One Thousand Words - Stories On The Way: Recent Episodes
Matthew Clark
Where the River Goes - Steven Beebe, “Longing for Home"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E25_WTRG_Beebe.mp3Steven A. Beebe, Ph.D., is Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Texas State University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at both Oxford University and Cambridge University and author or co-author of 15 books (with editions totaling more than 85 books) used at hundreds of universities throughout the world (including Russian, Chinese, Canadian and International editions) by several million students. He is also author or co-author of 75 articles/chapters emphasizing communication skill development. He received Texas State’s highest awards for teaching, research, and service, served as president of the National Communication Association, and was named Outstanding Communication Professor in America by the National Speaker’s Association. His book, C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication, was the basis for selection as Scholar of the Year by the Religious Communication Association.
Find Steven on Amazon
How Long?
by Matthew Clark
There’s nothing new beneath the sun
There is no song that ain’t been sung
But there is one that won’t go on forever
That song is writ in blood and tears
That beat down through these weary years
A song that burns down in our bones like a fever
CHORUS
How long, how long, Oh Lord?
Till we hang our broken harps up by the River?
How long, how long, Oh Lord?
Till a world that went so wrong is delivered
Your Bride has waited patiently
Kept watch these many centuries
Your family tree sent roots down deep to listen
These branches thirst for righteousness
For springs to burst the firmament
To wash this withered riverbed with music
BRIDGE
Count me among the fools, Out carving little boats
In the middle of the desert
Who still believes in you, And every word you spoke
And keeps and eye out for the weather
CHORUS
How long, how long, Oh Lord?
Till the labor pain of song gives way to wonder?
How long, how long, Oh Lord?
Till the day you tear the veil of sky asunder
The post S6:E25 – Where the River Goes: Steven Beebe, “Longing for Home” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
City Walls, pt 2by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/OTW_S6_E21_City-walls-2.mp3* Follow * Follow * Follow * Follow Sign up for the NewsletterThanks for signing up!First Name
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“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Once upon a time, when I was around twenty, I think, I drove out to a state park somewhere in Mississippi late at night in a rainstorm. I was a late adopter to cell phones, and somewhat enjoyed being unreachable at the time. What that means is that all I had were some general directions to the little lodge where a dear friend of mine was teaching Bible for a group of college students. This guy had been a mentor to me growing up, and I hadn’t seen him in a while. Last minute, I decided to crash this retreat, hear him teach, and give this longtime friend a big hug. But, I got lost.
The big rainstorm descended upon the state park right alongside the darkness of night before I got there. I had no GPS, and I couldn’t find the retreat center. I knew I was pretty close, but after a while, I decided to give up for the night.
I’ve had two vehicles in my adult life. Right now, I have a Sprinter van that I converted into a camper. Back then, I had a nissan maxima that I eventually put about 300,000 miles on. When I decided I was more likely to find my friend in the daylight in clearer weather, I crawled through the backseat of my maxima and curled up in a little nest of blankets in the trunk. That’s where I slept. The next morning, sure enough, I found the retreat center in the daylight and met my friend.
I’ll never forget what he said to me, after hearing about the prior evening’s adventures. He looked me in the face and said, “Matthew, you are a risk-taker.” And he smiled proudly. A took a sip of the hot coffee he’d given me a few minutes earlier, but the warmth I felt all over had more to do with the praise from this older brother in the Lord I so deeply respected.
I started this podcast with a famous C.S. Lewis quote: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” Love is a risk. It may be a calculated risk. I mean we do our best to be wise about it, but, in the end, to love is to voluntarily put ourselves in someone else’s hands.
