Reflections – By Another Road

The Divine Entanglement: A Meditation on Prayer

On October 1, 2026, I had the joy of offering a retreat talk for the Prayer Intercessor ministry team of Christ Church, Glendale, OH. The text of that talk, centered on Genesis 32:22-32 (Jacob’s wrestling with God) is offered below.

What is prayer? What does it mean to pray?

You would think these are straightforward questions, and yet they are not. Of all the things that we Christians do, I think that prayer—especially the kind outside of the words spoken at Sunday morning services—is one of the most difficult things for people to figure out.

So many times in ministry I have heard some version of: I don’t know how to pray. I don’t know what to say. I don’t think I am doing it right. People are self-conscious about prayer, hesitant to do it, even if they are people of deep faith.

Perhaps you, too, in your ministry, have struggled at times to speak a prayer, whether by yourself or with other people. I know I have. It is sadly not the case that putting on a clergy collar suddenly imbues you with all the right words to say to God in any given moment.

As intercessors, we can come up with some words, and sometimes they seem to meet the moment, and other times they are muddled and fall flat. But in either instance, I have the sense that the words are not really “the thing itself” in prayer—they are just the life raft that we hang onto as we float amid the great, silent undulations of the sea that is our life in God.

And so I have begun to wonder if we have the wrong starting idea about prayer. Often we hear “prayer” and we automatically think that means “saying nice words to God.”

And since God is, well, God, we assume we’d better have some really extra nice words to say. Some really wise, appropriate, eloquent, creative, clever, unique, transcendent words. Maybe we think that if we can get the words right, then God will really hear us this time. And as a starting premise, this can freeze us up before we even get started with prayer.

Part of what inspires me in the Psalms, and why I had us read through a few together earlier this morning, is because they push bask against the idea that prayer needs to be polished. The Psalms are all over the place emotionally and linguistically, sometimes within just a few phrases.

One gets the impression in most Psalms that the person speaking has stopped caring about being eloquent or spiritual and is just pouring out the mess of themselves—the anger, the fear, the love, the delight, the confusion, and they are trusting that God will know what to do with it.

This is a clue for us that, whatever prayer is, it is both simpler and more elemental, more of the guts and the body and the soul than we might care to admit. Especially we Episcopalians who love heady thoughts and pretty words and ordered approaches to things.

And so today I want to invite us to think about prayer in a different way, from a different starting premise—not primarily as “saying nice words to God.” Not as impressing God with eloquence or well-constructed sentences.

No, I want us to think of prayer first and foremost as a posture, as a presence, as a way of positioning our body, our heart, and our mind to engage with God all the time, even if we never say a word.

When Paul commends us to pray without ceasing, I think this is what he’s getting at.

So let’s explore this a bit more.

If you are comfortable doing so, close your eyes for a moment. If you had to imagine the posture of your body in the presence of God, what is it? Are your arms open, or hugged closely against you? Hands wide or clasped? Body wide and tall, or crouched low? Eyes open, or shut?

There is no wrong answer to this. Do not just imagine the posture that you think a prayerful person should assume. Give yourself the gift of being honest with yourself and with God, who already sees you and already knows.

Now open your eyes.

There is a story in Scripture that, I think, requires us to reconsider prayer, and what it looks like and what it is meant for, and what posture it requires of us. It is the story of Jacob as he wrestles through the long night with a figure referred to simply and ambiguously as “a man.”

But first a bit of context, just to refresh our memories and give this story some of its shape.

Jacob is a cunning man. He is a trickster and, we might even say, a cheat. He is used to doing things that will get him his way. You may recall the story of how he tricked his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright by tempting him with a pot of stew. Now, Esau’s own failings aside, this is still not the most honorable or straightforward way of dealing with a brother. But this is Jacob—someone for whom all of life, including his prayers, are primarily about being clever. His words have won him many things.

But now, on a particular journey through the wilderness, Jacob is about to face his brother Esau again after many years. And he is terrified, because he hears that Esau has a large group of men coming with him. Jacob assumes Esau might still be pretty mad about that whole incident with the stew and the birthright.

And so he does his Jacob thing—he goes into “crafty” mode, coming up with various plots and plans to appease his brother and maybe escape his wrath if need be. And then he prays a very eloquent, clever prayer, which I will read to you in its entirety:

O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who said to me, “Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good”, I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. Yet you have said, “I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.”’

If you read this closely, you will see that Jacob is negotiating with God, even baiting God a little bit—reminding God of the promises made and asking God to keep up God’s end of the deal. He throws in a bit of “I’m not worthy” language for good effect. As far as spoken prayers go, it’s a good one. Very well constructed and thought out, and meant to get what he wants.

Jacob indeed has all the right words to say.

But this is where it gets interesting—and this is the part we need to notice, we who fear that we don’t always have the right words to say.

In the night, by the river bank, without any explanation or reason given, Jacob is given over to wrestling with a mysterious man. The text is evocative and spare: “Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.”

This man, who is never directly identified, strikes Jacob’s hip and leaves him with a limp. But Jacob holds fast to him as the sun begins to rise, and he demands two things: to receive a blessing and to know the man’s name. He receives the blessing, but the man will not tell him his name. Instead, the man gives Jacob a new name: Israel, which means “one who strives with God.”

And in the predawn illumination we begin to realize that Jacob has been wrestling with God, and that this is how God has chosen to respond to him.

Jacob has been forced to lay down all his clever words and pious posturing and has discovered that God wants something more fundamental than pretty prayers—God wants to be entangled with us, pressed up against the flesh of us, limbs intertwined, hearts raging and heaving, blood and blessings poured out in something that is all at once a fight, and dance, and a consummation, and a surrender to one another.

That is prayer. A whole-body, whole-life entanglement with God. It is letting go of the life raft and sinking into the great sea. Words are incidental in this thing that is true prayer.

For it is striving, wrestling, tangling, holding fast to God. Claiming our blessings from amid the wreckage of our expectations and coming away with a limp and a holy light in our eyes.

This does not mean we can’t talk to God. Surely we can, just as the Psalmist does and as Jesus speaks to his Father and shows us how to pray. But until we realize that God doesn’t care as much about the words as God does about the one who speaks them, we will continue to hold ourselves back from God and each other, and we will let the temptations toward cleverness and eloquence be our stumbling blocks, and we will come to the end of our days realizing we have talked about God without ever truly meeting God. We will have talked to each other without ever truly meeting each other.

