The Nativity of St John the Baptist, June 24, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Nativity of St John the Baptist, June 24, 2025

• Isaiah 40:1-11
• Acts 13:14b-26
• Luke 1:57-80

Click here for an audio of the sermon

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen. 

In the middle of June every year, we get a little Advent. This year, the weather has even been cooperating. Today’s feast is a timely reminder that, whatever the season, God is constantly preparing the way of our return. 

This year, in particular, I’m struck by the resonance of Isaiah’s poetry: “Comfort, O Comfort, my people. […] Speak tenderly to [them.]” Oh, how we need that tenderness! How we need that comfort! In the midst of so many and great temptations to despair and fatigue—an ever expanding list these days—the comfort of God’s promise of faithfulness and return beckons all the more strongly. 

Comfort my people. Tell them that their return to me is imminent. Prepare the way of their salvation, their wholeness, their new life in me, says the Lord. 

John the Baptist, whose birth we celebrate today, and Isaiah both knew darkness and exile. Both lived in times of great chaos and upheaval, in which the very life and existence of their communities was anything but assured. Isaiah, for instance, comes proclaiming this good news of the elevation of Mount Zion precisely at one of the moments of Israel’s greatest darkness. When the Assyrian empire has decimated Jerusalem, when all that the Israelites hold dear has been ravaged and the world seems irreparably fragmented, the voice of hope sounds its clear bell. This home that has been destroyed will not only be rebuilt, but it will become a center of welcome, peace, and love for all the world. 

John comes as the morning star, the great forerunner of the morn, as that wonderful hymn puts it. He is the sign that the life that really is life is coming into the world as Jesus, our brother, our friend, and our God. And like the morning star, he comes at the darkest hour of the night as a promise that the sun will rise again. 

Before I entered the Monastery, echoing Isaiah, Br. Andrew told me, “there are no sharp edges here. Everything in the Monastery has been worn smooth through years of prayer.” It was a lovely sentiment, and just what I wanted to hear in that moment of romantic infatuation. Having lived in this community for a little while now, I can tell you that there are actually plenty of sharp edges remaining. I’ve even introduced a few myself. Not all has been worn smooth, at least not yet. 

But nor was Andrew’s comment mere sentimentality. The common life—whether in a monastery, a family, a parish, or a nation—is one of great friction. Our sharp edges are only worn down by rubbing against those of our brothers, our coreligionists, or our neighbors. Much the same can be said for the life of prayer, in which, whatever consolations may come our way, we will eventually find ourselves facing into dryness, desolation, and the fracturing of our optimism that the spiritual life will finally make us into shining examples of perfect, ordered human life. 

The great Anthony Bloom connects this stripping down to the work of prayer: 

“There is a degree of despair that is linked with total, perfect hope. This is the point at which, having gone inward, we will be able to pray; and then ‘Lord, have mercy’ is quite enough. We do not need to make any of the elaborate discourses we find in manuals of prayer. It is enough simply to shout out of despair ‘Help!’ and you will be heard.” 

He continues, “Very often we do not find sufficient intensity in our prayer, sufficient conviction, sufficient faith, because our despair is not deep enough. We want God in addition to so many other things we have, we want His help, but simultaneously we are trying to get help wherever we can, and we keep God in store for our last push. […] If our despair comes from sufficient depth, if what we ask for, cry for, is so essential that it sums up all the needs of our life, then we find words of prayer and we will be able to reach the core of the prayer, the meeting with God.”1 

The encounter with the realities of his own dark time of empire, domination, and the potential extinction of his religion and his people led John into the wilderness to fast and to pray. In the purification of his own desire, in the distilling of that desire down to its essential element—Lord, have mercy!—he became, as the eucharistic preface puts it, a burning and a shining light, drawing others away from the city toward the boundaries of their becoming. There he invited them to turn back to the Lord and to be washed clean in the waters of baptism. 

It's no accident that the movement of return and remembrance that John proclaims originates in the wilderness. It is there that the Israelites wandered after their slavery. It is there that they encountered God and that, through their trials, murmurings, and cursing God forged them into a community. It is into the wilderness that the Spirit drives Jesus after his baptism, there to be tempted, yes, but also there to be formed. For it is through his temptation that Jesus touches his deepest desire, which is for God alone. 

It is in this place of wild wandering that we come to know God and, in that encounter, to be known as God’s beloved.  

And so, it is to the wilderness that John calls—or we might say recalls—the people when they have strayed from God’s ways. And it is in the wilderness of this historical moment that we, too, must face down temptation and despair. It is in this wilderness of death and anxiety and fear that we may allow God to strip down our desire, until all we want is God. And it is from this wilderness of darkness and wandering that our hope will emerge. 

On the eve of the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel wrote about what it means to hope: 

“Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. […] Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, that gives strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.” 

Real hope, as writer and activist Rebecca Solnit points out, is always dark, because the future is forever dim. And while the darkness may frighten us, in her words, it is always the dark, not just of the grave, but of the womb. For out of the dark wilderness emerge possibilities we could never have imagined in the clear light of day. 

If the emergence of hope from the dark is true in the secular world, how much truer it is for the Christian, who bears not only Christ’s life within her, but first bears Christ’s death on the Cross. We who profess the faith of Jesus, profess, not that he died and made everything okay in the world, but that having died and risen, he now lives in us, right here and now, still working to stitch back together this fractured world. 

The Israelites and the early Christian community discovered in the darkness of wilderness and exile that, although they could no longer see the way forward, they could be seen, seen in the depths of their being, known and loved in the very foundation of their soul, in that darkest point within that is reserved for God alone. And in that foundational place, too deep even really to call it love, for it is so much more than that, from that deepest place hope is born. 

John, the great forerunner of the morn, the morning star and herald of the dawn, continues to shine like a beacon of hope in the darkness of our time, just as he did in his own. His voice calls out today that though we are like the flower of the field that springs up today and tomorrow is gone, the word of the Lord—the word that is Jesus within and around us—endures forever. There is always cause to hope, because God is good, and that is everything. 

