Tag Archives: God

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.

No Kings? — A Biblical Parable for Independence Day

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In 1776, the fourth of July became “No Kings Day.” In my lifetime, that central meaning has been largely ceremonial and festive, but in the annus horribilis of 2025 it has become profoundly existential. The crisis which provoked the Declaration of Independence is back with a vengeance. But the abuses of King George can’t hold a candle to the malignant and murderous cruelty of our current tyrants.

In the Episcopal lectionary for daily prayer, we are currently following the saga of early Israel from the First Book of Samuel, where the whole idea of kingship is up for debate. As my country rushes headlong toward the extinction of the common good, these biblical texts have felt quite timely. I am particularly struck by the eighth chapter of I Samuel as a parable of our own collective folly. [i]

In the biblical narrative, Israel’s early days in the “Promised Land” were marked by political instability. Leadership was provided by a series of charismatic figures who governed with varying degrees of cunning and force. In the ideal, the leader would be touched by the spirit of the Lord, giving the “judge” an aura of power and purpose the people could not fail to recognize. In practice, such a system of leadership was often sustained through bloodshed. As Robert Alter points out, “survival through violence, without a coherent and stable political framework, cannot be sustained, and runs the danger of turning into sheer destruction.” [ii] Indeed, the disheartening Book of Judges ends in civil war and anarchy:

In those days there was no king in Israel.
Every man did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).

When I Samuel, the next book after Judges in the Hebrew Bible, takes up the narrative, the prophet Samuel is born and raised as a divinely chosen instrument for the guidance of God’s people. As it turns out, he is far from perfect, prone to anger, rigidity and ambition. But his dream of creating a prophetic dynasty out of his descendants is thwarted by the blatant corruption of his sons, who “took bribes and twisted justice” (I Samuel 8:3).

So when Samuel’s old age raises questions about succession, the elders of Israel demand a new kind of governance. “Give us a king to rule over us, just like all the other nations.” But Samuel resists their plea. No doubt he dislikes the idea of surrendering his own authority, or admitting his dream of a prophetic dynasty is doomed. But he is also clinging to the venerable idea that ancient Israel is not like any other nation. Its only king, its only absolute ruler, is God, who rules through the direct inspiration of human agents.

Then Samuel prays, laying his dilemma before the Holy One, whose answer is surprising. “Listen to the voice of the people,” God says. “And don’t take it personally. It’s my governance they are rejecting, not yours. They’ve been rejecting and ignoring me from the very first day I delivered them from Egypt.” But even while expressing disappointment over human waywardness, God seems to accept the historical situation. Forgetting the Holy One, their Creator and Savior, is what humans do. “So give them what they ask for,” God tells Samuel. “But be sure to make it clear what they’ll be getting. Remind them what kings do: abuse power, rule with violence, steal your wealth, and turn you into slaves.”

When Samuel delivers God’s warning, he adds a dismal prophecy of the endgame: “The day will come when you will cry out before your king whom you chose for yourselves; and on that day the Lord will not answer you.”

But the people refuse to heed Samuel’s voice. “WE DON’T CARE!” they cry. “We want a king to rule us!”

When Samuel returns to his prayers to report the people’s response, God replies, perhaps with a sigh of resignation, “Heed their voice and make them a king.” And so it goes.

That’s how the conversation concludes. But I can’t help imagining God adding one more thing to the biblical text as it speaks to us across the centuries:

“Let them see for themselves what kings are like. FAFO.”

[i] I use the word “parable” here not to deny the foundation of the text in historical events, but to highlight a significance for us that does not depend on our knowing exactly how things happened in the murky past. The text of Samuel is a creative fusion of diverse sources. As Robert Alter notes in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, “What matters is that the anonymous Hebrew writer, drawing on what he knew or thought he knew of the portentous historical events, has created this most searching story of men and women in the rapid and dangerous current of history that still speaks to us, floundering in history and the dilemmas of political life, three thousand years later.” Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary—Volume Two: Prophets (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 176.

[ii] Alter, 80.

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.

Three-in-One : One-in-Three

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Lorenzo Quinn, Building Bridges (Venice Biennale 2019)

Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2024 at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington

From late autumn to late spring, Christian liturgy takes us on a ritual journey through the gospel narrative, from the Incarnation and Epiphany of Christ to the dramatic finale of Passion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost.This great sequence concludes with Trinity Sunday, which serves as a kind of epilogue.

The abrupt shift from the engaging world of story to the tangled thicket of doctrine can be a bit of a shock. It’s like going directly from a seminar in English literature to a class in advanced calculus. Our hearts sink and our heads explode. But fear not. The Trinity is no dreary abstraction. Nor is it a matter, as Lewis Carroll might say, of believing three impossible things before breakfast. We are not here to solve once and for all the puzzle of Three-in-One and One-in-Three. We are here to adore the mystery.

The first Christians were not inventive theorists speculating about the divine nature of a generic God. They were the friends of Jesus trying to make sense of the concrete, experiential data of salvation, beginning with the dramatic biblical events they had lived through and continuing to unfold in the common life of their believing communities. Their profound experiences of Jesus and the Holy Spirit had shaken the foundations of their monotheistic faith, and they were trying to sort out the implications.

Jesus and the Spirit had done for them what only God can do: heal, save, sanctify—even vanquish the power of death. Did that make Jesus and Spirit divine? And if so, what did that multiplication of divine persons do to their belief that God was one?  Jesus had told them, “I and the Father are one.” But it would take centuries to agree on what he meant.

Without losing the unity of God, how could the early Christian community account for the divine diversity revealed in the saving activities of Christ and the Spirit?

Once they began to call Jesus Kyrios (Lord), which happened very early in their worship and their storytelling, traditional monotheism was radically destabilized. The growing perception of the Holy Spirit as a guiding and empowering presence of deity in their communities only compounded the problem.

There were various attempts to solve the issue by downgrading Jesus and Spirit to subordinate, derivative, or semi-divine realities, by no means equal to the eternal and uncreated God. Such “heresies” were popular with those who wanted to keep God simple. But “orthodoxy” was unwilling to deny the fullness of divinity to either Christ or the Spirit. For them the bottom line was this: 

Only God can save us. Christ and Spirit, in the biblical revelation and Christian experience, are integral and essential to salvation. Therefore, they must be “of one substance with the Father.” That is to say, the Persons are all equally integral to the divine reality: God above us, the source and ground of all being; God with us and among us, the companion who is our way, our truth, and our life; and God within us, the energy and vitality of our deepest self. As the theologians put it:

“The Trinity is an account of God that says these are [each] irreducible and indispensable dimensions of the same reality, not different ones, and yet each has its own irreducible integrity.” [i]

And so, a trinitarian faith became foundational for the Christian understanding of divinity: God in three persons, blessed Trinity. But the inherent tension between the one and the three remains to this day. Human thought and human language can’t quite manage to think both things at the same time. It’s like waves and particles. Gregory of Nazianzus, one of most influential shapers of the fourth-century trinitarian consensus, admitted the futility of trying to corral the mystery with concepts. He suggested that we just go with the divine flow:  

“I cannot think of the One without immediately being surrounded by the radiance of the Three; nor can I discern the Three without at once being carried back into the One.” [ii]

In an amusing caricature of crudely literal images of the Three-in-One, British theologian Keith Ward imagines three omniscient individuals trying to have a conversation:

“I think I’ll create a universe,” says one. “I knew you were going to say that,” says the second. “I think I’ll create one as well,” says the third. “Well, it had better be the same as mine,” says number one. “You already know that it is,” says number two. “I knew you were going to say that,” says number three.[iii]

If we have difficulty with “God in three Persons,” it is because we think of a person as defined by his or her separateness. I’m me and you’re you! We may interact and even form deep connections, but my identity does not depend upon you. I am a self-contained unit. You can’t live in my skin and I can’t live in yours. That’s the cultural assumption, which goes back at least as far as Descartes in the seventeenth century and continues today in such debased forms as rampant consumerism and economic selfishness, where my needs and my desires take precedence over any wider sense of interdependence, community, or ecology.