Before Holy Week, I posted Part 1 on this City Walls theme. That’s episode 12, if you want to go back and listen to it. In it, I talked about how Cain is portrayed as someone who, after killing his brother Abel, is sent into the wilderness where he “walls himself off,” rather than trusting God’s way of vulnerable relationality. That way of vulnerable relationality was gifted to us by God a few chapters earlier in the form of a strong delivering ally called woman. The man can only be truly human and escape the trap of not-good aloneness if he learns to love and be loved by someone outside of himself. But to go outside of ourselves is a risk. To allow someone to be truly other than us and to refuse to dominate, control, or manipulate that other means we are choosing to be wound-able. Cain, as he goes out, chooses to secure his own invulnerability by walling himself off. He’s not taking any risks.
This week, in part two, I wanted to look at some less obvious ‘walls’ that we build around ourselves.
Right now, I’m looking at a screen. I wish you and I were talking face to face. That’s the ideal, but we make do with what we’ve got, and I’m thankful for the technology that allows for some measure of connection to grow or be maintained at great distances. I really am. But what I long for is real presence, don’t you? Or maybe you don’t? Maybe sometimes I don’t? Why not? Because the screen is less risky, less vulnerable. Our screens can become like Cain’s city walls–devices that allow us to simulate connection without having to be truly vulnerable.
Screens and devices are walls that pretend not to be walls. Real connection just can’t be reduced like that. We can watch people instead of knowing them, interact without being known, receive without giving. Risk, push-back, and real personhood are beyond reach, even as a strong sense of connection is simulated. I mean they give us a sensation of being connected, but we’re missing out on so much. Screens are like the old idols that have eyes but can’t see, ears but can’t hear, and so on. The danger we’re in is that we become like the things we worship, and if we worship walls that pretend not to be walls, it becomes easier and easier to be deaf and blind to the real people in our lives, even to our own hearts.
Vulnerability, mutuality, and the full presence of the person are what God established as the ways he intended for us to find safety and flourishing in this world. You may have heard it called “attachment,” and it’s something I think we are all struggling to find these days.
Lately, I’m on the lookout for the ways that I’m walking in the footsteps of Cain, instead of Jesus. If the way of Cain is to build walls, avoid vulnerability, simulate connection, trust myself alone, and ultimately become less and less human, it seems the way of Christ is to take risks, accept vulnerability as a good feature calling me to move toward real relationships, trust others, and become more human.
In the end, God never asks us to do anything he’s not willing to do. He always goes first and blazes the trail to joy. God doesn’t wall himself off. He makes a world and allows it real otherness from himself, so that he can enter into relationship with us. It’s a vulnerable move. God is choosing to take a risk by not controlling or manipulating us. Our God is brave and wound-able, he refuses the way of coercion and trespass. He chooses to humbly serve, quietly die, opening to us an ongoing invitation of beauty. He tears down the dividing wall of hostility, the defensive mechanisms we construct that cut us off from deep connection, he tears the curtain of the temple in two, carrying his cross outside the city walls to die naked — to meet anyone who is willing to leave a simulated life of self-preservation and take a risk on real attachment. Jesus is showing up, and he is inviting us to choose the richness and risk of relationality over the isolation and control of fearful self-protection. Like the woman before the fall, God himself is our Ezer, our strong delivering ally who meets us in our loneliness, making a way for a life together that is “very good.”
Our Father, you created us for deep, life-giving interdependence and love, but we feel the danger in risking our hearts to those around us. It is true that not everyone is worthy of our trust. Give us the wisdom we need to discern who will take good care of our hearts, and who are those who, like you said, if we offer them pearls will, like pigs, carelessly stomp them into the mud. Free us from a life of fearful self-protection, give us courage to be more and more human as we follow your example, Jesus, of staying warm-hearted in a world whose heart is growing cold. Holy Spirit, give us the honesty to recognize when we are using the tools at hand to anesthetize the healthy pain of loneliness that would call us to connect to others. Teach us the deliberate goodness of our needs, limitations, and desires for attachment, and “set the lonely in families,” Lord. Finally, shape in us the kind of life you live together, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—a life of mutual submission, harmony, and self-emptying love. May your kind of life be realized here through your people, and may all peoples be drawn to your most beautiful ways for their own relief and your delight. Amen. The post S6:E21 – City Walls, pt 2 appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Easter: Secret Strength & Deeper Magicby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Holy-Week-Easter-Secret-Strength-Deeper-Magic.mp3The following is a version edited for length of the full length article, “Easter in the Liturgical Year” by the late Fr. Alexander Schmemann.
