Dr. Wesley Hill is a big believer in the power of the gospel of Jesus, the beauty of Christian friendships — and the joys of cooking. As an Episcopal priest and associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary, Wesley spends most of his time speaking and writing (or reading on the couch with his dog). He’s also the author of “Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality,” “Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian” and his latest, “Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus,” among others.

In this interview, Wesley is getting honest about the daily activities and disciplines that bring him joy and renew his faith, the struggle of loneliness as a celibate Christian and the books and sermons that have helped him know Jesus better.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

The meals we enjoy are about so much more than the food we eat. So how does a “go-to” meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?

Over the last couple of decades of my life, I’ve lived in several different places in the U.S. and overseas. Although I now reside in West Michigan, where I teach at a theological seminary, my longest stint anywhere in recent years has been in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And although cooking had been an already much-loved hobby for a while, it was in Pittsburgh that I dove headfirst into upping my game and hosting friends and family.

For much of my time in Pittsburgh, I shared a home with some dear friends. It was a bit of a fixer-upper, a turn-of-the-century grand old house with a somewhat storied past (it almost certainly housed an executive of the steel industry). There were intricate inlaid designs on the wood floor, and the vast bay window in the dining room we filled with plants. One of my friends and his father-in-law built us a long dinner table with cast-iron legs. My happiest meal memories are around that table. I recall especially one Christmas when we hosted friends for a creative take on the Italian tradition of the “Feast of the Seven Fishes.” It was multicourse and featured all manner of fried, baked, sautéed, roasted and raw creatures of the sea. I think my friends and I felt a bit like Babette (from “Babette’s Feast”) at the end of the evening, worn out and staring at towers of cluttered chinaware, but it was worth it all.

a pot of bolognese — Klaus Nielsen; pexels

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity do you love engaging in that also helps you find essential spiritual renewal?

Picking up from the previous question, I would say that cooking is one of the only activities I am doing these days that doesn’t involve speaking or writing sentences. Because of my work as a priest and professor, I am often writing lectures or sermons, grading papers or crafting essays and book chapters. And because of my love for reading, even when I’m not working, you can often find me curled up on a sofa with my dog reading a novel.

But when I’m in the kitchen, entirely different parts of myself come alive. I started off my cooking adventures with studious fidelity to whichever recipe I was working from. But as the years have gone by, I’ve come to read recipes more and more as rough-and-ready suggestions. As real cooks know, and as I’m trying to learn, nothing can substitute for sampling your creations along the way: tasting the broth to see if it needs more salt or maybe a splash of fish sauce, touching the steak to check if it yields like soft flesh, smelling the rising steam of the Bolognese to determine whether it might want some more aromatics. It’s all become much more about sight and touch and taste for me, regardless of what the official instructions say.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness; every human too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you confront its power head-on?

I have never married, and after a prolonged season of sharing a home with friends, I am now living alone again. It’s a long story, but I surmised in my 20s that God was calling me to a life of singleness, and I am now in my mid-40s. Naively, I assumed that with a couple of decades of singleness under my belt, I would have figured out by now how to deal with loneliness. But no. I continue to navigate feelings of being overlooked and unwanted. I still struggle to let others see the real me, and I often still wonder about basic matters of self-care: whose name to put down on an emergency contact form, who to call first with some heavy news, who I might be able to ask if I can join them for a vacation. I’ve written at length about the gift and spiritual practice of friendship, but I think I write not out of secure achievement but out of an ongoing sense of questing. In the immortal words of U2, there is a real sense in which “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

My latest project is a small book on the season — yes, season (more on that in a moment!) — of Easter titled “Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus.” It’s for a series of short, accessible books on each of the seasons of the church calendar, published by InterVarsity Press and edited by Esau McCaulley, a widely read New York Times columnist and New Testament scholar. The book is now out in the world, and I hope that churches and small groups and individual Christians would consider reading through it meditatively once we arrive at Easter Sunday (or before, in preparation!).

In the early decades and centuries of the church, Christians celebrated Jesus’ resurrection three days after Good Friday. And anyone who’s familiar at all with church today has probably had at least some experience of that tradition and all its trappings: hymns, festal flowers, a grand dinner party, egg hunting, chocolate bunnies and so on. But what is less well known is that Christians extended that daylong celebration into a period of 50 days — a whole span of weeks in which to ponder and pray through and sing about the glory of Jesus’ triumph over sin and death. This little book is meant to guide readers through that season. I don’t assume that you’re necessarily familiar with it, and so I start by explaining the significance of the Easter story itself — what the Gospels tell us about how some of Jesus’ followers found his tomb empty and then met Jesus himself newly alive, with the scars on his body to prove it. Then I talk about other aspects of the Easter season of joy: baptism, evangelism and service to the poor, Jesus’ ascension into heaven and his sending the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. It’s like a multifaceted diamond as you keep turning it all over in your mind and heart.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

One of the joys of writing this book on Easter was getting feedback from trusted friends as I worked on it. I most often experience God confirming my calling and direction when I receive encouragement from voices that aren’t just my own interior one. Every couple of Thursday mornings, I join four other friends early in the morning to share coffee and discuss a book that we’re reading together. We meet in a lovely lounge at my seminary, sitting on comfy couches and surrounded by beautiful artwork. It’s become an anchor point for me, full of intellectual stimulation but also just good fellowship and camaraderie. When these friends heard that I was working on this book, they suggested that we make that the focus of our discussions for a couple of weeks. I shared draft chapters with them, and when we met, I could see that they had carefully digested what I had shared — to the point of, in one case, printing out pages and scribbling comments and questions in the margins — and were ready to help me make it better. They cheered me on, telling me what was good even where I struggled to be convinced. And they made some concrete, critical suggestions that ended up strengthening the finished product considerably. This kind of external input is critical for me. I can so easily mix up the voice of my inner critic for the voice of God, and I need to hear grace coming to me from beyond.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?