But what we say about the Persons of the Trinity is quite different. Each Person is not an individual, separate subject who perceives the other Persons as objects. The Trinitarian persons experience one another not from the outside, but from the inside. They indwell each other in a mutual interiority.

But if the divine Persons are all inside each other, commingled, “of one being,” as the Creed says, what makes each Person distinct? To put it succinctly: the Persons are distinct because they are in relation with one another. No Father unless there is a Son. No Son without a Father. No Holy Spirit without Father and Son.

As Martin Buber observed, we are persons because we can say “Thou” to someone else. To be a person is to experience the difference – and the connection – that forms the space between two separate subjects. My consciousness is not alone in the universe. There are other centers of consciousness: Thou, I… Thou, I… The fact that you are not I is what creates self-consciousness, the awareness of my own difference from what is outside myself.

If we apply this to the Trinity, we say that there are Three Persons because there is relation within God, relation between the Source who begets, the Word who is begotten, and the Spirit who binds the two together and moves them outward in ever widening circles.

These relations are not occasional or accidental. They are eternal. There is an eternal sending within God, an eternal self-giving within God, an eternal exchange by which God is both Giver and Receiver simultaneously. God is Love giving itself away – self-emptying, self-diffusing, self-surrendering – and in so doing finds itself, receives itself, becomes itself. A French mystic put it this way: “it’s a case of un ‘je’ sans moi” (an “I” without a me).

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about the process of giving ourselves over to a larger whole. He called it “the intensest rendezvous,” where we find ourselves drawn out of isolation “into one thing.” He wasn’t writing about the Trinity, but his words come as close as any to describing the essential dynamic of the divine Persons:

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

As Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas says in his influential text, Being as Communion, “To be and to be in relation are the same thing for the divine life … Therefore if Trinity is our guide, the most fundamental definition of being we can give is person-in-communion … The being of the one divine nature is the communion of the irreducibly different persons; the being of the individual persons is constituted by their relations with each other.” [v]

God is not a simple, static substance but an event of relationships. That’s why we say that God is love. “To be” has no ontological reality apart from “to be in relationship.” In the words of Anglican priest John Mbiti of Kenya, expressing the strongly communal mindset of African theology, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” [vi]

Each Person contains the others and is contained by them in a shared communion of self-offering and self-surrender. But that continuous self-offering is never a one-way transaction, either one of self-emptying or one of being filled. It is always both at once – giving and receiving – as we ourselves know from our own mutual experience of love at its best. 

Trinitarian faith describes a God who is not solitary and alone, a God who is not an object which we can stand apart from and observe. The Trinity is an event of relationships: not three separate entities in isolation and independence from one another, but a union of subjects who are eternally interweaving and interpenetrating

This divine relationality is not something which an originally solitary God decided to take up at some point. God is eternally relational. Before there was an external creation to relate to, God’s own essential self was and is an event of perpetual relation. There was never simply being, but always being-with, being-for, being-in. To be and to be in relation are eternally identical.

When the Bible says, “God is love” (I John 4:16), it means that love is not just something God has or something God does; love is what God is.

As John Zizioulas puts it, “Love as God’s mode of existence … constitutes [divine] being.”[vii] Feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson echoes this when she says, “being in communion constitutes God’s very essence.” [viii]  In other words, God is Love giving itself away—self-emptying, self-diffusing, self-surrendering—and in so doing finds itself, receives itself, becomes itself. The theologians of late antiquity borrowed a word from the arts to describe this process: perichoresis, which means to “dance around.”

Trinity is a dance, with Creator, Christ and Spirit in a continuous movement of giving and receiving, initiating and responding, weaving and mingling, going out and coming in. And while our attention may focus at times on a particular dancer, we must never lose sight of the larger choreography to which each dancer belongs: the eternal perichoresis of Three in One, One in Three.

As Jesus said, “losing” yourself and “finding” yourself are equivalent and simultaneous. In giving ourselves away, we receive ourselves back. This may be counterintuitive to the modernist mindset of autonomous individual self-possession, but it is the essence of communion: “a giving of oneself that can only come from the ongoing and endless reception of the other.” [ix]

If we had the space, I would invite you now to dance the divine perichoresis with your own bodies. We would join hands, circle round, spiral inward, weave in and out of the arches and tunnels of upraised arms, and manifest with our bodies the divine fullness of the Holy Trinity, which has been described as an “interdependence of equally present but diverse energies … in a state of circumvolving multiplicity.” [x] And thus we would, both symbolically and in fact, participate in the divine reality of “reciprocal delight” [xi] which transpires not only in heaven, but “on earth as it is in heaven.”

There are no spectators in the Trinitarian dance, which is always extending outward to draw us and all creation into its motions. As Jürgen Moltmann said, “to know God means to participate in the fullness of the divine life.” [xii] 

It’s not a matter of our trying to imitate the relational being of the loving, dancing God, as if we were inferior knock-offs of the real thing. God wants us to become ourselves the real thing. God wants to gather us into the divine perechoresis as full participants in the endless offering and receiving, pouring out and being filled, which is the dance of God and the life of heaven.

And while our dance with God has its mystical, mysterious, transcendent dimensions, it is also very concrete and specific to our historical life on this earth. The divine life of communion and self-diffusive love is the only antidote for the poisonous hatreds of this fearful age.

We know the yoke of sin and death,
Our necks have worn it smooth;
Go tell the world of weight and woe
That we are free to move. [xiii]

Because we ourselves are made in God’s image, who God is matters deeply, both for our own self-understanding and for our engagement with the world. The Trinity isn’t only God’s life. It is ours as well. It’s the shape of every story, the deep structure of the church, and the foundational pattern of reality.

Because God is communion, the eternal exchange of mutual giving and receiving, then God’s Church must live a life of communion as well. When Love’s perechoresis becomes our way of being in the world—as believers, as church—the Trinity is no longer just doctrine or idea. It is a practice, begetting justice, peace, joy, kindness, compassion, reconciliation, holiness, humility, wisdom, healing and countless other gifts. As theologian Miroslav Volf has said, “The Trinity is our social program.” [xiv]

The dance of Trinity is meant
For human flesh and bone;
When fear confines the dance in death,
God rolls away the stone. [xv]

The Church exists to participate in the liberating life of God, and to enable others to do the same. We exist to make divine communion not just an inner experience but a public truth. We don’t just feel God’s perichoresis. We don’t just feel Love’s eternal dance. We embody it. We live it. We show it. We share it.  

