Beyond the needles

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  (Matthew 11:28)

I didn’t feel the needle when the phlebotomist slipped it into my right arm. She likely knew exactly when to ask a question to distract me from watching too closely. Or maybe she is simply deft from long practice.

She filled two vials with my blood before I knew what was happening. What was happening, however, went far beyond the needles. In fact, it is still happening. I am haunted by her voice.

‘I’m terrible,’ she said at one point during our three minutes together. ‘I’ve got to get back to my Bible reading.’ She shook her head and repeated her judgment, ‘I’m terrible.’

Whoever this person is—and whatever her name, since I didn’t catch it—she is a million miles from terrible, which, caught off guard, I assured her, fumbling over my words.

“You’re not terrible,” I said. ‘That’s only one way to commune with God. There’s prayer, being in nature, talking with friends.’ My voice trailed off, failing to find words to say what I felt but couldn’t get out.

‘Yes,’ she responded, cutting through my awkwardness. ‘I talk to him.’

Catching my eye, we nodded, and within seconds I was out of her chair as a dozen others waited for their turn.

Half way across the parking lot, when my brain finally kicked in (five minutes late, like always), the words for which I stumbled finally appeared in my heart. ‘You’re not terrible,’ I wanted to say. ‘You are beloved. There has never been a day of your life when God has not delighted in you.’

How I wish I had those words at the tip of my tongue, ready to speak in that moment. How different our lives would be if we were ready in all times and places to offer this, the heart of God’s love, amid our bitter, cynical times when the Holy Name of God is blasphemed to justify hatred, division and cruelty.

I cannot know how she would have responded. But I would have loved for her to have heard that one word, ‘beloved,’ hoping that it would fall like a seed in her heart and grow.

For your heart, O God, surely hungers for her to know you have cherished her since before the dawn of time. And I, Lord, want you to tell her that the other voice, the one that says,’ You’re terrible,’ is a damn liar. For your love is the core truth of our existence.

Maybe then, she can read her Bible not as a spiritual obligation to be performed (and to feel guilty about when she doesn’t do it), but as an opportunity to listen to the Voice of Love inviting her to come home and rest.

I need to go back to the clinic next month and have more blood drawn. I hope she is working that day. I’d like to hear how she’s doing. And there’s something I’d like to say.

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  (Matthew 11:28)

I didn’t feel the needle when the phlebotomist slipped it into my right arm. She likely knew exactly when to ask a question to distract me from watching too closely. Or maybe she is simply deft from long practice.

She filled two vials with my blood before I knew what was happening. What was happening, however, went far beyond the needles. In fact, it is still happening. I am haunted by her voice.

‘I’m terrible,’ she said at one point during our three minutes together. ‘I’ve got to get back to my Bible reading.’ She shook her head and repeated her judgment, ‘I’m terrible.’

Whoever this person is—and whatever her name, since I didn’t catch it—she is a million miles from terrible, which, caught off guard, I assured her, fumbling over my words.

“You’re not terrible,” I said. ‘That’s only one way to commune with God. There’s prayer, being in nature, talking with friends.’ My voice trailed off, failing to find words to say what I felt but couldn’t get out.

‘Yes,’ she responded, cutting through my awkwardness. ‘I talk to him.’

Catching my eye, we nodded, and within seconds I was out of her chair as a dozen others waited for their turn.

Half way across the parking lot, when my brain finally kicked in (five minutes late, like always), the words for which I stumbled finally appeared in my heart. ‘You’re not terrible,’ I wanted to say. ‘You are beloved. There has never been a day of your life when God has not delighted in you.’

How I wish I had those words at the tip of my tongue, ready to speak in that moment. How different our lives would be if we were ready in all times and places to offer this, the heart of God’s love, amid our bitter, cynical times when the Holy Name of God is blasphemed to justify hatred, division and cruelty.

I cannot know how she would have responded. But I would have loved for her to have heard that one word, ‘beloved,’ hoping that it would fall like a seed in her heart and grow.

For your heart, O God, surely hungers for her to know you have cherished her since before the dawn of time. And I, Lord, want you to tell her that the other voice, the one that says,’ You’re terrible,’ is a damn liar. For your love is the core truth of our existence.

Maybe then, she can read her Bible not as a spiritual obligation to be performed (and to feel guilty about when she doesn’t do it), but as an opportunity to listen to the Voice of Love inviting her to come home and rest.

I need to go back to the clinic next month and have more blood drawn. I hope she is working that day. I’d like to hear how she’s doing. And there’s something I’d like to say.