When I was living in England for graduate school, I discovered the tradition of Anglican Christianity. I joined the Church of England and began to learn to pray with the cornerstone of Anglican spirituality: a centuries-old guide called “The Book of Common Prayer.” When I moved back to the States, I took vows to become a priest in The Episcopal Church, the American branch of the worldwide Anglican family.

To this day, the still point of my calling is what we refer to as the “Daily Office,” services of prayer for the morning and evening, like bookends for each day. Admittedly, I am much more faithful at praying the service of Morning Prayer than I am at Evening Prayer. It works like this for me: I wake up, start the coffee pot brewing, let my dog out and settle in with the Prayer Book and my Bible.

The service of Morning Prayer is very simple: it begins with praying several Psalms (which have increasingly given me permission to bring the whole gamut of my emotions to God, with raw honesty and intensity), it moves into Scripture reading from the Old and New Testaments, and it finishes with a set of prayers: the Lord’s Prayer and various thanksgivings and intercessions. It has helped me do what Lesslie Newbigin once said that his 45 minutes of morning Bible reading did for him: remind him of the True Story he belongs to, which will soon be countered by a barrage of counter-signals once he leaves the house to begin his day. Having the first thing of my day being that sense of reorientation — of remembering the narrative that my life is being scripted into — is the touchstone of my spiritual life.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and your heart?

When I was in high school, I checked out an oversize book with glossy pages from the library. It had a very powerful painting on the cover, which I had never seen before. The book was “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Henri Nouwen, and the image on the cover was the masterpiece from Rembrandt van Rijn in which an old father is embracing his bedraggled son. Nouwen’s book describes his visit to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he sat for hours in front of Rembrandt’s painting and tried to take it in. His encounter with the painting led to a profound spiritual experience in which he learned to see himself as the younger, wayward son in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15), the stubborn older brother and, ultimately, as someone called to become like the welcoming father in the story, who embraces both of his sons with radical self-giving love.

Right around the time I discovered Nouwen’s book, I also discovered Tim Keller’s brief sermon series on the same theme. Later, Keller, the longtime pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, turned these sermons into an influential book called “The Prodigal God.” The book is great, but I still prefer the sermons: listen to them and let yourself remember the goodness of the gospel all over again, as I did when I first encountered them as a teenager.

Lastly, I found the Venite app to be a true gift. When I am traveling or otherwise away from my “Book of Common Prayer,” this app lets me pray the “Daily Office” on the go. It is also just beautifully designed and a pleasure to look at.

We all have things we cling to to survive or even thrive in our fast-paced, techno-driven world. How have you been successful in harnessing technology to aid in your spiritual growth?

Like almost everyone who’s reading this interview, I suppose, I have a complicated experience of technology. I veer between doomscrolling and deleting all the social media apps from my phone for days at a time. Truthfully, I am still searching for a happy medium. I am not satisfied with my relationship with my phone, to the point that I recently bought a book titled “How to Break Up with Your Phone.”

One thing I have found myself doing over the last several years, though, is downloading beautiful icons to my photo stream. Not icons in the Microsoft sense but historic images of biblical figures and Christian saints. In my better moments of self-presence, when I’m tempted to glut myself on angry X posts, I open my photo app and look at some of the icons. I remember the stories of the figures depicted, and I try to let the ethereal style of the icons direct my attention beyond their (impressive!) behaviors and feats of faith to their hidden life of connection to God in prayer. Icons are often deliberately styled to frustrate literalistic interpretations and remind us that the most important thing about saints is how they are able to beckon us into their intimacy with God.

QUESTION #8: dream

God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I am a priest, but I work full time as a professor. I don’t feel that I’m shirking my calling because in my classroom (and in the hallways, over meals, in conversations in my office) I am helping to train future ministers for the church. And yet a few months ago, I went to the rector (senior minister) at the parish church I belong to and asked him if I could be put on the rota to regularly preside at Communion and, on other Sundays, serve as a Eucharistic minister in helping to administer Communion. I once heard Duke Divinity School professor Lauren Winner say something to the effect of, “Among other things, a priest is someone who experiences closeness to God in praying the Eucharistic prayer” — the prayer of consecration over the elements of bread and wine that they might become God’s means of communicating grace to God’s people. I think she is right about that, or at least she has put her finger on something that seems to be true in my experience: my faith is reawakened and I have a new sense of direction and purpose when I serve at the Lord’s table as a minister of Holy Communion.

Another priest friend of mine, the late Rev. Martha Giltinan, who is now deceased, once said to me that she thinks God made her a priest in order to make her a Christian, and I suspect the same may be true of me. So I am praying about how to be more deeply invested in parish church ministry, more frequently and intentionally present at the altar, in addition to keeping my “day job,” so to speak. I want prayer — and specifically the Eucharistic prayer — to be the wellspring of everything I do.

One of the ways we can hear God’s voice is by meeting with him in the inner places of our hearts. But what happens when, as Wesley pointed out above, our inner voices do not align with God’s all-wise, all-true voice? What if inner criticism and lying thoughts begin to distract us from what God is trying to teach us?

If that’s been a struggle for you, then pray with us — and with the psalmist — today: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Ps. 139:23,24, ESV).

Wesley Hill