earth day reflection...

 EARTH DAY REFLECTION: Palmer, MA – April 21, 2024

Tomorrow marks the 54th anniversary of observing Earth Day in the United States: after our Out-reach Ministry suggested we pause our Eastertide contemplations for a day to reflect on what people of faith might bring to and learn from this conversation and observance, I was eager to comply. Some will recall that first Earth Day in April where more than 20 million Americans at tens of thousands of sites set aside time to discern and act in ways that cherished Mother Earth. Today it’s estimated that more than one billion residents across planet Earth will do likewise as we practice compassion, cooperation, and camaraderie with the land, sky, water, flora and fauna, and the diverse human cultures that comprise our 21st century reality.

· So, in the spirit of partnership with the cosmos I want to shift gears during my reflection to-day and tell you about an alternative Christian orthodoxy that starts with the affirmation that homo sapiens are not the only living beings that matter to the Lord. It’s a confession of solid-arity with reality rather than the traditionally anthropocentric celebration of humanity as the crown of creation.

· It’s a spiritual perspective brought to birth in the West first by our ancient Celtic ancestors in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; embraced and embellished later by St. Francis of Assisi in the 13th century CE; reclaimed and revived after WWII by the Rev. George MacLeod and the ecumenical monastic community of Iona; deepened by the French Jesuit botanist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; and popularized by the Franciscan scientist Illia Delio, Pope Francis, young evangelicals like Shane Claiborne as well as the late Rachel Held Evans.

This generous orthodoxy affirms a nonpartisan spirituality with room at the table for hunters, NRA members, and tree huggers alike: farmers and casual gardeners are involved along with city folk and suburbanites; intellectuals and utilitarian pragmatists; those who thrive in the countryside as well as those who dwell in apartments or assisted living communities. It’s a big tent spirituality that rec-ognizes climate change and other social problems without resorting to doomsday hyperbole. So, to open the door and help us center our hearts as well as our minds, I’m going to share a poem and a song that have become mentors for me. The poem is by the American poet William Safford called: “What the Earth Says.”

The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other. (Some people call their scenery flat, their only pictures framed by what they know: I think around them rise a riches and a loss too equal for their chart — but absolutely tall.)

The earth says every summer have a ranch that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape that proclaims a universe — sermon of the hills, hallelujah mountain, highway guided by the way the world is tilted, reduplication of mirage, flat evening: a kind of ritual for the wavering. The earth says where you live wear the kind of color that your life is (grey shirt for me) and by listening with the same bowed head that sings draw all things into one song, join the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy way, the rage without met by the wings within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.

Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.

And the song… well, some of you will know it right away…

Blackbird singing in the dead of night: take these broken wings and learn to fly all your life – you were only waiting for this moment to arise

Blackbird singing in the dead of night: take these sunken eyes and learn to see all your life – you were only waiting for this moment to be
Blackbird fly – blackbird fly – into the light of a dark, black night
Blackbird fly – blackbird fly – into the light of a dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night: take these broken eyes and learn to see all your life you were only waiting for this moment to be free
You were only waiting for this moment to be free
You were only waiting for this moment to be free

Often when I choose a popular secular poem or song to serve as a spiritual guide someone always asks: why not a traditional hymn or psalm? And that’s a good question – it tells me they’re listening and feel safe enough to take a risk - so my answer, respectfully born of decades of refinement, is this: artists have historically been a few generations ahead of theologians in naming and claiming the movement of the Holy Spirit in the world. Religion rightfully changes slowly: G.K. Chesterton said that tradition is the democracy of the dead that helps us pause and search for the big picture. Huston Smith, the granddaddy of contemporary interfaith dialogue, said: “The world’s enduring religions at their best reveal the distilled wisdom of the human race in history.” Traditional wisdom has been dragged through the cleansing sands of time and stripped of unnecessary distractions.