Easter Day, April 20, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Sunday of the Resurrection, April 20, 2025

• Luke 24:1-12

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” It’s a startling question. After all, they watched while he was tortured. They heard him cry out with his last breath. They placed his limpid body in that gash in the rock. The earth itself twisted in sympathy with his wounds.

They are not yet ready to let go. Who would be? So they come to the tomb at the quietest moment of the day, that soft time when the gauze between this world and the next is thinnest. They know he’s dead, but maybe they can glimpse the shadow of their friend and teacher moving in the distance.

Which one of us would not do the same? Which one of us hasn’t caught ourselves, in an unguarded moment, thinking “I can’t wait to tell her about this!” only to remember that our mother, or friend, or teacher is dead?

Only to have the grief cut, like a hot knife, once more. It takes a long time, sometimes a lifetime, for the soul to accept what the mind knows—that he is gone.

How absurd this needling question! Why do you look for the living among the dead? For anyone who has lost someone dear to them knows that the dead are never really dead at all. Their shades rise like mist over the river of our lives.

Maybe the soul is wiser than the mind. Maybe the stubborn clinging to the life of those we love is the soul’s proclamation of the resurrection. Maybe the soul knows what the messengers proclaim—he is not here! He is risen as he said, and he has gone before you on the way. He is not among the dead, because in Christ there are no dead. In Christ all are alive, all is life.

The empty tomb has become the womb from which new life—the life of the Crucified and Risen One—flows into the world. Tomb and womb are one, and death itself is a birthing and an unbinding.

We live today in a world of staggering loss. Loss upon loss, piled high like so many corpses on a field of battle. We will never recover much of what has gone and is going. When the maples are gone, as they almost certainly will be, we will never have them back again. When the last polar bear dies, that majestic creature will live only in memory. Even if Kilmar Garcia makes it back from El Salvador, there are many thousands who will not.

What does resurrection look like in the face of this flood of loss? How do we proclaim the good news of God in Jesus Christ as the darkness grows deeper and as the light seems further away than ever?

Like us, Jesus’ disciples knew something of the grinding violence of empire. In the face of that juggernaut, God offers the empty tomb as the proclamation of her faithfulness and love. We might see in the spaciousness of the tomb, in its largeness, an example of what it means to live the resurrected life of Christ right here and now. Perhaps we are called, like the tomb, to hollowness.

In the words of Christine Lore Webber’s poem:

Some of you I will hollow out.

I will make you a cave.

I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.

You will be a bowl.

You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain.

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.

I will do this for the space that you will be.

I will do this because you must be large.

A passage.

People will find their way through you.

God does not save us from our lives or from the times in which we live. Rather, God gives us the strength to live our lives fully, to drink them to the dregs. God raises us up in the midst of our times to be witnesses to the life that really is life. God does not stop the violence of empire that bears down upon us. Instead, God gives us the assurance of a love that far outstrips all that empire can do, so that we know, deep in the bones, that though the rulers and powers of this world may kill our bodies, they cannot touch our souls.

And some of us God hollows out with new life. Hollows us to be a tomb in which to lay the polar bear and the maple. Hollows us to be a bell tolling in witness to the lives of the innocents of Gaza. Hollows us to be a throat calling out for justice, wailing in lamentation, and singing songs of hope and resistance, a throat proclaiming the great and unending alleluia of God, of life flowing from the heart of death, like the waters of Eden.

Some of us God hollows out to be a passage through which to lead God’s people from the bondage of empire into the promised land of freedom and life. Bow down to the mystery, my brothers and sisters and nonbinary siblings. Bow down in your sorrow. Bow down in your longing for a new world. Bow down in your joy and your fear and your amazement at this new thing God is doing. Bow your head to the ground, stretch out your arms in freedom and surrender. Press your heart to the ground and feel the earth rise up to meet the pounding rhythm in your chest.

In Christ there is no death—there is only the life of God poured, for a moment, into these miraculous bodies of ours and then returning at last to its source. Nothing is ever really lost. All is bound up in the love of the God who loves us into life. When they have vanished from this earth, the maples will pepper the heavens of God’s memory. The polar bear’s cry will thread the song of God’s love. The hearts of this world’s innocent dead will beat forever in the sacred heart of Jesus, joined in the great work of love and redemption that will far outlast our brief lives.

In the midst of death we are in life. Always, always new and deeper life. This is the promise of Jesus’ resurrection. We must mourn our dead and then let them go, knowing that they are now closer to us than our own breath. For the Living One has gone before us to light the way to God’s new creation, to the ever-deeper life breaking out in the midst of death and destruction like the stars in the night sky.

No matter the state of the world or our own lives, Jesus Christ is indeed risen today and every day, bringing to birth God’s great work of love. We are that work. And the work

goes ever on.  

Feast of the Annunciation - March 25, 2025

The Feast of The Annunciation, March 25, 2025

 

Isaiah 7:10-14

Hebrews 10:4-10

Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Sooner or later we must all surrender to an unknown God. 
Until this moment comes, most of us have a rather tame idea of God. We have an image—positive or negative or somewhere in between—based on our childhood experiences of family and church and the world. We are running from or toward or even just ignoring this God. Beautiful or horrible as these images may be for us, they remain flat, pasted on the page of some imagined reality that, ultimately, we can control and shape according to our fantasies and illusions.
If our faith is ever to mature, we eventually have to face the reality of this unknown God who comes to us, asking us to bear him into a life we cannot even imagine. We stand on the edge of an abyss—a darkness that cannot be plumbed, a relationship than cannot be fathomed, an invitation to a death that will lead to a life beyond anything we can conceive. The cloud parts, beckoning us inward to overshadow us, and we must step forward willingly into the real God.

