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.

To see as we are seen

 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:12-13)

A magnificent nothing happened the other day. Only one other person noticed as far as I could tell, and I don’t know what he thought of it. We never spoke.

I first saw him as he hobbled to a chair across the aisle of the coffee shop, dropped his cane and plopped down, his thin white hair combed across the pink of his scalp. A faded blue shirt tucked loosely into his jeans, he settled in and read from his phone.

Returning to my book, I furtively glanced up from time to time, wanting to watch him for no reason I recognized. Once, our eyes met, and we quickly looked away, settling into our respective solitude.

But then something happened for which I have no reasonable explanation, only the intuition that faith provides. A flood of emotion surprised me. It came out of nowhere, a deep measure of love and respect for this stranger who for some reason wasn’t a stranger at all.

There was not an ounce of sympathy or compassion in the warm affection flooding my heart, and certainly no pity. I didn’t feel sorry for him. But an overwhelming warmth rose undeniably from the unsearchable depths of my soul. A love far beyond my own surged and filled my being with loving respect for the soul sitting across from me. It came of its own accord, unbidden by any desire, prayer or wish on my part.

For a moment, I saw the way we are seen, knowing as God knows us, my heart silently embracing and treasuring the mystery of the stranger for who he is, where he’d been, the life he’d lived, the struggles he’d suffered, the journey that brought him to this place on a cloudy March day to order a cup of coffee.

But maybe I make too much of the moment. Maybe it was just two 70-something men exchanging a glance, silently recognizing the decades of wear reflected in our faces. Maybe it is explainable as a simple acknowledgment of our shared humanity.

But even this is a grace, one too little found amid these days of malignant distrust and bitter politics when human souls are considered expendable.

I cannot dismiss what flooded through me or explain it away as the emotional quirk of my eccentric soul. There was … and is … something more.

For a moment, no, for more than a moment, I saw and felt him embraced by the Love who embraces both of us … and everything else, the Mystery who for some sweet reason chooses to dwell in the unsearchable depths of our being, ready to surprise us when we aren’t looking.

My coffee companion didn’t stay long. Picking up his coffee cup, keys and phone, he leaned on his cane and shuffled toward the door, dragging his bum right leg.

I looked up from my book and smiled. We exchanged a nod. His was clear, firm and respectful, a moment of mutual care, knowing ... we'd been seen.

Melting the ICE

Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (John 12:31-32)

Two visions collided in my heart this week. One was the image of ICE agents herding supposed criminals onto planes, ferrying them away to brutal foreign prisons without the benefit of hearings or trials or anything but the unsubstantiated claims of self-interested politicians.

The other vision melted my heart, feeding a soul-deep hope that will not die.

It happened on Sunday morning. My pre-service prayer complete, I opened my eyes and immediately knew prayer was not done with me. Look and see, said the voice of the Spirit within me.

The crucifix hanging high above the altar first captured my attention as the congregation gathered. Two Filipino mothers crowded in beside me with five children, black and brown. An elderly Chinese woman kneeled ahead of me.

An African American family sat three rows further up. Across the room, a batik-clad woman and her children looked like they’d just arrived from some west African country. And dozens of Hispanics from several southern nations scattered among folk who are as white as me.

I didn’t see a suit and tie in the place, except for the cantor and organist. More obvious were jeans, tennis shoes, the weathered faces of people who work outdoors, and others, with softer hands, who labor in classrooms and offices and over keyboards like the one beneath my fingers.

Looking at the crucifix above our gathering, it all felt right. Jesus’ words rang truer than ever. ‘If I be lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.’

For there we were, drawn together by the transcendent love of the One who makes the many … into one. That’s what love does, but it is better to say that is what Love does. The God who is Love, whose all-embracing compassion bears the face of Jesus in his suffering, seeks ever more to draw the human family and all creation into one loving union.

This vision held me through the service. I couldn’t stop looking around. What I saw was profoundly hopeful, promising a gracious world of welcome infused with the love of Jesus, whose heart is known in every welcome and act of hospitality whether his name is spoken or not.

But as hopeful as it was to kneel at Divine Savior Church and see what the Savior is doing among us, I was equally engulfed by a profound sadness over the daily reports of ICE raids. However necessary and important their function in society, too often human souls are being indiscriminately swept up and treated like trash—the documented and undocumented, the guilty and the innocent, the citizen, the green card holder and people who look like my brown-skinned grandsons and son-in-law, for whom I worry.