Please let yourself meet God, and each other, with your whole self. With your whole heart. That is your ministry.

The ironic, lovely epilogue to this story of Jacob-now-Israel is that the next day, he does meet his brother Esau on the road with that large group of men. And Esau comes running at him, but not to do battle. No, he comes to embrace his brother, to hold him, to weep with him. And we are meant to see that this wordless embrace between two brothers, too, is a meeting with God, and it is a sort of prayer. It is, maybe, the truest kind of prayer—the kind that you only know how to pray once you have lost your pretty words and been tangled up in God and learned to walk with a limp.

What all of this means, friends, is that if your ministry is prayer, your ministry is primarily one of wrestling with God yourself, honestly and vulnerably, and compassionately accompanying others as they do the same. Yours is a ministry that involves words but does not depend on them. If someone comes to you with their deep grief or their questions or their fears, your job is to hold the space in which they pour out these things and to listen, and to help them name those things clearly, and to tangle with God about them together. You don’t have to come up with an answer.

No, you just have to help them feel seen and known.

Because more than anything else, most people simply need to know that they are not alone as they wrestle. If all you ever did in your ministry was lay hands on someone and say “you are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone in this sometimes hard and lonely life” you would probably have 90% of the words you ever needed.

I don’t know about you, but I have been prayed for many times in my life and I cannot say I remember most of the words that were said. What I do remember is the presence of the the one praying for me—the way they showed up, the way they laid their hands upon my head, the way they were attentive to me, and breathed with me, and for just a moment let their own heart become entangled with my own.

That is what I remember. That is what made the difference.

And, as Jacob discovered in his long night of wrestling with God, maybe that is essentially what prayer needs to be.

God Comes to Us in the Dark: A Meditation

I offered this meditation at a service for The Longest Night at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH on December 20, 2023. It is a time of prayer, music, and stillness for those who are struggling in the holiday season.

God comes to us in the dark. This has always been true.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. So says Genesis. So say our ancestors in faith, grasping back through time, back through the shadowy recesses of human memory, back to an original stillness, an original peace, an original fullness, back to when God, alone, was—and it was dark, and it was already good.

And all that follows—let there be light, and let there be all of this, and let there be you and me—all of it emanated from the darkness of love, where God dreamed and saw visions, where God composed the constellations, where God traced out the edges of the universe and imagined all that could be if there were such a thing as being. In the dark, God already knew both the price and the promise of being—what it would require—of God, and of us—and so God made a promise, from the very start, when our being came to be:

And that promise is: I am here. I am here. And again and again, when you lose sight of me, I will come to you. In every season, in every hour. When the light is bright, I am here. When it fades, I am here. And when it is night—on the face of the earth, or in the depths of your soul—then I am still here. You will not lose me in the dark. No, in the dark you will encounter me as I was from before the beginning: hidden but present, dreaming but awake, tracing, now, the edges of your face, your flesh now holding a universe of meaning. I am here, gazing at the constellations in your eyes, reminding you that being, simply being, here and now, together, is enough. It is all I ever wanted. It always has been. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark

For God comes to us in the dark. And this has always been true.

…

Despite this truth, we have a complicated history with the darkness, for reasons both pragmatic and imaginative. Job calls down the darkness as a curse; the Psalmist yearns for light like the watchmen waiting for morning. We understand this in our bones.

Because, until recently, the night was, for most people, an inevitable and somewhat threatening feature of daily life. Before electric lights and heaters, it was a cold and dim and dangerous time when one had to gather in close to others for safety and warmth. For our siblings who have no home to go to on this night, for those who are alone, this is still true—the night is not always our friend.

And yet there are other reasons we fear the dark, ways we have been formed to fear it in our mind’s eye. We have been taught, too often, that night metaphors are literal—that the light itself is somehow truer, purer, stronger, more moral, and that the darkness is a time of indolence, of deceit, of confusion and waywardness. And so when we find ourselves in a seemingly dark place—a place in our lives where we cannot see the path ahead, where we cannot understand what has happened to us and why—we might assume that we have been forsaken, that we have been forgotten, that we are at fault, or that God has left us to fend for ourselves.

We call this the dark night of the soul and think that we are talking about God’s absence. But we are wrong.

For we must remember, again: God comes to us in the dark.

Not just in the beginning, but always. The darkness is when God chooses to appear.

Consider how the Passover and the Exodus and God’s liberating work all began at night.

Consider God speaking to Moses on a mountain covered in thick, dark cloud, amid thunder and lightning.

Consider Jacob wrestling with an angel all through the night, claiming a blessing upon his wounded body before sunrise.

Consider the promise spoken by the prophet Isaiah: I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places.

Consider the child, soon to be born in Bethlehem, in the silent, holy, starlit night.

Consider the Risen Christ, emerging from the darkness of the tomb into the predawn shadows of a garden.

And consider how the Lord promises his return when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,” how he will reveal himself, in the end, as he was in the beginning, emanating from that deep original mystery, that unseen, unspoken, ageless night of dreaming, older than the stars.

Yes, God always comes to us in the dark.

And if we consider this, then perhaps we will begin to realize that, indeed, darkness and light to God are both alike, because God’s presence and power and mercy are not dependent upon whether we walk confidently, whether we understand, whether we see clearly, whether we know exactly what to do next or how. God arrives in the night because God is at peace with hiddenness, with the unfolding mystery that God is to us, with the unfolding mystery that we are to God, and so we are invited, also, to make peace with that which is hidden—the reasons and the justifications and the certainties that elude us, and the ways that love endures regardless of what we know or do not know.

And God arrives in the night because, in truth, the darkness has its own particular knowing—its own intimacies and surrenders and quietude that come precisely when we cannot see everything, when we let go, when we cannot strive or plan or rely on ourselves as much as we do in the light of day.

The night engenders a deeper trust, if we will let it. If we will rest in it.

So whatever you carry with you on this night—a weariness, a fear, a grief, a bitterness, a question, a regret, a secret dream—what you must know is that God is still present to you in this place, God sees you and knows you, even if you cannot see God’s face, even if you don’t recognize who you have become.

Like a mother cradling her child, or like a lover in the darkness, God sees you, God gazes upon you tenderly, whispering gentle reminders of promises made and kept and renewed, of a covenant, of a bond deeper than eternity—one that will not break, even when we do. And we do sometimes.

