come away with me

Today is Pride Sunday in the US, the 66th anniversary of the founding of the United Church of Christ, and it is my final Sunday serving as your interim bridge pastor. It’s been a deep blessing for me on a variety of levels and I want to express my gratitude to you all for the way you have welcomed and engaged with me over these past 150 days.

· We’ve laughed and wept, worshipped and studied, sung and kept silence, danced and mourn-ed, pondered and prayed, cared for one another with compassion, and gone a bit deeper into the grace of God revealed in Jesus the Christ. This could have been simply a season of place holding till your new settled pastor arrives. And while it’s been that, too, it’s also been a mystical pilgrimage into the sacramental surprises of learning to walk in the dark.

· At the close of worship on week three someone said to me: I’ve never really LIKED Jesus much before but the way you talk about him makes me WAAY more receptive. What a precious gift to give to your pastor. I’m so thankful – and want to build on that insight by including a new rendering of today’s reading from St. Matthew’s gospel. We know it as: come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy laden and I will give you rest. The brilliant pastoral theologian, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Peterson of blessed memory, reframed it in what has become my all-time fav-orite Biblical poem. He writes:

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it – as you learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.

Two competing but not contradictory notions kept coming to me while preparing for this day: The first was a life-changing memory and the second, as you might imagine, was a song.

· The memory involves what a former pastor told me upon hearing this translation for the first time. The late Pastor Rada founded a tiny evangelical congregation in Tucson, AZ to the queer community during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As an out lesbian pastor in the late 70’s, she faced countless challenges from discrimination and hatred to misplaced fear and psychological projections from her often profoundly broken flock. The stories she told me of caring for her flock during that dreadful time still cuts me to the core: how funeral homes often refused to bury LGBTQ+ corpses or else required they be smuggled inside through the backdoor alleyway after dark; how struggling HIV/AIDS women and men passed from this life into life eternal convinced they had been condemned to a never-ending hell by a God who de-spised and hated them; and how too many in that community took their own lives in acts of unimaginable self-hatred.

· After hearing this text rephrased, Rada said to me as she and her wife were leaving worship: “I am SO burned out on religion, Pastor. I’m exhausted, heart-sick, grieving and aching to know something of Christ’s UN-forced rhythms of grace. So many in my community would still be alive if there were other churches proclaiming this truth.” Then she embraced me as we stood in the greeting line – and we wept together.

Those tears, hers and mine, opened her emotional flood gates and my commitment to craft a genuinely safe faith community grounded in the unconditional and unforced rhythms of God’s grace. This text – and how others responded to it – taught me that HOW we read and interpret the Holy Word is often a matter of life and death. The words we share in worship have consequences.

So, too the way we incarnate those words individually and in community. That’s where the song comes in: as I tried to articulate last week when some of our band was here sometimes the most important gift we can share in worship is the groove. How a song makes us feel regardless of its origins. We do that tacitly with the instrumental organ preludes and postludes that start and close worship so I’m just expanding on that truth. Like St. Wendell Berry put it: There are no unsacred places / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. I fundamentally agree.

· So, as I sat with this Biblical text, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, I kept hearing Nor-ah Jones singing: “Come Away with Me.” When I mentioned this to Di at breakfast she said, “Well, I could sing that – I love it – and I’m going to be with you on your final Sunday.” To which I could only reply: thank you.

· So, take a listen to this sweet song of the soul as yet another way of meditating on the invitation of Jesus to rest into the unforced rhythms of grace…

Come away with me in the night – Come away with me – 

and I will write you a song

Come away with me on a bus – Come away where they can't tempt us with their lies

I want to walk with you on a cloudy day – In fields where the yellow grass grows knee-high So won't you try to come

Come away with me and we'll be free - On a mountaintop – come away with me –And I'll never stop loving you – I want to wake up with the rain falling on a tin roof While I'm safe there in your arms so all I ask is for you is to come away with me in the night: Come away with me

Do you feel what the text is trying to tell us here? Of course, it’s a love song – not a hymn – but as the late George Harrison insisted: ALL of our love songs hold multiple layers of meaning and if we trust that creation is infused with God’s grace, then even a jazz ballad can become a prayer. There are no unsacred places / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. Indeed!

Stepping back periodically from the onslaught of issues, needs, demands, commitments, fears, busyness, tasks, trauma, and anxieties is essential for those allies of the holy who yearn to birth both solace and celebration in this savage culture. Activists and intellectuals are often put off by the call to contemplation thinking it’s a naval gazing distraction for people of privilege; while contemp-latives believe that hard-core activists don’t know how to consciously take either a breath or a break. But remember that old CERTS breath mint commercial: STOP you’re BOTH right!? Like Fr. Richard Rohr, I believe that contemplatives and activists need one another. The demands of com-passion and justice necessitate the linking of arms and fates as comrades if our quest for lasting social transformation and healing is to bear fruit. Back in 1932, T.S. Eliot sensed the importance of quiet discernment as part of any activist engagement in culture care. He put it like this in The Rock:

The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of THE Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death, but nearness to death is no nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in know-ledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The gospel’s call to come away for time of rest and reflection before returning to the fray allows our flesh to be restored, our minds to be renewed, and our spirits to be reconnected with the source of life. Sabbath – in any of its forms – is a spiritual practice that helps us trust that God is truly in cont-rol whether we can feel it or not. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, ally of Dr. King, used to say that the reason God gave us the Sabbath is that if we can commit to deep rest for 24 hours, leaving crea-tion in the hands of the Creator for one full day, then maybe we can extend this trust beyond the Sabbath so that its blessing fill every day. Rest, you see, is soul food yet most of us don’t believe it.

