Tag: Lent

Meeting in the Mess and the Mystery

There is something about this time of year. As Fr. Bill Ortt points out, the word “Lent” comes from an Old English word that means “lengthen”—for the days getting longer. It’s not the spring is here yet, but we are moving in that direction. The magnolia tree in our front yard attests to that (as do the neighbors saying, “there he is in the yard staring at and taking pictures of the tree again…”).

This week we end a long study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. And we start both Zoom and in-person studies of Debie Thomas’s “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.”

Talking about Romans, Rev. Jay Sidebotham in his book, “Conversations with Scripture: Romans” writes:

“Paul offers specific examples of what a community transformed by grace looks like. It is a community of righteousness, a matter of being in right relationship with each other. That community will be marked by a willingness to forgo one’s own agenda for the better of another, most definitely a countercultural thing to do… The Christian community is to be marked by a spirit that honors the other.”

For Paul, it was the impossible task of unifying the Jewish believers in Christ with the Gentiles–something that had never been done. It’s telling that we have had more than 2,000 years to work at this, but we seem to have taken steps backwards at welcoming and honoring the outsider, the other. That is something to think about and pray on during Lent (and beyond).

In society today, we’ve decided that faith is a personal/individual thing, it’s between us and God. But I wonder what happens if we poke our individual faith with a stick.

In the first essay in “Into the Mess,” Thomas looks at Luke’s Gospel, (1:26-38) where the angel Gabriel tells Mary what’s going on with her and how God is calling her. Thomas talks about what a shocking and impossible reality was being opened up for Mary. And after the angel leaves:

“(Mary) has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites–that beyond all easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment… (leading to) it’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.”

For both Mary and Paul, when they said yes to their callings/journeys with God, their lives got more difficult, harder to bear, not easier. For some of us, that kind of poking may be uncomfortable. It’s meant to be.

Thomas goes on to talk about the cost of loving, “to love anyone in this broken world takes tenacity and grit, long-suffering and great strength.” She goes from talking about Mary, to talking about us:

“The particularities of our own stories might differ from Mary’s, but the weight and cost of ‘bearing’ remain the same–and so does the grace. When we consent to bear the unbearable, we learn a new kind of hope. A hope set free from expectation and frenzy. A resurrected hope that doesn’t need or want easy answers. A hope that accepts the grayness of things and leaves room for mystery.”

Bearing the love for another in the world has its cost and its grace. Bearing the love of Christ in the world–being those who love God, welcome and love the outsider/other, those who feed the poor, heal the sick, or simply those who try to understand and love those who are difficult for us to understand or love–has its cost and its grace.

Faith isn’t an individual matter of being rescued from the mess, it is a choice to meet God in the mess, where He is, and we are, needed.

At Christ Church Easton, Fr. Bill has declared this Lent to be a season of healing, a time of sharing our stories and listening to others; of helping to find and spark hope for each other.

Tell us your story about where God entered your life and did something unexpected and remarkable. Share your story of healing.

The days are getting longer. We have a season where creation around us is going green and things are starting to blossom. We can use this season to draw closer to God and to encourage each other. We can bear the love of Christ into the world and in the process expand our faith into something vibrant and textured that embraces the messiness and mystery of life.

Sitting by the river

Solitude is a gift.

Silence is a gift.

Sunlight is a gift.

Sitting by the river with a strong breeze moving the water and blowing against one side of my face while the sun warms the other.

I woke up in a warm house, while it was still dark and made coffee. Made a to-go breakfast for my older daughter for her drive to work. I laughed with my younger daughter taking her to school.

Now I am sitting in the sun and the wind by the water praying, reading, writing, listening, smiling.

Behind me is a cemetery where my grandparents, family members, and friends rest peacefully. Memories and love dance between us and connect us.

The books in front of me are titled “Pilgrim” and “Gold.”

Talking to God, Rumi writes:

“Today you arrived beaming with laughter–
that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.

You are hope’s beating heart.
You are a doorway to the sun.
You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me.
Beginning and end.

You greet need with generous hands.
You flood us with spirit,

ringing from the heart,
lifting thought.”

Reading this, he and I say it together. I like to think God smiles in the sunlight.

Across the cove the sun and the wind dress a weeping willow tree. Geese float tucked away from the tide.