As the great Anglican preacher Austen Farrer put it so clearly a century ago:

“It is not required of us to think the Trinity.
We can do better; we can live the Trinity.” [xvi]

Photographs by the author.

[i] S. Mark Helm, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 132.

[ii] Gregory of Nazianzus, q. in Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Knopf, 2009). 116-117.

[iii] Keith Ward, God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003), 235.

[iv] Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Collected Poetry and Prose (NY: Library of America, 1997), 444.

[v] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 46.

[vi] quoted in Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 352.

[vii] Zizioulas, 46.

[viii] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (NY: Crossroad, 1993), 227.

[ix] Graham Ward, “The Schizoid Christ,” in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, ed. John Milbank and Simon Oliver (NY: Routledge, 2009), 241.

[x] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2003), 114.

[xi] St. Athanasius (c. 296-373), a bishop in Roman Egypt, was a key defender of Trinitarianism. 

[xii] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 152.

[xiii] Richard Leach, “Come Join the Dance of Trinity.”

[xiv] Miroslav Volf, “‘The Trinity is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (July 1998).

[xv] Leach.

[xvi] Austin Farrer, The Essential Sermons (London: SPCK, 1991), 78.

No Shortcuts: Transitioning from Transfiguration to Lent

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Fra Angelico, Transfiguration fresco on the wall of a monastic cell, San Marco, Florence (c. 1440).

O voi ch’ avete li ‘ntelletti sani,
Marate la dottrina cha s’asconde
Sotto ‘l velame de li versi strani.

O you whose minds are sound and full of sense,
consider the deeper meaning hidden here
behind the veil of these strange verses.

— Dante Alighieri, Inferno IX.61-63

Epiphany is a visual season. The mystery of God among us is shown to the world. And this showing culminates with the visionary experience of the Transfiguration: the veil covering Christ’s divinity is pulled aside, and three of his friends are dazzled by the radiance. The stark clarity of this revelation lasts only a moment. Epiphanies are brief by nature. When Jesus and the disciples descend from the mountaintop, the gospel narrative returns us to a more “normal” reality.

What did the disciples actually see in that moment on the mountain? Gregory of Palamas, a 14th-century theologian, believed that they glimpsed something actual and substantial, which he called the “uncreated light.”

“Christ is transfigured,” he said, “not by putting on some quality he did not possess previously, nor by changing into something he never was before, but by revealing to his disciples what he truly was, in opening their eyes and in giving sight to those who were blind. For while remaining identical to what he had been before, he appeared to the disciples in his splendor; he is indeed the true light, the radiance of glory.” [i]

Whatever we make of Gregory’s metaphysical claims, which were disputed by many of his contemporaries, the spiritual resonance of light is undeniable and universal. It ialways seems to be about something more than physics. It seems inevitably imbued with Spirit.

Where does such light come from? Is it something that happens to our eyes but is not really in the world? Or is it somehow there, within the heart of things, “born of the one light Eden saw play?” Is it not just a simulacrum of divinity, but a direct manifestation? Opinion is divided on this question, but I myself side with the visionaries who say there is more to reality than meets the eye. At the very least, this makes for a more interesting—and radiant—universe. Thoreau put the alternative as well as any when he said, “I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things.” [ii]

In the 17th century, when the science of optics was expanding to match developments in the telescope, the microscope, and the camera obscura, Jesuit thinkers took a keen interest in both the science and the theology of light. Observable facts and theological metaphors were for them compatible and complementary ways of knowing reality.

In Ars magna lucis et umbrae (“The great art of light and shadow”), published in 1646, Athanasius Kircher, S.J., described Christ as the Light of the World who contains divine glory and manifests it to the visible realm. “For Kircher, the infinite and eternal light is God the Father, thus the Son is the light from the light. The divine light first became visible as a result of his incarnation.” [iii]  It became common for his fellow Jesuits to employ optical phenomena in their devotional literature. The light from above, the light from within, the light which pierces the dark, the light which creates the visible world, and the light which illumines the mind of the receptive perceiver—all have their source in the eternal energies of God.

Theodore Galle, “Speculum urens,” from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula (1610).

Last year I had the good fortune to see the exhibition of a lifetime: 28 paintings by Johannes Vermeer at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. It was the largest number of his works ever assembled in one place, an historic event which may never be repeated. To be in the presence of those miracles of brush and pigment was an epiphany of the heart—three precious hours I will never forget.

According to art scholar Gregor J. M. Weber, Vermeer’s art was strongly influenced by the optical theology of the Jesuits. Light itself, simultaneously natural and transcendent, could be seen as the true subject of his pictures. Many of his images feature light pouring into an otherwise shadowy interior from a window on the left edge of the canvas. And even the defining lines of persons and objects, softened and blurred by subtle gradations of color and tone, seem on the verge of dematerializing into pure luminosity.

Johannes Vermeer, Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1662-1664).

A striking example of this is Woman with a Pearl Necklace (c. 1662-1664). Its explicit content employs a common visual trope for worldly vanity. A fashionably dressed woman, clutching a pearl necklace, admires herself in a mirror. Similar images can be found in the engravings of Jesuit devotional books. This illustration from a 1682 Jesuit publication contrasts vanity before a mirror with piety before a crucifix.

Frederick Bouttats, “Different Ways of Life,” from Adriaen Poirters, S.J., Den spieghel van Philagie (1682).

While the mirror and the pearls in Vermeer’s painting were certainly “customary symbols of transience and vanity,” art historian Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., argues that the woman’s priestly posture and the chaste beauty of the visual elements represent self-knowledge and truth. Perhaps. But Weber, making his case for Jesuit influence, focuses on the empty wall behind the preoccupied figure. In his original composition, Vermeer had darkened much of that wall with a large map. But then he painted out the map, leaving that wondrously glowing surface. “One must therefore ask,” writes Weber, “if the strikingly empty but bright white wall in Vermeer’s painting does not refer to God, invisible to the woman, fixated on her vain reflection—a metaphor for someone entangled in worldly things only.” [iv] 

God is there all the time, in the form of light, but the woman is oblivious! I find that an attractive reading of the painting, because it educates my own spiritual vision. “Find God in all things,” said Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola—even in a glowing wall. While riding the ferry to Seattle the other day, I did just that when I became absorbed by light reflected from Puget Sound onto the ceiling of the passenger cabin.

LIght on a ferry ceiling, Puget Sound, Washington (Last weekend of Epiphany)

I knew factually that this light had traveled 93 million miles to be deflected upward by rippling water so it could dance upon the white ceiling above me. Still, it seemed charged with significance beyond the basic prose of solar optics: the miracle of light itself, without which nothing would be seen; the miracle of perception, enabling our own inwardness to connect with a reality beyond us; the inescapable sense of gift bestowed by luminosity and warmth; the ineffable poetics of glory, without which there would be neither beauty nor art nor religion.

I’m putting this badly, of course. I don’t have the right words. There may be no right words whatsoever. But as I sat transfixed by the bright pulsations, they felt like a semaphore from a transcendent source, delivering a message for which I simply lacked the code. Was it saying “I am with you always,” or “All shall be well”? For a moment as brief as the Transfiguration, the sense of something shown and something received was at the very least an inner truth, what faith calls the light of God shining in my heart. In a time of so much darkness, that’s no small thing.

Alleluias burned to ashes on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany.

