Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez's Blog

With each funeral or memorial service, I preside over as an ordained pastor, I speak about our role as the Church (the whole Body of Christ throughout the world). In this rite we give the recently deceased, the loved one, back to God having completed their earthly baptism. No longer needing to be clothed in the one for whom humans could not obliterate. The funeral, while also for the bereaved, is at its core a rite of the Church. And not only or merely the congregation’s or the gathe...

I am excited to be one of the writers for “Forgive Us and Transform Us for the Life of the World,” a new resource from the ELCA. This resource contains stories, poetry, art, and explanations created by ELCA members to help people dig into what sexism and patriarchy are and how people experience them. “Forgive Us and Transform Us for the Life of the World” is free and can be accessed here.

Then the women remembered Jesus’ words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to the apostles an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened. (Luke 24: 8-12)

  I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13: 34-35*

In a chapter entitled, “Places We Go When the Heart is Open,” author and professor Brené Brown writes “there is a debate among researchers about whether love is an emotion.” [1]

Some researchers lean toward love being an action or an intention more than emotion. An...

 Jesus… got up from supper, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.  ~John 13: 3-5, NRSVUE Adapted

Each week chefs use our congregation’s professional kitchen as commissary for their businesses or in volunteering their time and talents to feed people at our two weekly community meals. One chef, even when he cooks as a volunteer, puts on his ch...

Life has a way of hurting. The unhealed pain of other people impacts our very existence. Nature, despite human taming and because it, will have its own way. No one lives then without wounds whether buried, forgotten, open, mending, or scars. Two truths:

Every human being hurts.

Every human being can heal.

If we all hurt, then why does the ongoing pain of others so often go unnoticed? And when we do notice why do we tend to stand, literally and metaphorically, an arm’s length away (...

I wake in a pool of exhaustion. My chest hurts. My body resists movement, thought, or feeling. I stay in bed repeating,

“I am on my own side this day. I am on my own side this day. I am on my own side this day.”

Tears form. I am so moved by this small gift to myself in the midst of chaos.

There is hope, I realize, in what my son’s Lyme-informed therapist says about personal boundaries, about speaking truth, about future. Although I do not know how yet or when hope will ...

On vacation rereading Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger. First found on a bookstore shelf during college years. Title speaking to me. Enough to buy a copy then and again now.

Reflect on how we lose ourselves in crisis, grief, and trauma’s afterlife. Seized by the past with future ceasing not in reality but in imagination. It’s a trauma induced de-selfing. Inflicted on our beings. Impacting our relationships.

Causing overfunction in flight or fight. Underfunction in freeze. Our re...

“Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked…” Psalm 18: 7

A Practice

Lie down. Pick a point within your body where you feel pain, discomfort, or crap. Close your eyes. Breathe in for five counts filling up your lungs from bottom to top. Send your breath into your pain. Surrounding it. Now breathe out for five counts. Sending some of your pain into God or the universe. Notice you may tremble on the exhale. Allow tremblings their say. Repea...

Each year on this day, August 13th, I honor all those who lost their lives in the Wisconsin River. I also honor their beloveds. Those left to make sense of life after death. In doing so I honor myself, my sons, and our large extended family. Yet I do so with heaviness. Ever wondering if this practice of mine is helpful. To me. To anyone.

This year, I scramble to find those who have died in the past year. The list seems small and nameless.

In March, a woman.

June 29th, a 63-year-o...