When I am fully here, in this moment, with a full heart and an open mind, and time alone with God, what more can I ask for? I am not alone.

Thank you for this view.
Thank you for this day.
Thank you for this life.
Thank you for your love.

Amen.

* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them. This is day #3.

Thank you for things that grow

Creator God, thank you for things that grow and change and bloom in their own time.

Thank you for patience so that we can wait with hope on your timing.

Thank you for giving us grateful hearts so that we can appreciate the impermanence, the fleeting moments–nothing remains in bloom and that makes each opening, each unfolding, each blossom special.

Thank you for making us able to grow, able to change, able to seek you, to seek beauty. Thank you for making us new creations in response to the shining of your light, your truth.

God, we thank you for helping us let go when it is time. Lord, I am not always good at this. Letting go hurts. I want to hold on to the blossoms, hold on to the people, hold on to the perfect moments–I want to stay in those wonderful experiences, found and lost in time, captured and forgotten in memory. Like Peter, I want to build dwellings to stay right there.

All around us, you show us that’s not how it works. You show us in your creation that everything has its time, its season. You show us the petals, the leaves dropping off, falling to the ground, coming apart, and going back into the dirt, back to dust.

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

From dust to dust.
From dust to seed.
From seed to sprout.
From sprout to bud.
From bud to flower.

Thank you for the dust we are and the blossoms we can become.

Thank you for your love that helps us grow and bloom.

Thank you for things that grow and change and bloom in their own time.

In your time.

Thank you.

* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them. This quick prayer on Ash Wednesday is the first.

To be a human being among human beings

Life has felt large and open and raw of late, where prayers, feelings, experiences and thoughts are all super charged.

There are plenty of reasons: Ava’s stereotactic neurosurgery is on Monday; Anna turns 21 on Tuesday and Ava turns 18 in mid-February; we’ve past the half-way point in our Romans Bible studies; seminary is stirring good things up and Kelsey Spiker and I just became postulants, the next designation in the path to ordination to the priesthood; even occasional preaching is a full-body experience; gearing up for Lent small groups; and the girls had their first ever snow skiing experiences, which was a trip with Holly and her kids as well as many teen and twenty-something friends.

Life has an open feeling, which is both filling and fulfilling and taxing and shaky sometimes.

Studying for a Saturday seminary day retreat, Rev. Susie Leight has us reading and thinking about the spirituality of the priesthood, which included excerpts from Barbara Brown Taylor’s “The Preaching Life” and Gordon W. Lathrop’s “The Pastor: A Spirituality.” Lathrop recalls an experience in a Swiss airport where he read a quote on a poster from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, written in French. Lathrop translated it literally to say:

“As a profound thirst: the desire to be a human being among human beings.”

A deep and profound desire to be a human being–someone who lives and feels, who is flawed and who needs others–among human beings. To be in community and to be allowed to be fully ourselves. This is what it is to be open, to be honest, to be vulnerable, which is not instantly a comfortable place to be.

Thursday we had a class discussing Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Life on Mars,” which is one of my favorite books. The discussion was about space and time, love, loss, grief, dancing, intimacy, language–it was flung like stars around the minds and hearts of those there. The last poem read was titled, “The Weather in Space”–

Is God being or pure force? The wind

Or what commands it? When our lives slow

And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm

Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

After all we’re certain to lose, so alive–

Faces radiant with panic.

That is part of the challenge of being human, loss and fear are always in the mix with us. It’s a lot and sometimes we want to–I want to–shut the faucet off. But that’s not why we’re here. That’s not why I am here.

On Tuesday morning, I was thinking ahead to this weekend’s Gospel reading, which is Matthew 5:1-12, commonly known as the Beatitudes:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.“


I’ve been in a habit of looking to see if Debie Thomas has anything to say about a particular Bible passage in her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.” And reading her take on the Beatitudes, it hit me that her book would make an incredible Lent study, looking at and discussing different aspects of Jesus’s life. Here is a bit of her take on the reading:

“What Jesus bears witness to in the Beatitudes is God’s unwavering proximity to pain, suffering, sorrow, and loss. God is nearest to those who are lowly, oppressed, unwanted and broken. God isn’t obsessed with the shiny and the impressive; God is too busy sticking close to what’s messy, chaotic, unruly, and unattractive.”