Just three days after beholding the light of Transfiguration on the Last Sunday of Epiphany, we step through the gateway to Lent on Ash Wednesday. It’s quite a shift. For a brief moment, we see the divine light right in front of us—so close we can almost touch it. Then, just like that, we find ourselves back at the bottom of the mountain, where the only way to return to the light is the long and winding road through the desert of unknowing and unmaking.

That’s exactly how Dante’s Divine Comedy begins. Lost in a dark wood, alone and afraid, the pilgrim poet looks up. A steep hill rises before him, and behind its summit a tentative glow suggests an end to the dreadful night. The lively translation by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders conveys the hope awakened in the poet by this glimpse of dawning:

Just when / I was feeling completely lost and was ready to give up, / I looked up and saw a faint light in the distance. / I figured that meant there must be a way out up ahead / somewhere. When I saw that light, I felt better, and the / fear I’d been holding inside me that whole time started / to lift a little bit, because I figured I’d be outta there soon.[v]

So Dante starts to climb toward the saving Light. As Helen Luke put it in her Jungian study of the poem, “He wanted, as we all want, to go the shortest and the quickest way to his goal.” [vi] But his way was suddenly blocked by three fierce beasts—the leopard, the lion, and the wolf—representing all the malformed and misdirected energies and aggressions of the ego.

William Blake, Dante Running from the Three Beasts (1824-1827).

Realizing there could be no easy way out of his darkness, no direct path to the Light, Dante surrenders his ambition to conquer the luminous summit by his own strength. He stops climbing, turns around, and begins the initially downward course along the arduous road of purgation and rebirth. Helen Luke sees in this radical change of itinerary an archetype for every spiritual journey:

“So indeed do we learn, struggling out of the dark wood, that we cannot hope to find wholeness by repressing the shadow sides of ourselves, or by the most heroic efforts of the ego to climb up, to achieve goodness. The leopard, the lion, and the wolf will not allow it, we may thank God. It is when we admit our powerlessness that the guide appears.” [vii]  

For Dante, the guide is Virgil, the long-dead poet who has been his greatest literary inspiration. In William Blake’s dramatic illustration, the beasts as well as Dante’s red garment signify turbulent emotion, while the soothing blue of Virgil’s gown suggests the transcendent imagination which nourishes hope and peace even in the abyss.

“I entreat you,” Dante tells his guide, “take me to the places I must go, that I may escape this evil and much worse.” [viii] And so they descend together, into the existential abyss of pain and  woundedness, on a journey which will, by God’s grace, lead upward in the end, to the Light that cleaves every darkness.

In the Transfiguration story, the disciples are also looking for a shortcut to wholeness. If only they could stay on the summit, clinging to the vision of Love’s brilliance. But Jesus, their own wise guide, takes them down the slope to resume the Way of the Cross: the long but necessary path of negation and affirmation, losing and finding, dying and rising.

Perhaps we ourselves would rather skip Lent, or at least Holy Week, and go straight to the cheering New Fire of the Easter Vigil. But there are no shortcuts. Still, even in the desert time of trial, the vision on the mountain can be rekindled and sustained by the burning bushes along the way—if only we turn aside to see them!

Icon of Moses before the Burning Bush (early 13th century, Mt. Sinai).

 

[i] St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, in Richard Harries, Art and the Beauty of God: A Christian Understanding (London: Mowbray, 1993), 85

[ii] Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).

[iii] Gregor J.M. Weber, Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2022), 89.

[iv] Ibid., 131-132.

[v] Sandow Birk & Marcus Sanders, Dante’s Inferno (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004), 2.

[vi] Helen Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy (New York: Parabola Books, 1989), 5.

[vii] Ibid., 7.

[viii] Inferno I.130-132.

How long? Not Long! – The Advent Collection (2023 Revision)

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Oregon dawn (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

Yet saints their watch are keeping,
their cry goes up, “How long?”
and soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.

–– Samuel John Stone

Of all the seasons, Advent is the one I love the best. Its flavors are so richly complex: prophetic shouts and angelic whispers, deepest dark and magical light, wintry cold and warming hearts, the end of the world and the birth of the new. And its symphonic progression, from the eschatological thunder of its opening movement to the midnight hush in the shepherds’ field, sounds the profoundest depths of the cosmos and the soul.

I fell in love with Advent as a child, when I knew no distinction between sacred and profane. The glow of colored lights on almost every house, our family prayers around the Advent wreath, the search for the perfect tree, the interminable wait for presents to be opened, the smell of baking cookies shaped like stars and Santas, the glorious texts of Isaiah and Luke on Sunday mornings, and hearty renditions of “O come, O come, Emmanuel” and “Come, thou long-expected Jesus”––they were all about the same thing: the wonder of a world where magic is afoot and Love’s gifts are never exhausted.

Over the years, as I have grown more acquainted with the sorrow, pain and injustice of mortal life and human history, the meanings of Advent have only deepened. And in today’s evil times, the practice of hope is more necessary than ever.

I have written more posts about Advent than any other season, and I gather all the links together here. Wander through them as you will. Try the practices. Share whatever you like. And may your own Advent bring you blessing, joy, and the nearness of holy Presence.

Practices

Ten Ways to Keep a Holy Advent –– This has been my most popular Advent post, with simple practices to deepen our experience of the season. “In a month that is already far too busy and rushed, these are not offered as one more to-do list to work through, but as ways to slow down, take a breath, pay attention, and make room in our lives for the birth of the Holy.” The 10 ways are: Interrupting, Silencing, Waiting, Listening, Watching, Praying, Reflecting, Loving, Giving, Receiving. (Dec. 6, 2014)

Praying the O Antiphons –– These sublime antiphons (best known in the hymn, “O come, O come, Emmanuel”) are a beautiful way to pray during Advent. This post includes my contemporary variations on the ancient texts. On each of the seven days before Christmas, put the appropriate antiphon on your mirror or refrigerator, and pray without ceasing. (Dec. 17, 2014)

The O Antiphons: Drenched in the Speech of God –– Further reflections on what the antiphons have to tell us. “God is not a hypothesis to be tested or a puzzle to be solved by detached observers, but an experience to be encountered by receptive participants, those who know how to say ‘O!’” (Dec. 17, 2015)

Short Meditations on the O Antiphons —The link will take you to December, 2019. Daily meditations are posted from Dec.16-23..

