I am loathe to pretend my life is perfect when I write little pieces like this. I sometimes feel this puts me at risk of sounding pessimistic, but allow me to note (perhaps as travel advice for my beloved home) that after last Sunday’s drive I would not recommend driving north through Big Sur at sunset, since the sun was in my eyes most of the way. South would’ve been perfect at sunset, though the wrong direction for my purposes.

Still, the drive was beautiful, and I had the good sense to roll down my windows for most of it. Something lovely happened toward the last stretch of Big Sur: a soft, pillowy, floral scent I don’t recognize (was it sage? some wildflower? another scrubby coastal brush?) would roll through my car and surround me at unexpected intervals, then alternate with the briny scent of beached kelp and the sharp refreshment of eucalyptus.

I have been doing a poem-a-day exercise for a week or so, and when it came time to scribble down a few lines on Sunday I decided to try my hand at finding a thread of connection between Pentecost and the scents of Big Sur. It’s simple and very much a draft 1.5 situation (and look, yes, the title’s a bit of a wreck), but I like it. So in these last wee hours of Pentecost I thought I’d share this little poem. I’ll drop in a few pictures from a hike I took on Monday, too.

Happy last day of Pentecost. May Trinity Sunday greet you graciously tomorrow.

Driving through Big Sur on the Feast of Pentecost

All that soft, sweet sage scent 
pouring through my car. Briny,
rotting kelp perseverating 
on some black sand shore. Or 

sea-swept eucalyptus loaming 
through the air: these show me
the olfactory kindness of Your 
presence — diffuse, shifting, everywhere.

And the cypress trees that slide past
in patient clusters: their veined clarity, 
their weird precipitous reaching 
toward a hushed expanse of sea. 

One day it may content me 
to reach for You in lists 
of things I smell and see. 
But You search me first, 

and I have never seen the air 
that passes through me when I breathe.

I think I’ve been trying to get my hands around the season of celebration. I’ve been trying to decide what it is, what it gives, what I ought to receive from it this year. My need to sit with those questions, and my lack of clear language for what I have received so far, has paused me when I’ve thought about writing another post.

I approached Easter along the path of a difficult fall and winter, in which love asked much of me and in the end did not bear the fruit I had dearly hoped to see. In the months since, I have been trying to reflect on and sort through that experience: what I gave, what I lost, where hope is and isn’t rising to meet me as I look toward the future.

Holy Week, when it came, presented an opportunity to give up my claim to my own love and the suffering it had required for many months. Both my love and my suffering had become quite precious to me by then, and it was difficult to open my hands and release them.

So the invitation I was given at the start of Holy Week proved another opportunity to try to bind my love and its pain to the Cross and trust Christ to make life where I could not. To once again face a truth I prefer to avoid (as I suspect many of us do): that the Cross is the most beautiful example of love we have in this life, and all of us are called to its standard of joyful, self-emptying generosity. The Cross is the language and essence of divine love expressed in human life. It is that to which all human love must ultimately conform or else exhaust itself in fruitless suffering.

I am grateful to report that in Easter weekend I felt released from a heartache I’d been carrying for a long time. With that release came relief, and peace, and an ability to begin pursuing healing in new ways. But I was not freed from sadness. I have continued to contend with sadness on and off all through Eastertide.

It’s had me thinking about the disciples, and how they must have felt on Easter morning. Christ had risen, joy Himself had returned — but just days before they had experienced, first hand, the worst loss the world has ever known. Some, like Peter, had also been faced with an overwhelming revelation of the staggering weakness in their own hearts.

One does not simply feel happy in the wake of a loss like that, even when the One who was lost returns. Grief is nonlinear, complicated, and often irrational. The body and soul can feel its aftershocks for a long time. And grief can coexist with joy.

In the wake of His resurrection, the victorious Christ is lighthearted and patient. He does not ask His disciples to feel anything other than what they feel. In the garden, He does not tell Mary Magdalen to stop weeping. Instead, he gives her a task by which to inhabit and express her complicated grief-joy — go to My brethren and say to them, “I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.” He answers Thomas’s shellshocked doubt with a tender invitation to touch His body and experience His return. He walks Peter slowly through a step-by-step restoration of his courage and love.

And then He calls them, all of them, to continue suffering like He did on behalf of their love for God and God’s love for the world. Most of the disciples went on to undertake extremely difficult mission work, to be despised by the communities they did their best to love, and often to have their lives cut short by violent martyrdoms.

If we can’t expect perfect earthly happiness as a result of Easter’s triumph over death, what can we expect?

Well, intimacy with Christ’s resurrected life made new in our selves, souls and bodies. The difficult, glorious work of allowing Him to recreate us in the likeness of His life. The gift of opportunities to offer our lives to the work of loving others after the pattern of Christ’s love. The sure promise of perfect life, of an eternity to enjoy Christ’s love and be enjoyed by Him in return. And we can expect peace: a peace that surpasses understanding, by which I mean peace that sustains and upholds us, that remains still and quiet, that steadies our souls no matter our circumstances. One can suffer greatly and still be at peace.

This is what I’ve started to look for in the wake of Easter this year. Maybe I suffered a lot, for far longer than I needed to. Maybe I am still sad sometimes, unsure if my desire will be answered, pained at the thought that what I have given will not be received or returned. But when I quiet myself in prayer enough to hear what the Lord is offering me, do I find myself at peace in the knowledge that I am doing my best to honor the call He has placed upon my life today?

If the answer to this question is yes, perhaps that’s enough for my soul to be satisfied, and find itself made still. Even if I continue to suffer sorrow, I can rest, and be at peace.

Christ died on Good Friday. He could not have died in a more shameful or excruciating way, or in a way better calculated to signal to those who loved Him that their love and allegiance could get them killed, too.

I cannot imagine the pain the disciples must have felt on Holy Saturday — most of whom had not only lost their Friend, but also suffered the shame of knowing they had abandoned Him in His moment of need. And those who walked with Him all the way up the path to Golgotha — Mary, Mary Magdalen, and John? One almost wonders how they survived the sorrow they must have felt that day.

I am reminded of Simeon’s words to Mary when she and Joseph brought Jesus to be presented in the temple:

And Joseph and His mother marveled at those things which were spoken of Him. Then Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary His mother, “Behold, this Child is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which will be spoken against (yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” [Luke 2:33-35 NKJV]

Yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also. When Mary assented to become the Mother of God, she agreed to a vocation that would pierce her soul with grief as much as with joy. If she would truly love her Child and Lord, she found, grief and joy could not be disentangled from each other.

Mary’s life, and the life of her Son, and the lives of all the disciples, saints, and apostles who followed in Christ’s footsteps, demonstrate over and over again that in this life — in this broken, death-riddled world — loving well means joining Christ in His Passion. As Dorothy Day wrote in her journals, “[Love] is a sword sundering bones and marrow. It reaches down into the depths. It means suffering. Passion is suffering. It is selfless. It seeks to lose self in God.”

Resurrection is coming, yes; but before we find resurrection, we must actually die and face what death has cost us. The gift of Holy Saturday is the gift of time to do this. It is the gift of time to face death in all its violent inevitability and choose how we will respond.

On Holy Saturday, we we see the strength of our love in the revelation of how willing we are to suffer pain on love’s behalf when all seems lost. Will we abandon and revile the love that has caused us to feel pain? Or will we turn toward our grief and bravely choose to keep feeling it for the sake of love, even though we have no power to bring what has died back to life?

Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalen seem to me to be our models as we decide how to grieve today. By practicing the careful formalities of burial, Joseph turns his heart toward Christ. He treasures and finds a way to bid farewell to the physical presence of his Teacher.

And Mary Magdalen — who likely had nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to, and no one she loved more than Christ — opens her heart to grief with all the courage and abandon of a passionate, self-forgetful love. Now the first day of the week, St. John’s gospel tells us, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early, while it was still dark (John 20:1a). Even in death, she will not leave His side. She goes to the place where she knows He is laid as soon as she is free to do so. She allows her heart to be torn open by love.

Since mid-January, I have felt like I’m living in an extended Holy Saturday, and I haven’t liked it. God made it fairly clear that I was entering such a season when it began. After the strain of several months of heartache, I balked at the invitation to inhabit my pain a little longer. The prospect of sitting still, giving space to my recursive thoughts and feelings, choosing to live with a sorrow that had already exhausted my heart and that I just wanted to be done with, felt long and empty and dry.

Oddly, though, it also felt simple and bright. Like sunlight on a hot, dry, breezy summer day. Something I craved and wanted to run from at the same time. It was clear that I had two choices: (1) abandon my sorrow and the love that had caused it, belittle both in my own heart, refuse to tend the wound, and set myself up to keep bleeding for much longer than I needed to, or (2) assent to God’s invitation to keep sorting through a loss I could not solve or heal, and allow Him to quietly guide me along the path of grief to Good Friday, where I could bind the death I found myself suffering to Christ’s death in sure hope of resurrection.

By no means have I been perfect. I do not pretend to be a saint. But even my halting, resistant efforts to submit to my Holy Saturday season have become avenues by which God has worked grace. He has given me gentle, expansive time to be wounded and confused. He has dignified my suffering by meeting me with refreshment. He has assured me that He never left me while I was suffering, or ceased advocating for my love. He has shown me places in my heart that I have kept Him out of, and given me opportunities to repent and invite Him in. Though the path ahead is still blurry, He has assured me that none of the things I gave to this loss will be wasted, and has begun to clarify that this time further equipped me for works of love yet to come.

Easter dawns tomorrow. Though part of my heart still weeps beside the tomb, I believe I will soon hear the voice of my Teacher calling my name. I trust resurrection will rise with the morning and enfold me in love.

Okay, the poem I promised in this post’s title. When I was 20, my sister and I went to Florence together and I saw the Palestrina Pietà for the first time. It has haunted me ever since. A year or so ago I revisited the sculpture on a second trip and wrote an ekphrastic devotional poem1 about it.

The sculpture depicts Mary and John holding Christ’s body just after He is removed from the cross. The Christian Century published my poem about it this week, in time for Holy Week. I offer it below for your Holy Saturday reflections, alongside an image of the sculpture. You can also read the poem on The Christian Century’s website.

And here are a few more angles of the sculpture, because it is beautiful and I wish to recommend it to your attention:

I always like reading this at open mic nights — it’s fun to hear people chuckle when I say, “once I had a terrible crush I couldn’t shake and it was miserable — so I went to a monastery because … that’s what you do in that situation, I guess?”

