Gazing out my window on a recent late-night flight, I was struck by how many stories there are out there, so many broken dreams and shattered promises. So many ways we hurt each other, wound creation, self-destruct.
Not one of us, even the best among us, can say with a straight face that we’ve no regrets. We hope that in the end our lives have done more good than harm, but we’ve succumbed to selfishness, we’ve nurtured greed, we’ve not loved our neighbor as ourselves.
And here we encounter that old, sturdy, often overused-but-rarely-embraced word: grace. Grace is dangerous, risky. We fear it’s too good to be true. Grace unravels all the shame we hide, all the failures we keep at bay, all the ways we’ve screwed up. And screwed up again.
Grace is the father watching out the window after we’ve run off with the Chevy and the family stash. Grace is the smile waiting behind the door that is always, always open. Grace is delighted laughter when we feared rejection, a warm embrace when we feared distance or reprisal.
So each night when we put our head on the pillow (or try to catch a wink on the red-eye), we rest in the good news that God (not our worst mistakes) tells our story.
Over the past twenty-six years, our family has made numerous summer treks to St. George Island, a barrier island three miles off Florida’s Forgotten Coast. Apalachicola, the seat of Franklin County, is seven miles of bridge away, and where you go for supplies.
Apalach is Old Florida. Spanish moss and air sticky-thick, like toasted honey. Weathered captains with rickety skiffs. Queen Anne homes with wraparound porches. A cemetery with gnarled trees, washed-out tombstones, and ghost walks. Apalachicola has one flashing yellow light. One biscuit shop. One soda fountain counter. One very small Piggly Wiggly.
Over the years, I’ve often visited Apalachicola’s Trinity Episcopal Church. Erected in 1838, carpenters constructed the white Greek Revival in White Plains, New York, then sailed the pieces around the tip of Florida and all the way back up to the panhandle where they jigsawed everything back together. Trinity is the state’s second oldest active church. Worshipers have been sitting on and kneeling at these same creaky, gorgeous pews for two centuries.
After service every Sunday, there’s a social hour with sweets and coffee. At the passing of the peace, they do it like they mean it. Folks linger and chat. A few look around to catch the eyes of a friend across the room, offering a neighborly nod or the peace symbol. Announcements cover the upcoming bingo night (no charge) with great prizes (art from a parishioner’s daughter and gift certificates to the local grill) and the fabulous response to the school backpack drive (“we’re small but mighty”). If you wanted to feel like an outsider here, you’d have to go after it on purpose.
On my recent visit, two elderly ushers welcomed everyone at the front door, passing out bulletins and a few hugs. One of the ushers with grey thin-cropped hair was the maestro. He had something to say to almost everyone, usually prompting laughter and a slap on the shoulder. If his hearing aids didn’t do their job, he leaned in closer. His way, like his jean shirt and khakis, was easy.
After a simple sermon from a preacher who believed Jesus was actually in the building, it was communion time, and the two ushers carried the offering and elements to the altar. On their way back toward the pews, I watched the maestro stop at the bottom of the platform steps, turn back facing the altar, and wait.
He stood there until the line of people who’d received the Eucharist began to file back past him, toward their seats. As each person stepped off the final step, he grabbed their hand, looked them in the eye, and gave a sturdy handshake. You received the body and blood of Christ, and then you received the warm hand and warmer smile of the maestro. I watched, eyes moist. I couldn’t wait for my turn.
It didn’t take long, the crowd was small. Up from the kneeler at the altar, wine and bread consumed, then only a few steps. He grabbed my hand. His vigorous clutch insisted that this grace I’d just tasted was as real as his grip, and it wouldn’t ever let me go.
I sat down, filled in every way.
After church, I had to say something. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Sir,” grabbing his hand once more, “my favorite part of the service was your handshake.” He put his other hand on the back of my neck, like he would a grandson, and squeezed. There was a glint of wonder, a bare knowing, in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. And he squeezed again.
The human touch. Kind, wise eyes. Another person just standing there, waiting for me. There’s lots of talk these days about the Church’s demise, hand-wringing over what we must do to regain relevance — most of it makes me want to shove a fire poker in my eyeball. Being the church is not easy, to be sure, but the basics are fairly simple.
Trapped inside the caged walls of the Shawshank State Penitentiary, Red tells Andy words that might save him. “Hope is a dangerous thing,” Red says. “It can kill a man.”
Hope rattles us, terrifies even, especially if we’ve lived with our eyes and our heart wide open, especially if we’ve told ourselves the truth about the ache and the lament. One thing’s certain: if we love full throttle and don’t hold our cards close to the chest, we will absolutely face that brutal pain we’re so desperate to avoid: disappointment. Hope is a dangerous thing.
