Posts Tagged ‘Presence’
Far More – Br. Luke Ditewig
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Br. Luke Ditewig
When I was a young child, my parents began a sabbath tradition adapting Jewish practice with special prayers and bread at the Saturday evening meal. It is a way to make Sunday special first at home before church the next day.
This includes Dad blessing me and any visiting children, which soon expanded to my parents’ chosen children. Saturday evening is special, all the more when I am home visiting. Dad stands behind, puts his hands on shoulders, and says something simple like: “May you be strengthened. May you know and rest in God’s deep love for you. May you have peace and joy.”
In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul gives a blessing. At its heart are these four lines: May you be strengthened in your inner being. May Christ dwell in your hearts. May you have power to comprehend [the expanse] so that may be filled with all the fullness of God. There are other great evocative images: “as you are being rooted and grounded in love” and “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”
Imagine a grandparent or favorite teacher or good friend or partner saying: May you be strong remembering whose you are. May you stand firm knowing you belong. May you rest in Jesus who holds the universe and loves you dearly. May you see there is more than you can imagine. Read More
On the Hard Road
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⇓ Download, print and share: On the Hard Road
We never thought life would be like this, never considered we could lose so much. Death keeps shattering our plans and expectations with loss. Everything is upended. The world feels doomed, and things don’t make sense anymore. What will happen next?
It’s hard to believe he’s gone. We’ve been together so long.
The doctors said there’s not much they can do.
If I lose this job, I don’t know how to keep supporting them.
We can’t go back. We have to find a way here.
Our words of disbelief and grief today could echo back, nearly unchanged, those spoken two thousand years ago, when two grieving companions talked together on the road to Emmaus. They shared their grief at losing Jesus, their friend, whom they expected would save them, but who was betrayed, killed, and buried. They talked of the body missing, and people supposedly seeing angels.
As these two walk to Emmaus, Jesus comes walking alongside them. They don’t recognize the one they love. The man asks about their conversation, sees and hears their sadness, and then shares about his own suffering, speaking through the language of scripture.
Our words of disbelief and grief today could echo back, nearly unchanged, those spoken two thousand years ago, when two grieving companions talked together on the road to Emmaus.
Hard as it is to believe, this is resurrection: feeling loss and disorientation, long talks of grief, and receiving a stranger’s compassionate presence. Easter does not come with quick fixes or easy answers. There are times when we do not even see that Jesus is here, alive, with us: Jesus came to Mary as she visited the tomb, and she supposed him to be a gardener; he came to a frightened community gathered behind locked doors; to a group out fishing for whom he provided breakfast; and to these two friends, on the way and linked in sad talk.
This is still true: Jesus comes where we are now, amid difficult emotions, perplexing questions, as we walk and eat. Frederick Buechner wrote: “Jesus is apt to come into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable moments. … He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.”
One way to see Jesus is to stop and look back. Ignatius of Loyola taught that reflecting and then giving thanks is a key way to pray. I see Jesus more easily by looking back. In the past day or more, for what are you most thankful? Perhaps a kind word or gesture, a fear unmanifested, a beauty glimpsed, a memory recalled. “How did you receive love? When were you most fully alive?” Sometimes it’s only after an experience that we can see what it truly held and meant for us. When the two disciples finally recognized Jesus in Emmaus, they were then able to remember their “hearts burning within” while Jesus spoke to them on the road. Recognition comes later. We have to stop and look back to not miss it.
Hard as it is to believe, this is resurrection: feeling loss and disorientation, long talks of grief, and receiving a stranger’s compassionate presence. Easter does not come with quick fixes or easy answers.
To see Jesus, we often have to seek company. If you feel blind and weighed down in grief, you are not alone. Many of us feel the same. Like the two companions on the road, speak your grief to compassionate friends and strangers. Pray even when God feels absent. Jesus is present alongside us including when we do not see him.
Pray your pain. If you’re wanting help with words, about half of the psalms are honest examples. Start with Psalm 13 and Psalm 102. Lament is a cry of pain and a cry of trust. It is stark and boldly real about pain and suffering, and it assumes being heard.
Lament is not just for Lent or Holy Week but for life. Even God grieves! In Genesis 6, God “grieved in the heart” at how people behaved. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. From the cross, Jesus cried out with words from Psalm 22, trust and question in tender, wrenching symmetry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Lament is our ancient prayer and part of being human.
