Do you know the name Matthew Fox? He’s a former Roman Catholic priest who was kicked of the church because of his expansive spirituality. Almost fifty years ago he embraced feminist theology, calling God “Mother,” and instead of original sin he talked about original blessing.

Years ago I read an essay about Fox and the creative ways he was practicing his spirituality, and I still remember what he said to an interviewer as he came out of Native American sweat lodge. Asked is there was a lesson that he’d learned there in the heat,  Matthew Fox smiled and said, “More joy.” 

Back when I was a teenager, we got an assistant minister at our church. He was young, free-spirited, kind of radical, at least for us in those days. Everyone loved him. Before preaching, he’d say this prayer: “God grant us the courage to seek the truth, come when it may, cost what it will.”

“Holy mother, life bestowing, bid our was and warfare cease.
Fill us all with grace o’er flowing. Teach us how to live in peace.”

This Easter, and every Easter I suppose, I feel this tug between the churchy, theological Easter with its story of the empty tomb and its promise of resurrection, and the earthy, natural Easter that celebrates the coming of spring, and our earth awakening again. Which is also a resurrection story, isn’t it?

I first came here a little over 11 years ago, in the late winter of  2013.  My wife and I had bought our home nearby in Haverhill a few months prior, and by the time we had fully moved and settled in, I was completely sick of thinking about material things.  

Though I had not regularly attended a church in decades, I was looking to kindle my spiritual life again.

It’s Palm Sunday, the day in the Christian tradition that remembers the symbolic story of Jesus coming into Jerusalem with his followers to celebrate the festival of freedom called Passover. It’s the start of Holy Week, when Christians remember Jesus getting into trouble with the authorities, then betrayed by his friend, being arrested and killed. 

My wife Jessica and I both grew up around here. We knew each other briefly in high school in the mid-90’s, neither was impressed with the other, then moved away and lived our separate lives. Years later in 2004 we met up again, this time we decided the other was actually pretty cool, and got married. And by the time Jess and I moved to Haverhill in 2008 we were ready to have kids. We decided we wanted to give our kids some kind of church experience. We talked about religion and church and what our upbringings were like. Neither of our childhoods were particularly religious. We’d both been through first communion and confirmation, so I guess…Catholic? But it was something that, as prospective parents, we decided was important. Our reasoning went thusly: if we introduce them to religion at a young age, then later on they’ll be less likely to join a cult. Better they learn it from us, than on the streets. She had settled on a belief in a higher spiritual power, and I had recently discovered I was an atheist. So the search began and the bar was low. During that time, about a year later, we learned one of us was pregnant. Then we learned it was twins.