Tag Archives: Faith

Wondrous and Mundane: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Dec

Space is still filled with the noise of destruction and annihilation, the shouts of self-assurance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and helplessness. But round about the horizon the eternal realities stand silent in their age-old longing.  Alfred Delp

The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak. Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.  Remy de Gourmont

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. Laurell K. Hamilton

We don’t heal in isolation, but in community. S. Kelley Harrell

We were refugees from ourselves.  Chris Cleave

One should be kinder than needed.  R. J. Palacio

The science behind nudging is little more than a thin set of claims about how humans are “predictably irrational,” and our policies and systems should heavily divest from its influence. Leif Weatherby

This mere snippet of our Milky Way, for me and others, serves as a daily reminder of the incomprehensible vastness of our universe as well as the extraordinary “constellation” of ingredients – including our relative planetary isolation – which has given life on this “third rock from the sun” at least a “puncher’s chance” of sustainable survival.

For me, images such as the one above courtesy of Hubble and Webb, speak to both the nature of Advent and to the complexities of our human condition.  Somehow, someway, we are the beneficiaries of life-permitting distance from the black holes, massive meteor incursions, supernovas and other solar instability which punctuate our galaxy and which could easily hasten the end of life as we know it.  That we have not treated our planetary abundance with the reverence that our galactic positioning warrants is yet another example of our genetic and temperamental limitations, one more reason for all of us to pay closer attention to who we are, what we long for, what we actually cherish, and who we might still become, timing, courage and intention permitting.

Little of the above, of course, would make sense to those long ago, praying under galactic illumination for something or someone to come and redirect the course of humanity, any more than would the eventual, incarnate embodiment of this redirection – a child of cosmic implications and modest means huddled in a barn.

This Advent as with others, I have tried to highlight what for me is a compelling image of a figure in “lonely exile” sitting on the edge of hill beholding the vastness of space in a world without artificial light and the conveniences and distractions which it brings to our own time. How do we make sense of the brilliance and awesomeness of the firmament juxtaposed against the drudgery of much of life then as now, drudgery punctuated by the longing that something or someone can come to us – to our families and communities – providing balm for our seasonal heartbreak while restoring our largely broken hope, a hope that many of us have almost given up believing we have what it takes to bring it home for ourselves and those we cherish.

This “lonely exile” motif highlights some of the complexities of our earthly sojourn, reaching for the stars and yet compelled to attend to some oft-mundane human needs, scanning the heavens for signs of hope while remembering to plant the crops, feed the livestock, prepare the meals, wash the utensils, and change the diapers (or whatever passed for diapers in those times).  Even in Advent, for some of us especially in Advent, we are constantly being dragged back into the habits of our pragmatic busyness, our preparations for the season of the manger which are more about material satisfaction than about spiritual consumption, more about getting our worldly goods in their preferred alignment than honoring the one we had long had the temerity to anticipate, the hope for humanity born into a thinly veiled chaos of social discrimination, straw bedding and bitter cold.   

There is little that would help most in times past to anticipate or even make sense of THAT child in THAT manger at the end of a sequence of longing, reflection and even heartbreak. For more than a few, it makes even less now as we have more or less resigned ourselves to our addictive and even counter-productive politics and diplomatic convenings, accepting the production of ever-new weapons that can kill ever-more antiseptically, threatening the future of the children we proclaim to love in order to satisfy current cravings, and introducing ever new technological manifestations such as “Artificial Intelligence” which among other things underscores the failures of humans to fully cultivate the full range of our indigenous capacities, the memory, reason and skill which constitute our inheritance- — genetic and divine – and which should have placed us long ago on a saner, kinder, less predatory, more just and peaceful path than the one we now routinely tread.

My personal “path” to Advent has not always been as aware nor as productive as it could have been.  I often spend Sunday mornings in New York engaged in a combination of activities which help to cleanse my often-clogged, spiritual palate, and which almost always include skype calls with friends and colleagues and a visit to a nearby farmer’s market with my best neighbor. But another Sunday ritual with Advent implications involves a walk to a neighborhood park to take in the bells of Riverside Church. Sitting under a rendition of Gabriel and his trumpet, I often find myself wishing that the stone could magically turn to flesh and that the trumpet could finally sound out its urgent notes, signaling some desperately needed backup from the beyond, some fortification of our now tepid and at times even duplicitous efforts to reverse climate impacts or halt our various predations and the conflicts from which they stem.  Even I who have thrown my life (alongside so many others) into an unsettled pot of policy and service can at times give in to the temptation – indeed the heartbreak – of fearing that we (and I) just don’t have what it takes to straighten out the messes we have made, that the elements of our cognitive and emotional inheritance are simply insufficiently practiced and cultivated to save us from ourselves. 

