Today is Saturday and I am finding it to be a good day to simply be quiet and spend some time with God. Today I will be praying the poem below as I remember the incredible Joy of Easter which has in many ways been shrouded by this pandemic. The Risen One taught us to hold sorrow and joy together. The Joy of Easter is indeed unspeakable and unfathomable and sometimes unnoticeable. It might need to be mined and released from being embedded in sad rock. Barbara Holmes gives us a litany of the joy unspeakable which accompanies all our isolation and all our grief. It is more magnificent than words I can find! And it speaks to doing this together! JOY UNSPEAKABLE by Barbara Holmes Joy Unspeakable is not silent, it moans, hums, and bends to the rhythm of a dancing universe. It is a fractal of transcendent hope, a hologram of God’s heart, a black hole of unknowing. For our free African ancestors, joy unspeakable is drum talk that invites the spirits to dance with us, and tell tall tale...

“Be like the fox/who makes more tracks than necessary,/some in the wrong direction./Practice resurrection.” Wendell Berry After the scuffle of disciples to and from the empty tomb, after testing our doubts again and again, perhaps even after the Ascension, it appears to be our own call to discipleship to practice resurrection. In fact, that may be a way of describing the work of the church. We practice when we worship, when we serve, and when we pray. At some point I like to imagine all our faces, and feet, turned toward the Risen One. Such alignment is not only unlikely but probably not accurate! As we scurry to seek the Risen One we do so from many directions and many identities. We also go down paths which may seem futile. We go down some paths which seem to feed our doubt not our faith. I believe, however, that all is fruitful and that doubt feeds faith. I believe that it is in the journey, it is in the practicing, that we deepen our relationship with God. I know these days ...

Last Friday, Good Friday, the Governor of Connecticut issued order 7X to extend the time of closure for nonessential businesses through May 20. While this did not come as a great shock and may in fact be extended further, it has cause me to ponder church during this strange time. Church in the truest sense of the word is not closed! (We can argue another time whether it is nonessential?!) Yes, the building is shut; yes, we are not gathering on Sundays physically.  But...the ways in which "church" is continuing are simply amazing and grace-filled! This tension has caused me to focus on what the church is...the Body of Christ finding ways to worship and serve. That is still "open". For me, ministering to the sick has become so difficult yet certainly more intentional and emergent. For me, prayer has deepened and lengthened.  I recall at the end of my first zoom Bible Study a remark was made: now that was church! I suppose we all showed up to pray and ponde...

    It is finished and it is only just begun! These last words of Jesus on the cross often get mistaken for ultimate finality, much like many of us mistake death as an endpoint.  I am reminded as I think of these words of how many of us have many moments in our lives when we think we are "done"; or that we have "arrived". Even more likely we think that we ought to have done so and berate ourselves for not yet! Jesus spoke these words on the cross, in the midst of a cosmic plan. His earthly being was "finished" but resurrection and ascension were to come, not to mention the continuous inbreaking of His Presence as the Risen One among us.  In this period after Easter when we still wake up to the pandemic and isolation, when we are again instructed to Love One Another as though for the first time, I wonder whether "it is finished" might help us die to our false selves and adopt "it is begun" as our Easter mantra? We are finishe...

  Tuesday of the first week of Easter and like the early stages of an athletic season it is time to practice. Practice Resurrection! One of the ways to do so is to look for signs of death transformed, new life where we thought it over. Certainly the seasons and the season of Spring is particularly instructive here. That which lay dormant over the winter now buds and blooms with new life. Color returns. But what about those of us who don't see spring because of our location or our emotional state. What about those of us who simply see fragments of brokenness and shards caused by carelessness or chaos? I offer a few comments about the Japanese art of kintsukori, an example of which appears above and will serve as a reminder in my new blog ( https://blessingimagination. blogspot.com/ ) that God gathers up the fragments of our lives and weaves a beautiful beloved community blessed in union. This Japanese art form involves taking the broken pieces of ordinary ceram...

Dear People of God: What now? " Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia" (v.4 Jesus Christ is Risen Today). The thing is I don't know how! The how I believe is in the process which is ever evolving, Easter like the golden ring on the merry go round. Today we are back at it. But we have taken one more turn around the sun, one more pass at the Easter altar. Unlike the merry go round we are in control of the pause. And in the pause I believe we are Eastered! Today I will ponder that word which has certainly to do with "soaring" and to do with practicing resurrection, and also to do with a beauty and grace poured into and over us which is transformative. We are Easter People! So I leave you today with a lengthy but powerful poem by Walter Brueggemann which first introduced me to the concept of eastering! Rest in this creative concept and the power of the Holy Spirit! Prayer: Easter us - Brueggemann You God who terrified the waters,     who crash...

Woman, behold your son; (to the beloved disciple) behold your mother. A copy of Michelangelo’s pieta sits on my desk, or during these days of isolation on my home altar. I gaze at it every day. It is for me an icon, a image not itself holy but which transports the gazer to a holy moment, a holy mother, the holy son, the holiness of grief held in absolute love. And on Good Friday laid alongside one of the seven last words of Jesus, its flat photographic quality becomes enlivened as though real or at least 3 dimensional. Woman, behold your son; Son, behold your mother. I don’t know about you but I wasn’t sure Good Friday would actually feel any different than the last 21days. I wasn’t sure that the grief and loss felt already through COVID 19 and its consequences would allow anything like the appropriate devotion and reverence usually called for at the cross, in the litany, by the prayers. I was wrong.  If Lent is intended to open us and empty us t...

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  (John 13:34,35) I speak to you on this Maundy Thursday, gazing at a stripped altar and a stripped sanctuary. I speak to you choking back the tears of loss and anxious anticipation yet smiling through them as I realize a new way of reaching out to you.  I have been troubled by so many things in these last weeks but none quite as much as the statement: when can we get back to normal? Normal? If normal means a world where we truly love one another I am all in, but I fear that is not what is meant! I for one am hoping that this pandemic ends for sure; I pray for healing and safety and I pray with love for the responders, not only the first ones but the consistent wave of courageous people showing up. I find myself each day, each night praying with gratitude ...

It is Wednesday of Holy Week, often a day of tenebrae, being with God in the shadows. Today is the day before the Triduum. Today we stand on the edge of a cliff summoning our faith, and courage, to step into the Passion!  My favorite definition of faith is: faith is standing at the edge of everything and knowing that when you step off one of two things will happen; you will either be caught by an angel or taught to fly! Many of us hedge our bets on that ledge however!We look for something to hold onto just in case that syllogism is not true! We often forget we are bound to God! So let’s check our tethers, our holy tethers to God, before making this flight. No matter what we think or do, we are tethered to God. We might let go and turn back; God will not! It is moments like this, or these, in which we might be reminded of the mutuality of this divine love. God desires us. God pursues us. God adores us.  I have found myself of late counting the things which do...

Many of us enter Holy Week with words like “rehearse the drama” which are of course fed by the enactment of the Passion on Palm Sunday. This year when there were only private or less than 5 gathered replayings of the Passion because enactments had previously taken place in church buildings, new meaning was poured into the words “rehearse the drama”. new props, new settings, even new scripts...All of this begs the question is a rehearsal even necessary when we are living the passion! Holy Week in this time of coronovirus only serves to heighten the drama and passion of Holy Week and has caused the word rehearsal to take on new poignancy. There are very few rehearsals; we are living it and have been doing so for a while now. We will continue to do so. This is no enactment. This is real. Instead of rehearse, we are called to re-member the passion and the Christ in its midst. And so might the Resurrection in the middle of this also be more real, even though there is no...