Category Archives: Spirituality

What Jesus Said About Vultures

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Turkey vulture.

In all my years as a priest, I had never preached on the apocalyptic imagery of Luke 17:26-37, where people disappear without warning and Jesus concludes with an unnerving proverb: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” This is not ideal preaching material, but with the help of the Epistle reading, Hebrews 11:29—12:2, I gave it a try last Sunday.

Today’s gospel [i] has quite a punchline: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” It’s got to be pretty low on the list of favorite Jesus quotes, but it certainly gets our attention.

A couple of weeks ago I was at a raptor show at the High Desert Museum in eastern Oregon. A variety of hawks, owls and vultures flew swiftly among the seated spectators, who were warned to stay very still lest we be mistaken for prey. I did my best not to be a target, but a turkey vulture came close enough to brush my head with its wing. Perhaps it was preparing me for this strange gospel verse.

Some scholars say Jesus was simply using a common folk expression in response to a question about discerning the times, meaning something like “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Such expressions have nothing to do with smoke or fire or vultures or corpses. They’re just colorful ways of making a point. Still, Jesus’ choice of such a grim illustration puts a sharp edge on his message. It certainly gets our attention. And where the enigmatic text is, there the scholars will gather.

Who is the corpse? they wonder. Who are the vultures? One interpretation suggests the corpse could represent ancient Palestine, with the rapacious vultures being the occupying army of Rome. The Book of Revelation, perhaps inspired by the vultures in the gospel text, imagined the raptors of midheaven being summoned to feast on the remains of the proud powers struck down by divine judgment. An even more fantastical interpretation identifies the sharp-eyed buzzards, who in fact can spot carrion from 3 miles away, as those perceptive disciples who gather to consume the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ given to feed our deepest hunger.

Well, none of these images is going to qualify for a stained glass window. And the vulture verse is perhaps profitless for the preacher.

And yet, it leaves a haunting impression. It’s unlike anything else Jesus ever said, and its gruesome tone puts an exclamation point on his discourse of crisis. A world is dying, he says. Just as a world died in the days of Noah, or in the days of Lot—names which recall destructive narratives of flood and fire—so it is happening now. The times are in no way normal, Jesus warns his listeners. Anyone who pretends that is not true, who thinks we can just go on about our business as usual—eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building—well, they are in for a surprise.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
You better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’ [ii]

When we sang that song 60 years ago, we thought the times were changing for the better. And that was true in many ways. But the flood of changes washing over us today do not feel like something better. When Jesus speaks of people being snatched up and disappeared without warning, he could be describing what’s happening right now in “the land of the free.” To paraphrase Jesus’ metaphor, “As it was in the days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—in 1930s Germany—so shall it be in our own time.”

I pray that this will not be our fate, but the fact that such an outcome is even conceivable is a measure of the times. It can happen here. So what are the friends of God to do? How do we start swimming so we don’t sink like a stone?

We are not the first believers to suffer the worst of times. The Epistle to the Hebrews is clear about that. History isn’t always about the lilies of the field. It has its corpses and vultures as well.

But as the author of Hebrews insists, the faithful believe in the victory of God, and they act out that faith with their bodies. Some of God’s friends have “received the test of mocking and whipping and even chains and prison. They were stoned, cut apart in a slaughter; they died upon a sword. They traveled around in ragged clothing, impoverished, oppressed, afflicted.” But for all they suffered, those who kept the faith “subdued monarchies, did the work of justice … shut the mouths of lions, quenched mighty fires …” (Hebrews 11:29-12:2)

As people baptized into the Paschal Mystery, we understand that dying and rising, defeat and victory, are deeply intertwined. You can’t have one without the other.

When certain medieval women mystics contemplated the cross in prayer and vision, they saw not the triumph of death, but a kind of birth. For them the crucified Jesus was like a woman in labor, enduring pain and travail in order to bring us all to birth: 

Ah! Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who ever saw a mother suffer such a birth! For when the hour of your delivery came you were placed on the hard bed of the cross and … in one day you gave birth to the whole world.” [iii]

To behold the death of Christ and call it birth is the central act of Christian imagination. It is why we declare victory at the cross. We don’t wait for Easter Sunday. We declare victory at the cross because the Passion isn’t just a story about the violent powers that always trample the weak and kill the prophets. It’s also a story about the Realm of God, where dry bones breathe and lost hopes dance, where the prodigal is welcomed home and the tears are wiped from every eye.

The Love that creates such a realm was nailed to a cross, but the cross did not consume it. Yes, death did what death does, but then God did what God does. And Love won. This is the story we belong to, and on the outcome of that story, we stake everything.

That is why we are here this morning. That is why we refuse to retreat to our private worlds, why we continue to gather in community at our Savior’s table: to nurture hope, shelter love’s flame, encourage one another, strengthen our hearts for service, eat the bread of life, pray without ceasing, sing our Alleluias and grow ever more fully into the visible, tangible body of Christ.

We are not alone in this journey. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, all those ancestors in the faith, from Abraham and Sarah and Mary and Luke right on down to the wise and loving mentors we’ve known in our own lives, who have taught us how to walk in the Way of life and peace.

I once heard a preacher describe the cloud of witnesses as “the balcony people” who are looking down and cheering us on as we run the race that is set before us. It’s a wonderful and resonant image. I’m sure that each of you has some very special people in that balcony, shouting their encouragement. Listen. You can hear their voices echoing through the years.

St. Luke, pray for us … St. Mary, pray for us … St. Francis, pray for us … Oscar Romero, pray for us … Dorothy Day, pray for us … Mom and Dad, pray for us.  

Last Sunday I was in Eugene for the National Track & Field Championships, and in the men’s 800 meters I witnessed one of the most stunning moments in the history of middle-distance racing. A 16-year-old high school sophomore named Cooper Lutkenhaus had qualified for the elite competition by breaking the 29-year-old high school record, running the distance in 1:45. And after stumbling and almost falling in his first race at the championships, he managed to survive the first two rounds.

Much to his surprise, he had made the final. But with some of the world’s top 800 meter runners in the race, no one expected him to be anywhere close to the top three who would earn a trip to the World Championships in September.

Rounding the last turn, Cooper was doing really well for a 16-year-old, in  sixth place out of nine racers, 10 meters behind the leader. Then, in the last 100 meters, he passed one runner, and another, and another, and another, to cross the line in second place. His time was 1:42.27, not only a personal best by an unbelievable 3 seconds, but the 18th-best all-time and the fourth-best ever by an American.

Donavan Brazier, Cooper Lutkenhaus, and Bryce Hoppel finish 1-2-3 in the 2025 U.S. Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon.

Now I’ve been at a noisy NBA final with Kareem and Magic and Larry Bird. I’ve been deafened by the 12th man [iv] at a Seahawks game. But the sound of the crowd cheering on young Cooper Lutkenhaus blew my ears off. The cloud of witnesses.

When we run the race that is set before us, there will be times when our lungs burn and our legs scream with lactic acid. There will be the races that disappoint, and workouts that feel listless or discouraging. We may even stumble and fall, more than once.

