Poet & Priest: The Rev. Megan McDermott

In my ministry as a priest, I hope that my presence, preaching, and teaching encourage people to be real with God, others, and themselves. I think our faith blooms best and brightest when we are all encouraged to bring our full, unique selves to the table. By writing and publishing poetry that honestly grapples with the difficulties of Scripture and of life, I have an avenue outside of my congregation for presenting a positive (and I hope feminist!) vision of what a Christian life can look like—one that potentially might be more honest than what some people have encountered through past church experiences.

Suggested Blessing for a New Prayer Book

The blessing is that you’re not who you thought you’d be, that year by year God opens you to another self, hidden in some crevice of the spirit.The blessing is that God whispers over you declarations utterly unidentical to those spoken over your neighbor. The blessing is the thing you hearsometimes trickling underneath self-doubt. That it is rising like beer foam crawling up a bottle, ready to crest. The blessing is a dream that didn’tmaterialize so you might meet the new one. The blessing is healing’s call surpassing your propriety. The blessing is your failure to liveup to a vision you crafted of yourself at seventeen. Now, let me rest a hand on your forehead. We can pause, and you can tell me something, anything: what you think about when trying to fall asleep, your first love, how often or seldom you cry. I’ll wait. My words, printed, may be rote, but blessing is never interchangeable. Know that I proclaim your worth while taking in the details, seeing the color of your eyes.

Color Your Own Mary or Martha Posters—$3.57

On one side, Jesus and Mary both smile. On the other, Martha scowls and stirs. All under the ominous banner, “Are you Mary or Martha?” This is the gospel of grinning— good Christian women deemed good for positivity more than anything else. Could Mary be a Mary all the time? Would she even recognize her sister in caricature, or would she know that grimace as only one side of the thousands shown in intertwined lives? Martha, the sister who held her, the sister who laughed. Neither intended to become a paradigm.