Consider this: How do you know when children are upset? They flail, cry, hit, stomp, and resist. How do children look when at ease, trusting? They slump, lean into us and objects, hug back, and rest.
As a child of God, I find that one way I am praying is like a child: with my body. I hit the air with my fists, then slowly push and pull as with a heavy object. Tensing arms and clenching fists, I curl or twist and stay in that tension offering my constricted self. This is a way of praying, expressing the pain.
Then I let go and relax, leaning against a wall or lying on the floor, letting my whole weight be supported. Taking deep breaths, I trust God holds me fully. I also stand with my arms outstretched and tilted back imagining I am floating in the ocean, or alternately tilted forward as if floating on a cloud. These are ways of expressing and feeling trust.
Music beckons the body to move, to dance, to express sighs too deep for words. Pray with music that prompts such tensing and hitting pain or such floating trust – or find music that invites both. Children of God, pray your confusion and pain, what is hard to bear. Ask for grace to trust and move in such a way that you can feel free to express and receive what is true for you.
Children of God, pray your confusion and pain, what is hard to bear.
Psychiatrist Curt Thompson encourages us to not deny our losses or diminish them by trying to compare our experience with someone else. Your grief is real, and it is yours. Thompson suggests writing down each day at least one thing you have lost or are losing. Then also name a couple things for which you are thankful. In this way, pray both grief and gratitude.
A tree with a large broken limb hanging down inspires both these moods of prayer in me. I let one arm bend, droop, twist, and hang, feeling the weight of what is broken and hurts. I then raise the other arm upward like healthy limbs in gratitude. Like the tree, I experience both realities at the same time and thus pray weight and wonder, grief and gratitude.
Jesus persistently comes to us, with us, alongside us – including when we do not see him. Not in dazzling power, but in the glimmering presence of shared stories, Jesus walks and eats with us. Pray your story wherever you are in its unfolding, perhaps with movements, shaking pain or floating trust. Jesus is with us, grieving with us, listening with love, and gently fanning our soul’s faint embers into flame.
Jesus is with us, grieving with us, listening with love, and gently fanning our soul’s faint embers into flame.
Questions for Reflection
– When have you met Jesus on the hard road? How did you know it was him?
– How does your body ask to pray? Do you pray with walking, or dancing, or other forms of movement? Will you try a new way of moving your prayer?
– Pray both grief and gratitude. Which one feels more present to you right now?
Is it possible this this is easter: the pain, the grief, the confusion, and the loss we know only too well? On the hard road of life, Br. Luke Ditewig promises us, we do and will encounter Jesus, who comes alongside us even when we do not see him. This is resurrection.
Whosoever Will Be Saved – Br. James Koester
Growing up in the Church, as I did, I often found myself, in those moments waiting for the service to begin, exploring the Prayer Book that I held in my hands. I would flip thought it, as perhaps you have done, and read the interesting bits. I liked to look at the The Calendar, and wonder who some of these people were: Bede, Dunstan, Dominic, Stephen. Over the years I have stopped wondering who they were, or even their place and role in history. I have come to know them as friends. As our Rule of Life says, in a somewhat different context: we remember that they are not dead figures from the past. Risen in Christ, they belong to the great cloud of witnesses who spur us on by their prayers to change and mature in response to the Holy Spirit who makes all things new.[1]
Or I would make my with through the Table of Kindred and Affinity, where I would read: A Man may not marry his Mother, his Sister, his Grandmother, his Aunt.[2] As I worked my way through the list, and picture the people I was not allowed to marry, I would wonder, not so much as why I may not marry them, but why on earth I would want to marry my mother, my sister, my grandmother, or my aunt, in the first place! Read More
Closer than Our Own Selves – Br. Lain Wilson
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What do you do when all options in front of you are bad ones?
This is the situation that Jeremiah finds himself in this morning. God has called him to his vocation as a prophet, to proclaim God’s word. In doing so, Jeremiah is mocked and plotted against, even by those close to him. In not proclaiming God’s word, though, he experiences pain, “something like a burning fire” (Jer 20:9).
All this because of who God has called him to be.