In the center of our liturgical life, in the very center of that time which we measure as year, we find the feast of Christ’s Resurrection. What is Resurrection? Resurrection is the appearance in this world, completely dominated by time and therefore by death, of a life that will have no end. The one who rose again from the dead does not die anymore. In this world of ours, not somewhere else, not in a world that we do not know at all, but in our world, there appeared one morning Someone who is beyond death and yet in our time. This meaning of Christ’s Resurrection, this great joy, is the central theme of Christianity…
The center, the day, that gives meaning to all days and therefore to all time, is that yearly commemoration of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter. This is always the end and the beginning. We are always living after Easter, and we are always going toward Easter. Easter is the earliest Christian feast. The whole tone and meaning of the liturgical life of the Church is contained in Easter, together with the subsequent fifty-day period, which culminates in the feast of the Pentecost, the coming down of Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. This unique Easter celebration is reflected every week in the Christian Sunday… every Sunday we have a little Easter.
St. Paul says: “If Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain.” There is nothing else to believe. This is the real center, and it is only in reference to Easter as the end of all natural time and the beginning of the new time in which we as Christians have to live that we can understand the whole liturgical year.
We are no longer people who are living in time as [if it were] a meaningless process, which makes us first old and then ends in our disappearance. We are given not only a new meaning in life, but even death itself has acquired a new significance. In the Troparion at Easter we say, “He trampled down death by death.” We do not say that He trampled down death by the Resurrection, but by death. A Christian still faces death as a decomposition of the body, as an end; yet in Christ, in the Church, because of Easter, because of Pentecost, death is no longer just the end but it is the beginning also. It is not something meaningless which therefore gives a meaningless taste to all of life. Death means entering into the Easter of the Lord. Christianity is, first of all, the proclamation in this world of Christ’s Resurrection.
We often use the term “grace.” But what is grace? Charisma in Greek means not only grace but also joy. “And I will give you the joy that no one will take away from you…” If I stress this point so much, it is because I am sure that, if we have a message to our own people, it is that message of Easter joy which finds its climax on Easter night. When we stand at the door of the church and the priest has said, “Christ Is Risen,” then the night becomes, in the terms of St. Gregory of Nyssa, “lighter than the day.” This is the secret strength, the real root of Christian experience. Only within the framework of this joy can we understand everything else.
Special Thanks to Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson for reading our Narnia passage this week. Please visit her website: http://kirstinjeffreyjohnson.com/
Kirstin has a wonderful Instagram account I bet you’d love: @mythopoeic_life
Kirstin, among many other scholarly works, has written and edited some great material on The Inklings and George Macdonald that you should definitely check out.
She’s also featured in the documentary “The Fantasy Makers – Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald” on Amazon Prime. Here’s the trailer for that:
The post S6:E20 – Easter: Secret Strength and Deeper Magic appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Holy Week: Easter Sundayby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Holy-Week-Easter-Sunday.mp3John 20:11-18
But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. As she wept, she bent down and looked into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white sitting where Jesus’ body had been lying, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” Mary replied, “They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have put him!” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?” Because she thought he was the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will take him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni” (which means Teacher). Jesus replied, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father. Go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene came and informed the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what Jesus had said to her.
Imagine with me – Amy Baik Lee, “In the space of a single word”
The women who had followed Jesus from Galilee stood at a distance watching Him breathe His last.
On the day of Preparation they followed Joseph of Arimathea and saw the tomb and Jesus’ body laid in it. The record in Luke says nothing of how they felt, or what they said amongst themselves, or how long they lingered in the last place they might see their Lord.
