The Forward Day by Day Archives

Most of my relatives live on the Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota. We are Oglala Lakotas. Around 1983, my parents moved back to the reservation after accepting a call to a new ministry. What was clear then was the extreme poverty: the area always made the top five list of being among t....

Sometimes I wonder how certain actions by others have influenced me for years, if not decades. When I was in my teens, I remember watching a news report about a woman in Denver, Colorado, who served hot meals to the homeless out of the trunk of her car. I don’t remember is if she did this once a y....

Christ is the living stone, the cornerstone, in the foundation of the church. When I think about this imagery, I am reminded of certain parts of the Lakota creation story and a ceremony. The creation story begins with Inyan (the stone), which is considered the oldest living spirit. In the ceremony, ....

How many of us can give away all of our possessions and money to follow Jesus today? We can go down the path of the prosperity gospel, or we can allegorize such passages or gloss over them by saying that what Jesus really meant was this, that, and the other. Surely Jesus doesn’t want us to give up....

When I responded to the call to the priesthood, I had to take several steps before I was ordained. The same process continues more or less today for most prospective clergy. It goes something like this: Meet with your priest, then the vestry, and next the bishop. Then more meetings with diocesan com....

I can’t pinpoint exactly when American politics first began to fissure and split into what is today: a two-party system, blue state or red state, liberal or conservative. The list goes on and on. Perhaps it has always been split. I’m almost certain that everyone would say that their officeholder....

My dad told a story about how one of his old relatives, who I will call Blind Man, sought out another man to exact vengeance. The other man had publicly shamed him, and it must have been bad because Blind Man planned to shoot him. He decided to wait somewhere along the trail that his foe took to go ....

What is your average Sunday attendance? How many families with children do you have coming on Sunday? How big is your children’s program?

These are some of the questions and comments that one of my Native colleagues had to endure at every clergy gathering.....

Wah’wala or humility is one of the seven virtues of the Lakota. To be wah’wala means you never speak highly of yourself and you always put others first without seeking recognition. Many of the past leaders of the Oglala Lakota were wah’wala. Though some had their det....

Distressed isn’t a word I use when describing how I feel after a tough event. I am more likely to say that I am stressed out, or in other cases, sad and grieving.

For me, distressed indicates a combination of anxiety, worry, fear, and sadness. It is a str....

A friend of mine once told me that Revelation was the first book of the Bible that she read. To this day, she has never really understood its meaning or why it is included in the Bible. I was in that camp too for a long time.

Revelation was also the first bo....

For the last twenty years, I have used a group Bible Study method that is prescribed in a gospel-based discipleship prayer book published by the Episcopal Church’s Indigenous Ministries Office in the late 1990s. The three-step process entails reading the gospel appointed for the upcoming Sunday or....

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” His words still ring true today.

In my early twenties, I went to live in an Episcopal intentional communit....

In 2019, the Most Rev. Don Tamihere, archbishop of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, invited us to spend a week visiting some of the Maori communities and churches. This friendship had its beginnings a decade earlier after the Maori churches sent two of their young people t....

Psalm 88 reminds me of when I first got clean and sober. Like the psalmist in the depths of the Pit, I felt like I had hit bottom. But could I have gone lower than that? Was there still a foundation to stand on? I burned all my bridges, and people avoided me. I was spiritually bankrupt.

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A few years ago, my wife and I spent a day with a French bread baker learning a bit about bread making. Life is flour, water, and salt, she told us, as she showed us how to use levain to start our bread.

I’ve continued the learning in our own kitchen and h....

I live in a time and place where there is a superabundance of fresh food at my disposal. I can go to the grocery store and make a purchase from an overwhelming selection of foodstuff at any time of the day.

During the growing season, farmers plant an array ....

Who are our storytellers today? In the Native communities, they are our elders and holy men and women. As that generation passes, so do the stories that they carry. Hopefully, we heard the stories enough times that some of us remember and learned something from them and will be the next generation o....

In 1986, the U.S. Congress directed the president to proclaim a week in November as American Indian Week. By 1990, the week became an entire month.

When I was a kid, I had to endure the annual Pilgrim and Indians, turkey, harvest, and giving-thanks programs....

Soon after I was called to be the priest in the church I now serve, a woman I will call Bev wanted a quick word with me just before the start of the service. The thought that she was going to say something jarring and distract me before worship passed through my mind. Instead, what she had to say ma....