When I was in Union Seminary in NYC in the late 70’s, I was deeply engaged in Central American solidarity work. I’d studied at Seminario Biblico in San Jose, Costa Rica, I’d read many of the early liberation theologians. And vehemently opposed the Reagan regime’s policies against Nicaragua. Early in my second year, as I was frantically organizing two busloads of students to go to DC to protest the regime’s support of the contras, my homiletics professor, the great Black preacher James Forbes, called me to his office. I had NO idea why this gifts orator wanted to speak with me, but I wasn’t going to miss the chance. 

So, after a few pleasantries, Dr. Forbes said: Lumsden, are you in hurry to get yourself killed? I was stunned! So, he added: Look, I’m no stranger to social activism, ok? You know my story. What you may not know, how-ever, is that ALL truly revolutionary activists regularly take time out for quiet rest and reflection: Gandhi did when he returned to India from South Africa, MLK did on a regular basis. So, too Cesar Chavez, Mary Lou Hammer and countless others. So why, can you please tell me in the name of God, are you wasting your quiet time in seminary with reactive and frantic acts of opposition when you only have a short time here?

I was dumbstruck and didn’t know what to say – so Jim brought our meeting to a close saying: Do not waste this quiet time, brother. You have the rest of your life to get yourself killed, ok? I left thinking that Dr. Forbes was totally wrong. I was young, bright, cocky, and full of energy so why in the world would I slow down? Some three years later, though, when I was totally exhausted, those words of wisdom came back to haunt and realized Dr. Forbes was right. About that same time, my first spiritual director gave me a beautiful copy of a prayer Reinhold Niebuhr had once scrawled quickly on the back of an envelope before a vacation bible school just down the road in Lee. Later it was published in 1951 as the Serenity Prayer and reads like this in its original form:

O God and Heavenly Father, grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed, courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.

The wisdom to know the one from the other is how prayer is balanced with politics and contemplation dances with action. Some of the wisdom-keepers in ancient Israel learned this both/and practice while living in captivity to Babylon 500 years before Jesus. Pete Seeger popularized their insights in his adaptation of Eccles-iastes 3 called “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

To everything there is a season: turn, turn, turn and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

Right now, I suspect someone is wondering: why on earth is he going on and on about rest and re-flection? He’s DONE and our new settled pastor will be here soon so let’s get to the party and move on. Well, I have a two-part answer: First, I’ve come to love and respect you so deeply that I want to plant a seed in your conscience and encourage you to seek balance as you face ALL the work that’s coming down the road in the months and years ahead. There are building issues to confront, fund raising concerns, the challenge of membership, as well as articulating the mission for this faith com-munity in a way that resonates with reality. Mother Earth is literally on fire. Political and spiritual polarization is at an all-time high. And fewer and fewer people care about the church.

The most recent survey of Massachusetts residents by the Pew Research Center shows that 34% of us are nominally Roman Catholic, 10% belong to our religious tradition, and a whopping 32% of our neighbors consider themselves spiritual but NOT religious – and are mostly unaffiliated. The Rev. Dr. William Barber, founder of the Poor Peoples Movement, adds an oft ignored context writing:

Though slavery officially ended after the Civil War, the Christianity that blessed white supremacy did not go away. It doubled down on the Lost Cause, endorsed racial terrorism during the Redemption era, blessed the leaders of Jim Crow, and continues to endorse racist policies as trad-tional values under the guise of a "religious right." As a Christian minister, I understand why, for my entire ministry, the number of people who choose not to affiliate with any religious tradition has doubled each decade: an increasingly diverse America is tired of the old slaveholder religion.

We KNOW at some profound level that part of our work for the next decade has to do with shaping a non-exclusive, non-judgmental way of following Jesus in a multi-cultural context where we can partner with others in pursuit of racial justice. Be a humble participant in a community movement to bring reparations and repentance to our genocidal origins. Tenderly explore revolutionary coop-eration with our LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers as we pursue true equality. This is a massive, shifting agenda, beloved, and without balance and faithful discernment could easily lead us into cynicism or despair. So, PLEASE take stock: if Jesus realized back in the first century CE that he and his allies needed quiet time periodically to regroup, to listen carefully for the still small voice of the Lord, and build a measure of consensus: how much more so is deep rest needed in our 24/7 world saturated with the sounds and sights of calamity?

Back when I was finishing my undergraduate studies in political science at SFSU, my pastor’s spouse worked with Mayor George Moscone. One night we were over at Bill’s house talking about the upcoming birth of our second daughter when we got a phone call that Moscone and Harvey Milk had been murdered. There would be NO dinner that night as hundreds of grief stricken souls gathered at city hall to mourn the loss of these two champions of inclusivity. You may recall that there was NO violence that night. There was NO hatred. There was just a deep and disciplined public grief as we all sang: We are and gentle, angry people and we are fighting, fighting for our lives. Dear friends, THAT type of focused and public grief does NOT happen automatically. It comes from practice and disciplined patience – and the wider LGBTQ+ community taught us all about what it means to challenge the status quo of violence and hatred with love and sobriety. That’s the first reason I’m going out with this message: pastorally and personally I pray for your well-being. You are wise, kind, talented, resourceful, and filled with possibilities: add times of intentional discernment into the mix and blessings will abound.