Jokes aside, on that monastery trip I learned a hard lesson about how ineffective it is to look for solutions to the problems that live within my daily life by looking for refuge from daily life at a “holier,” “more peaceful” place. On that and subsequent retreats I’ve made, I find the quiet of the monastery reveals, and never resolves, whatever internal state I brought with me. I typically leave challenged to return home and look for God there.

On that first trip to St. Andrew’s, I desperately wanted my retreat to solve the obsessive crush that had dominated 6 months of my life by then. Wanting the guy in question felt like it was slowly laying waste to my insides. I feared that if he never returned my affection, I would always be alone. Like, existentially alone. The anxiety was overwhelming and I couldn’t seem to crack it. (Aren’t our 20s so fun??)

St. Andrew’s couldn’t fix my fear, and didn’t try to. But it did show me my fear. In doing so, it gave me an opportunity to return home with slightly clearer vision, and helped me begin to look for God’s presence and comfort within my loneliness and anxiety and the dissatisfactions of my daily life.

That visit also kicked off my relationship with St. Andrew’s Abbey, where I’ve made retreats at least once a year for almost seven years. At some point, I finally learned to stop looking at the Abbey as if it was a magical solve for any problem I might throw at it. Over a long period of practiced return and some slow efforts to deepen relationships with people I’ve met there (a monk or two, some fellow retreatants [looking at you, Mary!]) visiting St. Andrew’s has become a way I can seek rest, safety, and hope.

At this year’s New Year’s Retreat, I found myself grieving the loss of a different hoped-for relationship. I’d done everything I could to offer myself to the possibility and still found it dying in my hands. Apart from a few more weeks of patience after a long wait, there was nothing more I could offer.

Though visiting St. Andrew’s did not solve that loss, it offered a few days of restoration as I prepared to take the last step in a long, difficult journey and let a cherished hope die. I didn’t enter expecting much, and found abundance — the place and its people offered me peace, refuge, community, and guidance. I left more fortified to face the loss at hand than I was when I arrived, and more hopeful for whatever might come after it.

Next time I visit, I know the gift St. Andrew’s gives me will be different. It will need to be, depending on what I bring with me up the mountain. I can’t wait to discover it.

If you live in SoCal, I recommend you check out their retreat schedule or visit for a private retreat. The monks are kind and wise, and the location is beautiful.

Enjoy the poem!

Want
St. Andrew's Abbey, Valyermo, CA

On the refectory's cinderblock wall light gathered
over Mary's eyes. Leaf-shaped shadows rustled
on the bricks beneath her feet. Mother of God

under the monastery's beamed ceiling you held
your Child close and you watched me. I expected
to find peace. My desire was anywhere

but with you. I wanted someone who didn't love me.
I wanted him like violence. Mother
of Christ, mother of so many, I found shadows

under turbulent nights. Under darkness
towering aspens cast shadows and I carried
my knife of wanting lodged somewhere near my heart

through double darkness. Wind poured
through leaves with a rush of sound
that told the same secret I found

in your eyes. What do women know of wanting?
I take its knife before I know it isn't love
and then I can't expel it — can't find relief —

Next morning the trees are still, replete with light.
I eat breakfast. I sip coffee. In the refectory
you watch me. You are so still. Mother

I could swear you know desire, could swear
I see it in your eyes. How are you at peace?
Leaf-shaped shadows gather beneath your feet.

The way they fall along the concrete wall
is endless

Find the CCCA version of it here, complete with the painting, music, and poem that were presented alongside the devotional. Folks are often curious about whether or not the writers select the accompanying art — the answer is no. :-) Biola’s got a team of folks who are specialists in those areas (often instructors in the music, art, and English departments) who select them. Part of why I like writing for this project is the challenge it offers to create a succinct, compelling piece of writing that honors each pre-set selection.

You’ll find a prayer at the end of the devotional piece. The Scripture passage on which this devotional is based is as follows:

Mark 8:34-38 (NKJV)

When He had called the people to Himself, with His disciples also, He said to them, “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man also will be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”

Take up your cross

Simon of Cyrene did not ask to struggle up the road to Golgotha with a bloody, backbreaking cross laid across his body. He did not ask to become part of the pageant of cruelty given for the pleasure of the clamoring mob. It seems unlikely he thought Jesus was anyone more than a common criminal. He was a bystander, a passerby. He did not ask to join in Christ’s suffering.

Yet that suffering was still asked of him. And for whatever reason — whether a mortified submission to bullying centurions, or a heartfelt compassion for the weakened Christ — Simon of Cyrene said yes to this unexpected call. He stepped into the road and took up Christ’s cross.

We often talk about Christian callings, about vocation, as if vocation is something God gives us to make us feel happy, special, or important. It is true that any vocation faithfully undertaken will become a gateway to joy and peace. But as Simon of Cyrene treads the difficult road to Calvary behind the battered Christ, his example challenges us to abandon any assumptions we might have that we undertake our vocations for the sake of our own fulfillment.

Recall the following from today’s Scripture passage: “[Jesus] said to them, ‘Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.’”

Jesus is not speaking in vague or abstract terms. With these words Christ calls us to rise each day and love others like He loved us on Good Friday. He calls us to submit to a daily self-emptying. To faithfully respond, we must willingly die to everything we think we know about ourselves, who we are, and what we want so that He might incarnate His love — His suffering, dying, humble, resurrecting, triumphant love — within our selves, souls, and bodies.

There is a paradox here. For the more we give ourselves to become avenues of Christ’s love to the world, the more completely Christ re-creates us into the unique persons we were made to be. My self, sacrificed without reservation or stipulation to be used as God wills, is the only meet offering I can make in response to Christ’s gift of His life on Good Friday. But it is specifically my self — unique, restored, resurrected, made beautiful — that He delights to use to love others.

It is important to remember that we do not have to seek heroic tasks to answer our vocations. We answer them by self-sacrificially loving the people, places, and work God sets before us in our daily lives. Any place, any community, any work faithfully undertaken can become the seat of a Christian vocation. And vocational work undertaken in simple circumstances is no less heroic for its apparent smallness. By assenting to take up our crosses here, now, we undertake no less than the work of Christ’s love as it was modeled for us on Calvary.

Scripture does not tell us what happened to Simon of Cyrene after Good Friday, but tradition teaches that he left that day changed — that he became an early follower of Christ; that his entire household converted to the new faith; and that he and his two sons went on to become Christian missionaries.

Only God knows the horizons our humble self-offerings might reach. We do not have to bother ourselves with worry about the impact our work will have. Our calling is simply to follow Him: to take the next step of faithfulness set before us today, then the next, and the next — just like Simon did, every inch up the road to Golgotha.

Prayer

God, of your goodness give me yourself: You are enough for me, and anything less that I could ask for would not do You full honor. And if I ask anything that is less, I shall always lack something, but in You alone I have everything. Amen.

— Drawn from Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love

I sometimes (often?) have a hard time trusting that God cares about the things I care about, and wants to flourish my good desires. (I imagine at least some of you can relate . . .). I don’t really know how to solve that. I feel spiritually weak when I look directly at my lack of trust. I also sometimes (often?? lol) feel a strong inclination to see myself as some sort of fairytale tragic hero, and retreat into despair as a way to assert my own importance. Not a great way to live, really . . .

And in this Lent, I sense God pressuring me toward freedom from that weakness by inviting me to practice trustful hope — specifically in the absence of my hope’s desired object(s). I find this practice best worked out in the little mundane rhythms of my life: sit in the sun with my coffee in the morning; daily repeat the same prayer about the things I want; enter silence for at least a few minutes a day to look for how/where God is choosing to meet me; show up to church; find time to share tea or break bread with friends.

I don’t have answers yet. I don’t have the specific object(s) of my unanswered desires. But just a week and a half into Lent there’s peace deepening where recently I felt panic and the threat of despair. I find myself quieted, in a good way, and more grateful than I expected I’d be.

I’ll call that a win. But onward, yes? We’ve just begun — there is so much more true abundance to come.

A little announcement! I am going to share some work at the upcoming evening in Los Angeles, on March 7. I’m very excited both to attend and to share some work — if you’re going to be there, I’ll see you there! <3

Here’s some stuff I’ve been paying attention to recently. I would love to know what you’ve been up to, listening to, thinking about, too! Please do share in the comments, if you’re so inclined.

Listening/watching

• On the recommendation of a friend I just listened to some episodes of In Our Time, a BBC podcast in which the host interviews experts about a vast (I mean, truly VAST) range of subjects. So far, I’ve really enjoyed episodes about George Herbert, Julian of Norwich, John Donne, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

• I haven’t watched it yet, but my priest recommended Moonrise Kingdom as “medicine” in our last spiritual direction meeting. I’m thinking I’ll watch it tonight. (Have you seen it? Do you like it?)

• The Shepherd’s Dog, by Iron & Wine. (It’s weirdly good for jogging?)

• Over the fall and winter, I repeatedly revisited Audrey Assad’s first two albums. I know she’s in a different place these days, but I still find those albums encouraging — they got me through a lot in my teens, and it would seem they’re still getting me through a lot at 31. (The production quality is a bit 2010-ish, but they’re still wonderful.) I earnestly and fondly recommend them.

  • The House You’re Building (particularly love the title track, “Carry Me,” and “Show Me”)

  • Heart (favs are: “Blessed Are the Ones,” “Sparrow,” “No Turning Back”)

Writing

• I’ve been working on a sonnet for the last few weeks and last week I think I . . . finished it? So weird. Lol. Current title is “My Lord the Honeybee, and I the Flower.”

• Revisions to a piece I included in my MFA thesis. It’s a long-form essay, and I’ve been combing through it for a few months off and on to polish the language and make it (hopefully) as lovely as I can. I don’t quite feel the internal energy to mount an attack on some unfinished essays, or to start some new ones I want to work on, and this has been a helpful, productive way to stay in touch with my prose while poetry is easier to work on.

• And some ad hoc poetry efforts; mostly revisions to old drafts. In particular, I’ve enjoyed reworking a poem I drafted in 2020 about praying the Daily Offices (spoiler: it involves my neighbor-at-the-time’s black cat, Satchmo).

Reading

• John Donne’s poetry. I’m revisiting his Divine Poëms, which are replete with phrases like “let man’s soul be a spheare [i.e., planet]” and “knottie Trinitie” (which, like, !!!) and “But why should I begg more Love, when as thou / Dost wooe my soule for hers; offring all thine . . .”

• I continue to chip away at MFK Fisher’s funny, elegant, luminous How to Cook a Wolf. From a chapter in which she discusses making roast pigeon: “It is not easy to find pigeons [to roast], these days. Most of the ones you know about in the city are working for the government.”

• I’m part of a spiritual direction training program at my church, and we just read Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living. We’re going to read Holy Dying next.