I heard it from the finches

He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son. (Colossians 1:13)

Early mornings were cooler this week. It was still humid, but lower temps summoned me to the balcony on the east side of the house to sip coffee and listen to the birds.

I usually try to call the cardinals, imitating their whistle. Sometimes they reply, although I sense confusion in their response.

There is no confusion among the finches, however. Red-crested house finches flutter madly around their home in the big spruce that brushes the side of the house, protecting their domain.

Nearby, goldfinches pierce the morning air, furiously pumping their wings. They rise then stop, pump then stop, pump then stop, pump then glide, over and over again. Their flight scallops the air in repetitive arcs, gracefully up and down, up and down, whizzing by until one lights on a frail, bare branch pointing skyward atop the maple near the corner.

With nary a catch of breath, like kindergarteners released for recess, they burst from their perch, racing and chasing each other above the grass-green expanse. Feather-light, unburdened with no thought of the morrow, they preach a Sunday sermon, demonstrating the joy for which we are made.

I pray to be as free as they. I seldom am, but watching them … I think I see what God has in mind for us.

Surely, Jesus had such as these in mind when he told us to look at the birds and let go of our obsession with ourselves. Just watch, he seemed to say. The Love who loves you will have its way; just give it some time. But that’s most of our problem. We want things our way.

It’s hard to let go and let Love have its inscrutable way with us. And it’s even harder these days when the Love Who Is appears so powerless. ‘The power of darkness’ poisons our politics as masked men maraud our streets, hunting prey, mocking the mercy and decency I once thought was irrevocably encoded in the DNA of our nation.

Examples of official cruelty and jingoism are too obvious to mention. More troubling are the millions who cheer it, willfully blind to the humanity of those crushed in the juggernaut of federally-sanctioned hatred.

Cheer it or condemn it, we all wake into the same world each morning, or do we?

So many appear to wake into a world where might makes right, a zero-sum world where one must always be on the defensive, where the most important value is power, being greater, better, stronger and able to enforce your will. In this callous world, the lives and struggles of others don’t much matter, especially if they are ‘different.’

This reality is all-too-much with us, but out here, looking at the birds, I feel the presence of quite another reality. Their sermon transports me into a world where the light of beauty and mercy has shattered the power of darkness, a world where I can breathe the featherlight sweetness of morning, drawing in the grace of an Immortal Love who dances and plays and charms my heart.

Out here, I know: I don’t live under the power of darkness. Transferred into the kingdom of the Beloved, I dwell in a world of beauty and mercy where every life is precious and holy.

And I … am personally invited … to come out and play.

The shining

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

There is no shortage of witnesses. Thousands testify to the shining. I come across their voices almost every week. Just yesterday, I found this:

‘Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little life in your heart, this Ah, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic; instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling why am I so ordinary?, … you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better because before this you hadn’t realized or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.’ (History of the Rain, Niall Williams, 128)

A smile rose from an uncontrollable something within as I read these words. Faces appeared, too, including a few I had met but once or twice. Remembrance also released a question. Where have I heard this before?

Was it Thomas Merton? Standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, he was suddenly overwhelmed with love as he watched the people around him going about their business. They have no idea, he wrote. ‘They are all walking around shining like the sun.’

But maybe Merton was borrowing from St. Irenaeus. ‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive,’ he wrote, 1800 years ago. I wonder, who was he thinking about when he wrote that? Somebody shiny, I suspect.

But this vision of glory is not reserved for saints and mystics. It also comes to those of no import, like me, as I watch the faces of people returning to their seats, after receiving Holy Communion.

They pass by me in the aisle, one after another, making no particular impression, when for no apparent reason, in the alchemy of the Spirit, a single face stuns me: A young girl, hands folded in front of her, a white scrunchy around her head, pulling together a long fall of black hair, a river of waves cascading nearly to her waist. Smiling, her face alight, this is a loved child who knows she belongs.

 

And with this, Irenaeus and Merton are sitting there beside me, wearing smug, ‘I told you so’ expressions, insufferably pleased with themselves, but not nearly as pleased as I am to witness one more face in a lifetime of faces that make me glad to be alive in a place where faith and love and beauty can strike you when you least expect. They can even make you forgive and infinitely forgettable sermon that doesn’t matter a whit, now that you’ve seen the shining.

‘The glory you have given me, I have given them,’ Jesus prayed, speaking of his disciples as he prepared to leave them. His giving didn’t end with them, as all who have seen the shining can attest.

