Welcome to Begin Again!
North End Beach, Isle of Iona. Looks Caribbean, feels Hebridean.
Hi, I’m Christina. Vocationally, I’m a writer and a pastor, in training to become a spiritual director, too. Personally, I’m a salty snack enthusiast, a minister of memes, a lover of the road. On this Substack, I write about progressive faith and pilgrim wanderings. I often riff on stories from the Bible and meditate on theology and Christian history through the lens of my own life.
Why Begin Again?
In the summer of 2024, I took a leave of absence from pastoral ministry. Some friends called it a sabbatical. Others called it a career break. I called it my grown-up gap year. My favorite phrase? A quest, answering a question: What is my work to do in this world now?
I walked half of the Camino Frances route of the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain. I lived and volunteered as a kitchen assistant at an abbey on the remote Isle of Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland.
Then I spent some time waiting and writing and walking in my hometown of Huntington, West Virginia, as I sorted through some health issues and tried to finish a draft of a novel about God, grief, and love set in my native Appalachia. Sometimes I write a reflection called Not-a-Sunday-Sermon where I set the passages from the Revised Common Lectionary (the common readings that a lot of churches read on Sundays) alongside my own life. I spent two months in Cusco, Peru, studying Spanish, living with a host family, and only occasionally visiting the official KFC of the Incas. Then I worked in the anthropology and paleontology museums/gift shops at Ghost Ranch in the desert outside Abiquiu, New Mexico, ancestral land of the Tewa people and stomping ground of Georgia O’Keeffe. (Reflections on this coming soon, I promise.)
In my old church parsonage in Raleigh, North Carolina, I hung a framed print in my entryway. In blue script, it read: Always we begin again. The phrase sometimes feels hopeful, sometimes leaves me exhausted. Again?
The quote is attributed to St. Benedict, whose Rule I’ve never actually read. The print reads “after St. Benedict,” which often means that some phrase is attributed to that famous holy person like St. Francis or John Wesley, but nobody can actually find proof that they said it. Benedict probably meant that each day is a new beginning.
It felt right for Begin Again to be the title of this little…Whatever It Is. As I told friends, I’m profoundly in-between right now. Between homes, jobs, states. Over the last forty years, I’ve had a strange number of beginnings. From divorce, to changing churches, to leaving fundamentalism and high-control religion, to living abroad. Somehow, hilariously, I’ve also managed to make my Camino de Santiago have two beginnings — the first time, in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the summer of 2024, and hopefully, the second half, sometime soon. And, in a plot twist that I should have seen coming, I’m back in North Carolina. Beginning again.
I usually think I need to wipe the slate clean, become a new person, reinvent. But what if beginning again means something different, composting the harm and difficulty and trauma, planting the seeds of the beauty and joy, growing something new that is rooted in the old? In a time of Christian nationalism, what does it mean to follow the divine-but-gloriously-human Jesus, who sought liberation and justice? When it feels easier to give up faith altogether when it’s wounded so many (even me), how do you walk a different way forward?
The tagline on this Substack is: meditations on progressive faith and pilgrim wanderings. Faith and pilgrimage (and almost everything, really) requires constant beginning again. You don’t pray once, write once, serve once, travel once, walk once, love once. It is a constant beginning again.
It can be exhausting, or it can be exhilarating. Usually, it’s both. I’m so grateful to have you reading and that we’re in this together. Let’s begin again.
-Christina
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