Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

change

  • When we paused the movie, my 7 year-old got in her pajamas without prompting. In that moment, I thought about how I actually miss the fights. The bedtime fights. The I don’t want to put on my pajamas I hate brushing teeth And Please can’t I stay up later Fights No fights. She just does…

  • We are shifting toward enlightenment. Not The Enlightenment, for we are leaving much of that behind. But a certain enlightened view of the world that is more than logic and rational, ideological and fearful, more than cynical and compassionate. We’re moving toward being real and being forgiving. I know this sounds pie in the sky…

  • As the candles are snuffed from our Easter liturgy and the only reminders of our celebration are the mountain of candy wrappers and plastic strips approximating grass, we go back to our lives as a return to normal, as if nothing is different. And the irony is lost on us all. We go about our…

  • Jesus’s call for the end of faith as we know it Now, Jesus isn’t pushing us toward a churchless faith, a religionless spirituality, or independent devotion. Jesus doesn’t attack the institution because it is an institution but because the leadership of the existing institution is corrupt. Because how they understand scripture is corrupt. Because the…

  • In the Middle

    The Transfiguration, Peter, and how it feels in the inbetween. The middle, the hinge point in Mark is the end of chapter 8, when Jesus tells the disciples what is about to happen to him and to the movement, and the beginning of chapter 9, when Jesus is transfigured on the mountain. This is the…