But God comes to us in the dark, saying: do not be afraid, and saying, blessed are you who mourn, for I will make my home in the cracks of your shattered heart, and saying your pain will turn into joy—not because pain is holy but because I AM, and I am the one who offers you a joy that is deeper than fear — the joy that is my own self, that same self from before the beginning, a divine darkness bathed in the stillness of eternity and traveling, traveling, across the constellations and the cosmos to be here, right here, to hold you when your eyes are blurred with tears and shadows on this long, long, longest night.

And to tell you that even when it’s not ok, even when you are not ok, you are loved.

…

In a few days, we will celebrate a birth, and we will speak of the Light of the World, and on that day we will be talking, of course, about God. But remember, as we do, and as you go from this place tonight, that the Light of the World is not all that can be said of God. For before the light, God was.

And here, in the night of the earth and, perhaps, in the night of your soul, God has not left you. God is still doing what God always has been doing, in that original, timeless, holy darkness: dreaming, creating, forming, loving. Remembering all the prices you have paid. Remembering the promises God has made. And reminding us of the one thing that is always true, the one thing God will never stop telling us, even in the dark:

I am here. I am here. I am here.

Garden at the End of the World: A Reflection

I offered this reflection during a parish Lenten retreat at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, which explored the various gardens of Scripture, including Eden, Gethsemane, and, here, the garden of the New Creation in the Book of Revelation.

I want to tell you a story about a garden at the end of the world.

Last summer, I was on a trip to the United Kingdom, and after a very long set of flights from Fort Wayne to London, and a train from London to the northern city of Newcastle, and a car from Newcastle to the Northumbrian coast near the border of England and Scotland, I found myself standing on the seashore, looking out towards my final destination: an island just off the mainland, separated by a tidal causeway that is only passable at certain times of day when the seawater does not inundate it. It was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, an ancient seat of Christian monasticism and a pilgrimage site for centuries.

I was still wearing the same clothes I’d put on, many, many hours ago in Indiana, and it was a surreal experience to stand there, bleary eyed, carrying the dust and the baggage of all I’d left behind, and yet to be in the midst of something so luminously, shockingly new.

We crossed the causeway as the sun sank into the North Sea and the skies were every pastel shade imaginable, like ice cream flavors melting together. Rasberry, peach, grape, blueberry, cream. And once we’d arrive to the other side, my companion and I made our way up a grassy embankment, to the top of a ridge overlooking the sea. We had arrived, and we were bathed in color and salt air, and I confess that it felt like the landscapes of heaven one dreams of as a child, before heaven seems a bit harder to imagine.

As we stood among the waving grasses of Lindisfarne, we looked out towards the far side of the island, straining our eyes in the falling dusk. Isn’t it interesting how, whenever we get to the edge of something we still want to see what is even further out? Curiousity, or longing, keeps our eyes on the horizon.

And as we looked, we noticed something that was hard to make out, a low structure of some kind, dark and earthen, out beyond any other buildings or roads. It wasn’t on our map. It was a mystery, and we decided to go out the next day to see what it was, sitting in solitude at the far end of an island at the far end of the earth.

So we set out the next morning, making our way along a path that followed the sea, curving out around the old castle that sits like a sentinel atop a rocky hill on the otherwise gentle landscape of Lindisfarne. And that low, dark thing, whatever it was, was still hard to make out, until we curved around the eastern edge of the island and followed a narrow road that led us closer.

It was not a building at all, in fact, but a set of low stone walls, made of rocks piled on top of one another, moss growing in the cracks between them, delicate sea grasses growing out of the top. And in the center of one wall was a gate. And when we opened the gate…we stepped into a garden.

A garden, sitting in silent, abundant repose, at the end of the earth. And in that garden, on this July afternoon, every color flower imaginable was blooming—red poppies and white daisies and flowers I did not recognize—fuschia and pink and gold and amethyst. And there were bees buzzing around, gathering their pollen, and the sea breeze stirred the plants gently and the air smelled like earth and salt and sweetness and greenness. Like viriditas.

And we just stood there, in awe, marveling that such a beautiful thing could actually exist anywhere, but especially here, out at the end of the world.

In the Revelation to John, we are given a vision of another garden, in another place and time, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is a vision of a garden that is in every place and beyond time. For it is the garden of the New Creation, the garden that is the fulfillment of God’s promise to redeem creation and to make it whole. To make it holy.

John writes: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

This vision, the very last one given in the Book of Revelation, and thus the final one in Holy Scripture, is the consummation of God’s promises: that in the end, beyond death, beyond time itself, there will be a garden, there will be life, there will be food and healing and abundance in every season. There will be a garden at the end of the world, and there will be a place for everyone and everything.

It is worth noting that this new garden, this new and eternal revelation of Divine viriditas, is not just a reentry into Eden. We don’t simply end up where our forebears started, as if nothing had happened, as if the millennia of life and death and growth and decay we’ve survived all just folded back on itself into some sort of primordial, unknowing, unremembering dream. Because God cherishes the beauty of all the seasons we have endured. God knows the seeds we have planted, the dreams and the tears and the blood spilled into the soil. God sees all of it, God sees all of you, all of us, and God does not desire to erase but to redeem it, to heal it, to imbue it with an everlasting radiance. To imbue it with viriditas.

So no, we are never going back to Eden. But neither are we stuck forever in Gethsemane, where life and death struggle in their tortured dance. No, in the Garden of the New Creation, we enter into something far better than a new and improved version of the world we know. We enter into the very life of God. We enter into God’s own heart, God’s own home, God’s own viriditas, a place that is not simply a lost paradise reclaimed, but is the very love and life that underlies every notion of paradise.

In the new heave and new earth, we enter into God, who is waiting for us at the end of the world. And according to Scripture, it seems that God looks very much like a garden.

I confess that as we look around the world today, it is hard to hold onto this vision. Our planet is in crisis, and all of us—humanity and plants and animals, rocks, rivers, and seas—all of us are bound together in uncertainty and in pain. So some days it’s hard to imagine a place where there is ever-ripening fruit and balm for every ailment. A place where all creation exists in harmony with itself and its Creator. It is a lovely thought, beyond lovely, but it can feel like a fanciful wish rather than a grounded hope, because we have known so much of hardship for so long.

Loss and death and finitude are so intimately part of our lives; they are big and burdensome yet also familiar, and if I am honest with myself, I can’t imagine life without death, as much as I want to. Sometimes the idea of eternity, even in a beautiful garden, scares me a little. I can’t really understand its unending joy. It’s hard to imagine a world that is not Eden or Gethsemane, a world where the serpent won’t show up again with his temptations, it’s hard to imagine a world where the Cup that we receive will be full of life, with not even a trace of bitterness or loss.