The vision of a world-made-one is a true and deeply Christian vision of God’s desire for the nations, including our own. The vision of ‘one out of many’ is also deeply encoded in the history and DNA of our nation. But it is daily attacked and shattered by the present administration as it stokes anger and fear of those who look like they ‘don’t belong here.’

Tragically, many Christians also have lost sight and faith in the vision of their Lord, who draws the many into one, ironically unaware that such hatred and rejection stands judged by the cross of Christ and the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.

But the vision of a world made new, born of God’s Spirit, does not die. It lives in human hearts and appears in flesh and blood gatherings, like Sunday morning, as we gathered beneath the cross of Christ where the hope of the world was clear to see.

All we needed to do was look around … and see what Love does.

‘I feel good when I fire someone’ … our spiritual crisis

All those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to [Jesus]; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah. (Luke 4:40-41)

I could never produce a convincing reason why Jesus told the demons to shut up when they shouted his identity. But the times we live in suggest an answer. More on that in a minute. First, a dinner party.

Nearly 20 years ago, Dixie and I sat in a suburban living room with several other church members, sharing a glass of wine before dinner. When conversation turned to work, one of our evening companions said he had to fire someone that day.

So sorry about that, another said. The response was immediate, ‘Don’t’ be. I feel good when I fire someone.’  

Two women in the room gasped and objected when he said it, including his wife, but he doubled down. ‘It makes my business more successful.’

That night had not occurred to me for years until the evening news assaulted my consciousness with the sight of Elon Musk prancing across a stage wielding a chain saw.

Gleefully delighting in dismantling government programs, he celebrated throwing talented, dedicated people on the street, all while a roomful of well-heeled sycophants cheered him on, utterly oblivious or willfully blind to the pain of those they’d repeatedly slandered.

Nor did they see, or have the spiritual capacity to see millions of people, in this country and beyond, who are served by the programs being trashed, people like my friend’s son who needs exorbitantly expensive medication to work and stay alive, or veterans who struggle to get health benefits, or special ed kids whose programs are disappearing, not to mention hundreds of thousands … who will die … because of the death of USAID.

But let’s go back to the dinner party. It is a relatively small step from what I heard years ago in that suburban living room to what hits us in the gut every day on the evening news. The only real difference is one of scale.

What is happening in our country has everything to do with the lack of empathy so evident in my dinner companion. Even with further conversation, he evinced no willingness or ability to see or consider the impact of his actions, even if they were necessary, on the mind, heart and well-being of another human soul.

He understood power and how to use it, sometimes employing it to bring people to heel, bending them to his will, a trait evident and celebrated in the MAGA movement in which being dominant is the most important value, trumping all others.

And this may be the great spiritual crisis of our day, the valorization of power, the ability to make others bend the knee, to get your way, to gain advantage or take revenge, to make America great.

And if others are injured or destroyed, killed or just waste away (and make no mistake, they are and will), well, that’s just the cost of doing business. Most of them are just parasites anyway. After all, empathy is a bug in the system of greatness. It just gets in the way.

But power without empathy, power untutored by faith and human values, is blind, deaf and dumb. It makes no friends, builds no relationships and cures no ills as it splinters societies. It sees, hears and attends to its whims and wishes, as utterly oblivious as those cheering Elon Musk’s chainsaw dance.

And this brings me back to Jesus and the demons, who always seemed to recognize who he was when others did not. Jesus wouldn’t let them spill the beans, and now I get it.

They only knew his power. That they recognized, but they didn’t see him and therefore didn’t really know him. For knowing him requires seeing, feeling and knowing his compassionate willingness to suffer in order to free the hearts and lives of those the great ones … would have us ignore.

Fly me home

John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. (Luke 3:16)

I saw them before I heard them, which is unusual for sand hill cranes. Their bugle calls and alto trill carry a couple of miles or more, and they fly so high you can topple backward while craning your neck to find them.

But today they appeared framed in the glass of the patio doors, which I scrambled to open, eager to welcome their joy into my wintered heart. How beautiful are the wings of those who bear hope’s holy promise.

Excitement for an unusually warm March day surely fanned their enthusiasm as they cried high to one another. Calls answered calls, weaving an ecstatic crescendo of delight, faster and louder, shouting over each other like children released for recess, voices over voices in a glorious cacophony of joy, as they made their way home to summer nesting grounds.

‘You came back,’ I whispered to the crystal blue dome of heaven’s splendor, tears of gratitude the best prayer I’d offered in weeks.