But always, always, the cloud of witnesses is cheering us on. They know from their own experience what the race is like. They all had their own moments of weakness and doubt. They became acquainted with suffering by training hard every day. They all had to learn how to get up after every fall, lay aside every weight, gulp the breath of the Spirit, and accept pain as the runner’s companion.

I’ve done my own share of racing, and when the pain comes, I try to greet it as a friend. “Hello, brother pain. I knew you’d show up. Well, here we go. I know you’re not going to kill me, right?. We’ll just take it step by step.”

“Even the fittest may stumble and fall (Isaiah 40:31). As Roisin Willis and Maggi Congdon finish 1-2 in the women’s 800 meters at the U.S. Championships, Sage Hurta-Klecker dives for the third and final spot on the World Championship team. In previous years, she had missed out on a championship podium twice due to falls, but this time her fall was a triumph. She made the team.

The perpetual contest between weariness and perseverance is familiar to every athlete—and every saint. You’re going to get tired. You’re going to get discouraged. You may faint and fall. But keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. On both good days and bad, you’ve got to put in the work, “lay aside every weight,” surrender to a power and a strength that is not your own, and stay in the flow.

I began with a raptor image, so let me close with another. This time it’s not a vulture, but an eagle, in a beautiful passage from the prophet Isaiah:

Even the youthful may faint and grow weary, 
even the fittest may stumble and fall,
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, 
they shall mount up with wings like eagles, 
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and never grow tired. [v]

Francesco Scaramuzza, Dante and the Eagle (c. 1860). The sleeping Dante dreamed he was carried by an eagle, but it was really St. Lucy who helped the poet on his upward journey toward heaven’s light (Purgatorio ix).

This homily was preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Renton, WA, on the 9th Sunday after Pentecost, 2025.

Race photo and video by the author.

[i] The texts for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost are in Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year C, which differs significantly for the Revised Common Lectionary used by most liturgical churches.

[ii] Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964).

[iii] Marguerite d’Oingt (d. 1310).

[iv] The loudest crowd in professional football is in Seattle, where the fans are called “the 12th man” for their ability to influence the game by making it hard for the other team to hear their quarterback’s signals.

[v] Isaiah 40:30-31.

Now Welcome Summer!

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18th-century altarpiece (detail), San Martin Pinario, Santiago, Spain.

“I implore you—be calmer.” — Goethe

I know the world is a hot mess at the moment, but I’m taking the rest of the day off to welcome summer. I’m not even going to compose a long-overdue new post (more of those soon). Instead, before I retire to the garden with a pleasurable book, I’ll do the lazy thing and share a few paragraphs from something I wrote years ago, after my first journey to Greece. I posted the following words on the Summer Solstice in 2001. A few months later, the world as we knew it would come to an end. But the lesson I learned in Greece still speaks to my heart, even in (or especially in) our fractious and fallen present condition.

The author on Naxos, Greece.

After a few weeks of history, culture and religion on the mainland, I boarded a ferry for the Greek islands, only to be put off by the scene on the sun-drenched deck. Everyone was a tourist, slathered with sun block; the Greeks had vanished. We were like an occupying army, obliterating the local culture with our foreign speech, our alien ways, our crass desires. But there was something else that bothered me. We lacked seriousness. We were a ship of fools.

During the first half of my journey, I had contemplated the noble remnants of classical culture, walked in the footsteps of Socrates and Paul, hiked to Byzantine monasteries scattered along the summits of towering rock formations, breathed the incense of exotic rituals, conversed passionately about ideas late into the night. It had felt something like pilgrimage. But now the only quest was for the perfect tan, the languorous cafe, the idle beach. I feared a loss of purpose. Had I come all this way to fall into a resort mentality, and forget the Greece of myth and history, liturgy and philosophy?

In the end, my Puritan rigor succumbed to the regime of pleasure. I rediscovered summer mind. Time to be, not do. Sink down into the deep pool of the moment. Enjoy the sun-dazzled days and fairy tale nights without anxiety, as though they will last forever. I am not perfect at this. At times I am likely to rush from place to place, acquiring experiences greedily, not wanting to miss anything. But a brisk pace is fatal to deeper forms of attention.

On my first day hike on Naxos, the greenest isle in the Cyclades, I took a quick look inside one of the little Byzantine churches that frequent its charming hills and valleys. I saw only bare stones inside, not too interesting. I soon returned into the sunlight, where I heard a voice calling to me. It was a German hiker, looking for the entrance into the churchyard. I showed her the way in.

“Look at these wonderful old frescoes!” she said. “What frescoes?” I thought to myself as I peered into the shadows. Once I had given my sun-blinded eyes time to adjust, I began to see what I had missed in my hasty first glances—the faint images of saints. Some of the figures were clearly defined, while others had weathered into dreamlike blurs, like background figures in a Munch painting.

Sixth-century fresco in a Naxos church.

Early in that journey, I had read these words by Thomas Merton in the shaded balcony of a clifftop monastery:  “In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have. And you realize that you are already there … All we need to do is experience what we already possess. The trouble is, we aren’t taking the time.”

Now welcome summer. Let the heavy fragrance of its green world release you from obligations. Let it be enough for now to wander aimlessly around the neighborhood, linger over relaxed conversations, or lie in the hammock and wait for falling stars. Idleness is the incense we offer the gods of summer.

Turning Pain into Praise: George Herbert on the Human Condition

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Marc Chagall, Moses at the Burning Bush (1960-1966): Uniting “incompatible distances.”

I have written repeatedly about major moments of the year such as Christmas, Easter and New Year’s Eve, but the only individual person (other than Jesus) to make repeated appearances on this site is the seventeenth-century Anglican poet-priest, George Herbert  (1593-1633). I enjoy many poets, but Herbert’s psalmic verse is a regular part of my prayer life, and I am particularly partial to priests for whom art is a spiritual practice.https://jimfriedrich.com/2015/02/27/heart-work-and-heaven-work/

After overviews of his life and work (Heart Work and Heaven Work and “Flie with Angels, Fall with Dust”), I have looked at particular poems (“Denial,” “Virtue,” “Time” and “Life”) in subsequent posts on his feast day (February 27). Having established something of a tradition, let us honor “the holy Mr. Herbert” by considering another of his poems.

In “Mans medley,” the poet tests the tension between the earthly and heavenly elements in humanity’s hybrid nature. Just as a musical medley is composed of contrasting parts, so are we a unique blend of animal and angel. When Herbert was seven years old, playgoers first heard Hamlet pondering this paradox of human existence: “how like an angel in apprehension” is this “quintessence of dust”. Ten years after Herbert’s poems were published, Sir Thomas Browne wrote that “we are only that amphibious piece between a corporall and spirituall essence, that middle forme that links these two together” and “unites incompatible distances.” [i]  

Mans medley

Hark, how the birds do sing,
And woods do ring.
All creatures have their joy: and man hath his.|
Yet if we rightly measure,
Mans joy and pleasure
Rather hereafter, then in present, is.

