The last few days has been spent in the company of preachers. This is not an unusual experience for me but this was an over-the-top gathering of those who preach called the Festival of Homiletics……church speak for preaching. When I would say to those not in on the lingo that I was attending this event, faces would take on that quizzical look of ‘whaaat?’ Each time I said it I was struck with the number of ways those of us who make our lives in the church have that inside-outside language we use that may just contribute to the many folks who no longer associate with faith communities. It is a complex and curious thing.

I am a shameless admirer of the work of Barbara Brown Taylor whose words I have often shared in this space and she was a presenter at this conference. I am always amazed at her easy-going, seemingly egoless way of articulating her own struggles with the church, faith, life and an understanding of how the Holy moves in the world. While I heard some good preaching, her illumination of both the sacred text of the Bible and the sacred text of life is what I will remember from these days.

One of the statements she made had to do with the speed at which we now live our lives. A speed we have come to see as normal, regular, just the way things are. She talked about the soon-to-be lost art of ‘slow reading’, that reading of a book or article that isn’t done for the scanning of the quick facts or top points the author is trying to convey but is mulled over, ruminated upon for the depth of what the author is saying. Her words made me think of the four, yes four, books I am reading simultaneously. I jump back and forth, back and forth between them like a grasshopper on summer grass. Surely I must be missing something, some miraculous gift of the author’s creativity in this process. How much more I might really get from the gift of the authors if I sat and gave my full attention to one book, one paragraph, one sentence, one word.

I was reminded of visiting the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin. One part of the exhibition before we actually saw the tiny, beautifully illuminated pages of the scriptures, was the story painted on panels of how the monks traveled with the scriptures in their daily lives. As they moved from town to town, from monastery to monastery, they carried a book on a strap that was slung over their shoulder much like a backpack. It was called the Book of Mulling. It was their traveling text named not from the act of mulling but from the place Moling. But when I read this I imagined the monks walking along, ‘mulling’ over the scriptures. I imagined it as a kind of slow reading that served them well.

Speaking of slow reading allowed Barbara Brown Taylor to move on to the act of slow writing. She described slow writing as writing to discern. Those I know who keep a journal do this. I am a sporadic journal keeper at best but my intentions are always grand. Perhaps you can relate. But I do write to discern in many other ways in a variety of places and ways.

Which brings me back to preaching. Some of the best sermons I have ever heard have invited me into my own discernment and have filled me with more questions than answers. They are not so much a to-do list or facts and figures that have a particular clarity. These are the sermons that allow me to see the wrestling the preacher is doing with the text and gives me permission to do the same. Since I don’t consider myself a preacher but often find myself in a place where I am asked to do something similar, my biggest hope is that everyone present, including myself, will be open to new ah-ha’s, to walking through the back door of a text, to discovering something new, something surprising, something challenging.
It is what I imagine those slow reading monks were doing with their Book of Mulling. As they walked along taking a phrase or word, allowing the scenes of field and city to wash over them, they must have had the opportunity to see the ways in which real life and the words on the page wove together in some way. Perhaps they were even inspired to see the Sacred in the every day, to feel the words take on flesh and bone, to be visible in the faces they met, the landscape that unfolded before them.

Mulling. Slow reading. Slow writing. It might be a good day to do all this.

“Good work joins earth to heaven.”
~Lu Chi

Noticing is a full time job these days. Papers pile up on my desk. Emails need to be answered, phones calls returned, meetings attended. There is the usual work around the house…..laundry to be done, meals to be made, the cleaning of this and that. But noticing is the real work and the other jobs have, I am happy to say, suffered.

Our winter was incredibly long and it is still cooler outside than is normal. And so I find myself clinging to the work of Creation with ever greater tenacity. Noticing how the impetus of Earth is toward rebirth, to respond to every warming place by bringing forth life, color, beauty, a glimpse of hope. This has become the real work. I have made a pact with our garden that each morning I will walk about, like a pilgrim in search of salvation, to notice the changes. I will notice how, despite temperatures that require layers and sometimes gloves, the soil is being pushed aside by green shoots that must be born, must make their way into the promise of a May day. I will notice how the chipmunks run wildly when I begin my inspection, their bodies fat with the birdseed they nuzzled into in the garage, a welcome gift from careless humans to a tiny four-legged that survived a harsh and frigid winter.