Artists and scientists, on the other hand, have been ordained to push the contours of culture, to point out as James Russell Lowell’s hymn proclaims: new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient truth uncouth. They are the canaries in the mine shafts of reality who reveal both the blessings and the dangers of any given moment in time. Think of the abstract expressionists after WWI who gave shape and form to the chaos and angst of their generation with their paintings; or com-posers like Messiaen and Mahler after WWII who expressed audibly what a world on fire sounds like. Same for Black bebop jazz artists in the 40s and 50s who conveyed the soul of the Civil Rights freedom movement. One important reason I’ve been drawn to all types of non-traditional spiritual poetry and music is that they express this moment in time while religion rightfully evokes the time-less.

· The other is that celebrating songs from OUTSIDE the canon reminds us that in the eyes of the Lord there’s NO such thing as secular and sacred: God’s presence fills the world. If you know the work of Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation, you know he insisted that everything we do is for the glory of God – and just to make his point he stole the melody of a German drinking song to be the foundation of his most famous hymn: A Mighty Fortress is Our God.

· Evangelicals, liberals, Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox have ALL affirmed this in their own unique way as Baptist preacher, Dallas Willard, said so well: “There is truly no division between sacred and secular except what we have created.”

That’s why the division of the legitimate roles and functions of human life into the sacred and secular does incalculable damage to our individual lives and to the cause of Christ. Holy people must stop going into “church work” as their natural course of action and take up holy orders in farming, industry, law, education, banking, and journalism with the same zeal previously given to evangelism, pastoral ministry, and missionary work.

And that’s why I chose “Blackbird” by the Beatles as my compass for Earth Day: it not only looks to nature as a time-tested guide into the heart and soul of the Lord’s creation; it does so by celebrating a humble and ordinary blackbird. This alternative and generous orthodoxy, you see, takes the first creation story in the Old Testament book of Genesis as its foundation – and posits original blessing instead of original sin. In the beginning, tradition teaches, God created: created the heavens and the earth, the water and the land, the sun, the moon, the animals, the insects, the birds as well as order out of the chaos. And when the cosmos was almost complete, God then created hum-an beings and called ALL of this creation good. Very, very good – hence original blessing rather than original sin.

· Not that sin is to be ignored or denied; not at all, just that sin does not define our essence eternally. This spirituality trusts that when the Lord God said, “Let us make human beings in our own image, according to our likeness” God wasn’t kidding which is a very different starting point than the second creation account in Genesis 2 that we know as the story of Adam and Eve, right?

· Their fall from grace has dominated Western Christianity since the 4th century of the CE when St. Augustine, brilliant African bishop of Hippo in what is now Algeria, tried to understand the incarnation of Jesus as the sinless Son of God. Given his literal reading of Scripture, Augustine concluded that the one reality that set the birth of Jesus apart from the rest of us is that Jesus was not born of concupiscence – lustful fornication – from the Latin con meaning with and cu-pere meaning ardent sensual obsession. All the rest of us, concluded Augustine, are descend-ants of Adam and Eve and poisoned by their rebellion against God.

To make matters worse, given the limitations of his era’s science – and his own misogyny – August-ne mistakenly concluded that the only way sin could be passed on from one generation to the next was through a woman’s birth canal – essentially naming women to be the source of original sin.

Now it’s critical to note that neither our spiritual cousins in Judaism nor our sisters and brothers in Eastern Orthodoxy accept this interpretation of the Adam and Eve story. They see it as a mythological description of humans entering the world pure and created in God’s image with the ability to choose either good or evil via free will.

· These traditions teach that a person always has the power to avoid sin and its negative effects IF we’re willing to own our failures, accept them are real, and then learn from our mistakes as the Serenity Prayer teaches, ok?

· God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference: one spirituality starts with creativity, humility, and trust, the other celebrates sin and shame.

And I don’t think it was accidental that the author of the Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr, not only hails from OUR spiritual tradition, but crafted this life-changing prayer in the dark days before WWII when, at our church in Lee, he was asked for a prayer to kick off Vacation Bible School. Despite the dangers of that era and the suffering that followed, Niebuhr proclaimed that the heart and soul of Christianity always starts with Jesus and God’s grace NOT judgment. “Nothing worth doing,” he wrote, “is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. And nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

· And that’s what I hear happening in the New Testament reading from St. Matthew today where the disciples ask: “Who is the greatest in the kingdom?” That is, who shows us what kingdom living looks like? Who models God’s soul for us in real life?

