Book review: Denial is my spiritual practice, Hackenberg & Spong

Posted on May 19, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Denial is my spiritual practice (and other failures of faith),
Rachel G Hackenberg & Martha Spong (Church Publishing, May 2018)

In her epilogue to the book, Rachel writes*

Our best hope is not that you read these stories and say, “Wow, cool dirty laundry,” but that you find a mirror for your spirit somewhere within these pages, a glimmer of a reflection to assure you that you’re not alone – in faith or in life, in pain or in change – and that you recognize yourself within God’s broader story.

I had already marked the page where Martha described arriving for a coffee date:

Once inside, I listened carefully to the orders of the people in line ahead of me, managed to request a cup of coffee without sounding inept …

because I do so recognize that grown woman covering her adolescent anxiety about fitting in with careful tactics designed to demonstrate competency. I saw her in the mirror on her way out of my house this morning.

The gift that Martha and Rachel offer in their stories is not found in the information about their lives per se, fascinating and generous as they are, but in that invitation to the reader to find herself (himself, themself) within the stories that we share; the ones that haunt us since our days growing up within or without families, within or without the embrace of our spiritual ancestors, whose stories creep out of the Bible to interweave with these pastors’ words and remind us that it was ever thus, and that God was ever so.

In the years between moving to America and becoming an Episcopal priest, through a series of associations I won’t go into here, “The Summons,” that beautiful song by John Bell of Iona has become my mantra of sorts; my theme song. One verse opens, Will you love the “you” you hide if I but call your name? The song kept singing itself to me as I read these women’s words. In a way, they are asking the same question, and laying their own struggle to answer it on the table.

Rachel’s writing style has the texture of that brittle shell that we cast around those parts of ourselves we most need to protect, even from ourselves, even from God; its touch unmasks the truthfulness of her storytelling, the depth of her honesty, the leap of faith it takes to put down on paper the prayer that names the fear,

Unless
God doesn’t come.

Martha’s writing opens a well for the reader to dip her pen (his, their pen) and write themselves into the story, write their own story. The conversation between the two, indirect, yet lilting, like songs answering each other across a fence, brings the reader home.

I’m not sure when a book last sang to me.

I recommend that you acquire yourself a copy, read it, savour it, and then keep it close for those moments when, for the sake of faith or sanity, you need once more to find yourself reflected in the mirror of another soul, another spirit, one that has wrestled with God, and, against all expectations, lived to see dawn’s light limping across the valley.

_________________________

  • By way of disclosure: I’ve met Rachel; Martha, too, online at least, and in print in the RevGalBlogPals book, There’s a Woman in the Pulpit (SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2015), which Martha compiled and edited, and to which we all contributed, me least of all.
  • Get the book from Church Publishing, on Amazon, or talk to your favourite independent book seller.
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Eleison

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Christ, have mercy,
we expostulate once more; he says

You do not know how often I
long to gather you to my arms
as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wing;
but are you sure that it is mercy that you want?

Instead of tenderness, how many times
have you sought solace in metal and kevlar;
instead of safety, preferred a hard perimeter;
instead of common ground, built
walls, chasms, barricades, as though history
were not littered with the ruins of your fortresses,
their stones repurposed to remember the dead?

Have mercy upon us, we pray, laying down
arms full of floral, teddy-bear tributes.
Have mercy, we say, from a sniper’s shot away,
watching the cross like a hawk for signs of life.

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The prayer bear

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

This article was first published at the Episcopal Café

A hundred years ago, or so, when they took my tonsils out, hospitals didn’t let families stay with their small patients. And they kept you for months (okay, maybe a week). As luck would have it, my mother worked next door to the hospital and could visit on her lunch breaks. In the meantime, I became quite attached to a rather worn, rather bald, brown teddy bear. When they finally released me into the wilds, the nurses very kindly let me take the ragged old thing with me. I do not know if they knew how generous they were being. The stuffed animal still sits in my entrance way at home, greeting me at the front door.