Is it any surprise, then, that Jeremiah hurls against God one of the bitterest invectives in Scripture? Different translations have different force—“O Lord, you have enticed me,” “you have seduced me,” “you have deceived me” (Jer 20:7)—but the basic accusation is that God has broken trust, that God has forced the prophet into submission.[1]
This is an accusation you can only hurl against someone you deeply love.
And it is, perhaps, something that we can relate to.
God calls each of us in ways that we may not understand, that we struggle to accept, that we may rail against. Our vocations, our experiences, our very lives may be excruciating mysteries to us. For reasons beyond our understanding, we may, like Jeremiah, end up in places and at times asking ourselves, “how did this come to be,” able only to cry to God, “Is this what you intend for me?” Read More
Hidden Presence – Br. Lain Wilson
Mark 12:28-34
Psalm 81:8-14
Hosea 14:1-9
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Jesus identifies who—and what—God is. He also offers up an indictment of all the alluring temptations in sight that lead us astray from a God who all too often remains hidden from us.
“O Israel, if you would but listen to me! There shall be no strange god among you; you shall not worship a foreign god” (Ps 81:8-9). This command is repeated throughout Scripture, and yet the pages of Scripture are filled with rebuke and lament for the failure to keep to this basic commandment.
This turning away, though, isn’t surprising, because our God is often hidden. In times of anxiety and uncertainty, we crave what is visible, tangible, assured. What people, institutions, processes, products do you turn to for assurance, for certainty? What are your idols today? Read More
The Joy of Friendship – Br. James Koester
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Aelred of Rievaulx, Monastic and Theologian, 1167
We remember today, Aelred, the twelfth century abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in northern England, who died on this day in the year 1167. Aelred is most remembered for his writings on the gift of friendship, hence the marvelous collect that we once prayed on this day:
Pour into our hearts, O God, the Holy Spirit’s gift of love,
that we, clasping each the other’s hand, may share the joy
of friendship, human and divine, and with your servant
Aelred draw many into your community of love….
The gift of friendship, both human and divine, which we celebrate today, is perhaps one of the most debased gifts of our time, for we can friend any number of people, many of whom we have never met in person, with the click of a computer key. At the same time, we can un – friend them just as easily. People also speak of friends with benefits, or hook – ups, by which they mean people who enjoy physical intimacy, without the problem of emotional intimacy or commitment. Aelred, I think would be appalled by it all.
For Aelred, friendship was a sacrament of God’s love. It is a way, not the only way, but a way in which you and I can taste here and now the mystery of God’s love for us. God has not friended us with the mere click of a computer key, and nor will God un-friend us with the click of the same key. At the same time, God does not regard us simply as a friend with benefits without the complexity of emotional intimacy or commitment.
What many regard as friendship today, is not what Aelred wrote about, when he described friendship as the medicine of life for friendship, Aelred says, heightens the joy of prosperity and mitigates the sorrows of adversity by dividing and sharing them. Hence the best medicine in life is friendship.
It is only in true friendship that we can know and be known in ways that heal our sorrows and multiply our joys. Such friendship takes hard work and a level of emotional commitment not found solely on a keyboard. While a computer may help to nurture such a friendship over time and long distances, it cannot replace the face – time that true friendship requires to survive and thrive.
In the same way, God longs for face – time with us, not the cursory click of a keyboard, or the fleeting acknowledgement that often passes for prayer, or a friend with benefits relationship that carries with it no degree of emotional honesty, intimacy, or commitment. To paraphrase John, and Aelred, for God so loved us that he gave his Son that we, clasping each the other’s hands, human and divine, might be friends with one another, and our joys heightened, and our sorrows mitigated.
Finding Our Way Again and Again – Br. Curtis Almquist
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Br. Curtis Almquist
The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Jesus and John have known one another since they were children. Today we remember their encounter at the Jordan River, both of them now about 30 years old. Their parents have talked to one another about their boys since before they were born. John is the miracle son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, who were old enough to be his great grandparents; and Jesus is the miracle son of Mary who “reportedly” conceived him through an angel, not with her husband, Joseph. John’s parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah, are Jesus’ aunt and uncle.
