Deus Misereatur

 In the past two weeks I have sat down with, and listened to, three young men who are completely different. They have told me tales of how their inner voices have accused them, how their world has been consumed by feelings of doubt, dismay, and dread. Two have clinical diagnoses and the third doesn’t. But their internal stories that they have related to me have all voiced their obsession for vindicating themselves, fixing themselves, grasping for certitude, and more. They are haunted men, in some significant ways. “A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ” is the story of John Andrew Bryant, a caregiver, writer, and part-time street pastor in a small steel town outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has chronicled his plunge into mental illness and his gut-wrenching trek through the dark night of the soul in this 312-page paperback. As I read his tale, it struck me how similar – in all of the dissimilarities – these lives were. And I found that th...

  [From my weekly letter to my congregation sent today: 29 November 2023] Recently I sent out a prayer for Thanksgiving on social media. Several of you commented on it, one or two asked about its origin, and some of you used it as a family-gathering devotion. So, here’s the story. The prayer originally comes from William Bright and was published in his “Ancient Collects and Other Prayers” in 1864. That prayer caught the attention of some and was published in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer in 1928, and in the Presbyterian’s Book of Common Worship in 1946. It was from the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship (1946) that I first stumbled on it and fell in love with it. But, I felt like I needed to tweak it a bit. This is how it reads originally: O MOST loving Father, who willest us to give thanks for all things, to dread nothing but the loss of thee, and to cast all our care on thee, who carest for us; Preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, and grant that...