This month, during our irregular education hour at church, we talked about expansive and alternative images for God, in the Bible and in our prayers. It was interesting to stretch our imaginations, and to find out where the stiffness of our necks and our prayer muscles pulled us back.

Male and female pronouns were fine, we found, in their place; but when we messed with their assigned gender roles – letting Mother rule almighty and Father tenderly nurture – some of us were in danger of straining something.

Nonhuman images seemed safer: a soft-winged hen was less of a leap than a birthing, nursing human mother to describe God. Lions were easy. Pillars of fire, anonymous and impassive pillars of cloud and dust presented few problems. The lamb – that one gets complicated. We are not sure about making God cute.

God as the she-bear protecting her cubs kept coming back around to haunt us. The image comes from Hosea 13:8: the prophet threatens the enemies of God’s people with the ravening wrath of a mama bear. It could certainly be considered less than comforting; yet it was an image that encapsulated our awe, even our caution, while inviting us to trust in the faithful protection and fearsome love of a God beyond our strength to reckon with.

Eventually, I was reminded me of my bear back home, the one who has been with me since one of my first dips into that valley of shadows. It reminds me of the pain, both physical and spiritual, of that time of separation, as well as of the comfort that was available. It speaks to me of a simple and profound generosity which goes beyond the logical understanding of an eight-year-old, or of an adult taught to measure out gifts given and received; which entered my heart without touching the sides on its way into my soul.

Great God
if I am fearfully and wonderfully made
you are more fearsome and wonderful
since I am a pale image of your essence
yet you let me take you in my hands
I am lost to the mystery of your body
wounded and whole, dangerous, untame
but soft as bread on the tongue, speaking
in the wild, unintelligible language of love.

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The prayer of a lost Leviathan

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

My Creator,
when you made sea monsters for sport, why
would you not make me buoyant,
flattening the waves,
smoothing surfaces, resting
zen-like on the moon’s reflection, bathed
beautiful by her silver light; why not
fiercely playful, breaking unexpectedly,
tossing aircraft carriers after their cargo,
catching men and women on my tongue,
roaring laughter as I lay them out on life rafts;
why did you not make me deeper, less
defenseless against downbearing pressure,
the weight of salt water rusting my scales,
crushing my heart within its own cavity,
turning me into a fossil of my own, ancient self?

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Our own devices

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the sixth Sunday of Easter at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid

_________________________________________________

“Whatever is born of God conquers the world,” writes the author of the letters attributed to John. And as we heard from the same lips last week, “God is love.” Ipso facto, love conquers the world. And yet so often we are still sighing for the lack of love, and dying of its frustration. We are still waiting for the glorious victory of the kingdom of God, a battle song to proclaim its mission accomplished …

As most of you know, back in the earliest centuries of the church, the Roman empire, the one that had the power to order crucifixions, that washed its hands of God when it put Jesus to death, the one whose lord was Caesar – that Roman empire continued to flourish and grow, finding in its victories its vindication, while the Christian religion, young and yet vigorous, was by turns persecuted and ignored.

That is, until Constantine, who became known eventually as Constantine the Great. Legend has it that Constantine’s conversion to Christianity began with a dream, by which he was inspired to go into battle under the Chi-Ro, a symbol of Christ, using the first two letters of that title in the Greek, set against the sun. [i]

Constantine was a sun-worshipper, but he saw no conflict between his devotions to that celestial body and the Son of God, Jesus Christ. And he postponed his baptism into the Christian faith until his deathbed, not because he doubted the power of the Risen Christ to bring him victory; still, it seems, he thought that he might hedge his bets, and keep his freedom to kill, rather than to pray for his enemies; to pursue by all means the goals of the same empire that had used the cross with which he was now anointed to kill Christ.[ii]

Oh, how often do we want it both ways? We want to be faithful, to honour our covenant with Christ, our baptismal vows, our promise to follow the way not of Constantine, not of the empire, but of the cross; and yet we want to enlist God as our foot soldier, our secret weapon, to ensure our own victory, to conquer the world on our behalf.

Constantine’s prevarication is like the prayer of Saint Augustine, before he was sainted: O God, “make me chaste and continent, but not yet.”[iii] We know the kind of love to which we are called, but we would like to run riot a little longer before we are completely conquered by it.