To this life things of sense
Make their pretence:
In th’ other Angels have a right by birth:
Man ties them both alone,
And makes them one,
With th’ one hand touching heav’n, with th’ other earth.

In soul he mounts and flies,
In flesh he dies.
He wears a stuffe whose thread is course and round,
But trimm’d with curious lace,
And should take place
After the trimming, not the stuffe and ground.

Not that he may not here
Taste of the cheer,
But as birds drink, and straight lift up their head,
So he must sip and think
Of better drink
He may attain to, after he is dead.

But as his joyes are double;
So is his trouble.
He hath two winters, other things but one:
Bothe frosts and thoughts do nip,
And bite his lip;
And he of all things fears two deaths alone.

Yet ev’n the greatest griefs
May be reliefs,
Could he but take them right, and in their wayes.
Happie is he, whose heart
Hath found the art
To turn his double pains to double praise.

The poem begins with a cheerful celebration of creation: Birds sing, forests ring, and all creatures, humans included, “have their joy.” But difference soon declares itself: below and above, material and spiritual, this life and the next. Only humans partake in each of the oppositions, with “th’ one hand touching heav’n, with th’ other earth.” This is a great privilege. The human alone “ties them both” and “makes them one,” but as the next verse reminds us, our mixed nature is also a problem. We may “flie with angels” as Herbert says in another poem, but we also “fall with dust.”[ii] In soul we mount and fly, but in flesh we die.

“Medley” is related to “motley,” and the image in verse 3 of being clothed in an awkward mixture of fine and coarse materials illustrates our chronic discomfort with humanity’s hybrid nature. To resolve the clashing colors of our mortal outfit, some have sought to suppress, downgrade, or disregard either the earthly or the heavenly. But Herbert seeks to harmonize them in the human medley. Let our joys be “double,” that we may “taste of the cheer” in our sensory existence while continuing to cultivate our taste for the “better drink” of spiritual reality.

The verse about the sipping birds is my favorite part of the poem. Unlike the generalized trope of singing birds in the poem’s first line, the birds in verse 4 are keenly observed in a way that was rare until the Romantics and naturalists of later centuries. The birds don’t keep their beaks in the water until they’re done, but follow each sip with a lifting of the head. Here Herbert takes a homely image from the visible world and makes it a lively spiritual metaphor. Like the birds, we should not gulp down reality without giving it our proper attention. We must learn to “sip and think,” alternating our experience with thoughtful reflection.  

And from there the meanings multiply. The “better drink” evokes the sacred wine of the Eucharist, while also recalling the water Jesus changed into wine at the Cana wedding feast. Sip and think. Sip and think. Could that be the essence of spiritual practice?

Our mortality is touched upon in verse 3 (“In flesh he dies”) and verse 4 (“after he is dead”), but verse 5 stops to face our fate directly. As both physical and spiritual creatures, we alone fear “two deaths”—the death of the body and the death of the soul. As dwellers in a secular age, some no longer worry about the fate of body and soul in the afterlife, but is anxiety over a failing body, a shriveled soul or an emotionally dead heart any improvement on the medieval fear of hell? There are many kinds of death, but the inward ones may be the worst.

Marc Chagall, The Prophet Jeremiah (1968).

Herbert doesn’t leave us there. As he warns in his manual of advice for country parsons, “nature will not bear everlasting droopings.” We need to stand on the rock of hope, and remember joy. “Yet ev’n the greatest griefs,” he says, “May be reliefs, / Could he but take them right … / Happy is he whose heart / Hath found the art / To turn his double pains to double praise.”  

We may wonder what it means specifically to “take them right.” We could all use some detailed instruction in the art of turning pain into praise, given the rapid escalation of pain in our collective life by a heartless coterie of dead souls. Herbert doesn’t spell it out in this poem, but turning pain into praise is a major theme in his work.

In both our personal spiritual journeys and our collective project of repairing the world, we must practice many virtues: patience, persistence, resistance, constancy, solidarity, compassion, humility—and, crucially, faith, hope and love—if we are to keep moving toward the light. And it is my firm conviction that the antidote to despair is trust in what I would call divine intention: the abiding and faithful Mystery whose desire is the flourishing of creation. That doesn’t mean everything goes perfectly. The Cross is planted deep in human history. But God will not leave us comfortless. The divine Yes has more future in it than a billion Nevers. Here’s how Herbert says it:

I knew that thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a scepter of the rod:

Hadst thou not had thy part,
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart. [iii] 

Virgin and St. John at the Cross, Flanders or Northern France (early 16th century).



[i] Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici xxxiv (1643).

[ii] George Herbert, “The Temper (I).”

[iii] Ibid., “Affliction (III).”

Happy or Not, the New Year is What God Has to Work With

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I have been writing New Year’s Eve posts since I started this blog in 2014, reflecting on time and change, endings and beginnings, hope and dread, impermanence and possibility. If you are curious about the workings of hope in the best of times and the worst of times, follow the links in my post on the last day of 2023. But let me say a few things here and now.

On the eve of 2025, many Americans are finding it hard to celebrate the unfolding of a dubious future. The powers of negation are shamelessly eager to destroy the good and torment the vulnerable, both here and abroad. Their malice and corrruption have no apparent bounds. LIke poor Lillian Gish lying exhausted and unconscious on an ice floe in the silent movie classic, Way Down East (1920), we the people (also exhausted and to some degree unconscious) are being swept toward the waterfall of doom.

Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920). Her hand suffered lifelong damage from the freezing river. In the movie, she is rescued just before going over the falls. Will the same go for us?

So Happy New Year, right? But as a friend declared on his Christmas card, “Hope is here—if we have eyes to see and hearts to respond.” Hope isn’t knowledge. It does its work before any outcomes are experienced. Who knows exactly how we will get through the coming year?

Since evil is the rejection of the co-inherence which is Love’s foundation—we are all in this together, part of one another—the toxic collection of so many egos dedicated to themselves alone may eat itself into oblivion. Or perhaps this time of trial will prove the refiner’s fire that burns away enough of our own sins and offenses to produce souls better fit for the human destiny of communnion and service revealed by the Incarnation. Or perhaps these awful times will ruthlessly strip away our false dependencies and hollow illusions until we are able to entrust ourselves wholly to Divine Mercy and nothing else. None of these options is a get-out-of-suffering card, but they are the kinds of things that clarify how real and urgent our faith, hope and love need to be these days.

This Christmastide, I’ve been re-reading Charles Williams’ “supernatural thriller,” War in Heaven, in which several malevolent individuals invoke demonic forces, not only to gain power but also for the perverse pleasure of destroying whatever is true and good. Their chief nemesis is an Anglican archdeacon, who endures their evil words and deeds with an extraordinary calm, rooted in his sense of the creative and loving God holding all things together. “This also is Thou” is one of Williams’ key phrases. Everything is pregnant with invisible reality, and souls may be won or lost in the most ordinary situations, words and gestures as they embody—or renounce—the Way of Love. Neither calamity nor chaos can shake the priest’s steadfast faith in an upholding, transcendent Presence. In the kind of dialogue only Williams could write, the Archdeacon declares,

“After all, one shouldn’t be put out of one’s stride by anything phenomenal and accidental. The just man wouldn’t be.”