She goes further:

“I think what Jesus is saying in the Beatitudes is that I have something to learn about discipleship that my privileged life circumstances will not teach me. Something to grasp about the beauty, glory, and freedom of the Christian life that I will never grasp until God becomes my all, my go-to, my starting and ending place. Something to recognize about the radical counter-intuitiveness of God’s priorities and promises. Something to notice about the obfuscating power of plenty to blind me to my own emptiness. Something to gain from the humility that says, ‘The people I think I am superior to have everything to teach me. Maybe it’s time to pay attention.'”

If I want to be a human being among human beings, I have to be open to, to learn from, to love, those whom God loves: everyone. More than that, if as followers of Christ, we look to do God’s work in the world, we have to be, we have to show, we have to act out in faith the love that God makes real here and now, especially to those who feel alienated or shut off from it.

In teaching the Beatitudes, Jesus is turning the world and what we think we know about it, on its head. This is something he does frequently in his teachings and his parables. We should ask why.

Next week we will discuss poet Joy Harjo’s book “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” In “Talking with the Sun,” she writes:

After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a
part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us
overhead.
When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are
renewed.
There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart
might be just down the road.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the
earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of
meaning.

To be a human being among human beings is also to be human in and as a part of God’s Creation. Which He asks us to be stewards of, to take care of.

Humans are vulnerable and rely on kindnesses. When I try to live with my heart open, I have a greater sense of, and gratitude for these kindnesses–kindnesses that can come from anywhere and anyone. Any one of us. Even me.

There’s Nothing As Whole As a Broken Heart

“There’s nothing as whole as a broken heart.” I read that sentence and just stopped. And sat. And let it wash over me. We have two different small groups reading Rachel Held Evans’ book “Wholehearted Faith,” during Lent at Christ Church Easton.

In a chapter titled “Where Stone Becomes Flesh,” she quotes Ezekiel:

“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26)

If there is anything we need in the world today, it’s to be able to cast off our hard hearts and start working and living with hearts of flesh.

Evans explains it further. She quotes Rabbi Ariel Burger from an interview.

“There’s a Hasidic teaching, from Rebbe Nachman of Breslow: ‘There’s nothing as whole as a broken heart… In these traditions you cultivate a broken heart, which is very different from depression or sadness. It’s the kind of vulnerability, openness, and acute sensitivity to your own suffering and the suffering of others that becomes an opportunity for connection.”

On Thursday night discussing the chapter, someone read this passage, and then added, “I’ve got a broken heart. And if through that, I could help someone else…”

And that’s it. Right there. When we take what we’ve been through, the hurt, the pain, the suffering, and see it and use it and offer it as a way to help others, then love wins.

That’s part of what we are here for. That’s the work that God has given us to do. To love one another.

Amen.

Contributing a Verse

Sometimes it’s there, just below the surface. My mind is distracted, looking for the familiar, but knowing it won’t come from there. It’s something new.

A beautiful morning, or evening, outside, smelling cut grass, swooning in the start of spring. It seems like normal. But go to grab groceries and it hits: it’s eerie. Off. Something is not right. You can feel it.

We are all called to respond in our own ways. To stay home, yes, but also called to look differently, think differently, maybe to live and be differently. I’ve been trying to get my head around it.

Before COVID-19 arrived, Fr. Bill Ortt put out a Lenten challenge at Christ Church Easton: 1) Find a word that speaks to you; 2) choose a Bible verse that uses your word; 3) Memorize your verse and pray, meditate, reflect on your word/verse as a Lenten mantra of sorts; 4) Write your word on one of the small, wooden crosses the church gives out. And if you are inspired to, take a picture and share your cross-verse.

There have been some wholly wonderful responses. “Heal,” “light,” “love,” “pray,” “faith”–it’s been inspiring to see and read how people came to their word (or their word came to them) and what they are doing with the experience.

My word wasn’t there at first. Or it was, but I wasn’t listening.

As a church, when it was clear that we weren’t going to be gathering together for a time, we had to figure out what that meant; what it looked like; how to stay relevant, be there for people; how to continue to shine a light; how to connect; how to help people be hopeful. We had to do things differently.