But their next act reminds me poignantly of a mother who once wrote about preparing for the death of her terminally ill daughter. All throughout the daughter’s young life she had packed her lunch for school, and snacks, clothes, and toys for family trips. But in those grief-weighted days at the end… what could she pack for her now? What could she give her for this long journey?
The women went back and prepared spices and ointments before the sun set and Sabbath began. This was, perhaps, the last loving thing they would be able to do for Jesus.
And none of it would be needed.
What happened to those spices? Did they fall to the ground with the women’s faces as the angels asked, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Were they clutched in their arms as the women took to their feet, leaving a fragrant trail of haste and incredulity?
*
In his gospel, John continues the account. Mary Magdalene stands weeping after the disciples have come and beheld the empty tomb and gone home. The spices are no longer present — but neither is the body they were intended for.
The two angels in the tomb ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
“They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him,” she replies. She turns to see a man, likely the gardener, who asks her the same question.
She does not know him until He says her name.
All the post-resurrection moments in which the eyes of Jesus’ followers open to recognize Him have something to tell us, I think; this one arrests my heart.
After all the earth-shattering events whose import and magnitude could be sensed, even if not fully comprehended; after the piercing agony of watching from a distance, and wondering what will become of her and the women with her; after wishing to catch one last sight of His body, at the very least, and yearning to hear His voice just one more time — here He is, and all He says is a single word. Not His own name, as He told Moses and the Israelites with equal succinctness so long ago — but hers.
“Mary.”
In the space of that word, I remember that the Chief Shepherd calls each of His sheep by name. The Captain of the Fishers of Men is, astonishingly, not in the business of pulling up anonymous crowds in a net; we are each line-caught, as it were.
In the tidal rush of world events and catastrophes, we are not forgotten. It is a truth that the Sons of Korah knew ages ago: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea…” (Ps. 46:1-2) — and it is a truth reiterated straightaway by the resurrected presence of Christ. He is here, with me, with you, not vaguely, not abstractly, not merely on the level of nations, but right here.
*
Today we were to host an Easter egg hunt. How I miss the sound of children laughing in the spring slant of sunlight across the garden. There ought to be bunting fluttering overhead here, and merry shouts of discovery, and the silent rejoicing of emerging tulips to trumpet Christ’s resurrection with color and vim.
But white snow blankets the ground instead, as heavy as the drift of this spring’s headlines. In place of putting up the banded banners, we’ve covered the strawberry crowns.
Make no mistake: we will rise to the joy of the occasion nonetheless; we will tuck a few eggs into bookshelves and hidden corners, and gather around the table with clasped hands and hearts full of wonder at the decisiveness of the Lord’s victory. We will still make way for “foolish and crucially beautiful things,” as Matthew mentioned on Wednesday, especially in this time of grief and limitation.
But perhaps the best commemoration I can make — the act most resonant with that new and holy morning so many years ago — is to come with confidence before the throne of grace, and look full in the face of His love. This Love who was not satisfied to die for mankind in one indistinguishable mass, but who stooped to look the desperate invalid in the eye, who raised His head to call directly to the single outcast in the sycamore tree. This Love who knows my face, and who calls me by my own name.
And so it is that we may turn from the ever-present specter of death with the gladness of Mary hearing the voice from beyond the grave. In place of spices to mask the decay of shrouded hope, here is, instead, the fragrance of life coming upon the wind of the Spirit — deep strength and purpose and joy in the face of an ageless Gardener as He prepares a place for us.
Alleluia; He is risen indeed.
Poem: Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson; John Updike – “Seven Stanzas at Easter”
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
Song: Son of Laughter (Chris Slaten), “The Gardener”
Amid the morning mist the gardener sings
To infant stems he bends almost whisperings
Their young unopened fists are softening
Their lily heads shall spread open offerings
I am learning how to see
Oh what is not as it shall be
And he is still singing over me
You found me by the riverside
So sick of my old ways I cried
I try, I try but I see no change in me
And you told me, Love change can be slow
Just look how long this river goes
To sketch its steep canyon deep calligraphies
I am learning how to see
Oh what is not as it shall be
And he is still singing over me
And that rivers’s still washing over me
So I was so confused the day we buried you
Searching in vain for a reply
I kissed the lines along your eyes
If we’re the work of thousands of days
Well, who could throw such work away?