Such is the stark reality of the Annunciation, dressed up as we often find it with lilies and silent poses of patient waiting. Mary, admittedly less flustered than I would be if an angel suddenly appeared to me, asks Gabriel a simple question: “How can this be?” To which the angel replies “The power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

It is a response ripe with symbolism and scriptural resonance. Mary’s body is the deep darkness at the beginning of creation over which the Holy Spirit hovers. She is Mount Sinai, bathed in cloud, as God conveys the Law to Moses or Mount Tabor bearing the enclouded glory of Jesus’ Transfiguration. Her womb—filled now with God’s Word becoming Flesh—is also the Cross heavy with the fruit of salvation and the Empty Tomb from which Jesus rises to new life.

In 2016 Good Friday fell, as it does occasionally, on March 25th, this Feast of the Annunciation. This won’t happen again until 2157, long after we’re all gone, God willing. This concurrence is not accidental. In patristic and medieval tradition, March 25th was thought to be the date of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Jesus was conceived and died on the same day, 33 years apart, a perfect circle joining life and death. Or, as John Donne puts it, today we see “The abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one / Of the Angel’s Ave and Consummatum est.”

Many medieval images twine these two observances together, showing Mary as the fruitful vine that becomes the Cross of Christ flowering into new life. The Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” links the two images with the tree in the Garden of Eden:

The fruit which gives life

Hangs, as we believe,

Upon the Virgin's breast,

And again upon the cross

Between two thieves.

Here, the child-bearing Virgin,

Here, the saving cross;

Both are mystic trees.

[The cross], the humble hyssop,

She, the noble cedar,

And both life-giving.

Her consent to birth and his to death finally made as one—the full circle of salvation written in the flesh of this day.

Mary could not have known, of course, where her “be it unto me according to thy word,” would take her and this life burgeoning inside her. I wonder if standing at the foot of the Cross, she heard the rustle of a wing and thought “Oh, this is the cost I agreed to all those years ago. Now, the bill is due.” I wonder if, hearing her son cry out, something inside her dropped, some long-held breath released in grief and recognition and—finally, all those years later—a surrender fully consummated.

God desires nothing less of us than everything we are or ever will be. In the first flush of infatuation, it’s easy enough to say yes, to give away our whole lives to this God who desires us and whom we desire. As the years draw on, though, the cost of our consent becomes clearer. And though we thought we knew what it meant to give our whole selves in love, we may come to see how little we understood in all our youthful bluster.

There comes a point—and likely a few such points throughout our lives—when, standing at the edge the abyss, we come face to cloudy face with this unknown and unknowable God who has been pursuing us our whole lives. We feel within the pit of ourselves the gravitational pull toward surrender. Like Mary, we consent to the overshadowing of all we are and all we have been. Through patience and, perhaps, longsuffering, we emerge from this dark baptism fully ourselves, maybe for the first time: God-bearers in a God-born world, holy Theotokoi—not from our own holiness but from the holiness of God forever infusing our bodies. This is what we were born for: to become the womb and the empty tomb, the fruitful vine and the flowering Cross. 

The emptiness that seemed to be our undoing becomes, through God’s great mercy, the very truest expression of our divine nature: the fullness of God’s love flowing through us into a hurting world.

I am convinced that this is the place of monasticism and of all authentic Christianity in our world today. We are called to bear witness (in the Greek, to become martyrs) to the love of a God who brings life out of death and whose final word is always love. In order to witness authentically to that love, we must step into the cloud of our own undoing, we must eventually choose to surrender to this unknown God who loves us into wholeness.

In 1920, Rilke wrote to a friend “The final thing is not self-subjugation / but silent loving from such centeredness / we feel round even rage and desolation / the finally enfolding tenderness.”

Surrender to the overshadowing of God’s power is not self-subjugation, but consent to transformation. It is an apotheosis, a full revelation of God’s power made manifest in our own humanity. It is an allowing of God’s life to stream from our very pores. It is the recognition, even the celebration, of that finally enfolding tenderness that never can or will desert us, whatever the rage and desolation.

My brothers and sisters, let the power of the Most High overshadow you. Surrender to this unknown God and be reborn as yourself. Step into your poverty that is also your glory. Let out your be it unto me and your consummatum est. Today is the day of our undoing and our full becoming.

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany C, February 9, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 9, 2025

• Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]
• 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
• Luke 5:1-11

This morning’s readings are full of sinful men. And so, I would imagine, is this church. Maybe even some sinful women and nonbinary people, too. In the lectionary we have Isaiah, the man of unclean lips; Paul, the last of the apostles and one untimely born; and, of course, Peter, who begs the Lord to go away from him. 

This latter is such a human reaction and one I bet we can all relate to. Grace and mercy tend to overwhelm us. An encounter with the full wattage of God’s love for us is, simultaneously, an encounter with our own abject poverty. In such circumstances, we may easily find ourselves, like Peter, begging that God would leave us alone. Sometimes our own smallness can be too much to bear. 

There are times when this reaction arises from compunction, which the early monastics called “the wound that leads to life.” Compunction is the understanding that all our striving will avail us nothing. That, hard as we have worked to save ourselves, we have utterly failed. But that God’s mercy has never left us, that what Peter asks is impossible—God can never go away from us, loving us as he does. Compunction sometimes appears as repentance for sin, sometimes as the sudden awareness of our own smallness in the face of beauty or love. It usually hits suddenly, the face of God unveiling itself in an apocalypse of love. 

But sometimes our diffidence in the face of God’s mercy is not compunction at all, but shame and its constant companion, fear. Shame is the conviction that who we are is wrong and that, because of our fundamental brokenness, we are beyond the reach of God’s loving mercy. Shame carries with it the fear that God will do just what Peter asks, so why not push God away first? If compunction is the wound that leads to life, then shame is the seed of despair, and ultimately it can and will kill us. 

Although it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between these two experiences, we know them by their fruits. Compunction always leads to greater freedom to love and to act without self-reference or clinging. It is what leads us to lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel of Love. Shame only leads us deeper into the dark spiral of isolation and self-fixation. 