But save us we must, with whatever human capacities we can bring to bear, hopefully to include the full range of skills and intelligences that we have been endowed with but have yet to fully energize.  To help this process along in my own life, when I am able and when the darkness enveloping me grants opportunity, I join the “lonely exile”in peering into the vastness of space as a means of recovering my sense of place in all its blessings and limitations, perceiving light reaching the end of its unintentional sojourn to earth spanning many thousands, even millions of our earthly years, light emanating from celestial bodies which now bear only provisional resemblance in real time to what the light reveals to us in our own time, light which also suggests that maybe we are not so imposing a species after all, indeed as much of our treatment of the natural world (and of each other) would already suggest.

For me, such revelations from the great void tend to shake me to my core. For is it not the miracle of Advent that despite our “failure to launch” as a species, despite our often lazy and self-referential engagements with our otherwise formidable capacities, despite our persistent bouts of “self-assurance and arrogance” in the material plane which routinely call out the demons of greed and indifference but less often the courage or the wonder, is it not a miracle of sorts that the vastness of cosmos and divinity has been mindful of us, has bothered with us in this time and place, has perhaps even taken us to heart at times more than we seem to have taken ourselves?

Indeed, is this not also the wonder of the manger from the standpoint of faith, this incarnate blending of the divine and the mundane, the peace which passes all understanding informing a peace to which we only occasionally give expression and which we often do not know how to effect even in our most intimate spaces? We have, to quote a Christian prayer book, “erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But even more, we have set ourselves on the path to become “refugees to ourselves,” unsure how to fuse the wonder of the heavens and the chores of our immediate circumstances; how to reach for the stars and fetch the waters essential to this life; how to integrate humility and show kindness beyond that which is immediately required; how to heal wounds — together — which are often deep but which never physically show themselves; how to incarnate, cultivate and sustain skills and capacities which our world still needs and which we still have at the ready, albeit in forms too-often reminiscent of beautiful gardens overcome with weeds or sumptuous foodstuffs contaminated with mold. 

This is too much about we refugees and our limitations perhaps.  But if so, Advent can serve as a reminder to ensure that our reflections on the season are also about the best of us, the best of what we can imagine, the best of what we can desire, the best of what we can accomplish. The longings and mysteries of Advent and the coming of the manger child, for me at least, bear witness to many things, perhaps the most significant of which is that our collective best of skills and capacities remain as a formidable conduit for mercy and healing, for peace and caring. And somehow, by some measure of the grace we can barely comprehend, all this lies still within our grasp.

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Getting Us:  A Holy Season Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Apr

Beautiful people do not just happen. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 In love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. Anaïs Nin

The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons. Jean Renoir

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.  Gwendolyn Brooks

Leave people better than you found them. Marvin J. Ashton

The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.  Erich Fromm

If you understood everything I said, you’d be me. Miles Davis

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted. Marcel Duchamp

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. Frederick Buechner

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Albert Einstein

I do not want the peace which passes understanding, I want the understanding which brings peace. Helen Keller

I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief. C.S. Lewis

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click ‘I agree’. Bill Maher

In this week of many expressions of faith across many cultures, one of the few television commercials that has piqued my interest is the one suggesting that “Jesus Gets Us;” that the one whom at least some of us reverently acknowledge was, on this day, unceremoniously nailed to a cross, really understands who and what we are, notwithstanding perhaps also being a murdered victim of some profound misconceptions about who HE was, what he represented, the challenge of what he expected of us and what many of his followers in real time also expected of him.

If any of you identify in whatever way as Christians and want to find out more about this movement, you are encouraged to check out https://hegetsus.com/en. In fairness, there are things here to warrant a look, especially the reminder that Jesus seemed to reach out to those who experienced rejection from the society into which he was born as well as those facing great pain or need, people longing for a more dignified existence which the dominant social conventions of that time (as in our own) largely denied them.

