Put your sword away

He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it."

I always thought Peter tended to get a bit unfairly characterized as the impulsive man with a big mouth and no follow-through.  Comparatively, at any rate, he certainly seems to show a lot more devotion than the other disciples: a lot of zeal with some real evidence of love.  I mean, let’s think of the things he tends to be criticized for:

• Jesus is walking on the water in a storm.  When Peter realizes that it is him, he asks if he can join him on the water, and then he proceeds to walk out of the boat in the middle of a raging storm in order to be near him.  Apparently he got a little scared, but I mean, everyone else was still on the boat.
• He and James and John see Christ transfigured standing between Moses and Elijah.  Peter is the one who speaks up and wants to set up a place of worship for the Messiah and those who have prepared the way.
• He drew his sword to defend Jesus in the garden.  Apparently he should have known that Jesus wanted to get arrested.  In any case, his later denial is more complicated than a mere fear of death; he was willing to die defending Jesus right then and there.
• Which brings us to his most infamous shortcoming: he denied Christ... when all the other disciples other than John had fled and hid.  Peter and John risked their lives to follow Jesus all the way to the High Priest’s courtyard.  John apparently had connections with the High Priest, so it was Peter who was most vulnerable in that moment, and he had willingly placed himself in that situation. 

Whatever faults Peter had, it didn’t seem to be a lack of follow-through, and it hardly seems to be fear.  At the Last Supper Peter declared that he was willing to lay down his life for Jesus, and in the Garden of Gethsemane he showed himself willing to put his money where his mouth was.  Peter showed no hesitation dying for the Messiah.

No, where Peter failed in the gospel reading from this morning, quoted at the top of this page, was not a fear of dying for the Messiah, but of suffering beside him.  Peter was all too willing to die in order to establish the reign of the triumphant King of the Jews; he was not prepared, no matter how many times Jesus foretold it, for the Messiah to be the one doing the dying.  The only way to follow a dying Messiah is to suffer shame and humiliation beside him, to give ones back to those who beat him, ones cheeks to those who plucked his beard, not shielding ones face from buffets and spitting.  It is not to die for him; it is to die with him.

Peter’s difficulty is still ours today.  The Messiah did indeed come, but the fact that he is not the kind of Messiah we feel that we so desperately need has not become any easier.  We are still as confused as we ever were.  We are still waiting even after his resurrection.  And he is still exhorting us to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow him into his suffering and our own.

Despite herself

My elegant grandmother, a relic of an age gone by with the Old South dripping from her accent and syntax, never saw my sister’s fiancé. 

“Now Sweetie Pie,” she had crooned to me across the breakfast table when I was about twelve, “what would you think if your brother came home one day and said, ‘Hey look y’all, I got married!’ and had a colored girl on his arm?”

The scenario confused my tender, adolescent brain, and after staring stupidly at her regal poise that awaited my response, I stammered the only reply I could articulate for this outlandish hypothetical.  “Well...” I hesitated, “I’d be really upset that he didn’t invite us to the wedding.”

There was a delay in Gramma’s chortle before she finally seemed to determine that I was joking.  “I mean, Doll Baby,” she winked good-naturedly, “what would you do if your brother wanted to marry a colored girl?”

I still blinked my innocent confusion, not feeling like I had been given enough data to determine a response.  “Do you mean,” I asked again, “without us getting to know her first?”

Finally Gramma seemed to determine the conversation would go more smoothly if she simply told me what she wanted to say.  “No, Baby Girl, I am just trying to point out that it is wrong for the races to mix.  There are many lovely colored people out there, and they should marry each other and have other lovely colored babies.  If the races mix, pretty soon there won’t be anymore races and we’ll all be a bunch of mongrels.  You wouldn’t want your brother to have a bunch of mongrel babies, would you?”

Dumbfounded, I had honestly not realized this was still a thing.

But my grandmother never saw my sister’s fiancé.  Oh, she met him several times in the past year before she died; she laid her frail, dignified hand in his caramel fingers, she interrogated him with regard to his life goals across the breakfast table, she offered him her litany of proverbs interspersed with her ever-changing anecdotes form her own life.  Essentially blind for the past six years, she could drill her sharp blue eyes into his sepia face without ever suspecting the nice young man to whom she spoke was one of the mongrels she had feared we might all become. 

Gramma’s blindness tortured the last years of her life before she died this summer, and in no way do I suggest that it was a good thing or that she deserved it.  Nevertheless, there was a bit of a poetic justice to the fact that her agonizing debility gave her access to a relationship that would have been barred otherwise.  Because she couldn’t see his face, Gramma could recognize him to be a nice young man for her granddaughter to marry.

I like to think that my perception of the world will become clearer as I age.  But until my heart is healed of its hardness, it is good to know that my debilitations can break down the barriers I have put around it.  I welcome the healing, even when it must come through ailment.  May we all find healing despite ourselves.