If we are ever to surrender to God’s mercy and to the freedom God intends for us, we must, like Peter, encounter our absolute poverty and, through that encounter, entrust ourselves to God’s prodigal love for us. This self-abnegation is the death that leads to life. Paradoxically, it is only in fully experiencing our own powerlessness that we can enter into true freedom. Therein lies hope, even in the darkest times. 

Our world so desperately needs this example of freedom through poverty. I’ve been struggling to find words to describe my inner experience over the last two weeks. I’ve finally settled on the word “bereaved.” The word “bereave” comes from the Old English bereafian, meaning “to take away by violence; to seize or rob.” That seems fitting. I feel utterly bereaved—as if the world I knew and loved has been torn away from me—from us—by a violent and malevolent force. 

The truth, of course, is more complicated. Part of what has been torn away is the illusion of control and the comfort that illusion makes possible. I don’t mean there aren’t very real losses, and a seemingly endless parade of them on the horizon. I don’t have to name them—you know too well what they are. But this moment is also an apocalypse—a revelation of our poverty and powerlessness in the face of a violent malevolence that is determined to dominate and destroy. We are, collectively, faced with the reality of our total dependence upon God’s mercy. And we are challenged in our stated conviction that God brings life out of death. 

In a strange and painful way, this revelation can be the beginning of our freedom and the seed of our hope. 

On the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany in 2017 (that’s Year A for you liturgy geeks), Br. Roy Parker preached one of the most powerful sermons I have ever heard. I quote him here: 

“Jesus’ death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and shotguns have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that God can. 

 

When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a shotgun, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course; their power and its weapons have done all they can do. But God’s logic persists; God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love—continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. Jesus does not conquer Rome, but Jesus outlasts Rome.” 

When Peter chose, in the face of his own powerlessness, to surrender to God’s mercy and to follow Jesus, he did not know where that choice would lead him. He certainly stumbled along the way. Who of us hasn’t? But having surrendered himself into God’s loving care, he did not cling to a comfortable life in the face of a cross. Instead, he chose God’s powerless weakness, which is the very heart of love. 

What does this choice look like today? When praying with this morning’s gospel passage, an answer began to emerge. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and the US Government failed to respond in any meaningful way, thousands and thousands of ordinary people took to their boats. In canoes, and trawlers, and yachts they navigated that drowned city searching for survivors. They literally fished for people. And as they did so, they did not ask who anyone voted for, or how much money they made, or what they thought of various religious or social issues. In the face of devastation, their own basic humanity took over, and they worked to preserve and save whatever lives they could.

My brothers and sisters, we are called to do the same today and in the coming days and years and, let’s be honest, perhaps decades. The only way the violent and malevolent forces of this world can win, is by implanting violence and hatred in our hearts. We must resist the urge to hate our brothers and sisters, no matter how harmful their choices. Hatred may make us feel powerful for a moment, but it only shields us from the powerless freedom God invites us to: the freedom to love. We must choose love, especially when it is hardest to do so. That is the self-giving way of Jesus. That is God’s powerless weakness. That is how God saves the world. 

Take to your boats. Leave everything behind. Leave your certainties. Leave your fear. Leave the clenched fist of grief and rage clogging up your throat. Set out into the wreckage of this world to search for the lost and drowning and the dead. And when you find them, pull them up by their arms like that net of fish. Give them water to drink and a blanket to warm them. And sing them songs of God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are mercy and love—and whose patient, persistent, non-violent mercy will outlast this violent malevolence that bereaves us. And held tight to Jesus, who will never leave us, we will, too. 

The First Sunday of Advent C - December 1, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The First Sunday of Advent C - December 1, 2024

• Jeremiah 33:14-16
• 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
• Luke 21:25-36

Back in September I walked St. Cuthbert’s Way, a 63-mile pilgrimage route that starts at the ruins of Melrose Abbey and ends at Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the east coast of England where St. Aidan founded his monastery in the 7^th century. Near the start of the trip, one of my brothers who had also walked St. Cuthbert’s Way texted me “You’ll have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community that loves you and will be very happy of your return.”

The first few days of the trip, I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. The walking had been pretty moderate. Being the UK, the weather was grey and cool, but that wasn’t so bad. I met kind and generous walkers along the way, and I enjoyed my time alone. There really were no difficult feelings—only gratitude and awe for the beauty that surrounded me.

Midway through the walk I had my mountaintop experience. I climbed to the highest point of the route with 360 degree views of rolling hills and the sea in the distance. It was the most perfectly stunning day you could imagine. Clear skies, warm sunshine, and miles of visibility. I was literally singing “The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music.” This is called foreshadowing, by the way.

The next day couldn’t have been more different. I set out in the driving rain. I could literally see sheets of rain blowing in front of me. Within fifteen minutes my waterproof boots were soaked through, not to mention my pants. As I wound my way through the Cheviots, I kept worrying that I’d miss a signpost because I was staring straight down at the path to keep the wind out of my face. It was a far cry from the mountaintop! Even as I was enduring the rain and the wind, I started to call that day my Day of Affliction.

I found myself yelling at God, literally screaming at the top of my lungs. There’s not much opportunity for that kind of prayer in a monastery, so I took advantage of my solitude to let it all out—all the frustration and the resentment and the fear and the anger and the disappointment that I wasn’t aware I had inside me. At my lowest point that day, my brother’s words came back to me: “You’ll have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community that loves you and will be very happy of your return.”

Now I understood what he meant. I did feel alone and afraid. I did feel resentful of the circumstances of my day and some of the circumstances of my life—some of which I had freely chosen, and some of which I had not. I was miserably and wonderfully alive, perhaps more alive in that moment than I had been in a long time. I hated every minute of that walk that day, and I was also surrounded by God’s love and the abundant beauty of God’s creation. I was held in my affliction—given the gift of the full experience of my life. I was also held in love by this beautiful community 3,500 miles away.