So at one level, good for them. Good for not trying to turn Jesus’ ministry into version II of the vengeance-prone deity which so many of his contemporary followers seem to prefer, a deity whose central concern during the earliest expressions of the Jewish faith seemed to be more about punitively keeping people in line – especially with regard to matters of sexuality and procreation – than in keeping people on the path to a higher compassion and a deeper understanding of faith which incorporated but was not confined to the utterances of religious leadership.

I want to get to the issue of what it means to “get us,” but as way of confessional background it has been clear to me, or at least as clear as anything can be with regard to the “mysteries of faith,” that the main concern of Jesus’ ministry was less with “sinners” per se and more with the hypocrisy and self-referential nature of religious authorities. Time after time, together with his band of misfit disciples, Jesus reminded others that the ones who had strayed the furthest from the faith were the ones who deigned to represent it, those who largely failed to heal or inspire, those who were more concerned with keeping Rome out of “their” business than with attending to God’s business.

The scriptures – which I would remind you we only know as translation and also know primarily (and rightly in my view) as an aid to liturgy more than as a stand-alone book of hard rules – put the notion of “getting us” in a particular light.  I don’t wish to force an interpretation on the reader, though I do agree with Bill Maher when he joked about the bible akin to “software license” which we merely scroll to the bottom to then give the most superfifical of assents.  But it is also clear to me that there are at least two kinds of “getting” embedded in Gospel narratives which were intended for diverse communities in part by rearranging and then communicating different pieces of the oral and written testimony about Jesus available at that time.

This testimony surely gives some credence to the notion of “getting” from healing the apparently unhealable and feeding multitudes to acknowledging the humanity of criminals as he hung from the cross. That Jesus had made a ministry out of “getting” those whom the religious leadership of the time had largely forsaken, those who should never be brushed aside by houses of faith but should instead constitute the core of ministry for all who imagine ourselves to be following in his sacred footsteps. 

But scripture equally chronicles a “getting” which is less about him “getting” us than the other side of the relationship. We must resist the temptation to brush aside from the bibilical narrative the degree to which few during the earthly sojourn of Jesus seemed to grasp what exactly was going on in that here-and-now and why it mattered.  From the wedding at Cana to the capture of Jesus by soldiers prior to his crucifixion, even the people closest to Jesus (his mother, Peter, etc.) apparently missed large portions of the point of the mystery and ministry which he embodied. 

I would humbly suggest that in this time when faith is becoming more aggressive and tribal than thoughtful or compassionate, we would do well to contemplate less on how Jesus “gets” us and more on whether we actually “get” Jesus, actually “get” who and what he prioritized, how he left people better than how he found them, where and how he dispensed both his compassion and his challenge, what he most fervently wished for those who flocked to hear his message but who surely were left to guess (and probably guessed erroneously) where this preacher and healer came from and what he had ultimately come to accomplish.

At the same time, we would do well to reflect on how this notion of “getting” has punctuated our contemporary discourse, suggesting relationships which seek to blend understanding of “where we’re coming from” with a degree of acceptance which largely assumes that change and growth are unlikely to occur and should hardly even be encouraged.  Such “getting” may well be key to the maintenance of domestic harmony, but I’m not convinced that it is entirely what Jesus had in mind. Of course, as Miles Davis suggested above, if we understood everything Jesus said, we would be Jesus. That was not happening then.  That is not happening now.

But what can happen is forging a closer synergy regarding the healing, caring, inspirational ministry which Jesus embodied and what he seemed to encourage in others – a ministry of our own defined by compassionate understanding and a stronger commitment  to change and growth.  We are complex beings to which the quotes above and thousands of others attest, and part of this complexity which has been uprooted through modern psychology and medicine has underscored the power of habit, our almost genetic stubbornness with regard to the sometimes unhelpful values and practices which tend to govern our lives – many of which we can ably rationalize or passionately defend but not sufficiently explain, even to ourselves.