Well, there we are. The evils of the coming days will be phenomenal and accidental. Though they will hurt, they will never be quite solid or real or enduring in the way that the Love, Justice and Mercy of God are, now and forever. We shall not remain silent about the damage, or complacent about the consequences of those evils. But we must not give them the power and glory which are God’s alone.

Weeping may spend the night, but joy will come in the morning (Psalm 30:6). In the meantime, may we rest securely in the One who makes all things new.

Marc Chagall, Noah’s Ark (detail), 1961-1966. Artists have typically painted the ark from outside, tossed by an angry sea. But Chagall shows the ark’s interior as an aquatic womb where hope is biirthed amid the storm. His head bent in prayer, Noah sends forth the dove as a sign of enduring faith and living hope.

Thank you to all of you who have read, pondered, commented, and shared my posts during the past year. Your own responses (shared or unshared) are why I write. I wish you great joy and real peace in 2025. Happy New Year! I’ll see you in January. I’m sure there will be lots to talk about.

Tending Faith’s Flame in the American Gloom

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Anonymous, The Descent from the Cross (detail), German c. 1500.

The evil and the armed draw near;
The weather smells of their hate
And the houses smell of our fear.

— W. H. Auden, For the Time Being

“ … because all you of Earth are idiots!”

— Plan 9 from Outer Space (Ed Wood, 1957)

How bad is it, anyway? In the first hours of the new Amerika last Tuesday, the original Planet of the Apes (1968) came to mind. Finding a half-buried Statue of Liberty on a deserted beach, space-and-time traveler Charlton Heston realizes he has not landed on some distant planet, but on his own earthly home, where humanity has evidently committed nuclear suicide. Literally pounding the sand, he cries out to his long-vanished fellow mortals, “You really, finally, did it! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

A ruined earh: The final image of Planet of the Apes (1968).

In the Year of our Lord 2024, a decisive majority of Americans have chosen to blow up democracy, the rule of law, the common good, civil liberty, women’s rights, health care, international stability, public sanity, and our last hopes of staving off climate apocalypse. Did they know what they were doing? I confess to zero interest in their motivation at this point. Their decision, measured by its inevitable consequences, was neither rational nor moral. The harm it will do is immeasurable. Even if they thought they were trying to make a point about their personal economic pain, the mad embrace of a fascistic, unstable sociopath and the MAGA dream of demolishing the American experiment—not to mention the livability of our planet—will impose a price none of us can afford.

The American minority, meanwhile, has spent the past week trying to cope with the shock and the horror of the Antichrist’s second coming (I use that name not in a mythical sense, but in a moral one, describing the Trump who in every respect is against the way of Jesus).

Some have engaged in second-guessing the Democratic campaign, as if putting the argument differently could have penetrated the thick shields of delusion and hate erected by right-wing propagandists and their carefully crafted algorithms. Some have sought comfort in the long view, looking toward the distant horizon where hope and history will someday rhyme. Some see the moment as a sobering diagnosis of our national maladies, putting an end to further denial. There’s no use pretending we’re still healthy. Some are tuning out, or contemplating flight to saner climes. Some, sadder and wiser, are vowing to carry on the fight for the common good. God help them.

Marc Chagall, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (detail), 1961.

Many people have been passing poems around on social media, lighting candles of gentleness and peace for one another in this dark night. I have taken comfort in these tender gestures, offered like balm in Gilead for the sin-sick soul. But I also have found myself browsing post-WWII poems that register the shock of brutal conflict. “The Last War” by Kingsley Amis (1948) touched a chord in me with its opening line: “The first country to die was normal in the evening.” By morning it was disfigured and dead

The poem narrates a kind of Agatha Christie murder story in a country house. No one, in the end, survives the weekend. When the sun (the light of Reason? the eye of God?) shows up to survey the damage and “tidy up,” he is unable to separate “the assassins from the victims.” Sickened by the folly and horror of human self-destruction, the sun goes back to bed. The last two stanzas begin with the sound of gunfire and end with a deathly quiet:

Homicide, pacifist, crusader, tyrant, adventurer, boor
Staggered about moaning, shooting into the dark.
Next day, to tidy up as usual, the sun came in
When they and their ammunition were all finished,
And found himself alone.

Upset, he looked them over, to separate, if he could,
The assassins from the victims, but every face
Had taken on the flat anonymity of pain;
And soon they’ll all smell alike, he thought, and felt sick,
And went to bed at noon.

The sense of recognition I felt in reading the poem oddly eased my post-election malaise. Though I dwell in the valley of the shadow, I’m not alone. Like Dante in hell, I’ve got a good poet for company.

Virgil and Dante in the 8th Circle of Hell The Roman poet would guide Dante through the infernal regions until they found the way out.

Well, what now? If there were ever a time demanding religious imagination—the ability to see resurrection light even on Good Friday—this is it. Such envisioning will be one of the ongoing tasks of The Religious Imagineer. But we can’t just leap into Easter. We must first do our time at the foot of the cross, living in solidarity—and risk?—with the victims and the vulnerable, tuning our hearts to the bells that toll for every human tear:

Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked,
Tolling for the outcast, burning constantly at stake …
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse,
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe. [1]

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington. Prayers silent and aloud were offered here the night before and the night after the election.

I feel blessed to be in Christian community during this time of trial. It is better to hold hands than clench fists. It restores the soul to share our griefs and voice our hopes in sacred discourse and common prayer. Preachers are encouraging our renewed commitment to the Baptismal Covenant: to persevere in resisting evil; seek and serve Christ in all persons; strive for justice and peace among all people; and respect the dignity of every human being.[2] Pastors, meanwhile, are reminding us to love those who voted against most of those things.

(I confess to my own struggle with the Christly precept of loving the haters. Yes, we all fall short, but the so-called Christians cheering the triumph of our basest impulses are, IMHO, falling short with unseemly enthusiasm. As Henry James noted, “when you hate you want to triumph.”) [3]

Tom Tomorrow always nails it: MAGA House of Horror (October 28, 2024).

Many of us, like the desert monks of Late Antiquity, are feeling the need to go on retreat from the public square, to hush the noise and attend the still small voice of holy wisdom. Our spiritual practices seem more necessary than ever.