Amid the morning mist the gardener sings
To infant stems he bends almost whisperings
And I stand alone in his periphery
Where this cemetery carries many scattered seeds
And I am learning how to see
Oh, what is not as it shall be
Yes, all that I’ve loved and all that I’ve known
Will one day be laid in this valley of bones
And with a song the Gardener
Will call all we are not as if we were
And will come springing from the earth
Prayer: Brian Brown, The Collect for Easter Sunday
O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten
Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection
delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die
daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of
his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and for ever. Amen.
*The artwork featured above was created by Shannon Sigler.
The post S6:E20: Holy Week: Easter Sunday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Holy Week: Saturday, The gift of the quiet in-betweenby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Holy-Week-Saturday-The-gift-of-the-quiet-in-between.mp3Today is a strange day, isn’t it? What do we do with today? It’s this empty, weird time just sort of suspended between Jesus’s death and his resurrection. Do we ignore it? Does it matter?
Jesus could have risen the very next morning. I don’t think he waited just to prove he was really dead, the Roman authorities confirmed that by jabbing a spearhead into his side and through his heart, which turned out to be unnecessary since he was already dead anyway. Why wait? Why leave everybody in suspense a whole day? At first glance, it seems a little mean.
But, I wonder whether there’s not some wise and compassionate intention toward us from Jesus built into the waiting this Saturday. It’s uncomfortable to sit with our grief. This day’s deep silence is a kind of resounding silence that sounds out the depths of our own hearts. Sailors take soundings to measure how far down the sea floor is, and today is a kind of sounding that calls us to float suspended and allow ourselves to fathom rather than fix the things that grief us most. We want to paddle the boat ashore and arrive as fast as possible at the resurrection; but Jesus himself, in the wisdom of his patience, seems to recommend against hurrying away from our pain. Jesus, his Father, and the Holy Spirit, seem themselves to be willing to pause here and take it in.
I thought about not doing an episode today, but my mind is changed. This is an important day. We can’t skip it or rush past it. This Suspended Saturday is God’s gift to us just as much as Good Friday or Easter Morning. Because so much of our lives inhabit a space like this, if we’re honest. This in-betweenness may even take up the majority of our human experience? Death is all around us, literal dying as well as figurative deaths, and this is the same world Jesus died in. Resurrection has already literally taken place in this same world we live in, and we’re surrounded by little signs of its reality.
But many of our days are long Saturdays like this one, where we sink down into our sorrows and disappointments, losses and failures, the ways others have trespassed against us and how we have trespassed against them, the death of certain hopes. We hold in our left hand the reality of all kinds of death, and we hold the reality of God’s victory in our right hand, and we don’t let either one cancel out the other.
This Saturday frees us to be who and where we really are much of the time, which is suspended in the realm of pilgrimage, of being on the way, truthful about where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and patiently, with painful honesty, faithfully grieving where we are right now.
Lewis’s devil Screwtape says, “Music and silence – how I hate them both!” And Josef Pieper says that there is a kind of music that “opens a path into the realm of silence.” It is a fruitful silence. This Silent Saturday, like a rest suspended between the two high notes of Friday and Sunday, has been intentionally composed by God. And the silent music he sings for us today, is one that we need to stop and attend carefully to. This silence, like the silence of a wintering garden, has its own way of speaking things that we desperately need to hear.
How kind of Jesus to be willing himself to sit with us in this in-between space. How kind of Jesus to minister to us here, remaining silently present as the slow story of faith-keeping unfolds without jumping forward to conclusions, or interrupting with fix-its. How compassionate of Jesus to resist the temptation to prematurely cheer us up with Easter, when what we need most is to weep and make full contact with our grief.