Prayers for the Advent Season — Intercessions for use in the liturgies of Advent. (Nov. 30, 2018)

Theology

Dancing with Time: An Advent Prelude –– A meditation on time, a major preoccupation of the season. As W. H. Auden said, “Time is our choice of How to love and Why.” (Dec. 1, 2017)

The World’s End (An Advent Manifesto) –– Worlds end all the time. Neither personal worlds nor public worlds last forever. That may bring sadness, but it is also the foundation of hope’s possiblities. “Yes, all the inadequate, incomplete versions of world will come to an end (some of them kicking and screaming!), but creation as it was intended will be restored, not discarded. Like a poet who creates a new language out of old words, Love will remake the ruins and recover the lost. And the Holy One who is the mystery of the world will be its light and its life forever.” (Nov. 25, 2016)

Blinded by the Light: An Advent Meditation — The mystery we call God is always beyond us. Beyond our grasp, beyond our language, beyond our sight. The mystics and great spiritual teachers sometime use the word darkness to convey their experience in close encounters with the divine. But what they call the darkness of God is not so much a matter of cognitive deprivation, where divinity simply hides its incommunicable essence from finite minds and hearts unprepared to receive it. No, they say, the darkness of God is not deprivation, but saturation. It is not an absence of light, but an excess of glory, that makes our eyes become so dim to divine presence. (Dec. 2, 2019)

“Hopes that pointed to the clouds”: A Sermon for Advent 1 — How do we sustain hope in apocalyptic times, when the “signs of ending” are all around us and we are discouraged by failed expectations? Jesus and the poets—William Wordsworth, W. H. Auden, and Anne Sexton—help us to take heart in challenging times. (Nov. 28, 2020)

“God Isn’t Fixing This” –– For an Advent liturgy, I constructed an enormous wall, made of newspapers with distressing headlines, and set it as a veil between the congregation and the beauty of the sanctuary. In the course of the liturgy, the wall was torn down, symbolizing God’s grace breaking into our troubled history. As I wrote in this post (after yet another American gun massacre): “What if an unexpected future is breaking through the walls of our self-made prison? The Advent message is to embrace this hope, as we take off the garments of sorrow and affliction to welcome the God of joy into our midst.” (Dec. 15, 2015)

“God is alive, surprising us everywhere” –– “God is alive, surprising us everywhere. The message of a dream, intimating something more real than language. But what? Not an idea in my mind. A feeling in my body. I tried briefly to give it words. Nearness. Urgency. Strength. Presence. Then I let the words go, and rested in whatever it was. In times so dark and dangerous, it felt––consoling. Heaven and earth may pass away, but this Presence will not. We are not alone. Perhaps, even loved.” In the deep gloom after the presidential election, I was given the grace of three small revelations. One came during a concert, one in a dream, and one from the mouth of a homeless woman. (Dec. 13, 2016)

I Say Rejoice: A Homily for Advent 3 (Year C) —People of faith abide in a different story, a story where death does not have the last word, a story where Love wins. To say that God will save us is to belong to that story, and to live accordingly. And what are the fruits of faith’s life-shaping story?––trust, confidence, hope, and the kind of invincible joy which St. Paul proclaims with such passion. “Rejoice! Again I say, rejoice!” (Dec. 15, 2018)

Gaudete! — The Advent Dance of Honesty and Hope — The 3rd Sunday of Advent sounds a note of rejoicing to dispute the wintry gloom. It doesn’t deny the darkness, but it also refuses to accept the black hole of unredeemed history as an inescapable fate. “Stir up your power,” we pray, “and with great might come among us.” God’s power will never compel us to rejoice, or to hope, or to love, but it will always seek to persuade us, until the end of time. (Dec. 10, 2022)

Say Yes: A Homily for Advent 4 (Year C) — When Mary said “Yes” to the angel of the Annunciation, it was neither the first nor the last time she would do so. Her whole life up to that point had been a series of consents that would prepare her to receive the Holy One into herself. And in the years that followed, she never renounced her acceptance of the story that would one day take her weeping to the foot of the cross. It is no light thing to say Yes to such a story. (Dec. 18, 2021)

Worship

Advent Adventures in Worship (Part 1: The Electric Eschaton) –– “As the liturgical season when the old is judged and found wanting and the new is never quite what anyone expects, Advent seems particularly suited to a disruption of routine and the intrusion of novelty into the worship experience.” In the apocalyptic year of 1968, I curated a multi-media Advent mash-up of sounds and images from films, rock and roll, poetry, political documentaries and other diverse sources to evoke two Advent themes: “Break on through to the other side” and “Please don’t be long.” This post includes an unusual 20-minute audio collage which, 49 years later, remains a unique artifact in the history of preaching. Wear headphones and turn it up! (Dec. 13, 2014)

Advent Adventures in Worship (Part 2: Homecoming) –– In a pioneering example of a worship “installation,” people journeyed in small groups through a series of multi-sensory experiences. “The journey was a dying (baptismal figure, narrowing of space, sounds and images of a yearning world, an unknown way, darkness) and a rising (emergence into an open, “transcendent” space, and being gathered into the community of the eucharist). It was a losing (leaving the original assembly and the main space) and a finding (rediscovering the community and the original space).” (Dec. 20, 2014)

Unsilent Night: An Advent Revelation –– In an annual December art experience by musician Phil Kline in cities across America, participants collectively create a river of sound moving through the streets––a striking instance of Advent surprise and wonder. “If God is more of a situation than an object, then the community, relationality, mystery, beauty, wonder, delight, and communion produced by the event seemed apt expressions of divinity taking ‘place,’ or ‘being here now.’ You didn’t have to name it to live it.” (Dec. 21, 2015)

Imitating the Trinity in Our Common Life

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Windows, south nave of León Cathedral on the Camino de Santiago.

I was walking instead of writing in May, on pilgrimage along St. Cuthbert’s Way from the Scottish Borders to Holy Island in Northumbria. More on that soon. Meanwhile, I’m preaching the following for Trinity Sunday at my home parish, St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Some of it has appeared before on this blog, but the ending is entirely new.

Part of the fun of Trinity Sunday is getting to watch the preacher attempt to explain the most formidable mystery of Christian faith in less than 20 minutes. It can’t be done! We all know that—the preacher knows it too—and the fun part is seeing how he or she is going to fail this time. 

Of course, we could just say that a mystery is not meant to be explained, and leave it at that. Let’s just adore the mystery, not investigate it.

But if, as the theologians insist, “the nature of the church should manifest the nature of God,”[i] then we need to know enough about the nature of God to understand how to be a church whose own way of being reflects and manifests that divine nature. 

And if investigating the nature of God seems like a daunting task best left to the professionals, those who have the aptitude and training to navigate levels of complexity and nuance which would make our own heads explode, we must remember that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a math problem (How can one be three and three be one?), nor is it an abstract, highly technical construction of the metaphysical elite who spent centuries sorting out differences between Arians, Monophysites, Monothelites, Monarchians, Modalists, Ebionites and Sabellians.

Trinitarian thought isn’t made of thin air or abstract speculation. It is produced and nourished by the concrete, tangible history of Christian experience. Whatever we can actually say about the Trinity is first of all grounded in experience, both the experience of our spiritual ancestors, encoded in Scripture and tradition, and the contemporary, ongoing revelations of our own communal and personal life.

Ever since the first Easter and the first Pentecost, Christians have been trying to make sense of the concrete, experiential data of salvation. Based on our collective and personal experience of being “saved” (or, if you prefer: healed, forgiven, reborn, renewed, resurrected, empowered), what can we say about the God who has done this? 

Trinitarian reflection began within an ancient community deeply grounded in the monotheism of Judaism, which had, over the centuries, found ultimate reality to be not a plurality of disconnected or contradictory energies—what the ancients called “the gods”—but a coherent unity, understood to be the “one God.” However, once the early Christians began to attribute divinity to both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, a simple self-contained oneness was no longer sufficient to describe the Reality.

Without losing the unity of God, how could they account for the divine diversity revealed in the saving activities of Christ and the Spirit? Once they began to call Jesus Kyrios (Lord), which happened very early in their worship and their storytelling, traditional monotheism was radically destabilized. The growing perception of the Holy Spirit as a guiding and empowering presence of deity in their communities only compounded the problem.