For me over the past week, that has taken the form of Daily Offices, running, watching the birds in the garden, reading Henry James, a Monteverdi concert, and a splendid evening of Balanchine works by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. I have also been fasting from political news, limiting myself to a small amount of reflective commentary from trusted sources. Such self-care through withdrawal from the fray is “meet and right so to do.” But unless we are contemplatives whose job is to provide for the rest of us what Jesuit activist Dan Berrigan called “large reserves of available sanity,” we can’t stay in the desert forever.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has responded to the election with a fine reflection on Elijah’s flight from the danger and exhaustion of public justice-making to the solitude and safety of the holy mountain. After a while, God tracks him down to ask, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  

“Go back to your proper place; you can linger here in self-pity only so long and then you must remember your call and perform your responsibility.” So Elijah is freshly dispatched back to his dangerous work. He is dispatched by the one who has lordly authority for him. The only assurance he is offered is that there are others—7000—who stand alongside in solidarity.[4]

We are not alone. God is with us. The night after the election, some of our local parish church gathered for Evening Prayer, with generous pauses for quiet resting in the Divine Presence. When words fail, let silence speak. Afterward, we had a deep and earnest conversation about the effect of the election on our hearts, minds, and bodies. The empowering richness of that exchange, a gift of the Holy Spirit, raised us from the depths to remember our vocation as God’s friends: to plant the seeds of resurrection amid the blind sufferings of history.  

Henri Matisse, The Rosary Chapel in Vence, French Riviera.

Let me close with an encouraging story from the desert monks.

The disciple of a great old man was once attacked by the demons within him. The old man, seeing it in his prayer, said to him, ‘Do you want me to ask God to relieve you of this battle?’ The other said, ‘Abba, I see that I am afflicted, but I also see that this affliction is producing fruit in me; therefore ask God to give me endurance to bear it.’ And his Abba said to him, ‘Today I know you surpass me in perfection.’” [5]

Throughout this time of trial and affliction, God grant each of us, and our communities, the endurance to bear what we must bear, and do what we must do, that our lives may prove both faithful and fruitful in due season.

[1] Bob Dylan, “Chimes of Freedom,” from Another Side of Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1964).

[2] From the Baptismal Covenant, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1979).

[3] Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 427.

[4] Walter Brueggemann’s reflection on I Kings 19, “Beyond a Fetal Position,” Nov. 7, 2024 on Church Anew: https://churchanew.org/brueggemann/beyond-a-fetal-position

[5] Cited in John Moses, The Desert: An Anthology for Lent (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1997), 62.

Stumbling in the Dark

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Pieter Brueghel, The Blind Leading the Blind (1658).

Note to reader: This is a post from 2021, revised to include comments on the moral blindness of admitting fascism into our political life.

Jesus was walking out of Jericho, surrounded by a big crowd. Like all such crowds, it was a mix of the curious and the adoring. Jesus was at the height of his popularity. He stirred people’s imaginations and raised their hopes. The excitement was palpable. But amid all the festive clamor, a single shout brought this parade to a sudden halt:

“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
It was a blind beggar, sitting by the roadside.
His name was Bartimaeus.

“Shush,” people said. “Don’t make a scene.” 
But he cried all the louder: “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And Jesus stood still, just the way the sun had stood still in the sky for Joshua in that same city of Jericho.

“Call him here,” Jesus said. And so they did. 
“Take heart!” they told him. “Get up. He is calling you.”

Immediately, Bartimaeus threw off his cloak, sprang to his feet, and came to Jesus. Then Jesus asked him a question that went straight to the point: “What do you want me to do for you?”

“Teacher,” he said, “Let me see again.”
And what Bartimaeus asked, Jesus granted.  (Mark 10: 46-52)

In Mark’s gospel, this is the last miracle performed by Jesus before he goes to his death in Jerusalem. It marks the fatal turning point between his ministry and his Passion. It is our Lord’s last act, his last word, before he begins the Way of the Cross.

To the world, that looked like the path to oblivion. But to those who have been given the eyes of faith, the Way of the Cross, as we pray every Holy Week, is “none other than the way of life and peace.”

And thus the healing of Bartimaeus is not just the story of one man’s good fortune. It is an invitation to each of us to perceive and receive the vision of salvation which is about to unfold. Mark is telling us that if you want to understand the Paschal Mystery of Passion and Resurrection, you need to open your eyes.

And notice that the climactic words of this story are not “he regained his sight,” but rather, “he followed him on the way.” Once you see what God is doing through Jesus, then it’s your turn to take up your own cross and follow. 

And yet, in the story leading up to this moment, even Jesus’ closest friends have suffered their own blindness. “Are your minds closed?” he chides them. “Have you eyes and do not see?” But they go on missing the point again and again.

To their credit, they continue to follow Jesus. They are drawn to him, they know something is happening here—but they don’t know what it is. “Do you not yet understand?” Jesus sighs. I’m sure he said this more than once.

And then, after repeated examples of the disciples’ blindness throughout Mark’s gospel, suddenly we hear a plaintive voice cry out from the crowd: “Jesus! Have mercy on me. Remove this grievous blindness.”

That’s our prayer too, isn’t it? 

Lord, take away our blindness. Help us to see.
And Jesus replies, “I thought you’d never ask!”

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century, was one of many theologians who have shared Mark’s diagnosis of the human condition as one of persistent blindness.

“Humanity was created for this end, that it might see ‘good,’ which is God; but because humanity would not stand in the light, [in fleeing from the light] it lost its eyes… We subjected ourselves to blindness, that we should not see the interior light.”

In other words, we are all stumbling in the dark. That is the human condition, until God brings us into the place of clarity.

St. Augustine talked about the inner eye, our capacity to see the things of God, as “bruised and wounded” by the transgression of Adam and Eve, who, he says, “began to dread the Divine light [and] fled back into darkness, anxious for the shade.”

Refusing to stand in the light… subjecting ourselves to blindness. 
Is this what we do? Are we truly so “anxious for the shade?”

Arthur Zajonc is a quantum physicist who became fascinated with the literal dimensions of this question, examining case histories of blind people who recovered their sight. In his book, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, he tells of an 8-year-old boy, blind at birth from cataracts, who underwent surgery in the year 1910. When the time came to remove his bandages, the doctor was very hopeful. He waved his hand in front of the boy’s eyes, which were now physically perfect. 

“What do you see?” asked the doctor.
“I don’t know,” the boy replied.
“Can’t you see my hand moving?” said the doctor.
“I don’t know,” said the boy.

The boy’s eyes did not follow the doctor’s slowly moving hand, but stared straight ahead. He only saw a varying brightness before him. Then the doctor asked him to touch his hand as it moved, and when he did, the boy cried out in a voice of triumph, “It’s moving!” He could feel it move, and even, as he said, could “hear it move,” but it would take laborious effort to learn to see it move.

As that first light passed through the child’s newly clear black pupils, it called forth no echoing image from within. His sight, Zajonc tells us, began as a hollow, silent, dark and frightening kind of seeing. The light of day beckoned, but no light of mind replied within the boy’s anxious, open eyes.

“The sober truth” says Zajonc, “remains that vision requires far more than a functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind.” This echoes Augustine’s description of our “bruised and wounded” inner eye. What is it that makes us so unable to process what is before us, to see what is being offered to our open eyes?

The mystical Anglican poet Thomas Traherne framed an answer in the ornately vivid language of the seventeenth century:

“As my body without my soul is a carcass, so is my Soul without Thy Spirit, a chaos, a dark obscure heap of empty faculties ignorant of itself, unsensible of Thy goodness, blind to Thy glory.” 