Tears are always interesting. They tell you what you love, what you need, what you hope for and when you have been graced beyond your capacity for middle-class composure.

Damn that.

Give me more of those tears, wordless prayers, born of the Spirit’s fire, that baptize the soul and wash away the muck that clings to the heart and paints the world gray.

Tasting the tears of hope renewed, my silent soul thanked the heavens for the utter goodness and total gratuity of being alive, winging my earth-bound heart to join the cranes raptured praise of the Loving Mystery who breathes life’s holy sweetness into every single moment … and begs us to take a breath.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Surely, the cranes know, their calls and cries, delight in flight and grace in the dance of landing, are a prayer of gratitude for having received a life to live and love, bidding us to embrace the lives we have been given—loving our days as best we can, savoring the graces that come our way, releasing our insistence that our lives and the world should be less messy and confounded than they are.

In the impenetrable alchemy of the Spirit, who wastes nothing and uses everything, the cranes migration carried me home. For at least one blessed moment, my heart and the Heart of Love, who made the cranes to fly and me to praise their beauty, were no longer two but overlapping circles merged as one, one love, loving everything that is, even myself, which can be the hardest of all.

Is not knowing this, feeling this oneness in love, what it means to be baptized in the Spirit’s fire? I think so, or at least that’s what the cranes told me … as they made their way home.

What’s so great?

Lord, you have been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn us back to dust, and say, ‘Turn back, you mortals.’ For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:1-4)

It’s just a broken piece of pottery, but in this season of ashes—and national turmoil—I can’t get it out of my mind.

It lives in a small basket near my desk where I throw my keys. Sometimes I use it for a paperweight. Occasionally, I trace the grooves worked by ancient hands as they fashioned the bowl or jar to which this fragment once belonged.

I don’t know how old it is, certainly hundreds of years, maybe a thousand or more. The hands that made it are dust, so is every civilization that once occupied this hill, Meggido, in northern Israel, where this fragment was one of thousands scattered from archeological digs.

Meggido overlooks a great valley where two ancient trade routes crossed. Armies trod those routes, too, and this ancient hill rose higher and higher as one power after another built on the ruins of those they conquered. The hill stands hundreds of feet higher than the ancient spring that still flows deep beneath it.

Great civilizations claimed this spot for their own at one time or another—Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, to name a few, certainly the Israelites as well. Canaanites made burnt offerings here four and five thousand years ago.

All of them are long gone now, no matter how great, powerful or even insurmountable their military and economic might once appeared.

Today, Meggido is a place where tourists and pilgrims gather among the remnants of digs. They climb dozens of steep steps down to the spring that still flows fresh and clean. Maybe they pocket a pottery fragment as they gaze at the beauty of the Jezreel Valley where ancient armies once clashed.

Memories of Meggido proved inescapable for me, this week, as Christians marked their foreheads with ash and heard sobering words. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’

There’s no escaping it, not for individuals or civilizations, which is why I picked up my little piece of history in Meggido and keep it near. It puts the lie to every claim of greatness that we, our nation or civilization might make about ourselves.

It calls into question any conception of greatness on which we might spend our lives or our nation’s resources in an effort to claim superiority, as if we could deny what is utterly apparent in the dust of Meggido.

Great nations, powerful leaders, once strode this place. Now, the silent fragments of their existence whisper wisdom, ‘Mortal greatness is an illusion. No matter how pressing or sure it seems, it will fail you.’

And we each are left to wonder, ‘What is truly great; is there anything that lasts, anything to which we might cleave and love and give ourselves to, anything that will hold us when we and all we touched have turned to ash?

Is there?

Yes, says the spring flowing deep beneath Megiddo’s height. There is. Just One. Don't let anyone else fool you.

Heaven’s light

 Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. (Luke 9:28-29)

I can see this, somehow. There would seem to be no analog, nothing that compares to this moment on the mountain when the inner soul of Jesus filled the fullness of his outer appearance with the glory of heaven’s light.

His interior union with the Father shimmers through his finite, mortal body, unveiling the secret of his identity and revealing, once and for all, what we are intended to know, to feel and to become, one with heaven’s light.

The inner eye of my heart conceives the vision, if only because I have stood in the gaze of souls who loved truly, deeply and beautifully, their eyes glistening with a light that hinted of a world of beauty beneath and beyond all that is, a world more real than the ground beneath our feet or the touch of our beloved’s hand.