There were various attempts to solve the problem by downgrading Jesus and Spirit to subordinate, derivative, or semi-divine realities, by no means equal to the eternal and uncreated God. Such “heresies” were popular with those who wanted to keep God simple. But “orthodoxy” was unwilling to deny the fullness of divinity to either Christ or the Spirit. For them the bottom line was this: 

Only God can save us. Christ and Spirit, in the biblical revelation and Christian experience, are integral and essential to salvation. Therefore, they must be equally integral to the Holy One who is the Creator and Redeemer of all things

As a consequence, the doctrine of God became trinitarian: Three in one and one in three. In other words, God is relational. God is social. God is a communion of Persons. 

If we have difficulty with “God in three Persons,” it is because we think of a person as defined by his or her separateness. I’m me and you’re you! We may interact and even form deep connections, but my identity does not depend upon you. I am a self-contained unit. You can’t live in my skin and I can’t live in yours. That’s the cultural assumption, which goes back at least as far as Descartes in the seventeenth century, and continues today in such debased forms as rampant consumerism and economic selfishness, where my needs and my desires take precedence over any wider sense of interdependence, community, or ecology.

But what we say about the Persons of the Trinity is quite different. Each Person is not an individual, separate subject who perceives the other Persons as objects. The Trinitarian persons experience one another not from the outside, but from the inside. They indwell each other in a mutual interiority.

Is this image of trinitarian indwelling difficult to conceive? Or is it something like the old John Lennon lyric?: “I am he as you are she as you are me and we are all together.” A French mystic put it this way: “it’s a case of un ‘je’ sans moi” (an “I” without a me). Subjectivity, yes, a distinct consciousness within my own body, particular and unique, yes; but a consciousness deeply permeated by the otherness of interdependent reality.

But if the divine Persons are all inside each other, commingled, “of one being,” as the Creed says, what makes each Person distinct? To put it succinctly: the Persons are distinct because they are in relation with one another.

As Jewish theologian Martin Buber observed, we are persons because we can say “Thou” to someone else. To be a person is to experience the difference – and the connection – that forms the space between two separate subjects. My consciousness is not alone in the universe. There are other centers of consciousness: Thou, I… Thou, I… The fact that you are not I is what creates self-consciousness, the awareness of my own difference from what is outside myself.

If we apply this to the Trinity, we say that there are Three Persons because there is relation within God, relation between the Source who begets, the Word who is begotten, and the Spirit who binds the two together and carries them—and the love between them—outward in ever widening circles.

These relations are not occasional or accidental. They are primordial. They are eternal. There is an eternal sending within God, an eternal self-giving within God, an eternal exchange by which God is both Giver and Receiver simultaneously.

Trinitarian faith describes a God who is not solitary and alone, a God who is not an object which we can stand apart from and observe. The Trinity is an event of relationships: not three separate entities in isolation and independence from one another, but a union of subjects who are eternally interweaving and interpenetrating.

The early Church had a word for this: perechoresis. It means that each Person penetrates the others, each contains the other, and is contained by them. Each fills the space of the other, each is the subject, not the object of each other. As Jesus says in the Fourth Gospel: I am in the Father and the Father is in me.

The word perechoresis literally means “to dance around,” and the ancient theologians quickly seized on that image as an accessibly concrete description of a complex process. The Trinity is a dance, with Creator, Christ and Spirit in a continuous movement of giving and receiving, initiating and responding, weaving and mingling, going out and coming in. And while our attention may focus at times on a particular dancer, we must never lose sight of the larger choreography to which each dancer belongs: the eternal perichoresis of Three in One, One in Three.

Wallace Stevens made a poem about the process of giving ourselves over to a larger whole. He calls it “the intensest rendezvous,” where we find ourselves drawn out of isolation “into one thing.” He wasn’t writing about the Trinity, but his words come as close as any to describing the essential dynamic of the divine Persons:

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

This divine relationality is not something which an originally solitary God decided to take up at some point. God is eternally relational. Before there was an external creation to relate to, God’s own essential self was and is an event of perpetual relation. There was never simply being, but always being-with, being-for, being-in. To be and to be in relation are eternally identical.

When the Bible says, “God is love” (I John 4:16), it means that love is not just something God has or something God does; love is what God is. As Orthodox theologian John D. Zizoulas says in his influential text, Being as Communion, “Love as God’s mode of existence … constitutes [divine] being.”[iii] Feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson echoes this when she says, “being in communion constitutes God’s very essence.”[iv]

In other words, God is Love giving itself away—self-emptying, self-diffusing, self-surrendering—and in so doing finds itself, receives itself, becomes itself.

For those of us made in God’s image, who God is matters deeply, both for our own self-understanding and for our engagement with the world. The Trinity isn’t just a doctrine or an idea. It’s a practice, a way of life, the shape of every story, the deep structure of the church, and indeed of all reality.

The mystics can help us out here. Early in the twelfth century, a German monk named Rupert of Deutz went into a church where mass was being said by a white-haired bishop. At the offertory procession he experienced a vision of the Holy Trinity:

“On the right at the edge of the altar stood three persons of such revered bearing and dignity that no tongue could describe them. Two were quite old, that is, with very white hair; the third was a beautiful youth of royal dignity …”[v]

A century later, Hadewijch of Antwerp, one of those remarkable women mystics who flourished in the late Middle Ages, also had a vision of the Trinity. But instead of three white males, what she saw was a dark whirlpool, which she described as “divine fruition in its hidden storms.” Hovering over this whirlpool was a spinning disc, on which sat a figure wearing the countenance of God – the face of God – on whose breast were written the words, “The Most Loved of All Beloveds.”

We may find Hadewijch’s vision more congenial: it is genderless, and less crudely specific than Rupert’s. And the tempestuous whirlpool, a flood of energy ceaselessly flowing through the universe, conveys a dynamic image of divinity that resembles the postmodern cosmologies of process theology and quantum physics. It’s probably easier for most of us to believe in a divine whirlpool than in three white guys.

But the crucial difference between Rupert and Hadewijch is not in the relative resonance of their imagery, but rather in what happens next. Rupert remains an observer, one who stands apart and sees God as an object. But Hadewijch does not remain separate from what she sees:

“Then I saw myself received in union by the One who sat there in the whirlpool upon the circling disc, and there I became one with him in the certainty of union… In that depth I saw myself swallowed up. Then I received the certainty of being received, in this form, in my Beloved, and my Beloved also in me.”

Rupert’s knowledge of God remained conceptual. Hadewijch’s knowledge of God became experiential. She was gathered into the circulating current of divinity. She became part of its flow, and that divine flow became part of her.

The language she uses for this experience is not mathematical or philosophical. Her language is the language of the heart. She describes being “swallowed up… in my Beloved, and my Beloved also in me.” Love, she discovered, is the way the soul knows. Love is the way the soul sees.[vi]

And what Love knows, what Love sees, is this: God is not a simple, static substance but an event of relationships. That’s why we say that God is love. “To be” has no ontological reality apart from “to be in relationship.” In the words of Anglican priest John Mbiti of Kenya, expressing the strongly communal mindset of African theology, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.”[vii]

Each Person contains the others and is contained by them in a shared communion of self-offering and self-surrender. But that continuous self-offering is never a one-way transaction, either one of self-emptying or one of being filled. It is always both at once – giving and receiving – as we ourselves know from our own mutual experience of love at its best. 

