James Derkits

     When I was about the age my son is now, starting my middle school journey of transformation, my dad printed out a table blessing for me to memorize. We had a glass top on our dining table so he slipped it under the glass, and I got to read it each night at dinner until I could say it by heart: "Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all thy mercies, and make us mindful of the needs of others; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." It's a simple prayer that is packed with pithy wisdom that I return to again and again.      Through adolescence, of the things we might become mindful of, others' needs can fall off the radar. It is a time when our ego comes into it's own: We discover we are separate from our parents with our own ideas and desires. Our sexuality awakens and we find attraction to people we may have been repulsed by just months before. It is a time of discovering peer pressure and peer competition. Through those delightful years and into earl...

Originally Published in the Diocese of West Texas Reflections  Magazine I remember this summer when every week there was news of more killings. I felt overwhelmed, and felt sick and helpless. It also pushed me to remember to pray. Since I could not turn back time and somehow save the senseless killing, the ripping apart of God’s family, I invited people near to me to gather and pray for peace. Then I felt another weight: how are we to pray for peace? I was frozen not by the need for peace and the end of senseless killing, but by another ripping apart of God’s family. The political climate in which we live. There is certainly no peace there. Public discourse rips us apart on a different level. It seems like the ones who we are to turn to for governance are at such opposition, it led Kendrick Lamar to call them “Demo-Crips and Re-Blood-icans” referencing the gang like mentality. Would someone out there be offended if we pray for peace? What does peace mean?  Then I realized, we ...

I cannot assume we grew up with the same teaching and therefore childhood understanding of repentance. I am  actually  pretty certain that the teaching I heard, and  my  childhood understanding  I walked away with do not match.  A psychologist friend recently pointed out the many perspectives in any conversation: What you mean and what I mean; What I think you mean, and what you think I mean; What you think I think you mean Repentance is a powerful word, and has been used and misused in many ways. I love words, and so when a word triggers a reaction in me or I notice that it does in others, I like to dig in, and see what I can find.  From my childhood and young adulthood connotations, my honest and initial response to the word repentance, and hearing a call to repent is that I must have done something wrong. I've been a bad boy, and I need to be a good boy to appease an angry God. I have images of street corner preachers holding signs listing a litany ...

I count myself fortunate that so far I have not been hospitalized or taken on medication for clinical depression. I have close friends and family who will help me get the attention I need if that ever becomes the case. I have experienced a different sort of depression that comes with life events. In particular it came following our hurricane and then the deaths of two of my nieces the spring after. The grief that shadowed over me, and still remains is another sort of depression. That sort also comes with sickness and injury.  I want to write here about a third type of depression that comes along from time to time in life's journey. It emerges as a haunting, and can help reveal where we are stuck in life. It can prompt us to wake up in the middle of the night with a dream or a thought we would rather ignore. Those  promptings , and this sort of depression I have learned to see as a gift, though one I would usually rather not accept at first. Again, I am fortunate to have people...

π is for Spirit I took the very minimum Greek language required from my seminary to graduate and become a priest. Sometimes I wish I had taken more, but more than that I am grateful to have the little bit I learned. It comes in really helpful sometimes ;  I   like to   use a Bible that has the English and Greek side-by-side to understand the original language of the New Testament.  In a recent study, I came across one of my favorite Greek words :   the word for Spirit. It is transliterated  pneuma , and is related to our English word, pneumonia, which refers to a sick spirit or breath. The word   pneuma   is   that gift given to the first Apostles,   it is what  empowered a virgin to be come   a mother, and   it   was the mover to watch in the early church , known to us in English as the   Holy Spirit.  This person of God, who dwells in the eternal dance with the Father and the Son is not a God to be underst...

I pray that by the time you read this, I will have left for my sabbatical: time for a pastor to be away from day to day parish life for spiritual renewal. I had planned to take this sabbatical spring of 2020 with the theme "Create in me a clean heart," from Psalm 51. I hoped to spend my time in play, performing music, praying, and producing (a record and a book.) It was all mapped out, and the day after Ash Wednesday  last year , I hit the road with a friend to Gulfport Mississippi to perform the first concert in a series to kick-off my sabbatical. I had already recorded the music, all songs about the Incarnation, Teachings, and Passion of Christ, called "Love One Another." ( I didn't make up that title , by the way.) Then we all know what happened in the world mid-March. As I quipped in a new song I wrote that month, "the world got infected: no more handshakes, no more shows..."  It is with more humility that I approach sabbatical this time around. I ...

  All Shall Be Well I have encountered the writings and teachings of Dame Julian of Norwich several times along my spiritual journey. Living in England through the black plague in the late 1300's to early 1400's, she got very sick to the brink of death, and had 16 visions of  Christ she called showings. She wrote them down, and then spent the rest of her life writing more about her experience and what it meant to her and the rest of the world. I was unaware until recently that she only became an anchoress (a monastic living "anchored" to a church, but in a solitary cell) after she received the Showings. It was after the sickness that she went into solitude to write though still in relationship with her church and community. She was in the thick of the pandemic before any understanding of germs, vaccines, or how the plague spread. It wiped out half of England's population so she lost about half of the people she knew. Her  Showings  are worth reading, or even a b...