I wrote my contributions over a year ago, finishing with a dedicated writing week at a gifted beach condo. It was a beautiful place to write some of the hardest prayers I’ve ever written.

The book is now available, and I’ll share ordering info below, though I wish it weren’t needed. Along with lovely artwork, the book contains prayers that can be used in a variety of settings: prayers for groups to use in a communal gathering after a gun-related shooting death, private prayers for individuals for after gun violence; and both individual and communal prayers for transformation.

Already I have given away one of my copies to friends whose town had a recent fatal shooting as their nearby church was planning a vigil.

Today I’m sharing one of my contributions to the personal prayers for transformation section. It’s probably the least liturgical prayer I wrote, but it’s a topic I consider often, as a writer, preacher, and general human being who uses language.

A Lexicon of Love

Lord, make me gun-shy about using language that normalizes weapons through my words. 

When I casually shoot the breeze, firing away with phrases shot through with images that should trigger me, show me how I’ve missed the mark. 

I want to be a straight shooter with my words, but I jump the gun like a hotshot and go off guns blazing, shooting from the hip, like a loose cannon in conversation. 

I talk about coming under fire when I just mean things are hard.
I say I’m under the gun when I’m really short on time.
I say I got shot down, when I didn’t get my way.
I say “bite the bullet” when what I mean is “be brave.”
I take a parting shot when I could share a benediction.

When I shoot my mouth off about riding shotgun, shooting myself in the foot, or taking aim at my best shot, show me—point blank—where I could use words of peace instead. 

Instead of being blown away, let me be awed.
Instead of sweating bullets, let me admit my anxieties.
Instead of sticking to my guns, let me be confident and courageous.
Instead of bang for my buck, let me seek abundance.

I know I’m not bullet proof—none of us are.
Help me remember that even silver bullets kill. 

Lord, you know that even this prayer is just a snapshot of how my language misfires, going off target.
I wonder if there is a surefire way to change.
Do I have a shot in hell? 
Should I take a shot in the dark?
Or just shoot for the moon? 

Slow me down long enough to reload my thoughts. 
Help me trade my big guns for small deliberate choices.
Instead of a grammar of guns, give me a lexicon of love.
Amen.

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ordering info

How Long, Oh Lord: A Prayerbook Concerning Gun Violence is available from the PC(USA) Store, as an initiative from The Office of Public Witness and its Decade to End Gun Violence.

“This prayerbook includes a mix of prayers for corporate and private use in circumstances following firearm related violence and death. Prayers by Dr. Willie James Jennings, Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, and Rev. Julie Hester address topics like shootings, gun violence culture, hunting, and suicide from a pastorally rich and sensitive perspective. The prayers are accompanied by artwork by Sayde Anderson and Blake Johnson.”

*Use my code JH for a 10% discount.

I don’t get any royalties from your purchase, but I recommend it as an addition to your library anyway. I trust it will be a helpful resource for your own prayers—individual or communal—even as I am already lamenting whatever fresh sorrow brings about your need for it.

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

― Etty Hillesum

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It is peaceful here, up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Birds calling, the wind blowing, not even many cars about today. I’m on the porch of the old Bluffs Lodge at Milepost 241.1—the wooden and stone structure beginning to crumble—victim to time and federal budget cuts. But there is still the possibility to reclaim some peace here, apart from the news of war, the constant stream of stories of how we dismiss and destroy people, cities, nations, without regard to how it is destroying ourselves.

If I could, I’d prescribe—insist on—some time in a quiet natural setting like this, for those who have the power to demolish it. Time without their access to email or social networks or cameras. Just the quiet, and maybe a pen and paper.

But absent that authority, I’ll prescribe it to myself and to those who sometimes listen to me:

Slow down enough to notice the bees. To listen to birds and wonder what their names are. To look at trees and hills and grass and remember the way human structures decay without nurturing, and natural ones might too if we aren’t attentive enough. We need the peace of wild things that Wendell Berry wrote about1.

In front of the Lodge is an empty parking lot. There’s hardly anyone here today. A couple hikers. A National Park Service crew up on the road. And our small band of writers, spread out now, all writing about peace.

I picked a dandelion gone-to-seed a few minutes ago, as we searched for a place to write, and remembered another writer’s comment I read on Substack. Her friend’s young daughter had forgotten the name for dandelion and called it “the one that explodes into wishes.”2

Let us wish for peace. More and more peace: in ourselves, in the natural world, in our fractured country, and troubled planet. Let our wish for peace explode and drift out over the landscape, sowing seeds of peace that sprout randomly, unexpectedly, determined, like the dandelions in this field of grass.

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a writing prompt

Here’s the quote again from Etty Hillesum (1914-1943), which was the prompt I used to write this piece up on the Parkway. Etty was a Dutch Jewish woman whose letters and diaries reveal a deep inner journey as her life took her from occupied Amsterdam, to Westerbork transit camp, and then to Auschwitz, where she died.

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

― Etty Hillesum

If you can, find a place outside where you can write about peace. Write as little or as long as you like.