Noticing has become a full time job and so yesterday I gave up, pushed myself away from all that seemed imperative and gave myself to the work. I was rewarded with a paycheck from the mysterious work of the Creator. I marveled at the tulips whose colors seem impossible, their patterns seemingly designed by a hand artful at both color and pattern,feathered with the daintiest of brushes. I stooped to look at how certain spring grasses rise from the Earth in perfect circles like mandalas formed by fairies for their own tiny world. I wondered at the ways in which the bleeding hearts in their more nubile form never gave a hint at the brilliant pink heart shapes that were to come. I spent time inspecting the tiny feathery buds of a volunteer chestnut tree that decided our yard was a good home. The buds have now opened into fans of chartreuse that waved in the cool, morning breeze. All this noticing in only a few minutes. My head was spinning!

As if that weren’t enough work for one day, my husband and I visited a rookery in the afternoon on our way to our church’s retreat center. We had visited there before without seeing many birds, only the tall, spindly trees rising from cold, autumn water, looking forlorn for want of residents. But yesterday, yesterday was a whole other story. Great blue herons swooped over the water spreading their prehistoric wings like the pterodactyl I always imagine as their ancestors. The swooping often took them to the top of a rookery tree so thin it would seem to break under their weight but didn’t as they stood atop the gray-brown pinnacle looking out over their kingdom. They shared air space and tree limb with cormorants, black as coal, and equally as impressive. Further noticing through squinted eyes and then the magic of binoculars showed nest upon nest of beaked heads……parents sitting, quietly warming their next generation. All around us in the bushes and smaller trees that blanketed the shore, warblers sang and chirped their migration song.

Sometimes our work can be exhausting. Other times it can be stressful. If we are lucky, or blessed, our work can be fulfilling and lift us to a place of illumination, a place only the mystics seem gifted to experience. This work of noticing often does just that. We are reminded of the great canvas upon which we have all been painted. A canvas that is ever evolving, changing and re-creating itself. In this life of art of which we are all a part….human, animal, insect, bird, plant, soil,air, water…..we all have a job to do. Mostly as humans our work is to notice. The Great Artist has seen to it by allowing us words and the ability to tell the story.

The poet Mary Oliver reminds us that our real work is to ” Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” My job description, and yours if you so choose, simply reads ‘Noticer’. It is a job that is never finished, always rewarding and often illuminating.

And now…..back to work.

It had been my intention to write something in this space about Mother’s Day. I feel particularly blessed to have my mom in my life. We talk several times a week and we laugh a lot and cry sometimes, too. I am grateful for all she has passed on to me and how she has been a mentor in more ways than probably either of us realize.

I am also blessed to be a mother of two young men who ceaselessly bring me joy and fill me with wonder. Watching their lives unfold is one of my life’s great gifts. There are also young women who, though I did not give birth to them, feel like daughters to me. This generational landscape that makes up my daily life, that colors how I see the world and the hopes and dreams I have for it, is never far away.

But this year’s celebration of this day that pays homage to those that mother, whether literally or figuratively, seemed a bittersweet day. Unlike those that I call sons and daughters, there exists in the world a band of mothers whose daughters have been taken from them. The young Nigerian women kidnapped from their school would not leave me. Like people all around the world, I have been outraged, saddened, and unable to fathom how humans can do these kinds of things to one another. How can it make any sense at all to take young girls at the freshest time of their lives and hold them for some political or religious purpose? Of course, this is not a logical act and the question I ask is based on some belief that logic or humanity or compassion makes sense to every one in equal measure. We know this is not true.

When I was in college I lived next door to a family from Nigeria. Actually, there were many students on campus from Nigeria studying and preparing to make a better life for not only themselves but also for their country. This was my first experience of people whose lives had been so different than mine. I treasured the time with them and came to know them as friends, particularly the two children, Cheetah and Ansu. They liked hanging out at my apartment. We did crafts together and played games. I also showed them how to put sprout seeds in a mason jar, cover the end with a nylon stocking and grow sprouts for their sandwiches. They thought it was magic! I thought it was a cheap way to make a sandwich taste better. Daily they would show up at the window of my apartment, push their beautiful brown faces against the screen to check on their sprouts.