  • From his list of ‘The Acts of Hope’: “To rejoice in the midst of a misfortune or seeming sadness, knowing that this may work for good, and will, if we be not wanting to our souls. This is a direct act of hope, to look through the cloud, and look for a beam of light from God; and this is called in scripture, ‘rejoicing in tribulation,’ when ‘the God of hope fills us with all joy in believing’; every degree of hope brings a degree of joy.”

• I’m part of a leadership group at my church that is reading Evelyn Underhill’s The School of Charity. I read this book a couple years ago for the MFA (Underhill is a killer spiritual writer, seriously the language is so beautiful) and then used it to write some retreat talks. Returning to it has been a gift in this season. We just read her chapter on Christ crucified (and the responsibility of all Christians to follow Him to Calvary) for our meeting this week.

  • This part haunts me: “For there is a hard and costly element, a deep seriousness, a crucial choice in all genuine religion, of which the New Testament warns us . . . There we find a suffering and love twined so closely together, that we cannot wrest them apart: and if we try to do so, the love is maimed in the process — loses its creative power — and the suffering remains, but without its aureole of wiling sacrifice. Love, after all, makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom. Pain, or at least the willingness to risk pain, alone gives dignity to human love, and is the price of its creative power: without this, it is mere emotional enjoyment. It costs much to love any human being to the bitter end; and on every plane a total generosity, a love that includes pain and embraces it, is the price of all genuine achievement. . . . The Cross means the ultimate helplessness and dependence of man, when he comes up to his own limit and has nothing left but charity; and his willing acceptance of that helplessness and limit, because it throws him back upon the God he trusts and loves. . . . What we really think about the Cross means, ultimately, what we really think about life.” (A fitting meditation for Lent, no?)

My apartment has a little porch that gets wonderful sunlight in the morning. I’ve taken to sitting out there for 15 or 20 minutes every day. It’s nice to feel the warmth on my face while I watch bees and monarch butterflies investigate tall stalks of Mexican fireweed, or just close my eyes to breathe and pray. As I have navigated some sorrow and disappointment in recent weeks, this practice has become a source of peace and consolation, even an important space to meet God.

When everything feels like it’s falling apart, as things do rather often these days, I think it is wise to drink deep of the small gifts we find alongside grief and fear. Not to deny or obscure the grief and fear, or that which gave rise to it, but to stay human and well-ordered within ourselves — to preserve something true and simple that the cruelties of the world would like to take from us. As I practice finding and giving thanks for small, steady gifts, my heart feels more grounded. Gratitude deepens my capacity for peace and kindness and care for others.

I am sharing a poem today that I drafted in December (during the period of difficult waiting I mentioned last week). I thought of it and the e.e. cummings poem it’s based on (also included below) as I sat on my porch the other day. I had a coffee cup folded between my palms, my eyes were closed, and I breathed slowly and deeply. God felt very near in the little gifts of sunlight and time to pause. The first line of the cummings poem rose to mind — I thank you, God, for this most amazing day.

I thank You God for this most amazing day
[after e.e. cummings]
Stoneville, NC, 12/5/25

I thank You God for this most amazing 
day: for I was sad, strained by waiting, 
and the cold, the snow, the quiet that pressed
between hosts of leafless silver trees 

refreshed me each time I stepped outside.
Their sharp tenderness touched my face, infiltrated 
my breathing, and reminded me I am
alive. (I who have died each day on the altar

of this waiting! I walk and I'm alive again, 
however briefly. Winter's gift, this is: the
widening of time into something glacial, into
ice blocks that press against my soul's membrane

until I am widened, too; until I meet spring
somewhat new.) How should my body, hemmed in
by waiting, taste touch hear see breathe 
this time — ? You lift life out of nothing.

And someday You will come, no doubt — You'll
come: You breath of cold, You bright gray sky.

The e.e. cummings poem, which I found in this anthology:

I have been a bit cryptic on here about the difficult autumn and winter that prevented me from writing much. I am not eager to divulge many details about what happened, but as I learned a lot from the last six months, and references to the personal “lore” will be relevant in this and future posts, allow me to share the following: I met someone over the summer, and had high hopes for the relationship. He paused our progress along that path due to some vocational matters he needed to discern, and claimed to have a set plan for discerning. I offered to wait for him believing it would be a month or two before he made a decision. He accepted the offer. And due to reasons I can only make educated guesses about, and will not speculate about here because they are his and not mine, he kept me waiting for a decision far longer than I had anticipated was likely or possible, and ultimately didn’t quite make one. I broke things off for good about a month ago.

In the wake of the drawn-out, agonizing uncertainty this experience created in my life, and the choice I made to be faithful to my promise to wait, I find myself grappling with an age-old problem — namely, how is it that a single-hearted gift of self made with courage, faithfulness, and patience can end in desolation? Why is it that love and virtue do not always reap what they intended to sow?

Of course, not everything in this situation is desolate. There have been many gifts in this season and its aftermath, not least in the way they have highlighted the security and richness of the community I have around me. And one of the big (if somewhat severe) gifts I found myself submitting to was (and is) the opportunity to embody the virtue of detachment: to hold a deeply held desire with a truly open hand, in the knowledge that I cannot ever own, claim, or possess its object.

Still, losing a potential love about which one had large, generous hope is painful. It just sucks. It necessitates grief where there could have been joy. It has been tempting to feel that I was foolish in choosing to feel so deeply, and to follow those feelings by offering a free, full gift of self to someone who proved unable to receive it.

I have found myself bolstered and comforted by the following passage from Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb (a portion of which is currently taped to my oven range, and which I will now unabashedly quote at length):

That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God. All man’s love is vast and inconvenient. It is tempting, of course, to blunt its edge by caution. It is so much easier not to get involved — to thirst for nothing and no one, to deny that matter matters and, if you have the stomach for it, to make your bed with meanings which cannot break your heart. But that, it seems to me, is neither human nor Divine. If we are to put up with all other bothers out of love, then no doubt we must put up with the bother of love itself and not just cut and run for cover when it comes.

First of all, such such faintness is unworthy of true men. We are the lords, the priests, and the lovers of the world: It is by our hands that its cities will be built if they are built at all. But anything to which we lie so close cannot be a matter of cool detachment and scientific indifference. . . . Love is as strong as death. Man . . . is worth knowing only with his guard down, his head up and his heart rampant on his sleeve.

But second, and last and most important, playing it safe is not Divine. . . . I tell you simply what I believe. Love is the widest, choicest door into the Passion. God saved the world not by sitting up in heaven and issuing antiseptic directives, but by becoming man, and vulnerable, in Jesus. He died, not because He despised the earth, but because He loved it as a man loves it — out of all proportion and sense. And when He rose again, He stood up like a man indeed: with glorious scars — and with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature.

I’ll stop myself before I quote the whole book at you. It’s hard to know what to add to this passage, other than to tell you a little about how it has met me in recent months. That first paragraph, in particular, has consoled me greatly. If my love, any love, I try to give to another is “vast and inconvenient” — if it causes me pain and uncertainty, if it opens my heart and deepens my courage, if it brings me to the edge of myself and throws me upon the strength of Christ’s love where mine fails — there’s a more than solid chance I’m not foolish, as I fear I am, but am actually loving the right way.

Of course, such love must have boundaries: we are only human, and should not sign up for relationships in which we are constantly crucified by someone else’s unexamined sin or disorder. Christ can take that on because He is God; we, on the other hand, are not God. We are called to be like God. In a romantic connection, the self-giving love must be willingly returned by the other if it will become creative and capable of sustaining itself. Still, love freely offered, in whatever form, should be lavish; it should open us to others; it should lead us to surrender ourselves in a costly and Christlike way.

The love we give to others should, in other words, serve as the “widest, choicest door into the Passion,” something that deepens our union with Christ in His perfect gift of love as given on the Cross.

I confess this opportunity for union with Christ in His Passion has often felt like small consolation over the last few months. My capacity to abide in the love of the Father is not perfect yet, so participating in Christ’s suffering for the sake of love does not yet feel like the gift it is. I will keep practicing, and I will hope for that capacity to become perfect in me someday. The opportunity to suffer with Christ is still a gift, though, regardless of my capacity to feel its kindness.

Valentine’s Day is, in its origin, Saint Valentine’s feast day. It was originally set apart for the sake of celebrating his choice to lavish his life after the pattern of the love preached by the Gospel. He was able to faithfully answer the call to martyrdom because he knew it was a way to be united to Christ’s death — and, in doing so, to be united to Christ’s life. For in Christ, no suffering or death ever ends in itself. By becoming bound to Christ’s death, we become bound to His life. In Him, all death is always redeemed in resurrection.

We cannot deny or avoid the necessity of suffering in this life. We probably don’t understand why it is necessary yet, and we cannot demand to understand its necessity without risk of becoming bitter and narrow-hearted. In choosing to love freely and without measure, we must accept the likely costs of that love, as Christ did. However, as Julian of Norwich writes in her Revelations of Divine Love, “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

All things will be redeemed. All things will be made new. Easter will always dawn after Good Friday.

Our call, while we wait, is to be faithful to whatever love requires of us today — no matter how “vast or inconvenient” that love may be.

I hope you’re finding Christ’s wordless, constant presence with you in the dailiness of your life. <3

Wordlessness

The Story of a Soul is St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual autobiography. It tells the story of how, at a very young age, she conceived a passionate desire to become a Carmelite nun. She fought hard to be admitted early entry, and took the veil at the young age of 15.

Her text functions, for much of its length, as a story. St. Thérèse possesses a passionate desire and pursues it; she faces obstacles; she tries again. Each time disappointment racks her with suffering, she renews her pursuit of her goal – “Those three months were rich in sufferings,” she writes when her entry date is pushed later than she wishes, “but richer still in graces . . . God made me realize the value of the extra time He gave me; I made up my mind to more serious mortification than ever . . . By these little things I made ready to become the spouse of Jesus” (82-3).

St. Thérèse has, in short, a story to tell. She can, and does, tell that story for as long as her desire for life in Carmel is unmet. Only when she is suffering for lack of her desire’s fulfillment – that is, only as long as her desire is a problem that needs solving – can there be more events, character development, and progression toward a stated goal.

