Resurrection realized--layer on layer: praying with those two on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:13-35)

An interrupted journey. They had a plan, were going somewhere. Maybe headed home, back to life before Jesus. They were “discussing” events. “Discussing” resonates with trying to explain, to analyze, to make it all make sense somehow. What were they saying to one another? "But we had hoped that He was the one who was going to redeem Israel." He was a prophet, of that they were certain.

And now reports His body was gone. Visions of angels who said He is alive—whatever that might mean. Rumors, impossible stories, all coming on the heels of trauma.

As they walked their darkening path, this stranger came alongside them to join their journey and their conversation. And despite the danger in being identified with Jesus, they found themselves pouring it out: the events, the grief, the terror, the confusion. They just told it, one tripping over the words of the other as it spilled. They watched it flow, experiencing it all over again as they let go every pretense of understanding or explanation.

"How foolish you are!" said the stranger. What was Your voice like, Lord Jesus? I hear gentle scoffing, but offered with a smile and warm acceptance in Your eyes. Because You then opened Your eternal Word and made everything plain. You opened their eyes, it says, and their hearts burned.

"They recognized Him, and he disappeared from their sight." Their own journey plans like a passing vapor, they grabbed cloaks of homespun brown and ran out into the night to chase the glorious mystery of You. 

Layer on layer-- 
An empty tomb 
An angelic vision 
given first to women and then to Peter and John 
Mary meets the Gardener Who is not a gardener 
Peter meets power, love, and forgiveness in a private place 
These two burn with the words of a Stranger on the open road

Layer on layer 
Building 
Shaping 
Peeling away 
Polishing 
Until world-changing glory gleams 
Shekinah bright to any given the gift of sight

Hearts burn 
Hearts open 
Hearts receive 
Layer on layer

The dare is to hope, but for what? Reports, dribbles of truth spill. To evaporate in the day's light and heat?  Or to accumulate until frail human vessels overflow with indestructible life?

Holy Saturday: Tattered Vows

Peter. So brave. So sure. He has never loved anyone or anything like he loves Jesus. Confusing, mysterious, undependably dependable, Shekinah-radiant Jesus. As others backed away from call too hard, path too strange, Peter whispered, "Where else would I go?"

Betray Jesus? Peter is ready to fight for Jesus, to stand in front and shield Him even if the sword should pierce Peter's own body. In his mind he can see himself wielding his sword as they come.

He does it, too, later that same night. His sword flashes, blood flows, an ear hangs floppy as a young man screams. 

And Jesus rebukes this bravest stand, heals the ear, lets them take Him. Even then Peter trails behind into that courtyard he can enter only on the word of another. Courtyard of authority. Courtyard of the enemy. 

Nosy questions from a nobody. At a time and place when no brave act could rescue Jesus. She'll bring the crowd down on him, too. Shut her up with the lie that makes him vomit. The lie uttered just as they drag Jesus into earshot.

Then Jesus is gone. Dead. Laid on cold stone and covered over, sealed in. 

Jagged-knife words, the last words Jesus heard fall from him. 

Peter's brave words, his best love, his fierce commitment lie there in the dirt at his feet. Wilted, shriveled, dirty. No unsaying. No undoing. No Jesus to gaze into his deepest self and love him still. All shattered and broken, and him with them. Fraud. Fake. Loving Jesus still. 

It is a tattered love. Pitiful, trampled, and beautiful with all its cracks and tears. 

Lenten Pilgrimage--a journey of moving on by staying still

Joseph’s flight with his little family to Egypt raises aspects of pilgrimage such as finding our way forward step by step, holding loosely to our understanding of plan and road, ever listening to the Lord and attentive to His best path.

As the week closed, I felt both graced and challenged to walk for a season by remaining still. To wait and watch from the threshold, where a great deal of movement is happening. To sit quiet, with awareness antenna stretched. To listen, to feel, and to intercede. Both in my own journey where permission to rest and wait is a gift, and in the journey alongside retreatants who pray their way through hard situations where the call is to move but the way is only slowly emerging. To hold them safe and give them space to make their two steps forward, two back, one more forward, sometimes tentative, sometimes too sure and pushing too hard, sometimes in fear, yet ever moving toward faith and rest.

