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Giovanni Percesepe was born in a mountainous region of Italy known as Abruzzi in 1886. He received his formal education through the Roman Catholic church and might have become a priest if not for his budding Protestant faith and capacity for anger. One day he saw some students throwing rocks. The rock throwers were Catholic; the target of the rocks were some Protestant kids from the village. Protestants were a tiny minority in Italy and remain so. My grandfather witnessed the violence and would not shut up. He complained to his superiors in the church. The Monsignor said to the young hothead, perhaps you’d like to go join those Protestants? Which is exactly what happened.

Giovanni migrated to the U.S. with little more than his faith. He found work in NYC as a weaver. With his wife Rose, he had five children, all of them boys. My father, Arnoldo, was his second son. My mother, Rosalie DeFrancesco, met my father in church after the war. There was much excitement that day. The Percesepe boys had returned from the War. My mother dropped her handkerchief. My father picked it up. A marriage proposal followed.

Federico DeFrancesco, my maternal grandfather, had red hair and blue eyes. He was a greengrocer. Also from Abruzzi, also an immigrant, also Protestant.

Giovanni Percesepe, Federico DeFrancesco, and a passel of Italian immigrants helped found a small Italian Methodist church that nurtured the faith of this immigrant community living in a strange place where they did not speak the language; where they were regarded as foreigners; they had no church where they felt they belonged. Immigrants to the New World, in the American Empire.

I think of these Italian migrants often, these days. The Italian Methodist Episcopal Church of Our Savior was my first church. Where I first learned as a child the grammar of faith from the loving lips of Italian immigrants.

Pastor Laurel Matthewson recently wrote about her experiences as pastor to a church of recent immigrants in San Diego.^[1] Recently, she sat with an asylum seeker who was in tears over a new security device, a restrictive ankle monitor, that ICE had arbitrarily imposed. The stigma, shame, and threat of the monitor weighed heavily on him, isolated from his family and community because he sought refuge.

Much has changed in this country since the Percesepe and DeFrancesco families immigrated in the early 20^th century and became U.S. citizens. But much has not.

My grandparents were marked by their Mediterranean complexion, their faith, their lack of formal education, their strange, hard to pronounce names. Giovanni became John. Federico became Fred. Arnaldo became Arnold. Rosalia became Lee. They wanted to assimilate quickly, meaning no Italian was allowed in our home. English only. My mother was forbidden to bathe in the sun. Whiteness was the desired ideal. She lived indoors, where she cultivated her alabaster white complexion. As a woman, and the child of southern Mediterranean migrants, her skin was her chief economic and social asset. With difficulty, I try to imagine my ancestors with not only their Whiteness in question but also falsely accused by the most powerful man in the country of being a rapist, a criminal, from a “shithole country.”

Laurel Matthewson sat with her congregant, who talked through his tears. Like Giovanni Percesepe, like Federico DeFrancesco, he was a man steeped in scripture, full of the “gentleness and reverence” described in First Peter. Laurel talked with him about where he might turn for daily comfort. “Where do you see your situation reflected in the Bible?” she asked.

“The psalms of David,” he answered, still quietly weeping, ‘where God sees me differently from the way I am seen here.”

I thought of my immigrant grandmother, Flora DeFrancesco, whose ancient Italian bible sat on her nightstand for decades, always opened to the Psalms. Reading scripture, we enter solidarity with the persecuted, besieged, and suffering. First Peter is closely associated with the civil rights movement, and other nonviolent social movements: “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.. . . [and] when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.”

Pastor Laurel offered her congregant these words: You have broken no laws. You are suffering even though you’ve done what is right, proactively applying for asylum. Do not let this symbol of shame define or intimidate you. You know who you are before God; let scripture and God’s Spirit remind you, every day.

The cruel tactics of this administration’s anti-immigrant policies remain a moral challenge to every resident of the U.S., regardless of our citizenship status.

“Even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed,” says 1 Peter. In these words, we hear the paradoxical echo of the Beatitudes: Blessed are the merciful, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.

In today’s gospel, Jesus speaks to his disciples of the promised Holy Spirit. In Hebrew the word spirit, ruach, is feminine. In legal terms, she is the Advocate who abides with God’s community at the margins. Knowing that his followers will be cut off from their ancestral trees and isolated, excluded, persecuted, Jesus says, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. . . . The world will no longer see me, but you will see me.” In this passage of promised comfort and presence, Jesus speaks openly of mutual love:“Those who keep my commandments love me, and I love them and reveal myself to them.”