Perhaps, then, it should not be surprising that after she enters Carmel, St. Thérèse’s capacity to tell a story starts to break down. At one point, after several pages of unstructured meditations on prayer, spiritual direction, and convent life, she writes, “But what has happened to my story? I have lost myself in a maze of thoughts. . . . I know my story is nothing but a tangled skein, but it is the best I can do. I simply write things down as they come . . .” (141). This impulse to “write things down as they come” only strengthens in the remaining pages of her text, which look less and less like a story as they go on. However, this in no way diminishes the power of St. Thérèse’s writing. On the contrary, a flame-like passion kindles her increasingly ecstatic language. By the book’s final pages, St. Thérèse has stopped trying to address her Carmelite sisters and instead speaks directly to Jesus with words of intense passion and self-abandonment. Here is an example:

“But to be a martyr is what I long for most of all. Martyrdom! I dreamed of it when I was young, and the dream has grown up with me in my little cell in Carmel. I am just as foolish about this because I do not desire any one kind of torture; I would be satisfied only with them all. . . . Open the Book of Life, my Jesus; see all the deeds recorded of the saints! All these I want to perform for You!” (162)

And another:

“. . . now the law of fear is superseded by the law of love, and love has chosen me as a victim, frail and imperfect as I am. It is surely a worthy choice for love to make, since to be wholly satisfied, it must stoop down to nothingness and turn that nothingness to fire.

. . . No! What I ask for is love. Only one thing, my Jesus, to love You.

Striking deeds are forbidden me. I cannot preach the Gospel; I cannot shed my blood, but what matter? My brothers do it for me, while I, a little child, stay close beside the royal throne and love for those who are fighting.

Love proves itself by deeds, and how shall I prove mine? The little child will scatter flowers whose fragrant perfume will surround the royal throne, and in a voice that is silver-toned, she will sing the canticle of love.

So, my Beloved, shall my short life be spent in your sight. I can prove my love only by scattering flowers, that is to say, by never letting slip a single little sacrifice . . . I want to suffer and even rejoice for love, for this is my way of scattering flowers . . .” (165)

I cannot hope to do justice to the torrent of St. Thérèse’s passion for Christ in this short blog post. I have quoted her at length because she is the best spokeswoman for her own love. Her autobiography is a text I highly recommend, perhaps especially for Lent, in which we spend the daily commitments of our lives practicing a pattern of prayer that was deeply familiar to St. Thérèse: “Every day a fresh disappointment . . . and Jesus slept on . . . This is how her Beloved dealt with His Thérèse – a long testing, and then He realized all her dreams” (82).

When St. Thérèse enters Carmel, she still experiences passionate desire and suffering. What has changed is that she is free to experience them in a manner fully focused on love of Christ. There are no obstacles for her to practice her love for Him in the way she longs to practice it: i.e., with undivided, dogged, tender attention, prayer, and perseverance.

The fact that her capacity to tell a story breaks down in the cloister, as she draws closer to Christ in love, should give us pause. We are a generation of people who are perhaps unhealthily addicted to story. We want to live in a story that’s going somewhere – some quest, or pilgrimage, or love story; a long, difficult journey is alright, we think to ourselves, if a triumph is promised at its end. We want, in short, to be able to narrate what we’re going through and so quantify, shrink, and hold it in our minds.

At first glance, Lent as a liturgical practice seems to support and affirm this impulse. We are, after all, spending forty days in anticipation of a familiar sequence of events: Jesus will enter Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, institute the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, die on Good Friday, rise again on Easter. But on second glance, this story is marked by a distressing timelessness. Easter already happened, didn’t it? And the New Heaven and New Earth clearly have yet to come . . . so, when we celebrate Christ’s resurrection on Easter, what are we supposed to do with the fact that the healed world is not yet here? What can we make of the necessity to cyclically, constantly — every day, week, month, year — grapple with our sin, imperfection, and suffering; the mundane yet often painful difficulties of our imperfect loves; the need to bring ourselves back to the foot of the Cross — again and again — and plead, again, for new life to come?

As we enter Lent and commit to this season of fasting and prayer, perhaps we are called to give up our attachment to our sense of story. Perhaps Christ invites us to ask ourselves: what if God is good even if I cannot narrate how He is good? What if His goodness, His holiness, and the ways He extends them to me are so good and so holy that they defeat words, leaving me with nothing to say? What if all I have to offer to Him is really, truly, myself — and all I can really do as I make this offering is be silent before Him?

What then, indeed?

The humility we are called to practice in Lent is at least in part the humility of the one who knows words and stories are only helpful to a point. One day, we will have to leave them behind. We will have to present ourselves wordless and open before a God whose love for us is so immense, so holy, it consumes and remakes us like flame.

For now, we enter the quiet days of Lent. We find prayer at the edge of its silence. There is the foretaste of the presence of God, however He chooses to unite Himself to us. And there is our own self, hesitant, waiting, learning the stillness necessary to receive that union – to receive it even as we suffer, even as the stories we want to cling to fall away before its flame.

St. Thérèse again:

“My heart is opened out by charity alone . . . O Jesus, ever since this heart of mine has been consumed by its gentle flame, I have run with delight in the way of Your new commandment, and may I go on doing so until the day when, in Your company of virgins, I will follow You throughout the boundless spaces of eternity, singing Your new Canticle, the Canticle of LOVE.” (132)

Image source - Wikimedia Commons

I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to share work on Substack this year. It should be more often than I did this fall. But I hope you hang around either way. :-)

I’m feeling grateful, finding hope and freshness alongside some sorrow in the early days of the new year. My mom, some friends, and I are visiting my sister in British Columbia this weekend and it feels good to be in the PNW for a few days. The weather is cold, gray, and beautiful. We’re on the coast, and I’m loving seeing all the low-lying, tree-covered islands rise between layers of mist.

How is 2026 greeting you? What are you seeing anew? What are you hoping for? I’d love to know, if you’re willing to drop a few lines in the comments.

I’m sharing a poem with you in this post that comes from a totally different place and a totally different time. I had the idea for it on a visit to the Getty a few years ago. I love how late afternoon sunlight light hazes golden over the hills and eucalyptus trees and bottle-green, scrubby brush in Los Angeles. That day the light was particularly lovely, and I happened to be feeling a lot of longing. When some poet friends and I decided to write villanelles together, I wrote the poem that follows. I hope you enjoy it!

May peace and gratitude greet you each day this year, whatever else may come.

Eros

At early evening there is a golden haze
that glows within the basin, filling every street
in L.A.'s tangled, fractured, concrete maze.

The air is softer in that hour. The light stays
and stills its hand; lingers for moments in the heat
at early evening. There is a golden haze

for all those moments. Its hand arrays 
the subjects of its touch with solvent light replete
in L.A.'s tangled, fractured, concrete maze.

Till darkness comes the gold light lingers, its rays
touching, reaching, holding everything they meet
at early evening. . . . There is a golden haze

that seems to want to stay until it goes, decays
at once in shadows of hills that arch to greet
the lip of L.A.'s tangled, fractured, concrete maze.

Diffuse, the brightness gentles — lowers — strays — 
Till darkness bids it leave, it blesses every broken street
at evening. There is a golden haze
in L.A.'s tangled, fractured, concrete maze.

The last few months have been pretty intense for me — in deeply good and hopeful, if somewhat difficult, ways — and I’ve needed to allow myself to not post here while I’ve given my energy to some big questions and big loves.

But! I hope to get back to an at least semi-regular posting schedule in November. I would love to know how you’re doing. If you’re willing, drop a few lines in the comments about whatever shenanigans you’ve been up to, what you’re reading, how fall is greeting you, something delicious you’re eating . . . whatever it is, I’d love to know. (My own next post will likely be an update about such things in my life.)

One of my friends told me she enjoyed my recent-ish post about Christina Rossetti, so I thought I’d share a little poem I wrote about Christina for this first post of November. This poem was part of my MFA thesis, and I shared it as the first piece in my student reading. I like to think of Christina as one of my poet-moms, and even a spiritual mentors of a sort through her writing and example.

Holiness, hard-won, can make a person strange. Christina allowed that to happen to her. Perhaps we should all hope the same humility for ourselves.

Christina at Middle Age

Her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism certainly intensified, and it took some odd forms, such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord’s name printed on them. – The Poetry Foundation’s biography of Christina Rossetti


A prim, unsentimental woman leaves the doors
of Christ Church last. A priest pats her hand
with fondness. You cannot hear their whispered 
conversation, standing where you stand 
across the street. Her stocky, earnest form
leans toward him, nods, then pulls away.
She passes quickly by her fellow worshippers
still chatting on the curb. They call and smile — 
she pauses just long enough to turn. Her eyes
are oddly large and searching, her shoulders 
tense and hunched, her visage otherworldly, 
though all that’s earthly in her presence — black
ruffled gown, boots scuffed and worn, dark ribbon
tied through graying hair — are tidy, unconcerned.

At Caversham’s stone corner she halts, bends,
grasps a slip of paper from the ground — perhaps 
a soiled wrapper from some handheld dinner pie
or a discarded leaf of newsprint. She stands
stock-still, unfolds it, reads every word it holds.

The first cold breath of winter tosses 
through the dogwood overhead. Minutes pass. 
At length she lifts her gaze — a slow
and steady rising, like she’s coming back to life —

So, I asked some poet friends to join me in trying it out. Luckily, I was proved wrong — not every poem we wrote proved impressive, but one friend wrote a haunting one about ADHD that the poem’s repetitive lines were perfect for. The same friend brought the form back to our writing group last summer, and I found myself trying it out on an idea I’d had at the Norton Simon Museum. I wanted to write an ekphrastic poem about Kandinsky’s Heavy Circles, a favorite painting of mine, and di Paolo’s Baptism of Christ, both images that heavily feature circles (some concentric, some not). And both of which had inspired a strange urge to kiss them on a late summer trip to the museum.

The duplex was perfect. And the poem was just published in The Christian Century, which is the real reason d’être for this post! It’s called “On Wanting to Kiss Kandinsky’s Heavy Circles and di Paolo’s Baptism of Christ,” and you can read it at this link. I hope you do, and that you let me know what you think in the comments!

Here, too, are the paintings, side by side. You’ll need to click on the di Paolo to see the whole thing. Both benefit, though, from being seen in person, as these photos do no justice to their colors. The Kandinsky one in particular is much better in person - here, the background looks black, but it’s actually an intense navy, and the colors are much more vibrant.

In early August I graduated from my MFA program. Hooray! I feel happy and proud of this accomplishment. It was a fun last residency full of time reconnecting with friends and valued mentors, and I especially enjoyed the opportunity to share my extended graduate reading, one of the concluding requirements of the program.

I also did a road trip up the West Coast en route to graduation (so much more pleasant than the first time I did this, as I actually, you know, planned it out this year . . .) complete with a gorgeous hike in Big Sur and another in the Redwoods, meals and chats with friends, and all the astonishing scenery that comes with traversing the 1 and the 101 along the West Coast.