I am grateful that my own weariness has become less desperate, as well as for this time to be where I am, at rest yet active in the threshold.

The photos capture images that illustrate for me the pilgrimage of this third week. Sunday I needed to give time to just sit in the beginning stages of a new room off our kitchen, a beginning that had awaited us when we had returned from Albania the night before. I needed to plop down, put my feet up, and stay awhile in that construction site; to feel it and re-imagine it, knowing what was in my original drawing, and asking whether and how that should change.

As the week proceeded, I determined to leave the woodstove as originally planned, to make the upper level a foot wider and inset the step, to leave out the stone step to outside in favor of a wood platform which will support cushions for a locally-traditional maglis style conversation space (instead of the two easy chairs in front of the stove that was my first plan). I also invited the stone mason to complete a whole other project, a new terrace at the main door of the house. Which now is finished and so right. As I wrote this, Suleyman had the doors to the house down and was laying a travertine threshold and shortening the doors to clear the new stone.

Through the week craftsmen and I tussled around over chimney height, floor level, need for a drain, and the shape of the platform for the woodstove. I encouraged, praised, corrected, sought opinions, asked for changes, and provided refreshment. And enjoyed those dear men.

That next Sunday I sat down and rested again in the new space. As if I had never moved. Yet much had unfolded. In the new room, in my life, and in lives of others who sheltered with us for that season.

Ever surprising, so still, yet always in motion, this God who loves us and leads us, eh?

Lenten Pilgrimage--sometimes it is good and right to flee

"When the Magi had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. 'Get up,' he said, 'take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.'

"So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'Out of Egypt I called my son.'" Matthew 2:13-15

In the third week of Lent we were invited to listen and pray this piece of Jesus’ story, to walk with the young family as they fled in the dark to Egypt after an angel came to Joseph in a dream. It was an unexpected and scary journey. Nothing they would have planned. God’s journey to protect them from dangers they could not have fully known, a journey resourced by gifts from contemplative men who responded to a sense of invitation to find a baby in a foreign land and to lay riches by his crib, and we can’t imagine that that those unusual men knew why they were drawn to do as they did either.  What follows is my own wakeful night prayer with this passage that I had read and read again in prayer the morning before.

“angel… dream… escape… stay until I tell you… left during the night… and so was fulfilled….”

I wake in the dark and find myself praying over a story that unfolded not long ago around our dinner table. Dear guests had come to Spa for the Soul from a place where they find their lives in danger. They came to shelter in a safe place for a season, to listen for God’s voice, and to gather strength to follow Him. Sort of like Elijah in the cave, it seemed to me. They arrived with drawn faces and weary eyes, exuding edgy fear and the fragility of long endurance in the presence of enemies. Conversation stayed surface and they dodged the warmth of vulnerability and friendship in their first few days.

But that evening they found themselves ready to bring it out. They were moving to the slow conclusion that, yes, flight is necessary. Flight from a place of long investment, important work, sacrifice. A beloved people and place. I can still see clearly how their pain vibrated in the glow of the candles. The “how” and the “for how long” of it remained murky. Their unity tattered as they shared and wept and tried, now with us as witnesses, to bring each other to the place of understanding the differences in the heart-burdens they carried. Something sacred, holy, unfolding in our presence, inviting our prayerful listening and quiet questions, questions asked not to satisfy curiosity but to help them move deeper into their experience and understanding.  

Warm and safe in my bed, I hear the angel whisper to me, “For some there comes a time to flee. No place for guilt. Lay down what others expect, what they may whisper among themselves. Lay down the question whether they should be able to handle this. Lay down gritted courage determined to trust and stand firm. Take up courage to flee, to chase the still small voice that whispers the unthinkable. How much courage is displayed in the choice to admit that flight is necessary for sanity, and perhaps for life.”

