James Derkits

I still feel grateful to have started my ordained ministry serving with The Rev. Beth Fain as my rector at St. Mary's, Cypress. Beth was at St. Mary's for over 20 years, and she was there for so long, in part, because she follows that commandment about honoring the sabbath and keeping it holy. Not to the letter, but the spirit that "most often broken" of the commandments as she would say. (She now works on the Diocese of Texas staff, and still teaches about sabbath.) We do not live in a culture that honors sabbath. As I've learned, it's about taking time to rest, reflect, and do those things that are restorative; it is spending time with God, in ways that support your own physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual health. For me, that is often running, surfing, writing, and playing music. After Eli gets out of school, it's playing with him. When Laura and I get to take a day together, even better. My sabbath-day happens to be on Friday, and there ...

Remember that you are dust...or sand, and salt, and water, and all sorts of decomposed matter. I got into a conversation with a couple of friends recently about what we are saying to our congregations as we smudge a cross of ash on people's heads and repeat the phrase, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." In one sense it remembers the second creation story in the book of Genesis when God forms the human from the dirt. It also recalls that our bodies are composed of recycled material that died, fell to the earth, fed plants, was processed by our mothers through food, and eventually, that old decomposed material began to form us, and then we started taking in the food (from the dust) and processing it ourselves. It recalls the miraculous quality of our very existence! It helps me to recollect that I've come from the prima materia of the earth, and yes, I will someday return to it again to eventually fertilize another garden for another generatio...

Thank you for taking time to read this, I hope it is worth your time.  We only have 24 hours a day, and if we are living a healthy life, about eight of those hours are spent sleeping. How do you spend the other 16? I have, in the past, led people thought a process of examining (not just a day, but) a week of hours, to determine how they spend their time. It is a way to examine what you actually place value in; similar to examining your finances to create a budget it can help you be intentional about the way your precious time is spent. It's interesting to compare things like how much time is spent watching TV verses how much time is spent in prayer. That may lead to pondering what might be influencing your decisions. The question about time comes up for me, because in my work I am reminded that our time is not infinite; not in this way: the familiar, earthly pilgrimage. It's part of a broader awareness that everything we have is a gift from God. This breath I am breathing i...

I get into the sentimental side of Christmas; that snow covered, Hallmark Movie Channel, Rudolf, and wanting for Two Front Teeth; all of that goes on display in the world earlier and earlier each year. It's fun to put on those tacky sweaters and eat too much turkey. I get into that side of Christmas like most people (though I don't go shopping the day after Thanksgiving.) There is another side to Christmas that is tangent to that worldly, fun, memory-lane sentimental side of Christmas, and it's the Jesus part. Sometimes you can find a little baby tucked away behind the big-ol-Santa statue, but even that little baby can get lost in the fluff of nostalgia. We hear very little of Jesus birth and childhood, and most of that is about what was happening around him--how the world responded to his Incarnation (when God put on flesh.) Jesus started causing trouble the moment he was born. The local authorities were out to get him because he threatened the order of things. There...

I'm not sure when my definition began to crystalize and then change, but it was somewhere around high school. I'm fortunate to have two very loving parents and four older sisters who have always told they loved me. I've never doubted I am loved by my family. For that I am grateful. I have heard love preached about in the Episcopal church my whole life. Love has always been part of my understanding of God (one of my favorite hymns is still "God is Love.") In my teenage years that sense of God's love was definitely more closely related to the Greek word for love "Eros." Eros is the creative, generative, exciting love of a new relationship. It is also the love of the artist for the art. Love is the dancer around the fire, and the excitement of a surfer paddling out on a good day. It feels good, it gets creative juices going, but it comes and it goes. It is fleeting. When two people feel they are not "in love" anymore, Eros has moved on ...

I was in North Carolina for a time this summer, trying to get some time to grieve, and reconnect with my family. I went on almost-daily runs up a little mountain road. Usually it was about a three mile run, sometimes further. Before I would go run, though, I would wake up, make coffee, and go sit on a porch to pray, write, read, and get in touch with what I was feeling that day. Less than eight months after Hurricane Harvey, two of my nieces died less than two months apart. It still doesn't seem real, and I've written about them elsewhere--but that's what I carried with me, and my family and I still carry the grief of losing Beatrice and Erin. On my runs in the Smokey Mountains, I would let that emotion out. When I felt anger, I would allow the anger to surge through me as I pushed forward and wore myself out. When I felt sadness, I would take a slower run, and allow the tears to fall when they were ready. When I didn't know what I was feeling, I would allow the confu...

Twelve years ago, I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, in Cypress, Texas, outside of Houston. I grew up in the Episcopal Church and about the time I got my driver's license I was talking with a friend about becoming a priest. From there, there was a lot of testing, questioning, wondering, and the way kept opening through college, after I graduated and worked as a youth minister in downtown Houston, and through three years of seminary, and many discernment meetings throughout; what I sensed in me as a call to priesthood was continually affirmed by my church community, so on January 6, 2007, I was ordained.  The ordination service in our  Book of Common Prayer , reads that I am "to work as a pastor, priest, and teacher, together with [my] bishop and fellow presbyters, and to take my share in the councils of the Church...to proclaim by word and deed the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to fashion [my] life in accordance with its precepts...to love and serve the people a...