June 8 is a big day at St. Clare's! At 8:30, we'll celebrate a quiet Pentecost service in the St. Francis chapel. You're welcome to bring a favorite poem that reminds you of Pentecost to share, if you wish. At 10:30, our Cantabile choir will roll out our theme for the...

Forty days after Easter, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Ascension. The story of Jesus ascending to heaven is told in Luke’s Gospel and in Acts, with minor differences (even though scholars believe the same person or group wrote both books). Jesus and the...

A teacher of mine used to say that conducting operas / musicals was like learning how to drive a stick shift car. Your body and your brain are working on multiple planes simultaneously, and once you’ve done that, driving an automatic vehicle (ONLY playing an...

This Sunday we will be celebrating the baptism of Tommy and Theo Daniels! We’ll officially welcome them into our church family and reaffirm our own commitment to follow the way of Christ, while the parish community promises to help them and their family grow into...

I have quite a few anecdotes that make it easy to explain why I love being a priest at St. Clare’s so much. Probably the most succinct one, though, is that a year or so ago I asked a few folks “what if one Sunday morning we sent all the adults downstairs for bible...

God seems to have a little hobby of renaming people at dramatic points in their lives.   Jacob’s grandparents Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah after God visited them to tell them they would have a child. Many centuries later, Jesus renamed Simon as Peter...

Recently while I was looking for something else, I found a pile of cloth face masks in many colors. I started sewing them by hand 5 years ago during all those early-Covid-era Zoom meetings when I desperately needed something to do with my hands to keep my anxiety...

In these weeks of so much destruction, the themes of Ash Wednesday have stayed present to me as Lent has unfolded: the finitude and potential present in ash. There have also been, as there so often are, a lot of emails, and so I hadn’t caught up on Kate Bowler’s...

During the next few months, Eliza and I are planning a few new ways to help engage kids in what’s going on during communion. Whatever works: First of all, there’s no right or wrong way for them to engage, and each kid is different (and then they grow and change and...

by the Rev. Toby Darrah In our “Love God, Love God’s World” discussion group this week, one of the things we talked about was the ways in which we feel more connected to the earth. I mentioned that something I’ve noticed is that I feel more connected not only to the...

One thing that’s been especially important to me in these overwhelming months is to make space for the difficult emotions- grief, fear, sadness. Because when I make space, I notice that these emotions don’t actually last forever, and they don’t take up all the space...

I have to admit, I sometimes struggle to pray with the Psalms. Some are lovely and joyful with wonderfully poetic expressions of the greatness of God. Some seem kind of irrelevant for prayer purposes; Psalm 45, for example, seems to be a description of a royal...