Recently I discovered a disturbing web site: www.withoutsanctuary.org. It documents postcards of lynchings in earlier times in America, most of the victims black. The scenes printed for mass distribution depict gut-wrenching brutality and obvious signs of torture leading up to the hangings. Just as striking is the nonchalance of the perpetrators, and the fact that the photographs, some capturing a carnival atmosphere with children present, became postcard “souvenirs,” a grotesque testimony to the way humans can grossly dehumanize one another. My discovery of the unspeakable atrocities coincided with something that has come back to mind, during this season of Lent.

A woman I heard about tried a prayer experiment. She had already decided she wanted to do less talking, more listening for a larger voice. She sat in a chair and tried to imagine the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the room sitting around her, conversing and communing. “I wanted,” she said, “to eavesdrop on the Trinity.”

What does it mean to grow close to someone in a healthy way? Is it a merging of souls, a fusing of identities? Do we not instead grow closer, perhaps intensely and intimately so, but still remain distinct? Tackling the question in the sphere of human relationships helps me make sense of what it means to grow into intimacy with God.

My new friend Kerry Egan spends her days with dying people, listening and talking. Those conversations come with her job as a hospice chaplain, but the way her eyes come alive when she talks about what she has learned shows that it’s also a calling.

My mom rocked me when I was little, holding me close. She sang sometimes, the rails of the rocker creaking in calming rhythm. One nursery ballad told of the unlikely courtship of a frog and mouse. It sounded fairytale-like, though looking back now it seems more like a portent.

Sometimes people who know about my past writing will ask, “Are you working on something now?” People might run into me at Indah or Drip--local coffee hangouts--my laptop open, and wonder.