Such is the light filling Jesus on the mountain. We desperately need this vision. When we lose it, when we forget it, the triviality of the ordinary, the repulsive violence that fills the daily news, and the smug egotism of the powerful tempt us to nihilistic despair, which may become the great spiritual malady of our era.

When that takes hold, the light in our souls can be eclipsed by the capricious will of the powerful who indulge their whims to shape a world of their choosing, a world where love, beauty, commitment, grace, generosity and other virtues have no place or purchase.

Such is the sordid state of American politics, about which we may feel powerless to change, a state that … if we fixate there … dims the light of Christ in our lives, stealing our joy and shrouding our days in a cheerless, gray cloud.

This is why we so badly need the vision of Jesus shimmering with heaven’s light on the mountain. The light of God shines there, drawing us to come and see and never doubt that heaven’s inextinguishable radiance is not now and never shall be eclipsed.

The luminous glory shimmering in the very clothes of Christ is a vision of eternity. Holding it before our eyes, it fans the flame of faith, hope and love within us. 

Even more, it stirs our desire not just to see heaven’s holy light … but to stand inside that light, enveloped in its shining, so that our hearts are one, united with our Lord, knowing what is in him, tasting the sweetness of eternity.

Standing in heaven’s light, we feel the world of beauty beneath and beyond all that is … where those who mourn shall laugh, where those who want shall be full, where suffering is turned into redemption and the powers of death shatter like glass.

For Colleen … and all who need to feel the fire

But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

I wonder how many of us feel like my cousin, Colleen. ‘I need a hug,’ she wrote, responding to a recent post. ‘I am scared to death every day I wake up. Any specific prayers or thoughts you can give me would be appreciated.’

If only there was a magic prayer to cast out fear and evict our worries and anger, amid the political upheaval that bombards our consciousness every time we watch the news, wondering, good Lord, what next?

For Colleen, the main demon is fear, for me it is anger at the brutal callousness and cruelty to human beings at home and abroad, evident in the actions of the current administration, cutting humanitarian aid and tossing committed public servants to the curb … with utterly no discernment about what is good, just and necessary.

Although our demons differ, Colleen and I—millions more, I suspect—face a spiritual crisis, as anger, fear or other demons like helplessness and despair claim ever-larger swathes of our consciousness.

We need to exercise an eviction notice or, better, perform an exorcism before the enemies of love possess our hearts. Anger, even righteous anger, can quickly metastasize into hatred, fear into immobility, despair into cynicism and helplessness into melancholy and sad despondency.

While I wish I had a special prayer for Colleen … and myself, there is a way of freedom … however partial it feels, at times … a way we can walk, which requires daily attention and maintenance.

Silly, sappy and naïve as it sounds, love is the only road to freedom, the only power strong enough to exorcise the damnedable powers that bind our hearts and tie us in knots.

Love casts out fear, First John 4 says. It does a pretty good job on anger, hopelessness, helplessness and a host of other chains that bind the heart, too. I speak from experience; more significantly, so do saints, mystics and ordinary Christians from any time and place you can possibly name.

The love that frees does not emanate in our souls; although as a gift in our creation and renewed in our redemption, it burns there, too, a living flame of love, to be sought, fanned and tended anew each day.

The deep substance of our souls … is the love God is, Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, tells us. We forget that … or maybe we never knew. Maybe we thought the surge of warmth, love and tears that bubble up, sometimes at the most unexpected and inopportune moments, is an aberration of little import, as opposed to our souls trying to break free and see the light of day.

Every day, we need to descend from our troubled minds into our hearts, there to find and feel the warmth of the flickering flame yet burning in us. Blow on those flames; stir love’s embers however you can. Savor whatever graces or memories, beauty or common moments awaken your heart.

And pray. Pray all your fears, your hopes and doubts and all the rest of it. Let it go, giving it all to Jesus, who bids you to come and sit in the sweet warmth of his love. You just may find the comfort and rest you need for one more day of loving your life and family and neighbors and this crazy, screwed-up world … and even yourself, which can be the hardest of all.

And Colleen, if none of this works, read Psalm 46, slowly, and remember who, in the last analysis, is still in charge.

Elon Musk meets the silent pulpit

Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. … ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. (Luke 6:20,23-24)

I would have thought it impossible to read these words this week without seeing the image of the world’s richest man, standing in the Oval Office, explaining why it’s okay to starve children and refuse them life-saving medicines.

But I was wrong.