But the Revelation, of course, doesn’t really explain how it all will work. We are given a dream, a promise to trust in. We are given a garden, and the rest is left to our sense of wonder. This vision of the New Creation is not a precise roadmap to eternity, but more of a song, or a poem, or an intuition. A reminder that as we wait, if we seek a foretaste of heaven, we might tend to the earth and help in flourish.

All we can do, here and now, is love the gardens in which we find ourselves, the gardens of the earth as it is: broken yet insistently hopeful; the gardens of our lives as they are: broken yet insistently hopeful. The gardens that remind us of what has been given, what has been lost, what has been promised. All I can do is walk through this earth and notice it, and care for it, and I can walk alongside my neighbor (my human neighbor and all the rest of creation too) and notice them and care for them, and I can trust that my Lord, the unseen gardener and caretaker of us all, is just on the other side of the dense greenery, smiling through the leaves, and that whatever he is planting for that future day, that final harvest, that eternal garden, it will be more beautiful, more whole, more full of connection and love than anything I’ve yet known or imagined.

More so, even, than the gift I found hidden behind those stone walls on the Holy Island, where for one brief summer afternoon, heaven whispered among the poppies and the seagrass, and God was in the green and in the wind and said,

I want to tell you a story about a garden at the end of the world.

The Edge of Knowing: An Advent Reflection

I offered this reflection as part of a contemplative retreat on Saturday, December 3rd at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The theme of the retreat was Be Born in Us: Preparing for the Advent of Christ.

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’ -Luke 1:39-45

Imagine: two women stand, side by side, at the edge of the world.

Behind them, receding from view, the conventional lives that they expected—lives of predictable joy and predictable sorrow, all held safely within the boundaries of what they already understood. Behind them, now, the future that they had been preparing for—the one that the world had prepared them for from their earliest days.

Here they stand, bearers of good news carried on the lips of angels. Here they stand, backs turned on all of those old certainties, facing instead toward a great unknown.

True, the villagers in this unnamed Judean hill town might just see two women like any other, shoulder to shoulder, staring out at nothing in particular. Hands instinctively resting upon their bellies. Two regular women, pausing to catch their breath, perhaps, caught up in a memory, or a daydream, or a question.

And why has this happened to me? asks Elizabeth.

They might still look the same as before, but inside, it feels as though they are standing at the edge of the earth, at the edge of a wide and restless sea, knowing that whatever must come next is out there beyond the solidity of the ground beneath their feet. But how does one step out into the unknown? How does one learn to walk on water?

The sun is coming out. The light is bright in their eyes.

Are they weeping? Are they laughing? Maybe both? Who can say?

But at the very least, they are willing.

Yes, let it be done according to your word. Blessed are we among women.

For Mary and Elizabeth, one just beginning her life and one late in her years, there is a new type of kinship on this day. Not just one of blood, and not just because they both find themselves unexpectedly bearing a child in their womb.

No, they are kindred spirits in this moment because they, like so many others before and after them, have come to the edge of what they know, of who they thought they were, and now must ask themselves:

How do I prepare for whatever comes next?

How do I prepare for the things nobody told me about? The things I could not have seen coming? How do I prepare for the bottom dropping out, for the unimaginable news at the door?

And how do I prepare for God, who comes like a thief in the night, making off with my comforts and my complacency, leaving me instead with strange, shadowy miracles and a song on my lips, only half-understood?

How do I prepare when I could not have ever prepared for this?

These, ultimately, are questions for all of us. And at their heart, they are Advent questions.

Because Advent, far from simply being a cozy, quiet season ahead of Christmas, is actually a season of learning how to live with that which is unknown and unresolved in our hearts and in our world.

It is the season of waiting and of preparation for Christ, but it is also the season that reminds us that preparation only brings us so far, because what lies ahead—the fullness of who God will be for us, who God will ask us to be for Him—is inevitably surprising and more expansive and more wondrous than we can imagine. It demands all, even as it redeems all.

What will be revealed to us, Lord, when you arrive? What will be revealed about us when you arrive? How can we ever prepare ourselves for you, when you are so much more than we understand?

And yet, even as we ask such unanswerable questions, even as we stand facing the unknown, there is new life stirring within us, leaping with joy at the promise of His appearing.

So we come here today to ask such questions, to notice this joy, to find kinship with Mary and Elizabeth: to dare to believe that God can indeed be born in each of us, even if we feel utterly unprepared for that to be possible. Even if it scares us a little bit.

It should scare us a little bit, if we’re honest. The truly important things always do.

I invite you to consider what you need this year during Advent—if there is a prayer or a question on your heart in this season of your life. I invite you, right now, to take a moment and close your eyes and call it to mind.

Feel the significance of that need or prayer or question within you, how your body holds it. Is it light? Is it heavy? Is it comforting? Is it unsettling?

What is God calling forth from within you?

My hope is that you will carry that intention with you in this season, that you will spend some time being very honest with God and with yourself—that you will consider what it is that you need, and who you are becoming, and that you will name these things—whether in conversation with others or in the silence of prayer with God.

Because the strange thing is that even if we cannot perfectly prepare for the unknown future, it is in knowing God and ourselves more deeply, and in knowing one another more deeply, that we will be able to bear it, whatever comes, whenever it comes.

Even if, sometimes, it feels like you are standing at the edge of the world, remember that you are not standing there alone. You are in solidarity with Mary and Elizabeth and with every person who has ever longed to let the powerful love of God be born in them, to transform them, to take them out beyond certainty, beyond complacency, into the wide and eternal mystery of grace.

Today we step out upon those waters, trusting that they will hold. Trusting the spirit of God who lives and moves within us. Trusting that the life of God which we carry will ultimately carry us.

For this is, in the end, how we truly prepare: by being bearers of love. By letting God’s love be born in us each day, no matter what happens. Standing side by side in the light of sun, facing forward, saying yes, saying come, saying even though I will never be ready, I am willing. Blessed are we. Blessed are we.

Are we weeping? Are we laughing? Maybe both? Who can say?

But we are willing. Yes, whatever comes, let us be willing.

No Paradise: HBO’s “The White Lotus” and the Limits of Natural Theology

This reflection does not contain specific plot spoilers for the HBO series “The White Lotus” but it does refer to the overall trajectory of the storyline.

