Good morning…
Walking our dog past a neighborhood nearby, I snapped the photo above on Friday morning. Bursting with color. Boasting with joyful variety. Blooming with the fabulous fragrance of spring. My whole weekend mirrored the image above, colorful, joyful, fabulously fragrant.
A few friends, one new and one old, hopped into my car for a ride to the final feast for our Friday morning class hosted at the home of a generous friend. We discussed our final chapter and talked about life-giving insights we will carry forward from our book, Paula D’Arcy’s Sacred Threshold: Crossing the Inner Barrier to a Deeper Love. We promised to seek our own answers to the questions on the final page.
Will I unsettle my life in order to grow?
Do I really want to know where Love can take me?
Can I leave home in order to know what is true?
Can I let Spirit awaken my sleeping soul?
One woman reminded us of a C.S. Lewis quote: “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” Regardless of what happens to our aging body, will we fan the flame of God’s Spirit alive within our soul?
After a fun walk and talk with a longtime friend, my husband and I shared a simple dinner before attending the electrifying lacrosse game of two rival high schools. The boys in blue won, a thrill experienced with many excited parents who have shared tons of hours with us in the stands while our four graduates went through school. Then Saturday night was prom and, after our own private dinner out, we greeted the gorgeous couples as they came off the buses and took pictures with my husband’s advisees and vestry wardens, the kids who help him as the chaplain to bring faith to life at the school. The whole weekend was saturated with the mystique of the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, a rich tradition we watched on our outdoor TV beside our roaring fire pit. Each of our four adult kids, by phone or face-to-face, were shimmering strands in the tapestry of the wonderful weekend.
On Saturday, I talked with my parents in Ohio and on Sunday we Zoomed as a family from far away. Miraculously, my mom attended the worship service at our hometown church. Guided by my dad in her wheelchair, following a small stroke and her long days in the ICU, my mom was like the bell of the Palm Sunday ball. (She is certainly a smiling soul with a body which is healing, slow and steady.) I booked my tickets for a return flight to Cleveland to celebrate my dad’s 85th birthday the last weekend in April.
My husband and I went to our Palm Sunday service here. Excited children. Waving palm branches. Even a donkey walked up the aisle to shouts of “Hosanna!” “Hosanna!” means “Please, save us.” The exuberant joy of a fun spring weekend felt much like the tulips, the pansies, the flowering bushes captured in the first photo above, bursting, boasting, blooming boldly. Then walking our dog down the same familiar street late in the seventy degree Sunday afternoon, I snapped this starkly contrasting image.
I lived this vibrant weekend keenly aware of the treacherous week ahead. Holy Week, the remembrance of Jesus walking through his final week on earth, always begins with the exuberant celebration of Palm Sunday. But, by next Saturday, we all know the colorful, vibrant, fabulous earthly life of Jesus will be violently stripped away. With his body hanging lifeless on a common cross and laid lifeless in a tomb, the soul of this suffering servant will again unearthed the gracious ground of God’s eternal plan to save all of creation, once, for all. …he came and told both you who were far from God and us who were near that the war was over. And it is through him that both of us now can approach the Father in the one Spirit (Ephesians 2:18, PHILLIPS).
“Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday always leads to the flower bed of Christ’s colorful earthly life being stripped bare again, ripped up, destroyed. This Holy Week, will we walk down our familiar streets in step with Jesus on the way to Easter morning, keenly awareness of God’s Spirit popping through the soil of our own humble soul?
God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us (Romans 8:3-4, MSG).
This Holy Week, filled full with contrasting images, will you simply embrace with me what the Spirit of God is doing in us?
…Sue…
