“Picture the soul drawing closer to God”

Five good reads for Holy Week + my favorite book on Easter

For Thursday:

The strange, humbling ritual of foot washing by Amy Frykholm in The Christian Century. “People don’t want to have their feet washed because it’s awkward, it’s weird, and it makes the recipient feel vulnerable. But when people do accept the task of washing one another’s feet, a strange and beautiful magic unfolds.”

“Bread” in Image Journal, a delicious, inventive theological excerpt from Lauren Winner’s Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God. “Some days I wish our Eucharistic meal in church were a bit more like a real meal, thick slices of focaccia and glasses of cabernet. But I have come to appreciate the small wafer, the small sip of wine. In the Holy Eucharist, we take a miniature sip of wine and a small bite of wafer, and we call this God’s abundance. I believe by regularly proclaiming that God’s abundance can be found in something small, we are gradually retooling our understandings of what is truly necessary for life.”

For Friday

Dust to Dust by Helen Rouner from Commonweal Magazine: “‘To love one another and die,’ by contrast, proposes a Christian temporality in which death is always imminent, always recent.” On a chance encounter with a nun & the poetry of W.H. Auden.

For Saturday

When You Are Nothing But Darkness,

The Museum Gaze with Marina Gross-Hoy

: “[Pierre] Soulages's paintings show us how, like the moon, we don't have to be our own source of light. We can just let our darkness be—trusting that something will meet us in our inky hopelessness.”

For Sunday

A gorgeous, vivid poem on fragility & resilience: “Preposterous” by

Courtney Martin

 

We must hold hold hold on.

Be preposterously gentle with ourselves despite all the

forgetting.

And a final poem of hidden hope, from the gentle sage Wendell Berry:

I. (from Leavings)

After the bitter nights
and the gray, cold days
comes a bright afternoon.
I go into the creek valley
and there are the horses, the black
and the white, lying in the warm
shine on a bed of dry hay.
They lie side by side,
identically posed as a painter
might imagine them:
heads up, ears and eyes
alert. They are beautiful in the light
and in the warmth happy. Such
harmonies are rare. This is
not the way the world
is. It is a possibility
nonetheless deeply seeded
within the world. It is
the way the world is sometimes.

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For Easter

If you need a good read for the coming Easter season—yes, it’s a whole, long, beautiful season and don’t we need all that light now more than ever?—here is one of my favorite books I’ve ever written: Risen: 50 Ways to Live Easter. Scripture (including all 4 Gospel accounts of the Resurrection), prayers, reflections, and creative practices to live all 50 days of Easter.

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