Theologians speak of God’s preferential love for the poor. What this means is that God loves all people, for God is love, but to those who have been displaced, cut off from land or family, God loves and reveals herself with a graciousness that the more established can only hope to imagine or understand.

“I have no one but God,” one of her congregants told Pastor Laurel. A 48-year-old man said from his hospital bed, “God loves me too much to let me die before I see my granddaughter turn one.” An elder of the church said, “I may look like a widow, but I am married now to Jesus,” with a twinkle in her eye.

In God’s realm, no one is excluded because of their skin color, race, social class or level of education. No one is rejected because of their sex, gender, or gender expression. There is no Jew, no Greek, no American, European, African, or Asian, no male or female, no immigrants, no foreigners, because in God’s sight no one of her children is foreign, and no one is illegal. The kindom of God is comprised of people from every tongue and nation!

Blessed are the poor, in ways that make no earthly sense. “This is the Spirit of truth,” Jesus says. This is your reminder that God sees you, like Jesus, differently than the world sees, “because the world neither sees him nor knows him.”

Offered to you in the name of God the Creator, Jesus the Redeemer and the Holy Spirit, [She Who is] our Advocate and Comforter.

Amen.

^[1] Laurel Matthewson, The Christian Century, Living the Lectionary, May 10, 2026. I am indebted to Pastor Matthewson for her stories of the lives of immigrants in her church, and the gracious way she handles this beautiful text in John’s gospel, which set to me thinking.

I never wanted to be a pastor. Nevertheless, I feel honored that people invite me into the most intimate and frightening moments of their lives. Graveside, hospital. Adults crying in Sunday School children chairs. In those moments I sense my entry into sacred space. I feel broken myself. Wholly inadequate. I often feel like a fraud. I feel omg how did I get into this? I’m a philosophy professor, a poet, scribbler of tales, a novelist. I abuse conscience: who the hell am I?

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J texted me last night, saying “I love you.” Which was nice to hear, especially now that she’s met someone and is, as she says, “ready for the next chapter.” We joked a bit about Virgo women. As in, what is it about them? I tried with Virgos, did my level best, I’m fascinated by them and have loved several but was never able to sustain a lasting relationship with any of them. They are mysterious to me, and now best kept as friends.

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I loved J deeply but see now that she was the healing sign. There was something earthy about her, grounded as a Russian peasant. Aquarians like me resist grounding. She was a comfort during a difficult time. But it wasn’t a real relationship? Or was it? It’s hard to know. Writers are prone to mimicry.

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My attraction to J went against my “norms of attraction”— like me, she was of Italian ancestry, a volatile valence I’d learned to avoid (also Sicilian, which I cannot, ever), she was sturdily built and not the willowy reed I favored, nor was she blonde, nor an artist. Rarely sober. Quiet, reticent, shy but formidable, in her way. But she hugged from the heart. My most enduring images of us occurred in the kitchen. Her arms circled around my shoulders, her face pressed to mine, my arms around her waist, holding her close. The dishwasher hummed its one, dumb note. We kissed, hot and passionate. Long deep kisses that never wanted to end. I couldn’t get enough of those hugs. J was a safe room in the dangerous world I inhabited then, living in a cold apartment with a precarious job in a city of strangers. J offered extravagant hospitality, the gift of her presence, the mystery of what went unspoken between us.

I never want to see her again. I’d get lost in her hug and lose myself for a week. I really wish her well. It will be a disaster with this new guy, of course, but they may weather it and find another gear. I hold good thoughts for her. She loves me and I love her now that it doesn’t matter.

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Reading My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard I come at last to his Proustian moment, his madeleine a shape in the wood flooring of his apartment: the face of Christ in a crown of thorns, which triggers the atmospherics of a 3600-page novel. My moment, oddly similar: the face in the cracked pale-yellow plaster above the stove in my grandparents’ apartment on Stanley Avenue in Yonkers, the street of death to me, the street where my older brother died. The plaster has been disturbed, perhaps by a water leak in pipes concealed in the wall? The amateurish attempt to re-plaster, repaint, the face formed whose shape continually eludes memory, but what comes into sharp focus in memory is my green-eyed grandfather playing cards with me at the kitchen table, raising his arm to scratch his bare back with a long knife. Me: startled by the movement of the knife, that a knife could be used for such a thing. I was very little, not yet four years old. Summer. Outside, the voices of children laughing. Splashing in puddles after a thunderstorm. Mothers, talking on the stoop. The voice of Red Barber on the radio calling the Yankees game. By February my brother would be dead, my asthmatic grandfather too. Shadows guard the shape of the face in the yellowed plaster which fills me with such longing for a lost world.