Or write about dandelions—the “ones that explode into wishes.”

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

From the archives, here’s an older post and prompt about dandelions, from 2023.

I didn’t think much about the first one we passed. By the fifth one, I started to imagine the possibilities.

Here’s one with a nice view of the South Mountains.

Upon further reflection, I realize these blank boards might be just the backing of what will be larger displays, but I like the look and idea of the two wooden slats just waiting for words. I know one of the employees who works for Foothills Conservancy, the conservation group in charge, and I plan to ask her what will go on these signs.

But not yet.

First, I want us to imagine what could go there.

• Maybe some encouragement, like “Hey hiker, you’re doing great!” Or just two words: “Keep going”

• Maybe a line from a poem, like Robert Frost’s: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep” or Mary Oliver’s line “If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”

• Or perhaps a question like the one that Wendell Berry asks in this poem: “What does the earth say?”

Let’s take this one. Just a blank sign along a trail in the woods.

What words or phrases would you put there for wandering hikers?

For strangers?

For yourself?

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a writing prompt

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

While my spouse was taking a two-day baking class (scones, rolls, bread!), I joined a happy group that did a little of everything: yoga, contemplative practice, print-making, hiking, and a trip into town for ice cream. Our contemplative leader sent us outside to notice nature, and write haiku. Without that invitation, I wouldn’t have seen or spent ten minutes considering what was growing on a tree stump by the stairs I’d tromped up and down several times already.

My haiku called it lichen like moth wings. Further research shows it to be Turkey Tail fungus. I’ve updated my original haiku with the scientific name:

fungus like moth wings 
trametes versicolor 
life among decay

Then I wrote this one:

the plants all have names
scientific and common
I call them all gift

The strangely beautiful fungus, and my attempt to capture it in words, reminded me of this Brian Doyle poem.

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a writing prompt

Take ten minutes and go outside to notice something in the natural world. Sit. Really look. Appreciate the poem in the air, and behind your eyes. Then, go ahead and try to find some words for it.

It doesn’t have to be the best poem ever, but it might be.

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April Writing Hour - Sat. April 18 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

I'm at my parents' apartment in sunny Florida, helping out with another cataract procedure for my mother. I wrote about the first one several months ago, and the miracle of seeing clearly when you didn't even know how much you were missing.  

When I arrived after my long drive,  I found my mother upstairs looking through a basket of old photos. Like all their containers of photos, this one is a gold mine—a mixed batch from all kinds of time periods and locations. Along with photos of various houses, pets, and extended family, my sisters and I are dressed in a great variety of matching holiday dresses, dress-up dresses, 70's pantsuits, and swim suits. I found some photos I've never seen before, including this one of me.

I believe I am wearing an Easter outfit. Was it hard to talk my mother into letting me wear it to school? And lucky me to get to carry that Archie lunchbox. I’m seven years old, finishing up first grade, and about to move houses. I have a big sister and two little sisters, and I love school and reading and ballet. In the pictures on the refrigerator behind me, one of us drew a camping scene, probably from our Father-Daughter camping trips, which were legendary. There’s a chore chart of some kind, which probably didn’t work. And an Easter card one of us drew. I look happy.

What would I like to tell that little girl? What do I know now that she needs to hear?

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a writing prompt

Write a letter to your younger self. 

If it helps, keep a photo of yourself at a particular age in your mind, or in front of you, as you write.

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April Writing Hour - Sat. April 18 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is in two Saturdays. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

I’m far from a poetry expert, but I think deep down they are saying something similar about how to approach living in a complicated world. Paying attention to the natural world and our experience moving through it can save us. Not just what we think about this world, but how we take it in through our whole selves: our senses, our bodies, what we see, hear, and taste, and then what all that does within us.

This is a week my faith tradition calls holy. We walk through stories of Jesus that are deeply sensory. We pour water and wash hands or feet, break bread and eat, touch nails and wood and stone and flowers, light candles and snuff them out, sing and sit in silence and then sing again.

As a worship planner and preacher, it’s easy to get stuck in my head about the whole theological meaning of it all. Instead, I’m trying to listen to Levertov’s advice this week: to taste and see, and pay attention to what this week in God’s world gifts to me and take it all in, trusting that it will transform within me into something that satisfies. Something that is neither too much, nor not enough. Something fully embodied and alive. I wish the same for you this week.

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a writing prompt

Read Levertov’s poem below, then find a word, a phrase, an image, or an idea, and use it to start your writing. Keep your pen moving without stopping to edit or erase. Just write and see what emerges on the page.

O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

—Denise Levertov

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

Behold: paint chip prompts!

The old school way to do this is to sidle up to the racks of chips in your local paint store and grab some strips, pretending that you are about to actually paint when really you are borrowing the colors and their names for other uses.

Recently I found a game called “Paint Chip Poetry” in a bookstore. “Let the paint chips be your muse!” it says. The possibilities are endless. (However, the box is poorly constructed, so I don’t recommend opening it in a moving car, otherwise the 400 individual paint chips will all spill out under your feet, and some are likely still lost under the passenger seat….)