The second reason is more complex but no less important: we who have come from privilege and power – and I include myself in this – are still learning what it means to partner and follow rather than lead. We are accustomed to being in charge – we’ve worked hard to get things done – and expect to be successful. Our churches were founded in this ethos coming of age in what Martin Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Barbara Brown Taylor, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Douglas John Hall have all called a theology of triumphalism – a theologia gloria – that “fraternizes with empire and power,” celebrates control more than trust, and ignores the theologia crucis – the theology of the cross – that was incarnated in Jesus at Golgotha. Please, PLEASE know this NOT a scolding but a confession that our buildings alone document. They’re enormous – costly – beautiful but predic-ated on principles of power and grandeur not humility and solidarity – and for countless churches in our tradition have now largely become unmanageable and unsustainable. I’m not weighing-in on what you will eventually choose as you have wise and committed leaders already working on this.

No, I’m simply commenting on one of the manifestations of our former theological foundation that still holds consequences, ok? You see, this theology of glory and power was born of a dominance that once worked – at least for folks like you and me – but is now being thoroughly rejected by peo-ple all over our community who are spiritual but NOT religious because that old-time religion has burned us out. Douglas John Hall of McGill Seminary in Montreal is spot on when he tells us that for congregations and denominations like our own:

The only antidote to religious triumphalism is the readiness of communities of faith to permit doubt and self-criticism to play a vital role in the life of faith. Because we have ignored the rigors of critical thought, we too often naïvely embrace big technology as our savior; because we have celebrated numbers, we naïvely court power; because we rejects nuance and know next to nothing of the dialectical and dialogical character of truth, we naïvely cozy up to the tyranny of religious ideology (or even sentimentalism.)

What’s happening in many of our churches right now is just what happened to people like me in seminary. I come from a background of relative privilege shaped by a triumphal theology of glory and power. I was raised among the movers and shakers of suburban, white Connecticut and Massa-chusetts where CEOs, college professors, medical professionals, and Wall Street lawyers called the shots. You can’t get MORE white, entitled and bourgeois than First Congregational Church of Dar-ien. So, I came to expect that I would be listened to when sharing an opinion in class. But my ex-pectation to be considered clashed with the experience and vision of radical feminists, people of color, LGBTQ+ folk, and non-Christians colleagues who had long been silenced and dismissed by my spiritual forebearers. So, when I started speaking from my privilege, they called me out. Challenged my limited vision and experience and kicked my theological butt in ways that took me down a peg or three. It hurt my feelings. Confused my understanding of how the world worked. And broke my heart open to new ways of being, listening, and learning.

One important revelation had to do with trust: in a broken and polarized culture, trust must be earned by showing up as a participant NOT a leader. My mentor in urban ministry, Ray Swartz-back used to say: documenting your right to be heard is not portable; you must consistently show up before you can be trusted. New alliances and partnerships are vital for the Christian church of the 21st century. Church historian, Diana Butler Bass, recently wrote that a fascinating new trend, still small but real, is starting to take place across the US. One-time young evangelicals are leaving the fundamentalism of their past to dip their toes in the water of churches like our own:

What is happening now reminds me a bit of a similar (and often overlooked) movement in the 1990s… when, Catholics who were discouraged by their church’s views on women’s ordination and divorce — and angry about the sexual abuse scandals — found their way into progressive main-line churches…. Many of those who have left Christianity will — most likely — never return to any sort of church. This won’t be a trend where folks will knock down your doors. So, don’t expect a tsunami to overwhelm your congregation — but there will likely be a kind of spring of newcomers curious about who you are and how you practice faith. If you are part of a progressive congrega-tion or spiritual community and are open to such newcomers: You're going to have to prove your-selves trustworthy, open, and accepting. You'll need to earn their respect. Not only will some of the newcomers be hurt and apprehensive, but there are decades of animosity between evangel-ical and mainline Protestants. Ex-evangelicals were schooled in that (as were mainliners!). So, expect misunderstanding.

· Like you and me these ex-evangelicals are sick of Christian nationalism. They are horrified by the anti-science ideology of their former tradition and the violence it advocates against those deemed unworthy heretics.

· You are a people grounded in love: You possess intellect, humor, and commitment and I be-lieve YOU have a place in what the church of the 21st century will become. And if I’ve ever had a doubt: your weekly peace of Jesus dance documents a commitment to joy, humility, and the unforced rhythms of grace.

So, keep letting go of that old theological paradigm of control as this new program year unfolds with your new settled pastor. Practice trusting that small is holy and partnership is the new normal. Do what you can to build times of rest into day to listen, slow down, feast with one another, laugh and weep in solidarity, trust that beyond our intellect and the obvious, God continues to embrace us in-to the unforced rhythms of grace. Because as Allan Watts taught us: “the task of a liberated person is NOT to scold the world or preach to it, but to delight it back to its senses.” May it be so. Amen.

reflections on pentecost 2023

 The late Henri Nouwen, spiritual mentor to many and seeker of God’s grace within our age of anxiety, used to regularly ask himself:

Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Say a word of healing? Make love flesh? These are the fundamental questions of faith, not doctrine or dogma, just incarnational peace-making in all its manifestations.

Nouwen’s questions ring true to my take on today’s Scripture, the appointed gospel for Pentecost, wherein Jesus returns to his frightened friends after the Crucifixion and offers them inner peace. They are hiding from the political and religious authorities of their day, imprisoned in angst, and frozen in feelings of helplessness. A witch hunt of sorts is taking place, you see; a well-coordinated campaign committed to eradicating the Jesus Movement from ancient Palestine and terrorizing its adherents into silent complacency.