This past week I have thought of them. They would now be about the age to be parents of one of these young girls. In thinking this I was once again face to face with the deep connection we have as human beings. We are woven together with mostly the same hopes and dreams regardless of where we were born, the color of our skin, the house we live in, the language we speak, the God we worship. We want to be safe….and know that our children are. We want to have food and shelter….and provide it for those we love. We want to be loved…..and to love. We want to make meaning of our lives….and create a place where the next generation can do the same.

And so on this Mother’s Day, I was filled to overflowing with love and gratitude for my life and my sons who I helped bring into the world and who bless me every day. That overflowing stream was also filled with the faces of those young women that I name ‘heart-daughters’. The privilege with which I walk the Earth was not lost on me as it is not, I hope, lost on them.

But my heart was also breaking for those Nigerian mothers and fathers who did not get a phone call or a card, who know nothing of this day we celebrate so richly here. Instead, they live with a fear and despair I cannot imagine. The prophet Jeremiah’s words floated in my mind: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted.”

Rachel weeps. The Nigerian parents weep. We weep. The Holy weeps.

Yesterday I pulled a pad of paper out of my drawer on my way to a meeting. Though I have migrated to using technology for notes I may take in a meeting, every now and then a good old fashioned pad of paper and pen is what is required. This was one of those times. Walking down the hallway to the meeting, I looked down at a cryptic few lines I had jotted down at some earlier time: ” You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need any more of that sound.” After these sentences, I had simply written M.O.

I shook my head is disbelief or to jar a memory loose as to where these words came from and why I had written them down. At some point they must have grabbed me and I had quickly committed them to paper before moving onto the next thing. Typical. And M.O.? I am assuming this is Mary Oliver whose work always wakes me up to something. I had written this shorthand as if we are close personal friends! The thought made laugh and feel humble all at the same time.

Later in the day I came back to the now crumpled paper I had quickly torn off the pad in order to make way for the meeting notes. I stared at these words and allowed their truth to sink into me. How many times a day do I want to cry my mistakes aloud? Some days too many to count. Some days the mistakes I have made are tattooed invisibly on every available patch of precious skin. ” Look at how I’ve messed up!” “See the things I overlooked, have forgotten, have neglected!” “What can I possibly do about the people I have hurt and those I have ignored?”

Any of that sound familiar to you? Have you also wanted to cry aloud your mistakes to anyone who will listen? It seems to be a common thread that we humans want to beat ourselves up for all manner of things. Things we’ve done and those we’ve left undone. There is a great prayer in the Christian tradition, and probably other traditions as well, that speaks to this human condition.

But our mistakes are only a small part of who we are. We are also people filled with the great potential of goodness and kindness and mercy. We are people who are capable of amazing beauty and the creativity that has brought healing and hope to the small places and grand places. If we are to cry aloud anything that might transform the world, wouldn’t it be those things? As M.O. points out, ‘the world doesn’t need any more of the sound’ of our crying out our mistakes.

I am not, I hope, being Pollyanna here. It is just that mistakes are most often an opening for something more, something new, something waiting to be changed or transformed. Naming them, honoring them for their role in our ever-creative lives is important. But crying them aloud? I don’t think so.

So on this day, this gorgeous spring day, may we each be found crying aloud, not our mistakes, but all the joy and hope we can muster. For some of us it will take more effort than others. Blessings on each. Let’s choose to give to the world this day a sound that can be heard by all Creation. For our own good. For the good of those we love and those with whom we tangle. And for the healing of the world.

We humans spend a lot of our time waiting. We wait in lines and in traffic. We wait for special days to arrive and other days to end. We wait for certain years to come round, certain birthdays that mark moments of growth or transitions. That is until we aren’t so interested in marking birthdays any more……which I’ve never understood. Consider the alternative. With all the waiting that is a part of living, you’d think we’d get better at it. But it is the nature of waiting, perhaps, to be a nag.

Right now I am sitting in my office that overlooks an enormous oak tree. It doesn’t look too much different today than it has over the last several months. Bare. Barky. Gnarly. Limbs twisted this way and that in a way that fills me with love. But I am waiting for some action from this tree. I am watching for the greenness of buds to begin to emerge, creating the shade that plays havoc with the little solar powered wind chime that sits near my desk. A robin, plump as anything, sits on one of the branches. But no other life seems to be happening out there. No signs of the rebirth that is to come. I am left waiting.