I grabbed 16 cards off the top for you, plus a few “prompt cards.” There are suggestions for how to use these as a game to play with others, but I am confident you can enjoy these words, colors, and ideas all on your own.

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a writing prompt

Combine the color cards and the prompt cards below in any way you like. Use one or some or all. Write a poem or a paragraph or a prayer. Use your memory or your imagination.

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New here?

Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

It’s rough out there. Disastrous, according to the headlines and my own opinion, much of the time.

And yet….

The sky is a brilliant blue today. A dog bounded across the grass and leaned on me, longer than necessary. The bunny in the front yard looked me straight in the eye for a full minute before streaking into the woods.

Thanks to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer for reminding me in her poem below that I can still be amazed by the world. I looked up amazement and the dictionary suggested I also consider bewilderment and I think that’s a little of what this poem reminds me to do. Not bewilder in the sense of perplexity or confusion, but bewilder in terms of BE WILDER. This week, my goal is to look for headlines out in the wild, in the natural world, as a counterweight to all the other news.

Let me know what headlines you notice out there….

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a writing prompt

Look for your own treasure on the page. Find a word, a phrase, a question, an image, or an idea in the poem, and start writing there. Or begin with the phrase: Here is also the news….

Today’s Headline

And then one day, while I read
aloud to my husband the news
and felt the widening hole in my heart,
he raised his hand to quiet me.
I followed his gaze out the window
to see in the yard a small fluffy thing
with black and white eyespots on its head.
A northern pygmy owl beside our door,
stout body slightly smaller than my fist.
It turned its neck a full half circle
to look at me with bright yellow eyes.
In an instant, I shifted from disgust
with the world to awe. Awe for this
fierce bespeckled miracle, this wonder
of feather and beak and claw, this
small being in the grass looking back
at me as if to say, Here is also the news.
How surprising the world can be.
How quickly, when I let it, amazement
overwrites my fear and makes
of the hole in my heart a home.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Find Rosemerry at wordwoman.com and ahundredfallingveils.com.

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March Writing Hour - Sat. March 21 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

I suppose some of you are here mostly for writing prompts, or thoughts on grief, or faith, or a combination of those, but I can’t seem to write about any of those topics lately without sharing something that the podcaster’s critics would call political, as they stamp their feet on the way out the door.

They are all entwined—faith, grief, politics, and what we learn as we write in response. I won’t stop sharing what matters to me. I hope you will keep reading and writing about what matters to you.

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a writing prompt

The poem below was written by Wendell Berry, and first published in 2009. It’s been making the rounds ever since, more applicable than ever. Every question is haunting me this week.

Find a word, a phrase, a question, an image, or an idea in the poem below, and start there. Or use the form of the poem to guide your own.

Questionnaire

—Wendell Berry

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got for an introduction.

Here’s the writing prompt.

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a writing prompt

Use the poem below as your prompt. Find a word, a phrase, an image and start there.

I usually say you can talk back to a poem if you want, but there is no talking back to this one.

Note: I’ve seen this poem attributed to James Baldwin, but other sources indicate it was written by Nikita Gill based on a quote from Baldwin.

Every bombed village is my hometown

—by Nikita Gill

“Every bombed village is my hometown” - James Baldwin

And every dead child is my child.
Every grieving mother is my mother.
Every crying father is my father.
Every home turned to rubble
is the home I grew up in.
Every brother carrying the remains
of his brother across borders
is my brother.
Every sister waiting for a sister
who will never come home
is my sister.

Every one of these people are ours,
Just like we are theirs.
We belong to them
and they belong to us.

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Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

I hardly ever have the ending in mind when I begin, whether it’s a sermon or a Substack post. Like Joan Didion said: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”1 The writing is how I get to whatever the ending ends up being.

I suppose that makes the middle the place where I move from the stuttering starting to the dismount and landing. It’s where ideas get worked out, and multiple threads are gathered in. (And a handful of mixed metaphors get tried out…If there is time they might be edited and refined, but clearly there is not always time or inclination.)

I’m working on a Lenten sermon this week where I think I’m talking about beginnings and endings, birth and death. I’m somewhere in the middle of it, and that’s the messy part. I’m also teaching an online class on writing as a spiritual practice for grief and healing, beginning today, so I’ve been deep in some reading about that topic.

Though I’ve known some of his work since the late 90’s, I’ve just discovered Thomas Lynch’s 2019 book Whence and Whither: On Lives and Living.2 Lynch is a funeral director, poet, and essayist whose writing is everything I aspire for mine to be—wise, funny, honest, and theological in such a human way that you almost don’t realize you are headed in that direction.

This book’s beginning stems from lectures given at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and it seems written in part for church leaders more directly than his other books. He writes about faith, doubt, and hope—topics familiar to us all, but from the perspective of those who find themselves more often than others at gravesides. I haven’t read it all yet, but the beginning gave me a beginning to this post.

Lynch starts his first three chapters with sections from Billy Collins’ poem Aristotle, “named for the Greek who believed that a ‘whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

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excerpts from Aristotle by Billy Collins

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.

