Like most people I have many identifiers. Currently I call myself writer, author, minister of Word and sacrament in the ELCA, and child development specialist. I am also a mother, widow, wife, sister, and daughter. My pronouns are she/hers.
Each year during Holy Week and into Easter, I am reminded of how thin this time is. How tears form and fall after many months of dry eyes. How hearts fill with sadnesses assumed transformed into something resembling new life.
My therapist says these times are dips into small pockets of what once was. Not places demanding we stay or get stuck in. Just revisit. For a few hours or days. Until this small opening reseals and the present now invites us back in. Leaving us with another memory. This one, a remembrance that we loved, love, and will continue to love.
For more writings on grief, trauma recovery, and this time of year, visit my post Easter Early in Grief.
Lord, hear my prayer, listen to my cry for mercy; in your faithfulness and righteousness come to my relief. Do not bring your servant into judgment, for no one living is righteous before you. The enemy pursues me, he crushes me to the ground; he makes me dwell in the darkness like those long dead…
I shall be like those who go down to the pit…
Psalm 143: 1-3, 7 NRSV
MEDITATION
The afterlife of traumatic experience wants us to feel confused, shamed, and guilty. These remains from what happened to us take over every cell in our bodies, settling in for an extended stay while we beg for relief, mercy, safety.
Healing, in the form of trauma recovery, removes this confusion, eradicates our shame, and brings guilt back down to a usable size. Healing reforms our crushed postures into expanded ones. Healing helps us see, feel, and hear God’s mercy.
PRAYER
God, hear my prayer. Listen to my cry for mercy. Relieve my agony. Give me courage to heal. Amen.
Yep, that’s right. The day is finally approaching in which I will be ordained in Word & Sacrament in the ELCA! The story leading up to this day is long, most of my life really. So after decades of waiting on myself and the church, here I am saying “yes”!
Attend Ordination Online
You are welcome to attend my ordination online on the YouTube Channel, “GatheredByGrace.”
Called to a Congregation
The good people of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Rock Island, Illinois called me to be their pastor on January 8, 2023. I began ministry among them immediately (the very next day). This amazing community of Christians is loving and missional. Their tag line is “a place for all people.” And they work at it! They also look outside their walls to see the deep needs of the world. Then they get involved out there in the world, working toward being part of God’s kingdom here on earth.
An Excerpt From Something I’m Writing
I love Jesus who is with God and the Holy Spirit. But not Jesus alone. Not Jesus the metaphor for a godly, dystopian superhero who shows up in Disney-style miracle scenes. Not Jesus the fictionalized character in a story I don’t want to read because it causes me and others harm. Not Jesus the caricature, the gross distortion of who and what God is. Not Jesus allowing human all-knowing-ness of God to obliterate the mystery of God.
Upcoming Events
My public schedule slows in this season of my life.
Thursdays find me teaching a pastoral care class in listening, caring, and assessing for Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. Teaching like writing is a love of mine and I am grateful for this unexpected return to the classroom.
Spirit fills me each Sunday when leading worship and preaching at St. John’s.
“…What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.” *
Reflection
Fallow field. Ground still, frozen. Plowed and harrowed for future days. Covered in frost or snow. Waiting for sowing, tending, harvesting.
Dormant, but only to the unobservant. Moisture seeping, trickling down. Absorbed through minute openings in hardened ground. Causing movement beneath. Winter’s soil preparing, ripening. For springtime’s burst. Energy creating improvisations, mistakes, hidden gems, harvest, and a few weeds.
In the beginning, healing is like standing on dormant ground. Cold seeping up through soles. Life numb, standing still. Feeling like a small speck in life’s vastness. Waiting to trust the un-death of dormancy.
Healing Practice: Unseen Seeds of Hope
Keep a list today. On a small piece of paper. One you can fold up. Fit in your pocket. Carry with you for writing on. Perhaps with a stubby pencil recording the moments, even fleeting ones, in which hope settles on your heart for a second as a realization, a discovery, or an opening into what’s possible. Name these moments of unexpected joy, mercy, compassion. Gathered for sowing in future’s field.
