What began as an inherited gesture has become a quiet ache of reaching for water that isn’t there. The longing becomes prayer that resonates with Scripture and explores how holy water represents the blessing of what already exists rather than a demand for something new.

The Great Litany asks us to look in the mirror before we look at the world. But the mirror doesn’t have to be theological. It can be as ordinary as the work you do every day — and what you notice when you’re honest about how you do it. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night because the daylight is too bright for the questions he’s carrying. This piece starts there: in the dark, with the questions you haven’t said out loud yet, and the things you’ve been avoiding naming. Where in your own creative or spiritual life do you feel the tension between needing help and wanting to honor the people who help you? A companion to Good Lord, Deliver Us: The Great Litany as Exile Survival Kit on Functioning Faith.

On this day (24 February) in 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth I of England. He was trying to make a political point and shore up the Roman Catholic Church in Great Britain. Instead his actions birthed the via media and allowed a tradition rooted not in uniformity but in common prayer to flourish. In pushing Elizabeth out, Rome gave Anglicanism room to breathe. For anyone who has been misunderstood, pressured to choose a side, or told they do not belong, the middle way offers another path. It invites us to honor what has been lost, to guard the sacred interior with gentleness, and to trust that clarity can emerge even without certainty. The middle is not weakness. Exile is not abandonment. It is the quiet space where courage takes root and where God still meets us.

This reflection explores breath as a sacred marker of belonging, weaving lived experience and Angela N. Parker’s book “If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I?” It names how many women live with “stifled breath” and unvoiced questions in spiritual spaces that constrict the lung of our souls rather than expanding them. This essay also introduces Womanist Theology, a tradition rooted in the real lives of Black women. Readers are invited to notice where their own breath feels tight or free and imagine Parker’s “redemptive self-love” in a grounded acceptance that honors one’s story as holy.