· So, what does Jesus do and say to answer them but bring a small child forward saying that unless you become childlike, you just won’t get what kingdom living is all about.

He’s not advocating childishness ok? There’s already too much childishness in our politics, fears, bigotries, and all the rest. Rather, Jesus calls us to reclaim being childlike: open, curious, trusting, and dependent upon powers greater than our themselves for safety and sustenance. Walter Wangerin, a brilliant pastor and teacher, used to say that children under the age of 10 are organically mystics who experienced God’s presence everywhere.

And by mystic he means one who has experienced something of the holy within. Fr. Richard Rohr writes analytically that: “A mystic has the power of receptivity and sympathy; their souls are porous and have the ability to be so open as to stretch beyond the usual small and protective ego to something salvific.” Marcus Borg evoked the innate mysticism of children in a way that still rings true to me:

Once a three-year-old girl who was the only child in her family when her mom became pregnant. The young girls was wildly excited about having a baby in the house. So, on the day the mother-to-be delivers, this soon to be sister is ecstatic. Mom and dad go off to the hospital while she stays with her grandparents. A few days later, they come home with a new baby brother and she is just delighted. After they’ve been home for a couple of hours, the little girl tells her parents that she wants to be with the baby in the baby’s room, alone, with the door shut. She’s absolutely insist-ent about the door being shut. Which creeps her parents out: they know she’s a good child but they’ve heard about sibling rivalry and aren’t sure what they should do. They remind one another that they’ve recently installed an intercom system in preparation for the arrival of the new baby and conclude and if they hear even the slightest weird thing happening, they can be in there in a flash. So, they let their little girl go into the room and close the door behind her. They race to the listening post at the intercom, hearing her footsteps move across the room. They imagine her now standing over the baby’s crib and then hear her say to her two-day-old baby brother: “Can you tell me about God. I’ve almost forgotten.”

· I LOVE that story! It captures the essence of what Jesus was teaching about childlike humility and awe. It reminds me of our own two daughters who, as PKs – preachers’ kids – used to play giving birth to Jesus every year during Christmas.

· They were both born at home so one daughter would don a blue head scarf in the manner of the Blessed Virgin Mary while the other girl covered her sister’s lower body with a blanket like a midwife. They would hold one another’s hands until Mother Mary said: I feel the urge to push. So, her sister would kneel on the floor, put her hands under the blanket, say: count to three and then push momma before pulling a baby doll out from under the blanket saying: LOOK baby Jesus has just been born. Then they’d swap places so that both sisters could bring Jesus to birth. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. Indeed.

The alternative orthodoxy that resonates with me on Earth Day starts with a generous creativity rather than sin and judgment. By grace awe supplants cynicism, trust switches places with fear, and the rhythms of God’s FIRST word – not the bible but creation itself – teaches us how-to live-in harmony with the holy, with the human, and with the whole world. Small wonder that St. Paul began his letter to the church in Rome with this affirmation:

What can be known about God is plain to us all because God has made it plain: ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature have been seen and understood through the things God has created in nature.

The prophet Isaiah was equally effusive about nature guiding us into a harmonious life:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Trust this and you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle, and it shall be to the Lord as an ever-lasting sign that shall not be cut off.

On Earth Day we’re invited to reconnect to God’s creation, cultivate a childlike trust and awe of the Lord as a way of grounding ourselves in the divine community of the cosmos, and dare I say to do it playfully? We’re in this together, beloved, our humanity thrives in concert with creation’s totality – and not just kith and kin, but flora and fauna as well as earth, sky, and sea. In the early days of the pandemic, I was helping our church in Williamstown wrestle through our collective angst and un-certainty when nothing seemed to make sense. 

A poem by Wendell Berry kept popping up that became a guide for us we re-learned how to stay grounded in grace even when life felt like it was go-ing to hell. It’s a practice – a spiritual discipline – and a taste of grace that I share with you now in the hopes it will help you get grounded in the community of creation and the blessings therein, too:

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.

trusting that the season of new life is calming creeping into its fullness...

