Rest On The Flight Into Egypt By Hermann Von Kaulbach

some of you forget that american southerners and white people aren’t the only christians on earth and it’s very obvious in the jenny holzer richard siken knockoff poetry you write for your portland queer polycule.

At the Last Judgment I shall not asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners. That is all I shall be asked.

St. Maria of Paris, quoted in Fr. Roberto Ubertino, To Give a Beautiful Witness: The Rule of St. John the Compassionate Mission

God comes through my open window every night, presses His body against mine, and tells me that love will destroy me if i let it; and i must let it. i go back to sleep

Podgórski Cemetery in Kraków, Poland on the evening of All Saints Day.

Read more about the origins of the custom in Poland here: Dziady / Zaduszki / Pominki.

Photos © Krzysztof Kalinowski / LoveKraków.pl

Lyuba Yatskiv, Annunciation / Nativity / Theotokos in Paradise

happy pride month to religious queer people, who feel like they’re contradictions, or told that they’re contradictions, but stay true to these important parts of themselves anyway. happy pride to the queer religious people who have to explain their identities, and who have to defend their faith or their queerness in either circle.

i love you, i am one of you, thank you for being in this community with me.

as much as the concept of Jesus being a fairly normal lad has its charms, im personally very intrigued by the idea of him being just… extremely weird. not even in a mystical sense, just…….staggeringly BIZZARRE. 

you go to the well to get some water, and here’s Miriam’s boy, staring at the sky, completely still. his expression is unreadable. you hazard a hello and ask how he’s doing, and he slowly, unblinkingly, lowers his gaze on you (he’s 8 and is missing his frontal teeth, not that this is making you any less uncomfortable) and says “I cannot speak of the state of my being, Nathan son of Saul, my brother, but rejoice for the water you shall take today will be as pure as the soul of the children of Heaven”

…you start sweating

jesus recovering from top surgery

in an alchemical-medical manuscript, germany, 1529

source: Kassel, Universitätsbibliothek, 4° Ms. chem. 82, fol. 25 recto (detail).

Every time I have ever found God it has been from a group of outsiders.

Every picture of God that has ever looks like him has been made by people who never saw a Jesus that looked like themselves

I have never felt more at home than when listening to a gay person talk about God. I have never understood someone better than the lesbian Catholics who love to veil, or the transgender episcoples who see their transition as an opportunity to share in God's creation, or anyone who found God and then carved their own way to him.

When I sit in chapel, and the worship music feels like noise, I know there is a hymn being sung with a shaking voice that sounds just like Christ calling out for his father. When I see lessons written in script, I know there are sheets of construction paper printed in stock fonts on a family's kitchen table sent home from Sunday school teaching the same. When I get a hand out with Bible verses bought from Amazon, I know that someone has written the same verse in craft glue and collage and their blood.

I think God is present the most when the process of finding him is distinctly human; because I think he knows us, and makes the way he finds us human.