An angel of the Lord, descending from heaven,
                        came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. …
                        For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.
            But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid;
                        I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.
                        He is not here; for he has been raised…”
                                       —Matthew 28.2-6

They’ve been through hell, these women.
Unlike the men who ran they stayed close,
they saw him killed, they stood by him faithfully,
they showed up at his grave.
See how they’ve been resurrected now,
and passed from death to life:
though hardened soldiers faint
the women are too close to God
to be so frightened of angels.

God, bear me through,
and give me faith to stay present
in the face of holiness.

Breath prayer: + Holy … presence +
 

                                       —April 21, 2017

            Jesus said, “Peace be with you.
                        As God has sent me, so I send you.”
            When he had said this, he breathed on them
                        and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
            If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them;
                        if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
                           —John 20.21-23

This is why Jesus has been raised from the dead:
to give us his Spirit.
This is how Jesus has been raised from the dead:
not in his own body now but ours:
we, the Body of the risen Christ.
God now sends us as Jesus,
to forgive.

When we forgive, all are set free.
When we retain sins we are stuck with them,
the burden ours as much as theirs.
But we are Spirit, sent to be free,
and to set free.
Breathe in all judgment.
Breathe out God’s grace.

God breathes us into the world,
grace-filled and free.
Breathe deeply, and go.

Breath prayer: + Free … to forgive +

                           —April 20, 2017

            “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,
            and put my finger in the mark of the nails
            and my hand in his side,
            I will not believe”
                           —John 20.25

The unease you feel is not doubt.
It is hunger to go deeper.
You are not done yet.

Learn from Thomas,
who, when Jesus planned to go to Bethany
where they had tried to stone him,
said, “Let us go die with him.”

You want to see the scar of your betrayal
and how love bears it.

You want to touch the wounds
and enter the heart of The One
Who Suffers for the World
and lives.

Now, more than before,
you are ready to come and die with him,
let love undo you and begin agin.

Don’t belittle your restlessness.
Let it lead you.
Reach out.
Even now he is saying your name.
 

 

       
The meadow is anointed with fresh light.
The dancing sun hangs ribbons in the trees.
The woods break forth in flecks of green,
and birds of praise fly up into your eye-blue sky.
Earth knows how to adore you:
she blossoms forth without her thought or strain.
We, too, no less than rising daffodils,
are all ourselves your exaltation,
each raised up from our winter’s deathly sleep,
each breathed to life eternal by your joy,
your joy in us, in us your life, your light.
The seeds and buds and bulbs and roots don’t wait
form some far distant rescue to arrive;
they rise from life within, your passion’s flow,
your pure delight embodied, just like us.
O Holy One, we are your resurrection,
we your beauty, we your Life made flesh.
May we then live this day in gratitude
and love, your holy ones, your adoration.
 

 

Holy One,
Holy Oneness,
Loving Self-Giver,

I am a clear glass.
You pour yourself into me
until I am all love,

and I pour my love,
which is all of myself,
into the world

and the glass is forgotten,
and the water flows out
and wherever it is,

tasted or spilled,
it is still water,
un-buriable,

blessing the earth;
it is still love, still you,
still eternal.

Christ. you pour yourself into me.
I pour myself out
and live beyond myself,

in you, as you,
resurrected:
life eternal.
 

 

         
Christ, you have occupied our humanity
more deeply than we,
bearing our sin and sorrow,
receiving our shame, our despair.
You, the Human One,
have borne our whole burden,
our separateness, our death.
You poured yourself out
into us until there was nothing left but God.
When we have poured ourselves into you
until there is nothing in us but you,
in the darkness of the tomb,
you who are life and light
unfold and break even the bonds of death itself
and there is only light and life,
and everything is changed.

Death is weak.
A door easily swung open.
Love is our grave and our womb,
and the flowing of our lives,
always out of ourselves into you.

Christ has borne the love of God
even into hell,
and love, as always, has prevailed.
Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed.
        

 

Poor Holy Saturday,
hung out to dry between
Good Friday’s drama
and Easter’s miracle.
Not much going for it,
this empty day bereft of tradition,
just an in between time.
A day of waiting around,
a day of thinking we knew.

Welcome home.
This is the day we live most of our life in,
the wide space between tragedy and recovery,
the emptiness between the pain and the healing.

We don’t always know know we’re waiting
for something not in our hands,
that has already happened,
unknowingly included in a procession
toward someone who’s already here.
Only later, not on this day, do we know
we’re not waiting for a future;
we’re watching God unfold.

That is enough.
That is why this day,
drab and ordinary,
is holy.
 

            My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
                        Why are you so far from helping me,
                        from the words of my groaning?
                                       —Psalm 22.1

Jesus, fully human,
feels the anguish of God’s distance,
the bare landscape of abandonment.
Jesus, fully divine, feels that anguish, too,
the ripping ache of aloneness.
This is not the cry of someone deserted by God
but of one who knows God listens
when we feel that way.
This is the cry of God, brokenhearted for us.
God does not peer into our loneliness from above,
but lives there, suffers there.
The void is the silence of the soul of God,
the desert of our exile,
whose sandstone canyons echo with God’s own sobs.
This is the prayer of a lifeguard whose lungs cry for air
who has dived deep to rescue us from drowning.
This is the cry of a mother running into the flames
for her children.
This is the sigh of the Beloved
whose ear is pressed to the door of our hearts
from the inside.
This is the only voice of hope.

            My God, my God,
                        you have descended so deep into my suffering
                        that even I no longer see you.
 

    
I wove a wreath of thorns one day
for some poor, ruined prisoner
whose name I don’t recall and cannot say.
We got a laugh at him, all right,
who claimed, I guess, to be a king,
though he had never uttered such a thing,
but only spoke of love through bleeding lips.
He was a tramp, and not of royal birth,
so we would see just what his realm was worth.
I made a crown with kingly flowers entwined,
and thorns so sharp they lanced my hands,
and as I did I greeted all that pain,
for it contained the wounds and years of wounds
I’d borne and now could shove away,
and make another bear instead of me.
Oh, it was worth the pain to jeer
and jam it on his sorrowing head.
And as I crowned him with contempt,
my bleeding hands about his face,
thorns piercing me and him as one,
though mine sweet pain of causing pain,
and his the pain of suffering,
he looked me in the eye,
though trembling, tenderly,
as if I were the one now dying, or had died,
and reached with something, though his hands were tied,
and touched a place beyond that place,
and then it seemed that something drained away,
though what it was I could not say.

After we crowned that pitiful king,
and beat him some, to clarify some things,
we killed him, as we always do.
I took a rest and caught my breath,
and went home from that little hell
and met a different kind of death
that it would take me longer to endure,
the strangest thing: my hands were healed,
and something else as well.
 

 

            “Have you come out with swords and clubs
            to arrest me as though I were a bandit?”
                           —Matthew 26.55

I pray for you, Christ, arrested in the night.
I pray for you, held without bail.
I pray for you profiled, tasered, detained,
dragged out by force with my silent blessing.

I pray for you, Christ, tortured and beaten.
I pray for you Christ, held in my prisons,
my Correctional Facility, our Guantanamo.

And how many of you, Christ,
are in prisons without walls,
in cells of fear, of abuse, of shame?
How many innocent?
How many twisted not by your own choosing?

I pray for you, Curtis, and your children.
I pray for you, Juanita, and your baby.

You, too, are God’s Beloved.
You all are divine.
Christ, I pray for you all,
and whatever we do to the least of you,
in all of your shackles.

Today, we are with you, in paradise….