Advent always begins with a Day of Affliction. Each year we hear about the signs of the apocalypse when “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. The powers of the heavens will be shaken.” Nations and temples will fall down around us. There will be wars and earthquakes, and we will be afraid.

This is the context in which hope is born. This is the darkness into which the Light of the World comes to us to save us and free us from our self-destruction. We don’t need hope on the mountaintop. We don’t need light when the sun is shining all around us and the hills glow with the golden beauty of God’s abundance.

Jesus comes to us in the moment of our greatest need, when the light seems to be failing and the world is crashing down around us. That isn’t to say that God is not present in the sunshine. But our need for God draws God to us in a way that contentment and wellbeing often do not.

Writing of the Crucifixion in a powerful essay on affliction, Simone Weil writes that “This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. […] Those who persevere in love hear this note from the very lowest depths into which affliction has thrust them. From that moment they can no longer have any doubt.”[1]

The stance of hope to which Advent—and this historical moment—invite us is first of all perseverance in love. If we can manage not to run from our fear and our anger and our dismay, if we can manage to shout them out into the driving rain and the threatening darkness, we will hear the pure and heart-rending harmony of God’s love echoing back to us, assuring us that we are not alone. Then we can no longer have any doubt that God holds us tight and will never—can never—let us go.

The key is to love ourselves enough to remain awake to our experience, not to dull our inner senses with our drug of choice. We can be numb, or we can be alive. The choice is ours.

Rebecca Solnit writes that “the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”[2]

Despair is its own kind of drug, numbing us both to the pain we are experiencing and to the possibilities of new life with which God is constantly seeding the world. Our salvation will not look like whatever we imagine in our limited desire for perfection. Into the darkness of Advent comes, not a mighty warrior to vanquish the violent overlords of the world, but a small and defenseless baby. Salvation comes to us as new life—a life that must be guarded, tended, fed, encouraged—and most of all, loved. This kind of salvation is a far cry from a lottery ticket we can clutch to our chest, sure that our worries are over. But it is so much better for that—for the salvation to which God invites us is the renewal of our own lives in hope and love.

We cannot persevere in love on our own. We need one another to remind us of the light and the love that await us on the other side of the storm. We need to be signposts for each other of the love of God that never lets us go. We need to sing a counterpoint to one another’s songs of affliction—not to overwhelm them but to accompany them on the way, to create together a truer and deeper harmony of the love and affliction that give birth to authentic hope. We need to be that love and that hope for one another.

“The final thing,” Rilke wrote a friend in 1920, giving just this kind of encouragement, “is not self-subjugation but silent loving from such centeredness we feel round even rage and desolation the finally enfolding tenderness.”

My brothers and sisters, in this life, you will have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community and your God that loves you and will be very happy of your return.

Come, Lord Jesus, and show us the way home to you.

---

[1] Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” in Waiting for God, p. 72.

[2] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, p. 19.Before I came to the Monastery I used to go to an Al-Anon meeting on Friday evenings. It was quite an eclectic group of people, the kind you can get in a 12-step meeting in New York City, and I loved it. At the end of the meeting, we’d all gather in a circle in this cramped church basement room, hold hands, and say the serenity prayer. Then we’d boisterously shout “keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it—you’re worth it!” The last cheer is meant to end the meeting on a high note, an energetic encouragement against despair and a reminder that the program is the solution.

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost B - September 16, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

Proper 19 B - Sunday, September 15, 2024 

Isaiah 50:4-9a
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

Before I came to the Monastery I used to go to an Al-Anon meeting on Friday evenings. It was quite an eclectic group of people, the kind you can get in a 12-step meeting in New York City, and I loved it. At the end of the meeting, we’d all gather in a circle in this cramped church basement room, hold hands, and say the serenity prayer. Then we’d boisterously shout “keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it—you’re worth it!” The last cheer is meant to end the meeting on a high note, an energetic encouragement against despair and a reminder that the program is the solution.

But there was one old-timer who didn’t like this tradition. After the serenity prayer, still holding our hands, she would chant along, “keep coming back.” Then she would say, “it works fine,” and rather forcefully drop the hands of those on either side of her. Curious, I asked her why she ended the meeting that way. She said, “we all work hard enough.”

As I prayed throughout the week with this Sunday’s gospel reading, that woman kept coming into my prayer. “It works fine,” she kept telling me, as she dropped my hand. “What works fine?” I pleaded in my prayer. What does that even mean?

We all know this story very well. It appears in all three synoptic gospels. With a few variations it follows the same pattern. Jesus asks the disciples who people say that he is, and they tell him one of the prophets. Then he asks who they say that he is. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah. Then Jesus goes on to tell them what being the Messiah actually means: he will be betrayed, tortured, and killed, and on the third day he will rise again. In all three accounts Peter rebukes Jesus and is then rebuked in turn.

There are, of course, so many layers to this story. We must all ask ourselves throughout our lives, who Jesus is for us. If we’re really wacky and creative, we might turn the question back on Jesus and ask him, “who do you say that I am?” We might meditate on what it means to take up our cross and follow. But the simplest layer of the story may be its most profound.

We watch Peter, in real time, face into the fracturing of his illusions, and in that witnessing we are invited to do the same. Peter is perhaps the best example of this process in the scriptures. He follows Jesus zealously from the beginning. In the synoptic gospels he is the first to call Jesus the Messiah (Thomas gets that honor in John). The text makes clear that Peter has a definite idea of what being the Messiah is all about—an idea that certainly does not look like betrayal, torture, and death, even if that passion leads to resurrection. Even as Jesus rebukes and corrects Peter, Peter will have to deny and betray Jesus himself, to watch his friend and teacher die on a cross, and to see him raised to life again before he can finally relinquish his fixed ideas of who God is to and for him and the world.

Like Peter, we are all invited, throughout our lives, to a process of disillusionment. We live, most of us, with fixed ideas of who God is and how God works. We are blinded by our obsessions and illusions, many of which appear to us as good and holy.