As Jesus said, “losing” yourself and “finding” yourself are equivalent and simultaneous. In giving ourselves away, we receive ourselves back. This may be counterintuitive to the modernist mindset of autonomous individual self-possession, but it is the essence of communion: “a giving of oneself that can only come from the ongoing and endless reception of the other.”[viii] 

As God’s friends, we are not merely observers of this divine life of self-offering and self-surrender. We are participants.

If God is communion, the eternal exchange of mutual giving and receiving, then the Church must live a life of communion as well. When Love’s perechoresis becomes our way of being in the world—as believers, as church—the Trinity is no longer just doctrine or idea. It is a practice, begetting justice, peace, joy, kindness, compassion, reconciliation, holiness, humility, wisdom, healing and countless other gifts. As theologian Miroslav Volf has said, “The Trinity is our social program.”[ix]

The Church exists to participate in the life of God, and to enable others to do the same. We exist to make divine communion not just an inner experience but a public truth. We don’t just feel God’s perichoresis. We don’t just feel Love’s eternal dance. We embody it. We live it. We show it. We share it.  

Church isn’t something we decide to do—or not do—on a Sunday, when we’re not otherwise occupied. It’s not a consumer item, just one of many options competing for our individual time and attention. Nor is it like a fire hose safely stored in a glass case, for emergency use only. And it is certainly not an antiquarian society preserving quaint rituals, or a museum to display our nostalgia for a lost past.  

No! The Church is the society of God’s friends—resurrection people, animated by divine breath—striving to imitate the triune communion of divine life in our human life together. By showing up, by committing to the shared vocation of worshipping, witnessing and serving together, by tending the holy flame of faith in a heedless world, we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, as vessels of that communion—not only in our sacramental life, but wherever we happen to live and move and have our being. 

Is that too hard for us? Are we up to it? My friend Bob Franke once wrote a song about the various ways he showed love for his daughter when she was a little girl. He didn’t do it perfectly, of course. No one does. But he gave it everything he had. And a line from that song, I think, speaks to our own calling as a community of faith to imitate the divine communion of the Trinity in our common life, to practice trinitarian love on earth as it is in heaven:

It may not be the thing we do best, but it’s the best thing that we do.[x] 

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, now and forever. Amen.

 

[i] Catherine LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), 403.

[ii] Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 444.

[iii] John D. Zizoulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 46.

[iv] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (NY: Crossroad, 1993), 227.

[v] Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the 12thCentury (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994), 330.

[vi] ibid., The Flowering of Mysticism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 212-16.

[vii] q. in Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 352.

[viii] Graham Ward, “The Schizoid Christ,” in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, ed. John Milbank and Simon Oliver (NY: Routledge, 2009), 241.

[ix] Miroslav Volf, “‘The Trinity is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (July 1998).

[x] Adapted from Bob Franke, “Boomerang Pancakes,” on For Real (1986). The original line is in the first person singular.  

Can the Right Please Stop Taking God’s Name in Vain?

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Fra Bartolomeo, St.Dominic (c. 1506-7), Museo di San Marco, Florence.

How hath man parcel’d out thy glorious name,
And thrown it on that dust which thou hast made …

— George Herbert, “Love (I)”

I sometimes meditate on a poem by George Herbert in my morning prayers, assisted by Helen Wilcox’s marvelous annotations [i] (the poet’s 17th-century idioms can be obscure for the contemporary reader).  And although “Love (I)” is not one of Herbert’s best poems, these lines jumped out at me when I read them today, for the debasement of the divine Name by American extremists has been very much on my mind. 

For example: Last week on Newsmax, a far-right cable channel, Eric Bolling (fired by Fox News in 2017 for sexual harassment) was interviewing conspiracy fabulist Lara Logan (“dumped”—her words—by Fox six months ago). Their subject was immigration at the southern border, which Logan said was a plot “to dilute the pool of patriots” in the United States. 

Bolling: “How does it end?”

Logan: “… this is a spiritual battle. I am a firm and solid and immovable believer in God and I believe that God wins.… and if you fight for god, god will fight for you.”

Bolling: “I have to ask you, because my audience is very god-fearing, god-loving, etc. Final thought, please, just a couple seconds: Is god ok with a closed border?”

Logan: “… God believes in sovereignty and national identity and the sanctity of families and all the things that we’ve lived with since the beginning of time, and he knows that the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants … the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches and that while they dine on the blood of children.”

Bolling (nervously): “Ha, ha, yeah.” [ii]

A day later, the opening prayer at the “ReAwaken America” tour in East Hempfield Township, Pennsylvania, went like this:

“Father god, we come to you in the name of Jesus. We’re asking you to open the eyes of president Trump’s understanding, that he will know the time of divine intervention, that he will know how to implement divine intervention, and you will surround him, father, with none of this Deep-State trash, none of this RINO trash. You will surround him with people that you pick with your own mighty hand. In the name of Jesus.”

The crowd, including Eric Trump, Michael Flynn (his father’s disgraced national security adviser), and the current Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor, repeated this evil prayer phrase by phrase.

White “Christian” nationalism is on the rise in America. It’s a toxic mixture of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, resentment and rage, thinly dressed in pious nostalgia, theological ignorance, and historical lies. For the increasingly extreme right, these are features, not bugs: 61% of Republicans—and 78% of Republican evangelicals—believe the United States should be declared “a Christian nation.” [iii]

I shudder to imagine what they have in mind, but I’m sure it has more to do with reactionary tribal identity and fear of the “other” than with the gospel, or love, or justice, or caring for the vulnerable, or welcoming the stranger, or healing God’s creation. And it’s not just a disgruntled and deluded mob that wants a more theocratic and less inclusive America. The defilement of both democracy and religion extends to the highest levels of government. 

I have written previously about the Supreme Court rushing in where angels fear to tread, substituting highly contested theological assertions for legal reasoning. If Republicans have their way in upcoming elections, it will only get worse. In a carefully argued response to the Dobbs decision on abortion, legal scholar Laurence Tribe warns, 

“… as the Court continues on the path of replacing long-settled individual rights with religiously inspired mandates, the odds would increase that the rules under which we live will reflect the preferences of ever smaller minorities.” [iv]

Gilead, here we come. 

In the January 6 insurrection, the rallying cry was “God! Guns! Trump!” The mob carried signs and shouted slogans proclaiming the will of God and the will of Trump to be identical. One attacker later told the Wall Street Journal how he sought divine guidance before storming the Capitol: 

“Lord, is this the right thing to do? Is this what I need to do?” He says he felt God’s hand on his back, pushing him forward. “I checked with the Lord,” he says. “I checked with Him three times. I never heard a ‘No.’” [v]

Insurrectionist wanted photo.

