Bad Love?

There are a whole genre of songs from my adolescence that express the sentiment I am calling this morning “Bad Love.” Bad Love is one such tune; another is Love Hurts. In lieu of moaning my way through either of those ditties to set us up for this morning’s consideration of the dirt under the edge of the biblical rug we are to discover in John’s epistles, I offer instead a prayer, a poem of the Sufi mystic Rumi.

Disciplines

Do not expect to be always happy on this way.
You have been caught by a lion, my dear.

The friend dumps plaster on your head.
Think of it as expensive perfume.

Inside you there is a monster
that must be tied up and whipped.

Watch the man beating a rug.
He is not mad at it.
He wants to loosen the layers of dirt.

Ego accumulations are not loosened
with one swat. Continual work
Is necessary, disciplines.

In dreams, and even awake,
you will hear the beloved screaming at you.

A carpenter saws and chisels a piece of wood,
because he knows how he wants to use it.

Curing a hide, the tanner
rubs in acid and all manner of filth.
This makes a beautiful soft leather.

What does the half-finished hide know?
Every hard thing that happens
works on you like that.

Hurry, Shams. Come back
like the sun comes back
every day with new
and powerful secrets.

The serious scholars who put together the New Revised Common Lectionary, the three year cycle of readings many Protestant communions use to guide their worship and study, are that kind of people, too. Their job is to give us, in three years’ time, the fullest possible exposure to the themes and narratives of scripture….but there are some parts of the bible they would really prefer to keep in the closet, unexamined. And although they have spent the entire six weeks of Easter working over the five short chapters of the first letter of John, you will never see these words from chapter 1: My little children, it is the last hour!!!! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come!!!! From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us they would have remained with us, but by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 1:18-19) Well, then.

The New Testament professor Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches at Union Seminary in Richmond and served on the Theological Task Force for Peace, Purity, and Unity, led our presbytery of Tropical Florida in a study of these less…uplifting texts from the Johannine letters, just about three years ago, as our own presbytery began to try to talk , finally, about the issues of social justice and Christology that have long divided us. Her honest, unflinching treatment of the difficult and painful schisms in the church of John’s letters—schisms over issues of Christology and social practice in the Church—so much like today, have long stayed with me. On Tuesday, this Presbytery which could not bring itself to speak lovingly to nor behave tolerantly toward colleagues who disagreed, will try to practice something we call Gracious Separation—releasing nine of our sister congregations to other, more conservative denominations—but which the author of John’s three letters would probably call Schism, which it is. I remember how Dr. Gench urged us to try to live and learn together, and read these words to warn us how easy it is to move from disagreement to disgust, especially among those we love and ought to love. From 2 John: Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ but goes beyond it does not have God…do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you and does not bring this teaching, for to welcome is to participate in the deeds of such a person. (2 John 9-10) Remembering how, down through the years of fighting over teachings relating to Christ’s welcome (or the church’s judgment) of homosexual persons, we each had suspected the other of not recognizing the bible (or Jesus) if he had knocked us over the head in a dark alley, we (or at least I) squirmed. Taylor went on, in her mellifluous southern lady voice, to tell us that the only place in the bible where the “antichrist” is mentioned is in the letters of John…and the only persons to whom that hateful and fearsome appellation is assigned is…a member of the community of Jesus, a member of the family, with whom the Elder who wrote the letters found himself in irreconcilable differences.

It’s hard to work up a head of self-righteous steam about those who have called me an antichrist for my belief system…when sitting next to me is a friend whose positions, and sometimes whose personality, I have secretly—and sometimes not so secretly—denounced as the same. Gench had gone from preachin’ to meddlin’, and I didn’t like it so much as I thought I would.

