The beach...
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Follow Him |
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The enduring messages of the Easter story are as expansive
as the sands on a beach, each grain a surf-polished facet of truth. The grains
are expansive but not necessarily elusive, because I can actually see them and
stand on them and feel them under my feet and between my toes and pick them up
and stuff my pockets with them and sense their texture and study them as I hold
them in my hands. And every year as I move through the full experience of
Easter…through Lent, Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and then Easter Sunday morning…I am
just a bit astounded at how so many of the enduring messages of Easter have,
like sifted sand, somehow slipped through my fingers in my daily walks along the
beach of my life.
I source my words not so much in self-deprecation as in
simple admission of what it means to be human; a regular human being taking a
daily walk on a Divine beach.
Jesus knew all about that walk. The delicate
breath-by-breath walk integrating humanity with Divinity…the daily walk of
Oneness with God coupled with the physical realities of earthly experience. He
walked it, talked it, taught it, lived it and ultimately, loved it.
And He asked us to Follow Him.
This Easter Sunday, rather than pockets and fistfuls of
sand, I offer up in only one hand but a single grain for you.
Oh, this sand grain has slipped through my fingers numerous
times over the last year, but somehow, through grace, I have noted it was
missing, bent over to the Divine beach, and picked it up yet again. It always
feels good in the palm of my hand…because I know it belongs there.
This sacred grain of Easter Story sand, in a still, small
voice, reminds me...
Faith transcends fear.
This sacred grain of Easter Story sand whispers to me,
fear is death, faith is life.
Sometimes, more observant than enlightened, I hear that and
sheepishly smile and say, “Ah, I had forgotten…” Again.
And like a pearl of great value, I treasure once more that
sacred grain of Easter story truth I hold in the palm of my human, holy,
doubting Thomas hand.
This morning, with grain of sand in hand, in my mind’s eye
I see Jesus, vibrant and shining and Easter Morning transcendent. He
smiles at me and I smile back and the softness in His eyes pierces my soul and
then He shakes His head and clicks His tongue and says, “O ye of little faith…”
and then He laughs right out loud and I know that He is not laughing at me but
with me because I suddenly find myself laughing too, loudly even, and then He
pauses, looks mock serious, and says, “Well, life’s a beach,” and then joyful
tears merge with our laughter, as I stand right there on the Divine Beach with
Him, together busting a mirthful gut in the vivid sunlight and the eternal surf
on the truthful sand.
Roll the stone away.
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As I stand on the metaphorical beach and gaze into my own
heart this Easter Sunday morning, I find myself looking also into the great
collectively beating heart of this earthly world. Yes, we’re all in it
together. And again, more observant than enlightened (unless they are one and
the same), I sheepishly smile and say, “Ah, it’s not just I, we have
dropped that grain of truth and forgotten.” Again.
Faith transcends fear.
This Easter Sunday, the Holiest of days in the Christian
calendar, I hold out my small hand and I lift up my eyes and I observe a
predominance of fear permeating our world. And just as it was nearly 2,000
years ago, much of the fear appears to be centered, of all things, on religion,
mixed up, of course, with a whole lot of politics.
Religion and politics, beneath the surface of external
exclaim, and well meaning though they may be, seem to consistently mire
themselves in the familiarity of fear instead of the power of faith. It’s as
if, beyond even the very best of intentions, the human worldly heart of
politics and religion exhibits a stubbornly persistent preference for (or faith
in) Good Friday instead of Easter Sunday.
Sure, many can and do exult in the promise of Easter
Sunday, count me in, but then before we know it Monday morning rolls around in
the world and it’s back to Calvary and Good Friday and impending death and a
heavy cross of earthly fears hoisted upon our shoulders in weary anticipation of
weighty, stultifying stones to be eventually rolled in front of our individual
and collective apocalypse tombs.
We know not what we do.
What we do, it appears, is mostly walk a path of fear.
There is no shame in that...it is, after all, quite a well-worn path. And on
this fearful path are made manifest ongoing and unending wars and hatreds and
exclusions and unforgiveness and misunderstandings and narrow ideologies and
righteousness and judgments and rigid opinions and competition and scarcity and
survival of the fittest.
We fear many things, but mostly, in boiling it down, I
suppose at the core of it all we fear death. And though we fear it, we are also
drawn to it. In our humanity, we cannot help but walk to it, at variant speeds
and degrees. We know Jesus felt it, in the Garden of Gethsemane; “Take this cup
from my hand,” his human voice cried, as he prayed.
And then, in absolute faith, in the Light of Divine Oneness
and Grace,
Jesus did what he knew he could do.
He transcended it.
Voila. Easter Sunday. Period, end of story.
What a beautiful grain of sand.
Follow Him.
In fear, we forget. In faith, we remember.
This Easter, I ask, is it truly and necessarily the way of
the world, this way of fear? Must religion and politics, consciously or
unconsciously, forever feed on it and propagate it? No matter how strongly it
rises up in our individual Gethsemane’s and our collective consciousness and
worldly experiences, yes, even beneath the surface of our religion and politics,
must we blindly and forever walk such a deeply rutted path?
Ha ha. Of course not. O ye of little faith.
On Easter Sunday morning, or for that matter, on any other
day of the year, I cannot change or fix or save the world any more than you
can. The world is the world. But what I can do is walk along the Divine beach
of my human experience with a precious sand grain of faith in my hand and do my
best to remember it is always there. And not just a little...a lot.
I can laugh loudly and often as best I can as I continually practice my faith,
especially in the everyday things, that I am then more able to walk through the
"big" things when they show up. Yes, that includes even human death.
I know you can do that, too. And grain-by-grain,
hand-by-hand, together, in ways beyond even our most vivid imagination, we will
in the eternal continuum of an endless beach, witness ever more resurrection and
salvation emergent in our world.
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Moving Towards Peace |
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Faith transcends fear.
Happy Easter.
-Rev. Tom
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The Calf-Path
Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)
One day,
through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail, as all calves do.
Since then
three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail
was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bellwether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bellwethers always do.
And from
that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made,
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ’twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed — do not laugh —
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.
This
forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years
passed on in swiftness fleet.
The road became a village street,
And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare,
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a
hundred thousand rout
Followed that zigzag calf about,
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They follow still his crooked way,
And lose one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
A moral
lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep
the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach. |