The Limits of Grace

 Remembrance, come live in these bodies again and cast light upon beauty. Find out our edges. Admit us to your company. Dwell with us.

Today is Good Friday. It is also Easter Sunday. Today is his Advent. This is our every day. It is his day. Every day we crucify our lord, and every day he is raised up again. Every day he is born into this world through the anguish and persistence of a vulnerable, tender, trusting, young woman, into the land of dust and grime, and refuse, and blood, and glory and light. Today he is new from the dead never to die, yet continually he endures wrongs and evils in his land.

About this time, warm rays broke through the mid-morning haze. He felt repeated, furious strokes, lashes separating bone and sinew. His lamb’s blood washed the ground and set it apart for its most holy use. 

About this time Mary, seeing alive one who had been dead, exclaimed in the garden, “Teacher!” 

About this time the maiden Mary, heavy with child, upon a donkey, felt the struggle of the beast against the broken road, and searched the horizon for the place of her deliverance. 

About this time I sit and sip coffee, brewed just so from a French press. I look out the dining room window toward flaming yellow Forsythia. It lines the back edge of our small yard, generous in terms of urban lots here in central Virginia. We have about all we please. We’re offered pleasure without restrictive, suppressive limits, a lie really, make-believe, but our sights are set low enough. A more subtle deception pretends such a world is desirable. We’re offered the path of never feeling hard things, of never knowing what’s truly valuable and precious, but beauty is marked by boundaries. Without a seal, broken souls hold no water. We buy to pretend we’re okay, so we fail to see the greatness of the hand that holds us here. 

Finding limits pressed in upon us, we find liberty. We’re shackled together with feelings we’ve hoped to escape, but need to embrace, need if we ever hope to see. Thank God the marketing can’t produce on its promises. We’re confronted with ourselves, and, finally reaching the longed-for spring, with you. We have to rest, to accept, receive. We get to. We had bought another narrative because we didn’t trust the plan which includes our pain. We are held in your hands. We are safe with your suffering. This is beauty and rest. 

Yes, we are timid to approach what we have pierced. We are fearful to apprehend truth. We are slow to trust your forgiveness. Trust your forgiveness - this bedrock limits us, from plummeting ages upon ages into a great abyss. Here we stand. Hindered, restricted from rust and thievery. Here we rest and breathe, and endure, and rejoice. Here’s a rock we’ve cast aside, which yet holds us continually, and ever builds upon us. This is wonder and Grace. He is with us!

Where life begins

I went to the cross this morning. Well, I started in Bethlehem, where the Spirit of God took up residence in a child, as a child, Jesus. I imagined the imperfect parents who "raised" him, probably confounded repeatedly at his peace and his perfect rejoicing in what was excellent, and now I think,  also his perfect grieving over broken things.
This narrative matured at the cross. He took into himself all our broken things and grieved them with the emptying of his life. To communicate his father's excellency in forgiving offenses, this was fitting, and totally worth it. The whole earth would be filled with his glory. This was his confidence while he suffocated, and bled there, and died.

I've listened recently to an account of the Pacific battles of WWII, which included some grisly descriptions of the changes that occur in a man's flesh post mortem. This morning I paused over the corpse being handled by men as it was taken from the cross and laid in a tomb, supposedly to decay. He told us this would happen. He was dead. All my wrongs were forgiven, but my love was in the grave. This is my invitation to grieve the loss of what is excellent.

This is where life begins. A hunger to know him. This is why it's good news that he was raised from the dead. We can know, and love, and wonder at him, and enjoy him forever! Our lives' purpose is restored: he is known as glorious, and his praises will fill all things.

Degrees

If you're suffering from depression, it's not because you're thinking of things as worse than they are, but because they are far worse than you imagine.

When at last you recognize your problems as unyieldingly insurmountable, then you may experience hope. When you come to understand the immeasurable degree to which you are destined for failure, you may reach a happy rest.

Jesus was raised from the dead. Imagine struggling with how to overcome death. What's your game plan? How badly will you feel like a screw up if you don't come back to life after 3 days? None right? That's crazy. Who comes back from the dead? Who will look down on you for staying dead? Nobody.

Well, stop feeling sorry for yourself: you're gonna be dead, and no one will think less of you for it. They might think of you less after a while though I guess. ;) Here's some good news: you're not dead yet! If being dead is clear accounts, then being alive is a bonus! I mean, one day your reputation will be that of a dead person. Who is so and so? Oh, they died.

You should be having a good triumphant laugh to yourself right now because you're better than dead. Is the pressure off? Are you free to live now, having the reality of your death? Try learning something new, and don't be afraid of messing up, at worst you'll be killed!

It gets better though. A cynic might accept his death and use that as a launching pad for productivity in life to some degree, but he'll never be at peace. He'll be a cynic. This is what's up: You don't have to stay dead, just ask Jesus.

On heroin and reputation

Yes addiction is "glorified selfishness", and that is a heart disease which we all share and feed in many ways, some of which are more socially acceptable than others.
Show me one person, one, who doesn't always pursue what they believe will bring them the most happiness. Some wise person said that pleasure is what each of us seek, even the man who hangs himself. In this we can't control our choices: we always choose what promises to most fulfill. Our sickness, our disease, for all of us, is that we continue seeking where there is no satisfaction.