Prayer
God, witness in me this day what I cannot see. Witness the tiny seeds of healing and hope I sow in my own fallowness. Witness in me my life-force still living. Witness in me my surprise in discovering unexpected joys. Receive my thanks for what I do not know will bless me this day and tomorrow and in my own healing. Amen.
As with all liturgies, this confession and litany has a life of its own. The words printed here will shift and changevoicing the needs of each context.If you use this confession and litany in any form I ask that you attribute the work to me even if you add or modify the work. The attribution may look like: “Our Confession and Litany today is based on a litany and confession written by Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez.”
Please also let me know you are using it. Thank you.
The assembly prays using these or similar words.
We, white bodied, white raised, and whiteness perpetuating women confess to God, ourselves, and to all others.
We confess we have social privileges and advantages other women do not have.
We confess we ignore other women do not have what we have.
We confess we take for granted the gifts of these advantages.
We confess we unconsciously and consciously think we deserve what we have over what other women do not have.
We confess we buy into the view that what we have is scarce and cannot feed all women.
We confess we hoard life’s bounty and in doing so allow others to suffer.
We confess there is so much we do not know and do not see.
We confess all that we leave undone each day for the unity of all human beings.
We confess we partake in communal sins of omission.
We confess to you, God ,and to all women and in doing so ask to be released from these evils imploding within us and out into the world so that we take only what we need. Making sure all are fed. Joining in the work of bringing your love-in-action into reality for all women.
We confess.
We, white bodied, white raised, and whiteness perpetuating women lament to God.
We cry out and in doing so our tears follow the tears of women kept down, aside, and under in an ongoing parade of lament before God.
We wail and in doing so tell the world we create ourselves and all others in God’s image. Not in man’s. Not others’ gender norms. Not from others’ perceptions of beauty. Not in human-made values of class structure. Not in empire’s power. Not in colonialism’s tyranny. Not in racism, genderism, or faith-ism. We lament, cry, and wail and in doing so imagine who we can be and are not yet.
We lament and in doing so ask for courage and tenacity in bringing your kingdom to earth. We feel weak in the face of this work. We lament this untruth of our weakness allowing this lie to dissipate and disappear into the atmosphere. We seek then through you O, God, to manifest your goodness and love which can only be fully revealed when all of creation and all of creation’s people are seen, heard, valued, and healed.
We lament.
We, white bodied, white raised, and whiteness perpetuating women feel.
We feel the pings, pinches, and punches of our battered bodies.
We feel the words we have not been allowed to say screaming from our souls out into the world.
We feel compassion for ourselves and for what we have not been allowed to reveal.
We feel and embrace the heroic and lifesaving ways of our bodies.
We feel what we know, do not know, do not want to know.
We feel, holding hope for all women to heal.
We feel understanding all bodies are one. One in God.
We feel.
We, white bodied, white raised, and whiteness perpetuating women begin and continue healing.
We heal, transforming our pain, the pain perpetuating damage onto other women, into goodness.
We heal as a continuation of life itself.
We heal, health giving new birth to new life.
We heal, tending all new life as if raising our own beloved children.
We heal, each one of us healing so that healing becomes greater than hurting.
We heal, healing becoming a way of life, one eradicating the wounding of hiding, avoiding, and blinding the hurt of hurting.
We heal.
We, white bodied, white raised, and whiteness perpetuating women act.
We act by refusing to accept the story told to us from birth that we are somehow different and better than other women.
We act in ways of public compassion first feeling the sorrows and joys of all women everywhere while no longer remaining silent or still.
We act, learning day by day how to bring God’s kingdom to earth.
We act, each of us becoming justice in words, deeds, marches, votes, public service, and answering yes to where we are called to serve.
We act in prayer. Never stopping. Never ceasing. Always praying. Until all women are whole. All girls are never torn apart.
We act as love. Building love out of healing, compassion, respect, and willingness.
Together, we white bodied, white raised, and whiteness perpetuating women lift up these prayers to you O, God. Trusting in your infinite mercy, grace, and spirit-filled direction. Breathing in your transformative power. Allowing its infusion to build our courage for the work to be done in us, among us, and around us. Amen.
Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez 