Bible Verse – Isaiah 42:1-4

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him,
and he will bring justice to the nations.
He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.
A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;
he will not falter or be discouraged
till he establishes justice on earth.
In his teaching the islands will put their hope.

Transcript

Lent is the season where we’re again immersed in this strange reality. Resurrection Hope is summed up in Christ and Him crucified.

Imagine for a moment your city has been leveled by one of the most powerful nations on Earth. You’ve watched as most people you know have been killed or carried off. Age, disability, vulnerability were not considerations as they carried out their orders and killed comprehensively. Everything smells like burning. And there is no water to wash away the taste of death. Underneath the rubble of what once was your life, horrifically, are your loved ones. In the dust and the disease and the trauma, a word is being spoken. Not a word of certainty, predicting a future. Not a campaigning word, pushing forward a certain reform. But a vulnerable poem, cutting through the numbness and the nihilism and the noise.

This is the context that most Hebrew Bible scholars situate the prophet in Isaiah 42. After the Babylonian
invasion, armed only with this vulnerable vision that cannot be bandaged in prose, a prophet speaks.

Weaponised hatred would be understandable. Revenge fantasies seem inevitable. Yet, like water in the wilderness, the prophet’s poem speaks of a vulnerable power that will never forsake the vulnerable. The power of a non-violent suffering servant, not an authoritarian strong man.

Here is the surprise of a suffering servant as Savior and a justice that will defend every life but refuses to take life.
Listen.

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights.
I put my Spirit upon him.
He will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry, or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the streets.
a bruised reed he will not break.
a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the Earth.
and the coastlands wait for his teaching

Friends, surprisingly, the prophet’s poetry does not mirror the surrounding brutality, nor escape into an otherworldly fantasy of neutrality. But there is talk of tenderness and intimacy in the Creator’s delight. Where some spirituality see forgiveness as the end of what the Savior brings rather than the beginning, the prophet sees the suffering servant’s job as bringing forth justice. Not justice as an optional extra for those so inclined by personality or necessity. Justice is the suffering servant’s purpose, vocation, and calling.

Please don’t miss the how. This is not a mendacious justice where your enemy is hungry and you engage in
the war crime of deliberate starvation, blocking off food after bombing.

No, the reason why this side of the resurrection the early Christians evoked the poems of the suffering servant when meditating on the crucified one is because Jesus brings a justice that breaks no bruised reeds. Jesus brings a justice that extinguishes no vulnerable candles.

Did you catch it? A Jesus-like justice rejects a way of working where those considered damaged goods are expendable for the greater good. A Jesus-like justice will have nothing to do with the extinguishing of the vulnerable smoldering light of those who others merely see as expendable.

A Jesus-like justice is not just for us, but for all of us. No one left out because everybody is made in the image of God. Jesus brings a justice that has no collateral damage. Jesus brings a justice that does not run on ‘us and them’, a justice where no life is worth more than any other, no child worth less than any who are suffering. Jesus brings a justice that doesn’t justify the bombing of children for any political or ideological or eschatological end.

Our hope is not sitting at the table with the lamb and the wolf and thinking that our role as Christians is to say grace before the strong devour the weak for dinner. Our hope is that us, bruised reeds, us candles, that only just hold on to a little light would be welcomed into a new world that doesn’t need more victims to bring justice.

Our hope is not a pious neutrality where we calculate when it will be too costly to protest against the bruising of those particular reeds. Our hope is not assessing whether the issue is popular enough to stand against the extinguishing of those smoldering wicks. No, our hope is to unashamedly put our bodies where Christ is, with those who are suffering.

This is why this Lent many of us are walking a peace pilgrimage the length of Gaza, knowing our hope is just putting one foot in front of the other as we around the world pray with our feet that the longed-for tidal wave of justice can finally rise up, and hope and history rhyme. We’re seeking to repent of the silence by taking up our cross and praying for an end to the killing and the oppression, so a Jesus-like justice would finally dawn. Because every Palestinian child is as precious to God as every Israeli child.

I do not do so simply because I qualify for Israeli citizenship, and I feel like I must do something. I do not do so simply because I worked in the region and my friends are crying out and I must answer. I do not do so simply because my nation is selling weapons that are killing children, and as a citizen, I have to respond. I don’t even do so because the incredibly moving, non-violent witness of our Palestinian sisters and brothers in Christ. Ultimately, I do so because I have been baptised in the Spirit of my suffering servant, a Savior who didn’t hide in neutrality but loved me and gave himself for me. A suffering servant who didn’t calculate, am I worth speaking up for? But set his face like flint towards Calvary.

This Lent may we be found trusting in resurrection and taking up our cross. This Lent may we realize with Daniel Berrigan that if we’re gonna follow Jesus, we better look good on wood. This Lent may we be found in the hope of Christ as he stands with the bruised reeds and smoldering wicks bringing a Jesus-shaped justice in resurrection power.

Amen.

Reflection Questions

What darkness and pain are you aware of in your community, in creation, or the world? What might
Jesus-shaped justice look like here?

What surprising hope do you find in the image of Jesus as the suffering servant faithfully bringing forth justice to the nations?

This Lent, how can we be living out our hope in Christ?

Prayer

Lord and Saviour Jesus.
As our hearts break by a world marred by conflict and injustice, may we find hope in you. A hope that is never realised through retaliation or violence, but triumphs through mercy, love, and compassion.

Pour Your Spirit upon us, that we might embody this ‘Jesus-shaped justice’ in our daily lives. Strengthen our resolve to follow in the footsteps of Christ, to not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smoldering wick, but to uplift the downtrodden and bring forth justice with patience and faithfulness.

As the early Christians found hope in Jesus, let us too cling to the resurrected Christ, committing ourselves to be peacemakers and bearers of Your divine justice. In the midst of suffering, may our actions reflect Your love and bring hope to those who despair.

Amen.

Reflection shared by Jarrod McKenna

Jarrod McKenna is passionate about God’s nonviolent-love becoming our experience of prayer and program for transformation. Jarrod is the co-host of the popular InVerse Podcast, served as the Nonviolent Social Change Advisor for World Vision (Middle East/Eastern Europe) and as a Former National Director of Common Grace. Jarrod pastors with Steeple Church in Melbourne and is a co-founder of the global peace pilgrimages for Gaza.

Connect with Jarrod McKenna

https://jarrodmckenna.com

https://jarrodmckenna.com/inverse-podcast

For many (most? all?) of us here in America, today is a lot of things. It’s odd, different, bizarre, quaint, lonely, dull, sad, triggering, exhausting, celebratory, energizing, or uncomfortable. This Thanksgiving holiday, regardless of how we have strived for normalcy or ignored the cautionary pleas of the CDC, there is no escaping reality: this is a complex day.

Hasn’t it always been?

I’m writing from a city called Shreveport, located in Northwest Louisiana, where a man named Captain Henry Shreve contributed to the Red River region’s settlement and in return received a legacy. But this little plot of land, where my son swings from oak branches beside the bayou . . . where we make mashed potatoes for three instead of twenty-three . . . where I call home . . . is much more than just a settler’s trophy. We live in Caddo territory, or so it was solely known before the Treaty of Cession of 1835. A whisper of the exiled blows through our walls and halls every time a resident references our “county” by name—Caddo Parish.

It is on this land of Caddo Parish where the Caddoan people were to be paid $80,000 for one-million acres of land. “Eventually these Louisiana Caddo left—their credit was cut off by local merchants, their payments ended, and the United States protection was failing—and headed for the Kiamichi River country in Oklahoma. The Caddoan presence in Louisiana, after a millennium, or more, was over.”

It is on this land of Caddo Parish where a makeshift capitol was established when Baton Rouge fell to Union forces during the Civil War. 

It is on this land of Caddo Parish where, “in the decade following the Civil War, white men . . . were killing and terrorizing African-Americans in such high numbers that the parish earned the name, ‘Bloody Caddo.’”

It is Caddo Parish where nearly 13,000 people have contracted the novel Coronavirus this year, and many continue to shame the masked as “living in fear.”

And it is on this land that I have learned who God and my neighbor are. Where I have seen love, known mercy, connected deeply to image-bearers who have shown me the way of life, death, and life after death. My family is here, living off the fruit of stolen trees nurtured by enslaved hands.

It is home—haunted and heartwarming.

It’s both/and. So, too, is Thanksgiving.

READ: Join us in Prophecy Against the Pandemics

We are grateful for life and any chance to press into joy, especially in 2020. And we are aware that this holiday is built upon a false narrative that spun exploitation into mutual affection. We are missing the warmth and awkwardness of ritualistic connection. And we know that we are citizens of an empire forged by oppression and sustained by racism and inequality. We are nurturing our paths. And we are deconstructing our paths because of how the gain of some came at the expense of many.

There is tension in our country, there is tension in our churches, there is tension in our very selves today and beyond, because these times—like our stories—are complicated.

And we don’t love complicated. We’d rather certainty, which is why dualism is fed so plentifully from our political podiums and pulpits. But for today, I wonder if we might not reject the tension and instead lean curiously into Mystery. I wonder if we might make an honest home in the uncomfortable both.

I wonder if we might pray prayers that acknowledge pain and hope for goodness at the very same time.

Maybe, we can even start here.

A Prayer for Today (and all the days after)

Spirit who hovered over the waters of our earth and our bodies throughout the generations, we give you thanks for connecting us to who we were, are, and will be.

We pause to look out over this plot of land: _____ territory.

As we remember our Native siblings—who first invited the foreigner seeking freedom from oppressive rule, who shared space and sustenance with the homeless and welcome with the sojourner—stir in us the hospitality toward those migrating and seeking refuge today.

As we remember our Native siblings—who did not possess immunity, and who were vulnerable to the diseases of colonizers—impress further upon us the responsibility of protecting those most vulnerable in our current pandemic and racial climate.

As we remember our Native siblings—who were forced to leave unceded land, who were stripped of space and identity, who were taken from home and killed—illuminate the injustices still terrorizing Native communities today. Let us hear your call to act on behalf of sacred lands and water, on behalf of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

As we remember our Native siblings of centuries past, convict us of the narratives we craft and sustain that suggest a people solely confined to history. Let us believe and affirm: you’re still here, I’m still here. Let us lend ourselves to listening, supporting, honoring, and leveraging in months beyond November.

Let us bend low to the ground now, touching the blades or soil, let us remember our baptisms in puddled water or bubbled stream, calling to mind our place in the long story of death and life.

May we feel grateful to recognize the evil and liberation within it and within us, the provision and the need, the celebration and lament and everything in between—all present today.

We give thanks for these: ______

While grieving these:______

And we ask that all which adds to the fulness of our lives is ever used to add to the fulness of others.

Till all are home again,

Amen.

Rev Otis Moss III, founder of Unashamed Media Group, asked Common Hymnal to contribute music for “Otis’ Dream,” the Get Out The Vote film he wrote and produced for the 2020 election. More specifically, he asked them to produce a new arrangement of the old spiritual ‘I Want Jesus To Walk With Me’ for the final credits.

The project’s goal was to combat the wave of voter suppression that was forming in states across the nation despite the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. And encourage black Christians to vote.

The film tells the story of his grandfather, a sharecropper, who was denied the right to vote in rural Georgia in the forties after walking over 18 miles to three different polling locations. Oprah Winfrey first heard the story in the early eighties and has told it in election cycles ever since. She previewed the movie and interviewed Otis on SuperSoul Sunday before the 2020 election. The film was shown in black churches across the country that weekend and will hopefully inspire black Christians to get out and vote for many election seasons to come.

Common Hymnal feels passionate about this issue and plans to support several Get Out The Vote initiatives this coming year. This recording is one of their contributions to the discussion.

Because of the deadline, they recorded the first version in an all-nighter and vowed to re-produce a full version of the song when they had a window of time. The result is this new music video, featuring vocals by The Spirituals, Junior Garr, Niiella, Sharon Irving and Chris Blue, and footage from the film and the animation that Ron Abdou and Zach Stewart created for the original track.

PLEASE visit otisdream.com to watch the story in its fullness, and find helpful resources.

For many (most? all?) of us here in America, today is a lot of things. It’s odd, different, bizarre, quaint, lonely, dull, sad, triggering, exhausting, celebratory, energizing, or uncomfortable. This Thanksgiving holiday, regardless of how we have strived for normalcy or ignored the cautionary pleas of the CDC, there is no escaping reality: this is a complex day.

Hasn’t it always been?

I’m writing from a city called Shreveport, located in Northwest Louisiana, where a man named Captain Henry Shreve contributed to the Red River region’s settlement and in return received a legacy. But this little plot of land, where my son swings from oak branches beside the bayou . . . where we make mashed potatoes for three instead of twenty-three . . . where I call home . . . is much more than just a settler’s trophy. We live in Caddo territory, or so it was solely known before the Treaty of Cession of 1835. A whisper of the exiled blows through our walls and halls every time a resident references our “county” by name—Caddo Parish.

It is on this land of Caddo Parish where the Caddoan people were to be paid $80,000 for one-million acres of land. “Eventually these Louisiana Caddo left—their credit was cut off by local merchants, their payments ended, and the United States protection was failing—and headed for the Kiamichi River country in Oklahoma. The Caddoan presence in Louisiana, after a millennium, or more, was over.”

It is on this land of Caddo Parish where a makeshift capitol was established when Baton Rouge fell to Union forces during the Civil War. 

It is on this land of Caddo Parish where, “in the decade following the Civil War, white men . . . were killing and terrorizing African-Americans in such high numbers that the parish earned the name, ‘Bloody Caddo.’”

It is Caddo Parish where nearly 13,000 people have contracted the novel Coronavirus this year, and many continue to shame the masked as “living in fear.”

And it is on this land that I have learned who God and my neighbor are. Where I have seen love, known mercy, connected deeply to image-bearers who have shown me the way of life, death, and life after death. My family is here, living off the fruit of stolen trees nurtured by enslaved hands.

It is home—haunted and heartwarming.

It’s both/and. So, too, is Thanksgiving.

READ: Join us in Prophecy Against the Pandemics

We are grateful for life and any chance to press into joy, especially in 2020. And we are aware that this holiday is built upon a false narrative that spun exploitation into mutual affection. We are missing the warmth and awkwardness of ritualistic connection. And we know that we are citizens of an empire forged by oppression and sustained by racism and inequality. We are nurturing our paths. And we are deconstructing our paths because of how the gain of some came at the expense of many. There is tension in our country, there is tension in our churches, there is tension in our very selves today and beyond, because these times—like our stories—are complicated.

And we don’t love complicated. We’d rather certainty, which is why dualism is fed so plentifully from our political podiums and pulpits. But for today, I wonder if we might not reject the tension and instead lean curiously into Mystery. I wonder if we might make an honest home in the uncomfortable both. I wonder if we might pray prayers that acknowledge pain and hope for goodness at the very same time.

Maybe, we can even start here.

A Prayer for Today (and all the days after)

Spirit who hovered over the waters of our earth and our bodies throughout the generations, we give you thanks for connecting us to who we were, are, and will be.

We pause to look out over this plot of land: _____ territory.

As we remember our Native siblings—who first invited the foreigner seeking freedom from oppressive rule, who shared space and sustenance with the homeless and welcome with the sojourner—stir in us the hospitality toward those migrating and seeking refuge today.

As we remember our Native siblings—who did not possess immunity, and who were vulnerable to the diseases of colonizers—impress further upon us the responsibility of protecting those most vulnerable in our current pandemic and racial climate.

As we remember our Native siblings—who were forced to leave unceded land, who were stripped of space and identity, who were taken from home and killed—illuminate the injustices still terrorizing Native communities today. Let us hear your call to act on behalf of sacred lands and water, on behalf of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

As we remember our Native siblings of centuries past, convict us of the narratives we craft and sustain that suggest a people solely confined to history. Let us believe and affirm: you’re still here, I’m still here. Let us lend ourselves to listening, supporting, honoring, and leveraging in months beyond November.

Let us bend low to the ground now, touching the blades or soil, let us remember our baptisms in puddled water or bubbled stream, calling to mind our place in the long story of death and life.

May we feel grateful to recognize the evil and liberation within it and within us, the provision and the need, the celebration and lament and everything in between—all present today.

We give thanks for these: ______

While grieving these:______

And we ask that all which adds to the fulness of our lives is ever used to add to the fulness of others.

Till all are home again,

Amen.

Given the messenger, I thought it was a joke. Walking into school immediately proved him honest, at least in this case. TVs hung on every wall and the burning 110-story skyscraper digitally surrounded me as I walked to my 9am editing lab where my classmates and instructor sat silently glued to the screen. 

The rest of the day’s classes were canceled, and we made our way home under palm trees and absurdly blue skies that now felt out of place, the Florida sun somehow dimmer than before.

“I guess we’re at war now,” I said, half question, half bewildered statement.

“We’re not at war,” my boyfriend laughed, not the first or last time a man would attempt to undermine my inner Knowing. It was too early to say with who, but surely someone attacking the United States on our own soil would not end well. I didn’t argue. My world was still small, and the way 9/11 would shape us all far beyond it.

Details fell slowly like ashes from the crumbled towers. Around 9:30 pm the director of the CIA told President George W. Bush—tucked safely inside a bunker beneath the White House—that Osama Bin Laden was the attack’s mastermind.

Like every other college student and most Americans, I didn’t know the name Osama bin Laden. I also didn’t know God. As a child, I begged God to keep my parents from divorcing. As an adolescent, I plead for God to keep my mother from moving me out of state. And as a teenager in the throes of depression and suicidal ideation, I cried out again. God didn’t answer, and I came to the only natural conclusion—God’s not there. Or maybe, if God is there, God didn’t care about me. 

READ: The Amnesia of ‘Never Forget’

I packed “lack of belief” along with my meager belongings and thrifted furniture into a U-Haul that my dad drove from Indiana to Orlando. It wasn’t an identity I wore as a badge but rather a receipt I kept in my pocket from the first two decades of life, evidence that the Divine is absent.

But on September 11th, 2001, I prayed. I prayed for the families of those who were killed. I prayed for the first responders searching for survivors among the rubble. I prayed for Osama bin Laden.

For some reason, on that day, I knew God was there. Everywhere. I had no former embodied examples of this, no mystic experiences to draw from, no Sunday school felt-board illustrations or youth-group-planted seeds to credit with my sudden faith. I just knew God was enough to hold all the pain in the world. The pain of those killed, of their loved ones, of the Muslim community, and even the pain in the hearts of the men flying those planes.

September 11th led me to a God who doesn’t take our pain away but chooses to be with us in it. In the two decades since, She has continually joined me there—in terminal illness. The death of a parent. The betrayal of my spiritual community. The mental illness and incarceration of my child. 

The presence of the Divine does not mean the absence of suffering as I once hoped. To take away our suffering would be to take away our freedom. And control is the opposite of Love.

I don’t know what to make of a loving God amidst a culture of death, when twenty years later Afghans fall from the sky, attempting to escape terror my tax dollars funded. What I do know is Jesus weeps with them, is them. Ours is the Broken-Hearted God who from the beginning of time is with the broken-hearted. 

My Knowing communicates to me the way the salt-soaked wind talks with the palm trees. In doing so, it tells me that the Divine loved Osama bin Laden and those he killed, that one faith tradition is too small to contain Mystery, and, because you cannot truly love what you are trying to control, expansive, always-with-us love is God’s heart for us all.

One such week prompted the words of lament unfolding in this litany. I hesitate to name the week because I find these events could be part of another week or another week or another week.

But I wrote these words as a yearning to encounter hope even as I cupped a depth of hopelessness. I wrote these words because although this earth can be unrelenting, I wanted a space to acknowledge and confess the ways we are complicit. I wrote these words because I wanted to remember that unrelenting can also describe God.

READ: For Afghanistan, Hospitality is the Least We Should Do

ONE: This earth we inhabit is a place 

Where hurricanes ravage and mudslides refuse to retreat, 

Where hate carries torches instead of cowering in fear, 

Where too often we speak of lives lost as numbers and not names, Where our place of birth impacts our length of life. 

ALL: Our children, our small ones, they sing of a world held in your cupped hands. 

And the psalmist writes of righteousness and justice, the Foundations of your throne.

ONE: In Lamentations, we read of your mercies, 

Your mercies, Oh Lord, as New each day. 

Then tell us, tell us, we plead and we beg 

What happens when over days or weeks or months or years or even centuries 

This world spins out of its orbit: 

A ball of dirt and stone 

Flung adrift in the galaxy 

When these foundations 

Of righteousness and justice 

Become rubble beneath our bare feet?

ALL: When we wake in the morning and 

The new day is worse than the old, 

When we long for you but 

We don’t see Heaven pressing against earth or the righting of wrongs, 

When we don’t find you 

In the groan of the wind, 

In the splintering of quaking land, 

In the heat of flames and fire.

ONE: Instead, all we hear Is a whisper 

A still small voice.

But Lord, we don’t want just whispers. 

We long for the might 

Of raging rivers that carve canyons, 

Of hands raised that calm the storm, 

Of a moon that blots out the sun. 

ALL: We cry, show us the foundations of your throne. 

ONE: And you, Lord, you invite us forth Into a sacred confession that gives rest. 

Make us people who can say 

We confess there are ways we have kneeled before a power that ignores 

Instead of falling face down at the foot of the cross. 

We confess that we are complicit in maintaining the very world we say we want changed. 

ALL: We confess we have thirsted after the fount of a comfort that blinds. 

ONE: It is not us that holds this orbit 

But you. 

With these words of confession, we say for ourselves and our communities 

ALL: Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty! 

ONE: The very foundation of all that was, and is, and is to come 

You cup the orbit of this spinning planet 

Between your holy palms. 

This earth is held, this earth is held, this earth is held. 

If your mercies are new each day, oh Lord Then as the earth spins on its axis 

And faces the rising sun, 

Spill this gold over our bodies. 

ALL: Make us fearless beacons of your radiant light. Amen.

This is an excerpt taken from Rally: Communal Prayers for Lovers of Jesus and Justice (Fresh Air Books, 2020).

There was a time when I kept a long list of people and circumstances for which to pray every day, as well as a rigid prayer schedule. I was known for being contemplative and disciplined in this, even as a teenager — rarely missing my morning “devotions,” complete with Bible reading, journaling, and memory verses.

But, at some crucial points in my life, prayer (and praying people) became a source of immense pain. So I let prayer — as a practice — go.

In allowing myself freedom and space from the guilt-driven obligation of prayer (and daily devotions), I discovered that I don’t encounter Jesus in my head, anyway. Rather, I encounter Jesus in vivid, lifelike clarity when I try to imitate him.

I encounter Jesus in the doing. The action. The practice.

Even though I don’t do much planned-praying these days, the action of following Jesus does sometimes draw desperate prayers out of me.

“Father forgive them; for they know not what they do” is a prayer I find myself praying on repeat. 

I pray it when I am disturbed, infuriated, enraged at whoever “they” are that day — raising my voice on a walk in the woods, where only the trees and earth beneath my feet can absorb my fury!

I pray it out loud on an otherwise silent drive to the grocery store – white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel and hot, frustration-tears pouring down my face.

I pray it when I come to the end of myself — the end of my knowledge and abilities — and need help from beyond, from outside of myself, to keep going.

If I’m honest, I pray it NOT so my enemy may be forgiven, but for ME.

So that I may be able to see through their words and deeds to
their humanity,
their reachability,
their changeability.

I pray it so that I may love them, or try.

“Father forgive them; for they know not what they do,” Jesus cried for his crucifiers. And I pray it with him — not understanding how he could pray it, but praying it anyway, that one day I might understand.

I pray it to remember there is light, even when there is darkness. And there is hope, even when there is hopelessness. I pray it to remember that I believe in the resurrection of dead things.

I pray it for ME.

I’ve seen prayer in this light for quite some time:  a thing I do more to ground myself, to center myself on Jesus, than to implore God to change someone else or the world.

More times than not, I think God uses ordinary, less than supernatural, people to do the world-changing. So, I pray another prayer too:

To those who would ask, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” I pray, “Here I am, send me.”

I am not special, significant, or any sort of savior — I know this now, though I didn’t always. Neither am I a mystic or a missionary. (I’ve tried those identities on and they don’t fit.) But I know something else, too: Jesus becomes more real to me when I act like him — when I love the people he loves. So I keep trying to do so.

I keep trying and failing and trying again. 

And it’s in this practicing that I sometimes catch myself praying. 

Perhaps, for some, prayer leads to practice — though this was not the case for me. Instead, I’ve found that my PRACTICE leads to prayer.

Maybe it is the prayer?

…a small reversal, but an enormous difference.

A threshold is not a simple boundary; 

It is … a real frontier that cannot be crossed without 

the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.

 This is one reason such vital crossings were often clothed in ritual. 

 John O’Donohue, To Bless The Space Between Us

If the poet philosopher John O’Donohue were still alive, maybe he would have written an updated version of his life-saving book To Bless the Space Between Us. Maybe that revised edition would include the blessing I was searching for last month. 

Four close friends and I—all of us middle-aged, cis-gender, straight, women—needed a ritual to bless our much younger friend, May, who would soon be on her way to Thailand for a series of gender affirmation surgeries. 

This was May’s threshold, but it was ours as well. 

A threshold is a place of letting go of an old identity and waiting on a new identity to emerge. It is a liminal moment when the sacred is being born in us, a time of unravelling and slowly reknitting back together.

We wanted May to feel our support as she crossed her threshold, following through on years of discerning this path. We wanted May and her partner, Ann, to know that a support squad of Aunties was walking beside them on what is often a lonely journey.  If their spirits waned as they crossed miles, time zones, quarantines, and language barriers, perhaps they would hear the echo of us cheering “we listen to your heart’s desire and we respond with love and joy!” 

My robust bookshelves and nook-and-cranny internet searches did not turn up such a blessing for this particular life threshold, so we patched one together ourselves, borrowing from some contemporary Jewish blessings and a few faith-based LGBTQ+ websites.

READ: Liturgy for Flag Removers

As we did so, I realized why thresholds need rituals. Over the course of three decades of friendship, this group of women circled up to bless pregnancies, celebrate births and weddings, and grieve the deaths of parents, a spouse, and a child. Standing with one another at the personal thresholds of life and death is something we know how to do deep in our bones. 

Standing in solidarity at a cultural threshold is not as familiar. As we gathered up our loving energy to strengthen May and Ann, we named out loud our hopes that the unjust treatment of trans people will end. We named the interconnected ways race, class, ethnicity, and immigrant status compound those injustices. We stood together in a liminal moment — touching the sacred born anew, as former beliefs about rigid gender binaries give way to rewoven understandings of God’s unfolding creation.  We affirmed the cultural journey we are on as a people of God creating a more loving and inclusive world.

Because our love is deeply rooted in having watched May grow up, this was more than just a performance for Pride Month. It was a micro-community of prayer and action taking one more step across a threshold of initiation into the slow and necessary work of creating a more hospitable world for all people. 

We spoke out loud words that remind us who we are and what we want to fight for, like these:

On this day, we commit and recommit to creating a world where all people of all genders know acceptance, love, equity, and justice. 

We commit and recommit to living with compassion, caring for all of humanity and the earth.

We commit and recommit to the healing work of critically evaluating the stories we inherited and revising the stories we live by, so that every person will know, no matter their gender or sexuality, that they are loved and valued.

Thresholds need rituals because rituals slow us down. They name a new or still-emerging reality. O’Donohue reminds us that a great complexity of emotions awakens at thresholds: confusion, fear, awe, grief, hope. It is good to take our time, to feel all the varieties of aliveness. At the threshold, we can focus our complete attention, listen inwardly until we hear more clearly the outward call.  

If you have created a ritual for social change or a blessing at a public threshold, please share it with the world. Let the people see micro-communities of prayer and action on the move, following the Spirit to a place of ever more radical love. As these threshold moments become visible, they are no longer rare or weird. They usher in a new normal. This is one way we change the world.

Long past my teenage years, into adulthood, I have continually been told, in different ways, that my body is problematic.  As a person with chronic illness, I am a wedge in a certain kind of privileged theology that is not big enough to account for long-term pain.

I encounter from others, again and again, a need to explain my body. They say my pain must happen because I am too stressed, too weak, or too sensitive. I have not gone to the right doctors or tried the right remedies. I don’t pray the right way or have the right kind of faith. It feels like I can be open about my struggle only if I am simultaneously counting my blessings and getting over it. This theology credits God for all the good and none of the bad. When a health concern arises, a person shares the concern with their faith community who joins them in praying for the problem to go away. God intervenes, the problem is resolved, and God is praised and credited. All good is celebrated and all bad is prayed away. (This has broad implications for behaviors in the COVID-19 Pandemic, but that’s another essay.) 

In reality, when you have white skin, enough money, a generally healthy body, and access to good healthcare, things do tend to break your way. I’m not sure God wants the credit for that because I’m not willing to say God is responsible for bestowing that kind of favor on some but not others. Think of the heartache and struggle endured by the majority of people in the world (the result of oppression, racism, poverty, violence, disease, disaster, and more). I believe God gives us strength, teaches us life-giving things, and loves us in many unique ways into greater wholeness. It is absolutely important to ask for and receive supportive prayers when enduring medical crises. However, is God directly responsible for one person’s healing while another suffers or dies? When God gets credit for the first outcome but not the second, it leaves the second person (and/or their loved ones) invisible, insignificant, and clearly excluded from God’s circle of care.  

The same people who hold this small theology seem to fixate on the word “blessed.” When I see or hear “blessed” or “blessing” used to indicate ‘chosen for special favor,’ or even to emphasize an aptitude for gratitude (i.e., “Blessed” home décor and jewelry), I think about the way Jesus uses the word “blessed” in places like the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12, NIV: “Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . those who mourn . . . the meek . . . those who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . . the merciful . . . the pure in heart . . . the peacemakers . . . the persecuted”). Is it possible that “blessedness” is more concerned with “what God can do through me and my struggle” than about “what God can do for me inside my abundance?”

READ: Untethered: On Exile, Chronic Illness, and Life in a Pandemic

I would like to know why and to what end pain and suffering exist. I know I am in good company. I firmly believe God cares and is up to something big. I wonder what suffering in this life will look like and mean in eternity. I believe Kingdom work involves the alleviation of suffering right now. Beyond that, I don’t understand. I feel guilt over the fact that I struggle to inhabit my body when I live a life of luxury and ease compared to most of my human siblings. I am privileged in so many ways. A pastor friend once told me that life is not “an Olympics of suffering.” The reality of existence is that you have to deal with what you have to deal with. The important thing is to deal with it so that you can be available to help others. 

To survive with chronic illness, I need to lament my pain and make space for it. I need a theology big enough to sit in solidarity with my suffering so that I can sit in solidarity with others.  

If you feel alone, forsaken, and smothered because you struggle with chronic illness, mental illness, different ability, or any other health-related condition, I want you to know that you are beautiful. I think your imperfect struggle is beautiful to God because the opposite of struggle is giving up. Struggle is faithfulness. Your pain and suffering are not your fault. Let any guilt or concern over that drop to the ground right this moment.  

I’m not saying don’t practice joy and gratitude.  I’m saying don’t let someone else’s demand for joy and gratitude crowd out your need to be real about your pain so you can survive.

If you suffer from health-related struggle as well as from struggle related to oppression, my heart swells with admiration for you. How do you do that? I can’t imagine the kind of strength required to navigate your daily life, the many obstacles you have to handle along with your sick body (including, in many cases, access to the healthcare you need for it in the first place). I am so sorry for all of your pain.  

No matter where you find yourself in life with chronic illness, please allow yourself to lament it. I recommend the Psalms as a guide. Find someone to sit with you whose theology is big enough to let your struggle breathe. Then sit with others who suffer. Listen to their stories. Read their words. God may, in this way, begin to redeem your own suffering and help you find your own “strange gift.”

A Strange Gift

In the morning,

the wind is furious.

White gusts tear at the windows,

which rattle and creak, but hold.

I am lucky on the inside.

Warm and lucky.

I am calm, even, at last,

because there is nothing

I can say that the wind,

in its bitter seethe of fury,

has not already said.

Listen closely:

To struggle is to survive.

Everything, even invisible suffering,

can be redeemed.

I see you.

You are not alone.

From The Unsaid Words (Finishing Line Press), used with permission