Here’s the thing: the four books that make up the Johannine corpus—the gospel and the three letters that follow—were written to and about a community, a family, really, that had gone through a painful and difficult divorce. Many scholars agree that the gospel of John, written late in the first century, had such a heavenly, divine view of who Jesus was because that was the issue over which the church had reached irreconcilable differences with the synagogue. That is to say, the church, which had been a part of Jewish life and practice, eventually divorced over their differences about who Jesus was: whether an inspired human teacher, or the divine manifestation of God in human flesh. That family broke up over this issue, and the gospel of John was written to help those who had lost their kin and their home place over it to remember what they stood for, and what it had cost them. The letters of John which followed were written, a little later, from that same fraught and frightened place, by an Elder who needed to believe he was right, and whose fear that he might not be caused him to anathematize the friends and family who disagreed with him. So, out of the same mouth that says, beloved, let us love one another because love is of God, also comes the angry and shrill, we are from God, whoever knows God listens to us. (and not to them!). Sometimes the bible’s best teaching is not taking at face value what is said, but in looking at how our convictions about what is most important for us lead us to behave exactly contrary to what we say we value the most. I believe in love, and if you don’t see it the way I do, then, to hell with you. Amen.

This past week, the state of North Carolina raised the stakes on its ban of same-sex marriage from a state law to a constitutional imperative. And President Obama confessed publically his long struggle with same-sex marriage and made public that he now supports it wholeheartedly—the first such affirmation by a sitting president. Both actions were promoted on the ground of Christian faith and practice—and both the state of North Carolina and President Obama have now been exhaustively denounced and demonized for their conclusion by brothers and sisters in the Christian faith. The Elder of I, II, and III John would be so proud!!!

It’s the people we love, or as Stephen Sapp always says, the people we ought to love, whom we can’t bear disagreement with, graciously. Some of the bitterest theological battles I have waged have been waged without mercy in my own or my parents’ living room. Some of the hardest words I have ever spoken have been spoken to my daughter, or my husband, or my little brother, because when those people get under my skin, or fail to support me when I need to know that I am right (and of course that means they need to admit that they are wrong) the only thing I can think of to do to save myself from the hurt is to shove my principled living into the closet and attack. The only people who deserve the title “antichrist,” after all, are those in whom we once saw Christ—that is to say, Love—face to face, but in whom now, at least for a moment, we cannot see any good at all.

Well, now I’ve gone and revealed what a mess I am, and probably not a one of you has ever fallen victim, as I have, to what I call baaad love. It comforts me a little to know that the bible isn’t much less human than I am, so that when I fall back or fail to be the kind of Christian, friend, ex- , spouse, parent, and child that I want to be, others have been down the bad love road before me, and still got up and dusted themselves off and went on reflecting the path of Christ, in the end. Sometimes, when the temptation to thunder antichrist!! is the worst, I think about this old story:

Once upon a time, a vibrant community of monks was reduced to five squabbling and cranky old men. Day after day, they went about God’s business devoid of joy and despairing of attracting neighboring townspeople to their work and worship. One day the abbot, in desperation, went to visit an old hermit who used to be the town’s rabbi. “I don’t know what to do,” he cried. Is there not some ancient wisdom that can help restore life and love to our community? “No.” said the rabbi sadly, “but I will tell you this: the messiah is one of you.” The abbot went home, puzzled and confused. “One of us?” He looked at his members and shook his head. No way. He told two of the brothers, and they, too, laughed in disbelief…and began to wonder: which one of us is messiah? On the off chance that one would turn out to be, each brother began to treat the other as if he might be Christ, and as each one both gave and received that honor, the old cranky monks became known for their extraordinary respect and kindness toward others…and thus, the community was renewed.

$3.00 Worth of God”

Keith Green, an evangelical singer whose music used to challenge and disturb me when I was a Baptist teenager, once said this: Americans have been inoculated with a slight case of Christianity that is preventing them from getting the real thing.

I was struck by this quote while pondering the eloquent words of the author of I John about the power of love: its fearlessness, its longing, its uncompromising purity of commitment—who can attain it? And who could resist it? We all want to love like that…..or, do we? Maybe the slight case could be enough for us….the “real thing” being far too potent an infection to be borne in this world.