And what are the causes of this abysmal state? he asks. He names several: 

“[The Light within us is eclipsed] by the customs and manners of [others], which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude, vulgar and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it: by the impetuous torrent of wrong; … by a whole sea of other matters and concernments that covered and drowned it…” 

“Contrary winds” blowing out the Light within us… being overwhelmed by “an innumerable company… of rude, vulgar and worthless things”… “the impetuous torrent of wrong desires” — does any of that sound familiar in this age of consumerism, social media, and widespread disinformation?

Not long after Traherne wrote those words, another English writer, John Bunyan, told the story of two pilgrims, named Christian and Faithful, who came upon Vanity Fair, a kind of shopping mall where all the transitory pleasures of this world were on seductive display.

“What will ye buy?” cried one of the merchants.
And Christian and Faithful replied, “We buy the truth!”

This was clearly the wrong answer, for the two pilgrims were immediately set upon, beaten, smeared with mud, thrown in a cage, and finally put on trial. The jury was rigged, led by Mr. Blind Man and Mr. Hate-Light. “Guilty,” they cried, and Faithful was put to death. But Christian managed to escape, and his journey into God continued. 

Bunyan’s allegorical constructs seem quaintly archaic today, but Vanity Fair is still with us, with its endless commodification of unsatisfiable desires. And Mr. Hate-Light is still at work, generating the ceaseless illusions and lies that blind us to the beauty of holiness, the beauty of one another, the beauty of loving community. 

I was born in 1944, 40 days after D-Day, and a few weeks before the liberation of Paris, when the evils of Nazism and fascism were on the run. Once and for all, we thought. But now, eighty years later, Adolf Hitler—Mr. Hate-Light himself—is making a comeback. And millions—millions!—of people are just shrugging their shoulders. So many of the children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the generation who shed their blood to stop fascist tyranny, seem kind of okay with the return of Mr. Hate-Light.

Lord have mercy, we are stumbling in the dark.

So what happens to Christian in Bunyan’s allegory? He escapes Vanity Fair, but he still has to pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where the light is so scarce, and the path so narrow, that he’s in constant danger of stumbling into the ditch on his right or the quagmire on his left. 

But Christian is not without hope in that dark valley. 
As Isaiah said, the God of light travels with us:

I shall lead the blind by a road they do not know… 
I shall turn the darkness into light before them, 
and turn the quagmire into solid ground.   (Isa 42:16)

All of us, deep down, want the light. All of us need the light. But sometimes we resist the light, or run away from it, or shut our eyes to it. There are things we’d rather not see, in the world or in ourselves. Illuminating our dark places can feel like a judgment, as if the light were accusing our shadows.

In Franco Zefferelli’s beautiful 1977 film, Jesus of Nazareth, we meet another blind man at the pool of Bethsaida in Jerusalem, but unlike Bartimaeus, he is deathly afraid of being healed. “Leave my eyes alone!” he shouts. “Stop touching my eyes!”

After analyzing sixty-six cases of blind people who had recovered their sight, Arthur Zajonc would concur with Zeffirelli’s portrayal of our resistance to having our eyes opened.

“The project of learning to see,” he writes, “inevitably leads to a psychological crisis in the life of the patients, who may wind up rejecting sight. New impressions threaten the security of a world previously built upon the sensations of touch and hearing. Some decided it is better to be blind in their own world than sighted in an alien one… The prospect of growth is as much a prospect of loss, and threat to security, as a bounty.”

In other words, opening our eyes to a more truthful clarity can be scary—no more fictions or illusions about the state of the world or the state of our souls. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (I John 1:8).

Seeing—clearly and accurately—the fallenness of our broken world—and our wounded selves—is a painful revelation. Once we face facts, transformation is the only way forward. We must change our life. A new way of seeing demands a new way of being. We can either fight that divine summons, like the man in the Zeffirelli film (Don’t touch my eyes!), or we can jump up and embrace it, like Bartimaeus.

But it’s not just the wrongness of things which is hidden by our blindness. The truth is, there is also so much blessing and beauty in this world, eagerly waiting to be discerned and embraced.

And whatever our doubts and fears about losing our protective blindness, the beauty revealed will be worth the price. It’s the beauty of God’s future—what Jesus called the Kingdom. We often think of the Kingdom of God as impossibly distant, but it is possible to glimpse it even now, in this present age. We only need the eyes to see. 

Scaffolding on the west side of Notre Dame in Paris (October 2024).

Last week my wife and I were in Paris, and it was thrilling to see the cathedral of Notre Dame in the final stages of its resurrection from the devastation of that terrible fire in 2019. There are still giant cranes and some scaffolding present, and a construction wall continues to keep the public at a distance until the house of God reopens in Advent.

And even though we could not yet go inside, it was powerful just to stand in the parvis, the open space in front of Notre Dame, joining the thousands and thousands of people who come there every day to wonder at the marriage of human creativity and divine glory.

And what made it especially moving was the beautiful photographs displayed on the temporary wall surrounding the site. In stunning black & white portraits, we saw a representative sample of the many thousands whose labor, skill and love have brought the cathedral back to life: architects, engineers, artisans, restoration experts, carpenters, stone-workers, stained glass artists, roofers, electricians, cleaners, works managers, heritage curators, scholars, liturgists, theologians, and all the service people who fed the multitude every day.

Photo of restoration team member on the construction wall at Notre Dame.
Photo of restoration team member on construction wall at Notre Dame.

What we saw in those faces, and in the fruits of their labor, was the very best of humanity, working together to repair the world, redeeming beauty and hope from the ashes of destruction and despair.

But if you walk just behind Notre Dame, to the tiny tip of the Ile de la Cité—the small island on the Seine River where the cathedral stands—you will find some stairs, which take you down into a dim, tomb-like space. There you move through a narrow passage whose floor is inscribed with the words, “They went to the ends of the earth and did not return.”

This subterranean passage is faintly illumined by 200,000 tiny, lighted crystals, representing the 200,000 people deported from France to the death camps during the Nazi occupation of the 1940s.

It is a powerful memorial—and a painful reminder. For the mass deportation in France was not simply the act of bad Germans upon an innocent French population. It was the French police who went door to door, rounding up Jews and dissidents. And though there were many French people who resisted the evils of the Occupation, there were many more who turned a blind eye to the mass deportation. The legacy of complicity and collaboration would long haunt the postwar memory of France.

Lying in the very shadow of the glorious and aspirational cathedral, the Memorial of the Deportation stands as a warning to those of any country who want to believe that “it can’t happen here.”

Lord, remove our grievous blindness. Help us see the light.

There is a passage from Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, which perfectly expresses the faith and the hope that we are not destined to remain in the dark—that we can, by God’s grace, recover the divine light within us. The novel’s protagonist, Jean-Marie Latour, a nineteenth-century missionary bishop to the territory of New Mexico, is discussing visions and miracles with his Vicar. 