I heard two sermons today, one in a large Roman Catholic Church, another in a prominent Lutheran congregation. In neither case, did the preacher think it was important to mention that humanitarian agencies of their own church bodies were being eviscerated, told to stand down, forced to release staff, while millions of tons of food are wasting in warehouses and ship holds, going to rot, because they have been denied access to USAID food and medication supplies.

Not only that, neither preacher bothered to mention that the very agencies of their church bodies, among the most efficient and effective in the world at feeding the poor and working among the bereft and forgotten, are being denounced, reviled and defamed.

I can only wonder if the reason is cluelessness … or cowardice.

We should have been praising God. We should have been celebrating that we are being reviled and defamed for loving Jesus and loving the people to whom he most directed us. We should have celebrated the work and sacrifices of those who so faithfully labor to be the hands and heart of Jesus in the world’s poorest places.

But what we got … was silence.

I can hardly think of a moment when Jesus’ words about what it means to love and follow him have had more obvious and immediate relevance. The world’s richest man stood in the most powerful office on the face of the earth and declared war on the world’s poor, whom Jesus called blessed, favored, chosen, treasured, the delight of his eye.

But I heard nary a word about this, and I wonder how common my experience was this day.

I wonder if the Western church is capable, whether it remains a fit instrument to bear the message of the Gospel and suffer for it like so many in other places and generations before us.

I wonder if we are so institutionally-bound that we lack the courage to be hated for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom. And yes, I wonder the same about myself. Have I become so acclimated to church as I have known it that I am unwilling to face the challenge of our times?

Contrary to my conversation with one of today’s preachers, it is not enough to exhort people to place commitment to Christ and his kingdom at the center of their lives—without naming the particularity of what that means in the present moment. If the Gospel is not preached in its particularity, it is not preached at all.

Today, the pulpits toward which I eagerly leaned, hoping to hear the word of God in the power of the Spirit, gave me polite, apologetic rhetoric which ignored or tried to explain that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said when he blessed the poor and warned the rich that their benighted ways lead to ruin.

And all the while, people were and are dying … because so many are unable or unwilling to speak and hear the Word of God.

Lord, have mercy.

Take a knee

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken …. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people. (Luke 5:8-10)

I am suspicious of all attempts to divide the human race into two groups, defined by some trait or attitude. But today … amid the cacophony of voices in the news … I am tempted.

Let’s see how it goes.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those astounded by orange-burst sunsets … and those who quickly turn away.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who feel the darkness of their hearts … and those who only see it in others.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who imagine they understand the great questions of the day … and those who know they don’t.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who kneel before the holy … and those who don’t or won’t or would never think of it.

I prefer the kneelers … and the light-lovers … and the hearts who feel the weight of their sin, the limits of their wisdom and the certainty of their mortality.

They are my brothers and sisters, which is why I like Peter as he kneels among the slippery fish flopping about on the deck of his boat. Knowing the dark impurity of his soul, the unworthiness of his heart, his want of faith and love, he hides his face in the presence of the Divine Soul whose light exposes the depth of his darkness.

But he doesn’t stay there long, for mercy will not allow it. God cannot seem to resist a truly humble heart, who is poor in spirit and has surrendered all attempts to deny their poverty.

The message is always the same; Old Testament, New Testament, doesn’t matter, the words soon come, ‘Do not be afraid.’

But it is never spoken to the arrogant who are certain of their wisdom, preening in their power and proud of their perversity. It is only for knees that know how to bend … and hearts who know how to confess … and souls who have tasted the tears of mortality.

God, who is Eternal Light and the sweetness of unfailing mercy, invites us to bring our darkness, our doubt, our fear, and the certainty of our unworthiness into the embrace of everlasting love.

For Christ, who is transcendent goodness, kindness and beauty, lifts us from our knees, again and again, amid the tears of joy that appear each time we catch the corner of his smile … and hear his voice, ‘Do not be afraid.’

Bag-ucation

‘This child [Jesus] is destined … to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed ….’ (Luke 2:34-35)

The malignant malice and ignorance of Elon Musk and his cadre of young tech-bros transports me to the belly of a C-130 turbo prop flying at 20,000 feet over the horn of Africa.

How I’d love to go back and take them with me, riding the bags, not that I think it would do much to illumine the darkened souls of those who imagine human life and society can be reduced to a series of algorithms.

There are a few things they don’t know as they stump their way through the national treasury like a bear in heat, supposedly eliminating waste and fraud, which would actually require them to know something about what federal dollars do.

I am far from an expert, but I know what it is to ride bags of USAID grain into war zones and killing fields amid rampant starvation.