[then]

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
[...]
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.

[then]

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
[...]

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a writing prompt

Read the entire poem Aristotle by Billy Collins3 at The Poetry Foundation here. Or listen to the poet read it in the video below.

In his poem Collins uses images of a play on a stage, climbers on a journey, and more. He writes about specifics that evoke feelings, and actions that imply meaning. Notice the images that grab you. What is asking to be written about, what shimmers, as Joan Didion calls the images that call to her, wanting to be explored in her writing? A particular event, a person, a topic? Go with your first thought, maybe the second. First thoughts have energy, according to Natalie Goldberg.

When you have an idea, write about it in three sections. Start them with these lines:

• This is the beginning.

• This is the middle.

• This is the end.

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February Writing Hour - Sat. Feb 28 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

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New here?

Welcome to Writing in Company! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

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Note: I am a Bookshop.org affiliate. If you purchase through my links to support independent bookstores (yay you!), I may earn a small commission.

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I’ve decided to give up trolls for Lent.

Not this kind, the fuzzy-haired plastic trolls of my childhood:

And not the genius wooden ones from artist Thomas Dambo, for whom I made a pilgrimage to see a traveling exhibit this week. These are so worth keeping:

No, I’m giving up internet trolls for Lent.

Back in 2020 when we were just a month into the pandemic, Reuters ran a headline that said Pope to Catholics: For Lent, give up trolling. In his Ash Wednesday address that year, Pope Francis said, “We live in an atmosphere polluted by too much verbal violence, too many offensive and harmful words, which are amplified by the internet. Today, people insult each other as if they were saying ‘Good Day.’”1 Francis would be even more appalled by what passes for online conversation now, six years later.

To be clear, I try hard not to add to the proliferation of online drama with my own words. I refrain from having debates in the comment sections on social media. But I too often scroll down to read the comments of other people after a news article, or on someone else’s post. I get dragged into the world of the trolls that screech and insult just by reading them. It’s visceral and addictive and it doesn’t add to my understanding of issues or my health and well-being. And it doesn’t bring me any closer to the kind of life of love I seek to live.

So I’m done giving trolls and comment sections any of my time and energy. At least for the next six weeks. I’ll be scrolling less and logging off earlier. And whatever Lent is or is not for you, I wish you at least six weeks of some peace in your online spaces.

(But if you comment here, I WILL read and respond, because you all are some of the nicest folks online anywhere.)

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a writing prompt

I really just want to share this photo from the troll exhibit, where the art was scattered along trails and around buildings. Each creation has a name, a personality, and a little story. They also had messages posted nearby with the trolls’ observations about our human fascination with phones, cars, and more; and their pointed questions about nature, recycling, human behavior, and community. (And that’s without them ever encountering the comment section of an online space….)

I invite you to imagine what this troll, named Wilde, is writing or drawing. Write yourself a letter from him, perhaps. What do you think he is noticing, and what does he have to say to you today, or during this season of Lent?

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

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As I write this, we’re four days into the 2026 Winter Olympics. On my television, athletes are flinging themselves off a ski jump slope as tall as the Statue of Liberty. I’ve looked up the rules to Curling again, and asked the internet where I can try it myself. (Nowhere nearby.) Every time an ice skater or skier falls I feel like their mother must feel. (Side note: When did I graduate from identifying with the athletes to identifying with their mothers?)

The alpine scenes from around Northern Italy are beautiful. I can’t help but think of my visit to snowy Sarajevo in 2023. Two of my sisters and I rode the cable car up to Mount Trebević, the site of the 1984 Olympic bobsled and luge events. If you squint you can almost see it as it must have looked then—a winter wonderland, spectators from around the world cheering, waving flags, and enjoying international competition and cooperation.

Just a few years later, the site was an artillery position during the Siege of Sarajevo. Snipers took aim where photographers once worked. Deadly mines were buried where crowds once celebrated. The war lasted four years, and the scars remain.

Today the site is a path for hikers and bikers, and a canvas for graffiti artists. The track still curves alongside the path, overgrown and haunting. The ghosts of past Olympians and the thousands of residents who died, hover nearby.

I have questions.

If it can happen in 1992 Sarajevo, could it happen in Milan or Cortina?

For that matter, if it can happen in 2014 and 2022 Ukraine, could it happen here?

What are the trigger points for the quick shift from sports and normalcy to violence and destruction?

How fragile is the peace we presume?

And. And. And.

How resilient are the people who keep going, living, creating, and reclaiming life out of death, and hope out of hell?

How resilient are we?

a writing prompt

Use one of my photos of the Sarajevo bobsled track as your prompt.

Or, write about Olympics past or present, ghosts or not.

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

Here’s a comparison of the Trebević track from 1984 to now.

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Every month I host a Writing Hour on Zoom. I never know who is going to pop onto the screen during these Saturday afternoon sessions. There are some regulars, whose beautiful writing and reading voices have become blessedly familiar. There are folks who come for a while, then disappear, and perhaps return. Some months there are new faces and voices, and I find myself rejoicing when—after witnessing the supportive responses to others’ offerings—these brave ones work up the courage to read their just-written words for the first time.

