Pathway of Love

Dear Ones of Trinity Church,

This evening, as I made my way from my office to the rectory, I took my usual path down the hall by the parish hall and out the back door. But tonight, there was a wonderful surprise waiting for me along the way.

The hallway outside the parish hall was covered in little confetti hearts. It was our usual Thursday evening choir supper, but tonight it carried a Valentine’s theme — beautifully decorated tables, special sweet treats, and heart-shaped confetti scattered across every surface. The tables had been lovingly prepared.

And as children are prone to do — and as I sometimes wish adults would do more often — they found the confetti hearts irresistible. They couldn’t help themselves. The hearts were scooped up and joyfully, generously spread throughout the room and into the hallway.

I did not witness the actual scattering of the hearts. I saw only the evidence of it. And immediately, I smiled. My own heart was warmed as I walked home on a pathway literally covered in hearts.

If only we would do the same with our own hearts — with our lives and our words. If only we would find such joy in spreading the love that already dwells within us. The hope that lives within us. The hope our Lord continually shows us.

As we come to the Last Sunday after the Epiphany and prepare to begin our Lenten journey, perhaps we might do so with the innocence, enthusiasm, faith, and hope of a child — while still holding the honest realities of adulthood and our sometimes shaky souls. Lent calls us into reflection and truth, yes — but never without love.

May we move through these coming days with the joy and freedom of those children, scattering kindness as freely as they scattered confetti hearts. May we spread God’s love generously, lavishly, without calculation - that all of us might walk each day along a pathway covered in love.

Peace and blessings,

Paul+

Welcome Jacqueline Burkholder!

A recent graduate from Westminster Choir College, Jacqueline Burkholder is a mezzo-soprano soloist and bass chorister who lives in Riverton, NJ. She teaches piano and voice at Cornerstone Music Studios in Millstone NJ and is a staff chorister at Trinity Church, Princeton. Jacqueline is thrilled to be expanding her involvement at Trinity Church, Princeton to include the role of Administrative Assistant for Music. She looks forward to taking her place in the staff who support the music program and the enrichment it brings to the community here. Jacqueline is the parent of an eleven year old girl and enjoys making and listening to music with her daughter, cooking meals for the people she loves, and reading books aloud with her partner.

A Letter From 150+ Bishops

A letter to our fellow Americans.

We, the undersigned bishops of The Episcopal Church, write today out of grief, righteous anger, and steadfast hope.

What happened a week ago in Minnesota and is happening in communities across the country runs counter to God’s vision of justice and peace. This crisis is about more than one city or state—it’s about who we are as a nation. The question before us is simple and urgent: Whose dignity matters?

In the wake of the tragic deaths of two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, we join Minnesotans and people across the nation in mourning two precious lives lost to state-sanctioned violence. We grieve with their families, their friends, and everyone harmed by the government’s policies. When fear becomes policy, everyone suffers.

We call on Americans to trust their moral compass—and to question rhetoric that trades in fear rather than the truth. As Episcopalians, our moral compass is rooted firmly in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is what we know. Women were shoved to the ground, children torn from their families, and citizens silenced and demeaned for exercising their constitutional rights. These actions sow fear, cast doubt, and wear us down with endless noise.

We cannot presume to speak for everyone or prescribe only one way to respond. For our part, we can only do as Jesus’ teaching shows us.

A Call for Action

This is a moment for action. We call on people of faith to stand by your values and act as your conscience demands.

We urge the immediate suspension of ICE and Border Patrol operations in Minnesota and in any community where enforcement has eroded public trust. Because the rule of law is weakened, not strengthened, when power is exercised without restraint.

We also call for transparent, independent investigations of the people killed—investigations centered on truth, not politics. Justice cannot wait, and accountability is essential to healing.

We call on the elected officials of our nation to remember the values that we share, including the rule of law. Rooted in our Constitution, it ensures that law—not the arbitrary will of individuals—governs us all, protecting individual rights, ensuring fairness, and maintaining stability.