But anything that’s truly good always carries danger with it. If we’re playing it safe, no one’s having kids, no one’s getting married, no one’s going to write a book or a poem or dream of a new tomorrow or follow a carpenter who acts like he’s God. Love and hope and danger—another trinity.
“Hope is a dangerous thing, my friend, it can kill a man,” says Red. “[But] hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things. And good things never die.”
Hope intrude everywhere. Dangerous hope. Consider these tulips by our mailbox. Every Spring, they insist on this same story. They’re “hopemongers,” as my friend John likes to say. Keep loving. Keep believing. Keep hoping. Good things never die.
Something strange is happening today. Beneath the cold, lifeless earth, a flame kindles. The spark we cannot see under the silent, moonless night — the warmth we cannot feel amid all the suffering, the pain, the sorrows, the death — this spark will soon erupt into a roaring, radiating flame of love and life and joy.
We misunderstand if we think of Jesus as merely some metaphysical ideal or the herald of a moral code or the fanciful projection of some poor schmucks just trying to cling to a little hope. Jesus is the healing fire. The fire that burns even in the middle of death’s forgotten country.
Something strange is happening today. Evil and sorrow are having to strain now to hold their grip. Death senses an uneasy rumbling — that ol’ snaggletooth enemy’s getting spooked. As St. Epiphanius said, “God has died in the flesh and Hades trembles with fear.”
It is a strange, strange day. Hold on.
+ + + +
Something strange is happening: There is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hades trembles with fear. {St. Epiphanius of Cyprus}
Twice yesterday, tears came unbidden. Once when I was listening to my friend Kenneth Tanner proclaim, with clear and stunning conviction, how God is always and in every way the enemy of death, evil, and injustice. It’s remarkable how our theologizing and sermons, our bumbled attempts at comfort, our belabored equivocations in the face of dehumanizing evil, coax us into a gloomy stupor and blunt our unfiltered rage against every violent horror. Our many words (so many) mute the shadow-shattering pronouncement: Jesus is a friend to every human and every creature, but Jesus is a dread enemy to death and evil. I couldn’t stop the tears.
And then last night in the kitchen with Miska, as the yellow curry chicken simmered on the stove, we reflected on a story of devastating tragedy, the sort that would wreck any parent. The conversation opened inside me a larger reckoning with the agonizing pain so many of us carry, that terror and disillusionment that always lurks, just at the edge, ready to pour out its crushing weight. But into this abyss, the good news arrives. God is never far from our suffering, never distant from our despair. If the Cross tells us anything, it’s that amid great suffering — this is where Jesus’ love glimmers most radiant. In Jesus, God descends into the very center of every human horror. My eyes turned moist. God would rather die than leave us alone.
Buechner told us we should pay attention to our tears, especially our unexpected tears, because “more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”
My tears tell me that I’ve come from God and that my end is in God. And my tears tell me, I believe, that this is true for you too, true for all of us. Among the many questions that haunt us, I believe this one cuts closest to the bone: Is God truly, deeply, profoundly good and love — and will God be this goodness and love for us always?
Yes. No matter the anguish that crushes you. No matter the tsunamis that overwhelm you. No matter the loneliness that presses upon you. No matter how far you run. In Jesus, God stands with you, inside your dismay, closer than your breath, opposing all that is evil without us and within us, whispering to us the truth of God’s powerful, undying love. Always. To the end of the age. Amen.
When we first began to dream about what the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination might be, the last thing I thought we’d do was organize something that smelled like a conference. Though there are happy exceptions, I often feel claustrophobic in such spaces, and Eugene was wary, avoiding them as much as he possibly could, typically going to speak only when his agent or publisher or a friend twisted his arm. And yet, in our first Peterson Center retreat, a desire kept emerging.
A number of folks expressed an ache for a space where we could name our longing for the holy, the beautiful, the good. To blow on the soul’s embers and awaken our longing for God. Might it be possible to have sacred space where (without falling prey to yet another scheme we’re certain will fix our troubles, always a disaster), we might carry in our weary-but-steadfast hearts our lament over (to borrow from Heschel) our “embarrassment at our pettiness, prejudices, envy, and conceit…embarrassment at the profanation of life”?
So, I carried a lot of hope, but more than a little trepidation too, when we decided to create and host Doxology. Is it possible to do something like this and resist the machine, the celebrity nonsense, the way we seem to always find a way to bludgeon the simplicity and wonder out of all good things? Is it possible for a few days like this to be about prayer and presence rather than production? Could we together practice that often lost art of being truly holy and wondrously human (two words that, because of the Incarnation, belong together)?
Last year, I feared the always lurking temptation to be overly scripted, to cave to our anxieties for things to go well and assuage that anxiety with the typical salves: too many words, too much polish, too little comfort with gaffe. Then Cherith Fee Nordling fell ill the night before we began, and Paul Zach missed a flight due to weather. And I thought, “Well, God saved us from clutching to any script.” When the days concluded, my overwhelming sense was gratitude. Beauty will do that to you.