One of the practices we hold together is that what is written and shared in that online space stays confidential—a value that lets us experiment and write what needs to be written, even if it surprises or even shocks us on the page. I won’t ever share someone’s words from a Writing Hour, unless I have their express permission. But I do want to share a prompt from this past Saturday’s session that resulted in some powerful writing.

I was feeling off for this gathering. News from earlier in the day about the death of a young adult child of friends was hard. Grief for them unbalanced me. I had a hard time connecting my notes about my planned prompts and the words that came out of my mouth. I struggled finding the right Zoom screen to share, more than once.

But the grace of the blank page, time to fill it with words in response to a spacious prompt, and the generous listening of other writers, brought me back to why I do this work. It’s because I learned how to write through/about/because of grief about my own lost child with other bereaved mothers. Because writing is a (slow) way to heal, to honor who and what we love, and to remember them and our own selves.

We are all grieving, because we all love. Writing can help us hold both those truths, weaving them with words so tightly together that eventually we can’t recall one without the other. We can’t grieve without love, and we can’t love without grief. Putting words to our losses and loves—the ones swirling around in our weeping wondering bodies and scattered searching minds—getting them out and onto the page is necessary medicine.

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a writing prompt

Start with a list.

In our Writing Hour on the last day of last month, we made a list of January—people, places, events, sounds, smells, and so on from the month.

My list included items as varied as

• snowstorms in North Carolina

• doing puzzles with twenty-somethings

• my sisters

• Andrea Gibson’s poetry

• ICE/ice/eyes

• turning sixty

• making macarons

• petting a baby goat

• losing a child

Making the list itself is a worthwhile exercise in putting our memories into words. But here’s what led to remarkable writing: we chose one item from our list and began writing with the phrase:

“Here’s what I want you to know about _____________.”

Try it yourself. And may your writing weave together what matters.

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

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I don’t have many words myself this week. But saying nothing isn’t an option.

When I don’t know what to say—when there is too much to say—when there is too much hurt to even know where to begin—I reach for a form that will help contain the words and the big feelings. Having boundaries of sorts helps the words not fly off the page, and keeps me focused on one doable task in the face of immeasurable need.

The form can vary.

Maya Stein writes 10 lines, interpreted generously.

Thomasin LaMay gives her students the assignment to write 100 words, exactly.

Amanda Gorman wrote a poem in the shape of Minneapolis.

Some days all I can manage is a few words in an acrostic. With no apologies for the embedded and thoroughly called-for profanity, but some apologies if the spacing gets weird on mobile devices, here’s what I wrote when nothing else surfaced:

F or the love of God, give

U p this insanity, this avalanche of

C alculated violence where people are being

K illed for no good reason, as

I f there is ever a good reason. Don’t you know real

C ourage doesn’t patrol streets with masks and guns, needing

E veryone to cower?

a writing prompt

Choose a form to contain your words. Ten lines, 100 words, a shape, an acrostic, or something else. Write what you can. Your words matter.

Also, call your congressional representatives and share some words with them, too. If you need help with the form of those words, try 5Calls.

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January Writing Hour - Sat. Jan 31 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

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Today’s prompt illustrates, literally, several ideas:

• How writers and artists share, and creativity grows

• How words from one writer can inspire other writers

• How everything is connected—synchronicity

Two weeks ago I was in a quirky shop in my hometown, and picked up a book by John Carroll called Make Blackout Poetry: turn these pages into poems. It’s chock full of thick pages from other sources, designed as a workbook to be blacked-out and repurposed into new poems. I passed over the book at first in my many rounds of the shop; but when my husband brought it to me and said, “this looks like something you would like,” I took it as a sign from the universe, and bought it. I thought perhaps I would stash it with my writing workshop materials to tear up and use someday with a group. Here’s the cover.

I’m not sure when or where I first learned about blackout poetry. It might have been at the annual conference I’m headed to (today!) where some of the most creative church educators have nurtured my faith and work for decades. It might have been through Austin Kleon, one of the very first writers and artists I followed on Substack. (Check out his work—it’s inspiring!)

I’ve experimented with blackout poetry myself off and on, but honestly have a hard time covering up the words of others. It’s sort of the opposite of what I try to do with writers—I want to open the page for words, and value the way they show up.

But I’ve been participating in Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals January 30-Day Journaling Challenge. She is sharing a daily writing prompt from her gorgeous work The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, and the prompts and community are helping me play on the page again. Not just with writing but also drawing, doodling, and just creating. Yesterday’s prompt was to make black-out poetry. Synchronicity.

Maybe the John Carroll book will eventually get shared with a group I lead, but at least for now, I’ve reclaimed it for myself and my own creative process.

I didn’t take a photo of the page I blacked out before I took to it with my marker, but it was from The Sleepers, by Walt Whitman in “Leaves of Grass.” The whole poem is long and lovely.

Here’s what emerged from and for me—a sort of prayer for America in these awful days.