The German liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle tells a story about her neighbor in post-WW II Hamburg, a widow who had been living alone since her husband had died. She lived in a tidy apartment, two rooms of which she rented out in order to increase her income. The only people she knew were the renters and the nearest neighbors on her floor. Her life consisted in keeping the apartment clean, going to the market, and cooking her meals. She seldom read books, or even magazines. She watched a little television in the afternoon. She was difficult to talk with, frequently repeating the same jokes, only becoming energized when relating stories of the homeland from which she had fled at the end of the war. She rarely spoke of anyone except herself. Though she was a confirmed and self-described Christian, her slight case of religion had very little impact in her circumscribed life. One time, she told Soelle, she had become friendly with a former colleague from work, but I don’t let her in the house.

To live one’s days alone like the woman in Hamburg, with no meaningful connection to another, no participation in the world of her renters or neighbors, no life at all beyond the self, is not living., says Soelle, but rather, a living death.

The first epistle of John, written late in the first century of the Christian era, echoes this stark judgment: We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.. In other words, the person who does not love is spiritually dead, and those who want to feel and be genuinely alive, must live for and with others.

It’s tempting to read 1st John—obsessed with the idea of love—as a kind of feel-good script, eminently suitable for weddings, so soothing and benign and sweet and tender and helpful…but the writer of 1st John, struggling for survival against the Romans while enduring schism within his own church family, has something else in mind altogether. When he is speaking about love and community and God, he is not being nice, but rather, praying his way through matters of life and death. The love he yearns for is potent, powerfully inconvenient, and massively disruptive of life as we know it: an experience so vital that it quite literally defined his world in terms as clear as darkness and light. This is love, as the Song of Solomon puts it, that is fierce as death, a passion as mighty as the grave, its darts are darts of fire, a blazing flame. Vast floods cannot quench love, nor rivers drown it. That is a lot to ask for—maybe, too much to bear? The poet Wilbur Rees put it this way:

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please. not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of him to make me love a (homeless) man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

American life continues sliding, I fear, into a $3.00 worth of god world view. We still use the language of welcome that Emma Lazarus once inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… but, worn down by years of war and fears of threats and a shrinking economy, we are more vulnerable than ever to settling—settling for a cup of warm milk, the warmth of the womb and a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack.

But we know we want more. We know we are more. We know God expects more.
And we know that God will give us more than we can imagine or believe, if we will take the risk of Love. And that is why we are here, week by week, trying to help each other with our prayers and our practice, to be more of God in our lives and in the worlds our lives touch.

I’ve been haunted all week by one of the prayer requests that was offered in worship last Sunday, as we sat, enveloped in community while the hard rain beat down on our metal roof, insistent and demanding. Camilla Tamargo stood up to make a plea for a child whose family is a client where she works. She spoke of the sweetness of this ten year old boy, and of his needs: he is partially paralyzed on one side of his body, mentally handicapped; yet he knows what love should be: he wonders, Camilla said, why doesn’t my mommy want me? Her voice carrying over the sound of the rain, Camilla wrung her hands and said, please, please, if anyone knows of someone who could find room for this child in their lives….

Beloved, says the author of I John, just another Christian like you and me who has been infected by the bug and can’t shake off the demanding Love of God: beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.

Let us pray: My Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine. For thee all the follies of sin I resign. My precious redeemer, my savior art thou: if ever I loved thee, my Jesus, ‘tis now. Amen.

A Wake of Goodness and Mercy

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want….
He makes me
Lie down in green pastures
Leads me beside still waters
Restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I fear no evil
for You are with me.
Your rod and your staff,
they comfort me
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies
You anoint my head with oil
my cup overflows….