There is a danger in our Easter hymns – because we are still in the season of Easter, and we are still singing them – of reducing Christ’s victory to one event. We sing of his victory over death, his triumph over the tomb, and we are right to do so. It is marvellous. It changed everything. The earthquake that rolled the rock away from the entrance to the cave where his body was laid continues to send its aftershocks through our lives, through our conscience, through our imaginations, shaking up hope wherever it is heard and felt.

Still, causing the soldiers standing guard to faint with fright was not the only victory that Jesus celebrated if we read the gospels again. We talked last week about how Jesus demonstrated love, gave us the example of how to love one another; and these were victories themselves. He fought demons, and he won. He fought illness, and gave life the victory. He won over critics, sometimes, and converted crooks into honest men. He rescued the impetuous joy of children from the hard hearts of those who knew better, and he fed the crowd on the hillside, conquering their hunger with God’s providence.

Small victories, born of God, have a profound effect on the people who encounter them. Small victories born of God, born of love, grow up to conquer the world. A word of comfort, of apology, of forgiveness; the sharing of a morsel of bread can become the seed for a movement that reconciles people to themselves, to one another, to Christ.

Small victories, like pulling off another community meal, or another summer music camp, or another prayer vigil. Small victories, like sharing the prayers that comfort and heal the hurting soul and give hope to the body. Small victories like hearing our own hearts confess the bets we are hedging, and hearing God’s word of absolute embrace, Christ’s ready forgiveness, the Spirit’s whisper of encouragement. These are the movements born of God that will conquer the world.

We wonder, always, if it is enough. We hear about the violence in our neighbourhoods, gunfire shooting children in their beds, drive-by death, statistical sin. We know how wrongheaded our own friends and relatives can be, those on the dark side, foot soldiers of the empire, or lawless rebels. We want to add our armies to the fight, to raise our voices, to run riot – which is fine, as long as we are sure that the flag we follow is the cross of Christ, serving the kingdom of God, and not some other standard that we, ever creative, dreamed up like Constantine.

I was reminded this past week at clergy conference of Bishop Curry’s words after the outrage at Charlottesville last summer.

I know too well that talk … of the kingdom of God in our midst, can be dismissed as nice but naive, idealistic yet unrealistic. I know that.

But I also know this. The way of Beloved Community is our only hope. In this most recent unveiling of hatred, bigotry, and cruelty, … we have seen the alternative to God’s Beloved Community. And that alternative is simply unthinkable….

We who follow Jesus have made a choice to walk a different way: the way of disciplined, intentional, passionate, compassionate, mobilized, organized love intent on creating God’s Beloved Community on earth.[iv]

Disciplined, intentional, passionate, compassionate, mobilized, organized: a force to be reckoned with?

We who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, God’s victory over sin and death, God’s conquest of our hearts – we do not have the luxury of Constantine to postpone our decision to follow the cross instead of a device we dreamt up. We are already enlisted in God’s kingdom, the beloved community.

Our victories, the fruits of our labour, our conscription, our service are those moments born of God when we see love in action: healing, reconciling, feeding, renewing, resurrecting. No matter the noise or smoke of the battle that frighten and distract us, discourage us from our cause, draw us away from the cross, from trusting the way of Christ; no matter, it is love that will conquer all in the end. Because whatever is born of God conquers the world; and God is love. And we, reborn out of the waters of baptism; we are beloved. And beloved, love is a force to be reckoned with.

____________________________________________________________

[i] Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Penguin Books, 1967; revd edn, 1993), 126-127

[ii] ibid

[iii] The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Book VIII, chapter 7), trans. Rex Warner (Signet Classic, 2001), 164

[iv] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/posts/publicaffairs/message-presiding-bishop-michael-curry-where-do-we-go-here-chaos-or-community

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Love/hate/relationship

Posted on April 29, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, 2018

If it’s not about love, it’s not about God,” our Presiding Bishop is known to say. The First Letter of John is all about love.