You can read more about how Carroll discovered blackout poetry, and how he founded the Instagram account Make Blackout Poetry.

a writing prompt

Now it’s your turn.

Find a page of something to black out—a page from a newspaper, an old book, a dictionary, even something printed from the internet. Choose words that jump out at you and circle or outline them with a pencil. Then black out the rest with a marker.

Carroll and Kleon both use lots of other techniques—connecting words and phrases with lines, using color and design, even adding other materials. But all you really need is a page, maybe a pencil, a marker, and trust in your own creativity, imagination, and genius. I’d love to see or hear about what you create.

And if you have a prayer for America, I need more of those, too….

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

Note: I am a Bookshop.org affiliate. If you purchase through my links to support independent bookstores (yay you!), I may earn a small commission.

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For about the hundredth time, I removed Facebook and Instagram from my phone this week. That itch to consume whatever the algorithms throw my way is too habitual for me to resist, especially in a time of deepening alarming headlines. I can still get to my accounts on my laptop, but that takes enough of an extra step or two that it means I am not starting and ending my day with mindless or despairing scrolling on a tiny screen.

I don’t think I have outrageous hopes or expectations for social media. I need to interact a bit with my church accounts. I actually want the news, and to be a well-informed, engaged citizen, and to be part of the future of democracy if we can keep it. I truly like to know when my church and writing friends post something smart or soulful about what’s going on, or share ideas for how to show up for my neighbors. I also don’t want to miss photos of people’s new puppies, and celebrations, and grandchildren.

But I haven’t yet perfected the art of curating my feed, if it’s even possible anymore. The things I need and want to see come mixed with a whole lot of ads now, and even more outrage—some of it deserved, but usually not productive. I catch myself staring at my phone, breathing shallowly, deepening the frown line between my eyebrows, wondering how many minutes I just lost to despair and anger. Doom scrolling, at least for me, is a real thing.

So I was struck by a phrase I learned recently in a newsletter from writer Shawna Lemay, whose Transactions with Beauty posts always give me something lovely to consider. She pointed back to another source, and they pointed back to the original source who shared the term “Bloom Scrolling.”

Bloom Scrolling is a practice of consciously planting what will bloom for us in our fields of attention. Why not curate and nurture our digital lives so we scroll for what blooms rather than what serves up doom or gloom? Instead of mindless doom scrolling, we can intentionally look for what we find beautiful, hopeful, and creative, and plant those seeds in our digital lives, too. This is not a new idea, but it is a timely one. And I’m not a gardener, but I think it must be like planning your spring and summer garden in the dead of winter: choosing seeds, deciding where to plant them, and then later, pulling the weeds that inevitably sprout up so the seeds you intentionally chose and planted will actually bloom.

So here’s my Bloom Scrolling question for you: Who are the people you look to, or follow, or trust, as sources of nature, photography, poetry, art, design, and other beautiful things in your online or digital world? I may still ditch FB and IG completely, but if I do decide to intentionally curate my feed, I’d love some new artists, writers, and creative folk to follow.

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a writing prompt

What are some beautiful “blooms” you have scrolled (or strolled) past recently? Do they stay in your memory long enough to capture on the page? Make a list or, if you are feeling up to it, scroll briefly through your social media or your recent photos or texts looking specifically for something blooming beautiful. Then write about it.

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two writing opportunities for you

1. I’m teaching a four-week online course for Columbia Theological Seminary’s Center for Lifelong Learning, called “Mourning Pages: Writing as Spiritual Practice for Grief and Healing.” The course is designed for those who want to write through grief themselves, as well as those who might want to host similar writing groups in their own ministry settings. We will meet on Zoom on four Wednesdays— February 25, March 4, 11, and 18—from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM ET with additional asynchronous readings and participation. Space is available, but register soon. Find out more here: Mourning Pages

   

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2. Because I’m prepping for the Columbia course, I’m not leading any of the AWA Write Around the World workshops this coming February, but I can highly recommend them! All will use the method in which I was trained to lead workshops, which honors a writer’s unique voice in a supportive environment. Some great teachers, on all different days and times and subjects, all on a donation basis. Check it out here: Amherst Writers & Artists

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

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Here’s another poetic writing prompt I took away from a preaching workshop I attended recently. This one refers to an historical event from Christmas Eve, 1929 along the US/Mexican border crossing through two towns, both called Nogales, and where the poet Alberto Ríos grew up.

Almost a century later, as we cross through another Christmas season where border lines bear witness to greed and violence, perhaps remembering what we human beings are capable of can inspire us all.

You can find the poem online here, and listen to the poet read it himself by clicking below.

Christmas on the Border, 1929

—Alberto Ríos

Based on local newspaper reports
and recollections from the time.

1929, the early days of the Great Depression.
The desert air was biting, but the spirit of the season was alive.

Despite hard times, the town of Nogales, Arizona, determined
They would host a grand Christmas party

For the children in the area—a celebration that would defy
The gloom of the year, the headlines in the paper, and winter itself.

In the heart of town, a towering Christmas tree stood,
A pine in the desert.