I write to remember and to forget. Which of these is in the ascendency depends on the shape that presents itself to my unconscious mind. One senses here the unimportance of any reader. As in Knausgaard’s autofiction, one writes because it is impossible not to.

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https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/604-practice-losing-everything

Søren has welcomed Prince into the family. He shares his toys with the new puppy. He doesn’t mind when Prince jumps on his back, steals his bone, eats his food. He watches Prince’s shenanigans with an air of serenity that I admire. He is regal. And mostly patient with puppy nonsense.

What does Søren know that most humans don’t?

That there is enough?

That we are all ultimately part of the same family, have the same breeding, our lineage traced to the same mother and father?

That he can help teach the new arrival the ways and rules of the house, rather than sit in a corner and pout that he has lost his special status as “THE dog of the family?” Or use violence to put the puppy in his place?

I’m projecting, of course. And yes, “anthropomorphizing” a canine, treating him as if he had human traits.

But I want to believe that as a “mature” six year old who has lived in three states in six years (NY, HI, and CA) Søren has secure attachment to his humans. He’s not going anywhere without us, snd wherever we land he will always be part of the family.

The book of Genesis is an “origin story,” most likely written during the Babylonian Captivity when things were at low ebb for God’s people. Everything they knew had been taken from them. Exile was their new identity. It was important for them to reflect on their origins in the faith, and to trust in God, that one day their deliverance would come.

It’s fascinating that it is during their seventy year captivity, they finally gave up their dual loyalty to both Yahweh and idols. The Jewish people became monotheists during the Babylonian Captivity.

They would recover a sense of purpose. Mission, yes. They would learn to adapt to changed circumstances.

They would refuse to be reduced to a one word description: captives.

I believe we’re living in our own “Days of Exile.”

The country we thought we knew has largely disappeared. Christendom is over. Lawlessness, rapacious capitalism, corruption, and greed are loose in the land.

Today the Voting Rights Act was essentially gutted, rendered unenforceable.

How can we be joyful in a strange land?

Joy is a choice.

Over and over the scriptures admonish us, “Trust in God and do not be afraid.”

Oddly enough, watching two dogs adapt to each other and to their humans has restored my human faith and unleashed pure joy. It feels good.

What brings you joy these days?

Grace and peace to you,

Gary

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g4uqOGxQAU8

Jason Bradley DeFord was born in 1984. He was nicknamed Jelly Roll by his mother because of his fondness for donuts. Like jelly, the name stuck. He was baptized at 14, the same year he began dabbling in drugs and stopped going to church. Eventually he’d be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for drug dealing and aggravated robbery. Thank God there’s more to the story.

Jelly Roll is an addict who met Jesus in the Big House, the same Jesus who refers to himself in today’s gospel as the way, the truth, and the life. The same Jesus who prepares his anxious disciples for his departure from earth with the words of comfort and assurance every pastor has read at funerals. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also. And you know the place where I am going. Thomas said to him, Lord, we do not know where you are going.”

In prison, Jelly Roll had a pretty good idea ofwhere he was: in hell. The hell of addiction. If you have ever loved or been in love with an addict, as I have been, you may want to listen to Jelly Roll’s Grammy winning album,Beautifully Broken.

In My Cross, Jelly Roll sings to his children:

I hope to God you don’t get my addictions/ don’t deal with my demons/ make my decisions

Yeah I hope the apple falls far from the tree/ and the sins of the fathers stop right here with me

Cause that’s my cross to carry/ my scars to heal / My pain to bury/ not yours to feel

I pray every day I can love you enough/ So my cross to carry won’t be yours to pick up

The problem with the way we approach today’s text is that we read it with our post-Easter glasses on: We know where Jesus is going (to heaven! Fully at home with God!), and we know the way (trust and follow Jesus!). If you read the gospel lazily like this, Thomas’ question, which is a real one, will seem merely stupid, and will have nothing to say to us. But when you stop to feel the deep pain of this world, and read it through the lens of the addict, you sense the power and importance of Thomas’s truth-telling: Jesus tells us he is going to live with God, and he will prepare a room for us, yet we don’t really know where this heavenly home is, or how to get there. Everyone’s searching for the peace and beauty of this sacred communion, but we keep driving down the wrong roads, looking for love in all the wrong places.