Earlier this week, when the temperature was a balmy 65F and the skies sunny and blue, I began my annual outdoor spring cleaning: piles and piles of decaying leaves and assorted tree branches and twigs were gathered from the front of the house and hauled to the edge of our wetlands. There's more landscaping to do over the next few days, but a semblance of visual order has been restored to what had become a pale reminder of last year's winter, wonder land. Today beckons me to the far side of our property where another two days of effort will be required as I reintroduce my chainsaw to a new crop of bracken. There's another few tons of leaf detritus destined for the wetlands, too along with maybe a hundred pine cones crying out to be collected. 

It's a small but satisfying way to embrace Earth Day 2024: a time to touch the earth and listen to the silent wisdom of creation; an embodied prayer, if you will, that "restoreth my soul." (Psalm 23 KJV) At about the same time as I was in the garden, I came across this blessing from the pen of William Safford who calls it: "What the Earth Says."

The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other. (Some people call their scenery flat, their only pictures framed by what they know: I think around them rise a riches and a loss
too equal for their chart — but absolutely tall.)

The earth says every summer have a ranch that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape that proclaims a universe — sermon of the hills, hallelujah mountain, highway guided by the way the world is tilted, reduplication of mirage, flat evening: a kind of ritual for the wavering. The earth says where you live wear the kind of color

that your life is (grey shirt for me) and by listening with the same bowed head that sings draw all things into one song, join the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy way,

the rage without met by the wings within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.

Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.

It's torn jeans, mud-crusted railroad boots, and a black sweatshirt for me as the earth invites me to wear the colors of my life. To be sure, I also have a brilliant new white Irish grandfather's shirt for worship. And a host of vintage rock'n'roll t-shirts for our upcoming gigs. But for the most part, its ragged denim and flannel for me until it is too hot to bother. Right now, this will suffice say the pale green and reddish brown buds of the trees in the wetlands and the nearly white-brown straw and weather-beaten greys nod in agreement. 

Over the nearly two decades that we've lived at the foot of the Berkshires, I have come to cherish the early days of spring. What some call "mud season" feels to me like a thin place where the sacred is palpable. Not in the extravagant abundance of summer nor the expanding melancholia of autumn. No, this is a quiet season in spite of the chorus of peepers singing mating songs from the marsh. The colors are tentative. The transformation of the woodlands from barren to fecund incremental. The return of the birds and the sunshine itself measured. My soul hungers for this season. It's wisdom and solace are simultaneously spiritual nourishment and antidote to the poisoned madness of our politics. 

I need both comfort and cure in order to be engaged "in the world but not part of it." For that's the invitation, yes? It is always both/and - refreshment as well as challenge - not the privileged illusion of either/or living where the hard and broken realities are left to others while I revel in peace. Even while my psyche yearns for solitude, my conscience calls me towards embodied solidarity. Wendell Berry gets it right when he writes:

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.

It's about a rhythm: entering and leaving, action and contemplation, acceptance and challenge. Not one only - or the other. That's what I sense from Mary Oliver's "Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches." It is brilliant.

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ of other lives— 

​​​​​​​ tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ hanging 

​​​​​​​ from the branches of the young locust trees, in early summer,

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ feel like? ...

​​​​Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? 

​​​​​​​ Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot 

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself 

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​ continually? 

​​​​​​​ Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed 

​​​​​​​ with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? 

​​​​​​​ Well, there is time left—

​​​​​​​ fields everywhere invite you into them

I still am not very good at both/and so I keep practicing. Mostly I don't grieve over my limitations and lack of nondual vision - that's part of balance, I think. All we can do is simply use what and who we are at this moment, keep at it, and trust God with the rest as the season of new life calmly creeps into its fullness.

reflections on the third sunday of eastertide...

What a fascinating, illuminating, humbling, and awesome week it was for those
who took the time to experience the eclipse. For most of our lives, we proceed as if we are in total control: we turn on a switch – and there’s light; we push a button – and there’s sound, heat, air conditioning, even digital entertainment or facetime communication with loved ones across the world. I value and utilize all of these conveniences and more, but know they can all too easily lull me into believing that I am the crown of creation and the center of the universe. And while I don’t say this to shame any of us, advance one political perspective over another, or deny my own complicity within a culture of arro-gance: the astonishing reverence evoked by the eclipse brought to mind a timeless spiritual critique that consistently calls us to accountability.