If you are looking for the key question that underlies HBO’s limited series The White Lotus, you will find it in episode 4, during a dinner conversation among the wealthy white Mossbacher family and their daughter’s BIPOC friend, Paula. In the midst of a terse intergenerational argument over race, class, and social change, the normally quiet teenage son Quinn erupts in frustration:

“What does it matter what we think? If we think the right things or the wrong things, we all do the same shit. We’re all still parasites on the earth. There’s no virtuous person when we’re all eating less fish and throwing all our plastic crap in the ocean. Like a billion animals died in Australia during the fire. A billion. Where does all the pain go?”

Where does all the pain go, indeed? Who pays the price for widespread abuse and destruction, be it climate change, systemic social injustices or otherwise?

Although it looks and sounds like a straightforward TV series centering intertwined human dramas, it is the tension between ethics and ecology that is, in truth, the force propelling the stories of the indolent guests at The White Lotus resort. Certain questions linger and prod at us throughout the series: can we (especially we white, economically-privileged westerners) insulate ourselves from the raw forces of nature, including the self-destructiveness of our own predatory instincts? Will nature eventually humble us into a greater sense of mutuality and interconnectedness with our neighbor and our planet?

For The White Lotus, at least, the answer is yes to the first question and no to the second. Without giving away any specific plot points, it is safe to say that there is no dramatic comeuppance for the hotel guests. They emerge from their vacations largely unscathed, still ensconced in their entitlement, while those who serve them or tread in their wake are left to bear the brunt of the tragedy that ensues.

This can feel a bit disappointing, especially if you were hoping for the emotional gratification of seeing some problematic people get their just deserts. The sinister, sickly-golden artifice of the resort, which at the outset of the series hints at the possibility of some moral reckoning lurking among the hibiscus flowers (like a modern-day Fantasy Island) gives way to an even more sinister truth at the end: there is no reckoning, at least not for those at the top of the food chain. The world, the show seems to admit, continues to reward the dominant and chew up the vulnerable. There is no moral arc intrinsic to the natural order of creation.

A bleak takeaway for an intelligent and entertaining TV series, perhaps. However, there is much here to consider through the lens of Christian faith—especially for those of us who operate in generally progressive Christian circles or who frequently emphasize the inherent goodness of creation. Here’s why.

If you or anyone you know has ever said something like, “I sense God’s presence most clearly in nature,” you have participated to some degree in what is called natural theology, which explores “what can be known of God through the natural world without any divine guidance or revelation” (McGrath, Christian Theology, 141.) When we behold the beauty of a sunset or marvel at the intricacy of an ecological system and then consider how those things might reveal something of their Creator, we are, in that moment, natural theologians. In our wonder we echo the words of the Psalmist who cries out that “the heavens declare the glory of God; the heavens proclaim the work of God’s hands” (Psalm 19:1).

This can be a sacred and life-giving pursuit. Natural theology is a deeply important approach, especially because in an age of overly-spiritualized Christianity it emphasizes the goodness and the preciousness of the created world and our responsibility to it. For if nature bears some imprint of God’s own majesty, then presumably we are called to honor it and care for it, just as we do for our neighbor whose own face reveals to us the face of Christ. In the era of destructive climate change, this perspective is more urgent than ever.

But natural theology has its limits, and we must be mindful of acknowledging them. For as much as we celebrate in the Christian faith that God created the earth and called it good (see:Genesis) this ought not send us into a mawkish romanticism that sees nature simply as a benign object of admiration. For example, it is unarguably lovely to imagine God revealed in a sunset or a rainbow, but far more troubling to consider God as exercising Divine prerogative in an earthquake or a hurricane. And although the record of Scriputure does both, it is far too easy to reject the latter while blithely retaining the former. God becomes the object of our pleasure rather than our awe, and God then suspiciously begins to look a lot like us, as malleable as the landscape we exploit.

And while they do not seem to profess any particular faith, this is, in fact, what the characters of The White Lotus are prone to do in their Hawaiian pseudo-paradise. They are natural theologians in extremis. They admire the waves and the flowers and the hula dancers as scenery while carefully ignoring their own complicity in the subjugation of the land and the people in whose midst they are traveling. Nature is beautiful and largely banal to them because, as those residing at the top of the ecosystem, they can afford to ignore the ugly, brutal stuff. But others (the hotel workers and those in more precarious social circumstances) cannot help but notice that stuff because they are the ones left to clean it up, both literally and figuratively.

Natural theology, unmitigated, can result in a subtle sort of idolatry in which the world as it is is interpreted as an end in itself. Our reverence for creation risks turning into reverence for ourselves with creation as a soothing backdrop, which might sound like a harmless form of self-empowerment until you see it at work among those who hold all of the power and who claim that this is both natural and divinely sanctioned (see: white supremacy.) At the risk of gross understatement, we’ve seen too much of this, and there must be a corrective.

Thankfully, there is. A central aspect of our faith, which can get lost in our contemporary enthusiasm for natural theologies, is that Christianity is revealed—that is, God’s activity and self-disclosure in Christ are outside of the natural order. This activity is characterized by intervention, by miraculousness, and what might be called a loving antagonism against the established natural and social order of the world.

Because if we, like the creators of The White Lotus, observe that nature is inherently amoral in its ordering, such that “there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous.” (Ecclesiastes 8:14), then God has provided a revolutionary new thing (Isaiah 43:19) in the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus. This new thing is categorically unnatural, because it overturns the tendencies of death and domination that pervade nature as we know it.

And in its unnatural character, God’s work in Christ liberates us from the expected outcomes. It is a promise that those who feast and laugh (and, ahem, take expensive and exploitative beach vacations) at the expense of others must eventually be accountable for their share of the world’s suffering.

Divine judgment, which tends to make us progressive Christians squirm, is actually a promise that the brutality of nature is not the end of the story. Hence Mary’s jubilant song: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:52-53).

This is the moral outcome which is utterly lacking in The White Lotus, but our dismay about that absence is actually a sign of encouragement. For if nature itself (and the society we have built upon its back) is largely indifferent to our basest impulses, then from whence comes our longing for justice and our capacity for selflessness? How can we imagine pure benevolence when we have no direct experience of it in the world around us? That these questions are inherently “unnatural” and unsupported by prevailing evidence suggests that there is more going on in God’s universe than what we can readily perceive.