It is distressing to hear the word “god” on the lips of the wicked. But not shocking. Taking God’s name in vain is an ancient sin, from the Crusaders and Inquisitors of the past to the terrorists and extremists (including elected officials!) of our own day. Whether they sincerely believe that ultimate reality is backing them up, or cynically employ the word to authorize their own seething id, “god” on their lips becomes drained of meaningful content. It refers to nothing outside themselves. To borrow Herbert’s image, they have “parcel’d” out the divine Name, cut it into tiny pieces and tossed it into the trash.[vi]

Of course, “God” has never been a proper name. It’s more of a nickname, enabling us to talk to or talk about the “ground of our being” (Paul Tillich) or the “Love who loves us” (my personal favorite[vii]) without thinking we have reduced the Real to the dimensions of language. The Holy One has many such nicknames: Kyrie, Deus, Abba, Creator, Deliverer, Father, Mother, Spirit, and countless others. In Herbert’s poem, the “glorious name” is “Immortal Love.” If “love” had been invoked instead of “god” by the mob at the Capitol, might it have tempered their violence or extinguished their rage? Or would Love, too, have been thrown so carelessly into the dust?

Seventy years ago, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote a moving defense of the problematic necessity of “God” language in human discourse. I first heard this passage read aloud in a theology class by one of my great mentors, the saintly Robert McAfee Brown. It touched my heart then, and has remained with me through the years: 

“‘God’ is the most heavy-laden of human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger-marks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! … We may not give the word ‘God’ up. How understandable it is that some suggest we should remain silent about the ‘last things’ for a time in order that misused words may be redeemed! But they are not to be redeemed thus. We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.” [viii]

[i] Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Each poem is accompanied by extensive notes and a survey of modern critical views.

[ii] I have not capitalized “god” in these kinds of statements, since they speak of something quite other than God. https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1583069972267696134?s=20&t=KwdkjkDH7hvg0GSnYm79NA

[iii] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/21/most-republicans-support-declaring-the-united-states-a-christian-nation-00057736

[iv] Laurence Tribe, “Deconstructing Dobbs,” New York Review of Books, Sept. 22, 2022, p. 81.

[v] Michael M. Phillips, Jennifer Levitz, and Jim Oberman, One Trump Fan’s Descent Into the Capitol Mob, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/one-trump-fans-descent-into-the-u-s- capitol-mob-11610311660 I found it in Andrew L. Seidel, “Attack on the Capitol: Evidence of the Role of White Christian Nationalism,” which contains many such examples. Seidel’s article is Part VI of a highly recommended report and analysis, “Christian Nationalism and the January 6 Insurrection”: https://bjconline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Christian_Nationalism_and_the_Jan6_Insurrection-2-9-22.pdf

[vi] Herbert’s poem was contrasting the immensity of divine love with the trivializing reductions and diminishments of love we creatures of dust make when we apply it to the wrong object. But as I say at the outset, his lines seem a perfect match for the misuses we make of “God” in our political life.

[vii] From Terence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life (2011).

[viii] Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God (1952), 8-9.

Should “God” Be Spoken at a Political Convention?

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“I alone am God; there is no other.” (Phrygian Sybil, Vito de Marco, pavement of Siena cathedral, c. 1482)

I always cringe when political figures conclude their speeches with “God bless the United States of America.” In that context it is not a prayer; it is an assertion of privilege and dominance, invoking divine consent and protection for a sinful status quo. At best it is a formulaic trivialization of divine-human communication, lacking the humility, attentiveness and depth proper for addressing the Holy. At worst, in the mouths of scheming hypocrites and cruel tyrants, it’s blasphemy.

How many times, at this week’s Republican National Convention, did we hear the word ‘God’ on the lips of angry, hateful, lying partisans? I don’t know which is worse—the cynicism of unbelievers who speak the word only to dupe the gullible, or the bizarre piety of those who seem to believe that God blesses corruption, deception and violence.

One might debate degrees of difference between Democrats and Republicans regarding the promiscuous appropriation of “God” in their rhetoric. No one is without sin in the world of politics, and the abuse of rhetorical piety is a bipartisan failing. It’s hard to remain spotless when it comes to power struggles. But can we at least agree that anyone who has committed, condoned or enabled the torture of caged children should never dare to cry “God!” unless they are lying prostrate on the ground, weeping bitter tears, begging forgiveness in fear and trembling?

Time magazine cover, July 2, 2018.

When I was a young man studying theology with Robert McAfee Brown, he read us a passage from Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God. Fifty years later, I still remember the passionate wisdom of the Jewish theologian’s words. He was responding to a friend who thought “God” to be a word so defiled by centuries of misuse that its utterance should be suspended indefinitely, giving it time to recover its proper purity and depth. Buber replied:

“Yes,” I said, “it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. The generations have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. Human beings with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger marks and their blood.

“Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of the One whom the generations have honoured and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean God whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations mean. Certainly, they draw caricatures and write ‘God’ underneath; they murder one another and say ‘in God’s name.’ But when all madness and delusion fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say, ‘He, He,’ but rather sigh ‘Thou,’ shout ‘Thou,’ all of them the one word, and when they then add ‘God,’ is it not the real God whom they all implore, the One Living God, the God of the human race? Is it not He who hears them?

“And just for this reason, is not the word ‘God’, the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all human tongues for all times? We must esteem those who interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which is so readily referred to ‘God’ for authorisation. But we may not give up. How understandable it is that some suggest we should remain silent about ‘the last things’ for a time in order that the misused words may be redeemed! But they are not to be redeemed thus. We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”

The Deposition (early Gothic; Leon cathedral on the Camino de Santiago)

Lost at Sea: Retelling the Flood Story in a Pandemic

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Row on, row on, another day
May shine with brighter light.
Ply, ply the oars, and pull away,
There’s dawn beyond the night.

–– Traditional sea shanty

 

At the Easter Vigil, we light a fire in the dark and tell our sacred stories. One of them is the saga of the Flood from the Book of Genesis. Tonight, as we stream the Vigil liturgy from our living room for our local parish, this is how it wants to be told. 

When we wonder about things, we tell stories.  One of our oldest stories describes a great flood that sweeps away everything in the world until there is nothing left but an endless sea. Some people say it’s a story about God getting fed up with the world’s violence and greed and wanting to start over. Others say the story is about everything being thrown out of balance by human sin––the harmonies break down, and God’s beautiful creation is swallowed up by chaos.

But tonight, when a new kind of flood is sweeping across the earth, washing away the world we know, maybe the story needs to be about the ark. We’re all in this boat together, hoping and praying we can survive the raging sea until the storms are over and we can anchor in some safe and peaceful harbor.

That’s where we are now, in the middle of the story––cooped up in this ark with a bad case of cabin fever, wondering if the flood is ever going to subside so things can get back to normal. It’s not easy, being stuck in this boat. It’s strange and stressful for us. Meanwhile, the sea gets rougher, the storms wilder.

It’s like that Psalm we say in Holy Week:

Save me, O God! The waters have risen up to my neck.
I am sinking in a deep mire. The waves wash over me.
Do not let the flood swallow me up! (Psalm 69)

That’s how it feels, here in the middle of the story, in the middle of the flood. We have our fears. We have our doubts. We have our losses. And frankly, some of us are getting sick and tired of this stupid ark. Been in the storm so long, Lord! How long? Too long.

But this isn’t where the story ends, with us lost at sea, sinking into oblivion. The One who made us will not forget us. The One who loves us will not forsake us. Already, God is imagining a future for us. Maybe it will be something better.

God never said we won’t be afflicted.
God never said we won’t be disquieted.
God did say we shall not be overcome.

When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not thee overflow,
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.