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In this week’s newsletter, Mother Liz draws inspiration from Archbishop Sarah Mullally walking the 87-mile Becket Camino pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, traveling at “slow, human speed” as she prepares for her new role. The rector connects this ancient practice to Holy Week, when we follow Jesus step by step through his final days—using our bodies and imaginations to walk the Passion story together. She invites us to enter Holy Week’s liturgies fully, starting with next week’s Palm Sunday observance, finding in this deliberate, embodied pilgrimage “strong medicine, nourishment, strength and healing for our profoundly challenging times.”

This week, the rector explores the gospel story of the man born blind—a dramatic, often hilarious narrative in which Jesus heals with mud and spit while religious authorities grow increasingly certain the healing is impossible or illegitimate. At the story’s pivot, the healed man offers simple testimony: “I don’t know if he is a sinner. One thing I know. I was blind and now I see.” Mother Liz asks what we know from our own experience that challenges assumptions or contradicts what authorities insist is true, inviting us to follow the blind man’s path: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

In this week’s newsletter, Mother Liz reflects on the devastating escalation of war in the Middle East and shares a powerful pastoral letter from Archbishop Hosam Naoum, whose Anglican Province spans every nation now engaged in combat—from Iran enduring bombardment to Cyprus, the Gulf states, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The archbishop’s words help us imagine what it means to shepherd congregations on all sides of the conflict, refusing to see neighbors as enemies “whether they be in Tehran, Tel Aviv, or the military bases of the Gulf.” Mother Liz calls us to join his urgent threefold appeal: unceasing prayer, Christian love across divisions, and keeping the doors of reconciliation open as we work courageously for peace.

In this week’s newsletter, the rector explores the gospel story of Nicodemus, a religious leader who comes to Jesus under cover of night, seeking yet fearful. Jesus speaks mysteriously of being “born from above” and compares the Spirit to wind that “blows where it chooses” — confounding Nicodemus but stirring something deeper. Mother Liz invites us to notice where the Spirit-wind is blowing in our own Lenten journey, making space for uncertainty and tentative steps toward transformation.

This week, the rector offers a Lenten prayer by Jan Richardson that embraces the spiritual wilderness as a place of self-discovery rather than escape. The poem acknowledges the inner wildness, hunger, and thirst we encounter in desert seasons, while asking not for removal from the journey but for “tough angels, sweet wine, strong bread: just enough” to sustain us through this time of transformation and unexpected grace.