The one who seeks to rest satisfied by despising another's shameless pursuit of their fulfillment, is likely further from finding their own.

I'm saying addiction is a disease, and that maybe it's less of a disease than some have who settle for less gratifying social approval. In both cases what is needed is a cure, a superior pleasure to expel the inferior. The heroin addict and the one who seeks the praise of their peers each only do so because they know of no greater relief, or reprieve from their own emptiness. I'm talking this way from personal experience on both counts. They do each have a choice. One option is that they can harden and shrink their capacity for joy, that is they may give up on the possibility that there really is something good and right that will bring fulfillment, and glut themselves on poison that pleases them less and less as it kills them. Or they may choose to keep seeking, to believe that there really is something better, something altogether unlike the thief they've bedded down with for so many nights, that possibly there is somewhere waiting for them figuratively a pure faithful spouse beyond comparison to these dirty, spiteful mistresses.

He is there. Our disease is only that we can't appreciate how good he is. Come to me all you worn out and heavily burdened, I'll give you rest for your souls, he says. The fulfillment we're seeking because we're empty, is simply the knowledge that he is full, that God is good, and satisfied, happy, and fulfilled without any need of you to put down the crack pipe or impress your friends. This is what he says through Jesus. And through this word of Christ we can be reconciled to know him as he is and let that be our rest. Keep seeking, Keep knocking, Keep asking, and you'll be the one who gets him. Your responsibility is to cry out for the boldness to believe.

Special thanks to Erica! Also Chris and Michella. Be addicts y'all, just go for what really pleases.

Entitled

She passes lightly over field and flower
Barely moving the grass beneath her feet
As if carried on the wind
May I know this grace again
And witness the beauty you sing inside

The fight cuts to the bone
And the night it wounds like a sword
You haven't left me here alone
I'm held, and I'm reaching

We've never known a love song
Don't know the steps, doot-doot-do-do
Never walked in fields of gold
On our faces before we knew
What a sin we share together now
Can we ever get away

It seems impossible that life should have this light
That day should cast away the night
As if torn by the wild
What can make us whole again
When it's love, obedience cannot be denied

This cry for permanence, it chains it grips
But we've heard love never seeks it's own
Waiting on true love's kiss
Oh we'll not be put to shame

We've never known a love song
Now we set our eyes on you
Never walked, never stood at all
Til you embraced us like you do
You draw us in, put us together now
Together we shall stay, always

We've never known a love song
Now we set our eyes on you
Never walked in fields of gold
Or drank the morning dew
You draw us in, we're together now
Together we shall stay, always
It's the dawning of the day

You have given us your voice
Strength gently spoken to our souls
Turn us from our course, to yours

Piece of Cake

I love love's patience. Love is confident in its own fullness and the inevitability of its object being brought to the same. For this reason minor degrees of perfection can be more readily celebrated, and these celebrations are the more precious (rather than diminished) because the fullness has yet to come.

Here's a loose analogy for one aspect of this. I made a cake once, just to eat it. When I iced it, it crumbled to pieces, and I laughed out loud the whole time. It wasn't made for presentation, it was made to eat, so it was fine that it fell apart. It was still cake! What might have otherwise been quite distressing tended more toward a happy near delirium. It was fantastic! The cake was free to fall, and I was wonderfully pleased. It wasn't the cake it was "supposed" to be; it was divine.

When faced with apparent disorder, love recognizes and finds glad participation with the divine.

Love's patience is at rest in the desert, in a way I don't think it can be in the rich valley. I don't mean to juxtapose the worth of the two, but to say this. The one who has known the refreshment of streams in the desert enjoys those of the valley in a way another could not. I may or may not enjoy another cake better than that broken cake, but now my enjoyment of every cake is better for it.

Love doesn't feel the need for a good presentation, at least not in the way that would disrupt joy in the midst of imperfection. There's an exalted culinary artist who is perfectly crafting each one of us for specific purposes. Love praises his wisdom at every stage of development. Love knows the mess in the bowl will melt in his mouth, and treats it with the same respect.

Blue, Grey, Green

Don't worry mama: he's comin' for you.
He's gonna lift you up, beyond the blue.
Don't mind the darkness; just look for heaven's dew.
The earth is breaking open now; up springs life so new: he comes for you.

Look it's rainin' mama; a thousand tiny worlds well they can't keep away.
The earth, it pulls them down, reaches up, empties the skies of grey.
Sometimes it whispers; some-times it floods. What do you hear them say?
I hear them sing to me of love, falling to rise another day: a thousand worlds can't keep away.

The trees make peace with gravity.  They fight and they rise; they thrive on the life that dissolves the stone.
Up top they build houses for birds, and hang fruit for the ones down below.

They sing every one, and they clap their hands. Through winter and spring, be sure they will stand for the sun's return.
He was, and he is, and he comes: our hearts come alive as he burns.

He was, and he is, and he comes.

Don't worry Mama: he's comin' for you.