This is our hope: that the answers to these questions transcend the limits of natural theology and invite us into something more vast than the largest ocean and more beautiful than the most perfect sunset—something made known to us not by human wisdom or striving, but only in the revelation we receive as followers of Christ. While Jesus does not deny that domination and death will still shape our experience of life and discipleship (see: Calvary), he also promises through his conquering of death that yes, there is place where all the pain goes. It goes to a place where it is held and transformed and redeemed by Love itself. We usually call it the Kingdom of God. It is a realm where we are are not just on vacation, but where we—and all of creation—can finally experience what the hapless travelers at The White Lotus never actually find: true peace.

Love and Order: Rethinking Everything

I recently offered this reflection as part of an online retreat at Trinity, Fort Wayne, All Shall Be Well: Hope for Hard Times with Julian of Norwich. Julian’s text, Revelations of Divine Love, is one of the classics of Christian mysticism.

We are coming up on almost a year of a shared experience of disruption and disorder. In the past 10 months or so, we’ve had to adapt in major ways to the conditions around us—the pandemic, of course, being the factor that has altered our daily lives in the most obvious ways, though it is certainly not the only challenge we’ve had to face.

I’ve had conversations with so many people over the past year, including some of you, about how hard these times feel for so many of us, and the sense of loss that many of us are experiencing. We even devoted a whole retreat last summer to the theme of Lament in Christian life, as we struggle to figure out how our shared sense of loss fits into our relationship with God.

But today we’re talking about hope, the kind of hope that survives hard times—not a vague type of hope, not the sort that ignores the bad stuff or glosses it over, but the kind of hope that acknowledges it, doesn’t try to candy-coat it, and yet persists in look for something deeper, more real, than whatever our present circumstances might be.

For Julian of Norwich, that hope was founded upon a vision of God’s enduring, undying, all-pervading LOVE, something that she witnessed and engaged with firsthand in her mystical visions of Christ. At the every end of her text, she writes,

“You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold onto this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else—ever!”

Julian discovered that it is love, more than anything else, that characterizes WHO God is (identity), HOW God acts (methodology) and WHY God does so (purpose). And from that, we might conclude that love is also OUR identity, our methodology, and our purpose for being–we who have been made in God’s image. It is, in the end, all that there is to know about being human.

This isn’t something Julian pulled out of thin air, of course—Scripture attests to it in many ways. Consider 1 John:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

But I will admit that we might talk about God’s love and God AS love so often that we’ve dulled the impact a bit. We might have lost a sense of what a radical statment this actually is, the claim that love—not political power, not personal control, not wealth, not ritual purity, nor anything else but LOVE—is the fundamental reality from which everything else grows and finds its significance.

Because we might SAY that love matters a lot to us—at church, in our families, among friends—but do we actually relate to the circumstances of life in a way that acknowledges love’s primacy over all else?

Do we center love in our perception of what is happening and what is required of us in any given moment, or do we view it as a derivative of other preconditions, like security or knowledge or success?

If you have ever said to yourself (as I certainly have): “If I can only get this one thing sorted out…if I can only get this one person in my life to agree that I am right…if I can just save enough money, or lose enough weight, or get the right job…and THEN I will have all the capacity in the world to love–to be patient and kind. THEN, I promise, Lord, I will never say another nasty thing, I’ll be compassionate and loving toward everyone I meet…after I get this one thing in order.”

Then we start to realize that perhaps something else in our lives is taking precedence over the mandate of love; the urgency of love. And that perhaps we have been conditioned to think that something else must come first, before love can flourish in our lives.

And what is that “something else”? I would argue that it is the idea of order.

For a very long time, our culture has taught that God– the kingly ruler–desires order above all else, and that the primary work of Christ is repairing the DISorder that sin has wrought upon our lives. We have built insitutions and regulations and moral inventories to attest to this. And in this schema, we must first participate in God’s vision of order and only THEN we can experience the fullness of God’s love.

And that might seem well and good and sensible when things are flowing smoothly, when the system functions.

But what about when things go wrong for us and for those around us, as they often tend to do?

Consider this example: a person lives a relatively “normal” and well-ordered life, doing all of the things expected in their cultural context, working hard, maybe raising a family, being a generally conscientous citizen. And then, the bottom drops out. They get sick. They lose their livelihood. Their family falls apart. Their life is in complete disarray. They might wonder why “God has abandoned them” or “how they have offended God” to be punished in such a way. The apparent disorder of their life suggests to them that God is far from them.

But is this true? Is God only present to those with well-ordered lives, or is there something more profound, something deeper even than this, that bonds us to the Divine Life?

Lady Julian would tell us, yes, there is something deeper than God’s sense of order—and it is his love. Her claim is that God’s love underlies everything, it sustains everything, and thus it cannot be taken away or made inaccessible, even and especially in those moments when the circumstances of life all seem to be going wrong.

Her famous statement that “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” which Jesus says to her in her vision, is not a platitude, but a bold assertion that God’s love will continue to find a way, even amid the most hopeless, disordered situations—and that nothing, not even death and suffering, not even the devil himself, can inhibit God’s love for us or frustrate God’s plan to reconcile all things in that love.

Julian looks at the world, and at herself, and she is under no illusion about the realities of brokenness. She is fully aware that there is disorder, disease, death, and sin. And yet, the fundamental thrust of her visions is that everything is going to be OK, becasue underneath all of that apparent disorder, there is God’s love, which WILL NOT FAIL. God’s love keeps coming up through the cracks, like a weed-flower that refuses to die.

And thus, for her, it is love, not order, which is the lens through which we should view and assess EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, including ourselves. Rather than wonder: how high do I rank, how well do I fit, how far have I fallen, we must ask, instead, how deeply have I loved? How freely have I forgiven? How gently, how heartfully have I trod the tender, ravaged places of the earth?

Those places are everywhere. We’re in a moment where we, like the person in our earlier example, might be feeling a great sense of loss, frustration, or isolation. All the plans we might have had are upended, suspended, or ruined. But rather than see this disorder as a punishment or even as an impediment to our relationship with God, we might instead hunt through the rubble of our great expectations and figure out where love is springing up like that hopeful weed and then tend to it, letting it carpet the bruised soil, growing a garden in the ruins.

Because the miraculous thing is that love can ALWAYS be found unfurling itself, can always be sown and nurtured, in even the most dire circumstances, even in the seasons of our deepest disappointment, even when order is fractured. For order, as we have seen of late, is a fragile thing, but love…love is tenacious. It cannot die, because it is the essence of life. It is God’s very self. And it is everywhere, always.