Glory may not always shimmer, but it breaks out and sheds its light in lives of grace and truth that make you glad to be alive, wherever and whenever you are awake enough to see them.

For me, this gratitude quickly gives way to longing and prayer. ‘Might I shine, too, my Friend, just a little? knowing that Jesus doesn’t have all that much to work with when it comes to me.

But the prayer has already been answered. For in his light, we see light and become the light we see.

Eat this bread

 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” (John 21:15)

My Jesus, how shall I hear your words? ‘Feed my lambs,’ you say. Is this an invitation, a command, a demand? And what is the tone and timbre of your voice? Gentle and quiet? Firm and full of resolve? Do I hear beseeching, hoping or an authoritative insistence that this must be done?

I suppose how we hear those words or any words you speak says a great deal about how we see you … or how we want and need you to be for us.

So, forgive me, if I am merely projecting my need, but I don’t think that I am. For, how can anyone hear your words and not know that you ache for the ache within us, hungry for our hunger to feed on bread that satisfies?

Maybe that’s why there are so many stories about you eating and drinking in the Bible. There was nothing more typical of you than sitting around a table with friends and disciples and even opponents, talking, teaching and sharing food.

Whatever was on the table was almost incidental to the bread you offered, which was you, yourself, what was in your heart, the loving intimacy between you and the Mystery you called the Father, radiating from your presence.

People felt it when they were near you, which is why they came to you with their wounds and hurts and fears, and why they followed you.

You were their bread … and mine. I listen and hear your heart in these three little words, ‘feed my lambs.’ You want all our hungry hearts to feel and know what is in you.

Knowing the Love who abides in you stirs your Spirit in the secret room of our hearts, who rises and flows out, emanating from within to fill the heart and still the ancient ache which longs for the bread of life, you are.

At this time of life, I am less clear about how I can feed your sheep with the bread of your life, which so long has been my food and drink. My role is less clear, and the world roundabout has convinced itself it can satisfy the soul’s ancient hunger … or avoid it … by staying busy with one distraction or another. But our societies’ underlying angers and anxieties tell us what we fear to admit.

Beset by my own angers and anxieties, I look into your eyes Jesus and listen to the tenderness of your question to Peter … and to me. I have an answer. Yes, I do love you. I think I always have, from my youngest days, only I didn’t know how much I needed you then.

That didn’t matter. You found ways to feed me as you do now. Thank you for that. Thank you very much. Help me along, if you would, and I’ll try to share what you have so generously given.

A step too far … and not far enough

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything …. (Matthew 5:13)

Arresting farm hands harvesting strawberries was apparently a step too far in the current crackdown on undocumented workers.

Cabinet members lobbied President Trump on behalf of agricultural states, pointing out that the administration’s current policy could leave fruit and vegetables rotting unharvested in the field, as undocumented workers were being rounded up or not coming to work to avoid ICE raids.

One could cheer this development as a partial return to sanity, if not decency, curbing the despicable passions of those who would deport willing workers who, in many cases, have done arduous farm labor in this country for decades, raising their families and paying their taxes while bringing food to our tables.

But neither wisdom nor decency are evident in the casual cruelty of federal policies that daily inflict the nation’s conscience with images of children placed in zip ties by masked, gun-toting agents arresting their mothers and fathers, carting them off to an ICE gulag.

Their lives and families crushed by forces that neither see nor care about the inhumanity they inflict, one wonders at the fear fired in the fragile hearts of those children … and whether it will harden into hatred of what this country is doing to them.

Malignant seeds are sown into the soil of society with every one of these ICE raids; some, no doubt, will yield a bitter crop of alienation, resentment and perhaps, violence, in years to come.

And curse it all, too many of those who bear the name of my Savior, Jesus, the Christ, stand silently or cheer as if this display, rising from the cynical circles of hell, were not utterly contrary to Jesus’ call to love their neighbor.

One hopes that the president’s order to refrain from rounding up undocumented farm laborers, as well as hotel and hospitality workers, restricts ICE’s reach and destruction of the lives, families and communities wounded by recent sweeps.

We can also hope rational voices will prevail and further restrictions will be placed on arrests of others—like short order cooks and street vendors, or the mechanic in the shop down the street or the guys who show up every Friday to landscape around the townhouse where I live.

It's a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

As one who names Jesus as Lord, I can’t help but notice the reason given for the president’s recent directive, to hold off on some arrests, reflects a very pragmatic, utilitarian ethic. Don’t round them up because we need them. They are valuable to us. The ag economy might take a dive without them. Food prices would spike. Meat won’t get packed. Hotels and the hospitality industry won’t have enough workers.