Because God has loved us, the letter writer advises, we should love one another. Because Jesus has shown us the depth and height and expanse of God’s love, we should extend ourselves, should invest ourselves in loving God and loving one another. Because in the love of Christ we have seen the extent to which God will go to love us, we should not hold back on loving one another.

It sounds so simple, on the one hand; but we know that as soon as open our eyes from prayer, we will find ourselves mired in the complications of real relationships, and the silos of our segregated world, and the barriers, internal and external, that we construct and fail to deconstruct, that keep us from loving our siblings.

First of all, we have the semantic problem. What does it mean, to love one another? We are not supposed to love every person in the same way as we love our spouse, or our child, or our dog. We are not commanded to prefer the company of every individual, or to have warm, fuzzy feelings about every passer by. We are not obliged to approve of every action, word, opinion of those whom we love. We are obligated to love them, anyway.

If we are to try to work out some kind of working process for what that love looks like, we know where to look. “Abide in me,” says Jesus. “Have this mind in you, which was in Christ,” we are advised elsewhere. “God is love,” writes the letter writer.

Jesus demonstrated by plenty of words and actions what he meant by love. He healed people, sometimes without even thinking about it. The woman who touched the hem of his robe was able to steal his healing power, and he let her have it. He was as limited and as rationed in his time, his presence, his reach as any of us, during his walk on this earth; but he gave to all who asked of him, and healed all who presented their need to him, because he loved them, because he had compassion for them.

Compassion was the word that described his feelings towards the thousands gathered on the hillside to hear him speak. Unprepared and under-resourced, they had nothing to eat, but instead of sending them away empty, Jesus fed them out of the providence that he found in God’s love.

Jesus was not discriminatory in the dispensation of his love, but neither was he indiscriminate. He was not afraid to criticize the people he loved.

He rebuked his host at a dinner party when that host was rude to a woman in attendance. He rebuked his disciples when they shrugged away the children who were pushing forward to see Jesus. He rebuked Peter when he suggested that Jesus might want to take a less loving, a more practical, political, savvy route to salvation.

Which leads us to the more difficult part of this passage.

“Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen,” warns the letter writer, and if we are in any way human, our heart sinks. We know whereof we are guilty.

A century ago, Margaret Plath, writing about Judas Iscariot, remarked,

Another practical religious need to be kept in mind … [is] the need to hate – for not a few the most preferred, indeed perhaps the only form they have of showing their love for their Lord; many can still muster honourable hatred against the traitors and enemies of Jesus even though they find it difficult to express in deeds their love for their Lord through following him in the attitudes he demands: meekness, purity of heart, and peacemaking.*

I would add that for some of us our preferred form for loving ourselves, as our neighbours, may be to muster that same honourable hatred against those who have done us, or others, wrong. This is how we love what is right, we argue.

After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples in multiple attested places and occasions. He breathed peace upon them – those who had fled at the first sign of trouble, those who had abandoned him to a lonely death on a hard cross on a desolate hillside reserved for criminals and outcasts. He returned even to those disciples and breathed peace upon them.

He even appeared to Saul, later known as Paul, who was persecuting Jesus’ first followers. Jesus confronted him on the road to Damascus, and, refusing to let him continue in his abusive and murderous ways, converted him through the demonstration of Christ’s enduring power and of his overwhelming mercy.

“Love your enemies,” he told his disciples, “and pray for those who persecute you.”

He did not, as far as we are told, visit Pilate. He did not, as far as we know, seek out Herod, or the high priests. We do not know what he said to those soldiers standing guard when he first emerged from the tomb.

We know, from his own words from the cross: “Father, forgive them,” that Jesus, in his perfection, forgave them. He would not let his righteous anger, his appropriate indignation, his ready rebuke be reworked into hatred. Neither did he find it necessary to present himself to them for further abuse in order to prove it; he had no time to waste.

Here’s the thing: you all have families, of one kind or another. You all have friends, colleagues, acquaintances against whom you are mentally measuring the balance of hate versus love. You are wondering how far you have to bend to limbo into the righteous column.

