One really early morning, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

It happens sometimes: I awaken at 2 or 3 am and lay in bed wide awake for an hour, my mind too alert. I work over the day’s high points or low points. Sometimes I find myself anxious, sometimes just keyed up. Eventually I go back to sleep. But sometimes I do some significant reflecting or praying.

This is what happened during a recent time of restive wakefulness. On this particular morning I found myself thinking about Easter.

And not just thinking, but puzzling.

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It’s Holy Saturday, an often-overlooked part of Holy Week. But it’s so important to recognize this quiet day, I’m discovering, as we look back on Good Friday’s somberness and peer ahead to tomorrow’s Easter joy. This day, when Jesus rests in his tomb, helps us become more aware of all God has done for us, meeting the aches of the human heart with his companionship, even in moments of darkness. There’s a tender, touching meaning in the scene.

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For all we say, I wonder if we want what this season offers, this Holy Week so focused on the Cross of Christ. There’s glory in the message we tell on Good Friday, but also a bit of the gory: An innocent man put through a horrible death. The Cross, when we look hard, was dramatic: a trauma, even. It feels gritty, like sand in the mouth when you’re at the beach, gravelly instead of the smoothness of water or silk.

My new friend Margery Kennelly told a story in a recent sermon that made me think of how gripping and possibly off-putting the crucifixion of Christ can seem.

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A few days ago I took a tumble down the stairs of our back deck. 

It was windy and I was carrying an empty flattened packing box in one hand, and a house fixture I’d just painted in the other, taking it all to the garage, when a gust caught the cardboard like a sail, threw me off balance, and I went down headfirst. (I know: Really dumb.)

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A cartoonist, noticing how Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day sometimes (if rarely, like today) fall on the same day, imagined how greeting card companies might kill two birds with one stone.

Like a saying on a card that goes,

Roses are red / Violets are blue

Lent is beginning / No chocolates for you

 Or he thought of another card’s greeting, recalling the Episcopal prayer book’s language for our human condition:

Won’t you be my valentine…

you miserable offender?

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I have a passed-down photograph taken of me when just an infant. While my parents are now both deceased, for decades the gold-plated frame holding the almost sepia-toned image graced their bedroom dresser.

There was more behind the picture, as the saying goes, than the wall.

I’m chubby cheeked in the shot, two locks of my hair curled and pasted down on my forehead. I’m pushing myself up from my tummy on my baby-fat-laden forearms; someone off-camera—my mom? my dad?—had caught my attention. I’m delighting in the fuss, it seems, liking getting my picture taken.

And to look at me then you’d say I greeted my first weeks and months with wide smiles, with a child’s wide inquisitive open eyes.

And I see that I arrived, as I believe we all do when born into this wonder-filled and fallen world, with a longing to be loved and liked, along with occasional fears that I would not. I smiled for the photographer, but I must also have known in some moments a rattled need for security.

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A link to my Christian Century interview with the revered preacher and author Fleming Rutledge is found here. …

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I admit it: I have mixed feelings about the urge lots of us have this season. Yes, the threshold of a new year often rouses in me a normal desire to better myself. I too am prone to get more serious about tweaking a habit I have or circumstance I wrestle with.

But sometimes not. As to this year, I’m not sure yet about resolutions.

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I remember one Christmas morning when I was eleven, and I couldn’t stand the suspense. At dawn I sneaked out to our living room, long before anyone else was awake. I had one keen hope.

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Lately I’ve been intrigued by the strange and plague-ridden world of the medieval writer Julian of Norwich. I even video-recorded a talk about her (soon to be available online) with the title “Communion in the Chaos.” I hoped, in my presentation, to set her renowned, radiant faith amid the gritty, devastating events in her troubled English era.

And, as I worked, I thought I would look up definitions of the word chaos, which I’m seeing in print a lot these days as folks grope for words for the turmoil of our own aching, anxious times.

In physics, I learned, chaos is defined as “behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to … small changes in conditions.” I was struck especially by the first part: That’s how chaos can feel. Like things are random. That they are hard (or impossible) to predict. Subject to big forces and little moments.

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I went for almost three years avoiding COVID-19. Then, a few months ago, after a band rehearsal where, we later discovered, one of us was unknowingly infected, I began to sneeze and cough. So I took a home test. The first day: all good, no sign of the virus.

But then, the next, there was: a red-lined positive result. I felt disoriented for a moment, felt a bit of disbelief, some disappointment, and a tinge of fear. But I had, amid the jumble of emotions, enough clarity to realize that God can be trusted even in a setback, and that thanks would make a good alternative to an attack of anxiety.

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Loneliness hurts. We all know that. But I’m not sure most of us think of it as deadly. 

Yet the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, called our social isolation a “public health crisis.” A lack of belonging can harm your physical health, inflicting the same damage as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, leading to strokes and other debilitating illness. 

Lonesome is more, then, than an uncomfortable feeling. More than the pangs of the lovelorn coping with long-distance phone calls. (Not that that’s a picnic, as I can look back on and attest.) Loneliness springs from more than the packed schedules that crowd out time for friendships.

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On Saturday, November 4, I’m doing a special Zoom lecture/presentation on the great medieval figure Julian of Norwich (best known for saying “All shall be well”). There was more to the writer than a sunny disposition. Much more …

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Anybody out there heard of Taylor Swift?

Kidding! Who hasn’t?

Swift’s Eras stadium tour crashed Ticketmaster’s site when fans overwhelmed the Internet. One of her concerts in Seattle measured on a seismograph; fans’ cheering, dancing, and singing combined with her massive sound system to generate seismic activity of 2.3.

How do you know you’ve made it as a pop star? When your performance causes an earthquake.

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Tomorrow, Jill and I head to Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey as I begin a 2 1/2-month appointment as a Visiting Scholar!. I’m excited.

Other than a monthly meeting with other Scholars to share our learning, no responsibilities save research and study and writing. I’m anticipating. …

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When’s the last time you said to yourself, “That just isn’t right”?

I’m talking about our reaction to some terrible situation, some unfairness, some inhuman cruelty. You feel anger or sorrow or an aching sense of bewilderment over the indignity done. The sheer wrongness.

And it doesn’t help that the news sometimes seems downright apocalyptic. With temperatures soaring, breaking records, wilting people’s souls. Injustice is in on full display. And all the while our communities are more divided, polarized, at odds than ever.

Paul the apostle turned to a dramatic image to help us with all that. …

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I’m thinking of the time my son Micah was little. He battled chronic ear infections back then. The allergy-related fluid in his ears made it hard for him to hear words clearly. Micah was slower to pick up words. He wanted to talk, but his lack of vocabulary frustrated his attempts.

We noticed this especially when we had nightly family prayers just before the boys went to bed.

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My friend Chris Maxwell is a writer—a fellow minister with a love of words—and a way with words.

He told me about rereading a chapter he was about to send off to his publisher, a chapter in which he had quoted Jesus’s invitation to rest, as in, “Come to me, all you are weary and heavy-laden.” Jesus goes on to say the burden he lays on us—the yoke— will be light.

Chris discovered, though, that he had misspelled one word—frequently.

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My wife and I recently took a trip to the Canadian Rockies to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary--something special to mark that milestone of our decades of life together.

We saw turquoise lakes and stunning waterfalls; wildlife like bears and bighorn sheep; we stopped at quaint shops. And, no surprise, the most impressive parts of our traveling in the Rockies had to do with mountains: Snow-capped peaks filled our sight just about our whole time there—everywhere we turned.

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There we were, in our backyard for this momentous event. The gently clouded, mostly sunny, warmer-than-normal weather cooperated. (Whew!)

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