A couple of publication notes from my summer, one of which you may already be aware but which I will nonetheless bring to your attention:

• My poem “Thoughts Upon Reading On Beauty and Being Just in the Oncologist’s Office” was published in Vita Poetica at the top of the summer. You can read it here, and/or listen to a recording of me reading it at the bottom of the page. This one’s special to me — I hope it is a gift to you, too.

• I am SO SO SO EXCITED TO SHARE that I will have a piece published in the fall 2025 issue of Image! This is a dream publication for me. I truly couldn’t be more grateful! I’ll keep you posted on more details when the issue is published, but I wanted to let you know a little early so you can keep an eye out for it.

• A few poems I’m excited about and can’t wait to share are forthcoming in the September issue of Christian Century. I’m not 100% sure when that will be available for access, but I’ll keep you posted.

One other announcement: I am leading another creative retreat at St. Matt’s on September 13, 2025. It’s a day retreat and will take place from 9am to 5pm. The theme is “The Gift of Our Creativity: Humility, Detachment, and Generosity in a Creative Life.” If you’re in the area, please consider coming! You can check out the event details and RSVP here.

Reading, writing, listening, watching

Reading

• I’ve been chipping away at the end of Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor, I book I read for my degree but (shhhh . . . don’t tell!) never finished before writing the annotation for it. It’s fantastic. I think I’ve recommended it here before — in case you missed that, I recommend you read it!

• I’m also still chipping away at The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon and Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, both of which continue to be wonderful. I think I’m going to get really into food writing this fall. I’m excited about it.

  • Capon: “Only miracle is plain; it is the ordinary that groans with the unnutterable weight of glory.”

• Consider the Oyster, by MFK Fisher, a slender, beautiful collection of short essays about — you guessed it — oysters. Their lifespans, how to cook them, experiences of eating them, how they figure into her memories, etc. It’s wonderful, funny, and haunting. I recommend.

• I continue to wend my way through The Duty of Delight, selections from Dorothy Day’s journals. I’m taking them slowly on purpose. It feels like, and is, a text to live with, not to finish.

  • From an entry I read the other day: “These hot August days when we are so tired I wake up wondering what we will do in the dead of winter — it seems to get harder in anticipation and yet I know by experience how one should take the hardships as they come, day by day, one by one, rather than to look forward, or backward either. To live in the now is to be like little children. To be utterly dependent on our Father is to be like little children.”

Writing

• Some journal entries . . . and, to be honest, not much else. I’m giving myself freedom not to write anything unless I feel like it until October or November. It’s nice. I love a self-imposed fallow season.

• Oh — except the talks for the aforementioned retreat, of course.

• And I did draft a poem about a banana slug at residency that I’ve been noodling on over the last couple of weeks. I like it. It’s fun.

Listening

• THE FIRST EPISODE OF THE NEW SEASON OF HOME COOKING DROPPED YESTERDAY AND I AM SO EXCITED. I may or may not have spent more than $60 a sweatshirt and magnet to celebrate but we’re not going to talk about that . . . (Side question: why did I get really into branded merch after turning 30? Did that happen to anyone else? If so please let me know — I need to make sure I’m not crazy.)

• Some old Ella Fitzgerald standards. (Here’s a playlist with some of my favorites.)

• El Camino by The Black Keys. I find it to be an excellent soundtrack for my morning jogs. (How Millennial is that of me?)

• Home by Josh Garrells.

Watching

• The recent episodes of Good Hang (Amy Poehler’s new podcast) that featured her Parks and Rec co-stars Adam Scott and Aubrey Plaza.

That’s it for now! I would love to know how your summer is going. Has anything surprised you? Maybe a delicious summer fruit, a nice walk, a good book? Drop it in the comments if you feel so moved.

With love,

Alea

We have considered what it means to make our artistic vocations, as Evelyn Underhill puts it, “an oblation from the first.” As we consider how to do this in our own lives, I want to put the example of a specific artist before you.

In the Church of England calendar, today is the feast day of Christina Rossetti, a Victorian poet and devotional writer. Rossetti died in 1894, when Evelyn Underhill was about 20 years old. Like Underhill, Rossetti was a member of the Anglican-Catholic movement that emerged in the middle of the 19th century. If you think you’ve never heard of Rossetti, think again — the lyrics to “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the beloved Christmas hymn, are a poem she wrote.

Christina Rossetti was born the youngest of four siblings into a family of Italian immigrants that lived a respectable, lower middle-class life in London. Her childhood was happy. She shared an intimate bond with her mother and maintained robust friendships with her siblings. She composed her first poem in her mind before she could write. A family member transcribed it for her.

Biographers have observed that the child Christina had a passionate, tempestuous temperament. The Poetry Foundation notes she, “was given to tantrums and fractious behavior, and she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper … perhaps too much so. … As an adult [she] was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.” The adult Christina’s scrupulosity and religious passion affected her marriage prospects. She turned down two suitors because they did not share her depth of religious conviction. This is perhaps especially poignant because it seems she loved both of them deeply.

When Christina was a teen, her father became ill and unable to continue teaching. This plunged the family into a genteel poverty from which they never recovered. The rest of the family went to work, but the youthful Christina stayed home to care for her father. Two years later she, too, began to experience severe health issues. Christina’s doctors diagnosed her with a heart condition, but her collapse in health continues to confuse biographers, who have speculated that the illness she experienced was psychosomatic and may have been due to a panic disorder or suppressed sexual trauma.

Christina’s health issues never fully abated. She struggled with recurrent bouts of illness for the rest of her life, and in her forties almost died from Grave’s disease. The lymphatic illness weakened her heart and left her forever changed — her physical appearance altered and her hair thinned, wasting what beauty she had had in her youth. By her forties, she was living with and caring for her elderly mother and aunts; in her fifties and sixties, she contended with breast cancer twice. Breast cancer would take her life in her 64th year.

Through all of this, Christina wrote. She was astonishingly prolific. According to one scholar, she wrote over 1,100 poems. She also achieved authorial success, publishing over 900 of her poems before she died and attaining some measure of fame among the English reading public. When Alfred, Lord Tennyson died, Christina was suggested to replace him as England’s Poet Laureate. Her health prevented this, but the fact that she was considered indicates the startling degree of her achievement, especially given the difficult plight of intelligent women in Victorian England. (Women, for example, could be committed to insane asylums for reading novels and were not permitted to formally matriculate at Oxford University until 1920.)

As Rossetti grew older, her poetic output decreased, but she began to conduct research into poets like Petrarch and wrote a significant quantity of devotional prose, including Annus Domini, a collection of daily collects; Time Flies, a daily devotional; and The Face of the Deep, a devotional commentary on the book of Revelation.

I have shared this information about Christina Rossetti because I want to sketch for you the kind of example she offers us. One can analyze her life according to various frameworks. Many scholars make persistent attempts to “get to the bottom” of why she lived the way she lived by focusing on her repressed sexuality and the oppression she faced as a woman in Victorian society. These are factors that would have had no small effect on her life, but for my part I tend to find the scholarly fixation on them limited. It seems to me people struggle to understand Rossetti because they persistently treat her faith as if it was ancillary or dispensable. For example, when analyzing “Goblin Market,” a poem about sisterhood, temptation, and redemption, critics tend to focus on the psychology of Christina’s repressed sexuality, but only give passing reference to her 11 years of volunteer work at the Saint Mary Magdalene Penitentiary, a charity that rehabilitated former prostitutes in a convent-like residential setting.

When I look at Christina Rossetti’s life, I glimpse a woman who, to the best of her wisdom and abilities, made her life a “living sacrifice” to God. She did so imperfectly, perhaps overcompensating for her faults or erring on the side of scrupulosity. The social circumstances of the world she lived in did not make this any easier, often misdiagnosing her suffering or requiring her to suppress qualities that could have opened into boldness of character and delight. But Christina Rossetti willingly and relentlessly persisted in her devotion to Christ, His Church, and the artistic vocation God gave her. Until her death, Rossetti attended church weekly. She contributed to the prayer life of the average churchgoer by writing liturgical poetry and daily devotional texts.

One of my favorite biographical observations about her life notes that in her middle age, “her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism … intensified, and it took some odd forms, such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord’s name printed on them.” One can see in this habit a sign of religious neurosis; but one might also see in it the sign of a consuming thirst for the presence of God, and a willingness to be made strange in pursuit of that Presence. I am reminded of an Evelyn Underhill sentence we have encountered a couple of times: “Only thus can humanity use to the full its strange power of embodying eternal realities; and uniting the extremes of mystery and homeliness.”

Christina Rossetti suffered. But in her poetry and devotional writing the concern of her speakers is always to persist in clinging to Jesus, no matter how intense one’s suffering or despair might be. The fierce intensity of this repeated theme is astonishing, even unsettling. If we are to take Rossetti seriously as a creative, we must allow ourselves to be challenged to an intense degree by her radical dedication to say yes to whatever God would ask of her.

After all, Rossetti’s writerly success — which she certainly achieved — does not seem to have obtained much more for her in earthly terms than a degree of fame that made her uncomfortable, and whatever joy she derived from the act of writing (I do suspect this was a deep joy). It did not win her financial security; romantic happiness; release from physical ailment; wellbeing for her suffering family members; freedom from grief; or a secure sense of self. Instead, it appears in large part to have been one of the ways Rossetti doggedly sought to practice what we heard Underhill call the “true and active death to self” necessary in any Christian life, and which she then freely gave to the faithful reading public as a gift. In her January 3 entry of Time Flies, she writes that all the stories and illustrations she shares in the collection are, “alike written down in the humble wish to help others by such means as I myself have found helpful.”

Underhill observes that prayer is not necessarily intended to make us feel good or happy, though pleasant emotion may follow upon prayer from time to time. Instead, it is a means by which we become accessible to God for the purpose of ministering His Charity. Rossetti seems to me to have understood this, to have known that any prayerful endeavor — whether it be churchgoing, charitable work, writing poetry, or caring for family — might not make her “feel better,” but that these things were good to do for Christ’s sake, not hers.

How do we practice such a posture? Where do we start?

To put it bluntly: we start. In another Time Flies entry, Rossetti observes, “Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes: work never begun.” If we don’t know how to begin, we take Rossetti’s advice seriously. We refuse to leave the work undone. We find a small beginning, and endeavor to begin.

This could take the form of scribbling down a bad draft, or having a go at a painting that scares us; but more than likely our beginning will be a movement to re-commit to the responsibilities of our daily lives and our prayer. Underhill writes: “we are not required to go outside the frame of normal experience … to fulfill the creative design of God for souls. There is no place and no career which lies outside Eternity, and cannot incarnate something of the Eternal Charity. What was done in the carpenter’s shop can be done in the engineer’s shop too.”