“The fullness of joy is to see God in all things,” Julian writes. Once we lay claim to love as the fundamental nature of who God is (and who we are) then we realize that such joy can never be taken away, because it is dependent on no outer circumstance. It is pure gift, given and received, in the ordered times and the messy ones—always present, always ours.

If you take nothing else away from this reflection, I hope you will hear this: God doesn’t need you to be fully in order, in order to love you. God doesn’t need your house to be fully in order before he comes to abide with you, to work with and in and through you. God is reaching out to you, an unfurling tendril, even at this very moment, even in these hard times, longing to love you, because love is the point of contact between all that He is and all that He has made.

Love is his meaning. And ours. And, as it was for Lady Julian, that is the cause for much joy, and for much hope.

“Darkness and Light to You are Both Alike”: An Epiphany Reflection

I originally wrote this piece for The Episcopal Church’s Sermons that Work series in honor of the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 2021.

The metaphors of light and darkness are pervasive throughout Holy Scripture and Church tradition, but such imagery reaches its apogee now, on the Feast of the Epiphany. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, this is the day, in the lean light of January, when we often speak of Christ as brightness, as radiance, as the child bathed in starlight—attempting to articulate how an Incarnate God is not simply present among us, but revealed to us, just as the day is revealed by its dawning.

“Arise, shine; for your light has come,” declares Isaiah; it is an invitation to wake from sleep, to gather in the holy places, to pay homage to the one true Gift: God’s desire to know and be known by us. “We observed his star at its rising,” the wise men say, and it is a reminder that even the light of inconceivably distant galaxies has been caught up in the narrative of Divine Love made manifest, reaching across the vastness of space to find itself reflected in the eyes of an infant Lord.

For all the beauty of this imagery, however, and despite its centrality to our faith tradition, as people of this time and place we must contend in new ways with the ideas of darkness and light. We must be mindful of how this dichotomy has been used not only to depict the landscapes of spiritual consciousness but has also been misapplied to the physicality of people themselves, as if the color of our skin were an indicator of our soul’s worth.

This is especially true for those of us who live and worship in the United States; we cannot casually equate “light” with God and “darkness” with evil or ignorance in our preaching and our prayers without realizing how these very terms have been corrupted in recent centuries by our own sinfulness and that of our forebears—by this nation’s history of equating skin color with moral and spiritual capacities. All of us, no matter our background or good intentions, are inheritors of this bitter reality, and as Christians attentive to justice and reconciliation and breaking down that which disfigures beloved community, part of our own emerging Epiphany is a frank assessment of how language can harm just as powerfully as it can heal.

This is not about erasing the use of traditional imagery, nor is it about excising portions of Scripture. It is about taking these resources even more seriously than we have before: sitting with them, wrestling with them, plumbing the depths of Christian writing and hymnody to incorporate the full scope of ways we might speak about God—the One whom John calls “the true light… coming into the world,” but also the One of whom the psalmist says, “darkness and light to you are both alike.” The God whom Isaiah promises will be our “everlasting light” and the One whom the mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius calls “the ray of divine darkness.”

Rich and varied use of such metaphorical language preserves us from two extremes: first, from assuming that this imagery has no intrinsic power of its own to shape our social consciousness (it does); and second, from idolizing such imagery as if it were itself God (it isn’t). It is in the tension of opposites, then, and the playful spectrum between them, that we find our language’s best attempt at expressing the inexpressible, the experience of which we celebrate today.

For many of us, these considerations might feel like uncharted terrain. As such, the wise men in Matthew’s Gospel are ideal guides for our journey—strangers from another land, led through the night by wonder and hope, following the path to Christ fixed in the stars (which, of course, can only be seen in the dark). The Magi are not bound by the political machinations of Herod; they are not beholden to the present order of domination and exploitation. Instead, they are guided by dreams and visions, by the wisdom of hidden roads, by attentiveness to the signs around them. And in their journey—one that is itself the union of brightness and shadow—they are led to the place of our collective longing: to gaze upon the hidden face of God and to know that it is indeed God gazing back, beyond metaphor, beyond language itself, as pure, Incarnate presence.

How might we, too, encounter God again, if we are courageous enough to think deeply about the language we use to approach Divine Mystery? How might we, too, be guided to travel “by another road,” a road upon which we acknowledge the limits and the lamentable uses of “light” and “dark” in our recent past and then push beyond them? What new ways might we dream of to depict and express the epiphany that God is, and always has been, reaching out from across eternity to abide with us, to heal us, to bring us back to ourselves?

For us, as Episcopalians, this is an instance where our liturgy, our theological process, and God’s mission converge to do a brave new thing. As with any worthwhile journey, this is not one that can be finished quickly, nor can it be done alone. We must listen to one another, and to the voices of others whose lives are quite different from our own. We must be willing to hold ourselves accountable for speaking eternal truth in new and varied ways, knowing that even our most beautiful language is but a foretaste of the beauty that will one day be revealed in its fullness. But until then, it is what we have to offer.

“They all gather together, they come to you,” Isaiah promises the Holy City of God, and still we are coming, traversing the ages, stumbling, lost, hopeful, guided by stars and secret longings, to the place that is neither dark nor light, but deep and dazzling nonetheless—the place of love’s Epiphany: distant, hidden, home.

Jesus, the Incarnate Lamentation of God

I offered this address as a video teaching on June 21, 2020, as part of a parish retreat, “The Transformative Power of Lament.” That video can be viewed here.

This weekend we have spent a great deal of time considering how and why we lament. We have talked about God’s ability to hear and hold our lament; about how God wants us to express our sorrow as one part of the deep fullness of what it means to be human.

But what about God? Is God simply an impassive sort of figure, up there, who calmly, magnanimously receives our cries of grief and frustration with a cosmic pat on the head? Or does lamentation itself somehow bear the image of Divine Life? Can we say that God, that perfect Trinity of Love, is also a figure of lamentation?

Yes, I think we can. And as followers of Jesus, I would say that we must. Because in Jesus, in both his earthly life and in his passion and crucifixion, we see and hear God’s enfleshed lament. God’s anguish. God’s piteous tears.

The idea that God might have a lamentation to offer back to creation was intuited long before the Incarnation, of course. The tradition of the Hebrew prophets already bears the imprint of God’s sorrow over Israel’s brokenness

From the prophet Amos:

Hear this word that I take up over you in lamentation, O house of Israel:

Fallen, no more to rise,

is maiden Israel;

forsaken on her land,

with no one to raise her up.

