Given for you......

If you are paying attention closely, there will be a moment on Good Friday when time stops.

In that moment, you will know the darkness.  Death will be at your fingertips.There will be no more time to heal wounded places or reconcile with estranged friends and family. There will be no more time to do good and mend fences.   No matter how many people surround you when that moment is yours,  you will make this final journey alone....

....just you and whomever it is that created us and who calls us back to our origins.

Wait and watch for the moment ......

                       then know that this Jesus
                                will walk into that darkness with you.

       

Holy Week: dark night of the soul

It is a place - a time - when the absence of God is the most palpable experience that you have of God.  It is the depth of the Good Friday cross.

The dark night of the soul is that moment when you realize that God is not a thing to be grasped, even in love.  Rather God can only be encountered 'as that which eclipses the reality of all other things.'  In this space you have moved beyond describing who God is and are left with saying what God is not.  God is not all light.  God is not easily understood.  God is not........

The dark night of the soul is a darkness that descends upon one.  There is no glowing light in the darkness; the only way out of the darkness is to travel through it.  Not striving.  Not ordering or arranging.  But breathing, existing, walking one step at a time listening for the whisper of the 'still small voice' from Elijah, or the weight of a presence that simply is.  There is no pathway neither to God or from God; only is exists.

There is no safe place; there are no promises; there is nowhere to settle.  It is unnerving yet also exquisite.  It is gift in the pain of uncertainty where you wander asking, "Where is the God I have known?"

It is not even a spiritual practice even as it is a powerfully spiritual experience.  It can not be sought; it finds you.  "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God" the writer of Hebrews tells us.

Yet in this deepest darkness, God is. Just possibly the deepest darkness is necessary to truly encounter God. Or, it is in the deepest darkness that what we encounter is truly God.

I have no answers, only the fearful journey of seeking, on this, the day of the cross.

*the original reflections on the dark night of the soul belong to St. John of the Cross

Beneath the cross of Jesus

"Beneath the cross of Jesus, I long to take my stand.

The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land

A home within a wilderness, a rest upon the way,

from the burning of the noontide heat and burdens of the day."  ELW 338

The cross is not a place to hide from this world.  Rather it is here that we find truth: our own weakness and the strength of Christ's love.

Wrenched away.......Good Friday

I remember the day he died.  I was sure the earth had stopped spinning and yet it tilted under my feet.  The sun no longer gave warmth.  I had to remind myself to inhale for breath no longer came unbidden.

In those moments, hours, even days following, my life seemed a journey to the center of the earth, where chaos rules and the order of this world is unknown.  Someone had taken all that I knew and ripped in in two, from top to bottom and a new reality came flooding in.   Nothing had changed - horns honked and children laughed and groceries needed to be bought - and yet everything had changed.  Fear and dread would startle me awake in the wee hours of the morning.  I wanted to find a place to hide away, to curl into myself, to learn how to breathe again, to figure out how this could have happened.

The world shifted in an emergency room in a strange town.... 

       and on a cross on a hill called Golgotha. 

         Death for the sake of a new creation.  

What do we say about the cross?

Every Lent we move inexorably from ashes to cross and the question arises again.  What can we say about the cross?  How could the suffering of the 'good', our Lord Jesus, in any way be a part of the redemption of the 'broken' (you and me)?

For Christians the cross is everywhere.  It is held up as a sign of God's commitment born out of love for all of creation....'for God so loved the world that God gave the only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not die but have eternal life....'  We even wear it as jewelry!

The truth is, the cross is an instrument of cruel, inhumane suffering and death.  It is a symbol of everything we wish to avoid in this lifetime.  To look on the face of the suffering Jesus, even if only in your imagination, and see the love of God takes a spiritual clarity that frequently slips away from me.

St. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles….” Foolishness.  A stumbling block.  

Oh, St. Paul.  Let's not put too fine a line on it.  The cross scares the pants off me.  At the same time, any effort to diminish the cruel reality of the cross, in my mind, serves only to dim the bright light on my brokenness and the cruelty of the world we live in. It keeps me from being truthful about myself.

To leap frog over Good Friday to Easter morning is to pretend that the pain and suffering of this world can somehow be avoided.  More than that.  It implies that Easter is a reward for those who 'live right' or 'live a good life' as if Jesus didn't do exactly those things!

And here is my final confession.  Confronting the cross on Good Friday, I know....KNOW....that I am so far beyond the pale of 'good' that I am sure God is exhausted from searching for me.  I do not understand.  I can interpret.  I can explain.  But I will never understand how the cross of Christ could cover me.

But in the midnight of my soul, it is to the cross I cling.  Perhaps I believe that something which makes absolutely no sense at all has to be the work of God.  The same God who brings us an empty tomb........