Will Christ drive us home? Must we believe, as so many churches insist, that what Jesus means in verse 6 is that Jesus is the only road to God and heaven, and everyone who refuses to believe this is doomed to eternal hell? Is that what Jelly Roll is singing about?

What if we decided to look deeper into Jesus’ imagery and invitation to dwell with him in his father’s house, a house with capacious dwelling places? What if Jesus’ invitation to a divine habitation for is for everyone born, not in the sweet hereafter but right here and now on earth?

St. Teresa of Ávila was a sixteenth century Carmelite mystic who explored the richness of Jesus’ word pictures in her book, commonly known as The Interior Castle. In Spanish the title is simply Las moradas: the dwelling places.

The image of a castle appears in the text as one of many metaphors Teresa uses for our souls’ capacities for encounter with God. She uses castle imagery because it points to a valuable, spacious, diverse, large, elaborate structure. She is speaking of the many mansions of our soul. The soul is an immortal diamond; the place we encounter the God who created and loves us. The place where Jelly Roll and so many before him encountered the fulfillment to their yearning. In Las moradas the soul “is not a tiny gem or needle in a haystack, hidden away or easily crushed.”^[1] It is more like a majestic castle, more enduring than our failing flesh. Not heavenly glory that we only know when we die, but eternally present to us when we encounter Christ in prayer.

Las morades reveals a Christ who draws us to the center of God’s heart, which is our center, too. We can choose to spend our lives “outside the castle,” wandering the grounds, never exploring our capacity for divine-human companionship. But most people eventually “turn inward,” usually because of some personal crisis. And those who pray with any regularity, Teresa says, who are intent on following Jesus’ way, will hear the beckoning call of Christ: “This Lord of ours deeply wants us to love Him and seek His companionship. And so He calls us again and again, ceaselessly, come closer.”

We experience God’s alluring love in many ways: words spoken by caring people, overheard in hospital corridors, sermons, good books, sometimes through sicknesses and trials, or through prayer. Or through the music of Jelly Roll.

When you look back on your life, what are the pivotal moments when you perceived the grace of an invitation to a whole new way of being? When have you experienced in your flesh “that of God,” a true encounter with your oceanic soul, full communion, taking you beyond your false self, beyond the ego into the mystery of God’s Presence? Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling.

Jesus is not an intellectual proposition, a cheap ticket to heaven, or a “great moral teacher.” Jesus doesn’t merely know a way, Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life,” alive and present to us now through the gift of the Holy Spirit, and not just at our funeral.

Jelly Roll understands what St. Augustine said long ago--that our restless hearts will not rest until they rest in God’s very presence.

Here is what he said a few months ago during his short speech accepting a Grammy for Beautifully Broken:

“They’re going to try to kick me off here, so just let me try to get this out. First of all, Jesus, I hear you, and I’m listening. Lord, I am listening. Second, I want to thank my beautiful wife. I would have never changed my life without you. I would have ended up dead or in jail. I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for you and Jesus. I thank you for that”.

Then he said: “There was a time in my life, y’all, that I was broken. That’s why I wrote this album. I didn’t think I had a chance, y’all. There were days that I thought the darkest things. I was a horrible human”.

He held up a small red Bible and said, “There was a moment in my life that all I had was a Bible this big, and a radio the same size, and a six-by-eight-foot cell. And I believe that those two things could change my life. I believe that music had the power to change my life, and God had the power to change my life. And I want to tell y’all right now Jesus is for everybody. Jesus is not owned by one political party. Jesus is not owned by no music label. Jesus is Jesus and anybody can have a relationship with Him. I love you, Lord”.

Jelly Roll’s speech was heartfelt testimony to the power and reach of God’s saving grace. No prison cell can separate us from Jesus. But there’s also a challenge here to churches to reconsider the passages from 1 Peter and Psalm 31: will we allow ourselves to be built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, a community with space for grace, where bodies and souls in pain can find refuge, mercy and extravagant hospitality? Because no matter our social class, race, class, gender, musical or political preferences, we all need to be freed from addiction to idols. Are we doing enough to extend a hand to those with their asses in the ditch, for whom the drugs don’t work no more? Because we all need someone to drive us home.

Sometimes we must be broken open to find the expansive mansions within our own soul—beautifully broken. As we gather at the table, we behold One who was beautiful and whole, who was broken, for us—so that through him we might be made whole. Amen.

^[1] Laurel Matthewson, Lectionary Essay in The Christian Century, April 26, 2026 issue.