For thus says the Lord God:

The city that marched out a thousand

shall have a hundred left,

and that which marched out a hundred

shall have ten left.

For thus says the Lord to the house of Israel:

Seek me and live. (Amos 5:1-4)

And then in Jesus, we hear something so very similar, uttered on the human lips of that very same God, who has come to be as one with creation, and thus issues a cry in his own voice:

“If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.” (Luke 19:42-44)

That is, of course, the pathos of God from the very beginning of our story, from Eden, through the Exodus, to Calvary and beyond —an inability to be fully recognized by creation in those moments of visitation. The Father weeps, in a sense, over our inability to see his face clearly through the tears of our finitude; the Son weeps over the hardness of our hearts, ossified by fear and apathy; the Holy Spirit weeps over our inability to hear her crying out across the the desert, across the void of infinite closeness between us.

Thinking about God as a figure of lamentation changes a few things. First, it recasts a lot of the ideas about God’s “wrathfulness” in a new light. What would be like if you imagined all of those “angry” proclamations from God in Scripture as being, instead, expressions of deep grief, said through tears and sighs? Would that affect how you imagine God’s realationship with the world?

This should not be especially surprising, if we think about it, because as Christians, Jesus reveals precisely what God has to say to the world about its brokenness, unmediated through the prophets, and far from being an expression of vengeful anger or rage, it is an expression of lament. Somehow God knows, in Holy Wisdom, that lament is the necessary message.

Why is this?

The theologian and scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that it is grief and lament, rather than rage, which God offers to us in Jesus because God understands that lament is the fundamental act which penetrates the numbing self-interest of systems of domination and death; it is God’s solidarity wtih us, God’s joining in our anguish and asking us to learn from anguish rather than acting out of denial. It is in taking up our cross that we encounter the narrow but certain path to wisdom and redemption. The way, the truth, and the life. Thus it is Only lamentation—that which we express and that which we listen to from others—which can build compassion within us, soften our hearts, and open us up to the mystery of transformative love.

As Brueggemann writes, “Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into the pain and giving it voice” (The Prophetic Imagination, 91).

And so when we look at Jesus on the cross, the ultimate expression of God’s lamentation, we are looking at that gateway into newness. We are looking at the articulation of God’s grief over a broken creation, and of God’s deep longing to be so close to us that he is willing to be broken himself. And then, in the resurrection, the definitive evidence that lament, for all its power, is a prelude to something even more powerful: healing, liberation, and enduring life.

But in Jesus we learn that it is a necessary prelude. There is no shortcut around Golgotha, no avoiding an intentional engagement with grief. This, in some ways, is one of Christianity’s unique contributions to the faith traditions of the world—that suffering is itself a wisdom path, a holy road, one that Divinity itself has trod.

It is not a road for the fainthearted, but it is also not one that we walk alone. God walks with us, and we walk it with each other, to encourage, to listen, to grieve, and to celebrate as one body.

So, as we conclude our retreat, the question is: are we willing to go down that road? Are we willing to go through the gate of newness that is the cross? Are we willing to articulate our grief, and respond to the grief of others? Are we willing to weep with Jesus at the edge of the city, to bear that same fierce love he does, for people, including ourselves, who have not recongized the things that make for peace?

If we are willing, then lamentation is where we begin.

God bless you on the journey. I will see you out there.

Holy Week at Home #8: Easter Day

The final installment of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; a meditation on happiness and joy in a season when both feel harder to inhabit. Yet still we say: Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Something I am continuing to discover is how joy and happiness are not the same thing. And on this particular Easter, when the usual signs of celebration are absent or muted by grief, understanding that distinction feels more important than ever.

Happiness is precious and usually comes, in its purest form, unbidden, from humble things. A flower blooming, a familiar voice, a gentle hand outstretched. But happiness also vanishes as quickly as it comes, and cannot be pursued. We must learn to hold it gently, and then let it go.

Thus I think of Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus in the garden on Easter morning. There is a flower and a voice and an outstretched hand, yes, but also this: “Do not hold onto me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father, to my God and your God.” This happiness is only momentary. Resurrection is not just reunion. It’s also letting go.

So, we must consider what we mean by joy, and Easter joy in particular. Not mere happiness, but perhaps, instead, a fullness. Fullness of life. Fullness of presence, both God’s presence and our own. A fullness that contains happiness, yes, but also grief, and confusion, and wonder, and mercy, and everything else that emanates from the deep heart of Life. A fullness that sustains us even when our pleasures feel meagre, as they sometimes do.

As we live into the reality of this unusual Eastertide, I find myself kneeling in the garden with Mary Magdalene, having experienced such a collision of grief and happiness that my soul feels stretched beyond its capacity. But I am choosing to trust that in the stretching, there is the shape of joy. In the stretching, Christ is forming me into something new. Something that can contain a bit more of the vastness of God’s dream, wherein Resurrection finds its source and endpoint.

Blessed Easter, dear friends. I wish you happiness to soothe your spirit. And I wish you joy, that each of us might become who God made us to be.

Holy Week at Home #7: Holy Saturday

A continuation of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; on Holy Saturday we are caught in that space between grief and hope. I have a particular love for the Virgin Mary on this day, who is known on Holy Saturday as Our Lady of Solitude. She has been with me through many seasons of waiting and wondering, including this one. I dedicate this poem to her.

In between beginnings, I must learn to live in interims.

And today I am here, in that shadow-place at the intersection of memory and hope,
The dove-grey moment
when the past ebbs, unreachable
and the cloud bears no hint of light.

Where have you gone, my beloved?

I wait, and yes, I grieve
the yet-unsatisfied promise
But I also find that

shadows cast their own illumination over those who pause to consider–
who ponder in their heart–
the saintliness of not knowing;
The beatitude of contingency.

And as the night enfolds understanding
As your absence drapes over me like a mantle of fog
I perceive how needed it is
To say goodbye, and to mean it

To let this waiting be its own solace
Its own teacher
Its own revelation of the
unchanging liminality
at the heart of my restless heart.

After the going and before the coming
There is simply this,
The sufficient poverty of now,
And that must always be enough
Or nothing ever will.

Son, behold your mother
in repose
in recollection
in the resilience you required of her
wild as the sea-grass
Bending
in solitude
But rising
in strength.