· In St. Mark’s gospel, for example, Jesus asks us: What does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose their soul?

· More than a millennia later, 19th century spiritual wisdom-keeper and warrior of the indigenous Lakota nation, Sitting Bull, lamented that: “the love of possession is like a disease with them: they take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this Mother of ours, the Earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away. If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough for them.”

And from within our own Western intellectual tradition, the French poet, Cyrano de Bergerac, quip-ped: The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.

Two details from eclipse continue to touch me deeply. First was an awareness of a power beyond my comprehension and control. I like the way singer-songwriter, Carrie Newcomer, put it from her home in rural Indiana:

The temperature dropped precipitously… then the wind came up dramatically blowing across the new grasses in the springtime field… colors began to glow and birds began to quiet until finally there was only the barest sliver of the sun showing. Then, in a moment, we were in full totality. What hit me immediately was that I had no reference point for the light around me. We know in our minds and bodies what morning light is, how it feels, what time of year. We know when we walk outside that it is twilight or that the sun must be slipping below the horizon. Our hearts and minds have filed away so many kinds of light and something inside us says,” Oh, this is evening in winter, or morning in summer.” But my mind and body had absolutely no reference point for this kind of light. As the cold increased and the winds came up further, we were surrounded by an im-possibly unfamiliar light as the world had dimmed beyond twilight or dawn: this was something completely rarified..

Second, for at least a short time – maybe just four minutes and 27 seconds – we were one. In the anticipation and the encounter, we were no longer antagonistic or judgmental: we were in this to-gether. I thought of St. Paul reminding us that after experiencing God’s grace in the love of Jesus: we’re no longer just male and female, rich and poor, male and female, or Christian and Jew…and I would add Republican or Democrat, capitalist or communist, gay, straight, or bi, believer or agnostic, Muslim, Buddhist, none or done: regardless of our very real differences we were united in heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit. 

Seeing ALL those faces turned upward inspired by the mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the mystery of creation before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is simultaneously repelled and attracted – in that moment, when the wonderous power of the Creator embraced us all – our place in the cosmos was revealed and the blessing of wonder trumped both our cynicism and anxiety – at least for a moment.

· Which brings us to the third Sunday of Eastertide – our series of seven Sabbaths set aside to cultivate sacramental vision – the acquisition, cultivation, training, and trust of eyes that can see and recognize the presence of our Risen Lord within our ordinary existence.

· Starting with Easter, our gospel readings have all been about the Risen Christ returning to those he cared for after his resurrection and their inability to recognize the Lord because… they do not yet have eyes to see. Resurrection eyes and sacramental vision are not automatic: they take time, patience, practice, intentionality, doubt as well as a willingness to relinquish some control in order to see by faith and live by grace.

The Biblical story is clear: on Easter Sunday, Mary Magdalene – perhaps the most insightful of all of Jesus’ disciples – acts with tender solidarity by returning to the tomb to dress his cadaver for burial. In spite of her profound commitment, however, Magdalene is initially unable to recognize the Risen Christ and mistakes him for the gardener.

Same for the other disciples including our icon of skepticism, Doubting Thomas, and the two unnamed disciples who encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus but only recognize him in the breaking of bread. The remaining faith community back in Jerusalem was equally bewildered when Jesus suddenly appears to them again in the Upper Room. Today’s text from St. Luke says: they were startled and frightened, thinking they’d seen a ghost. Even AFTER Jesus blesses them with peace and carefully shows them his torn flesh, the disciples experience both joy and disbelief wondering what in the world was happening. Resurrection eyes and sacramental vision, it would seem, are gifts from God’s Holy Spirit that we’re asked to receive, trust, practice, and refine.

· First, Jesus blesses us with God’s peace – shalom in Hebrew, charis in Greek meaning peace and grace – a peace that passes human understanding yet restores us to wholeness. All the post resurrection stories in the New Testa-ment are about healing and renewal rather than judgment and condemnation.

