+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.
+
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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