We had to create something new. Or at least new to us. We moved our meetings, small groups, and prayer gatherings to ZOOM. Worship services (what would worship look like now?) to Facebook Live. And our music ministries became video artists–I stop every time I hear/watch “Hold Us Together,” “Stand in Your Love / Chain Breaker,” or “Be Still My Soul.” These are videos that have been viewed tens of thousands of times now on Facebook and shared widely. They strike a chord, they speak to hope and faith and love and connection. They weren’t a priority before social distancing, until they became one of the key ways to communicate. This is a time that is teaching us how to create, how to be differently, how to look at what’s important. And it’s not about adapting to a temporary predicament–it’s about moving toward, embracing something new.

I am fascinated by stories. As a writer, I read them, listen to them, think about them, and hope to share and tell them in new and interesting ways. But with between work, two teenage daughters, life, it’s not always easy to make time to write.

As I sat, prayed, reflected, my word, both professionally and personally was there all along: CREATE. And when I started looking through Bible verses, Isaiah practically smacked me upside the head:

“For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.”

Isaiah, 65:17

In this time, our time, maybe we are called to look at our lives with an eye towards creating better lives.

Maybe we are called to look at our personal and collective stories, and tell new ones.

If our world is necessarily knocked off its axis, perhaps we can look at how to get it spinning around love, kindness, community, sustainability, and creativity.

If I stay home, simply waiting, doing things as I’ve always done them, and at the other end of this pandemic, just shrug, and go back to business as usual, what have I learned or gained from the experience?

This isn’t meant to be some Pollyanna motivational speech. I know my shortcomings. I know I will be lazy, I will fall short, I will miss opportunities. I try to own my humanity, my flaws, and my mistakes. But the idea behind a word, a mantra, a verse to think, pray, reflect on, is what I set my eyes to–what I aim towards, what I strive for. And in the face of a global virus the world is responding to in ways that none of us have seen in our lifetimes, it is a legitimate time to look at our lives and think about where and how we are and where we want to be.

Each spring, I go back to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” It’s become a way to enter the season of rebirth, of resurrection. And this year I am hit especially by his “O ME! O LIFE!” in the same space and way that Robin Williams quoted it in Dead Poets Society.

We are here. We exist. It didn’t have to be, but it is. And in life’s powerful play, we may contribute a verse. That is what we create. But it’s up to us.

I want to wake up open to what it is God is creating in the world and creating in me.

“Create in my a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.”

(Psalm 51:10-12)

One bloom might hold it all

The magnolia in the front yard is a ten-day tree. For maybe ten days at most, there is nothing like it; it’s in full blaze glory. Then it drops its bloom and doesn’t say much the rest of the year. But those ten days.

As our unplanned retreat/social distancing kicks in, we are in the middle of ten-day Magnolia time. It’s an excuse to sit on the bench under the tree, to walk around it, to put my head between blooms and breathe in. If I’m honest, I don’t need a virus to do this, it’s life everyday as long as I’m paying attention.

The sky is still dark, but the birds are noisy. It’s transition time, just before the sun changes the horizon’s color. Morning routine: coffee, prayer, reading, writing. Cat purring on the armrest against my left arm, dog curled up against my right thigh–demanding bookends with fur. As it warms, morning time will be on the deck or in the writing shed.

This early dark time matters. It frames the day with attention. It sets the tone before the day’s demands start. Lately, I’ve been thinking about writing, storytelling, the force of words that point to something words can’t really get to.

One of the books currently traveling with me–in the car, in waiting rooms, to work, the spare minutes picking the girls up from school.

In the preface to “The Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction,” the Rose Metal Press folks point to Bernard Cooper’s notion that short nonfiction needs “an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens… until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

Mull that last phrase as you sit to pray, read, or write, “some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

Overshadowed by the Coronavirus these days, is Lent, a season where we look to pare away those things that distract us so that we can draw closer to God. When I spend time in the Bible, it’s the Gospels that sing. It’s not Paul’s letters, it’s Jesus’ stories. Christ tries to show us and tell us what it means to be human in a way we too often overlook.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

Matthew 13:31-32

Ummm… thanks, Jesus. What the heck are we supposed to do with that? Even his followers want to know why he always talks in parables. And this is a parable told after the Parable of the Sower and after Jesus broke it down for them. It was part of our reading in N.T. Wright’s “Lent for Everyone,” on Saturday. Wright points out that, Jesus, “told parables because what he was doing was so different, so explosive, and so dangerous, that the only way he could talk about it was to use stories. They are earthly, and sometimes heavenly, stories with an emphatically earthly meaning. They explain the full meaning not of distant, timeless truths, but of what Jesus was up to then and there. This is what is going on, they say, if only you had eyes to see. Or, indeed, as Jesus frequently says, ears to hear… Jesus’ parables invite the hearer, to look at the world, and particularly at Jesus himself, in a whole new way.”