Surely goodness and mercy
shall follow me
all the days of my life….
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

The story was about a cocktail party conversation with a bunch of seminarians and the boyfriend of one of them: a real shepherd. A seminarian at the party asked…..is it true, the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep? Nope, a dead shepherd don’t do anybody any good…. If you couldn’t tell by the reading and all the hymns based on Psalm 23, this is good shepherd Sunday….usually an extended metaphor on the shepherd, Jesus about whom there are so many childhood bible and church pictures that the life has been beaten out of the metaphor, especially for us, for whom the agrarian context is distant and quaint) But in the life of Jesus and his friends—the 23rd Psalm was a prayer, a song of the heart that anchored his own life, despite circumstances, in a sense of the abiding presence of God. This morning, I invite us into a similar way of praying: to allow this so familiar psalm to seep into the cracks and crevices of our daily lives to see what wisdom lingers there, to connect where we live and move with the sometimes-distant benevolence of God.

We will consider four moments in the psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd….I shall not want.

What does it mean to live a life grounded in this belief: “I Have Enough.”
So much of our lives is focused around anxiety: rooted in what we lack.
Possessions, yes, resources; but more, the anxiety that we, ourselves, are not enough, not sufficient, severely lacking in the face of some imagined perfection or adequacy. So often our self perception focuses on our inadequacy instead of our sufficiency, our gift from God. What wakes us up in the night, I suspect, is not the challenges that face us, but the deep and haunting notion that, in the face of those challenges, we do not have enough, we ourselves will not be enough.

I can’t do this…because I lack _____________.

The psalm, after enumerating the many places and gifts God gives (green pastures, still waters, rest and restoration) invites us to imagine a life grounded in trust and abundance, rather than in anxiety. The word for “right” in the phrase, he leads me in right paths is tsedeq, from which the mystical tradition in Judaism derives the name for those who are wise: Tsaddek. From the same root comes the word for offerings: tsaddakah. The way of wisdom breathes into a sense that we have enough, are enough: living in “enough,” we offer ourselves with generosity and grace.

How might our lives be more rooted in a sense of trust, sufficiency, confidence.? That God has made us, and made us adequate? How might the way we inhabit our workplaces, schools, homes and neighborhoods be more of an offering, a blessing, if we lived in the conviction: The Lord is my shepherd, I have enough.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil….

Some of you may recall a story I once told about a walk in the valley where our cabin is in the mountains of Colorado, an intentional walk in the darkness, with my daughter, so that we could see the stars…. A walk that began in wonder and appreciation, and ended, for no reason other than an overactive imagination and the sound of a cow breathing near us in the field, in a headlong, reckless rush back to the safety of light and warmth. We don’t walk through the valleys of our shadows, we run headlong. When threat looms….when grief hovers…when death is near or just past…when we are in any place of darkness, sorrow, fear, or distress, we do not linger there, but will do anything, anything, to preserve our denial and restore our souls—even at the cost of our souls.

The study of holocaust survivors: interviews that rewarded happy endings.

The psalm invites us to pay attention to the places in our lives that are shadowed.
The psalmist invites us not to fear evil in our lives, nor in the lives of others, but to walk alongside them, to companion them with tenderness, patience, slowness.

To walk through the valley of shadows, not to run. To meander, to pause, to step carefully, not carelessly, over the rocks and past the pits and pitfalls. To pay attention to those places that come to all of us, many times, with gentleness, and not with fear. Rainer Maria Rilke:

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots embrace:

A dream once lost
among the sorrows and songs.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies…you anoint my head with oil.

There has always been for me, in imagining this scene from the psalm, a tiny sense of smugness. Who doesn’t want one’s enemies to watch us with hunger and longing, being feted, rewarded, treated with lavish respect and joy?

Two stories: the presbytery meeting here at RPC, when, in the midst of being dis-enfranchised, the people of this church prepared a table, literally in the presence of their “enemies,” those who would shut them out and shut them down. From where do we find the strength, courage, and freedom to prepare such a table?