· Over the centuries we have constructed theologies built upon fear and confusion about sin, but if we keep our eyes on Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection we see a deeper truth be-yond all superstitious notions of God’s wrath. Jesus brings us peace born of grace. Period. End of story. Mic drop and all the rest. And just so that we don’t miss this truth, after teaching the disciples on the road to Emmaus about Moses and the prophets and being revealed in the breaking of bread, Jesus shows up back in Jerusalem offering peace again before immediately asking for something to eat. There’s NO condemnation here whatsoever: just tenderness and food for the journey. That’s the first insight.

The second is how Jesus closes this passage with a promise: I am sending upon you the gift my Father promised: so stay put until you are clothed in power from on high. So, we need to know what IS this promised gift of power from on high? The short answer is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The presence of grace in our hearts that gives us resurrection eyes and sacramental vision. Sr. Joan Chittister, a wise Benedictine nun who consistently advocates for equal rights for women in her Roman Catholic context, explains resurrection eyes like this: “In order to continue working for justice and integrity in the world – or the church – without becoming cynical necessitates the wisdom and presence of the Holy Spirit. The gift of sacramental vision is our ability to recognize the butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle within the egg, and the saint within the sinner.” That’s why the Risen Christ teaches his disciples about Moses and the Prophets – the LONG answer:

· Torah was given to Moses with the promise that honoring the spirit of the commandments would link God’s people to the steadfast love of the Lord that endures forever. King David celebrated this in Psalm 51: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness; create in me, O God, a clean heart that will blot out my offenses with thy ceaseless tender mercies. Part of the promised power from on high is the steadfast grace of God that never ends.

· The prophet Joel added that when God pours out the Spirit upon us we will be so bathed in grace that our sons and daughters will prophesy, our elders will dream dreams, and our youth will see visions of healing and peace. Isaiah amplified this in chapter 65 saying:

Chaos and pain can be things of the past to be forgotten. Look ahead with joy. Anticipate what I’m creating as I pour out my spirit upon you: No more sounds of weeping in the city, no more cries of anguish; No more babies dying in the cradle, or old people who don’t enjoy a full lifetime; You will build houses and move in, plant fields and eat what is grown… my people will be as long-lived as trees, my chosen ones will have satisfaction in their work… for before they call out, I’ll an-swer. Before they’ve finished speaking, I’ll have heard. The wolf and lamb will graze the same meadow, the lion and ox will eat straw from the same trough…and NO harm will take place any- where on my Holy Mountain,” says the Lord our God.

God’s promise for those who receive the gift of power from on high is the resolution of paradox – eyes to see as the Lord does – and today’s text from St. Luke offers three clues about nourishing the gift of grace within and among us. Resurrection living and seeing with sacramental vision, you see, is not JUST for Jesus but “includes a greater intimacy with the Lord our God so that we have eyes to see the sacred beyond the chaos and confusion.”

· None of us organically have resurrection eyes that can recognize the Risen Christ in our midst or see the eagle within the egg. It takes training and trust and the willingness and ability to get out of God’s way.

· Fr. Richard Rohr has been helpful to me when he says: “Practice is an essential reset but-ton that we must push many times before we can experience any genuine newness. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we are practicing all the time .When we operate by our habituated patterns, we strengthen certain neural pathways, which makes us, as the saying goes, “set in our ways.” But when we stop using old neural grooves, these pathways actually die off! Practice can literally create new responses and allow rigid ones to show themselves. It’s strange that we’ve come to understand the importance of practice in sports, in most therapies, in any successful business, and in creative endeavors, but for some reason most of us do not see the need for it in the world of spirituality. Yet it’s probably more important there than in any other area. “New wine demands fresh skins or otherwise we lose both the wine and the container.” Practices, more than anything else, create a new container for us, one that will protect the new wine we wish to take in (and strengthen the promised power from above born of the Spirit AND our receptivity.)

· For some of us the eclipse awakened us to this truth – at least for a few moments – when everything felt new and genuinely beyond our ability to control or even comprehend. Two days after the eclipse I had a more prosaic encounter with the Lord’s quiet invitation to get out of my limited vision when I rented a car in order to make a quick trip to Brooklyn. My precious grandson was going to step up from his beginner’s guitar and get a new instrument and both he as well and his momma, our daughter Jesse, wanted my help.

