John 11:3 KJV
[3] Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.
In my hunger I sit with him, follow him from room to room. Marvel at his silence
He does not have to tell me what we both already know, but I trail him regardless
Want something from him
Whether it is what he saw so long ago now or what he will not say
About the days of our mutual confinement
Of course, neither of us chew
scoop cold water to our waiting lips
In the congregation of those
Waiting for bright sunlight
Resurrection
He moves up the wall quickly, ascending over three thousand vertical feet in a little over 3 hours. We all marvel at him, as well we should, that kind of hubris and fearlessness is an altar to the human spirit
Who fails to see the God who held him there
All along
I go back to Alex’s choosing the rocks over the ladies
As I count days and hours and minutes and seconds
A slow hunger crawl
All fat girl dependence not on
Finger strength and will power but the dorsal strength of a lullaby–
I have a dear friend who signs notes to me you are greatly loved. Which is cool, right?
On one of my phones I have played with the tag phrase at the end of emails. I am not sure anyone needs to know I have sent this from my iPhone, but perhaps they need a Bible verse, and exhortation of some sort, or to know they are greatly loved?
Sometimes I forget it is there. Sometimes I read it and think this snarky email I am about to send needs to be edited for snark if I truly believe the recipient is greatly loved. Sometimes I acknowledge it but then delete each letter because the mayor or the police chief or the college professor or college president already thinks I am crazy as a loon and annoying and foolish as well.
The phrase itself is not the strongest iteration of the idea. It is in passive voice. The active form is just I love you, which can be the most exposed and committed utterance when rendered true.
When we love someone enough to fight for them
When we intervene on their behalf.
When we are willing to be desperate or look foolish for them.
When we are willing to be misunderstood to keep them safe.
When we go hungry for them
Or give up jobs and honors for them.
Or when we call for help on their behalf.
When we give them our voice because their voice is young or small or taken from them.
They are greatly loved because love demands fierce and extraordinary things.
…..
A few days ago I was in deep mourning thinking about the sheer number of people who have decided that either I was not good enough for love, or worse, that God was not good enough for love.
I cried over this, and opened up YouTube to pray and sing through this grief. Matthew Mole’s You are loved appeared without a search or a place on my history.
God does that. He leaves signs all around us that we are greatly loved. He sends leaves falling over us, pennies shining on the pavement, songs which feel like lullabies, setting and rising suns–all love letters with the same matchless
guarantee–
You are greatly loved.
–John 3:16
Children are notoriously voiceless, which is why Lindy West’s crusade to “shout your abortion” is so very tone deaf.
In this country and in many countries all over the world, women of childbearing age may have the right to kill their own small daughters and sons, but once that procedure has resulted in the death of a child, it no longer belongs to the mother to shout.
Mother–see how ironic that sounds.
We have to shout for…
…the voiceless girls
Who have lost their lives, their right to shout
For daughters
For sons
Forever missing
Their voices.
Prayer comes from the Latin word precarius which means, obtained by entreaty. I remember years ago looking at the way it came to us through the feudal system–subjects would pray to their lords and protectors for the things they needed to survive.
Sometimes prayer can seem less feudal than futile. Is anyone listening? Will anyone come to save me? Those two questions can haunt the soul.
I believe in prayer. I believe it brings light and brings help.
The hardest time to tell someone to pray is when you yourself feel the most alone, the most abandoned.
God never leaves us or forsakes us.
Pray, beautiful one, pray.
It was a garden-variety Protestant set up–big ol’ baptistery in the rear, low pile carpeted stage, wood veneer podium, and home-made wooden sign written by an earnest non-native speaker of English,
DO not PLAY on the stage!
I used to speak there once a month for several years. If it was my week to sermonize I would pray first, wait for a topic to surface (unless one was assigned or liturgically evident), then chew on that passage all week. I would research words in original languages, cross-reference key words with other passages, sift through for what it all might mean for us.
I remember speaking on faith, rivers, stones, and children. The process was often exposing, riveting, beautiful, intimate, and met with a regularly dozing deacon or two.
You preach a message and then hope some small smudge of it besmirches the forehead of the listener.
And still I struggle whether anything did.
Anything like–once there was a woman who used to speak in a church where there was an ordinary altar, garden-variety stage, oddly capitalized sign propped upon it.
DO not PLAY on the stage
Sometimes all we need to know about the beauty, splendor, and grace of this dying religion is that the Spirit of the Living God can drive an ordinary man to
Print the words that matter
ALL IN capital letters
For those who are awake
By the end of the sermon.
I wonder, perhaps more often than I should, what would happen if we actually expected church sermons to be practical, actionable, real?
I wonder this because in the last 10 years I have worn my proverbial mendicant’s shirt to communities of faith, as has my whole family, only to find that the churchy probably don’t want us there.
They don’t want us because we talk about horrible things–rape, sexual assault, the abuse of children, sexual exploitation, the way the justice system fails victims, the way branded communities fail.
Not all at once, mind you.
But the truth remains so. If you tell a story about faith-minded adopting family neck-deep in ministry and family and community and then those people, especially their young children, are hurt, terribly hurt, by the people they were supposed to consider family.
Well, that is not a good sermon.
It is, however, very similar to many stories in the Bible, which is where I have gone for my uncomfortable sermons.
Where do you find yours? Where do you go to find the way through
The darkest, hardest places?
The bowls, cups, and occasional ramekins return my level gaze. All damaged, we regard each other warily–the gash, the chipped and missing pieces, the jagged edges
Make us all precipitous,
Weepy as we
search for impossible answers for
Broken
How do atheists turf their ghosts? Wispy girls, long gone, in their place, algorithms, aggregates, the trees were old back when we were young, how wise they will be when we have left this place.
Who will bear the children of the dead? Who will tell the grown man
How pretty, how young you looked in your operatic yukata, how many letters have been written for you, all for you
Careful, I say, careful.
measure out impossible prayers to a Most Evident God
As though they were
Leaves caught in the wind
Carrying Light 