A Shared Commitment

Every act of courage matters. We must keep showing up for one another. We are bound together because we are all made in the image of God. This begins with small, faithful steps.

As bishops in the Episcopal Church, we promise to keep showing up—to pray, to speak, and to stand with every person working to make our communities just, safe, and whole.

We are committed to making our communities safer and more compassionate:

    •    So children can walk to school without fear.

    •    So families can shop, work, and worship freely.

    •    So we recognize the dignity of every neighbor—immigrant communities, military families, law enforcement officers, nurses, teachers, and essential workers alike.

You may feel powerless, angry, or heartbroken right now. Know that you’re not alone.

Each of us has real power: community power, financial power, political power, and knowledge power. We can show up for our neighbors, support small businesses and food banks, contact elected officials and vote, and learn our rights so we can speak up peacefully without fear.

Choosing Hope

This crisis is about more than one city or state—it’s about who we are as a nation. The question before us is simple and urgent: Whose dignity matters?

Our faith gives a clear answer: everyone’s.

Safety built on fear is an illusion. True safety comes when we replace fear with compassion, violence with justice, and unchecked power with accountability. That’s the vision our faith calls us to live out—and the promise our country is meant to uphold.

In the face of fear, we choose hope.

By the grace of God, may this season of grief become a season of renewal. May courage rise from lament, and love take root in every heart.

By the grace of God, may this season of grief become a season of renewal. May courage rise from lament, and love take root in every heart.

Faithfully,

† 150+ Episcopalian Bishops

Letter here

Spread Your Love Princeton

Dear Good People of Trinity Church,

I would like to extend to you a heartfelt invitation to an evening of creativity, art, community, and love. On February 13th, Trinity Church will host #SpreadYourLove Princeton, a gathering rooted in our shared humanity and our call to love more deeply.

We are honored to welcome local artist Perry Milou, a local artist who has worked for several years with the Spread Your Love initiative, exploring our common humanity and the unifying power of love that created us. His work invites us to consider meaningful ways we can express and embody love in the world, helping to make our shared life more compassionate and whole.

In a time marked by division, discord, distrust, and animosity—when harsh and demeaning words often feel loud and overwhelming—we are called to gather together, grounded in love and grace. This evening is an opportunity to come together as a church community and as a wider community, united in hope and purpose, to help make our world a better place.

Please view the link below for a short video about the evening, and look for more information to come. Most of all, I hope you will join us on February 13th for #SpreadYourLove.

Forward in faith.

Forward together. 

Forward in Love  

In Christ,

Paul+

The Eyes of Jesus

Dear Beloved of Trinity,

As you may know, each day this month, I have been posting a short video reflection on social media, working my way through John O’Donohue’s book To Bless the Space Between Us.

Today, I offer a brief reflection on O’Donohue’s blessing entitled The Eyes of Jesus.

I imagine the eyes of Jesus were harvest brown,
the light of their gazing suffused with the seasons:
the shadow of winter,
the mind of spring,
the blues of summer,
and the amber of harvest.

The eyes of Jesus gaze on us.¸
This gaze knows the signature of our heartbeat.
It recognizes us before we explain ourselves,
names us before we speak.

Forever falling softly on our faces,
his gaze piles the soul with light.

What we cast our gaze upon, over time, shapes our lives. Our attention is never neutral; it forms our desires, trains our loves, and slowly makes us into a certain kind of person. So we are wise to be gentle and cautious with our looking—with what we linger over, what we scroll past,
what we allow to claim our eyes and our hearts.

And yet, there is a gaze that does not drain us or scatter us.
The gaze of Jesus does not demand or diminish.
It rests upon us with patience and delight.
To meet his eyes is to be seen without fear,
known without being reduced,
loved without condition.

This is the gaze that changes us.
This is the gaze that sustains us.
This is the gaze that quietly reminds us, again and again,
that we are already beloved.

Grace and peace,
Paul+

Beauty

Dear Beloved of Trinity,

Yesterday, a good friend took me on what he called a “field trip.” He sensed that I needed a break—a day set aside for quiet, reflection, and beauty. In other words, a soul-cation.