Truth be told most Minnesotans are waiting these days. We are uncovering flower beds weighed down by months of snow and ice. And we are looking with hopeful eyes toward the ground that is invisibly ripe. We vaguely remember the plants that will soon….soon….make an appearance. But for now, our work is to watch for the incremental arrival of green in a variety of shades pushing its way to the stage that is our yard. Our eyes will work overtime, as mine are right this minute, scanning every available space for something, anything, blooming.

I have seen some daffodils showing their brilliant yellow faces toward the sun. It felt like a pure shot of adrenaline! I wanted to stop my car and get out, run around and shout loud hosannas just like we did Easter morning. But I didn’t. I just tucked the sight into that happy place where we store memories for recall…..for a time when we need them.

Do you think humans are the only ones who have this experience of waiting? I don’t think so. Anyone who has ever been greeted by a dog at the end of a day knows somehow they were anticipating someone’s arrival. They might not care who that someone is but their excitement says something.

Waiting can be, if we allow it, not an annoyance but a meditation. How long might it take a bud to appear? How much longer till it becomes a leaf? How long will I need to wait to see the color of tulips emerge from their winter home? How much longer until they unfold their sunburst to its fullness and then let loose their petals,dropping them to the ground below? Being present to this slow, mysterious process, a process we have no part in nor control over, can teach us much about living this precious life.

Keeping watch over the oak tree has reminded me that the two of us are in a relationship. I am witness to its living season to season and I suppose it does the same for me. Over the years I have seen its limbs bear bud and leaf and then slowly let these leaves fall to the ground below. I have followed the path of their falling knowing that their letting go signaled by own. Another season come and gone. Another one on which to wait. This oak and I have a ‘thing’ going on and I plan to stick with my part of the bargain.

The buds will soon be visible and leaves will make their way into the world. That is the work of the tree. I will wait and watch and give thanks that I have the privilege of watching and waiting into one more season, one more summer, filled with its beauty.

It is an agreement we have made with one another.

“Cancel work today. Go and enjoy May Day by doing something that gives you great pleasure. Try to be outdoors all day if you can. Leave formal meditation alone and let your natural joy find its best outlet.”
~Caitlin Matthews,The Celtic Spirit

Yesterday was May Day, the first day of the month that welcomes summer into our lives. Or so says the Celtic calendar. Here in Minnesota we would be hard-pressed to see signs of spring much less summer. But the calendar read May 1st and so I imagined the many places in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland where people danced at dawn to welcome in the delights of summer. I did this while pealing off my flannel pajamas and donning the same number of layers, minus one, that I have worn for the last eight months. Can you hear my weary voice?

Generally, I am unscathed by weather. It drives certain people in my family nuts that I say with regularity that ‘My favorite season is whichever one we are in.’ There is truth in it. It keeps me living in the moment and not projecting ahead too far to what is yet to be. But yesterday’s gloom piled on gloom did fray my edges. I forced myself to walk outside in the morning while the mist gave me a free facial. It actually was enjoyable though cold and wet. While walking I squinted my eyes to see the tiny buds on lilac bushes and trees. Minuscule, chartreuse sightings opened something deep in my heart. I offered them a blessing….one for them and one for me….that their hope, and mine, would not be stifled much longer.

May Day is celebrated, of course, not only in those nations that flow with Celtic blood. The Scandinavians also honor this day. And it has also been celebrated by those whose
political views swing far to the left and nearly off the grid as a day to lift up issues of social and political injustices. The morning paper was filled with stories of those protests and marches, some that got sadly out of hand. Sometimes our fervent passion for change or new life takes us places that can be dangerous, even hurtful, though I want to believe, perhaps naively, that this is not the original intention.

May is the month when we open ourselves to the passion that lives within, the passion for re-creation, the madness of love. (Cue ‘It’s May!It’s May! The lusty month of May!) The Earth and its people are ready to fall in love all over again with whatever it was that stole our heart and then buried it deep in the winter snows. I imagine those who live even further north in this hemisphere than I do, those whose lives are cloaked in precipitation and darkness for so many months, as they celebrate with fullness the joy of the green born of the rain and the brilliance of the sun that will shine upon them. Who wouldn’t want to dance and sing at the coming of the month of May and the promise of increased sunlight?