Mysteriously joyful

Christian devotional practices from the Middle Ages have included meditations of the “mysteries” around the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. The specific scenes selected for emphasis are called the “Joyful Mysteries,” “Sorrowful Mysteries,” and “Glorious Mysteries,” respectively, with five in each set.

Yet at the close of the Christmas season, I was suddenly taken aback at the name of the mysteries of this season—the "Joyful Mysteries." Perhaps we who read the story of Christ’s birth retrospectively in the light of his later death and resurrection can call these events “joyful,” but to the people involved, to Mary in particular, joy does not seem the most obvious common thread.

• The Annunciation: An angel greets a young teenager and announces to her that she will bear a son. The betrothed virgin is troubled, as any mother with an unwanted pregnancy can imagine, but humbly submits to what she knows will be a source of shame. A mystery, yes, but joyful?
• The Visitation: The pregnant girl travels eighty miles to visit her pregnant cousin. When she arrives, the baby in the elderly woman’s womb tips his mother off, and the secret is out of the bag. I wonder about Mary’s fear in front of her cousin. Her Magnificat may have expressed relief as much as joy.
• The Nativity: The long journey to Bethlehem climaxes when Mary goes into labor in the streets. There is no place to stay, and so the couple takes refuge in a barn, and Mary suffers the pains of childbirth on dirty straw among animals. Joy could only have come on the heels of fear and pain.
• The Presentation: The couple presents the poor-man’s sacrifice at the temple, and Mary hears Jesus’ screams as he is circumcised. An old man and woman recognize the child as the awaited Messiah, and Simeon gives a chilling prophesy that “This Child is destined to be the downfall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed.” Then he turns to Mary and foretells that a sword will pierce her soul as well.
• The Finding of Jesus in the Temple: Mary and Joseph only discover they have left the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem after traveling for a day, and their panicked return must have been plagued by anxiety and grief. When they find him on the third day, the boy chides them for their fear and identifies his higher priorities.

I don’t know if I’m treading dangerous ground to say I don’t imagine these events being times of great joy for the Holy Family as they unfolded. Yet the Church calls them joyful: joyful for humanity, certainly, and thus by extension to the actors involved, however fearful and humiliating and painful they might have been at the time. Perhaps that is part of what is so mysterious about them.

I once wrote a (slightly controversial) post about God rewriting his own story in Hebrews 11, declaring against our available data that various men and women were heroes of a faith that they often did not demonstrate possessing. Perhaps the Church has done that here as well, pointing to this awkward union of God and humanity and declaring it “joyful.” The pain and fear of our human experience is not nullified by the Incarnation; it is heightened, and then redefined.

Only with a God who can enter a human womb can joy enter our human pain. As we close the Christmas season, that is still as much a mystery to me as it ever was.

Tale of Two Grandmothers

My two grandmothers could not be less alike. There is the short, nearly-deaf, one-armed Polish woman who hardly says a word and is characterized by extreme frugality; there is the tall, nearly-blind, stylish, Southern belle who never stops talking and is characterized by finicky taste. Somehow, I am baffled to realize, I am made up of pieces of both these women.

One night last week as both grandmothers were visiting for Christmas, after the Southern Belle had pulled herself feebly up the stairs for bed, the Polish woman sighed and shuffled her way to me, cradling her stub of a left arm.

“That is one woman I feel so sorry for,” she projected into my ear, unaware of how loud her voice was to healthy ears.

“What’s that, Gramma?” I shouted loud enough for her to hear, startled a bit to hear her speaking at all, and startled that it was pity she was communicating.

“Your grandmother,” she explained. “I can’t imagine losing my eyesight. What would you do with yourself if you couldn’t see?”

And while I agreed with the sentiment entirely, I was surprised by it. After all, Gramma has seen her fair share of hardship, between starting school in America without knowing any English at all, growing up during the Great Depression, losing an arm in a factory accident and a baby a couple months afterwards, giving up family members to World War II, raising nine children with one arm, and surviving a husband who flew into a rage when drunk. All the while, I’ve never heard a complaint, and I almost developed an assumption that her stout, silent 4-foot-10 frame didn’t even identify suffering anymore.

Yet as both my grandmothers shuffle their way into their 90s treasuring whatever faculties their weakened bodies have maintained, none of the differences in their background seemed to matter. None of the Southern Belle’s good looks or social graces that earned her four husbands mattered, none of her descriptions of wealth and yachts, none of her stories of befriending Winston Churchill at a horserace in England. She can hardly see, and that is enough to elicit the sympathy of a woman who has never had anything she deemed worthy of bragging about.

And as the days of their visit progressed, the Southern Belle matched the Pole’s pity with extreme admiration. She raved about the little woman’s “accomplishments” (though she never identified what any of them were) as if she were Winston Churchill himself. For the feeble blind woman, I suppose, money and social graces had suddenly become less flashy.

