Dear Westwood Family, Last month, a beautiful, old, big jacaranda tree on my parsonage lawn fell over. I'm not sure exactly what prompted the fall: it happened just before midnight on a still night. Certainly, the soil underneath was saturated with water from recent rains. The...
Dear Westwood Family, This week, we are finishing up the parent's reading group that I started a few months ago. We read and discussed Dr. Becky Kennedy's book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want To Be. As a new parent and the parent...
Dear Westwood Family, Happy April! As I’m fairly sure none of you know about me, Easter is my favorite holiday. Partially for the birds and bunnies, partially because I love Spring, but mostly for the story behind it and the reminder it brings me each year...
Greetings Westwood Community, Peter doesn’t want Jesus to go to Jerusalem, and he lets him know. Jesus responds, “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus knows that he must turn his face towards his own death; he has lived a life of dangerous, radical love, and this is...
Greetings Westwood Community, On Easter, we get to open our doors to welcome our community to share the joy that is at the heart of our faith tradition as we celebrate resurrection. In a world that's so often divided by age and race, economic status, gender,...
Greetings Westwood Community, During Lent, we've been on a journey--the Loft has been talking about Pilgrimage, the Sanctuary and our young people have been following Peter's Wandering Heart, and our children even walked a labyrinth last Sunday. Since a beloved undergrad comparative religion class gave me...
Greetings Westwood Community, Today, I have two things that I want to say: First, I want to affirm our deep commitment to interfaith cooperation and respect, and our persistent opposition to antisemitism and hate speech. I am grateful that our church campus is located so close to...
Greetings Westwood Community, This last weekend, during Sunday worship in both of our gatherings, we celebrated and blessed the Claremont School of Theology (CST), which is now located on our campus. (They are, I should note, still finishing renovations in the Lower Helms Hall area, which will be...
Greetings Westwood Community, I have always understood Lent as a time of preparation, a time to sit and explore the depths of my inner world. As Howard Thurman notes in his sermon The Sound Of the Genuine (a sermon from which I constantly draw!), Lent is...
Dear Westwood Community, Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. I want to invite you to worship, online or on campus at noon, in our Sanctuary. Please know that you can also watch via YouTube any time afterwards. On Ash Wednesday, our worship includes...
Dear Westwood Community, Over the past year, we've been sharing more about our church on social media--especially including using video clips from worship as Instagram and Facebook Reels. A few posts have gotten quite a lot of attention--and (even better) allowed us to get messages that...
The Grammy Awards are this coming weekend, which has me, again, thinking about music, and what a gift it is to my faith. Singing, it becomes an embodied experience of prayer, turning my breath and the vibrations of notes into divine communication. Listening, it wraps...
Greetings Westwood UMC Family, This week, the Claremont School of Theology is hosting its first in-person classes on their new Westwood Campus, on our church campus; they are hosting two inter-term classes on campus this week. The renovation projects that are preparing the lower level of...
Greetings Westwood UMC Family, I pray this message finds you all doing well and that the new year has gotten off to a good start. As I am sure you are aware, today is a National Holiday, a day when we celebrate the life and legacy...
Greetings Westwood Family, Like me, you may have read news articles about splits and division in the United Methodist Church in recent weeks and months. Last month, a New York Times story described what's been happening through the lens of a large church in Texas that's...
Greetings Westwood Family, I pray this message finds you all doing well and that your New Year is off to an excellent start. For some, the new year marks an opportunity to make a concerted effort to change and grow; we often refer to this as...
I will light candles this Christmas. Candles of joy, despite all the sadness. Candles of hope where despair keeps watch. Candles of courage where fear is ever present. Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days. Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens. Candles of love to inspire all of my living. Candles that...
Dear Friends, In Christ’s birth, God becomes present among us. The divine and the humble are all wrapped up together. A child is laid in a manger, and heaven and earth erupt into song–singing of hope, and peace on earth. This year, may we have courage...
Dear Friends, I pray this note finds you all doing well during this holiday season. Throughout Advent the Loft community has been wrestling with the question, how does a weary world rejoice. And so, even as I write words of hope and wellness, I recognize that...
Dear Westwood Family, There are three, interconnecting prayers on my mind, today: First, a prayer of gratitude for art that has been deepening my prayer practice this season. The collage posted here, made by Liberty Worth of our congregation, is one of several pieces that hangs in...