I am guilty of not catching anything the first time, or first several times, I hear it. It takes time for me to learn things, to let them sink in. I need seeds. I need seeds that take time to take root, take time to grow, but once they are there, they stick, and maybe they bloom in each of us uniquely, in ways that can only be made manifest in the exact way, with our particular eyes and ears.

Often my eyes and ears work against me. Words I’ve heard or used too many times or sights that have become ordinary and overlooked. We don’t see God if we don’t look, or take the time to make the connection. Maybe the more we connect, the more we awaken ourselves to His presence.

American Goldfinch, by Michael Brown. Macaulay Library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Reading further in the Flash Field Guide, there is an essay by Lia Purpura called, “Augury.” She walks up on a dead Goldfinch hanging in a tree, caught up in fishing line. It’s jarring, disturbing, unexpected, confusing. It’s wrong for what is supposed to be there, how things are supposed to be.

Her description of this moment, this encounter is eerie and uncanny and beautiful all at once. In maybe a why moment for the experience, she latches onto, “It’s good to stand beneath a thing that takes words away. It’s good to be in a place where thought can’t form the usual way.”

Experiencing things that take words away, where thoughts can’t form the usual way.

I prefer my encounters to be with live Goldfinches, as I am sure Purpura does as well. But I appreciate her flash essay in the way it helps me to look at Goldfinches with new eyes. It helps me to look at writing with new eyes. Hopefully it helps me look at life with new eyes.

Life and death loom large. While I sit here, for the time I have, life looms larger. It’s part of the ten-day tree time. New birds, Goldfinches included, are appearing at the feeders, and at the edge of woods where I hike or trail run. Crisp, spring sunrises and sunsets are punctuated with cool, clear night skies full of stars. in the midst of it all, the magnolia makes a statement.

If I have eyes to see, one bloom might hold it all.

Grace leans out of the alley

As a people, we get in our own way a lot. We make ourselves so busy, so manic, so overscheduled, and so quick to be heard that we rarely listen. And what and to whom we listen are often suspect.

“[A]lmost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”

David Foster Wallce, Infinite Jest

I dig David Foster Wallace’s image of destiny leaning out of the alley, but we’re too busy to hear it. And the reason destiny, the big, epic, cool, yummy ideas and things that could fill and direct our lives, is left hanging out in the alley is that we’ve unknowingly designed the cities that are our lives and that is the space we’ve often left the stuff that might really matter.

Yesterday (Ash Wednesday) was the beginning of Lent. In N.T. Wright’s devotional book, “Lent for Everyone: Matthew, Year A,” he gives us a reading and some thoughts each day of the season. He begins with reminding us that when God does something new, he often involves unlikely, frequently surprised or alarmed people:

“He asks them to trust him in a new way, to put aside their natural reactions, to listen humbly for a fresh word and to act on it without knowing exactly how it’s going to work out… we may have to put our initial reactions on hold and be prepared to hear new words, to think new thoughts, and to live them out.”

I wonder if destiny isn’t the only thing we’ve shoved in the alley; I wonder if we’ve put grace there too. As we head into Lent and look for fresh words, new thoughts, and seasonal and spiritual renewal–maybe grace leans out of the alley to remind us it is there for the taking, our taking, our lives, and our hearts.

Preaching at an Ash Wednesday service at Christ Church Easton, Fr. Bill Ortt put it like this:

You are loved
You are forgiven
God wants his grace to be a part of your life.

And he quoted Psalm 90, which says, “Teach us to number our days, so that we might apply our hearts to wisdom.” (verse 12, KJV)

Mortality has loomed large in our community lately. We don’t need reminders. But that is one thing that Ash Wednesday does for us anyway. We come from dust and to dust we shall return. So we need to use the time we have the best we can. In numbering our days, we feel and learn the urgency and necessity of wisdom.