· That’s what tyrants and bullies do when confronted by radical grace: they weaponize every-day life – including religion, intimacy, and information – so that we remain locked inside our homes instead of engaging our communities in acts of solidarity and compassion.

· It is my conviction that Pentecost is Christianity’s explicit challenge to society’s bullies – a clear alternative to fear and powerlessness personally and politically – but in a unique way. Jesus returns to his friends in their isolation to inwardly empower them to act outwardly by breathing the peace of the Holy Spirit upon them.

Victoria Lynn Garvey, bible scholar and Episcopal lay person writing in the most recent edition of the Christian Century, notes that breathing peace upon another is a singularly curious thing to do. “Breath as the simple process of inhale-exhale is one thing, if quite valuable. Breathing on someone takes a bit more effort and intention. This word breath on, emphusao, in both its Hebrew and Greek incarnations is used to describe the action of blowing on smoldering embers to coax a fire back to life generating sparks, heat, and roaring flames from faltering kindling.” Biblical interpreter, Brian Stoffregen, adds that:

This same word is used in Genesis 2 of the Septuagint (the Old Testament in Greek) where God breathes the breath of life into the nostrils of the earth being who then becomes a living being and again in Ezekiel 37 where the breath breathes on the slain valley of dry bones so that they may live again as well.

St. John, you see, portrays Pentecost to be part of Jewish history where the steadfast love of the Lord that endures forever brings order to the chaos, liberates Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt, shares Torah with Moses on Mt. Sinai, and inspirationally raises up the valley of dry bones. Garvey adds that the early Jewish disciples of Jesus would have known all of this.

They would recall the significance of being breathed upon. This breath now would take them way back to the “then” of creation when God also breathed purposefully… causing the first human to become a living being and suggesting that right now this breath might be generative again.

These ancient stories are retold today to remind us how the old can become new: how trust can replace terror, the personal can take on political or public consequences, and both community and courage can be restored. In this Pentecost is re-interpreted in our tradition to be a RE-creation story, always connected to its origins in Judaism, but sacramentally distinctive because OUR Pentecost begins inwardly. This isn’t better or worse than “the ancient Jewish pilgrimage festival of Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks celebrated 50 days after Passover” by the community as the close of the grain harvest, it’s just different. The SALT Project scholars write:

For the ancient Israelites, this festival was an explicitly diverse, inclusive harvest celebration for the whole community – it was tied to the seasons, the wisdom of the land, as well as the story of liberation – and over time came to mark the reception of Torah itself given to Moses on Mount Sinai.

· At first, the Jewish Pentecost was a spring feast: it began as barley was harvested, increment-ally became the Festival of Unleavened Bread at Passover, and concluded when the first crop of wheat was gathered up some fifty days later. Both crops are planted in the fall, but barley matures faster. As is often the case in spiritual traditions, our own as well as the festival of Norouz we recently shared with our Afghani friends, Mother Earth teaches us how to live into the rhythms of the sacred. The Hebrew wisdom says: “To everything there is a season, right? A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance…” and all the rest.

· Eventually, a religious ritual emerged setting aside the first fruits of the grain harvest to be a thanksgiving offering to God: primal piety intuitively recognizes that giving gratitude to the source of life before baking bread for the community’s consumption is both respectful and re-sponsible. Consequently, Passover came to initiate the blessings of the spring harvest while Pentecost crowned the festival with a concluding feast. By linking the physical bounty of the grain harvest to the spiritual nourishment of Torah that Moses received on Mt. Sinai Jewish tradition sacramentally showed that beyond the official 10 Commandments of Torah, all 613 guidelines for personal and public life extracted from the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were food for the soul and ethical wisdom for the faithful.

This is the context into which a uniquely Christian Pentecost came into being. OUR

story stipulates that after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus, the same Holy Spirit who brought order out of the chaos at the beginning of creation and inspired the ancient prophets of Israel to advocate for justice and mercy rather than mere religious rituals and sacrificial blood offerings, this same Spirit – Ruach in Hebrew and Pneuma in Greek both meaning the Spirit or Breath of the Lord – THIS same Spirit was breathed upon the first disciples of by Jesus himself.

· Jesus wasn’t discarding his tradition, mind you – there’s NO supercessionism in authentic Christianity – for Jesus and his first disciples were ALWAYS Jews. Like the ancient prophets and rabbis before him, Jesus simply adapted and reinterpreted the symbols and practices of his heritage. By breathing the Spirit upon his bewildered and anxious disciples, he inwardly filled them with the same peace that passes understanding that historically fortified God’s people in ancient Israel.

· In a way that historically and mystically connects heart and head to flesh and conscience, Jesus offered his frightened friends soul food that empowered them to leave their fears be-hind and live into the love of God out loud and in public much like Moses empowered the enslaved serfs during the exodus from Egypt. THAT’S what our text grafts on to the ancient legends of the Hebrew people: Jesus brings healing to his emotionally wounded friends by breathing the spirit of inspiration upon them like Ezekiel did in the valley of dry bones: Peace be with you – MY peace be yours – not as the world gives it but as the Lord our God has shared it with us since before the beginning of time.

· Are you with me on this? Is the connection between the events and mythology of ancient Israel clear in the reinterpretation Jesus evokes on Pentecost? Christianity claims continuity with the Holy Spirit who brings the same reassurance, solidarity, peace, and forgiveness to THIS era as she birthed in times past. Additionally, we link our prayers during the 50 days between Passover and Shavuot – or Easter and Pentecost – to the prayers Judaism offers.