I once had a spiritual director who pointed out that we are afraid to pray dangerously. To pray dangerously, he said, was to pray for God to rid us of our obsessions and illusions. Most of us stick with very nice prayers—prayers for people’s health and wellbeing that are, in themselves good prayers, but that fall far short of praying for our own transformation in whatever ways God wants us to be transformed.

One of the great gifts of monastic life is the opportunity to be freed from the tyranny of desire. Most of the time we talk about desire as a positive force in the spiritual life, and our heart’s deepest desire for wholeness in God is a very good thing indeed. But we are all plagued with much smaller and pettier desires—wants, if you will. We want to feel comfortable. We want things to stay the way they’ve always been. We want to be certain about who we are, who God is, how the world functions. We want, we want, we want—and we allow all these little wants to guide how and who we are in and for the world. And so we make our decisions and evaluations based, not on a discernment of God’s will for us, but on what we want in any given situation. In other words, like Peter, we set our mind on human things.

Monastic life will teach you that you can get on perfectly well without having things the way you want them. Indeed, any mature Christian life will be dictated by higher ideals than what we want in any particular moment. That isn’t to say that our wants and desires are bad. Unless we allow them to dictate our lives they are rather neutral. I would love for God to be the kind of God who gave me everything I want, but that isn’t reality. Fortunately, reality is so much richer than what we want. Fortunately, God promises us transformation, freedom, wholeness, and the life that really is life—whether we want that or not.

In his book My Bright Abyss, the poet Christian Wiman warns that “What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will become so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.” (29-30)

I think this is the deeper meaning that that old-timer was trying to convey in her cranky way. The spiritual life works fine. Our images of God, our methods of prayer, our beliefs and practices, and our wants and desires—they’re all just fine, but they’re also all a beginning, not an end. Peter had to undergo a painful process of disillusionment in order fully to give himself to God for whatever God willed. I’m sorry to say that the process is no less painful and no shorter for the rest of us. In order to become the mature, surrendering, loving people that God wills us to be, we must let go of anything at all that is not God.

There will be grief in this process. Hopefully there will also be moments of laughter, when we can see the absurdity of our self-will. It may, at times, feel like we have loaded our backpack with stones. We will certainly hear the groan of the cross as we drag it along. But if we persevere, we will find ourselves living a life freer than we could ever have imagined possible. We will find ourselves filled with the life that really is life, the life of Christ welling up within us. So keep coming back. It works fine!

Easter 7 B - May 12, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Seventh Sunday in Easter B, May 12, 2024

• Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
• 1 John 5:9-13
• John 17:6-19

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

  A few years ago I went to a friend’s ordination to the priesthood at the Cathedral in New York. It was 2019. I’m sure you remember that four-year period we were in the middle of. When it came time for the sermon, the preacher gave a list of all the terrible things going on in the world. And when the list was done, so was the sermon. No Jesus. No God. No encouragement about what it means to be a Christian or a priest in difficult times. I was speechless. 

Even more astonishing to me was the response from my fellow clergy. In the sacristy after the service, everyone around me was talking about what a powerful sermon it had been. I wanted to shout, “But where was the good news?” I was put in mind of Friedrich Nietzsche’s great critique of Christianity summed up in the words he attributes to Zarathustra: “They would have to sing better songs to me that I might believe in their Redeemer: his disciples would have to look more redeemed!” 

There was a lot of bad news at that time. Arguably there is even more bad news today. But we Christians are called to preach, not the bad news, but the good news. We are called to proclaim the challenging message that even here and now, in the midst of sorrow and devastation, genocide and war, political upheaval and climatic collapse—even here and now Jesus Christ is risen. When the news gets worse and worse, our need to proclaim and model the joy of the resurrection is even more paramount. 

Joy is meant to be the characteristic state of the redeemed Christian. But, like its counterpart gratitude, it is hard to maintain, particularly when we believe that our joy is a product of our own action rather than a gift of the Spirit enlivening us. Of course we will be dour when we think the salvation of the world is a matter solely of political and social action and that action rests entirely on our shoulders. 

This morning’s gospel reading gives us a section of what we call the High Priestly Prayer or Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. I recently heard someone set the scene thus. Jesus is having a meal with his friends. He knows it will be the last time they are all together like this, and he just can’t bear to part with them, so much does he love them. So he keeps finding other things he needs to tell them. He is doing his best to equip them for the days and years ahead. And maybe he’s also having a little trouble letting go. I imagine we’ve all be there. 

And yet, long though it may be, this prayer of love and inspiration contains some of the most exquisitely beautiful passages in Scripture. At the heart of this morning’s passage is the verse “I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.” 

This is what Jesus is up to: praying—interceding with his Father—so that his joy made be made complete, whole, total in us. Here is the first clue to sustaining the joy of the redeemed. It is not our joy. It is God’s joy, initiated by Jesus, and made full and complete in the Holy Spirit dwelling within and among us. 

We often use joy as a synonym for happiness. But lightness of spirit, giddiness, being carefree—these are all too anemic to be called joy. Joy is something deeper, stronger, more profound. It is a gift of the Spirit, equal parts acceptance, hope, and love. 

Christian Wiman points out that joy must contain sorrow. In fact, he calls sorrow “the seams of ore that burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and […] make joy the complete experience that it is.” (My Bright Abyss, p. 19) Joy is not a denial of reality, but an embracing of it, a drinking of reality to the dregs. 

Joy understands the limitations of our knowledge and trusts that God is working out God’s purpose in the world and in our own hearts, whatever the outward appearance. Joy is a thing of the Cross as much as of the Resurrection. 

I’m always surprised at quickly we move from the sadness and somberness of Good Friday into the celebration of Easter. That certainly doesn’t seem to have been the disciples’ experience, if we read the scriptures closely. They were afraid. They were perplexed. They were confused and astonished. So lost are they, that they often don’t recognize Jesus when he appears to them. Instead, their hearts burn strangely within them. We can only celebrate Easter morning because we know the end of the story, or we think we do. 

