Archive for the ‘truth’ Category
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.
God gives fire for light, not for ruin.
Many of us are tired.
Not just busy—tired in the bones.
We have watched things we care about erode. We have seen people suffer needlessly. We have tried to speak, to help, to hold ground—and anger has found a home in us.
That doesn’t make you a bad person.
It makes you human.
Anger often begins as love that has nowhere to go.
But if you are feeling scorched inside—if rage has become your daily fuel—you are not failing morally. You are overburdened.
You were never meant to carry the weight of the world on anger alone.
You are still called to care.
You are still allowed to resist what harms.
But you are also allowed to rest from outrage.
Contempt feels powerful, but it is a thin power. It burns fast and leaves little behind. Love is slower. It requires breathing room. It needs light more than heat.
If all you can do right now is tend one small good thing—do that.
If all you can offer is restraint instead of rage—let that be enough for today.
Your vocation is not to be consumed.
Your presence matters too.
There is a fire that warms without destroying.
May you be given that fire again.
The Moral Equivalent of Starvation
By David Wilkerson
In 1978, my wife and I were an unlikely pair for poverty. I was an officer in the Navy; she was a schoolteacher in Jacksonville, Florida. For our age and time, we were well paid. We had a brand-new baby, and we left our jobs so that I could attend graduate school.
Why would anyone do that? For both of us, it was the next logical step. I believed then — and still believe now — that the Almighty, our God, had a purpose to fulfill in the world and was inviting us to take part in it. Specifically, to take on the role of a minister in the church.
We saved our money, but not enough. Not long after we arrived, I found part-time work during the day and more part-time work at night. I was in school full-time, holding down two part-time jobs. Beth, the mother of a newborn, had few alternatives. Yet the need for rent and food drove her to take a part-time job in the campus post office. So there we were — the three of us. The neighbor watched the baby when she was at work, and I was rarely home.
That still wasn’t enough. I applied for, and we received, food stamps. When I say I felt degraded and incompetent, it’s an understatement. Going to the grocery store and supplementing our payment with food stamps was excruciating and humiliating.
But without those food stamps, our meager meals would have been calorie-free.
Today, families like ours will again face that kind of hunger. Someone will say they should “get a job.” Someone will say they need to give up their avocado toast. And someone — there’s always someone — will say something unproductive and useless.
The individuals responsible for the ongoing vitality of the modern equivalent of food stamps, SNAP, have decided to use this program as a bargaining chip in their political gamesmanship.
It is self-evident that the administration and Congress are profoundly divided. But what also seems self-evident is that division has taken priority over need. Each side seeks to portray the other as the one responsible for the calamity about to descend on the most vulnerable in our society.
Let me name a few: an old man, feeble from advancing disease; a three-year-old toddler; a nursing mother; and yes, perhaps someone who took advantage of the system. But of that number, the overwhelming majority will suffer severe consequences when the program runs out of funds.
Someone will point out that there are other emergency funds available — but that misses the point.
The point is this: the only losers in this contest between Congress and the administration will be Americans. Not just those who live on the brink, but also those of us who choose to accept such behavior from our elected government.
While the most vulnerable may eat less — and eat less often — the rest of us will find our consciences further degraded. That is the moral equivalent of starvation.
I do not imagine for a moment that this little essay will have any effect on the players or the partisans. But I will not be silent.
I do not agree. I do not approve.
Shame on you.
Death’s Anniversary
Twenty years ago, and earlier this evening, Beth Batson Wilkerson departed from this life. That which remained was buried and that which persists has moved on. Even now we who remember wonder to where and to when did she go? In the geography of time and space there is no chart on which we can mark her destination but there are places in the heart where shadows tease us with what reason cannot deduce; A place where departed loved ones linger.
I have not been idle these twenty years. Much has changed and, for now, much remains the same. I have a son, now. Like all of us he is curious about his origins and we often talk of how our family was shaped. Beth’s death and our grief is a prominent moment in that story as well as my present happiness. For years I struggled with how to speak of my two great loves: my wife and my late wife. My son seems to grasp this easily. He asks, “Would she like me?” To which I reply, “She would love you!” He states, “I wish she could be here but then we wouldn’t have Mom, would we?” I ponder this as he continues, “But maybe we could just be a bigger family than we are now.” I think, maybe that’s what heaven is, the biggest of all families.
Thus, life as we know it has gone on. I have discharged some responsibilities and, as I have just related, I have taken on new ones. I am not alone and that is how Beth wished it. I live, somehow, both in grief and in joy; Living a paradox founded on an irony.
It is a difficult for me today. I am compelled to accept these truths: I could not have been who I was without one and I would not be who I am without the other. My dreams are never the same and always the same. I can not have what I want and I want to keep what I have. It is as if life is conducted in the vestibule of a great house. All of the loves, the dramas, the moments of grief and ecstasy are lived out in discrete moments of “then” while I am sustained by a sense of waiting for “eventually”.
I imagine heaven as a state of being where our grammar is changed. Every “was” and all our “somedays” are transfigured into “now”. Past and present tense have no context and, deprived of time, they fade as all things mortal must. It is there that we, all of us, gather in the presence of the Almighty. We gather before One whose otherness renders us silent; Our once bountiful sense of time distilled into an everlasting “now”.
Those who have gone before us do not wait for us, we are they who wait restlessly for them. Our Lord said of himself that he is the Alpha and the Omega. In him, we find our First and Last, our Beginning and End.
Let All the Earth Keep Silence…
“Speak only if it improves the silence.” Courtesy of Chantelle Says
A friend perished tonight; I want to say ‘faded’. She faded from view. Or maybe I want to say, “she passed”, as they say in the part of Georgia where I came to know a bit more of God than I bargained for. No, just faded. Faded like the sun sinking below the horizon only to rise like the sun from another. Fading out, fading in. Setting and rising; borrowed images that, tonight, belong to others. They make me want to pray.
In her short book, “Help, Thanks, Wow”, Anne Lamott declares that prayer should be simple. I agree, but I want to add, it can still be beautiful. The question is, in whose eyes should such beauty be held? Is it possible to perceive beauty most properly when our hearts are tuned to a pitch heard only in darkest nights, or greatest joys, or deepest yearnings; a beauty encountered in the midst of mystery? Is it probable that what often passes for beauty is noisy and as likely to carry prayers ‘aloft’ as a blossom might drift into the sky borne on the backs of gilded bricks? I need more than bricks tonight.
I want to pray. I want to let a stream of yearning flow from my heart to Another’s. Sometimes words of any kind get in the way of prayer. Of all the prayers I have uttered or heard the most profound was the extended silence that followed when Dr. Raymond H. Bailey halted, mid sermon. He had just declared that we should remain silent that God might speak; the following silence provoked hope in some, joy in others, and (perhaps) surprise. In silence we held our breath and our words. We listened and our hearts found the pitch; we simply and silently prayed. What could be more beautiful?
A friend perished tonight. Her family must surely struggle to find something lost in the shambles; in the midst of their grief I pray.
“But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.”
– Habakkuk 4:20 KJV
On a whim... 