Her blind eyes saw the strength in the little woman’s silence, just as the other woman’s deaf ears heard the pain in the tall woman’s elegies. Sometimes we need to lose our eyes and our ears a little to find them.

Caoineadh Phádraig Shéamais

The story is told of a father and son in a small village outside of Galway who were crossing a channel late at night to get barley to make poitín, Irish moonshine. When they loaded the small boat and prepared to return home, a storm started to gather and they decided that the boat, laden with the barley, would not make it to the other side with both passengers. The father told the son to cross in the boat and walked several miles alone to a place he could walk across. When he reached the place the boat would have landed, he saw neither son or boat. The next day they found the shattered pieces of the boat and the dead body of his son.

For the next week as his wife and daughter sang keenings over the body of the young man, the father was entirely silent, eating nothing and talking to no one. His friends and family worried that he would follow his son to the grave in sorrow, but they could do nothing to ease his pain. Then one day as the daughter was walking by the river, she heard her father singing this song:

An chéad Mháirt de fhomhar ba bhrónach turseach mo scéal.
Lámh thapa a bhí cróga ag gabháil romham ar leaba na n-éag.
Ar charraig na nDeor is dó gur chaill mé mo radharc
Is go dté mé faoi fhód is ní thógfad m’aigne i do dhéidh.

Tá do mháthair is Niall faoi chian ‘s is fada leo an lá.
D’fhág tú osna ina gcliabh nach leigheasann dochtúir nó lia.
Ar sholáthair mé riamh is bíodh sé ‘lig cruinn i mo láimh,
go dtabharfainn é uaim ach fuascledh—Paidí bheith slán.

The first Tuesday of September sad and sorrowful was my plight:
The brave able hand going before me to the bed of death
On the Rock of Tears I lost my sight.
Till I go to my grave I’ll not lift my spirit after you.

Your mother and Niall are sorrowing and the day is long for them.
You left them a heavy heart that no doctor or physician can cure.
All that I ever earned, were it all gathered in my hand,
I would give it in ransom—that Paddy be safe.*

Never having heard her father sing before, the girl worried that his grief was driving him further from his sanity. She went to a friend of his and related the tale.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” the old man assured the girl. “If he’s singing, he’ll get better.” The father’s song, painful and agonizing though it might have been, was a sign of life in him, evidence of healing.

“When I heard that story,” the Irishman told me, “the pain of the father was so fresh in the words that I assumed it was a recent incident. I asked the storyteller if he had known Pádraig Shéamais or his father. The man shook his head, and I later learned that the incident had happened in 1811.”



*Text and translation by Breandán Ó Madagáin, author of Caointe agus Seancheolta Eile: Keening and other Old Irish Musics

Rejecting the Rules

During my first semester of college, I attended a discussion between an Evangelical campus minister and an agnostic Religion professor (who is now a Unitarian pastor). After answering the question of what drew him toward the person of Christ, the professor was asked to explain what drew him away from Christ. A mere two months after 9/11, the issue of the suffering of the innocent came immediately to his mind.

“I understand all your arguments about free will and sin,” he interjected when dozens of hands shot up around the room to respond with their attempts to justify the ways of evil to man. “I understand that if the rules demand an option of evil to prevent us from being puppets, then a good God would give us the option, and that the choice of evil hurts all of creation, even the innocent. I understand retributive justice and atonement theology and eschatological justice at the world’s end. If those are the rules, then I guess that’s just the way it is.”

He paused, and then said something that still haunts me ten years later. “But... God made the rules. If something seems terrible, we have to accept it as the way the world works, but God made the way the world works. I know you’re going to tell me it wasn’t the way he intended it to be and explain a comprehensive system to understand evil, and I couldn’t necessarily tell you a different way it could have been. But I imagine that God could have. I don’t actually reject God; I just reject those rules, and I suppose if you equate them with God then it would look to you that I am rejecting him.”

Though I wouldn’t recognize it until years later, there was something of Job’s challenge to God in his words, and something of his friends’ rationalization of suffering in our theological responses. It was fitting that it came from someone on the outside, as it were, just as Job himself was outside the people of Israel. In any case, I started to wonder on that November evening if the professor’s demands for God’s goodness were more in keeping of faith than our canned acquittals were.

I bumped into that old professor this week in cyberspace. I don’t have the answer to those questions of ten years ago, but I am grateful for the way he helped me distinguish between my faith in Christ and a closed system of rationalizations that looks cold from the outside.

By this we know love

Late one night last month, a few days after the earthquake in Japan, my phone rang. It was my dear friend Benedict, the formerly homeless man I met in college. My heart leapt a bit, worried that a late-night phone call might forebode an emergency, and Lord-knows he’s had more than his share of those.

“Hello there!” I answered with masked cheerfulness, bracing myself for the worse.

“Hi,” his voice on the other end was serious, his gravity unburdened with pleasantries. “Em...” he struggled, and couldn’t continue.

