Tracy M. Simmons

Faith and Values: Finding rest, whether on the Sabbath or not, is important

Because I write about faith, people often ask me what religion I am.

Faith and Values: Launching a community class focused on religious literacy

Faith and Values: Death of mentor is reminder it's never too early to reach out and say thank you

On a Friday morning in November, about two dozen people gathered at St. James Episcopal Church in Pullman to do something that has become increasingly rare in American life: talk honestly about politics without tearing each other apart.

For nine months, while my wife, Traci, and I waited for our son, I kept returning to one question like a meditation: What will he call me?

There were 15 of us on the ride for Alex Pretti. We gathered in Moscow, Idaho, on a chilly afternoon, some faces familiar, others new. We should have had a banner with his name on it – something to wave at passing cars, an invitation for other cyclists to join us. But we didn’t plan that far ahead. The call had gone out across the country: Ride for Alex. He was one of us, a cyclist, and he died on a Minneapolis street with federal bullets in his body.

There is a Buddhist practice I used to struggle with: the instruction to look at every person as if they were once your mother – someone who, in another life, cared for you completely, asking nothing in return. I couldn’t get there. My own mother chose her religion over me. The idea of universal maternal love felt like a cruelty. Then Stanley arrived, and I finally understood it from the other side.

I have spent more than 20 years covering religion in the Inland Northwest, and recently I had the chance to share what I’ve learned as a guest preacher at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse in Moscow, Idaho. What I told that congregation is something the news cycle rarely makes room for: Faith communities are not waiting for permission to work for love and justice. They are already doing it. I see it every week from my desk at FāVS News.

Rejection cuts straight to my bones. Perhaps because it’s a demon I’ve been fighting for decades. So, when a letter arrived in the mail a few days ago discouraging me from submitting a full grant proposal to a major funder in the religion news space – the reason being that we fall into “a very competitive funding environment” – it landed harder than it should have.