More and more, though, the world seems like that first Easter morning. We have seen the crucifixion of our hopes and loves. We have even laid some of them to rest. And now we’ve come to visit them and found an empty cave and a pile of clothes. We know that something has happened, something immense, something shattering. But what? 

I call to mind a section of Christine Lore Webber’s poem “Mother Wisdom Speaks”: 

Some of you I will hollow out. 

I will make you a cave. 

I will carve you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness. 

You will be a bowl. 

You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain. 

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you. 

I will do this for the space that you will be. 

I will do this because you must be large. 

A passage. 

People will find their way through you. 

Sometimes joy looks like being hollowed out like a cave. Sometimes joy looks like allowing the darkness to make its home in us, so that the lines between the light and the dark soften, and we come to know more clearly the unity of all things, to bear that unity in our bodies. Are we willing to be bearers of joy in broken world? Are we are willing to look at the wreck of this world and see not only the rubble but the beauty? 

Jesus prays for his joy to be made complete in us. Having ascended into heaven so that, as the letter to the Ephesians put it, he might fill all things, it falls to us to complete God’s joy. Without us, the joy, hope, and love that God means to fill the whole creation is incomplete. Take that in for a moment. God chooses to be incomplete without you and me. And that also means that the world is incomplete without our joy. 

If we are shy or guilty about being persons of joy, then why in the world are we Christians? We are people who not only believe but know in the flesh of our bodies that Jesus Christ is risen. The world needs this joy. If we are not to bear it, then who will? 

Without joy, we cannot sing the song of the Redeemed. It may be frightening to live in joy when the world prefers chaos. We may feel guilty or shy. But, to quote Rebecca Solnit, “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”  

Even more so for us Christians. Joy is our birthright. So call the banners. Step out of the shadows and join hands. Let the insurrection of the Redeemed begin! Amen. 

Easter 6 B - May 5, 2024

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Sixth Sunday in Easter B, May 5, 2024

• Acts 10:44-48
• 1 John 5:1-6
• John 15:9-17

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

Most people think of celibacy only in the negative. You’re giving up sexual contact with others. You’re giving up marriage and family. Or even worse—you’re suppressing this natural and beautiful part of your humanity. At the most superficial level, this understanding is accurate. You are giving up something—many somethings, in fact—when you live into a call to consecrated celibate chastity. But for those whom God truly calls to that life, celibacy is a doorway joy and depth and ever-expanding love.  

The celibate life, lived with integrity, is not so different from a sacramental marriage. By limiting our expression of our sexuality, we allow God to expand our capacity to love and be loved. If it’s the life you’re called to—and that’s the key right there—you can fall in love with God in every person, every glint of sunlight off the water, every beat of the crow’s wing. 

One of the greatest gifts of celibacy for me has been the discovery of the joys of true and deep friendship. When we speak of love and relationship, we are almost always talking about sexual or romantic connection. But deep, true, and abiding love flowers in many other fields, if we let it. 

In this morning’s gospel reading—which my friend Suzanne calls lovey dovey Sunday—Jesus invites his disciples and us into a different kind of relationship with God than we are accustomed to. “You are my friends,” he tells them. Then he emphasizes that this move to friendship is a marked change in his relationship with them. “I do not call you servants any longer; […] but I have called you friends.” 

This shift should shock us. At the very least, it should cause us to stop and wonder and question. 

Throughout the synoptic gospels and in the earlier parts of John, Jesus offers many different images for the relationship with God. God is a forgiving father running into a field to meet us or a mother hen protecting her flock. Jesus is the bridegroom, the lover who pursues us, woos us, weds us. God is the master or lord challenging us to obedience, patience, and service. Jesus is the teacher opening the way to wisdom and self-abandonment. But here Jesus calls us his friends. 

Until this moment, each relational image that Jesus uses is hierarchical. If God is our mother, we are children. If Jesus is our teacher, we are students. If God is our master, we are servants. Our tradition has used these same power-differentiated images of God almost exclusively. There is certainly a value and truth in these images. After all, we are not God. We are limited human creatures. 

And yet this morning Jesus says to his disciples and to us, “I do not call you servants any longer, but I have called you my friends.” True friendship is not power-differentiated. True friendship is mutual, egalitarian, horizontal. Not only does Jesus tell us that this kind of mutual, equal relationship is available to us, but he tells that friendship—not parental love, not romantic love, not the loving bond of teacher and student—friendship is the truest and deepest love. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It is through friendship that we most fully know and love Jesus and that we fulfill his commandment to love one another. 

The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist has a beautiful chapter on the graces of friendship: 

“For us no honor exists that could be greater than Jesus calling us his friends. The more we enter into the fullness of our friendship with him, the more he will move us to be friends for one another, and to cherish friendship itself as a means of grace. The forging of bonds between us that would make us ready to lay down our lives for one another is a powerful witness to the reality of our risen life in Christ. In an alienating world, where so many are frustrated and wounded in their quest for intimacy, we can bear life-giving testimony to the graces of friendship as men who know by experience its demands, its limitations and its rewards.” 

Our world certainly is alienating. So many are frustrated and wounded in their quest for intimacy. So many are abused by parents and lovers and masters and teachers. Jesus offers those of us who have been so wounded a different way to know him and love him and one another: the way of friendship. 

I believe one of the reasons we often have such an anemic understanding of friendship is that true friendship—with God and one another—requires total vulnerability. To share one’s soul with another can be frightening. It can and does open us to betrayal. Jesus knew this, of course. Still, he chose to call his disciples friends the same night that they would leave him, deny him, and hand him over. Still, he returned to them, laid himself bare for them again, and showed them the way of forgiveness and healing. 