We drove about an hour and a half to Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Longwood describes itself as “the living legacy of Pierre S. du Pont, bringing joy and inspiration to everyone through the beauty of nature, conservation, and learning.” In their vision statement, they declare: “We envision a world where beauty is accessible to all.”

The Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue once wrote, “Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.” O’Donohue insisted that beauty is a human calling.

We are meant to live our lives embraced and animated, challenged and healed, inspired and sustained by beauty. Beauty is all around us, yet so often we fail to recognize it. Our world offers cheap imitations—quick dopamine hits that fire in our brains—and we mistake these fleeting sensations for beauty itself.

God, with great intention, infused all of creation with beauty, knowing it would help to sustain and heal us, revive and inspire us. To remind us of this sacred truth, I share with you the iconic hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth.”

For the beauty of the earth,
for the glory of the skies,
for the love which from our birth
over and around us lies.
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise
this, our hymn of grateful praise.

For the wonder of each hour
of the day and of the night,
hill and vale and tree and flower,
sun and moon and stars of light.
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise
this, our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of human love,
brother, sister, parent, child,
friends on earth, and friends above,
for all gentle thoughts and mild.
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise
this, our hymn of grateful praise.

For yourself, best gift divine,
to the world so freely given,
agent of God’s grand design:
peace on earth and joy in heaven.
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise
this, our hymn of grateful praise.

May the beauty of God—and of God’s creation—bless you this day.

Peace and Blessings,

Paul+

Baptism of our Lord

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live. – Deuteronomy 30:19

In the calendar of the Church year, we have just celebrated the feast of the Epiphany. This Sunday, we will commemorate the Baptism of our Lord. At Epiphany, Jesus is revealed as the Son of God to the Gentiles. The question of Epiphany is: Who is this one who is shown to the gentiles, and to all the world? He is none other than the Son of God. The question of the first Sunday after the Epiphany is: What is this baptism in which we’re united to the Son of God, and to each other?

Baptism is about our inclusion in the household of God, to be sure. It is about God accepting us, and about our accepting Christ as our Lord and Savior. But there are also things to be rejected: the powers of death, the forces that draw us from the love of God, all those things that corrupt the creatures of God. In baptism, we say “no” to death and “yes” to life, as we pass by God’s grace through death to life in Jesus’ cross and resurrection. This “no” and “yes” is the ground of our Christian lives.

The 20th century Episcopal lay theologian William Stringfellow wrote that “the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called. The only thing that really matters to live in Christ instead of death.” In Jesus Christ, God has said “yes” to us, unequivocally. God calls each one of us to say “yes” to life, to live in Christ, and to walk in love.

Yours in Christ,

Kara+

A New Year’s Blessing

Dear Beloved of Trinity Church,

As we begin this new year together, I am drawn to the words of the Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue, from the introduction to his book To Bless the Space Between Us:

“There is a quiet light that shines in every heart.
It draws no attention to itself,
though it is always secretly there.
It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty,
our desire to seek possibility,
and our hearts to love life.
Without this subtle quickening,
our days would be empty and wearisome,
and no horizon would ever awaken our longing…
We enter the world as strangers,
who all at once become heirs
to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream
that has long preceded us
and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us.
The gift of the world is our first blessing.”

In the days and months to come, I invite us to open ourselves to the sustaining, guiding, comforting, encouraging, and healing light of Christ—a light that is indeed present in every heart. A light set ablaze at the beginning of creation, the light from which all other light has come to be.

As the true light, it does not burn for its own glory or for praise or attention. Rather, it burns to break through the darkness. It burns to help all living things flourish. It burns to set us free, to show us the way home, to keep us warm, to give us courage, and to remind us that we are not alone. It is the light around which the cosmos revolves, and the source from which all of us find our life.

May we, this year, find ourselves illumined and blessed by this holy, subtle, sacred, blazing flame of life and love.
May it shine within us and through us—
with each breath,
each word,
each act.

Peace and blessings,
Paul+