This is still very much a work in progress, and I’d love to invite you to come be part of making Doxology whatever it is supposed to be. There will be laughter and spaciousness and rich words and art. And God. Whatever else succeeds or fails, we will turn our hearts homeward, in Doxology.
“We crave radiance in an austere world,” writes the poet Elizabeth Alexander. This puts words to my hope, my need, as good as anything.
__
Get a glimpse of last year in the video.
Oct 2-4
To guard the spirit of Doxology, space is limited. Details are available here, with early bird discounts for just a bit. And if you can’t afford it but really want to be with us, email hello@petersoncenter.org and share your need.
We’re experts at taking the very best things and grinding them into the ground, hacking at them until we wear away all the life and the wonder. It’s no different with Advent.
Advent’s hope and unease arrive like a bolt of lighting. God catches us off guard. Advent disorients us, sends us reeling. Reading the thundering, weeping prophets (the readings assigned during the first weeks of Advent), every cliché melts. Here, we encounter God aflame. Our future relies entirely on the mercy of God’s sturdy promise — that God will dismantle evil, overwhelm sorrows, and once again speak light into the stifling darkness. Our hope rests in the furious love of God. But this encounter makes us tremble. We’re deluding ourselves if we think we can package or control the fury.
So how then does Advent sometimes feel like yet another intrusion of religious industry? The products. The quotes. And yes, the blog posts too.
Then the wrangling that kicks up every year, all the finger wagging around how we’re supposed to properly observe these Advent days. I have my opinions with these things, but Advent isn’t primarily a celebration to enjoy or a Christian season to “get right.” Advent is the cataclysmic story of God’s disruptive, creative action in human history. Advent renews our heavy souls by insisting that God does in fact arrive in the midst of our pain and worry, right in the middle of our despair and dismay.
In Advent, light pierces the darkness. Pierce — this is not a gentle word. The Light disrupts and scatters, and then the Light renews and heals. In Advent, God confronts us. God makes us promises. In Advent, we tremble and laugh. We lament, and we are overcome by wonder. Advent lifts our heart and rekindles hope’s fire. Advent offers more than we know to ask. Advent is gentle as a child, and Advent blazes like the sun.
Thank goodness, Advent is not what we make of it. I need something more than what I can muster. Advent pierces. Advent pierces the dark.
Some of us may think we are far, far from God, estranged across a barren desert of shame or boredom or disillusionment or rage. Some of us may even think we make the distance, denouncing a God we insist does not exist.
But God is always as close as our breath; distance is a delusion. God’s love made visible in Jesus is vast and expansive, filling the whole cosmos. There is no place we can be where we are not brushing against the mercy.
I’m thinking of Eugene and Frederick, the two of them sitting at the same time in the pews at Madison Ave Presbyterian in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, young and open to the world and wild, not knowing each other but both having their profound encounter with grace via the lyric and power of George Buttrick’s preaching. Who could have known how the words would flow, how they’d evoke such wonder in us, such hope, such yearning for a life faithful and beautiful and good.
I hope they are sharing quite a view and a bourbon together now, if it works that way. And I hope that Eugene and Frederick know how much they’ve meant to us, how many of us felt the dark fall back a little when we encountered something so marvelous and simple as a sentence, a string of hearty words put to true use. Can you really open a whole world or put salve to a deep, ancient wound with only one clear, heart-wrenching line? I hope they know how many of us felt less alone and more emboldened and more alive in God because of how they helped us to see and hear and stand in awe.
Frederick, you told us that beautiful and terrible things would happen — but you also told us, “Don’t be afraid.” We’re trying. We really are.
Our family is in County Claire, Ireland, walking the Burren Way. On one stretch, we walked 13 miles to the little village by the sea, Fanore, only to discover this is the burial place of one of Miska’s favorite modern poets, John O’Donohue. He left us too soon, in 2008. The cemetery is a small plot tucked into a stark, bare hillside, with an expansive view of the wild Atlantic. John often said that if we’re to endure times of bleakness, it is essential to always keep the image of something beautiful in your soul. His resting place does just this.
I met a young woman who was visiting the grave of a loved one. She was friends with John and shared stories of how he’d light up every room he entered, and how in the lashing rain, she’d take her dog to the beach — and John would be the only other person out reveling in the tempest along with her. John would ask how she was, and she’d reply with a quick brush-off response.
“No,” he’d say (and you have to hear this in the strong Irish lilt this woman and John shared). “How are you really?”
So, I hope you are keeping your heart’s eye on something beautiful. And I hope you have someone near you who every once in a while says, “No, how are you really.”
Thank you, John. You gave us so much.
Southern Portion of the Cliffs of MoherCliffs of Moher