To lay down one’s life for one’s friends does only mean to accept physical death on their behalf. Mostly it means to be willing to lay oneself bare, to stand wide open to the possibility of betrayal and abandonment and to choose to love anyway. Cynthia Bourgeault writes that “self-emptying is at the same time self-disclosure.” To offer the gift of one’s true self and to accept another’s gift of self is what it means to abide in and with God and one another. 

This is the way Jesus calls us to love him. This is the way Jesus calls us to love each other. Without power over, without manipulation, without hiding or shame. Freely. Vulnerably. Nakedly ourselves. 

And because you know I have to say it: What a friend we have in Jesus! Amen. 

Lent 5 B - March 17, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Fifth Sunday in Lent B, March 17, 2024

• Jeremiah 31:31-34
• Hebrews 5:5-10
• John 12:20-33

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

In my prayer and preaching this Lent, I’ve been following the throughline of covenant. Our readings have told the story of God’s continual refinement of her covenant, which begins with Noah as the representative of the whole creation (very important that we recover that ecological understanding) and follows through God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, and then in the giving of the law through Moses on Mt. Sinai. At each point along the way, the people violate this sacred covenantal relationship with God. But rather than abandon them (us), God rejigs the covenant.

This reworking on God’s part is itself a revelation of divine love. God’s promise becomes more and more specific as it moves from the whole creation, symbolized by a beautiful sign in the sky, into the stone tablets of the law. That specificity is meant, not as a prison for human agency, but as a grace that can lead to our freedom. 

Infected as we are with a radical protestant reading of Paul, we have often come to view the law, and therefore the covenant, as a dead thing in opposition to the living spirit. But, of course, our Jewish ancestors in the faith knew, just as our Jewish siblings still know, that the law and the covenant that it represents was and is a means of grace, a beautiful and life-giving doorway into the full flowering of the life of God. If they and we know the law more in its violation than in its keeping, that has everything to do with human frailty—and yet even our failure to keep the law opens us more and more to God’s abundant mercy.

This morning we hear God’s promise, given through Jeremiah, to refine the covenant yet once more: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me.” Where once God made her covenant with one person on behalf of the whole creation, now God promises to write that covenant on every single heart. Where once God mediated the covenant through law written on stone tablets, now God promises to write that law on the tablets of our hearts. Where once the elders conveyed knowledge of God to their people, now God promises to be so close to her people that everyone will know God in the innermost part of their being. God will be closer to us than our own breath, and every heartbeat will whisper her name.

Of course, we know how well that worked out. We have only to look around us at the world we have created to see that even God’s indwelling presence cannot guarantee our virtue. Even written on the tablet of our heart, the law cannot corral this restless human nature of ours. But God’s mercy is such that God chooses to leave us free to choose whether and how to respond to God’s love. So that, whether we conform to God’s way or violate it, we are steeped in mercy.

In her new book Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson writes “The old Christian theologies spoke of felix culpa, the fortunate fall. This is in effect another name for human agency, responsibility, even freedom. If we could do only what God wills, we would not be truly free, though to discern the will of God and act on it is freedom. Our human nature as fallen and our human nature as divine have a dynamic […] relation with each other, meeting at infinity, perhaps.”

Our total freedom to choose either good or evil, life or death, is perhaps God’s greatest mercy to us. Our lives and our choices are not predetermined. Yes, we know that we are all driven by instinctual forces, manipulated by past traumas and the unmet needs of our child selves, shaped by beliefs so deeply held as to be shadows on the wall of our consciousness. And yet, we are not now, nor have we ever been, predetermined or predestined. We are radically, frighteningly, and miraculously free. 

I can say with certainty that it is a miracle some of us are here today worshipping and loving and laughing and singing and not dead or in prison or drugged into oblivion. Because yes, we may be assaulted daily by the shadows of the past and the urges of our unmet longings and the compulsions the advertisers stir up in us, and yet still there remains that quiet tapping on the inner chamber of our hearts, that whisper of a voice that calls our name if get quiet enough to hear it.

Jesus himself offers us this example in this morning’s complex and rich passage from John. It’s one of the few times we hear something of Jesus’ inner thoughts. He knows that he is nearing his death and, in that death, the fulfilling of God’s purpose for him. Human as he is, he shows some reticence to accept death. But then he chooses actively to surrender himself to God’s will. That choice is not incidental. It is everything! Jesus has a choice. Like us, he has total freedom to walk away. Without that freedom, his obedience to God would be a puppet show, and his death and resurrection would mean nothing at all. His radical freedom—and ours—are the fountain from which the living waters of God’s love flow into our hearts. 

We might wonder how Jesus comes to be able to surrender himself to God’s purpose. The clue is in the voice from heaven. Each time that voice has echoes in the scriptures, it proclaims God’s love for Jesus, calling him the beloved child—first at his baptism and then at his transfiguration. By now it would see the mere echo of God’s voice in the thunder above him reminds Jesus of who and whose he is. And like the voice of a loving parent, God’s voice settles Jesus enough to choose once more the path of self-giving love.

This is the kind of obedience to which God calls us—not slavish or begrudging or tepid—but born from the sure knowledge that God loves us and wills for us our salvation and our healing. God desires nothing less than to drive the ruler of this world from our hearts and our lives, so that, like Jesus, we can lay down our lives for the world in radical and miraculous freedom. We can think of obedience as a chore, some kind of boring or difficult task that we know we need to do but would rather not. But the very fact that we can obey is itself God’s grace to us, the freedom of the children of God written on the flesh of our hearts.

I know that our lives are challenging. Often they’re boring, too. Sometimes they’re painful. And sometimes, hopefully more and more as we grow in Christ, our lives shine out with the radiance of God’s love and we hear in the thunder above us the reassurance that yes, we, too, are God’s beloved children. Our lives, in all their complexity, are God’s grace to us, and we can choose to see and celebrate and cultivate that grace, a freedom that is itself grace and opens the way to more grace. Because the more we learn to recognize God’s mercy to us, the more we come to see that everything, absolutely everything is grace. It is a miracle to be alive, my brothers and sisters. You are God’s miracle and God’s promise.