I know this, because I have family, and without going into any kind of unnecessary detail, mine shakes out somewhere on the difficult side of normal. I have spent plenty of time wondering how to reconcile those difficulties with the admonishment to love the brothers and sisters and siblings whom we see, who carry the image of the unseen God, however distorted it may seem at times.

I have come to realize that I need to rest in Jesus’ advice: Abide in me. Abide in me, through prayer, through any and all acts of generosity where they are called for, through the self-preservation of staying away from Pilate, and did I mention prayer? Above all, the practice and perfection of love, its giving and its receiving, helps insulate the heart from hate.

And for the whole human family, the need for mitigation is obvious.

Yesterday, I heard of the death of James Cone, credited as the father of black liberation theology. In recent years, I travelled to hear him speak on his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, but a credible threat of violence against the venue and his person prevented him from attending. Now, I will not meet him in this lifetime, because hatred kept him from us that day.

Cone died in the same week that a national memorial to victims of lynching was unveiled. Through his words and work, he brought into the light of Christ the consequences of our history, and the constant conviction and strange comfort of the cross. Like the visitors to that new monument, we hardly dare look away now.

Hate will not have the last word. Whether we speak it, out of our pain and bitterness, or whether we hear it addressed to us, the resurrection is our assurance that God’s love, which endures all assaults of the enemy, is stronger, more resilient, more radical, more righteous than the most outrageous acts of ours that we can imagine.

We abide in the love of a God who heals us without our asking, and feeds us out of God’s own hand, in whose image we are made, who has made us for love and reconciliation, who loves us unconditionally.

Without that love, we are lost.

________________________

* Margaret Plath, “Warum hat die urchristliche Gemeinde suffer die Überlieferung der Judaserzählung Wert gelegt?”, quoted in William Klassen, Judas (Fortress Press, 1997)

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Mark the urgent evangelist

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Immediately, suddenly, Mark wrote a gospel!

When I was in college studying the New Testament for the first time, I was introduced to Mark as the author of the earliest, shortest, and least likely gospel to earn its evangelist an A for his composition skills. He was always lurching from one scene to the next, like a small child eager to show a beloved friend one new discovery after another. He was breathless in his pursuit of the Messiah, Jesus the Christ, through his ministry, through his crucifixion, to the empty tomb.

It is there that Mark left us, finally run out of things to say in that clumsy, endearing, run-on way. Others thought that his ending was not finished enough, and added one coda to another; but Mark knew his way through his gospel. His good news was as astonishing, as abrupt, as immediate, and as sudden as the ending of his book.

The word, “immediately,” occurs more than twenty times in Mark’s sixteen brief chapters. There is an urgency to his proclamation of the “good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God” which has its own profound beauty.

We live in a maelstrom, a world which never stops spinning (in more ways than one), which never seems to slow down between breathless episodes of news, commentary, opinion, reaction; not to mention the everyday minute-to-minute work of breathing, being present, making the bed, the tea, the grade. We are inundated with suggestions and exhortations to slow down, make space, take time – which would be lovely, given half a chance.

When half a chance doesn’t present itself, there is good news in Mark’s reckless, headlong delivery of the gospel. God will easily keep pace with us. Jesus will immediately, suddenly run with us. The Spirit never runs out of breath.

________________

First shared on the Episcopal Cafe. Featured image: Mark the Evangelist from the Book of Cerne. Public Domain, via wikicommons

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Stealing the gospel

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

A brief word at a Vigil Against Gun Violence: Prayers for Our Lives, on the eve of the anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999

The text is the story of Simon the Magus in Acts 8

_________________

Simon wanted to buy God’s power from the apostles.

But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! … Your heart is not right before God.’

We cannot buy our salvation.

We cannot purchase protection at the price of our souls, still less at the cost of our children’s lives.

Gun violence is stealing the gospel from us at an alarming rate. It ruins lives, it enables despair, it facilitates fear. At its root are the things we were warned against long ago: the greed that money-making breeds; the divisions increased by suspicion and the evils of isms: sexism, nationalism, selfish individualism, and especially racism. It branches out into paranoia, deluding us into trusting in our own handiwork instead of the hands of our creator, who gave us life and taught us how to live, if we would but listen.