Jesus and John bear both the blessing and the burden of their destinies. Their lives were prophesied to be great: John was predicted to be the Messiah’s “advance man,” the Messiah’s “forerunner,” to set the stage. Jesus was predicted to be the Messiah. How can this be?[i]
The stories about angels and the miraculous conceptions of these two cousins are undoubtedly the makings for small town gossip and, I imagine, eye-rolling derisive humor, and people’s incredulity. If Jesus and John were supposed to be these bionic boys, why did they appear so normal and unspectacular, disappointing even? What would it have been like for these two cousins to grow up in each other’s shadows, most likely to live in close proximity, never finding their voices for almost 30 years, which is approaching old age in their own day?[ii] Their lives had been shrouded with such mystery, and speculation, and derision about their identities and their destinies. Neither of them married. Neither of them was all-that-special, really, at least for men who were supposed to become so great. What did they know about each other? What did they think about each other? How did they talk to one another? We don’t know. Read More
Of Kitchens and Christmas – Br. James Koester
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Memories are a powerful force in the human psyche. They have the ability to trap and imprison, but they have also the ability to liberate and free. They have the power to make one weep in despair or grief and to laugh with the delight of a child. They have the power to shape and mold a life and in hindsight to help make sense of all that was and is, and even is to be. As we all know, it doesn’t take much to trigger a memory: a sound, a taste, a smell, an image, even just a word or phrase and suddenly we are back there as if it were happening this very instant.
I have one such memory that crops up in my mind and heart on a regular basis and it happens many days at Morning Prayer. I had no idea at the time, that the event itself was to be a harbinger of things to come. As a memory it continues to delight and console, and even assure me.
I couldn’t have been more than 9 or 10 and my mother and I were alone in the kitchen. I can’t remember what we were doing, but we were doing something together, and we were talking as a 9-year-old boy talks with his mother, or at least as this 9-year-old boy and his mother did. I was puzzled and I wanted to know something. The burning question I had, had something to do with church. (It’s okay of you want to roll your eyes at this point.) We had been to church as some point before this conversation, and it had been a Morning Prayer Sunday (if you have been an Episcopalian for more than 50 or 60 years, you’ll remember those). We had sung the Te Deum, and what I wanted to know, and what had puzzled me, was what exactly did we mean when we sang: When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man: thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.[1] I knew what all the words in that phrase meant except one, and I wanted to know what was meant by the word abhor. Read More
An Assured Hope – Br. Lain Wilson
Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle
Habakkuk 2:1-4
Hebrews 10:35—11:1
John 20:24-29
What would it mean for you to have proof?
This question is in the background of P. D. James’s novel Death in Holy Orders. A theological college holds a papyrus that purports to disprove the Resurrection. Surely, if this document proves to be authentic, the inspector asks one of the priests on staff, if it is hard proof about something that had until then only been a belief, this would surely be relevant to your faith. “My son,” the priest responds, “for one who every hour of his life has the assurance of the living presence of Christ, why should I worry about what happened to earthly bones?”[1]
Earthly bones very much worry the apostle Thomas, whom we celebrate today. Bones and flesh, blood and wounds—the physicality of Jesus’s body, the fleshly reality of his friend and teacher. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25) Jesus lets Thomas see and feel his body, giving him the proof he seeks. But not without a rebuke: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (Jn 20:29). Read More
Humble Joy – Br. Jack Crowley
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Br. Jack Crowley
Good morning and welcome to the third Sunday of Advent. We are just about one week away from the big day. Next Sunday, Advent four and Christmas eve will collide, and liturgical heads will spin.
Every year during this final stretch of Advent, I always love to imagine how Mary must have felt as the birth of her baby boy drew near. I’m sure Mary was filled with all sorts of emotions. I mean imagine for nine months carrying the son of God in your belly and feeling baby Jesus kick inside of you. Imagine for nine months going to bed every night knowing the savior of mankind was growing inside you.
Above all else, I imagine Mary feeling a sort of humble joy. Joy. Not just happiness, not just gratitude, not just relief, but joy. Joy and all the good that comes with it.
Traditionally on this third Sunday of Advent, we celebrate joy. You may have already noticed that our Advent wreath magically grew some roses last night at first evensong. Those roses are our reminder, in the midst of Advent, in the midst of a busy holiday season, to stop and appreciate the simple beauty of creation, to pause and give thanks and feel the simple joys of the season. Read More