“What is it, Benedict?” I asked, my voice sinking to match his somber tone.

“I was just watching the news tonight,” he explained, “and I saw what’s happening, and I remembered...” he struggled again... “what country was it where your family moved?”

A rush of relief flooded me. “Oh, Benedict,” I assured him, “it wasn’t Japan. They’re far inland in Asia, nowhere near Japan. Don’t worry, they’re quite safe.”

His voice on the other end let out an immediate gust of relief. “Ahhhhhhhhh! Okay, that’s what I needed to hear. I just couldn’t remember, and I was so afraid. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight until I knew they were safe.”

And after we chatted for a few minutes about the whereabouts of my Asia-residing siblings and nephews, family members whom he has met only a handful of times in the past seven years of our friendship, I hung up the phone feeling quite humbled. In his love for me, Benedict has adopted the trials of my family as his own, despite his host of ever-gnawing trials.

Indeed, John tells us, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, as we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” And though the opportunity to die a hero’s death does not present itself to many of us, I suppose that just as Christ showed us love by entering into our sufferings, we also ought to enter into the sufferings of others. Benedict at least has been willing to enter into the potential sufferings of my family as if they were his own.

That, coming from a man who knows what it is to suffer, was one of the most startling expressions of love I have heard in a while.

Delightful misery

“Why Padraic, how are you now?” the cheerful Irishman asked as we navigated the isles at Tesco on our work-day at the priory.

“Terrible, terrible,” the priest answered brightly as if he had won the lottery, “but nobody cares now, do they? And how are you?”

“Truthfully about the same, but isn’t that always the case?” came the chipper, polite answer. “But you can’t complain about the weather we have today at any rate. What are you here for?”

“This young lady and myself are getting an apartment ready for some visitors tomorrow,” Fr. Padraic began, and the conversation never returned to their mutual miseries.

The Irish are without a doubt the most delightfully miserable people I have ever met. Their suffering is quite real and never forgotten, but that is somehow not enough to ruin an otherwise lovely day (or even to worsen a rainy one).

As I commented last year, the Irish wear suffering like a well-worn t-shirt. It is unmistakably present, but has become so well-worn over time that it could almost be considered comfortable. After all, there is always tea to greet the morning and beer to greet the night, and perhaps even a few cigarettes to get you from one to the other.

Of course, I don’t mean to minimize their pain and oppression over the centuries, to brush it aside and gloss over the raw evil of it. But they sort of do that for me.

God rested

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
-From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

Today we have been sitting with the death of Christ, the great, deep silence that will not be broken until tonight (not to get ahead of the story).

If I had posted on Thursday, I would have mentioned something about the New Testament reading in Hebrews 5 that says “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (a peculiar use of the word “heard,” I would say). I mentioned before that this seems to be Christ’s credentials as the Great High Priest. Rejoice, he tells us; we have as a mediator a man who similarly prayed seemingly unanswered prayers. What kind of a high priest is a man who begs God to let the cup pass from him but willingly drinks it anyway?

But he did drink it yesterday, and it is finished. Now, on the seventh day, God rests. At morning prayers we read from the previous chapter of Hebrews that “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.” Christ has offered his prayers to let the cup pass, he has drunk from it anyway, he declared his work finished, and today he rests. This is our high priest. This is the mediator of the new covenant. This is our model of suffering.

I read yesterday in a sermon of Melito of Sardis:

It is he who endured every kind of suffering in all those who foreshadowed him. In Abel he was slain, in Isaac bound, in Jacob exiled, in Joseph sold, in Moses exposed to die. He was sacrificed in the Passover Lamb, persecuted in David, dishonored in the prophets.

Now, it turns out, he is also prefigured (or postfigured) in everyone who has or will ever offer seemingly unanswered prayers, anyone who has ever tasted suffering he longed to avoid, anyone who has ever faced the silence of God.

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest.

Therefore let us keep the feast

When I was a kid, I found myself baffled by the idea of eating crackers and grape juice to remember the crucifixion. Really, I wanted to tell the adults, if remembering is the goal, then surely we could come up with better ways to remind ourselves. Even when I pondered the connection between the Jewish Passover customs and Christ’s death as our Passover Lamb, communion didn’t quite make sense. Why would we eat the things that remind us of Jesus? Isn’t that a bit disrespectful? (I was a bit of an odd, overly-pensive child, I’ll freely admit!)

Holy Week in Rome is a bit too heavy for me to sort into short and pithy posts, but I can at least say that with a Sacramental understanding of, well, of the Sacraments, there is nothing more beautiful than the idea of eating Jesus. Christ entered our world not just spiritually, but physically; Christ enters the sanctuary not just spiritually, but physically; Christ enters us not just spiritually, but physically. Just as he comes to heal our broken souls, he comes physically to nourish our needy bodies. Just as we receive the whole of Christ, he receives the whole of us, bodies and all.