Some time ago, I heard from an old Miami veteran of the civil rights movement a story from right downtown in Overtown. A man of color, Mr. Clayton Moore, went into a diner with his white friend, and they sat down at the counter. With a face twisted in hate and disgust, the short order cook and waiter sneered: we don’t serve niggers here. The room tensed, fell silent. Danger was there, in the presence of enemies. Not missing a beat, Mr. Moore said pleasantly, That’s all right, then. I don’t want n–, I just want ham and eggs. The cook froze, and in the silence of that standoff a holy space opened up: his lips twitched, and he laughed. Ok, then, ham and eggs.
In the presence of enemies, God makes a way for us to sit down together, to feast.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

These days, when I read the words, shall follow me…., the first image that comes to me is of pursuit. I recall moments in which I have found myself on a dark road at night, and fear caused me to believe that the sounds behind me, the shadows of men and the sounds of footfalls, were not goodness and mercy following, but rather, danger in pursuit. What pursues us in the night? What do we leave in our wake?
For more than two months now, we have been following the story of Trayvon Martin and the neighborhood watchman, Zimmerman, who shot and killed him after following him down some dark valley we can scarcely imagine. There was no goodness there, no mercy for either man in the end. Families have been shattered by whatever it was that followed Zimmerman and haunted his heart: by that, and by how, in turn, he followed Travyon Martin. Communities beyond Miami and Sanford have been, by this event, shaken and shattered—old wounds of racism we had hoped were healed, ripped open and exposed in their raw, painful ugliness.

What follows you? What do you leave in your wake? When you leave a meeting, a room, a visit with family, a chance encounter in the grocery store, the gas station, the shop—what is left in your wake? Were you on the phone as you pushed your groceries down the counter, so that the clerk who checked you out found in your wake not courtesy or a moment of community, but instead, indifference and invisibility? Did your impatient honking or angry gesturing at an intersection shock someone into better driving, or add a touch of violence to a day that may already have been shadowed by trouble?

How does our orientation to these words—whether we live a life pursued by threat, or a life in which we imagine ourselves leaving a wake of goodness and mercy behind us, shape our reality, and the experience of those around us?

Practicing a life shaped by goodness and mercy, we will find ourselves, paradoxically, followed less and less by fear…and regardless of circumstances,
the gracious rooms of the house of the Lord will rise around us, providing shelter and welcome—all our life long.

Read the original article at MiamiHerald.com | Copyright ©2012 The Miami Herald

Sometimes, people hide inside the Bible.

That is, they use the Christian holy book as authority and excuse for biases that have nothing to do with God. They did this when women sought to vote and when African Americans sought freedom.

They are doing it now, as gay men and lesbians seek the right to be married.

The latest battleground in that fight is North Carolina, where voters go to the polls Tuesday to render a verdict on Amendment One, which would add to the state constitution the following stipulation: “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”

Mind you, the Tarheel State already has a law on the books banning same-sex marriage. The would-be constitutional amendment is meant to double down on exclusion. And if you read the language carefully, you saw what many observers have seen — that it can also be interpreted as denying legal recognition to unmarried heterosexuals.

Not that this holds any sway with those who hide inside the Bible. “God has defined marriage,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins in a Sunday sermon quoted in the Charlotte Observer. “It is not up to us to redefine it.” In a letter to the editor, an Observer reader put it thusly: “You either believe [the Bible] or not.”

One wishes those people could spend a little quality time with Matthew Vines.

Vines is a Christian, a 22-year-old Harvard undergrad raised in a conservative evangelical church in Kansas. He is also gay and says he grew up being taught that the Bible condemns his sexual orientation. He took two years off from school to research and study whether or not that assertion is true.

The result is The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality. It’s a video — you can find it online with a simple Google search — of a speech he gave in March at a church in Wichita that has become a minor sensation. Small wonder. Vines’ speech is a masterwork of scriptural exegesis and a marvel of patient logic, slicing and dicing with surgical precision the claim that homophobia is God ordained. So effective is the video that after viewing it, Sandra Delemares a Christian blogger from the United Kingdom who had, for years, spoken in staunch opposition to same sex marriage, wrote that it “revolutionised” her thinking.

Vines points out, for instance, that the frequently quoted condemnation (homosexuality is an “abomination”) from the Old Testament lawbook of Leviticus has no application to Christians, who are bound by the teachings of the New Testament. He explains that St. Paul’s admonitions about the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” stem from modern mis-translations of ancient Greek terminology.