“Where there is great love,” he says, “there are always miracles. One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love .… The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is about us always.”

Human vision corrected by divine love. 
How blessed are they who receive such a miracle! 

“Mercy, O thou Son of David, 
thus poor blind Bartimaeus prayed.
“Others by thy grace are saved,
now afford to me thine aid.”

“Lord, remove this grievous blindness,
let mine eyes behold the day.”
Straight he saw, and, won by kindness,
followed Jesus in the way.

The Joy of Letting Go — Spirituality in a Season of Change

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Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core …

— John Keats, “To Autumn”

October light! October color! Ripeness to the core! We share the poet’s pleasure in this season of earthly delight. But we know it will not last. As one of the earliest English poets put it over a millennium ago:

A little while the leaves are green;
then they fallow again, fall to the earth,
and die, turn to dust.

The falling leaf is an ancient trope for decline and fall, and we mortals tend to take it personally. “I have lived long enough,” lamented Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

… my way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have.

Yes, of course. We know where this autumnal existence is headed. Even the finest October day contains the seeds of melancholy. The cold and the dark draw near. But if we can take the long view, these too shall pass.

Pamela Steed Hill says this so poignantly in her poem, “September Pitch”:

Mama, the autumn is deep.
Its pitch is only beginning, and will brighten
before the end. Brighten
into darkness,
or into spring.

Here in America, the darkness is already here. As we approach the most consequential—and potentially catastrophic—election of our lifetime, we wonder whether our present world can in fact brighten into spring. If there ever were a time to keep the faith, it is now.

A few days ago I happened to hear on the radio a beautiful autumn song by Jennifer Cutting, encouraging us to move into the unknown with a trusting spirit, come what may.

To know the joy of letting go
The giddy flight of falling
Surprise at softly landing so
Among the leaves of autumn

And though the last refuse to fall
And cling for fear of changing
October overcomes our song
Among the leaves of autumn

O bitterness can shrivel dead
What gratitude made rosy
The brown leaves curl beside the red
Among the leaves of autumn

What was will never be again
What will be is uncharted
What’s now is change, so let’s begin
Among the leaves of autumn

I have set the song link between autumnal images, which I invite you to contemplate as you listen. Grace and peace to you in this season of change.

Photographs by the author.

Living the Dream: Thoughts at 80

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William Blake, Oberon, Titania, Puck & Fairies Dancing (1786)

“The tables outside the cantina were full of beautiful laughing men and women. I didn’t like the cantina at night: it was hard to book a table, and everyone who sat there looked on display, the women in their lovely summer dresses, the men with their hair oiled back on their heads, their tanned bare feet resting proprietorially on top of their Gucci loafers. One wanted to applaud them for presenting such a successful vision of life: you could almost believe they had lived their whole lives, had been reared and groomed from birth, for this one particular night: that this was the pinnacle, this golden summer evening they had all reached simultaneously.

“Yet it made me a little sad to see them there, laughing and drinking champagne, for you knew it was all downhill from here.”

— Peter Cameron, Andorra [i]  

The beautiful laughing men and women in Cameron’s cantina do not arouse our envy. Their self-display seems shallow, narcissistic and unreal. They appear ignorant of time. Golden summer evenings do not last forever. Having achieved the pinnacle, what Wallace Stevens called “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can attain no more,”[ii] they have nowhere to go but down.

The traditional lore of Midsummer Eve shares this suspicion. To mark the year’s longest day, bonfires were lit on British hilltops to assist and encourage the sun at the outset of its long inevitable decline into the winter dark. And “Midsummer Night”—blessedly short—was said to be a time of both mischief and danger, when chaotic pressures cracked open the stability of the world and wild spirits were abroad.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare explores these themes with a complicated plot in which the normal order of the world is unraveled for a night, and confusion rules until the dawn. Rulers find their commands thwarted. Lovers aim their desire at mistaken targets. The beautiful queen of the fairies falls madly in love with a low-born mortal who, by magic spell, has the monstrous head of an ass. Puck, the fairy trickster, multiplies the mischief by both design and error. And even words of dialogue take on altered and contradictory meanings.

All this takes place in an enchanted forest, a wild, liminal state outside the civilized order, where societal assumptions and rules are suspended or reversed, hierarchies are overturned, and identities become fluid and changeable. As Bottom says to Titania, “reason and love keep little company together these days.”

In Shakespeare, such liminal spaces serve a critical purpose. Their disorder offers a freedom to reshuffle and reconsider accepted realities, inviting transformation at both a personal and social level. Removed for a time from the customary rules and roles, characters discover new possibilities for themselves and society before returning to “reality.”

However, once you leave your given world for a time, you can never again accept its reality as absolute. You realize that there is more than one way to do both the self and the world. Any single version of reality is but an alternative. In this sense, life itself is but a dream. This refusal to absolutize the given world is the foundation of social justice: we can live better lives and make a better world. It also, however, can open the door to irrationality and madness, exemplified by the millions who live, happily and hatefully, in the fact-free world of American fascism..

At the end of Shakespeare’s play, Puck delivers an epilogue to the audience, those “who have slumbered here, / While these visions did appear.” It’s all been a dream, he assures us, as if we had never really crossed the boundary into the transformative space of a visionary world.

But can we be so sure? Have we not ourselves been touched, perhaps even transformed? Within A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is a play-within-a-play (the comically performed tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe). The actors in Midsummer watch the actors playing actors in Pyramus, just as we the audience watch all these permutations from our safe position outside the “fourth wall” which separates the stage from reality. But are we so different from the players on the stage? As Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber writes,

“A play is a fiction, art is an illusion, ‘no more yielding but a dream.’ Can we be blamed if we wonder—now that we have been told that we are reality—when someone will wake and recognize that we are only a dream? Can we be blamed for looking over our shoulders, and wondering who is watching the play in which we are acting, while we watch, onstage, actors watching actors who play actors performing a play?” [iii]

Two weeks after Midsummer Eve, I saw a magical outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bloedel Reserve, an Arcadian refuge of woods and meadows on my island. Beginning before sunset, it utilized the fading of the day to intensify our immersion into the dreamworld. By play’s end, it was almost night. The narrow path across a rolling meadow to the exit prevented an immediate return to reality. For a few precious minutes more we lingered in the dream, making our ghostly procession of shadows in the twilight.

Every play comes to an end. Every actor must make an exit. I have no plans to do so any time soon (God willing). There are more lines to deliver! However, since I begin my ninth decade tomorrow, time may not be on my side—but it’s on my mind.  

Medieval thinkers divided a human lifetime into “ages.” Some had just four: Childhood, Youth, Maturity, and Old Age. Isadore of Seville (c. 560-636) expanded that to six: infancy (up to 7), childhood (7-14), adolescence (14-28), youth (28-50), gravitas (50-70), and, for anything beyond 70, senectum  (the same root as senior and senility).

[Of course, senectum is a hot topic in this election year. Is the President too old to govern? Perhaps a better question would be: Why can’t the other guy act his age? As the Bible says, “Woe to you, land, if your king is a child!” (Ecclesiastes 10:16). But I digress.]

