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.
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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.
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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
It’s a stroke of genius that this year Earth Day happens the first week of Eastertide. Easter, Resurrection, and a grateful tending to God’s beautiful, stunning, and suffering world are, according to the Scriptures, intimately interwoven. While this day was the brainchild of politicians (a Democrat and a Republican teamed up to make it happen, if you can imagine such a thing), the Church, as Resurrection people, should have thought of it first.
John’s gospel takes great literary pains to set Jesus’ story as the in-breaking of a new creation, a healing of the entire cosmos bloodied and scarred by human rebellion and hubris. And John wants to make certain we know that it was in a garden where Jesus’ dead corpse was buried–and that in this garden those courageous, bewildered women discovered that this corpse was no longer a corpse. It all happened in a garden. Maybe we thought Eden was completely lost, but Eden would be remade again.
And in Mark’s telling of the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to those stunned disciples, still rattled and big-eyed. “Go into all the world,” Jesus said, “and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” The gospel is good news. Good news for you and me, good news for every big wig in a fancy office, for every down-and-outer trying to scrape together a few dollars. Good news for every deluded person thumping their chest at the top of the pile, for every exhausted person suffocating underneath the pile’s crush. But the gospel is also good news for the whole creation. For razed West Virginia mountaintops, for oceans littered with miles of plastic islands, for skies grey with toxins. Paul tells us that creation groans–and we, bound up in creation, grown with her. But Jesus hears our groans. All of them.
My friend and teacher, Vigen Guroian, in his marvelous book Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening, offers stunning sentences: “Every gardener is an imitator of Mary’s Son; every gardener is an apprentice of the good Gardener of creation. Gardening teaches us that we belong to nature and are also responsible for it. Human culture and nature’s destiny are inextricably intertwined.”
May we–with whatever gifts and resources God has given us–be tender, creative, and wise gardeners in our acres of creation. May we be Resurrection people.
I offer this image of the Grand Canyon because it is for me one of those sacred places of creation
In the story of Jesus as told through the Church Year, we are in the season of Epiphany. Epiphany commenced right after the twelfth day of Christmas, when we gathered with the wide-eyed magi, stunned by the sheer wonder of a child, a miraculous in-breaking of light and love we did not in any way see coming. And we gathered with those beleaguered, hope-weary bodies around the Jordan River, that distraught band of misfits with no expectations whatsoever that on this day, in the middle of nowhere, their God would thunder–and a Son would descend into death’s murky waters and rise again, carrying all of creation with him for the entire, preposterous ride.
Epiphany–that marvelous, terrifying word. It means that God comes precisely where and when we don’t expect it. Epiphany means that God does for us what we could never do for ourselves, no matter our frantic efforts. Epiphany means that even when all seems lost (and these days there’s a whole lot that feels deep-in-the-well lost), God is (despite every fear to the contrary) very, very near.
Epiphany means that light comes, but it breaks in on a timetable we cannot manipulate–and often into the midnight dark, long after we’ve abandoned hope. Epiphany means that we must lose control, that we never really had control, that we truly are at the mercy. Epiphany means that everything really is grace.
Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. {The prophet Isaiah}