It is fascinating stuff, and there is not nearly enough space here to do it justice, but the salient point is this: Matthew Vines is not some godless heathen lobbing bombs at Christianity from outside its walls. No, he lives inside Christianity’s walls, still holds the faith in which he was raised. So this is not an outsider’s attack. It is an insider’s plea.

One hopes that plea is heeded. Vines’ speech is long — a little over an hour — but well worth the time, particularly for those seeking to reconcile first-century faith with 21st-century social concerns..

Many in North Carolina — many around the country — are swimming against the tide of human freedom and blaming God for it. Again, this is not a new thing. We saw it back when God was for segregation and against women’s suffrage.

How convenient it must be to lay your own narrowness and smallness off on God, to accept no responsibility for the niggardly nature of your own soul. Vines’ video is a welcome, overdue and eloquent rebuke of the moral and intellectual laziness of throwing rocks, then hiding inside Scripture. It is a reminder, too.

You don’t go to the Bible to hide. You go there to seek.

Read the original article at MiamiHerald.com | Copyright ©2012 The Miami Herald

If you think you may have an interest in such a small group, please let me know. Spiritual direction, also known as spiritual companionship, is both an ancient and a contemporary practice, rooted in the understanding that exploring one’s spiritual life may be undertaken as an intentional practice—not just prayer, or church participation—but a contemplative work developed in partnership with one who has been trained in helping others to discern and notice the presence of the divine in their daily lives. I became interested in this kind of experiential training (which was not offered when I was in seminary!) because it seemed to me that these practices are more useful than ever, as we work to be a spiritual community equipping its members to “reflect the path of Christ” not just in their religious lives, but, most importantly, in your lives in the world of work, school, family, culture, and community.

It is easy to see how crisis or catastrophe challenges one’s sense of the presence of the divine in daily life; more and more, I think, the hardships of daily life are in similar ways challenging and attenuating our ability to sense the holy and carry it with us as we work and live. The time immersing myself in this discipline of spiritual companionship has enlightened my work as a pastor, and deepened my ability to perceive the presence of the holy in hard times.

I have noticed and been deeply grateful for this richness of experience as I worked my way, pastorally, through the liturgical and spiritual terrain of Holy Week and Easter this year, so soon after the death of my mother. As many of you already have experienced in your own lives, the death of a parent challenges and changes our experience of our faith and of our ordinary life perspectives. Working through the stories of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection were challenging for me this year: trying to engage the practices I was taught in my Spiritual direction work, I was especially appreciative of the witness of Mark’s gospel this year: how the proclamation of resurrection may not be loud, joyful and certain in all times. The women of Mark saw their experience begin first in a recognition of emptiness; second in a willingness to watch and pay attention, and finally, in embracing a sense of awe at the mystery of the holy—so much that we cannot perceive nor understand. Resurrection joy came to them so slowly—as they left the emptiness of the tomb behind, left the old ways in the past, and went forward (“to Galilee”) to seek the presence of the Risen Christ. It has been, as a friend of mine observed, a Mark kind of Easter.

Like Mark, I am grateful for the witness of patience, steady love and companionship I have received from all of you during this season of loss. As ever, I see the risen Christ most clearly when I seek him in the community of the faithful here at Riviera. In our baptisms, adoptions, new member gatherings, confirmation classes, worship and play together, as well as in our times of standing with each other in challenge or loss. The ancient tradition of the Church says that Easter is such an important festival for our re-creation as God’s people that, like the first week of Creation, it requires a full “week” of Sundays for us to begin to live into the Easter experience. So we have seven weeks of Easter—each Sunday, a day in the week of God’s new creation, as we ponder, play, and pray our way into resurrection life. May this season of Easter—all seven weeks of it!—be a time for you each, as well, of appreciating the open and even empty places in your own lives, and gratefully making way for experiences of awe, a pondering of life’s mysteries, and the tentative growth of the newness of life of resurrection.

–Laurie