Our bodies are perhaps the best metaphor of the paradoxical experience we all have of being human. We are fragile yet fierce, susceptible yet strong, ordinary yet also one-of-a-kind. We are valueless dust inhabited by priceless divinity.
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Kiss the hand you cannot bite, the sign in the art gallery said. I’ve spent the week wondering, What if I don’t want to? What if I can’t?
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This morning my Lyft driver said, “Happy Mother’s Day, Sarah!” as I was getting out of the car. And all of a sudden, the day I’d not given much thought to came crashing down on me…
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It’s easy to believe that God uses us in spite of our failures, in spite of our doubts, in spite of our mistakes. But what I’m realizing is that more often, God uses us not in spite of but because of those flaws.
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Only when we feel the depths of dark emotions can we find the strength and determination we need to not only grieve at the way the world is, but to do something to make the world the way it was always meant to be.
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Today we say that when even one instrument is silenced, the whole symphony suffers. And we say that we’re committed to working, praying, hoping, speaking and insisting on these truths until every single instrument has the opportunity to play her soaring, God-given notes.
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Skyscrapers teach us that if you want to reach new heights, you have to first reach new depths. And that, my friends, is what Lent is all about.
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This morning I find myself wondering, "What does it mean to follow Jesus in the desert?", because I’m a little uncertain about what life holds for me now that I’m back from Africa. And wondering (and wandering) is what Lent is all about.
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After watching the Oscars last night, I’ve been thinking about all the things we can live for in the world. We can live for security, for superiority, for wealth, for fame, for attention, for success, for prestige. But those ambitions often enrich us to the exclusion of others’ good, building our transient ladders of pride and sand castles of self-aggrandizement at other people’s expense.
But there is another way.
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When we live as wells instead of cisterns, we tap into something deep inside of us that doesn't go stagnant and doesn't run dry. When we live as wells, we breathe, and rest, and sink into stillness. We pause from our efforts to allow Love to fill us up again.
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During the next forty days, may we create the stillness and the silence to hear the Voice that whispers to us, "I created you, my precious child, because my soul wanted you." And may we say, over and over again for the 40 days (and the lifetime) it takes us to reach the Resurrection, "My soul wants You, too."
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On Valentine's Day three years ago, I told a saintly, septuagenarian nun, "My life is harder than yours." She raised her eyebrows. "I mean, it's harder for me to be single than it is for you," I explained.
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The word empathy means "in feeling." In feeling other peoples' experience of the world, we can understand them better. We can love people better when we take the time to ask, "What is it like to be you?"
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Bethesda means both "House of Mercy" and "House of Shame." When Jesus heals the man who's waited 38 years in Bethesda to be well, he reminds us that our place of deepest shame is the place of Love's greatest mercy.
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It's not that we need to unseat the already-seated orchestra. It's just that the orchestra we have is incomplete. There are notes missing that we don't even know are missing because we haven't ever heard them.
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If we look at everything Jesus left undone when he departed from the earth, then his presence hardly mattered at all. People were still sick, they still died, they were still oppressed, and they still suffered.So why did it matter that Emmanuel was here?
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It's right here, right in this moment, that we have an incredibly important choice to make. This choice is going to define how we feel New Years Eve 2018, looking back at how we spent the 365 days of possibilities that we were gifted this year. We can either choose to give up, or refuse to give up.
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MLK said the difference between the priest and Levite and the Good Samaritan was that the Good Samaritan reversed the question. Instead of asking "What will happen to me if I stop to help?" he asked "What will happen to the dying man if I don't?"
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In upstate New York today, there's a 13-year-old black, Muslim, refugee girl walking around with a broken heart who needs a kind smile, a gentle hug, a generous gesture. There are people like that in my neighborhood in San Francisco -- and your neighborhood, too.
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Taking the smallest step you can think of might sound insignificant, maybe even silly. But this is how change happens. It happens with small, incremental, nearly-imperceptible steps. But the important thing is -- it happens.
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