Rossetti seems to have known this truth in her bones, and over and over again she practiced it. She knew that a devotional commentary on Revelation might be written at home, in the midst of caring for elderly relatives, just as well as in the libraries of Oxford. She lived a life that embodied the tension we heard Underhill name earlier today — a life that “unit[ed] the extremes of mystery and homeliness.” Perhaps such simplicity offends our sense of artistic greatness. But the examples of saints and faithful people like Christina Rossetti repeatedly compel us to reconsider and surrender our need to be exalted.

Start here, their lives tell us. Begin with the materials you have. That is where the artist’s vocation takes root. Again in her January 3 Time Flies entry, Rossetti writes, “I have heard tell of a painter who sought far and wide for an atmosphere wherein to paint. At last he found an available atmosphere in Italy: and returning thither he worked? … not so: he died. A bad beginning may be retrieved and a good ending achieved. No beginning, no ending.”

There’s humor in her prose here, a sort of sardonic attention to artistic foolishness. But she’s making a serious point, and she’s right. Where can we go if we won’t begin?

Of course, to assay such a beginning requires us to die to how we think the artist’s life should look. And it requires us to submit to the reality that our art has no life if it is not a channel of God’s Charity. Such surrender is, as we’ve discussed, painful — is a death — but it is also all freedom, a source of relief from the weight of our own needy expectations. The call to give up the things that are precious to us — specific projects, artistic dreams — is a severe one. We need Christ’s life in us to fortify our efforts and endue them with love.

We want to love. But we cannot love unless Love Himself fills us with a charitable, giving love. If we are faithful to throw ourselves upon the Charity of God, He will not only make us channels of this love, but will also fortify us for the effort. He will further His purposes through our art. What else can we ask for?

Let us, then, set our eyes upon Him, and give Him every creative effort and desire of our hearts as a willing sacrifice. Through our art, let us become ministers of His love, made like Christ, shaped into channels of His Charity to a grieving world. Let us pray, as Rossetti does in one of her sonnets:

Lord, Thou Thyself art Love and only Thou;
Yet I who am not love would fain love Thee;
But Thou alone being Love canst furnish me
With that same love my heart is craving now.
… Nerve me to labor till Thou bid me rest,
Kindle my fire from Thine unkindled fire,
And charm the willing heart from out my breast.

We’ve considered the necessity of self-death through Christ in the life of the Christian artist. What’s next? What is the point of this self-death? Where does it go? Does my story, my particular identity, matter at all in my artistic practice?

The short answer is yes. Just as only Christ — in His particular personality, body, time, and place — could make the ultimate act of loving self-sacrifice on the Cross, so only the particular artist can make the specific art she is called to make. But Christ did not die on the Cross so He could better articulate and claim his identity for the sake of feeling happier and self-actualized. He died so He could make a gift of His own life to the entirety of creation. He died and rose to pour His Charity over the world.

To claim the label of artist is to claim a vocation. As with any vocational calling, those who accept this call are required to make an oblation of themselves and their work. An artist has a responsibility to steward her calling for the purposes of God. She must give precisely herself and her talents to the call to Charity God has placed upon her. This can take many different forms, but always comes with all the spiritual, emotional, and relational demands a vocation requires.

As Underhill writes in another passage, “The whole life made an oblation from the first — placed on the altar, and lived right through as a reasonable sacrifice from beginning to end — this is the pattern put before us. Only thus can humanity use to the full its strange power of embodying eternal realities; and uniting the extremes of mystery and homeliness.”

As we live in and love the world, as we remain grounded in its necessities, those of us who practice art in the spirit of our “reasonable sacrifice” find ourselves compelled to express the “strange power” of humanity to “[embody] eternal realities; and [unite] the extremes of mystery and homeliness” in our art. All Christians are called to do this, but artists are perhaps called to do so in a particular way. We are called to help others see these things — to make these eternal realities, the extremes of mystery and homeliness united — evident to the world in ways it cannot deny or avoid; in ways that induct or compel other creatures into attentive communion with and surrender to the Charity of God.

An artistic practice that tries to lift the artist up and away from the particular realities of her life, relationships, and external circumstances — perhaps especially if it tries to do so by declaring easy Christian answers to life’s problems — will always produce tepid, empty, or false fruit. (Think of the God’s Not Dead movie franchise or your least favorite, sickly sweet pop worship songs.) Art like this is in denial of reality, of the real situation of this broken, bleeding world. In submitting her art to God’s purposes, a mature Christian artist enters the world’s suffering with her creativity, meeting those who suffer as they truly are and ministering Charity to them exactly there.

If we wish to embody Christ’s Charity in our lives and our art, we cannot get away with dismissing the world, with trying to avoid its annoying and difficult mundanities. All of us are bound to the necessity and circularity of doing the dishes, changing the next diaper, loving a difficult neighbor, eating another meal, weeding the garden, caring for our bodies, working out how to communicate with each other, engaging with suffering as it comes. We are stewards of these necessities. As artists, we are called to cultivate an intimate relationship with them, and so work out a creative, redemptive attention to human life. We perceive and then give expression to the way God makes His love known in and through the things humans actually experience.

Evelyn Underhill meditates on this idea again at another place in her book:

The Light of the World enters our life to show us reality; and forces us to accept the fact that it is the whole of that life, not some supposed spiritual part of it, which is involved in our response to God, and must be self-given to the mysterious purposes of Charity. Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not ‘follow the footsteps of His most holy life’ by the exercise of a trained religious imagination; but by treading the firm rough earth, up hill and down dale, on the mountain, by the lake-side, in garden, temple, street, or up the strait way to Calvary. The whole physical scene counts and is of vital importance to Christians; it can and does test us, save us or break us. So, to dismiss the pressures, limitations and crucial problems of practical life, bodily sufferings and self-denials, or even the most childlike and crude devotional exercises, as merely material, merely external, and so on, witnesses to a cheap and fundamentally unchristian attitude of mind; a complete misunderstanding of our real situation and the many-leveled richness of God’s revelation within life.

Again we come up against this hard necessity of giving our entire life — giving everything it involves, including the mundane, daily necessities we cannot escape — to God. Only through such self-sacrifice can we most fully see and delight in the gift of the circumstances God has given us to inhabit. Without the necessity of self-sacrifice, we might be prone to spurn the world as it is and declare ourselves little gods, people who know better than God and who, through our art, can improve upon the boring or inconvenient world He has made. This is a sin of pride.

Our willingness to die to self opens the way for God to enter our art and use it to minister His self-giving love to the world. Artists are prevailed upon, as we live in community with ourselves and the world, to perceive how God’s love for His creation endows all that exists — no matter how broken — with dignity, and draws it toward eternity.

We work this out first in prayer. Our artistic practice must find its source and life and being in prayer offered for the sake of union with and attention to God. Underhill writes, “Christ seems to have thought of prayer as, above all, a way in which our little spirits may become more and more accessible to the life of that Eternal Spirit.” Though union with God is the wellspring of all joy and peace, it is important to note that Underhill’s definition of prayer is not focused on making us feel happier. She suggests the point of prayer is to become accessible to God so He can accomplish His work through us.

Regardless of the cost to our personal preferences, artists are called to rigorously attend to and shed light on the cracks in this present reality, those places of suffering, fear, or personal repentance — or even overwhelming joy — that we don’t want to face, really would like to run from forever if we could, but which the “pressure of God” is upon us to let Him enter and make new. We are called to illuminate these things and then, with the beauty, rigor, tenderness, and unflinching honesty of our art, help people face reality so God’s Charity can meet them there; can slip through the cracks their suffering rends in time and give them His life. Think of the Psalmists—those ancient poets and musicians who faced every part of human experience and, as they offered both joy and grief to God, were enabled by the Spirit to create poetry that invites people into prayer and illuminates the Charity of God working in human life to hold, dignify, and rescue us.

Thus our art must seek to be as honest as it is grateful. It must present reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. And it must be made by us, generated in and through the particular circumstances and identities God has given to us as gifts. The vocation of the Christian artist is not to make “Christian art,” per say — it is to enter the crucible of self-loss after the pattern of the Cross, and in doing so become a specific channel of the generous, suffering, joyful Charity of God as He pours His life out upon all that exists.

Underhill again:

[In the New Testament] we find a suffering and love twined so closely together that we cannot wrench them apart: and if we try to do so, the love is maimed in the process — loses its creative power — and the suffering remains, but without its aureole of willing sacrifice.

Love for God; love for others; love for the world; and a willingness to be consumed in the creative flame of that love, to become what God’s Charity wills to make us, and to body forth His creativity in the vocation He wills for us to take — that is the price and the joy of every Christian’s commitment to the Cross. As artists, we must not flinch from submitting our art to such sacrifice, lest the love that gives our art life “[lose] its creative power.”

And if you’re in SoCal, mark your calendars – I’m leading another such retreat on Saturday, September 13.

This is the first of three retreat talks delivered at a “creativity day retreat” at Saint Matthew’s Church in Newport Beach, CA on April 27, 2024.

Today, I wish to consider the self-death necessary to the vocation of the artist.

This is an essential topic for creative people to consider. I suspect an unhealthy self-preoccupation haunts current dialogue around the question of what it means, and why it matters, to be an artist. Many contemporary creatives seem frequently, if not constantly, concerned with using their art to create or define themselves, and often get lauded for this work.

Who am I? What have I suffered, and who needs to know about it? How effective or evocative or new is my work? What do you need to know about me in order for me to feel known?

We can figure it out, we tell ourselves, by making art.

A Christian ethic of making challenges this impulse to self-define and self-celebrate through art. The pattern in which God creates, and after which we are called to pattern our creativity, is typified for us in the Genesis Creation account. God’s first creative acts reflect His identity as a maker, but not through obsessive self-reflection or self-definition. Instead, God’s first creative acts reveal him to be a charitable and communal God: He inaugurates a thriving world of communal beings that exist in creative relationship with each other. This suggests that a rightly ordered creativity is one that moves out toward the other, inviting the creation and other people into wholeness and community. It is a pattern of making that does not accommodate an exclusive, hyper-individualized pursuit of self through art.

We find ourselves challenged by this pattern to look again at some old questions. What makes an artist an artist? Or, more to the point, what makes a Christian artist a Christian artist?

I will add my voice to the chorus of attempts to answer this question, and I would like to keep it simple. I suggest that to be an artist means to be someone who commits to the practice of applying one’s creative abilities to making things out of a chosen medium or mediums. To be a Christian artist is to be someone who engages that practice as a way to be a channel of the generosity of God.