I sat on those bags and climbed into the cockpit more than once or twice to listen to pilots talk to aid workers on the ground, who advised them whether it was safe to land. I watched men young and younger than Musk’s arrogant army scramble to unload tons of grain and cooking oil from those planes, loading them on smaller trucks and jeeps before hostile soldiers and warlord bandits descended with AK-47s to steal it.

Those jeeps and trucks bore many signs, like, WFP, the World Food Program, Catholic Relief Services, International Committee of the Red Cross, Goal, and Doctors Without Borders. The food whisked away went to feeding and distribution centers run by these agencies and others, including the Sisters of Charity, Save the Children and Lutheran World Federation-World Service, whose initials, LWF, were also emblazoned on some of the C-130s.

It is not only domestically, within the United States, that the U.S. government depends on public-private partnerships—such as with Lutheran and Catholic social services—to accomplish aspects of its mission.

Those bags of grain represent only a small portion, I’m sure, of the work and reach of USAID. But I know this much: Lives are saved. Regions are stabilized or given the hope of stabilization. U.S. foreign policy goals are served, undergirding the reputation of the United States as a just, generous and reliable partner in the welter of global affairs.

I doubt Musk and his minions know much, if any of this, and they show no evidence that they care to know, as they slash away at the fabric of relationships that help hold the world together and keep it, at least, somewhat sane and decent.

Still, I would love to take them for a ride in one of those Southern Air Transport planes. I’d have them scramble to pick of 50-kilogram bags of grain and carry them down the ramp and onto the trucks. I’d like to watch them look over their shoulders, wondering if they were about to come face-to-face with armed men, who didn’t give a damn who they are or what they think they know.

I want aid workers to walk them among starving kids with orange hair, kwashiorkor, as they withered away. 

I’d like to bring them face-to-face with something beyond a confounded computer screen so they might see the faces of these kids—and the young men and women who work among them, revealing a depth and beauty of heart they, too, could have … if only they could feel something beyond the cocksure arrogance of those who know little more than numbers on a screen.

I’d call it bag-ucation.

The eyes have it

Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, ‘Lord, let your servant now depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation. (Luke 2:27-30) 

Crystal blue eyes, shining clear as an April morning, shimmer in memory when I hear Simeon’s name. I knew Simeon. I still know him and always will, except his name is not Simeon. It’s Eilert. But he is Simeon to me. Of all the souls I want to meet in that realm where tears are no more, Eilert is on the short list.

I want to look into his moist, blue eyes one more time. But I don’t need to wait. All I need to do is close my eyes and imagine old Simeon taking the infant Jesus in his arms and blessing God, his heart a fountain of gratitude.

For when I do, the face I see is Eilert’s … in the last hours of his life, his eyes as blue as the day I met him, his heart as generous, his words blessing me one last time as he had dozens of times before. As surely as Simeon held Jesus in his arms, Eilert held my heart in his.

‘Just know, we love you, and we love you a lot,’ he whispered. ‘But now it’s time for auf wedersehen.’ That was more than 40 years ago, or was it yesterday?

The old man’s heart, like Simeon, was a fountain of gratitude. He had seen what he needed to see, touched what he needed to touch, felt what he needed to feel to die in peace, knowing his life, the life of his people and the life of this crazy world rest in the hands of a Faithful Love, stronger than every death that was ever died or ever will be.

Eilert had tasted salvation in the beauty of the earth, the bounty of the soil, the goodness of love and the stories of Jesus he read from the worn Bible and devotionals lying on his kitchen chair.

His heart rested in peace in the early morning hours when eternity came to claim him, leaving me the holy privilege of closing his eyes on this earth for the last time.

Those eyes have lived in me all these years, and I suspect they always will. It was one of those moments that reveal your heart so clearly that the mind, so slow on the uptake, begins to understand what you most dearly want and need.

I want to see and touch and feel the faithful love of the One who is Love, the One held in Simeon’s arms and Eilert’s heart, the One who made their old eyes glisten with gratitude and so filled their hearts with words of blessing that they spilled out … even on the grossly unworthy, like me.

I want my eyes to shimmer with the secret of Love’s Living Presence that maybe, just maybe, I might bless someone as surely and profoundly as they continue to bless me. Maybe then, the Holy One will have some reasonable return on the great investment of love and wonder the Lord has poured out on me.

For I, too, have seen the Lord’s salvation, not least in the sparkle of old eyes alive with the Love who is everywhere present … and every moment for us.