Elliot Ritzema's Blog

I’ve recently realized that the last thing I put on this blog was a melancholy reflection on Christmas. Now, I’d like to put before you this Advent a painting by Albrecht Altdorfer:

Sitting in prison on the first Sunday of Advent 1943, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

November 28, 1943

My dear Parents,

Although no one has any idea whether and how letters are presently being handled, I nevertheless want to write to you on this afternoon of the first Sunday in Adve...

I’m weary this Christmas. Maybe you are, too. I’m weary of all the decisions I’ve had to make this year, figuring out how to navigate the pandemic, deciding on my own risk tolerance, trying to balance that with other people’s. I can only imagine what kind of weariness government officials and church leaders are feeling as they make decisions for others.

I’m weary of being alone. Not always. Sometimes I’m quite content. But this is will be the third Christmas since divorce proceedings started ...

Last month, I had an essay published at Fathom Magazine for their “Transcendence” issue. It tells the story of an even that I initially thought was a coincidence, then came to conclude was a miracle. Here is how it begins:

I decided, too late, that I wanted to go home. It was a cool fall Saturday night in Budapest, where my post-college aimlessness had landed me a job teaching high school English. I lived in an outlying district at the far southern terminus of a metro line, filled with massiv...

A while back, a friend and I were joking about cowriting a Christian romance novel centered around meeting someone via Craigslist (or some similar buying/selling platform). It didn’t come to fruition. But before it fizzled out, I wrote a first chapter. So now I present to you chapter 1 of Secondhand Love. I am accepting inquiries from agents.

Gina Cranston had it all. While in college, she had asked herself, “What if I put the words ‘Live, Laugh, Lov...

I wrote an essay about how I have struggled with loneliness during this past year, and how I have attempted to push through that loneliness into solitude. I wanted to see if I could put words to my experience in a way that connected with what so many others are experiencing during the pandemic. The good folks at Fathom magazine included it in their latest issue, and it was posted this week. Here is how I ended it:

I have empty spaces in my calendar, now. I have empty spaces in my life. Beca...

I was alerted recently to this quote from a letter by C. S. Lewis to Dom Bede Griffiths from December 20, 1946:

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills wh. he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we kno...

Since I accidentally pushed out a blank blog post yesterday to all who subscribe (oops!), I wanted to write something a little more substantive today to make it up to all of you.

I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s book Thoughts in Solitude in an attempt to learn as much as I can about how to live in this strange, isolated pandemic time. I came across this prayer:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end...

In the Gospel of Luke, one of the experts in the law asks Jesus...

The Pacific Northwest has a reputation for getting a lot of rain, but volume-wise it doesn’t rain that much more here than a lot of other places. It’s just that the rain is spread out over so many dark, cloudy days during the fall … and the winter … and the spring … and the early summer. I grew up and went to college in the South, and when I moved here it was the persistent gloom that took getting used to more than the rain itself. But July, August, and September are usually sunny, not too hot, ...

I preached this sermon on June 28, 2020, at Bellingham Covenant Church.

There’s a famous quote from Martin Luther King that says 11 a.m. on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. It’s still a famous quote because, even though he said it in the ‘60s and official segregation ended a long time ago, churches still tend, by and large, to sort themselves out along racial lines. And it isn’t just racial lines; we also tend to sort ourselves out along political and economic lines, as ...