Yesterday I did not do what Caitlin Matthews suggested. I did not ‘cancel work’. But I did spend a fair amount of time outside and I ended the day dancing which always brings me great pleasure. But on Sunday, I will join with others to welcome spring at the annual May Day parade hosted by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. This yearly gathering of creativity, art, social justice, imagination and hope is a tradition for me. It is the yearly shot in the arm of what can happen when a group of people choose to live out loud and thumb their noses at the cold, the darkness that can overwhelm. They do this by doing what people have done for hundreds if not thousands of years. They gather to mark the change of seasons and the welcoming of new life.

On this first Sunday of May, as I watch the parade and that band of people who give their lives to creating both small and enormous works out of the simplest things, I will be filled with the goodness and promise of another summer whose time will come. Eventually. This will be my ‘few days late’ May Day celebration. Like the winter that does not want to let go, my timing may be a bit off. But I will get to it in due time. I will welcome the promise of May, which is also my birthday month. Even more reason to celebrate…….each and every precious day.

It’s May! It’s May!

On Friday, I was in the presence of healing. I was not in a hospital or a church. I was not at the bedside of someone who is struggling with illness. I was not on my knees in prayer though the whole of the day felt like one, long conversation with the Holy. So,perhaps, it was prayer.

Instead, I was in the front row pew of my car traveling the highways and back roads of southern Minnesota. My husband and I had decided to do a little road trip for the day. Travel down the Minnesota side of the river and then cross over into Wisconsin and make our way home from the view of our neighboring state. But before we made it to the river, we took the rolling roads of farmland and small town,our eyes soaking in the possibility, the promise of what is yet to be. It was like watching the act of resurrection in its infant stages.

For as far as the eye could see fields unfolded, their soil in various stages of readiness for planting. In some the rivulets of blades were visible and I imagined the farmers having driven through the land with hope tucked in their jean pockets. Other fields were marked with last year’s corn stalks nubbed off and sticking up like a bad crew cut on a young boy’s head. But even those fields held the promise of ‘not yet’ but soon.

In one field, we saw the gathering of a whole herd of what I have always called ‘Oreo cows’. I do not know their proper name but they have the look of an Oreo cookie….black head and upper body, black rump and tail, with a creamy white strip in the middle. They were too beautiful to pass up so we had to pull off and take some photos. In our stopping we noticed the numbers of young ones, new to the world, lying down for a morning,drinking from their mother’s undersides. There appeared to be a set of three snuggled up together…triplets? The adults in the group clearly were uncertain about the two-leggeds who had stopped to take in their sight. Looking at us with their enormous, brown eyes they began to move their community further away and down into the field to safety. But this was not before we got a good dose of healing and hope from their effort at continuing their species and also a nice experience of humor and awe that they exist at all.

This healing journey came after the longest winter, one that still does not want to leave us. Rain flecked with snow falls still as we make our way into May. And so the healing comes from the wisdom of those who do not know the calendar date but continue their push toward new life regardless of numbers assigned to days. These are the ones who feel the pull of seasons in ways undefined in human terms.

Like the pelicans that flew overhead in Friday, flapping their prehistoric looking wings and carrying their comical beaks along the springtime sky. These amazing white birds twisted and turned their way along the winding river route, periodically landing for a rest on the still frigid water. One would dip down, land, float and a few of its friends would do the same. To keep it company? Who knows. It was a beautiful and peaceful sight to these human eyes.

This road trip had the words of Wendell Berry’s poem floating through my head. Berry, a farmer by trade and a writer as well captures the gift we experienced:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And so it was. Freedom. Healing. Hope. Possibility. Imagination. Wisdom. All from those who have no words, who have no way of communicating the goodness and promise of the Universe except by being.

And that was more than enough.

It is rare that I have sleepless nights. Unlike many friends and family, I am a ‘good’ sleeper. Some time ago I convinced myself that sleeping is a choice. This works for me though I know it does not for others and my heart goes out to you. I have heard the stories and seen the fallout from other’s sleepless nights. And to those who do battle with bedclothes, I say…peace…peace…peace.