In the fourth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, we read that after marking each of the 50 days between Passover and Shavuot with prayers of gratitude for the liberating blessings of Torah AND the Exodus, the first disciples of Jesus joined the rest of faithful Judaism from all over the region by going to the Temple to express their joy over God’s benevolence. Chapter two of Acts says there were Jews from all over the known world in Jerusalem: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia (in modern day Turkey); believers from Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, as well as Egypt, the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, Jews as well as Gentile proselytes from Crete and Arabia. The harvests were complete. Seven weeks of prayer were over. So, now it was time for a feast – and what a feast it turned out to be – a feast of forgiveness, a feast of peace, a feast of solidarity and compassion all expressed and experienced out loud and in public!

You may recall from last week’s Ascension Sunday message that I see the Ascension of Jesus to be an invitation for us to give up fundamentalism so that we might cultivate a spirituality of poetry and mystical, metaphorical wisdom. The brilliant novelist, Madeleine L'engle, liked to say: “Ours is an irrational spirituality where love blooms bright and wild (in the desert.) Had Mary been filled with reason, there'd have been no room for her child.” St. Paul said much the same thing noting that ours is the assurance of faith NOT the false certainties of Biblical literalism. That’s why we mark Pentecost as the BIRTH Day of the church: it was when the inner peace of spiritual grace embraced the outward fears of empire with concrete expressions of solidarity and compassion in public.

On this Memorial Day weekend, I sense this contextual background about Pentecost to be vital for us for two reasons: first, given the worldwide epidemic of virulent antisemitism and violence being waged against our Jewish sisters and brothers, the more WE mark, honor, cherish, and celebrate our spiritual and familial connections to Judaism, the more likely we’ll be able to own how OUR own well-being is eternally linked with theirs: Whatsoever you do unto the LEAST of these, my sisters and brothers, Jesus taught in Matthew 25, you do unto me. Historically Christianity seems addicted to repeatedly violating this foundational tenet in the ghastliest ways. Think the witch-hunts of Europe and the US, our genocide against first nations people, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Irish Magdalene laundries, 250 years of slavery and another 200 of Jim Crow. Our current crop of-so-called Christian nationalist vigilantes are sadly nothing new making the words of Bonhoeffer’s co-conspirator against the Nazis, Lutheran pastor Martin Neimoller, instructive:

First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me

Did you read the recent NY Times OP ED column by Wyoming Republican Susan Stubson who confessionally described the fear, hatred, violence, and terror so-called followers of Jesus are perpetrating in her great Western state even as we worship today? It’s chilling, sobering, and sadly a portent of things to come. When prominent Christian leaders and politicians invoke the name of Jesus to promote slander, murder, race hatred, and antisemitism, other people of faith must link arms and stand as one another’s protectors in public. How did MLK put it?

Those who passively accept evil are as much involved in it as those who help to perpetrate it. The one who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. That is why when evil souls plot, honest people must plan. When evil burns and bombs, we must build and bind. When evil men, women, and children shout ugly words of hatred, we must commit ourselves to the glories of love.

This is how we become people of Pentecost – souls bound together by grace, love, history, and shalom – who at our best SEE and feel our connection to one another trusting that whatsoever is done to the least of our sisters and brothers in all of creation is done to Christ Jesus and all of us as well. And now that we are finally putting limits upon Cartesian wisdom and gaining a greater perspective into what’s being called an ecological civilization, we can hear what indigenous people have known for millennia and our best ecologists and scientists have been telling us since the 70’s: that we’re ALL linked together – humans, animals, plants, wind, water, soil, and fire – and what injures ONE wounds us all.

Standing in solidarity against antisemitism – and ALL forms of social hatred including Black Lives Matter and the redressing of our origins – is faithfully receiving the sacred breath of peace Jesus breathed upon us at Pentecost. It is NOT coincidental that earlier this week not only did the Biden-Harris administration announce the first ever US Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, but our courts sentenced the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stuart Rhodes, to 18 years in prison for sedition. If you recall the chilling images from January 6th and Charlottesville that looked to Kristallnacht 2.0 you will give thanks to God. Renewing our solidarity with our Jewish spiritual cousins at Pentecost this Memorial Day weekend is the first reason for my overview.

The second is the unique interpretation Jesus adds to our Pentecost tradition: for

all intents and purposes, he reminds us today that we can’t give to others what we don’t have ourselves. We used to say if you don’t walk the walk, baby, you can’t talk the talk. So, notice that in this story Jesus returns to his friends after the resurrection to reassure them – to share his presence with them in their darkest hour – because presence matters. Sometimes we ALL need a shoulder to cry on, a lov-ing non-judgmental friend to listen to us or sit with us in the hospital when we’re enveloped in fear, or know that another living soul is available to share our joys and sorrows generosity and with pro-found attentiveness. Being present to one another is, you see, ONE of the ways the Holy Spirit becomes flesh within as its breathed upon us. So, too, inner peace: if serenity is foreign to our souls – if our insides are a sea of chaos rather than a harbor of tranquility – if we have NOT befriended silence and solitude and do not know how to cultivate being a non-anxious presence in our current chaos: then we really don’t have much to offer this wounded world. Thomas Merton put it well when he wisely wrote:

Inner serenity is a spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source. (It is) above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond reason and simple faith…It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words, or even in clear concepts…

It is intimacy with and trust of God’s grace from the inside out and is key for authentic, transformative social action to spread the love of Jesus in public. In the words of today’s gospel, it is letting the peace of forgiveness that refuses to bind ourselves and others to sin ripen and mature within. The text tells us that when Jesus returned to this small, bewildered, confused, and frightened commun-ity of faith after the Cross, he didn’t scold them. He didn’t drag up their previous abandonment or betrayals nor sully them with shame.