Receiving the whole of Christ, of course, is not only wonderful; it is offensive (and until I saw true evil at work, I never realized how offensive its redemption can be). As I mentioned once before, it is not a mere matter of “trading our sorrows” for his joy. We enter with him into his suffering as Mary and John and the daughters of Jerusalem did on Good Friday. We embrace it willingly, as Christ who prayed “Lord if it be possible let this cup pass from me, but not my will but yours be done.” In a Catholic Good Friday service, we even embrace it physically as the congregation processes to the cross and kisses it.

It is because our sufferings are united with his (wholly, sacramentally, physically) that Christ can tell his followers who will mostly all be martyred one day, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Christ has prepared the way through suffering into resurrection...

...but I am getting ahead of the story. Tonight, suffering is not to be triumphed over; it is only to be embraced.

We Are Six

--------A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

Three separate dear friends of mine from three separate times past gave birth to three separate beautiful baby girls in the past week. Life is beautiful.

And today is the fourth birthday of another friend’s baby girl who died a few months before her third birthday after a short life beset with inexplicable seizures and a shrinking brain. And here in this strange intersection of life and death, I am reminded to continue praying for my two other dear friends who lost newborn sons this past fall, one because he had inexplicably failed to form a skull during the early months in the womb, and the other because he inexplicably failed to keep on breathing in the early days of his seemingly healthy life outside it.

I could insert some well-known maxim here, something along the lines of the familiar “Life is short” or Tennyson’s “O life as futile, then, as frail!” or Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle! / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.” These are true of our experience, certainly of the experiences of those three grieving mothers.

But I wonder if these maxims are so often repeated because our spirit so thoroughly rejects them. If they are so true of our experience, true as obvious statements like “The sun is bright” or “The grass is green,” then why do we have to keep reminding ourselves of the shortness of life? If Macbeth was right that life is a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, why would we be so disturbed when my friend is given a full two hours (or two days, or two years) with her child?

Perhaps “the deeper magic,” to use Lewis’ lovingly weathered phrase, is that life is not a candle that can be extinguished. Perhaps my three friends are still grieving because the have been torn away from children who still exist. Perhaps (and pardon me if I’m being too erudite, too Platonic, or too Catholic here, especially for such a sensitive issue) love and life are parts of the same thing, as if life is the matter and love is the substance (or vice-versa?); and as the love exists no less in the grieving mother than in the celebrating one, perhaps we are assured that the life exists as strongly.

Perhaps I do not merely believe that the Church is a single body made up of the apostles and saints and my ancestors and my descendants because I learned it in a book or a sermon or a creed; perhaps my soul has always known it. As Christendom—Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike—affirm together that the soul is eternal and does not die when the body stops breathing, perhaps I do not believe it because I am brainwashed but because it is true. Whether we believe that we are anticipating a future reunion with our loved ones or that we can even speak to them now, we believe that we are mutually connected to a living unit of humanity that includes the not-yet-alive and the live and the even-more-alive.

Apart from that hope, I do not know how people can endure the severity of love. And to each of those six loving mothers out there, you are in my prayers.

"How many are you, then," said I,
"If they two are in heaven?"
Quick was the little Maid's reply,
"O Master! we are seven."

"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"

from “We Are Seven” by William Wordsworth

Bless me father for I have sinned

During my time in college, the American racial struggles that had always seemed truisms slowly and definitively began to change. As I shared laughter, tears, and bread with people of other races, racial violence was no longer merely wrong, a sin against humanity; it had become personal, a sin against my brothers.

One of those brothers grew closer to me during my sophomore year, and eventually my roommate pointed out that I saw more of Kyle in a given week than of her. Kyle and I had a tendency to find ourselves in the thick of conversations about theology, sociology, history, the church, and our purpose in the world, and when we had to pause the conversation for an inconvenience like class it was not unheard of for one of us to invite the other to join.

“Kyle,” I said one night as I kept him company on his midnight shift in the residence hall office, “you realize if we had lived two hundred years ago, we would never have been friends?”

Kyle nodded sadly. As a black man who spent significant portions of his week involved in a mostly-white campus organization, I suppose he was used to this fact that was somewhat jarring to nineteen-year-old me.

“What if I had enslaved you?” I asked him, something deeper than guilt stirring in my conscience. “Or even if I didn’t have slaves, what if I mistreated you when I saw you on the street, or didn’t even notice that you existed? I know there were plenty of abolitionists in the South and I like to think I would have been one, but there’s no way to know that about myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with slavery. Maybe I would have thought that was just the way the world worked. Maybe I would have enslaved you.”

It was deeper than guilt because I was struggling with sins that neither I nor my ancestors (at least half of whom were too busy starving to death on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time) had committed. I was struggling with the depravity that I knew was within me, waiting for opportune times to emerge. If those opportune times never came, the depravity would be just as present.