Jesus surely “got” that some of those who sought his forgiveness would likely return to behaviors which prompted the search for forgiveness in the first place. But for others, the encounters were life-changing in the most complete sense of that term – a turning point for people whose aspirations had been buried under social convention, foreign occupation and religious authorities more concerned about their own piety than about the well-being of those who legitimately felt abandoned by them.  For these, the testimony of Jesus, the touch of his garment, the meals he shared, the removal of afflictions which had turned sons and daughters into social outcasts, these were both manifestations of his ministry and invitations to grow and change, invitations as well to take up ministry ourselves, to “leave people better than we found them” in whatever ways we are able.

Jesus “gets” us enough to offer us pathways to companionship through this sometimes challenging life, but also “gets” the habits of our hearts, habits from which stem many outcomes including compassion, courage and caring but also violence and indifference, discrimination and self-deception. This Jesus who we claim to “get” but mostly don’t, this Jesus who constantly chided those nearest to him who understood his person and ministry largely through the lens of their own assumptions and expectations, this Jesus urges all — especially in these holy times — to see with greater clarity that we might truly become “each other’s harvest.”

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Secret Service: Uncovering Commitments to Seeing and Knowing, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Apr

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?   Bob Dylan

She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom. Kate Chopin

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. George Orwell

So we explain it to ourselves, justify it enough to sleep. And then we bury it deep, so deep we can almost pretend it never happened. Jesse Kirby

Lie until even you believe it – that’s the real secret. Holly Black

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves – our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding. Andrew Sean Greer

As much of the monotheistic world finds itself in the midst of annual devotions and preparations, we find ourselves in the throes of what the theologian Paul Tillich used to refer to as the “already and not yet,” the often bumpy road we have collectively traveled and the better-maintained stretches that potentially lie ahead, the places in which we have currently invested our hope and confidence and the changes we have yet to make to ensure our common, sustainable future.

In discerning this unusual time, it is reassuring that so many voices in diverse settings are now questioning the virtue of a “return to normal,” recognizing the restoration of nature and community which, in many instances, has been a welcome by-product of human quarantine. Many of us questioned the viability of the path that we have fallen upon, the ride that we have been on for such a long time, in part because we claimed to have forgotten how to disembark.   It seems that it took a virus, and the utterly reckless deaths and disruptions –so often to persons living in poverty– that have occurred in its wake to pierce through at least some of our stubborn allegiance to structures of economy and society that have literally been killing us for some time.

And yet as we exit the seasons of Lent and Passover and enter the season of Ramadan, it is not clear that we have yet pinpointed the specific changes that we collectively need to make, changes that are being undermined by much of our leadership as much as encouraged.   We focus now on things like fabric for masks, as well we should, but still too many heroic health workers remain without their full protection. And, in a paradoxical sense, we have yet to take down the metaphorical masks that we wear each and every day, the masks made of flesh that fail to keep out the virus but which keep our lies and secrets deeply buried, so deep that they act like the earth’s molten core, affecting most every aspect of our lives from a depth that is largely beyond our reach.

And so before we completely shake off the beneficial effects of our holy seasons, before we book our return trip to the familiarity of gross inequalities, clogged arteries (streets and veins), polluted cities and waterways, weapons (forever it seems) on the march, and resolutions and legislation focused on the health and security of “horses that have already left the barn,” let’s take a moment for an “unaccustomed taste of candor,” a look at tasks that we can undertake  from the relative (for some) comfort and connectivity of the places where we are waiting out the viral storm.

One suggestion is that we examine our collective proclivity to highly selective perception, the skill we have honed to acknowledge only the information that suits our purposes or that helps us cover mistakes that we make but refuse to own.

Our virus-affected politics are now drowning in such selectivity.   “Nobody could have seen this coming,” one after another leader maintains.   “Nobody knew the extent of the threat,” insist others.   In instance after instance, those who should know better (and in fact did know better) employ the “plausible deniability” card, the notion that “information never reached my desk,” “I never saw the memo,” and so forth. And this is generally linked to the altogether suspect claim by that very same leadership that “once they knew” they “did the right thing” with determination and resolve.

Many people want to be convinced by this, so much so that once these lies are exposed, once it becomes clear from media reports and leaks by people close to power that our leadership turned its collective head and pretended not to see, the focus has already shifted from the pandemic we could have done more to prevent to the pandemic which we are anxious to move past – to bury the dead, take in the vaccine once its ready, and get those shopping malls, lending institutions and cruise ships back on line.