Right now I am methodically making my way through favorite author Barbara Brown Taylor’s newest book Learning to Walk in the Dark. As always her words draw me in and create images that stick with me all day. I say I am reading it methodically, one chapter a day, because otherwise I would devour it like a cheap chocolate bar and it deserves more. Since the book follows the movements of the moon from waxing to waning stages, it also seems the right rhythm. The book celebrates the importance of darkness in our lives. How we need it. How it challenges us. How it nurtures us. Something we often forget or even deny.

It was the following set of sentences that grabbed me a couple of days ago and put me in the same camp as my insomniac frIends. Though I may sleep well, mostly, these words were truth writ large: “By day, I am a servant of the urgent. Nothing important has a chance with me. I am too consumed with the things that MUST be done to consider whether or not doing them even matters. But in the middle of the night I do not have so much to do. Once the lights are off and I am lying in my bed, the dark angel knows right where to find me. I am a captive audience.”

Recently I have started to wear one of the popular FitBit bracelets that monitors and records the activity and calories burned in my day. Another feature of this bracelet is that it also records sleeping patterns. Times awake. Times restless. In the morning I log onto my computer and get a colorful reading of the patterns of my nighttime life. A lovely blue is the backdrop and shows when I am actually sleeping. This is interrupted by an aqua line for times when I have tossed and turned. And then there are hot pink lines when I am awake. Seeing this allowed me to know that while I see myself as a good sleeper, the truth is that I have a more active sleep-awake life than I had known.

Reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s words and seeing the colorful painting my sleep patterns created, woke me up to the times in the night when I was indeed a ‘captive audience’. Each night there is no doubt a time when something that happened at the office that day replays itself and I see how my words could have been hurtful or graceless. At some point of the hot pink line on my sleep pattern, I am in mother-worry-mode, a place that has painted its color on my life story for more than two decades and one that will probably never be without color in my nighttime work. Still other spans of the night I am held captive by the things I forgot to do or those I must remember to do tomorrow….when I wake up….after I have gotten a good night’s sleep. Indeed the dark angel always finds me even if I am a ‘good sleeper’.

What to do with this nighttime activity? Wiser more well-trained and educated folks than I have tried to answer that question. For me, breathing helps. Being aware of the breath that carries me through some of my hurried days, slowing the rhythm, the in and out of animating spirit, takes me to the resting place that is one of the gifts of the dark and is one of the gifts of sleep.

And breathing is a form of prayer, isn’t it? Connecting with the Breath that breathed us all into being and rocks us into the sacred rhythm of the night, helping to take away the aqua and hot pink lines that pattern our bluest night and bring us into the rest that will fuel our days. In that place we will try with all our might to make meaning of all that fills the minutes and hours……and for that we need a good night’s sleep.

Sweet, peaceful, sleep to you……

Easter is an over-the-top day of fullness. Many of us rise early, “while it is still dark” as the scriptures describe, and gather for worship at near sunrise. Worship for those of us who make a home in the Christian household is also over-the-top. Big music. Big words. Big crowds. Big. All this is as it should be. We are after all declaring the biggest story of Life and the inability of anything, especially, death, to overcome the urgency and pulse of this Life that breathes through all Creation and has done so from the beginning. Big.

This ‘bigness’ is usually accompanied by gathering with family and friends, meals filled with traditions that cannot be tampered with and all other manner of activities….egg hunts….walks to look for burgeoning signs of spring….doses of longed-for sunshine…..naps. Fullness.

Yesterday, in between the bigness of a morning filled with worship and the meal that was to come, we took a leisurely drive around a couple of the Twin Cities lakes. Like prisoners released from winter confinement, people were streaming along the walking paths. Dressed in everything from Easter finery to shorts and halter tops, it was a sight of freedom, colorful freedom. With our windows rolled down to let in the sounds of birds and shouts of children riding bikes, we overheard this short interchange between a mother and her young son.

“Mom, what are we gonna do when we get home?”,the boy yelled as he brought up the rear of a procession of the family making their way around the lake. “Sit.”, answered the mother. There was no response to what may have sounded like a preposterous idea to this youngster. We laughed out loud!

Sit. In the midst of what had already been a no doubt full day, the answer to what would be next on the agenda was simple. Sit. I loved this mother for her attention to what was probably needed most.