There in the dark, it also comes to me that more than once in recent months we have sheltered dear ones burned and torn through living long in places where there are enemies that would beat, rape, even kill them. Faces set like flint, for a long season all of them believed God’s grace and power would shelter them. They stood firm and carried on pouring themselves out, pouring and leaking out the love of Jesus on their world, on their enemies.

And God listened and preserved them. Until their cracked old vessels of fallen mind and body began to give way and a season of escape became a lifeline to finding themselves again. Yet again I remember Elijah’s flight after all his brave dependence, and I remember that God met him and nourished him and gave him rest, and then God gave Elijah more of Himself, and a human successor who would carry on after he was finished. And then God sent Elijah back. For some we’ve sheltered, the season was temporary, for these others, the open question whether they will ever return forms part of their pain.

So hard to admit, to face that frailty of body and soul.  Long nights wondering if this is a failure of faith. Long days when the tears won’t stop. Lethargy that refuses to venture out the door. Constant watchfulness. Heavy fear that leaders and supporters will see all of it as weak and unworthy, and that those they serve will wither without them. Over it all is the fear that they might never reach the place of return. The heart longing to hear clear direction, to know for certain that this is God’s way for the journey for now.

Yes, Lord, you could have protected Jesus and his family in Israel, without the escape to Egypt. Oh, so many ways that you could have done it. But sometimes, it seems, You call Your people to flee, to run away and hide, to wait Your time and Your fresh word to return—or not, in Your sovereign choice.

Lord, that Your word will be clear for all of Your people who dwell in such places, that You will resource their way with treasures of gold, incense, and myrrh, that You will bring them back—or not--in Your perfect time.

Lenten pilgrimage--we discover the way forward step by wondering step

Discovering the way forward step by wondering step,

Only in the looking back do I discover where I was going….

Is it another of those tensions? One of those contrary juxtapositions in which things that seem paradoxical are both true? A mystery of God? God is One, yet Three. We dwell in the already/not yet of Christ’s first and second coming. We die, yet we live. Do we who belong to Jesus also dwell in the make-plans-set-goals-pursue-dreams/let-it-unfold? 

Or is it simpler than that? More counter the culture of this world? Is it that all our plans, dreams and understandings of call need ever to be held loosely, open to the unexpected journey?

When to hold fast to the plan and stay the course, to persevere, to see all else as distraction and diffusion? When to mold our lives around the interruptions and the unexpected, to see them as God’s surprising illumination of a way our hearts and minds are too small to dream? So that we live to the full in God's better ideas? 

I auditioned to dance and then go on to graduate school, then married Curt Bidinger and moved to Saudi Arabia.

I married a school teacher, then lived for thirty years now with a petroleum engineer.

I planned a career in public relations in San Francisco, then worked in a law office in Alaska.

I assumed I would bear three children, then was named infertile.

I studied real estate, then found myself in law school.

I made commitments of a childless life, then bore two children.

I bought materials for homeschooling, then moved to Scotland where Caitlin thrived in great schools.

I took up ministry to young adults, then, transferred to a new country, discovered peers, working poor, and elderly.

I prodded and poked towards ministry doing legal aid, then was called to teach the Bible.

I looked to live the rest of life in our beloved Alaska, then moved to Abu Dhabi and later to Turkey to welcome the world.

Every threshold an opportunity I could not have dreamed. An unexpected turn that interrupted my best, prayed-much-about efforts to follow Jesus. Several I would not have chosen, but the choice was made for me. Every one a holy portal to joy, growth, and fruitful living.  I sit in our garden on this rocky hillside overlooking the Mediterranean and marvel that I live in an adventurously renovated contemplative prayer house surrounded by olive trees and enveloped in sounds of bird call, grazing sheep and goats and milkcows, and children at play down in the village square.

I don’t plan much anymore. Other than to love, welcome, serve, listen, and do the next thing that appears along the path of invitation.