More guns bring more violence, and we have had enough of the ‘gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness.’

We cannot buy our way out of the mess that we have bought ourselves into, by selling our votes and our souls to manufacturers of domestic war. But we do not have to stand idly by while the gospel is stolen from us and our children.

As Christians we hold one another accountable to Christ and to the gospel. So we get to ask the difficult questions.

If a child in our care is going to play somewhere, we get to ask the impolitic question, “Are there guns in the house? If so, exactly how are they stored?”

As friends, we get to ask the impossible questions: “Are you depressed? Where are your guns? What are you doing to keep yourself safe from using them?”

As family, we get to ask the invasive questions: “How often does he get angry? Is there a gun in the house? How can I help keep you safe?”

As citizens, we get to ask our representatives, “What are you doing to rein in the flood tide of guns sloshing about this country? How are you turning the tide on gun violence?”

As Christians, we get to say, “Jesus died for us, but he didn’t kill anyone for us. What makes anyone more of a good guy than Christ?”

In the past nineteen years, since Columbine, school shootings have become part of our national storyline, no longer unthinkable, instead, our administrators and enforcers spend their time and energy strategizing for something that now seems almost inevitable. It should not be this way. Our children should not be living under threat, as though in a war zone. The gospel – good news – should not have been stolen from them so cynically.

We need to give it back. We need to build them up. We need to open our hearts and minds to a world, a kingdom of God in which the answer to violence is not more weapons but fewer, and the answer to insecurity is not to retreat but to embrace one another, to strengthen the bonds of community, of love, of life, trusting not in metal or money, but in the living heart of God.

We may think it is impossible. But we thought it unlikely that Jesus could rise from the dead. And yet here we are, gathered in his name.

We need to keep that surprise before us, to excite our hearts to hope and open our minds to new ways of thinking. Because God will not let the gospel be traded for silver or stolen from God’s children, because God is always on the side of the meek and the lowly, because God is love, and love can ever be defeated by death. That much we know, and it is the gospel of Christ. Amen

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Resurrection and reality

Posted on April 15, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

The readings for the Third Sunday of Easter in Year B are here.

When Jesus came back from the land of the dead, the disciples thought that they were seeing a ghost (Luke 24:36-48). Nothing – not even their years of direct experience of Jesus – had prepared them for the ultimate miracle, which was his resurrection, which was his life, his unquenchable, unburiable, unequalled life; the force of God somehow embodied by one made in God’s image; the glory of God somehow sufficiently muted that they could look upon him, and live.

After growing up knowing that Christ is alive, it is hard for us to fathom quite how mind-blowing, how truly inconceivable his appearance was to those disciples, who had fled the cross in fear, and denied any knowledge of Jesus to save their own sad selves from arrest alongside him.

Whatever Jesus had told them, however he had promised, they were not expecting resurrection.

Having grown up knowing that Christ is alive, we are just as numb to the astonishing reality that such a claim represents; we are just as disbelieving of the power of resurrection to surprise us; we are as dismissive of the Risen Christ standing among us as those first disciples. Like them, we know better. We know death when we see it, in the bombs of war, in our own families, in our own lives; and we are not sure that we expect God really to reverse its bite.

 

I have been haunted all week by that junior league hockey team bus crash that happened in Saskatchewan last weekend. The loss of life, and especially of such young life; the loss of health and happiness and the split-second upending of everything that a person, a family, a community thought that they had hold of – it is almost unimaginable.

There was more to the story. One of the young men who died was misidentified as another of his teammates who survived. I cannot read this story today without thinking of those parents, that family, who had resigned themselves to the devastation of death, only to be shocked by a new announcement of life. For the other family, of course, the news was cruel beyond belief.

The difficulty of recognizing even the most beloved in those moments that define life and death, build bridges between them, add to our sensitivity, our squeamishness in facing the realities of resurrection.