This rationale sounds reasonable, but it falls far short of recognizing and respecting the humanity of each person, whether documented or not. It depersonalizes and devalues human beings to the status of economic units, of value only if they produce something society needs or wants.

And if they don’t, well, perhaps chasing the unwanted across strawberry fields and zip-tying their children becomes justifiable.

The moral and spiritual degradation into which our society threatens to sink is all-too-clear in the daily assaults on human bodies and souls that cross our television screens, offenses that deny the God-given sanctity of human life and the dignity of every human being—values which Christians insist upon, as long as they remain committed to Christ.

‘You are the salt of the earth,’ Jesus tells his followers in the Sermon on the Mount. At no time in my life has this nation more needed Christ followers to be exactly that—salt, working to preserve respect for the dignity of every human being. Christian witness in these times requires no less.

Mary in white chiffon

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed. (Luke 1:46-48)

Their images merge before my eyes, the mother of life and a child on my television screen.

On one hand, Mary, the Mother of Our Lord, raises her eyes to the gentle heavens and speaks in startled gratitude of the grace given to a humble spirit like herself. ‘You have looked upon me … me!’

I see no pride in her face, no defiant self-assertion. She wears the sincere, innocent joy and astonished gratitude of those who have tasted the utter gratuity of God. For she, who is small, seeming of no account, carries the beauty of eternity, the world’s true light, in the dark warmth of her womb.

On the other hand, there is this girl, a tiny slip of a child not yet in double figures, on my television screen. Garbed in a cascade of white chiffon, she positions herself on a bench and tilts a harp to her shoulder, preparing to play in the finals of a national competition. Her harp is smaller than the rest, for she is by far the youngest. Her fingers barely reach the low strings.

But she doesn’t begin her performance, not yet. Something essential must be done first. She repositions the harp, setting it upright. Folding her small brown hands, she lays them in the cloud of white chiffon in her lap, bows her head and prays.

She does not do this once, but before each composition she performs, playing her heart out.

And I wonder, what is she praying? Does she ask for help to do her best? Does she seek a breath of peace to calm her nerves? Does she ask for the Holy One to bless her and her performance? Does she give thanks for being graced with the skill and desire to make music? Does she express gratitude for just being there, for making it to the finals?

The innocence of this child in prayer—asking, seeking, giving thanks or whatever else was pulsing through her—merged with the image of Mary. She was Mary, and Mary was her.

Both of them humble and full of grace, they both bear the wonder of divine beauty within them. Each, in their own way and moment, birthed that beauty into the light of day … that we might see … and hear … and feel our hearts melt in the warmth of that which is most true and loving.

‘All generations will call me blessed,’ Mary sang, praising God that she should bear Christ, the heart of God, into the world.

I suppose I’ll never know what the girl in white was feeling and praying. But I hope, like Mary, she knows how blessed she is. She bears the treasure of God’s own life in the innocent beauty of her heart … and most certainly in the grace of those little hands.

The measure of all things

‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ (John 18:37)

With the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, the cross of his Passion has become the measure of all things, the light that reveals the truth of our lives and the meaning of our times. It exposes human callousness and cruelty for what it is, the sadistic denial of justice, the resolute defiance toward the sanctity of human life and dignity, created in God’s image.

But it does much more than expose the ugliness of human beings and nations.  It holds the image of Jesus before our hearts as he is handed over—surrendering himself in love to the will of the One who is Love, refusing to hate, forgiving his enemies, caring for his mother, blessing a dying man at his side with the promise of paradise.

Bearing every ugliness the world can inflict upon him, the beauty of God, who is Love Unbounded, shines from him on Calvary’s dark mountain. Risen in glory, still bearing the wounds of love glorified, our Lord holds his wounded hands our eyes, speaking the one word that bears the power to heal us, ‘Peace.’

He is measure of love … for there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s enemies.

He is the measure of beauty … for there is no greater beauty than a heart fully surrendered to love the world in all its imperfection.

He is the measure of purity … for he willed but one thing … the blessed Kingdom of God in which the power of love overwhelms the love of power.

He is measure of truth … for the infinite love of God flowing from his wounded side is the beginning and end of all that is, all we are and all that will be.

He is the measure of joy … for his heart is the home for which our hearts long.

He is the measure of power … for he tramples the power of sin, death and hell underfoot and bears their captives to life.

‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54-55)

Let no tongue on earth be silent. Let every heart sing with tears of holy joy. Christ is risen. Life reigns. The banquet of eternity is set forth. Come, take and eat.