Watching the wild geese overhead in the "stick season" of November in northern Wisconsin, I've come to wonder if we might be able to say something like "Deep calls to deep in the honking of your geese?"

A baby serves as a metaphor for today’s church: fragile yet beautiful, crying yet worthy of every effort toward consolation, messy yet adorable.

This is a Jann Wenner moment for the church. It is time to search our hearts and examine our practices, asking how the church continues the sexism and racism reflected in society.

Roman Catholics and Protestants alike benefit from being in dialogue, from sharing our stories with one another. For we enrich our understanding of what God is doing in the world and that the Spirit of God never ceases in empowering the faithful, especially in times of crisis and challenge. Yet stories of saints need to be read with care, lest in our telling, we are reinforcing uncritical readings of those stories that valorize issues of gender, power, and beliefs or practices best left in the distant past.