Rather he set them free by consciously choosing to welcome them with reassurance, helping them reclaim their trust in God’s grace; and then, based upon their inner peace, going out into the world to share the acts of solidarity born of forgiveness wherever they went. Do unto others, he told them again, as I have just done unto you. Jesus did not breathe the peace of forgiveness upon them so that they would stay behind locked doors. It was given so that they might be in the world as he was once in the world – setting all types of people free.

And THAT, dear friends, is how WE are to confront the hatred of Christian nationalism in this era. NOT with shame. NOT with self-righteousness. NOT as bullies nor those ignorant of grace. So often we well-intentioned liberals get caught in the hurry up and DO something trap. Our hearts are in the right place, but unless we’ve been nourished at the contemplative feast of peace, we may do more harm than good. If we’re not certain that God is at work within and among us even in those events and people beyond our control – if we’ve not practiced cultivating discernment but give ourselves over to reacting with just out feelings that are NEVER the whole story – we’re adding insult to injury.

What’s more, and this is as true of conservative activists as well as liberals, in our rush to do something, we can easily guilt-trip one another – use shame to push our agenda – which only breeds greater resentment and eventually more passivity. I’ve done it – sadly – you may have, too. It’s how we’re trained in this culture. And it’s the exact OPPOSITE of how Jesus asks us to incarnate love, mercy, trust, peace-making, and activism in the world: we are to show others an alternative to the shame-based status quo by living into an inward serenity so that we can outwardly practice a radical and cleansing forgiveness with others. That’s what the sacramental and liturgical calendar of our tradition aspires to teach us, you know?

Have you noticed that the first half of the Christian year – starting in November and going through April – is ALL about discernment and contemplation; while the second half is all about action in the world? Talk about to everything there is a season, right? That’s roughly six months of inner work (Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Eastertide), and six months of outward engagement in Ordinary Time using the ordinal numerals to count the weeks after Pentecost as a season ordered for action. “Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, or a pair of lungs breathing in and out, the church alter-nates between these two modes every year: we have high holidays, and everyday life. The joys of celebration, and the grunt work of growth.”

Pentecost asks us to get honest about the health of our soul: it’s a holy invitation to become fully alive, fully gracious, and fully engaged as co-creators with the Creator. It also asks us to be certain to do our own inner work so that we don’t project our junk on others. More than many, St. Wendell Berry of Kentucky knows how these two truths are entwined and shares them with us in ways that we can hear – and love – and maybe even trust. In the “Peace of Wild Things,” he frames Pentecost like this:

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Lord, may it be so among us. Amen.

reflections on ascension sunday 2023

To reflect on Ascension Sunday this year, I've juxtaposed two New Testament readings together – one from the farewell discourse of St. John’s gospel, the other from the close of St. Luke’s good news about the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus – in order to evoke both the paradox and the blessing of this unique day.

+John 17: 1-11: After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

+ Luke 24: 36-52: Jesus said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering, and he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish and he took it and ate in their presence. Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.

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I know in advance that MOST of us haven’t spent a lot of time considering the value of Ascension Sunday – if we even KNOW of its purpose in the liturgical calendar – for our Reformed and non-conformist tradition was never BIG into sacramental spirituality. To be honest, I had never heard of Ascension Sunday until my third year in seminary when, under the leadership of the granddaddy of urban ministry in the Presbyterian church, Ray Swartzback, he called our attention to it as a way embracing metaphorical interpretation of the Bible as one of four time-tested tools.

St. Augustine of Hippo, Bishop of North Africa during the early 5th century, taught that there were four key ways to make sense of our ancient spiritual texts: some passages required a literal interpretation, others offered a moral perspective, some were clearly allegorical, while still others asked for anagogical or metaphorical eyes to further our understanding. He was clear that whenever the Bible contradicted science, facts must trump fundamentalism every time. Such was the commonsense sophistication of historic Christianity until the late 19th century when anxious Protestants gave birth to the heresy of fundamentalism.

The Ascension of Jesus, described in our second reading, falls into this later anagogical category – a theological poem, if you will – about how we might live faithfully even with doubts and questions. Reading number one finds Jesus offering his worried friends comfort and consolation as they con-sider life without him – the Passion and the Cross loom heavily in their hearts – while reading number two imaginatively describes the spiritual departure of Jesus as a stage in spiritual maturation: living the questions as Rilke put it in Letters to a Young Poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

And therein lies the paradox: maturing in faith, growing deeper into gravitas and trust, demands making peace with uncertainty. Thinking sacramentally helps us discern mystical wisdom from our senses – we see the cycle of life built into the pulse of creation and the seasons – and extrapolate that there is an order to God’s grace. This is the BEST of the Via Positiva. Thinking metaphorically and/or paradoxically, however, is the soul of the Via Negativa where we make peace with what we cannot or do not comprehend. My doctoral advisor said it was learning to accept what gaps in my understanding I could live with. Or as St. Paul said: now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall see face to face: so we walk by faith not always by sight.

The late Reverend Dr. James Fowler of Emory University, founder of the Center for Research on Faith and Moral Development, called this the universalist stage of faith development. Influenced and guided by the rigorous acumen of Erik Ericson, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Paul Tillich, Fowler discerned seven key stages of faith:

· Undifferentiated Faith is given to children in the first years of their lives by loving caregivers who evoke trust, courage, and love; this stage is essentially trust as part of the bonds of a healthy family.