And rather than brush off my sins on the mere technicality that I hadn’t committed them or suggesting ways to ensure the monster inside me could never emerge, Kyle’s response shocked me, enough that I still remember it seven years later.

“Yeah,” the mused humbly, “I wonder about the same thing. If I had been given the chance to be a house slave, would I have taken it and looked down on my brothers sweating in the field?”

Momentarily, I was jarred as if Kyle had responded to my confession by changing the subject, ironically prefacing the subject-change by calling it “the same thing.” It was almost laughably comic: I had made a heart-felt confession that I might have oppressed him, and he echoed my confession by saying that, had he been oppressed, he might have accepted a lighter load. These were in no way congruous.

But slightly older than me and much more familiar with this kind of depravity that I was encountering as if it were foreign territory, Kyle had the grace to see the monsters living in his chest as the same monsters in the hypothetical oppressors. Rather than forgiving my depravity, he empathized with it.

He stumbled simply and casually upon a profound truth, like one who kicks a stone and finds oil pouring out of the ground. Not only did he manage to treat depravity as no less depraved for its being common, but he treated the common sin of humanity no less universal (and thus no more startling) for its being depraved.

Beyond that, I wonder if in his empathy he stumbled on the nature of Christ. While Christ may not have shared our depravity, he shared our frailty (perhaps different forms of the same thing, or at least near cousins?), and the author of Hebrews spends a lot of ink on the point that Christ is the Great High Priest because he sympathizes with our weakness, our temptations, our tears, and our unanswered prayers.

I wonder if Christ hears my confessions of frailty and depravity, actual or potential, and responds as Kyle had: “Yeah, I felt the same thing...”

Fingerprints of God

The week that thousands were dying in Haiti from a catastrophic earthquake, my dear friend Seamus in Ireland very nearly died from a weather-related freak accident. In an unusually harsh Irish winter, Seamus was riding into town with his parents when a tree, roots weakened by the severe frost, fell directly on their vehicle and destroyed it. “At the extremest end of statistical unlikelihood,” Seamus called the situation. His crouch-instinct saved his life; the tree crushed past the headrest in the back seat where he was sitting. In the end, Seamus and his parents emerged from the pulverized vehicle without a scratch. “I’ve cut myself worse shaving,” he told me.

Unbeknownst to the three hapless passengers, Seamus’ devout grandmother had awoken at 6am afraid for her son’s life, and spent the next hour praying for him. The tree fell at 6:45.

It’s a bizarre situation that seems to have the intervention of God written all over it, but as I’ve mulled over it in the past week it strikes me that I cannot isolate specific locations for his fingerprints. Does God knock trees down on people to demonstrate his power and protection (by far the most uncanny part of the whole story)? Does God take the initiative to wake old women in order to answer their prayers, as if he could do the former unprompted but required prompting for the latter? Does God simply manufacture the physics of the world such that the tree did not crush the family (reverse entropy yet again?), so that the climax of the story is the most explainable, and the most joyous miracle can be accepted by a Deist?

I do not know. Nor exactly did I know how to pinpoint God’s intervention when my college friend hit a patch of ice in the mountains and found herself upside-down in a freezing river trapped in her seatbelt. Nor when an enormous tree fell where my little brother was playing in our childhood, scratching his arm as it came down. Nor when a car hit my housemate on her bike, or me on foot. Nor can I make sense of it when there seems to be no intervention, and friends get shot or hit by cars or drown.

Perhaps we meet God like any other person, not like a scientific phenomenon that we can test and analyze. Just as I cannot objectively qualify the actions of a friend, determining which are fueled by love and which by self-interest, but can nevertheless assert over time that I know my friend, perhaps in time we can come to know our God who is loving and powerful as we become familiar with the way he runs his world.

I do not know how to qualify God’s actions; all I know is what they say about him. And they seem to say that he is a God near enough for me to love.

Why do you contend against him,
saying, “He will answer none of man’s words”?
For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.
Job 33:13-14

Holy Innocents

I spent yesterday evening with my sister-in-law, receiving somber updates about her cousin who flew into Haiti on Tuesday 20 minutes before the earthquake hit. Sobered by the details as he sleeps in cornfields with the orphan girls he went to serve with little food or water and the looming threat of rampant disease as bodies decay, I was in no mood to receive a call from my old KKK friend Russ this morning on my way home from a mass offered for the victims of the tragedy. I should not have answered the phone. While his editorial is not worth repeating, it somehow connected the brokenness of the shattered country to the brokenness of our sinful hearts, the decay of death in the ravaged country to the decay of bitterness in our ravaged spirits. I pray for Haiti. I pray for my cousin-in-law. I pray for Russ.

We seek the living here among the dead,
But may we find you.
Where we discover our decay instead
And cannot find you,
Then be at least the cold that slows disease
And slithers through the shelter of debris.