There are two points to make here in this context. The first is that it is not only leadership that turns its head when it is convenient to do so.   To some degree we are all “jellyfish” on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding, adjusting our metaphorical shape to fit the times rather than insisting that our longstanding self-deceptions escape their prisons and share the disinfecting light.   We choose to turn our own heads more than we acknowledge; turn away from persons in need or from the internal rubble of disappointments and deceptions that impacts so many of our movements and reactions.  And we pretty much all employ a now-familiar brand of deniability, a narrative about “missing emails and phone calls” that we simply don’t want to deal with, of sharing the half of the truth that puts us in a more favorable light, of acting as though we don’t see and hear what we clearly see and hear.

This is what we do.   It may not cost lives but it makes the lives we live less authentic and less connected; in some sense making them less of a life.

The second point pertains to the implications of our increasingly securitized societies. I often find it painfully amusing that in an age of drones and spy satellites that can determine what people are reading from a distance of hundreds of miles; of increasingly sophisticated forms of espionage, ubiquitous surveillance and cell phone cameras, and websites that relentlessly track our personal preferences and drag intimate details of our personal lives out from the dark for inspection and (often) ridicule; that leadership with regular access to updated intelligence and expertise from all corners of the earth can so often get away with “not knowing.”

Most often, they only pretend not to know. They only pretend not to see.

These willful deficits of knowledge and perception have become the cardinal tools with which our leadership too often justifies a failure to act, or more precisely, a failure to act in a manner that is both timely and sufficiently robust. These are the tools that allow leadership to sleep at night while so many others remain sleepless, wondering how their families are going to manage another crisis not of their making, survive another opportunity for our “not knowing” leadership to consolidate their political and economic power at the expense of the many who were barely holding on before this virus cut through their remaining options like a hot knife.

As we emerge from the worst of this current viral iteration as well as our own special seasons of faith, we must do better than run towards a now-romanticized version of normalcy and the muddled “truths” that underlie its attractions. We must do better than to allow the falsehoods that have enabled so much of our broken politics and economics — as well as those that exert so much power over our individual lives from their deep and hidden places — to resume their perches of illegitimate authority.

Many of us have more time on our hands now than we ever thought we would.  Let’s use some of that to insist that our leadership — and we ourselves — examine and expose the places of secrecy and willful ignorance that run contrary to the core of our faith traditions and that are, even now, paving fresh pathways of misery and deceit.

Our “not yet” can truly be brighter than our “already,” but only as we admit to knowing and seeing what we actually know and see, and to insist that our leadership does likewise.

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Heart Burn: Words that Consume our Peace and Development Prospects, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Apr

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I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become. Clayton Christensen

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within. Alfred Lord Tennyson

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all. Emily Dickinson

It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Mahatma Gandhi

In the Security Council this month, Dutch Ambassador Karel van Oosterom in his capacity as president of the Council, invoked Provisional Rule 507 on a daily basis, urging Council members and briefers to be succinct and relevant to both the topic under consideration and the flow of the discussion.

For this Council, indeed for almost any discussions held inside the UN, this “507” business is a high bar. Indeed, what Ambassador van Oosterom (and at points in March his Prime Minister and Foreign Minister) requested was merely a small portion of the recommendations that could speed up meetings, avoid redundancy, and most importantly help establish the conditions for actionable policy.  And, while we didn’t bring a stopwatch to Council meetings, there appeared to be no apparent impact on the length or content of statements.  With few exceptions –including some states at Wednesday’s open debate on peacekeeping and an excellent brief at that same meeting by Mali’s Fatimata Touré – states and briefers mostly did what they always do: write what they want and read what they wrote.  If any changes were evident, they were primarily regarding the speed at which prepared statements were read, a frustrating practice which caused more than one headache for our excellent interpreters.

But it is the redundancy of positions that both interests and alarms the interns and fellows who often accompany me in Council chambers, statements prepared in anticipation of briefings rather than in response to them; statements replete with tepid deference to protocol and with only fleeting references to positions taken by Council colleagues; statements that communicate little hope that the future for these (and other) young people will be much different than their current, unsettled prospects.

