts: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.

In the pledge, the magician shows you something ordinary. At the turn, the magician makes this ordinary thing do something extraordinary like disappear. The third act...

The Myth of Return, and Grief

The possibility of return holds a powerful grip on the human psyche and in our mythology (by which I mean foundational stories we tell about ourselves). The two most prominent biblical examples of return I can think of involve The Garden of Eden and Jerusalem. The first portrays a pristine original human condition – a garden of innocence and abundance that was lost in our collective coming of age through the eating from the tree of knowledge. The second took hold after the Judeans’ exile to Babylon and the destruction of their holy city Jerusalem. Hebrew prophets and various...

Name tags +

These last couple weeks we’ve been wearing name tags during in-person worship services. It’s good to remind each other who we are, or at least what our parents named us. After living most of my life as the only Joel in the room, I now enjoy being one of several and so sign my tag “Joel M.”

One of the things about living in Zoom-land for the last two years is that nametags come with the package. And not just name tags, but often name tags + something else. Depending on what kind of call I’m on, I may include the name of the church after my name: “Joel Miller, Columbus...

Turning our attention

We live, as some have observed, in an attention economy. Attention, like time, is a limited resource. Because where we direct our attention impacts what we buy, getting and keeping our attention is a key strategy for those with something to sell.

Attention is also a spiritual resource. It is essential for being in tune with ourselves and one of the greatest gifts – if not the greatest – we can give another person. And we can tell, I can tell! when someone is or isn’t being attentive.

It’s hard to talk about attention without considering the role smart phones play in...

Lent Devotional: Go Back Home

The church camp I grew up going to every summer had a tradition that, in retrospect, was somewhat odd. One of the songs we regularly sang as part of mealtimes or worship services was the folk song “500 Miles.” I always naively assumed this was just a camp song, and it wasn’t until much later in life that I realized it was more widely known and popularized by Peter, Paul, and Mary.

I say this was an odd tradition because it’s not a particularly “church-y” song. Even so, I think it became so popular with us campers because...

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