I heard that Herod made a careful search
And could not find you;
But in the blood of Innocents the Church
Still strains to find you.
Be never as elusive as before
And more tenacious than the shattered floor.

We asked you for a king, but found his fist—
Now may we find you—
For life, but found a Cross behind the mist—
There may we find you.
And to the slave-girl when the dust is clear
Unveil your presence that was always near.

Blood and Feathers

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

Emily Dickenson

Hope is not a thing with feathers, for
It does not sing or fly. Whoever told
You otherwise has never felt the cold
Despair that spreads it dragon wings to soar
Away. Hope does not fly away, O glory;
It is made of flesh and blood that fold
Around us like a Virgin's womb who's bold
To sing the Word without the tune, the story
That begins and ends in water and
The bloodbath. Any less is sentiment,
Mere air that cannot perch a soul or stand
Against the slings and arrows it is sent.
There may be Hope that flesh and blood can wear,
But disembodied hope is but Despair.

Its Damp but where ok

Friday morning my friends in Cork woke at 2am to the sound of running water, and went downstairs to find water pouring through their floor. Two weeks of record-breaking rain had finally overwhelmed the dam upstream, and officials were forced to let out water to avoid a bigger catastrophe if it were to burst. Cork, lying on an island between two channels of the River Lee, had become part of the river. By the morning, the water had reached the top of the kitchen table where I had sat every day over the summer.

People lost businesses. The art museum lost the works that were stored in its basement. Several houses may be irrevocably damaged. The city has been essentially shut down. Who knows what the costs of repair will be.

Immediately upon hearing the news, I wrote to friends in various corners of the devastated city to let them know of my prayers, coveting the scarce pieces of news I could acquire from their facebook information and my own internet searches.

This morning I heard from Finbar, a native Corkonian whose blue-collar upbringing, shady history, warm hospitality, and simple approach to life (not to mention his nearly incomprehensible accent) set him apart as pure Cork, through and through. He responded to my concern with a short note that, both in its brevity and its message (not to mention its diction), well-depict what seems to me to be the Irish approach to suffering:

“Thanks for the prayers but don't worry where fine out. Its Damp but where ok.”

It’s damp.

How Irish. How delightfully Irish.

Bitterness unbridled

We only see you in this world of mud
When both your hands are stained with our own blood.

“Dear Lord,” I remember one of the leaders in my church praying after a local high school shooting back in 2006, “we cannot imagine what would make a child do a thing like this...”

...only I could. High school is brutal, and I remember just what it felt like to be rejected by the savage in-crowd... and I was only a little bit nerdy. I can’t imagine what being a little more outcast would have done to my little teenage soul.

I am a part of a generation that grew up with tragedies, I suppose: the Columbine shooting happened at the end of my sophomore year of high school, the Twin Towers fell three weeks into my college career, and the Virginia Tech massacre happened right as I prepared to begin graduate school. And whenever I hear about another story of unbridled bitterness, I can only shudder and think, “There but for the Grace of God go I...”

So when I bumped into an article yesterday about the execution of the DC sniper from seven years ago, back when I had been a rootless college sophomore whose family lived overseas and who was constantly driving to DC to spend time with my cousin, I could not help but be grieved. I remembered the terror in DC on those mornings when I was visiting my cousin; I remembered the frustration of the African American community back home when the man was caught; I remembered the stories of my housemates who would visit the families of people on death row in the ensuing years.

I don’t mean to poke at controversial political issues, but when I read an article like this I can’t help but be grieved for all parties: for the innocent people who were killed, for their families who lost loved ones with no reasons or a chance to say goodbye, for the man’s ex-wives and children who years ago had lost the man who died yesterday, for the man himself who died without having seen his four children in his seven years in prison. The story seems laced with bitterness from start to finish, bitterness that indeed rots the soul but for the forgiveness of Christ.

Come now, Lord Jesus. Come into those high schools. Come into those broken families. Come into those prison cells. Come into our bitter hearts. Clean the bitterness from us, before we rot completely.

God have mercy on the soul of John Allen Muhammad. God have mercy on the souls still grieving. God have mercy on mine.

Once again...

Another dear friend of mine lost a baby this week: a seemingly healthy five-day-old little boy whom she put down for a nap only to watch him stop breathing.

There is a name for this syndrome (as it is called): Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. From what I can tell, that is just a fancy way of trying to define the unknown, to diagnose undiagonosability. When life slips through our fingers like sand, we cry out to doctors for reasons, and receive mere descriptions. They could have just as easily named it Frailty; they could have just as easily named it The Fall.

Once again, I find myself grieving for the little momentary miracle that shocks us like a lightning stroke and is gone. Once again I find myself amazed at the human capacity for love, that the human soul can make room for love so quickly, that love can leave a hole so large after so short a life. Once again, I find myself longing for the Resurrection, and find the little seed of love that the little boy’s life creates within us being the germ of hope, the deposit in our souls to remind us that life is not a flame that can be extinguished. But the germ is a small one.

