On a whim…

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.