I borrow the phrase “channel of the generosity of God” from The School of Charity, Evelyn Underhill’s book of “Meditations on the Christian Creed.” Underhill writes:

Only those who are generous up to the limits of self-loss can hope to become channels of the generosity of God. In that crisis the I, the separate self, with its loves and hates, its personal preoccupations, is sacrificed and left behind. And out of this most true and active death to self, the spirit is reborn into the real life: not in some other transcendental world, but in this world, among those who love us and those we love.

Per Underhill, no generosity can be sustained after the pattern of God’s generosity if it insists on preserving the ingeniousness or specialness of the “separate self.” To become a channel of the generosity of God — that is, to fulfill our Christian vocation on this earth — we must surrender all the things we think of as ours to the “crisis” of self-loss modeled on the Cross.

This includes our artistic talents, passions, even hobbies. Even good things, like creative talents, will fail and become cheapened if we try to name, quantify, and cling to them for our own sake or on our own terms. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that no matter what we think we have, we have nothing if we do not have Charity. In Underhill’s understanding, such Charity is defined not by happy feelings or fraternal bliss, but instead by our capacity to be “generous up to the limits of self-loss … to become channels of the generosity of God”; to submit to “that crisis” in which “the I, the separate self … is sacrificed and left behind.”

We in this room today are Christians who, I presume, wish to practice the art we love in a holy way. Such holiness requires faithfulness — the regular returning, the regular yes to the necessities of a creative practice. But it also requires us to faithfully submit to, as Underhill puts it, a “true and active death to self.” We cannot think of our art as ultimately useful because it will help us define our life, create ourselves, or capture importance. We must recognize that the gift of an artistic talent is given so it can become a “channel of the generosity of God” to a grieving, lonely world.

We face a temptation to see art as the best way out of suffering or doubt and back to ourselves, but it is prayer that can best guide us through these difficulties. Art can, and in some cases should, serve a therapeutic role in the life of a suffering person. But the model given to us by Christ indicates that any endeavor undertaken solely for the sake of claiming ourselves and prioritizing our own interests is doomed from its beginning. Even art engaged for therapeutic purposes must have an end beyond the maker in sight — that is, to help the maker become capable of loving self, others, and God more freely.

Christians are concerned with the practice of submitting every gift we’re ever given — of talent, insight, energy, resources — to the project of becoming united with God so He might use us to further His purposes in the world. Only through the death involved in this submission, this absolute giving over to God, can we be made empty enough of self to receive the Charity of God and then offer it back to Him and to the world.

Sometimes, for the artist, self-death means letting God heal an experience of suffering we have come to identify with because the experience makes us feel special, or simply because it feels easier to make art about suffering than about joy or grace. Artists are perhaps especially prone to resisting this call. We can tend to want to stay stuck in our wounds, where we nurse the fear, nostalgia, longing, or sense of identity that comes with those wounds because it makes us feel like we have something meaningful to make art about. We might fear that without our suffering our art cannot exist.

But if we ever hope to have our creative selves resurrected, uplifted through and past those places of death in our souls into a generative, eternally-minded creative life, we must give that suffering to God, and with it give Him the artistry or sense of self we have constructed around it.

Regardless of the gift we must make to God, to give that gift is often, as Underhill terms it, a crisis. I must die to my understanding of myself, that sense of identity I am already familiar and comfortable with; even to the creativity I understand and feel I can manage. I must open myself entirely to the way the Spirit would have with me and my art — which, again, often feels like a death. This moment of self-death is one where we must trust God to bring us back to life.

Artists must here trust God in a unique way. We must trust that even if our moment of self-surrender is followed by a period in which we lack inspiration, God has a plan for our creativity and will resurrect it into a renewed, generous, and self-emptied inspiration.

I challenge each of us to examine what motivates our creative practice. Why do I make art? Do I make art to more fully express, realize, define, or possess myself? Do I make art to pin down healing on my terms? To prove something? To make sure others know exactly how and why I have suffered? Defend my behavior? Tell the story my way? Do I make art solely to make money? Do I make it because I consider it an actual extension of myself, and fear there is nothing left of me if I stop?

Or do I make art out of a movement of Eucharistic, self-emptied gratitude? Do I make art to seek God, to discover where He has met and upheld me in my suffering, to celebrate His charity and offer it back to Him, and then pour it out upon the suffering world? Making art can be a way to make an offering to God out of the things I don’t understand — my suffering, loss, fear — and ask Him to redeem them into an expansive, hospitable charity for other people, society, and the natural world. Am I open to letting Him do this?

I am making an implicit claim here that the mature artist, the one who has given his artistic vocation up to the Charity of God, is one who has died to his own plans for his art and abandoned it to the purposes of God. This process of abandonment is Underhill’s “crisis” of the loss of the “separate self” and its concerns.

It is a death.

It can feel terrifying.

But let us face this crisis head-on. Let us ask God: What are You asking of me and my art? How can I abandon my creativity to Your hand, that I might become a channel of your Charity to the world?

I’ve got another poem for you this weekend. You’ll need to click a link to read it — but for those of you who didn’t see my Note earlier this week, I’m excited to share that my poem “Thoughts Upon Reading On Beauty and Being Just in the Oncologist’s Office” was just published in Vita Poetica.

I began to write this poem last summer, around halfway through my first round of preventative breast cancer screenings. I have the BRCA1 gene, so this is something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, and it should be mundane most of the time. But after my first screening I got a call in which a radiologist told me they’d caught something they wanted to double check, and I found myself in and out of the doctor’s office over the next month for more screenings and tests.

I was terrified. I found I couldn’t talk about it without crying, so I chose not to talk about it all that widely until I knew for sure. As I started working on this poem, I reassured myself that I would triumphantly share it with friends and classmates and readers in a year.

It’s been a year. I’m so grateful to share that this time, what they caught was not cancer. And this poem was published almost exactly a year after that journey began. Again — so much gratitude. It could have been a very different year.

I go in for my next round of screenings in a few weeks. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and my prayers persistent that there won’t be anything abnormal this time — hoping dearly for many years of unremarkable mundanity at these appointments.

Also: if you are a woman in her late 20s / early 30s or older and you have not begun regular screenings for breast cancer, it’s a good idea to start sooner than later. Genetics are not the only source of risk, and it’s better to know what’s going on than not to know until it’s too late. Olivia Munn, the actress, has become an inspirational advocate for early and frequent testing after the Tyrer-Cusick risk assessment test helped save her life. If you want to read more about her story, here’s a CNN article about it. She’s also very open about this on her Instagram account, where she includes a lot of free resources at the link in her bio.

Love ya. Hang in there. May the Lord’s peace attend you this weekend, and always. (And I hope you enjoy the poem.)

In Him,

Alea

This image suggested some tenuous balance between stillness and motion to me. I wonder if that’s the sort of meditation every good still life art piece is, at its heart. I’ve tried to capture some sense of that balance in this poem. I think I might play around with different versions of it sometime (perhaps a different person moving away from the pear, or a different way to set up the moment, or a different form — who knows).

Either way, please consider this my encouragement to you to take writerly inspiration from anywhere — especially anywhere you find something beautiful that arrests your attention. Even Pinterest.

In the Still Life

In the still life a green bough arches
from an earthenware jug and a glow of light
rests on the wall behind them. Three pears

wait. One pear nods away from the plate
that holds its brothers. Someone —
photographer, painter — needed balance

and placed it there. But it seems to promise
more: perhaps a woman, in a linen dress,
who stands at the sideboard moments before.

She holds the pear. Light gilds her hair.
With a firm grasp and eyes closed she draws 
the pear to her nostrils, inhales its verdant scent.

Commotion stirs behind her. She turns.
She presses the pear against the walnut 
surface, her laden arm outstretched until

she leans forward, steps forth, and lets go
the pear. In the still life, the pear tips over, 
the pear nods, the pear turns away from the plate.

Reading, writing, listening, watching . . .

Before I talk about myself! My wonderful, brilliant poet friend Calleja Smiley Welsh is hosting an ecopoetics workshop with No, Dear magazine on July 19. The title is “Ecopoetics: pathways for participation.” She’s wrapping up her MFA in Poetry at Columbia, and is someone I’ve learned so much from as we’ve workshopped together over the years. I encourage you to attend if you feel the need for a little inspiration.

Reading

• Just finished (like, ten minutes ago as of the time I write this sentence) Under the Sea Wind, the first book in Rachel Carson’s The Sea Trilogy. It’s beautiful (only thing I might critique is her over-reliance on “be” verbs — call me a snob if you will, but where sometimes they add elegance, in over-use they start to slow down the motion suggested by her prose). Here’s a little taste of her lovely, lyrical writing: “That night the sea burned with unusual phosphorescence. Many fish were near the surface, feeding. The chill of November quickened their movements, and as their schools rolled through the water they disturbed the millions of luminous plankton animals, causing them to glow with a fierce luster. So the darkness of the moonless night was broken in many places by flickering patches of light that came and went, flared to brilliance, and died away.”

Writing

• Drafted a poem the other day about Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a couple of dead birds I’ve witnessed in the last few years, and my first pelvic floor physical therapy appointment (something I’m doing in my ongoing pursuit of better digestive health). Being an early draft it’s a bit rough around the edges, but I’ve got high hopes for it.

• Revising a few poems for our upcoming, final (!) MFA workshops in August.

• I have not been writing the final five annotations I need to finish for the MFA, but expect that’ll consume my free time over the next week or so — what’s life without a little of the excitement procrastination + a crushing deadline can give you?

• A journal entry or two. Gotta put the big feelings somewhere, yeah?

Listening

• A ton of Switchfoot. I’d forgotten how much I love their music somehow. I picked up Vice Verses for a run for maybe the first time in 10 or 12 years, on a day I happened to be feeling rather sad. “Restless” had me openly weeping as I jogged down a cracked sidewalk. Idk. Adulting is weird. I’ve loved revisiting Oh! Gravity. and Fading West, too.

• So. Much. Normal Gossip. This episode about an old ladies’ bunco league had me cackling, and includes two plot twists that quite literally made my jaw drop.

• “Joy Deep as Sorrow,” a beautiful song by my friend and fellow parishioner Bob Bennet. Bob and his wife Elena have been in a leadership group with me for the last year, and this song is quickly becoming one of my heart-songs.

Watching

• I have gained access to Dropout TV by “borrowing” my little brother’s password so I have FINALLY watched full episodes of Game Changer and Make Some Noise and let me tell ya, I’m thrilled. Roulette is the best kind of chaos, and had me laughing harder than I’ve laughed in I truly do not know how long.

