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.

Poured out

Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table. But when the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, ‘Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.’ (Matthew 26:6-9)

She has no name, at least as Matthew tells the story. Perhaps that is the best way to tell this story, for then she becomes a stand-in, a representative of the many millions whose names disappear in the deep silence of history, as I am sure my name will.

But that doesn’t matter, as long as one has loved much and well. For the love poured into small moments lives long into the future, where we cannot go.

So it is with this unnamed woman at Jesus feet. Twenty centuries gone, her soul elevated into the halls of eternity, her story is told, just as we tell stories of our sweet saints, the mothers and fathers and friends and grandparents and neighbors and coaches and teachers and Lord-knows-who-else.

A simple gaze into one’s past produces a gallery of faces whose smiles we craved because their kind indulgence provided a circle of safety in a wounding world, an oasis of care where we could be our needy selves without apology.  

She is them, this unnamed woman at Jesus feet, and they are her, for one reason alone. Like them, she gave freely. She poured out the beauty that was in her.

Entering the house where Jesus was eating, she knelt beside him and anointed his head with expensive oil. She says nothing. We never hear her voice, nor does Matthew suggest her motivation.

But anyone with a minimally working heart understands that this is about love. An immense, uncontainable love bursts the seams of her exquisitely beautiful heart. It floods her being, refusing to be denied or controlled, pouring from the depth of her truly liberated soul, propriety and reason be damned. They don’t matter, only love.

Without further explanation, we can only wonder what she saw or felt or heard from Jesus that awakened such love. Something. And love creates its own necessity. Just so, she did what love required of her, silently anointing Jesus, preparing him for his ugly death soon to come.

Wherever the gospel is proclaimed what she has done will be told, Jesus tells those who criticized her extravagance.

Her name is unknown, but her love reaches across centuries of time, awakening my heart not only to love her, but to give thanks for so many souls like her whom I have met in my journeys, people who did the hard things others feared, many who poured out their hearts in obscure places where few, if any, paid them much attention … or understood why they cared so much and so deeply. They felt love’s holy necessity.

A parade of faces, a great cloud of witnesses passes before my eyes some days. Few of them are known beyond the time and place of their habitation, and even there they are quickly forgotten in the wash of time. Few, if any, would be considered great or important as our society measures such things. But they are.

I owe my faith, my joy, my hope and the meaning of my life to such as these, many of whom now rest in the eternal arms of the Love who captured and filled them.

In wildly divergent ways, they bore the beauty of Christ, who poured himself out in love for the world, awakening their hearts. I can only pray that maybe, somewhere along the line, I have or still could bless the world so well as they blessed me.

But I suppose one need not worry about such things. It is far better to give oneself to each moment, no matter how small or insignificant, pouring such love as I have into this finite cup of time … knowing … I am held in the Love that courses through the centuries to every place and time.

Come home

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:28-29)

Lord, I have been lost lately. And I want to come home.

Consumed by the constant conflict of a nation at odds over what it is becoming, a cloud of anger, fear and sadness has descended on my heart, shrouding the place where you, dear Friend, abide.

And I need you. I need your friendship, the palpable sense of your love within, or I am not myself, let alone a pale shadow of the heart you seemed to have had in mind when you created me.

From earliest days, you fashioned my tenderness, I believe, as a partial expression of your unspeakable beauty. But in these days, I have lost the gentleness I long craved and wanted evermore to become.

The rancor of these times sours my heart. And I have offered little resistance, allowing myself to be carried away in bitter tides of cynicism and negativity that barb my words into weapons.

This is my Lenten confession, accept it, dear Friend, as the heartfelt desire of a prodigal soul eager to come home … where I can look in the mirror and see something of you in the weariness staring back at me.

The words of hearts deeper and truer than my own lift me these days. They tell me that I am not alone. Others have walked harder roads without losing themselves in the tumult of their times.

‘There is a deep well inside me,’ wrote Dutch mystic, Etty Hillesum, in the days before the Holocaust swept her away. ‘And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again.’

That’s what I am doing, digging, trusting—no, knowing—that beneath the detritus that consumes my consciousness, there is a place, a room, a quiet corner in the darkness where you, dear Friend, abide, beckoning me to come home that you might enfold me in the Love you are, restoring me to myself and the loving joy you intend for all of us.

You do not leave us to fight alone through the clamor to the place of Love’s abiding. You breathe through every gracious smile of our beloved, in every word of forgiveness and in every moment of beauty that awakens our senses as Spring’s hope dawns fresh.

And what they only whisper, you sing aloud from the cross of your Passion, ‘Come to me, you weary, and I will give you rest.’

Handed over … a word of hope

 When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples, ‘You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.’ (Matthew 26:1-2)

Holy Week can’t come soon enough. I long to see beauty, and I hunger for the ugliness of our times to be exposed for what it is … because I’m angry … and disgusted … and sad.

I ache for love’s splendor to release a cascade of tears and wash the squalor of our times … and of our present government … from my heart, for it overwhelms my senses.

There appears to be no low beneath which our current administration will not go. Virtually anything can be justified in the MAGA hive-mind, blatant injustice, callous cruelty, sadistic posturing. It’s the daily diet of the evening news.

It should shock the conscience of all people of good will—and especially of Christians, as we contemplate the image of Jesus being handed over to those who conspire to callously kill him. The resonance between Jesus’ last days … and our days … seems too obvious to miss, although, sadly, many will.

The evening news exposes the spectacle of masked agents swarming from unmarked vans to surround international students and hard-working immigrants and God-knows who else. Refusing to show credentials or warrants, they seize their phones, identification documents and sweep them away to detention centers a thousand miles distant, to be stripped of their clothing and dignity, denied access to families, counsel, hearings or trials.

The sadistic depravity of our present administration descended to a new and absurdist depth when the meticulously-coifed Secretary of Homeland Security, wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, stood in front of dozens of prisoners, stacked in a multi-tiered Salvadoran prison, talking tough about what happens to the undocumented who commit crimes on American streets.

She used human beings as a prop for her get-tough posturing, quite against the Geneva Convention, but what does that matter to an administration where the value of human dignity is as expendable as the people rounded up just for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Nor does it matter when ICE agents get the wrong person, a citizen or someone with protected status, and hands them over to that brutal Salvadoran prison. They, too are expendable, denounced as criminals by an administration with a deplorable disregard for facts.

Even when an ‘administrative error’ is acknowledged, the President’s press secretary, who sometimes stands before the White House briefing room wearing a cross around her neck, justifies the imprisonment of an innocent man and indicates the administration will make no effort, not even a phone call to Salvadoran authorities, to seek his release and return him to his family.

His innocence doesn’t matter. He’s been handed over and needs to stay that way for the good of the country, which was exactly the logic of the authorities who rounded Jesus up and pinned him to a cross.

The cross of Christ is the measure of all things, the light that reveals and clarifies 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, a resolute defiance toward the sanctity of human life and dignity, created in God’s image.

But it does so much more than expose the ugliness of human beings and nations. It also 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 to raise from death the love he is within us.

Look there. Behold his beauty. The darkness of our times will not overtake you.