November 8, 2025
co-hosting Ordinary Saints with Church of the Advent & Coracle.
One week ago at this time, I was just getting my tired kids to bed, too late, full on afterglow from a delicious evening of new friends, brave stories, and sumptuous cheese boards. I won’t say the next day was pretty, with overtired little bodies struggling through daylight savings. But any storm was worth the delight of sharing an evening celebrating ordinary saints in your lives and mine.
Not only hearing tales from seven other storytellers, with their moments of gravity and grace. (Moments I am still pondering: sitting, in distress, back to back with a friend who becomes the presence of Jesus. Giving out of poverty. Offering small seeds, breakfast, a place to sleep, which grew into expansive goodness.)
Not just giving my children some glimmer of this weird writing thing mom does.
Not merely the privilege of sharing my work with aloud, my gratitude for the honor this attentive audience offered me for the world premier(!!) of Ordinary Times.
But a week later, picturing the faces of those who came, seeing some of them in the photos below, what strikes me most is that the ordinary saints among us are not only those whose stories we beheld together, but everyone in the room.
All these bulbs of light bringing something of goodness, beauty and truth with you, carrying it as you depart back into the worlds you inhabit. What a privilege for my kids to experience the great cloud of witnesses not only as stories, but as a tangible body of people they can touch and talk to, whose laps they can sit in, who admire their glow necklaces, who vacuum up the juice they spill. In a nutshell, what we all need from each other?
What a gift to share last Saturday not only stories but community. Thank you to all who were part of it.
With joy,
Jeannie Rose