And once again, I find myself pontificating, trying to distract myself with philosophical musings to avoid the only response that makes any sense: grief.

On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.

On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;

he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove the disgrace of his people
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.

In that day they will say,
"Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation."

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.


Photo taken by Franklin Golden. Franklin is a volunteer with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a non-profit foundation that provides professional maternity and birth photos to parents who are losing a child.

They shall not enter my rest

Moses said to the LORD, "Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth, that you should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing child,' to the land that you swore to give their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they weep before me and say, 'Give us meat, that we may eat.' I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me. If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness."

“The story of Moses always breaks my heart,” I remember explaining to a friend across the table at a coffee shop. “He clearly had never wanted to lead the people in the first place, but had led them anyway when God called him. He had a miserable time with it. The people were constantly wanting to stone him, and their stubbornness added another 40 years to the journey. During that time God decides he’s going to wipe out the people, and it is Moses who wrestles with him and convinces him not to wipe them out. And after all that, at some point, God tells Moses to speak to a rock and he hits it instead, and then God won’t let him into the Promised Land. Seems like God’s pretty mean.”

“No,” my friend struggled, seemingly unsure of how he knew this, “God’s not mean. Something else is going on there.”

“Seems pretty mean to me,” I persisted. “And I’m no Moses... if this is what a man like Moses can expect after 80 years of serving God, what do we have to look forward to?”

My friend looked at me sadly, unsure of how to speak words of Grace into the world as I saw it.

“I mean,” I continued when he had nothing to add, “he keeps leading the ‘stiff-necked’ people after God tells him he won’t get to enter the Promised Land, and then sits on a mountain at the edge of Canaan begging God to change his mind. But God had some point he needed to make about Moses not showing his name as holy before the people or some ambiguous thing like that. For whatever reason, that was worth more to God than letting Moses enter the Promised Land.”

I concluded strongly, as if I dared him to suggest redemption in a story like that.

“Em,” my friend finally interjected, “Moses did enter the Promised Land.”

I looked stupidly at him, wondering which Bible he had read.

“He did,” he insisted. “At the Transfiguration. Jesus was there with Moses and Elijah. Moses was there.”

I sat there dumbfounded. Truth be told, I was halfway scandalized. My friend was right. My most bleak, grim, hated Bible story had suddenly been tainted with Grace, and my standard extreme-situation trump card had been trumped. While Moses had been cheated out of the Promised Land because of some ambiguous punishment, the Punishment had been cheated out of Moses when Christ came.

And I don’t know why that conversation is coming back to me this week, except that I am being reminded that as much as pain is deeper than the airy, ephemeral sentiments that Christians often confuse with hope, Grace is deeper than the pain.

The Miracle

“Well, I’m fading,” I interjected into a pause in the conversation, standing up and making my way across the room to my bereaved friend. It had been over six hours since I had arrived, hours that encompassed a funeral, a potluck, and a walk through the nearby university gardens, and were now dwindling to sitting around her living room with the few family members and friends who were still around.

My friend stood up smiling and met my embrace warmly. “Thanks for coming out,” she said, and then added in a whisper on my shoulder, “Thank you for loving our little boy.”

I realized two things in that moment: I realized that my friend had been comforted in my sharing of love for her son, and I realized that she was right... I did love him. Somehow, I had come to love a boy I would never see or touch.

In some ways, certainly, love is contagious. How could you not love the little guy after watching his parents love him so deeply since their giddy announcement in January, after hearing the weekly updates announcing that their baby was the size of a pea or had developed fingers, after seeing their commitment to love him continue past the tragic day in May when they learned he would not live, after watching slideshows of beautiful photos taken by a non-profit called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep that celebrated the family in the pregnancy and the two hours in the delivery room? The family had been a heartrending monument to love, and no one at the funeral was immune to it.

But while love may in some ways be a gift that we cannot produce ourselves (like faith), I wonder if prayer is an active agent in fertilizing soil that nurtures it. I love that little 3-pound-5-ounce baby I never met because his parents’ love entered into my heart that had been praying for him for three months and especially in the hour of his death. I once mused that prayer is often more a means of opening our own eyes than of catching God’s; now I wonder if it also opens our hearts. Prayer may be as much about our own sanctification as it is the needs of others.

Sometimes the call to love one another and to forgive our enemies feels as much beyond my control as the task of healing my friend’s son would have been. But at least we can pray nevertheless—for our friends, for the poor, for our enemies—and in the absence of the latter miracle, God may surprise us with the former. While the miracle for my friends’ son was not the ex nihilo creation of the bones and organs he was lacking, maybe it was the ex nihilo creation of love in the hearts of us who prayed for him.


Photo taken by Franklin Golden. Franklin is a volunteer with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a non-profit foundation that provides professional maternity and birth photos to parents who are losing a child.