“The Jesus I grew up with was zero percent relaxed, but the Jesus I know now carries an ease I’ve wished for my whole life.” —Jen Hatmaker The above quote comes from author and podcaster Jen Hatmaker’s new memoir, titled Awake. In the book, Jen talks about the mid-life awakening she experienced when her long-time marriage ended … Read more
As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you … Read more
A friend tells a story of being a little boy and having an ice cream cone in the back of the old family Cadillac on a hot summer day.
There are certain rhythms of the liturgical year I can often feel like I’m learning for the very first time.
We know nothing of Jesus’ life between the age of 12 – when his parents accidentally left him in the Temple – and his encounter with John in the Jordan River approximately 18 years later. To the best of our knowledge, he spends that time completing his apprenticeship and working in the family carpentry business, troubling no waters and drawing no attention to himself.
But immediately following his baptism, everything changes.
I’ve spent a long time pondering what universal human experience the story of the Transfiguration is trying to tell us.
Sometimes, Easter comes a little too soon.
While in high school, I played Jesus in the school musical. The show was not one of the usual Jesus ones. This one was Cotton Patch Gospel by the excellent Harry Chapin, and in it, Jesus heads to Atlanta rather than Jerusalem; talks about eating grits rather than bread; and prays that God might “spitball me Lord over the home plate of life.”
I enjoyed the experience of acting as of the Son of God. Whenever someone exclaimed ‘Jesus!’ in the day-to-day gauntlet of high school, I’d respond: Yes? It always made us laugh in the midst of the terribly anxious time that is high school—high school was hard for us, with friends who struggled with self-harm, all the usual worrying about the future, and more. The show itself was a wonderful project, full of music and dancing and silliness and the good kind of high school drama. Everyone formed that wonderful temporary community that high school theater allows. The whole thing was so full, so busy. I relished the strange job of imagining what Jesus thought and felt.
But in the whole of the show, the only time I ever truly felt connected to Jesus, something mystic, was when Jesus was dead. In the precious minute or two between being crucified on stage, and needing to jump up for a resurrection appearance, there was a brief narrative lull. For a minute or two, I was put in a box out of everyone’s sight. The sides of the box quieted the noise, the lights dimmed, and every time, I felt close to Jesus.
I wondered: how did Jesus feel, lying in a tomb?
After all the everything that is his last week, did the hard stone feel like the pillow he needed?
What was it like to wake up?
How did he feel about his friends, who also struggled with self-harm and who worried about the future?
Shouldering is a way of moving upwards, out of the darkness and into the light. Not unlike human shoulders that shrug and scrunch, sometimes toward the ears and sometimes back down toward the belly, when a vegetable is good and ready it will scrunch and shoulder toward the sky.
The Samaritan woman, whom the orthodox church names Saint Photini, carries a burden of shame along with her water jar as she walks the through heat and dust.