I’ve been navigating some big feelings lately, which has felt lonely and a little painful sometimes. But there’s been a lot of joy too — a Disneyland trip with one of my brothers and his two oldest boys (4 and 6); long walks at sunset (beautiful at the nearby estuary and in my somewhat grungy neighborhood, see below); cheerful conversations after church; happy chats with some of my friends’ wonderful children; lots of time with church pals, including my first viewing of Gladiator with my friend and her teenaged daughter; baking sourdough (threw some chocolate chips and honey into one of them this week! very excited about this); a superabundance of monarch butterflies frequenting the milkweed by my window (again see below); beginning to learn how not to constantly believe I’m doing something wrong (where do we pick these things up??); a little, growing hope that feels like it’s holding my sorrow and helps me trust that walking through some wounds with patience and faithfulness will lead to healing, even if that healing isn’t fully realized until the next life.

If you’re wading through big feelings too, hang in there. The Lord is with you. Even if you haven’t yet learned how to see how He’s with you, He’s there. Always.

(Believe me when I say the moon was WAY bigger in real life!)

I’m a number of weeks too late to share this as a Pentecost piece. But I want to post it anyway because we are several weeks into Trinity now, and if there’s ever a season when we need a reminder that the Comfort of the Spirit is always present, it’s Trinity — this season focused on the long life of prayer, in which we’re constantly faced with our inconstancy, impatience, and need.

I also find it helpful to remember, each year, that Trinity is immediately preceded by the eight days of the Pentecost feast. The Church was wise in crafting this tradition: it is a yearly reminder that while we first celebrate the revelation of the Holy Spirit descended in glory, and are baptized by the fire of His presence, we are then immediately called into the wilderness of our prayer. (Not unlike Christ after His baptism, no?)

The Spirit is with us, dwelling inside us, and the revelation holds true, but our practice of perceiving His presence happens over a lengthy, almost unbearable period of time. Thus, in Trinity, our faith is perhaps primarily characterized by persistence and humility. We must practice resilience and remain humble enough to accept our weakness when it rises. We must learn to let the Spirit be our strength, and to work as He wills in our lives.

Once, as a day fell into evening on the edge of the Salish Sea, I sat under a cold wind and watched sunlight burn pink over the horizon. A pale haze made the Olympic Range look ghostly. Five minutes into my solitary reflection, I was startled by movement—an enormous bald eagle, who had been resting on the rough asphalt of an old basketball court, stirred. I watched as it stepped a few paces forward and raised its wings, then flew over the field past a friend of mine, who was wending her way back to our camp cabin. The eagle alighted above her on an old barracks roof and proceeded to survey the scene.

I wondered, as I watched my friend and saw the eagle rise over her path, whether she had noticed his benedictive flight. I hoped she had. I knew she was suffering and weary in spirit.

I am reminded by this memory of Isaiah’s famous simile—those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

I have often heard this verse quoted as a way to undercut or minimize the necessity of contending with fatigue or emptiness. But in watching that eagle, who stirred from his stillness on the court and rose only to pause a moment later, it occurred to me that even the eagle must take his rest.

The verse I have quoted above closes Isaiah 40, a chapter that opens with a commanding exhortation from God that Israel take comfort in His work: “Comfort, yes, comfort my people! … Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry out to her, that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned.”

The chapter goes on like this for many verses, weaving triumphant declarations of the LORD’s victory over sin, death, and suffering with startlingly honest assertions regarding the futility and brevity of human life—for example, verses seven and eight: “All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, and the flower fades, because the breath of the LORD blows upon it.”

In our historical moment, we are perhaps overly-accustomed to expecting “comfort” to arrive in the form of “consolation”—that is, as a solution or reprieve from suffering that will enable us to get up off our feet, stop being (or feeling) weak, and keep “fighting the good fight.” But Isaiah 40 compels us to reconsider the nature of comfort. This chapter relentlessly contrasts the absolute frailty of the human condition with the overwhelming, absolute power of the Creator God who cannot be compared to any created thing. Per verse 24, all God needs to do is breathe on the princes and the nations “and they will wither, and the whirlwind will take them away like stubble.” This, too, is the God who, at the chapter’s outset, calls his people to take comfort in his vanquishing, victorious power.

The chapter suggests we are meant to take comfort in God’s existence, the magnitude and activity of His power (perhaps especially on behalf of those who trust Him), and nothing else. The comforted one is she who has seen this reality—has seen that God, the One who “has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,” chooses to apply His inestimable strength to empowering and strengthening her. Per Isaiah 40, the proper response of the comforted one is not to try to escape suffering, solve the world’s problems, or prove how strong she is. Instead, she ought to “bring good tidings, and lift up [her] voice with strength.” (Sometimes, of course, being the bearer of God’s good tidings can get the message-bearer killed—but the call remains the same, and having been comforted by the strength of the LORD, she will have what she needs to persevere.)

Tomorrow is the Feast of Pentecost, which means we are, as a community, on the cusp of receiving the Spirit—that Breath of God who can raze the nations with a single exhalation—into our lives again, in a new way. We cannot know specifically how He, the Comforter, will choose to enliven and strengthen us. But we can trust that He will, and we can make ourselves ready to say yes to however He wills to make His comfort known.

In the meantime, I cannot shake the thought of the eagle I witnessed on the edge of the Salish Sea. Who can know what errands he was about that evening? But when I saw him, I saw that his flight did not initially lead to larger and grander flight. The first thing he did after rising on the strength of his great wings was find another place to pause and receive peace.

As we run in the way of Comfort, we will inevitably faint and grow weary, but the LORD never does. The witness of that eagle suggests that when we collide with our limitations, it is wise not to keep “pushing through.” Instead it is good to pause, receive rest and peace, survey the scene, and consider where the Comforter is at work in us, through us, and in the world on our behalf—and to trust that even if we cannot discern His work, He is advocating on our behalf.

“And the Lord said, ‘Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.”
— Luke 22:31-2

“Lord, You know all things; You know that I love You.”
— John 21:17

Tomorrow we’ll celebrate the feast day of Saint Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus said, in Matthew 16:18-9, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah … you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

Before these prophetic words came true, though, Saint Peter had to face Gethsemane. The story is long-familiar—after the Passover meal, Jesus takes his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he brings his agony into prayer, and the disciples struggle against sleep. Judas leads a group of men carrying swords and clubs to Jesus, where he identifies him with a kiss. Jesus exchanges what were likely tense words with the angry crowd, who tell him they are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. “I have told you that I am He,” he repeats. “Therefore, if you seek Me, let these [the disciples] go their way” (John 18:8).

At this moment, Saint John’s gospel tells us, “Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear.” We cannot know exactly what possessed Saint Peter in this moment. But the randomness of the action suggests impulsiveness, lack of consideration, even panic. Saint Peter seems to have been overcome by a desire to do something that could help the situation, save his friend; but he can’t figure out how to express that desire in action. The result is a half-strangled determination, an attempted gesture of protective love that does not find purchase.

Jesus’ response is calm but firm: “Put your sword into the sheath. Shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given me?”

This moment is reminiscent of Saint Peter’s other rash outbursts and actions in the Gospels, such as his bewildering suggestion at the Transfiguration to build three tents for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, or his attempt to walk on water toward Christ, in which his faith falters and he must be rescued. Or the moment in Matthew 16, just a few verses after Jesus tells Saint Peter he’ll be the rock of the church, when Saint Peter takes Jesus aside and tells Him to stop predicting His own death (“this shall not happen to You!”). Jesus returns a reply that feels almost vicious: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an offense to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.”

During the Passover meal, before Gethsemane, Jesus turns to Saint Peter and cries, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.” Saint Peter seems confused. “Lord,” he replies, “I am ready to go with you, both to prison and to death.” Jesus then tells Saint Peter he will deny that he even knows Jesus three times before the rooster crows.

Out of moments like these, a portrait emerges of a man capable of great passion and courage, wholly given to the cause of following Christ, but whose understanding and maturity have not quite caught up with his love. Saint Peter does not want Jesus to suffer; he does not want Him to be kidnapped, or to die young, or to be alone when on trial. Perhaps even more than these, Saint Peter does not want to lose his beloved Friend, on whom he has staked his future. Saint Peter must have felt a near-constant internal pressure, even a sort of blaze, of passion for Jesus. The felt experience of this love seems to have blinded him to anything else. I suspect it caused him to overestimate the strength of his own passion, and to underestimate Christ’s love and the ethics of the Kingdom He had come to inaugurate.

Such a love as Saint Peter’s is not something that can survive into maturity, or reach its full expression and power, without first being “sifted.” Christ’s words to Saint Peter in the Upper Room—“Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you …”—are difficult words, even frightening. How could God possibly consent to deliver anyone He loves into Satan’s hand?

But if we pause and consider the nature of our loves, we see pretty quickly that any passion worth having is one that must be “sifted.” The suffering of shame we feel when the immaturity of our love is revealed to us—a suffering that can sometimes edge near despair—is perhaps the only sure way to burn up the chaff and strengthen the wheat.

I suspect the few days between Christ’s death and resurrection were the worst days of Saint Peter’s life. Given the great passion he was clearly capable of feeling, what depths of despair and grief must he have entered when faced with his own failure? Perhaps he ran and hid to grieve in secret, like Adam and Eve in the garden, trying to keep his shame away from everyone he knew. Thus isolated, perhaps he experienced a crisis of personhood. Who am I if I am not, as I believed, the one who loves Christ unto death?

But then Easter. Then his footrace with Saint John to the tomb. Then that morning by the sea of Galilee, when Saint Peter realizes it is the risen Christ waiting for them on shore and jumps into the ocean with all of his clothes on, too eager to embrace Him again to wait for the boat to return to shore. Then the sequence of repeated questions over breakfast, the undoing of his denials—“Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?” “Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.”

We can learn many things from the example of Saint Peter. One of them is that a passionate love riddled with imperfections is a gift from God. If we will simply stay the course, God will move our passion past its childish expressions to deepen, intensify, and cultivate it into strength. Another is that embarrassment and shame are sometimes moments of “sifting,” gifts of clarity in which we recognize how our loves fall short and receive opportunities to pursue their deeper life.

Jesus may periodically rebuke and train Saint Peter’s passion, but He never scorns or belittles it. Saint Peter’s passion is one of his greatest gifts. Christ patiently shepherds it, slowly but surely establishing it in Saint Peter’s soul as the bedrock of the work he will be called to do after the Ascension. After all, only an unusually expansive, determined capacity for love—a rash sort of passion—could sustain the work of one called to establish and cultivate the Church.