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, The Four Ages (1467-1475)

In this fifteenth-century illumination by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the four ages of the human life-cycle stand in the same room, as if each of us is all the ages we have ever been. Childhood is clothed in red, the color of sanguinity (eager hopefulness). Youth is into fashion and sports, while Maturity dresses for battle. Old Age, warmly attired for the wintry years, glances back at all his past selves, hopefully with gratitude rather than regret.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, The Seven Ages (1482)

A later image by the same artist depicts seven ages standing in two groups. On the right, Childhood plays with a stick and ball, Adolescence clasps his schoolbooks, and Youth carries a spear, perhaps dreaming of competitive glory. The first three stages of Maturity are not radically distinct from one another, but Old Age, shorter and bearded, is starting to separate his body from the group. Yet he still keeps an eye on the Child he once was.

Idleness, Dunois Book of Hours (c. 1439-50)

Time is a gift, and I am truly grateful for my years so far—the dreams as well as the realities. Je ne regrette rien. As for the road ahead (even if it’s all downhill), I wish not to be the man on the donkey, idly dozing along the pilgrim way. Like the figure gazing at the view from the bridge, I want to keep taking it all in. As an old man advised a younger friend in Henry James’ The Ambassadors:

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

[i] Peter Cameron, Andorra (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1997), 149-150.

[ii] Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer.”

[iii] Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor, 2005), 237.

Ascension Day Double Bill

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“Opulent Ascension,” an installation by Sean Scully in San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice Biennale, 2019).

Inspired by Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:12), Scully’s stack of colored felt slabs rises more than ten meters toward the luminous dome of San Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio’s splendid Renaissance church in Venice. Amid the subdued grays and whites of the interior, the miraculous colors exude the vitality of spiritual aspiration, like spring flowers refuting winter’s drab.

On this Ascension Day, let me offer another image, a 36-second “video icon” of a cloud disappearing into the blue. Consider it a brief meditation on Luke’s text, “As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).

The Ascension of Christ takes us into an ineffable realm, far above the literalism of earthly life. What are we to make of such a strange story? The following video of an Ascension Day homily was streamed during the pandemic a few years ago, when we were not able to gather in person to celebrate the mystery. Fittingly, it was recorded mostly outside, under the open sky.

What Is Your Most Precious Possession?

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Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi (1481).

What is your most precious possession? This was the question posed by two British artists in their random encounters with strangers at the Venice Biennale. For three days in April, Neil Musson and Jono Retallick wandered about the art festival venues literally clothed in the question, printed in various languages on their white smocks. Whenever a curious glance at their outfits prompted conversational engagement, the artists recorded whatever answers people chose to give. From more than fifty responses, the artists will edit the results to post on their website, M+R, in the near future.

Jono Retallick and Neil Musso wearing The Question in Venice.
(Photo by Neil Lambert)

It’s a great question! In my monthly Zoom converation with longtime clergy friends, Jono made a guest appearance from the Venice apartment of one of our members.[i] When he invited each of us to name our most precious possession, no one selected a material object. David, a gifted writer and preacher, chose the stories he’s lived—and lived by—over a lifetime. Richard cited his sense of humor, which has never deserted him even when laughter was scarce. Mark, who in his eighties finds himself, as he put it, “in the process of disappearing” as time grows ever shorter, said that what he values most is “now”—the savored fullness of the present moment.

I’m still working on my own answer. The first thing I told Jono was that since everything we are and everything we have is a gift—from the Creator of all as well as the secondary causes of heredity, culture, and the labor of others—it could be said that we in fact possess nothing. But that seems a bit of a cheat, a way to avoid the work of values clarification. The question wants me to think: Where does my greatest treasure lie? What would be the hardest thing to lose?

I’ve known people who had only a few minutes to flee their homes in the path of racing wildfires. And I’ve wondered: If I were in that situation, what irreplaceable items would I grab before running out the door? The box with 50 years of journals? An album of family photographs? The Theotokos icon painted for us on a Greek island? The wooden moon carved by a First Nation artist in Canada? A guitar once played by the legendary Ramblin’ Jack Elliott? It’s only stuff of course, but the things we love best are saturated with stories. They are outward and visible signs of inward and beloved memories. I would feel the poverty of their loss. But I would not call them “most precious.”[ii]

Moon mask (1991) carved on Vancouver Island from alder wood by Richard Menard duing a lunar eclipse. Theotokos icon (2015) by Dimitris Koliousis, Santorini, Greece.

All of us, of course, would reserve “most precious” for our deepest relationships—with God, lovers and friends. But it would violate the integrity of their otherness to deem any of these to be possessions. So I must look elsewhere for my answer to the question.

Good health comes to mind, or even life itself. These are certainly very highly treasured—but as gifts to enjoy, impossible to possess. As the Psalmist reminds us, we are “but flesh, a breath that goes forth and does not return” (Psalm 78:39). We all must learn to loosen our grip in this transitory life.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

— William Blake. “Eternity”

I could call faith my most precious possession, for without it I would be hopelessly adrift in a sea of unmeaning. But faith is a communal possession. It is not distinctively mine. Faith is plural, shared and nourished within the collectivity of God’s friends. If I am to speak in the singular, to name what is uniquely mine, I would say that my most precious possession is my imagination—the particular way I see the givenness of the world, processing it within my own heart and intellect, then reflecting my perception back into the world in some fresh way, whether that be in the form of conversation, writing, art, or simply as praise and thanks for a world of beauty and blessing (or lament and protest in the case of suffering and evil).

Calligraphy of Robert Bresson text by Br. Roy Parker OHC.

“Make visible what, without you, might never be seen,” said Robert Bresson, who made films unlike any other. As one critic put it, “Bresson’s films are not merely the most lucid; they are, in essence, lucidity itself.”[iii] Perhaps only the saints attain “lucidity itself,” but each of us has our own unique way of seeing and being. And I imagine that God finds equal delight in what each of us has to report from our respective locations in a universe of infinite possibility.  

Dante and Beatrice each adore the heavenly light from their own location
Venetian woodcut by Francesco Marcolini (1544).

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

— Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”

[i] The Rev. Neil Lambert, an Anglican artist/priest at St. Mary’s, Ash Vale, UK, has collaborated on some previous projects with Musson and Retallick. For more on Lambert and Venice, see Dreaming the Church That Wants to Be.

[ii] In a time when the people of Gaza, Ukraine and many other places are being dispossessed of nearly everything, I am not entirely comfortable talking about the things I have due to my privilege. Situations where the most precious possession might be a loaf of bread, a bottle of water, or a bomb shelter shatter all complacency.  

[iii] Sharad Raj, “The Austere Ascetic,” Just Cinema website, Dec. 18, 2020 — https://www.just-cinema.com/post/the-austere-ascetic-by-sharad-raj

M+R, the webstie of artists Neil Musso and Jono Retallick, is well worth a visit. They are exploring creative ways to transform the way we experience public spaces and social interaction.