· Projective Faith occurs in pre-school children who are unable to think scientifically but claim impressions of the holy as their family involves them in the rituals and rites of religion.

· Mythic/Literal Faith is stage three among pre-adolescent children who are starting to figure out what is fact or speculation. They are growing beyond the influence of their parents as they interact with teachers and worship leaders; it is still experiential but with nuance.

· Conventional Faith is stage number four: it begins about 13 years of age and usually concludes at 18 but some stay in this phase all their lives. Conventional faith affirms the rules and authority of tradition and finds a measure of certainty in conformity.

· Individuated or Reflective Faith is rebellious: it drives many young adults as assumptions and convention are questioned, challenged, and often discarded in pursuit of truth. As Fowler liked to say: maturity is gained by rejecting some parts of our faith while affirming other parts; it is how a person starts to take greater ownership of his/her own faith journey.

· Conjunctive Faith is the sixth stage of faith that comes into play in our early 30s. We’ve made some peace with our questions, given more of our attention to becoming successful in our public lives, and seek the assurance of community. Kierkegaard used to say that rebels often come back to church at this stage – especially if they have children.

Fowler concluded that most people end their faith journeys in either stage five or six: one remains obsessed with questioning authority while the other values community life more than certainty. But one last stage remains: universalizing faith. Fowler describes people at this stage as having "a special grace that makes them seem more lucid, more simple, and yet somehow more fully human than the rest of us." 

People at this stage can become important religious teachers because they have the ability to relate to anyone at any stage and from any faith. They can relate without condescension but at the same time are able to challenge the assumptions that those of other stages might have. People at this stage cherish life but also do not hold on to life too tightly. They put their faith in action, challenging the status quo and working to create justice in the world.

Ascension Sunday is the institutional church’s way of encouraging us to keep moving towards this universalist stage of faith that celebrates a both/and perspective – a trust in the Via Positiva and Negativa simultaneously – along with a few clues about how to get there. The calculated cruelty of the current crop of Christian Nationalists in the US but all over Europe and South American as well shows why the journey of faith towards maturity is vital to our personal and collective well-being. The assault on trans-people could be a case study of why this matters: according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation sixteen stages have already passed laws or policies banning gender affirming care for people under 18 – and seven other states are considering doing so, too. 

At this moment more than 300,000 high school transgender youth are seeking information, counseling, and guidance about how to live healthy and I submit to you HOLY lives – and 44 % of those teens now find themselves in states that have already passed discriminatory laws. The Human Rights Campaign is clear:

By preventing doctors from providing this care – or threatening to take children away from parents who support their child in their transition – these bills prevent transgender youth from accessing medically necessary, safe health care backed by decades of research and supported by every major medical association representing over 1.3 million US doctors.

Encouraging maturity and ripening in our spiritual journeys is a matter of life and death – and it carries economic concerns with it, too. You may have read that the Disney Corporation just pull-ed the plug on an expansion project in Orlando, FLA that would have resulted in another 2,000 well-paying jobs and over one billion in building expenses because the states governor is using his fundamentalist faith to create a punitive theocracy. So, let’s be clear: faith development is NOT just a personal matter – it carries with it wonderful or worrisome consequences.

The censorship campaigns currently cascading through the realm of public school text-books is yet another place where banning words, books, and poems is training a new generation in bottom line, literal and conventional thinking when what this era cries for is metaphorical imagination. Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade, purveyors of the mythopoetic movement among men seeking maturity, wrote this in the introduction to their brilliant anthology: The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. “How does the work of men moving into maturity connect to poetry? We cannot explain their attention in terms of literacy or electricity – most of the men of the world can’t read OR watch television.”

The relationship of poetry to culture has been debated as far back as Plato’s attach on Homer, through the Renaissance and the Puritan’s Reformation, and continuing with the Romantic Shelley’s Defense of Poetry and today’s arguments for a core curriculum of great books. While our European-American tradition questions and argues – and has to teach poetry to sullen students in English classes – other cultures speaking Spanish, Russian, Arabic to say nothing of the many tongues of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, grow up INSIDE poems, drenched with poetic metaphors and rhythms. As we learn to criticize, to take a poem apart, to get its meaning, they learn to listen and to recite. By drawing this SHARP contrast with other cultures we are pointing to a defect in ours. We live in a poetically underdeveloped nation… and with-out the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, our emotions and imagination flattens out into a lack of spirit and loss of vision.

They conclude – and I concur – that reclaiming the heart and soul of poetry is both a way into the healing of our brokenness AND an essential ingredient in spiritual maturity. At this stage of our common lives: poetry is also at the core of resistance to the fascism of fundamentalism and a way to renew our souls. It is, I have come to believe, the essence of the Ascension which is PURE metaphor.

Now, as I’ve intimated before, I’m often late to the party. I usually get there, but I’m rarely in the vanguard – and this is as true emotionally and politically as it is poetically and spiritually. There’s a REASON why I love the song, “It’s been a long time coming – going to be a long time, long time gone!” Apparently, that’s just the way I was made and it doesn’t matter HOW hard I fight it: I move at the speed of discernment. For decades I didn’t read or listen to poetry – I was down with music and lyrics but followed the groove, melody, and beat more than the lyrics. Then, one cold, rainy, grey night in a Borders Bookstore outside of Cleveland, I stumbled upon this poem by Rilke – and I dissolved into tears:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors
And keeps walking because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house, dies there –
Inside the dishes and the glasses, so that his children have to go out into the world on their own toward that same church which he forgot.