 

Peter, for one, was convinced. When he addressed his fellow Israelites at the temple a few weeks later; when he told them that as hard as they had tried to doubt and to deny, even to bury and to kill Jesus, that he was alive, that he had forgiven them, that he was for real, the real deal of God, dishing up mercy and dealing out grace, even in the face of death and denial, terror and torture, enmity and sin, he spoke out of his own experience (Acts 3:12-19). While Jesus had been to hell and back, Peter had been in his own abyss of grief, regret, shame, self-recrimination, doubt, and despair. Everything that he had invested his whole life in, left home for, risked ridicule over, had come crashing down, and his own courage had failed him, leaving his questioning his own heart, mind, and soul.

Then Jesus had returned, and offered him peace. Unbelievably, unexpectedly, undeservedly, unreservedly; looking like something dragged in from the gates of hell, with gaping wounds and wild eyes, Jesus, the one from the cross, had offered Peter the kiss of peace.

This was the enormity, the extremity that Peter was trying to describe, to convey to the crowds at the temple a few weeks later.

“You are in awe because of one little healing miracle,” Peter told them, “one life restored. You have no idea, you haven’t an inkling of what this Jesus is capable of. You do not even know how close he is to upending your entire way of life. You cannot imagine how he will love you, if only you will face his bruised body, risk a glimpse of the glory that you tried to leave buried in the grave.”

 

Jesus was at pains to demonstrate to his disciples that he was truly alive, and that he was truly himself. He knew that they could barely trust their own senses, and his own appearance was marred by the violence he had endured; his hands still bore the ragged marks of iron nails and his side the wound made post-mortem by the soldier’s spear. In this state, he invited the disciples to make sure that it was he, to test his humanity, and his identity.

It was not only Thomas who sought to quell doubts and fear by a direct and intimate encounter with Jesus. None of his disciples was immune to the terror that comes from wondering if God has, in fact, forsaken us; and none was immune to the terror of realizing that resurrection is not a reset, but a redemption; that resurrection may not be shiny, or tidy, or clean, but that it is real; that through Christ’s love, life is transformed, with all of its wounds, and scars, and memories, into something that is livable after all.

 

Inconceivable things happen every day: things of great wonder, like falling in love, like the birth of a new life, like a remission from suffering and disease; and things of great sorrow and bewildering pain, such as war, the death of a beloved one, or a dreaded diagnosis, like the realization of our own shame, guilt, denial, or a simple and profound loneliness.

What Jesus invites us to recognize, in his resurrection, in his love, in the peace and the power that he offers to Peter is that he is present throughout it all. He is present in those who advocate for peace and promote healing. He is with us in the valley of the shadow of death, and he is with us on the mountaintop. He returns again and again to reassure us that resurrection is present even in the most twisted and swollen and stricken circumstances; that everything, everything, everything is able to be redeemed by the love of God who created us, and who wants nothing more than to embrace us as God’s beloved children.

“Little children,” writes John, “let no one deceive you” (1 John 3:7). If you think you are stuck in sin and trapped in lawlessness, Jesus has already set you free to do what is righteous in his name. If you think that you have seen it all, and know how much grace God has for you, you have seen nothing compared to what God still has left to reveal at our own resurrection. If you think that the world is so bewildering that nothing makes sense, Jesus has come patiently, so patiently to point out his hands, his feet, his broken body, his own spear-pierced heart, to tell us that he is with us, that he has redeemed all of it, that he is alive so that we might know what real life is. As hard as it is sometimes to see, Jesus’ resurrection appearance amongst his disciples, even among us today, is summed up in the lines of a hymn,

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight;
all praise we would render, O help us to see
’tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee![i]

[i] Immortal, invisible, God only wise, words by Walter C. Smith (1867)

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Silent prayer

Posted on April 14, 2018 by Rosalind C Hughes

Eyelids lowered, immersed in unstillness and disquiet;

the tumble dryer tumbles, the dishwasher sloshes,

the circuits in my head hum in ecstatic, rhythmic union

with the beverage fridge.

Beyond the glass, fighting rip tides on the wind,

a frantic bird is crying out,

“Hear ye, hear ye, hear me!”

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