Allowing grace to speak to us, allowing grace into our lives, living into forgiveness so that we can let go of our past and be present now, and step towards what will be.

Seen/scene during Ava’s stay at Children’s Hospital in DC for testing and observation.

After Ash Wednesday services, I headed to Children’s Hospital in DC, where younger daughter Ava is staying for a few days for tests and observation to see if they can learn more about her seizures and spells. As we’re sitting in her room after breakfast, she puts on “Into the Spider-Verse,” a movie we both love.

Miles Morales is a young teenager in a new school and he doesn’t have a clue how he fits in or who he is supposed to be. After he tries to fail his way out of the school, his physics teacher calls him out and assigns him an essay.

“I’m assigning you an essay, not about physics, but about you and what kind of person you want to be.”

That’s a question we need to continually ask ourselves; an ongoing conversation. During the course of the movie, Miles finds his own way, not the way that the other Spider-Men and Women have, but a way that is his. He takes the book “Great Expectations,” turns it into street art of “No Expectations,” and lives into his personal destiny.

Maybe grace is how we get to our destiny. Maybe by reconciling and letting go of our past and the world’s designs for who we are supposed to be, and stepping into God’s grace, forgiveness, and vision for us, we can become who we are meant to be.

“My name is Miles Morales. I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for like two days, I’ve been the one and only Spider-Man. I think you know the rest. I finished my essay. Saved a bunch of people…. And when I feel alone, like no one understands what I’m going through, I remember my friends who get it. I never thought I’d be able to do any of this stuff, but I can. “

Through God’s grace, we can. So when destiny, clothed in grace, leans out of the alley, stop, lean in, and listen.

Nothing gold can stay

“Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold.”

Robert Frost might have had a magnolia tree in his front yard. I’ve never seen anything like it. Over the past week, it’s been in different phases of bloom and I just go out and stand underneath it in complete awe. It will only last a week or two, but man, what a week.

“Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only for an hour.”

Spring is a time for rebirth, for taking root and for growth. But within that, there is also the notion that it doesn’t last, like the magnolia tree in bloom, so appreciate it while it’s here. Be present. Feel the growth. Take the moment.

W.S. Merwin in Hawaii at the Merwin Conservancy. Image from Stefan Schaefer.

W.S. Merwin, one of the brightest shining, most brilliant, and most venerable American poets died recently. I met him briefly in Washington, DC, after hearing him read. I’d made it a point to catch him after work when I worked in the city. He was one of the voices; one of the lives worth emulating, or using as a model to find your own.

In a great New Yorker article, Casey Cep writes about Merwin’s writing and his effort to preserve Hawaiian landscape, “The palm forest, like Merwin’s poetry, has become a kind of prophetic stance against contemporary life: bearing witness to individual, almost foolish acts of creativity while devastation abounds.” We do what we can in the time that we have.

Sometimes I can connect the dots, sometimes I lose the picture. My reading list of late has included large parts of Luke’s Gospel, Henri Nouwen’s “Return of the Prodigal Son,” and legendary and/or mind-bending graphic novels, including Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s “Daredevil” run, Donny Cates’ “God Country,” and Jonathan Hickman’s “Fantastic Four.” I’ve never read Hickman, who is known for his epic story arcs for Marvel Comics. Marvel announced this past week that he is set to take over the X-Men this summer.

I’ve been thinking about the Faust/Faustus storyline a lot lately, where to gain unlimited knowledge, the seeker sells their soul to the devil. It has to deal with hubris, excessive pride, and pushing beyond the limits of where we should go. And Hickman plays that exact storyline out with Reed Richards in his Fantastic Four story. But when faced with the decision either come up with the answer to everything, to save the universe and feed his ego flashing his brilliance, or to be human, be with his family, Richards thinks back to the words of his father.

“All of my hopes and desires rest in you becoming what I am not. When you grow up, I expect more. Son, I expect better. I want you to be a better friend than I was. Be a better husband. Be a better father. Be a better man.”

Father-son, father-daughter messages hit me straight in the heart. And it makes me reflect on the prodigal son story, and how the father wants his sons to know his love, no matter what they’ve done. And that’s big.

