Archive for the ‘Love’ Category
The World Is Too Much
John 20:26 NRSV
“Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them…”
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The world is too much.
Not only in its weight, though it is heavy.
In its insistence. Its density. Its claim to be all that there is.
What can be seen, measured, named—this is what we learn to trust.
This is what presses in on us.
This is what fills the room.
And so we live inside it.
Easter does not remove us from the world.
It does something more unsettling.
It asks whether what we have taken to be the whole of reality
is, in fact, only what we can perceive.
He stood among them.
The doors were locked.
Nothing had changed that could be pointed to.
The room remained what it was.
And still, he was there.
Not outside the world.
Not beyond it.
Within it—without being contained by it.
They did not recognize him immediately.
Not because he was absent.
Because what they were looking at
was still being interpreted by a world that had not yet made room
for what had happened.
I know that condition.
It is not that presence is nowhere to be found.
It is that the world, as I have learned to perceive it,
leaves little space for anything that does not behave
as presence used to behave.
I do not fail to perceive because nothing is there.
I fail because too much else is.
Too much that insists on finality.
Too much that closes the case.
Too much that declares what can and cannot remain.
And yet—
I cannot say that absence is complete.
Something resists that conclusion.
Not consistently. Not in a way I can prove.
But enough that I cannot live as though what is gone
is all that is real.
To live inside resurrection is not to see clearly.
It is to discover that what I see
is no longer the measure of what is.
The world is too much.
And still, it is not all there is.
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Prayer
God, loosen the hold of what I can see, so that I may not miss what is already present.
Do Not Hold On
John 20:17 NRSV
“Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me…”
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She does not recognize him at first.
Not because he is hidden. Because grief has arranged the world in a way that leaves no room for anything else. She is looking for a body. Something that can be found, carried, returned.
She is still speaking when he interrupts her.
“Mary.”
Not an explanation. Not an argument.
Her name.
And in that moment, everything shifts.
Recognition does not come through sight. It comes through being addressed. Through hearing what only one voice can say in that way.
She turns toward him.
Not gradually. Not cautiously. All at once.
“Rabbouni.”
She reaches for him.
Of course she does.
Not to test what she sees. Not to prove it. To hold it. To keep it from being taken again. To close her hands around what has already been lost once.
And that is where he stops her.
Do not hold on to me.
Not a rejection. Not a withdrawal. A boundary.
What is now present cannot be held the way it once was.
Resurrection does not return things to their previous form. It is not resuscitation. It does not restore what was lost so that it can be kept again. It changes what it means for something to be real.
She is not being asked to let go because he is leaving.
She is being asked to let go because he is no longer confined to what she can grasp.
The garden is quiet.
No crowd. No explanation. No resolution offered.
Only presence.
She does not understand it.
She cannot hold it.
And still, she has encountered it.
We are often taught to look for clarity. For something that settles the moment, explains what has happened, secures what has been given.
But this moment refuses that.
She is recognized.
She responds.
She reaches.
And she is interrupted.
Not so that the moment can end—
but so that it can become something she cannot possess.
Silence would have left her alone.
Quiet allowed her to hear her name.
And what she heard was not something she could keep.
Only something she could receive.
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Prayer
God, teach me to receive what is real, even when I cannot hold it.
The Body Handed Over
Mark 15:24 NRSV: “Then they crucified him.”
There is no metaphor left.
The body that was named on Thursday is now handled.
Struck.
Spat upon.
Measured.
Nailed.
The crowd is smaller now. The noise less triumphant. The sky darker than expected.
Good Friday resists explanation. We have written volumes trying to make sense of it — sacrifice, atonement, substitution, victory. Some of those words are necessary. None of them remove the wood.
Then they crucified him.
The body does not symbolize suffering. It endures it.
I have watched a body endure more than it should. I have seen strength leave it slowly. I have felt how helpless love can be when flesh fails.
There is a particular violence in watching and not being able to stop what is happening.
At the cross, even the faithful stand at a distance.
The temptation on Good Friday is to hurry toward Sunday. To speak of what will come. To soften the finality of the sentence.
But Lent forbids that.
The body hangs.
Breath shortens.
The words grow fewer.
It is finished.
And for a moment, it looks like death has the last word.
Prayer
God, stay with me when the cross is more real than hope.
What the Day Allows
Matthew 6:34 NRSV “Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
By then, days were no longer measured by intention.
They were measured by allowance.
What could be done without consequence. What would cost too much. What needed to wait. The body made these decisions before the mind could argue with them.
Getting out of bed was not assumed. Standing required a pause. Walking came with calculation. Even conversation had limits—how long, how much, when to stop.
This was not weakness revealing itself.
It was information.
The day did not ask for ambition. It asked for accuracy. To notice what was possible and stay within it. To stop before depletion. To rest without apology.
Jesus’ words are often misheard as reassurance. They are closer to instruction. Each day has enough—not more than can be borne, not less than is real. The work is not to overcome the day, but to live truthfully inside it.
There was no sense of improvement yet. No upward curve. Only the slow learning of how to inhabit a smaller life without contempt.
What the day allowed had to be enough.
Prayer God, help me attend to what this day allows, and not demand more.
Outside the Sanctuary
On April 27, 1959, my grandmother Wilkerson died.
I traveled with my parents to a church in Snellville, Georgia. I was not admitted into the building. I remained in the car — a black Ford coupe — parked on gravel beneath open windows.
This was the second death of my childhood. My grandfather Powell had died in July of 1957. I remember more of him. He was sixty-four. She was eighty-six. I was too young to understand death’s permanence, but I felt his absence. I also felt, without language for it, the fracture between him and my mother, and her refusal of affection toward the woman who became his companion after divorce. Even as a child, I sensed something torn.
But my grandmother Wilkerson’s death was different.
It was my first existential crisis.
From the sanctuary, across the gravel parking lot and through the open windows of that black coupe, a hymn drifted toward me:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
In films, that hymn is often reduced to shorthand for naïveté — a prop for simplistic faith. But it was nothing of the sort to me.
I was a boy sitting outside a church, trying to locate my grandmother inside those words.
Where is she?
And by extension — where is he?
That question has never left me.
Now, more than sixty years later, I sit in church again. It is Lent. Deaths have layered themselves over time, one pressing upon another. Each carries weight.
But there is one whose weight eclipses the rest.
Beth.
Her absence is not historical. It is immediate. It still crushes me.
The boy in the black Ford coupe asked, Where is she? about his grandmother.
The man in the pew asks the same question now.
Where is she?
I weep for her.
And yet, in ways I do not fully understand, I sometimes experience her not as memory alone but as presence. Not as an “It” confined to the past, but as Thou — to borrow Buber’s language — encountered in moments that are unsummoned and enlarging.
I fear wishful thinking. There were long years — decades — of silence. I know what absence feels like. This renewed sense of nearness feels fragile.
But here is what steadies me:
When I sense her presence, I do not become smaller or more withdrawn. I become more loving.
If it were fantasy, I suspect it would narrow me. Instead, it opens me — toward patience, toward tenderness, toward others.
If love reduces the dead to memory alone, then death wins twice.
I am not ready to grant it that victory.
The boy is still listening through open windows.
And even now, I think I hear the hymn.
On a whim... 