Most of us are pretty good at filling our days with long lists of what must be done even on days that are not made of the fullness of Easter. It has been my experience that there is a certain level of addiction to busyness and when we are presented with the opportunity to ‘sit’, it can be a twitchy, troublesome time. Days off can be stuffed full of the household tasks that nag us. There are always bills to pay, laundry to be done, exercises that beg to find a home in our muscles. This is to say nothing of the stack of books and articles that have piled up for the’when I have a moment’ time.

This experience of mother and son reminded me of a a few sentences I had read earlier in the week in a Lenten devotional by Jan Richardson: “Can it be that stillness is a journey, too? Can it be that waiting offers its own road, one that, instead of propelling us outward, spirals us inward? Is it possible that waiting is part of how a way is made for us?”

I am imagining those early followers of Jesus making their way in the days after they have found the tomb empty. Someone might have asked the question “What are we going to do when we get home?” Because I love Mary Magdelene so, I can imagine her saying, “Sit.” Sit in the stillness and come to some understanding of the journey. Sit while we come to rest in our inward wisdom. Sit until we can allow memory and grief to hold hands. Sit as a way was being made for them.

After the bigness of Easter comes the rest of our days. How we walk those ordinary, not-so-over-the-top days, tells the real story of resurrection. What are we going to do when we get home?

For awhile, I plan to sit.

Sometimes you just know when you’ve done something right. There are so many other times when you second guess yourself or you feel like if you had done something with a little more this or a little more that then you would have hit the mark. Other times you are quite certain that whatever it was you had hoped to do, you were so off that the bigger hope is that no one was looking, that what you had focused so intently on was so insignificant to everyone else, that you can slink back into your private hole and just wait for the dust to settle. Yesterday I had one of those ‘done something right’ experiences.

When we began our Lenten walk together as a faith community more nearly forty days plus or minus a few, we chose to embrace the theme of ‘Holy Way’. In our words, prayers, reflections, sermons, music, intentions, we would try to unpack what it means to walk in a holy way after the example of Jesus. It was and is a noble endeavor, one that is of course impossible to ever attain. We would also try to help the community visualize this and embody it in some way.

As the theme began to unfold I was reminded of the act of walking the Stations of the Cross. While this is more often an Episcopal or Roman Catholic tradition, who is to say that United Methodists could not also benefit from this way of entering into the story of Jesus’ last days? Seriously. So we decided to invite people within our community, artists and those who like to create, to take the traditional messages of the different stations and see them with new eyes. We asked them to create a ‘station’, a stopping off point along the Holy Way, where people might reflect on the story of Jesus movement in the world, and in their own lives, in new ways.

As the stations began to arrive at the church, to say I was overwhelmed with the depth of them is such an understatement! What was created by an array of generations was beautiful, touching, raw, despairing and hopeful. A perfect set of descriptors for this terrifying and miraculous story.

Yesterday our Holy Thursday services centered on people walking the stations…..walking one kind of Holy Way. Those who attended walked singly or in groups, reading aloud the words that described the message of each station and then praying the prayer: “By the power of your Holy Way, O God, help us to love and change the world.” Pausing at each unique station, created by people they might know, the worshipers became pilgrims. Like the countless people who have labored to unpack and understand, embody and employ the sacred story, these travelers saw things in the Passion story they had not seen before. Things not preached to them from a pulpit by those ‘trained’ in theological reflection. Instead, the message came through the lens of those who wrestled to make the gospel message real, alive, inspirited in this time in which we all live.

As these stations of the cross were created,theology became practical, real. The movement of God became present, not in some dusty place of tradition, but in the headlines and back rooms of every day living. Questions were asked. What does Jesus’ courage and despair mean in my life? How does crucifixion happen today and to whom and what? Whose tears are shed? Where is the passion for the way of love in our time? What can this mean for how I, how you, walk the holy way of our lives? Where am I entombed? Who is rolling away the stone? How are we, all of us, rising from the dead places that are in speech of us?

In creating these stations, people embodied the gospel story and offered that to others. In walking the stations, people allowed the gospel message to seep into the cracks and crevices of their prayer, their path. For me this is one way the Word has become flesh….and dwells among us. The blessing of this will carry me through this Good Friday into the glory of Easter morning.

Blessing…..blessing….blessing….