For Lent this year, Fr. Bill Ortt at Christ Church Easton, has given out prayer stones during worship services. There are 11 different words and you choose without looking: love, peace, believe, remember, listen, forgive, hope, pray, heal, follow, grace. The idea is to use your word as a mantra during Lent. And to look up Scripture for your word that you connect with, and pray, reflect, and meditate on it for the season.

My stone is love. It’s not the one I expected or the one I would have picked. But it’s the one I needed. It’s what I need to remember and to focus on. I picked two verses.

John 13.34-35

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’

And

Corinthians 13:4-8

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. 

Those are big for me. Because it is easy for me to look past, to get too busy, to be in my head or deep in thought too often.

Finishing up Robert Frost’s poem:

Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. /  Nothing gold can stay.

Nothing gold can stay. And that’s true for spring. It’s true for knowledge and accomplishments. It’s true for the world. It’s true for almost everything we see around us.

But not for God. And not for love. “Love never ends.”

Prodigal in Flux

Two kids. One is out of control, squanders opportunities, messes up, fails repeatedly, doesn’t know which way is up, goes off track, loses track, what track? Tries to find their own way in so many ways they get lost. The other child doesn’t question, stays in line, is dutiful, doesn’t stray from home. And a father (or parent) who loves them both. That’s a set up of the parable of the prodigal son that Jesus lays out in chapter 15 of Luke’s Gospel. And it’s a story, and family dynamic that is familiar to a lot of us.

I have always been the first example; I am much more prodigal than prodigy. I’ve taken more wrong turns, wasted time and money, and been clueless enough to be dropkicked more times than I can count.

But a funny thing happens to the wayward, reckless prodigal son in Jesus’ parable. When he is lost and at his lowest, he humbles himself. He swallows his pride, casts off his son-ship, and looks to return home to his father to beg to be a servant or slave, no longer a son. The father is overjoyed, knows in his bones that his son was lost, but now is found, welcomes him home and celebrates.

Meanwhile, the other son, the one who was there all along, didn’t stray, stayed in line, is furious. And we get that, we recognize it, we see that tendency in ourselves. When Jesus told his parable, he used it as a way to talk about groups and types of people, but man, can we feel it personally and emotionally. It works both ways. We recently discussed it in our Luke studies and it is remarkable what it stirs up in us. It’s the parable in the Gospels that I most identify with.

Writer and theologian Henri Nouwen had an encounter with Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” which changed Nouwen’s life. It started him on a long spiritual adventure, got him thinking about his own life and calling in terms of the parable, and sent him searching inside himself in new ways. He took his reflections and experiences and turned them into what he calls his favorite of the many books he has written.

“For many years I tried to get a glimpse of God by looking carefully at the varieties of human experience: loneliness and love, sorrow and joy, resentment and gratitude, war and peace. I sought to understand the ups and downs of the human soul, to discern there a hunger and thirst that only a God whose name is Love could satisfy.”

Rembrandt’s painting helped him find God’s home in Nouwen’s own heart, showed him to look inside himself as well.

“I have to kneel before the Father, put my ear against his chest and listen, without interruption, to the heartbeat of God… I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into passing realities of our short existence on this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God’s abode into the dwellings of human beings.”

Jesus invites us into his story and Nouwen invites us along for his journey of personal discovery. This March and April for five weeks, I am stoked that we are going to make it a group adventure. Wednesday evenings at 6:30pm, from March 20 through April 17 at Christ Church Easton. If it’s the kind of adventure that you are looking for, you can sign up here.

I like this from the back cover of the book, “For all who ask, ‘Where has my struggle led me?’ or for those ‘on the road’ who have the courage to embark on the journey but seek the illumination of a known way and safe passage, this book will inspire and guide each time its read.”

And I am a big fan of Charlie Mackey‘s bronzes and drawings of the prodigal son (below).

Ultimately, I wonder if we are each of the characters in the story–the prodigal when we are reckless, self-destructive, stray and feel lost. And when we humble ourselves and look for forgiveness. The other brother when we feel resentful of others, entitled to what we feel we deserve, and maybe when we go through the motions without putting our hearts and souls into things. And we are asked to be the father when we forgive, welcome back, and celebrate those who were lost, but now are found.