You know the old aphorism: when the student is ready, the Buddha appears? Man this student was FINALLY ready – and the Buddha CLEARLY appeared. I’ve indicated that there’ve been a few times my life was in the dumper – and that was one of them. I was ready to chuck my ministry, get as far away from popular culture as possible, get on a motorcycle and head to New Mexico to train as a massage therapist. I was sick inside and out and was caught in grief and fear.

And then Brother Rilke showed up as a bookstore Buddha telling me that it was ESSENTIAL to walk out of mediocrity, conformity, and bourgeois values and get DOWN to it. Down to the soul of being, down to the depths of my angst, down to my passions and deepest love. It was, if you will, a come to Jesus moment where the Spirit pushed me into poetry and the power of symbols and metaphor. Isn’t THAT what’s being advocated in the second reading from St. Luke? I find two clues in St. Luke’s text:

· The first is what Jesus says to his friends after LIVING with them for three intense years and then spiritually guiding them for seven weeks of resurrection. “Everything I have told you while I was with you comes to this: All the things written about me in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms have to be fulfilled.” So, he went on to open their under-standing of the Word of God by showing them how to read their Bibles this way.

· Ok, that’s Eugene Peterson’s reworking and paraphrase of Luke 24 but it still rings true: you would’ve thought that by now the disciples would have sorted this all out and started to engage the scriptures creatively like Jesus – but that’s apparently not the case. They’re still confused and mixed up and doubtful — joyful, yes, but “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.” So, even here, in his very last moments with them before his ascension, Jesus is still their teacher: Let’s go over this one more time… as he opens their minds to understanding the scriptures” — which is to say, prior to even this eleventh-hour moment, even after all they’d been through, the minds of the disciples were still closed. (SALT Project) In Fowler’s paradigm, they’re still thinking like adolescents or children.

Learning to think, see, speak, and trust sacred metaphor is what takes us all deeper – beyond the obvious – into the doubts and darkness we need to ripen. The Quaker educator and activist, Parker Palmer who often works with singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer, just this past week wrote that as he celebrated his 81st birthday the importance of poetic metaphor brought him this blessing as he pondered his own mortality:

I woke up with a line running thru my head, a line that seemed to want to go somewhere: “Everything falls away.” As I tracked those words in my journal, and then into a poem, I learned that they are not words of despair. As things fall away, other things, important things, are revealed—including the fact that we are not separate beings who can or must go it alone. Our fates are for-ever threaded together with all beings in the intricate tapestry of life. When we pretend we can live heedless of one another, we make a deadly mistake. But when our lives honor our inter-dependence with each other and the earth, we live in what William Blake called “eternity’s sunrise. To which he then crafted this poem:



Sooner or later, everything falls away. You, the work you’ve done, your successes, large and small, your failures, too. Those moments when you were light, alongside the times you became one with the night. The friends, the people you loved, who loved you, those who might have wished you ill, none of this is forever. All of it is soon to go, or going, or long gone. Everything – you see – falls away, except the thread you’ve followed throughout your life. This thread strings together all you’ve been and done, the thread you didn’t know you were tracking until, toward the end, you see that the tread is what stays as everything else falls away.
For those who remain I say: follow that thread as far as you can and you’ll find that it does not end, but weaves into the unimaginable vastness of life. Your life never was the solo turn it seemed to be. It was always part of the great weave of nature and humanity, an immensity we come to know only as we follow our own small threads to the place where they merge with the boundless whole. Each of our threads runs its course, then joins in life together. This magnificent tapestry – this masterpiece in which we live forever.

I see this at work as I prepare my gardens for seedlings. I see it within me as I age, ripen, and relinquish some of the fears, distractions, addictions, and traps that I once relied upon in my youth. I see it in our political chaos as ONE way of being the US of A dies on the vine while competing visions rise-up and struggle for dominance. This falling away is akin to acceptance – the key to serenity – which doesn’t happen automatically but is built into the fabric and pulse of creation starting with the Big Bang and continuing today personally, collectively, artistically, spiritually, and politically. Let-ting part of life fall away – accepting it as part of God’s sacred order – is what Jesus is trying to communicate to his friends by teaching them a new way to interpret scripture.

· The other clue takes place just after they experience the departure of Jesus. In what we know as chapter two of St. Luke’s gospel – the Acts of the Apostles – while the disciples are standing there awe-struck and looking up to heaven, a messenger – an angel? – appears and says: dear people why are you stuck here with your heads in the clouds? Jesus is NOT here any more so get back to basics and start living his love as he just told you.

· I think Salman Rushdie is right when he told us: art is not entertainment – it is revolution. “All art began as sacred art, all painting began as religious painting and all writing began as sacred poems.” Our culture – our politics – our religions and economies need a revolution – a revolution of trust and nuance, the abandonment of fundamentalism in ALL its forms – and the resurrections and even ascension of mystery, metaphor, and poetry. I believe that’s a key com-ponent for the redemption of our American soul – and the jury is still out whether or not we’re up to the challenge. To which Jesus replied: well, get your heads out of the clouds, get down to reclaiming poetry as part of your spiritual journey, and I will be with you always. One of the implications of living by faith is trusting God beyond the evidence – not stupidly – but as those informed by grace which shows up in the most unexpected ways. Poet Jane Kenyon hit a home run when she penned, “Happiness” which closes today’s reflection.



There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon, as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night. It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens, to rain falling on the open sea, to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Lord, may it be so among us, as well.