And what is communicated directly through such statements is only a portion of the full revelation.  While we as an office remain seized of any new ideas or turns-of-phrase that might help clarify a path to peace in places as far-flung as Myanmar, Yemen and Mali, my younger colleagues are even more inclined than I am to interpret the “culture” of Council meetings in a skeptical light– Ambassadors preaching Council unity while habitually branding agendas largely conceived in national capitals; states expressing “concerns” and issuing condemnations that mostly fall on deaf ears; resolutions and presidential statements adopted that have little teeth and that represent political compromise more than an honest and urgent response to conflict threats.

This is the future of my younger colleagues after all, and their level of skepticism can sometimes be alarming regarding the value and potential impact of Council “deliberations.” While they can recognize those times when Council discussions actually open space for peacemaking, they too often witness a hardening of positions and even a choking off of viable options for Council members sincerely seeking to “be deliberate” about the prevention and resolution of conflict or other threats to human well-being.

This weekend as most of you know marks the relative convergence of the Christian feast of Easter (this weekend for the west, next weekend for the east) and the Jewish feast of Passover.  The latter is tied to liberation – in this instance the liberation of Jews from their Egyptian bondage; the former to liberation of another sort – the hope for some kind of life beyond this one, some place of serenity beyond the pain of this world with which we at the UN are at least rhetorically familiar.

Both feasts are replete with powerful images communicated largely through the Easter Eucharist and the Seder.   But while our Easter churches are often full and there are generally few empty seats to be found around our Seder tables, there is something here that doesn’t seem quite right for me.  Simply put, we seem to be celebrating freedom from a bondage with which we have largely lost touch; the hope of some “heaven” that we have mostly not done nearly enough to replicate here on earth.

After all, this time of feasts is also a weekend in which the UN Secretary General complained openly about the slow pace of our collective response to climate change.  This is a weekend as well when bombs continued to fall on Syrian children despite a Council-mandated cease fire, when legitimate protesters along Gaza border regions were gunned down by Israeli troops, when the US decided to block any UN condemnation of such shootings (again assuming that any “condemnations” by this Council actually matter), and when fresh arms sales to erstwhile “allies” promise more violence,  suffering and trauma endured in large measure by “tomorrow’s adults.”

In recognition of the pain which punctuates this ostensibly “holy” weekend, I spent a good bit of this past week looking for inspiration that could properly bind the misery of Good Friday with the hope of Easter Sunday, linking real pain with the hope of deliverance. It was during this search that I came across once again Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford, one of the many books about religion that makes greater sense to those on the margins of faith than those who strive to maintain a more orthodox center.

Some of Spufford’s passages are frustrating; others almost tearfully moving.  His rendition of the Good Friday crucifixion is one of my favorites:

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is.

There will come a time when none of us will be able to do much of anything that is “deliberate.”  Our bodies will betray us.  Our minds will no longer be able to recall the small rituals that lie behind so many of our own utterances, let alone transform the half-heartedness of so many of our actions.  We will be eventually melded to our memories; the things we did that mattered, of course, but also the many things left undone, the opportunities to make change stifled by largely imaginary impediments. We will be left to remember actions that were hopeful and loving, but also the misery we failed to prevent, the damage we inflicted and then overlooked, the freedom we claimed for ourselves and denied to others, the matters we conspired to ignore so that we wouldn’t feel obligated to care, the words we employed to distract our audiences or “sell” them on our half-truths rather than inspire their own deliberate engagement with the world.

This sometimes uncomfortable time of memory may be our destiny but it is not yet our whole reality, not for Spufford nor for the rest of us who labor in places like the UN. For at the conclusion of his litany of human misery and disappointment soaked up by the one who cares so deeply but can no longer be deliberate about very much; and as the sun rises on Easter Sunday revealing confused specialists in stitching and cleaning beholding a seemingly empty tomb, we read the following:

Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.

Yes, far more can be mended than we know. Far more can be healed than we know. Far more can be resolved or prevented than we know.  In this season of holy possibility, let us commit to use this time and our often-formidable gifts to “take in” more of our human condition and then to be more deliberate about our “mending,” about the things we have the capacity and responsibility to fix before our time to fix comes to an end.

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