Its branches, they promised, would be adorned
With over 3,000 gifts. 3,000.

The thought at first was to illuminate the tree like at home,
With candles, but it was already a little dry.

Needles were beginning to contemplate jumping.
A finger along a branch made them all fall off.

People brought candles anyway. The church sent over
Some used ones, too. The grocery store sent

Some paper bags, which settled things.
Everyone knew what to do.

They filled the bags with sand from the fire station,
Put the candles in them, making a big pool of lighted luminarias.

From a distance the tree was floating in a lake of light—
Fire so normally a terror in the desert, but here so close to miracle.

For the tree itself, people brought garlands from home, garlands
Made of everything, walnuts and small gourds and flowers,

Chilies, too—the chilies themselves looking
A little like flames.

The townspeople strung them all over the beast—
It kept getting bigger, after all, with each new addition,

This curious donkey whose burden was joy.
At the end, the final touch was tinsel, tinsel everywhere, more tinsel.

Children from nearby communities were invited, and so were those
From across the border, in Nogales, Sonora, a stone’s throw away.

But there was a problem. The border.
As the festive day approached, it became painfully clear—

The children in Nogales, Sonora, would not be able to cross over.
They were, quite literally, on the wrong side of Christmas.

Determined to find a solution, the people of Nogales, Arizona,
Collaborated with Mexican authorities on the other side.

In a gesture as generous as it was bold, as happy as it was cold:
On Christmas Eve, 1929,

For a few transcendent hours,
The border moved.

Officials shifted it north, past city hall, in this way bringing
The Christmas tree within reach of children from both towns.

On Christmas Day, thousands of children—
American and Mexican, Indigenous and orphaned—

Gathered around the tree, hands outstretched,
Eyes wide, with shouting and singing both.

Gifts were passed out, candy canes were licked,
And for one day, there was no border.

When the last present had been handed out,
When the last child returned home,

The border resumed its usual place,
Separating the two towns once again.

For those few hours, however, the line in the sand disappeared.
The only thing that mattered was Christmas.

Newspapers reported no incidents that day, nothing beyond
The running of children, their pockets stuffed with candy and toys,

Milling people on both sides,
The music of so many peppermint candies being unwrapped.

On that chilly December day, the people of Nogales
Gathered and did what seemed impossible:

However quietly regarding the outside world,
They simply redrew the border.

In doing so, they brought a little more warmth to the desert winter.
On the border, on this day, they had a problem and they solved it.

Copyright © 2024 by Alberto Ríos. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 22, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

a writing prompt

Find a word, a phrase, an image, or an idea in the poem and start there. Then, let your writing wander freely without any gate-keeping at the borders of your imagination or memory.

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December Writing Hour - Sat. Dec 20 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

holiday posting schedule

I’ve scheduled a few weeks off from regular posting to navigate Christmas as a solo pastor, and to spend time with family. Posts will resume on January 14. Remember you can always look back through the archive for writing prompts to try. I’ll see some of you on Saturday at the December Writing Hour. All my best to each of you this season. Keep writing!

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

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A conversation last week with a chatty wine-tasting host brought back memories of a long-ago train trip. Actually, there were two train trips that I can no longer distinguish between, but since it’s been almost twenty-five years, I’m forgiving my messy remembering. When our children were very small, we visited both the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer and the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad in Bryson City. Both trips involved a noisy steam engine train ride and a model train display. One trip included my dad looking for gifts for grandchildren, then wondering why all the hats in the gift shop had only the name Thomas. Neither trip included the Polar Express because the film had not yet made the book hugely popular.

While we had a wooden train set in the playroom that got plenty of play, we have never had an electric train, under our Christmas tree or anywhere. We have, however, stood around plenty through the years—at Biltmore, at the NC Arboretum, in toy stores, in BBQ restaurants—and imagined ourselves aboard the miniature engines and passenger cars, or as one of the frozen village inhabitants along the tracks. At Christmas, the magic of model trains seems magnified.

Here’s a poem about a model train at Christmas. It’s also about small children and small towns, memory and imagination, sensory images and somehow, incarnation. Like last week’s poem, this one came to me in a packet of poems shared in a preaching workshop, and I’m gladly passing it on to you.

Good poems are meant to be passed around. Round and round, like model train cars on a track to nowhere, and everywhere.

Model-Train Display at Christmas in a Shopping Mall Food Court
—by James Arthur

These kids watching so intently
on every side of the display
must love the feeling of being gigantic:
of having a giant’s power
over this little world of snow, where buttons
lift and lower
the railway’s crossing gate, or switch the track,
or make the bent wire topped with a toy helicopter
turn and turn
like a sped-up sunflower. A steam engine
draws coal tender, passenger cars, and a gleaming caboose
out from the mountain tunnel,
through a forest of spruce and pine, over the trestle bridge,
to come down near the old silver mine.

Maybe all Christmases
are haunted by Christmases long gone:
old songs, old customs, people who loved you
and who’ve died. Within a family
sometimes even the smallest disagreements
can turn, and grow unkind.