· Now, because my wife has some physical limitations and health issues, I didn’t feel comfort-able taking our only car 150 miles away, so I made arrangements and found myself driving a brand-new Chevy Trax to Brooklyn. Apparently, I hadn’t rented a car for a while, nor have I been the driver of a NEW vehicle since well before the pandemic lockdown. It was great – at first - but then frustrating before it eventually became humbling. You see, I couldn’t figure out how to open the trunk. When I stopped for gas, it took at least 10 minutes to find and then open the hidden little door to the gas tank. And as I sat before the massive instrumental panel that resembled something out of Star Trek, I had NO idea how to get the AC or the radio on.

The piece de resistance, however, was my slow realization that there was NO CD player in this car and I had 25 discs I was ready to listen to on the ride. It seems that contemporary folk no longer play CDs in their cars anymore – it’s all blue tooth and streaming apps – which totally confuse me. So, as I sat at a Stewart’s Convenience Store trying to figure out what the devil the owner’s manual was trying to tell me, it began to dawn on me how much of a techno-dinosaur I am: not only was I caught in my limited experience with this brave new world – I really do live a quiet, slow-pa-ed con-templative and quasi- monastic life that’s wildly out of touch with parts of the modern realm – but in that car all my beautiful musical CDs were worthless.

· I had to sit with this for a few minutes – take it all in – before bursting out in laughter at myself for being such a techno-relic. It seems that even in this all too ordinary encounter, God’s Spirit wanted me to remember that I can be all too set in my ways. That I still don’t con-sistently have eyes to see what’s going on. And that I regularly forget to practice sacramental vision, ok?

· Sometimes it’s an eclipse, other times a rental car, but I believe that the sacred comes to us over and over to help us practice seeing beyond the obvious, to show us how get out of our own way and trust a wisdom greater than ourselves. Scripture calls this the Spirit empowering us from above – and one of my mentors, the late Bard of Vermont, Frederick Buechner, adds:

I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I live can open up into extraordinary vistas… that’s why I believe that there is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly… So, please: listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell you way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis ALL moments are key moments and life itself is grace.

· And just so that I wouldn’t miss the blessing of laughing at myself yet again and opening-up rather than shutting down, when I FINALLY figured out how to operate this newfangled radio, who was speaking in an interview but one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott. I thought I’d stumbled onto a radio evangelist’s program at first and I usually find them too smarmy or in- complete for my taste.

· But after a moment, Anne’s wise, humble, and humorous voice said: I do not at all under-stand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. That’s why I believe the opposite of faith is not doubt: It’s certainty and madness. You can always tell that you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do. That’s when I realized I had tears in my eyes – and brother Buechner taught me something about my tears, too when he wrote:

YOU NEVER KNOW what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God s speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.

The wisdom of Eastertide – the path of sacramental vision that shows us how to see beyond the obvious and discover resurrection eyes that celebrate the presence of the Risen Christ – is a par-adox. God’s gift of grace and promise of power and inspiration from above are totally free and un-earned, “yet God does not give them except to people who really want them, who choose them, and say “yes” to them. This is the fully symbiotic nature of grace. Divine Loving is so pure that it never manipulates, shames, or forces itself on anyone. Love waits to be invited and desired, and only then rushes in.”

· This next week won’t bring an eclipse, but it MIGHT bring a new car rental. Or an embrace by a loved one. Or a crocus or daffodil peeking through the detritus of winter with a hint of spring. Or who knows what.

· Your homework – your practice for the third week of Eastertide if you’re ready – is first to move through the week a bit more slowly so that you might notice what the Lord is bringing your way. And second, whenever and however it occurs, to bring a symbol of what you saw with you to worship next week and we’ll place them on a table as a thank offering to God, ok?

What Jesus said after the FIRST Easter, is what he says now: stay where you are – slow down and be awaken – as you wait for the promise of power from on high. It’s everywhere for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. And THAT, beloved, is the good news for today.