The train’s imaginary passengers,
looking outward from inside,
are steaming toward the one town they could be going to:
the town they have just left,
where everything is local
and nothing is to scale. One church, one skating rink,
one place to buy a saw.
A single hook-and-ladder truck
and one officer of the law. Maybe in another valley
it’s early spring
and the thick air is redolent of chimney smoke and rain,
but here the diner’s always open
so you can always get a meal. Or go down to the drive-in
looking for a fight. Or stay up
all night, so tormented by desire, you can hardly think.

Beyond the edges of the model-train display, the food court
is abuzz. Gingerbread and candy canes
surround a blow mold Virgin Mary, illuminated from within;
a grapevine reindeer
has been hung with sticks of cinnamon. One by one, kids
get pulled away
from the model trains: Christmas Eve is bearing down,
and many chores remain undone.

But for every child who leaves, another child appears.
The great pagan pine
catches and throws back wave on wave of light,
like a king-size chandelier, announcing
that the jingle hop has begun,
and the drummer boy
still has nothing to offer the son of God
but the sound of one small drum.

a writing prompt

Find a word, a phrase, an image, or an idea in the poem and start there. Let your writing chug along as it wishes, without stopping to plan or edit, and see where the engine of your memory and imagination take you.

Or, write about a model train, or a large train, if those are signaling for your attention. Enjoy.

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December Writing Hour - Sat. Dec 20 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is in two Saturdays. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

holiday posting schedule

I’ve scheduled a few weeks off from regular posting to navigate Christmas as a solo pastor, and to spend time with family. Look for a writing prompt next Wednesday, December 17, then posts will resume on January 14. I’ll see some of you online for the Writing Hour on December 20. Remember you can always look back through the archive for writing prompts to try. Holiday blessings to you all. Keep writing!

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

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Poetry is the gift that keeps giving. There is always a new poem to discover—even from poets you’ve known and loved for years. This one came to me through a preaching workshop I attended recently, and I just went down a deep satisfying internet trail about it.

It’s from Pádraig Ó Tuama. In a podcast episode on belonging, with Kate Bowler, he talks about how he has always been interested in form, like the Trinitarian formula both Protestants and Catholics use of “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” As an Irish peacemaker he has seen close up the destructive ways people in both groups have claimed to be acting “in the name of” shared values, yet the result is violence and harm. In the podcast and the poem, he wonders about using the form in a more “civic liturgy” of belonging, where we can confess the truth of what we’ve all been carrying. Perhaps we might find we all belong somewhere together.

Here’s the poem. If you’d like to hear the poet read it in his glorious voice, I’ve shared a video below. But I suggest reading it through yourself first, slowly.

In the Name

—by Pádraig Ó Tuama

In the name of goodness, of love and of broken community
in the name of meaning, of feeling and I hope you don’t screw me
in the name of darkness and light and ungraspable twilight
in the name of mealtimes and sharing and caring by firelight

In the name of action, of peace and human redemption
in the name of eating, of drinking and table confession
in the name of sadness, regret and holy obsession
in the holy name of anger, the spirit of aggression

In the name of forgive and forget, and I hope I get over this
in the name of fathers and mothers and unholy spirits
in the name of beauty and broken and beaten up daily
in the name of seeing our creeds and believing in maybe

We gather here, a roomful of strangers
and speak of our hopeland, and talk of our danger
to make sense of our thinking, to authenticate lives
to humanize feeling and stop telling lies

In the name of philosophy, of theology and who gives a damn
in the name of employment and study and finding new family
in the name of our passions, our lovings and indecent obsessions
in the name of prayer, of worship and demon possession

In the name of solitude, of quiet and holy reflection
in the name of the lost, the lonely and the without-direction
in the name of the early and the late and the wholly ineffectual
in the name of the straight, and the queer, transgender and  bisexual

In the name of bootclogs, and boobjobs and erectile dysfunction
schizophrenia, hysteria and obsessive compulsion
in the name of Jesus, and Mary and the mostly silent Joseph
in the name of speaking to ourselves, saying ‘this is more than I can cope with’

In the name of touch-up, and break-up, and breakdown-and-weeping
in the name of therapy, and Prozac, and of full-hearted breathing
in the name of sadness and madness and years-since-I’ve-smiled
in the name of the Unknown, the Alien, and of the Wholly-In-Exile

In the name of the named and the unnamed and the names of the nameless
in the name of the prayers that repeat ‘I wish that I could change this’
in the name of goodness and kindness and intentionality
in the name of harbour, and shelter and family.

© Pádraig Ó Tuama

You can find the poet at the Poetry Unbound newsletter, the On Being podcast, and at his website: https://www.padraigotuama.com

a writing prompt

Find a word, a phrase, an image, or an idea in the poem, and start writing there.

Or add your own stanzas to the poem. In what names that matter to you, and are familiar to you—to which you and yours belong, for better or for worse—do you offer a prayer or a blessing for today?

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like/comment/share

Join in the conversation with others in the comments. Tell me what you think about the prompt, or where your writing takes you.

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Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!

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Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.