We say “Jesus is the answer”, and he is; and sometimes the answer he gives is to refrain from answering so we have time to sink down into the significance of good questions. Today, I wonder if maybe he’s setting us an example as a good listener and friend, one who knows the best ways to “bind up the brokenhearted”.
Luke 23:50-56
Now there was a man named Joseph who was a member of the council, a good and righteous man. (He had not consented to their plan and action.) He was from the Judean town of Arimathea, and was looking forward to the kingdom of God. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and placed it in a tomb cut out of the rock, where no one had yet been buried. It was the day of preparation and the Sabbath was beginning. The women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it. Then they returned and prepared aromatic spices and perfumes.
On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.
Imagine with me – Taylor Leonhardt, “On Holy Saturday”
How I would like to skip this part.
I can do sorrow, Lord,
Weep with you in Gethsemane,
Climb beside you to Golgotha
Til your tears become mine
I am no stranger to death.
I can do joy, Lord
Look for angels in the graveyard,
Embrace you by the seashore,
Sit down with you to breakfast.
I am no stranger to resurrection.
But stranger to me is the space between
Death and life
Despair and hope
The crush of the grape and the first sip
Of new wine.
Strange is the silence between my question and your answer,
But this is the room you haunt,
This is where you hover,
over the liminal waters of my unknowing,
Breathing on the smoldering wicks.
Tell me again
You will not let the flame
go out.
Song – Taylor Leonhardt – Lights gone out
Lord, I pray your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Today it’s hard to believe in
Hell has never come quite so close
I see the whites of his eyes and oh
I feel the breaking of every bone
CHORUS
What do I do now that all the light’s gone out?
How many times did I promise to
Walk through the smoke and the fire with you
That long before I ever knew the flame
Not them, not this, not the thing that I cannot fix
The house is burning and I’m helpless, I’m helpless
CHORUS
What do I do now that all the light’s gone out?
What will we find at the bottom of
This bitter drink this awful cup
When all the pain’s been swallowed up
Will it make us different
Will we say with confidence
That the love was worth the risk
That the end is joy?
CHORUS
What do I do now that all the light’s gone out?
Poem – Matthew Clark, Christina Rossetti – “A Better Resurrection”
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numb’d too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.
My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.
My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold;
Cast in the fire the perish’d thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King:
O Jesus, drink of me.
Prayer – Brian Brown, Collect for Holy Saturday
O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the
crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and
rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the
coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of
life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
*The image featured above was created by Shannon Sigler.
The post S6:E19 – Holy Week: Saturday, The Gift of the Quiet In-Between appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Holy Week: Good Fridayby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Holy-Week-Good-Friday.mp3Today is Crucifixion Day, Good Friday. Today we can’t pretend anymore that everything will be okay, we can’t be idealists and act like people will simply improve. While being led to Golgotha, Jesus remarks, “If this is what they do to the tree when it’s green, how much worse will it be when it’s dry?” Luke 23:31. And Muggeridge says,
“Jesus was not in our contemporary sense, an idealist, and gives no intimation that the world could be made better on its own terms any more than that individual human beings could make themselves better on their own terms…Jesus was concerned with showing us how men could be reborn.”
In the few minutes we have together in this podcast, what can be said about the Cross of Jesus? It’s worth saying that it was necessary, our “wound is incurable”, death is the only remedy. I can’t help but squirm today, looking at a crucified Jesus – surely I’m not as bad off as that? Aren’t you being a little dramatic about all this, overreacting a bit, Lord? But, I know better, really. I’m full of things that, if even my closest friends knew, I’d be terrified they’d abandon me. You’re full of those things, too, I imagine, unless I really am utterly alone in this world. (But we both know better than that. At least, I pray you do.)
I said death is the only remedy, but not our own deaths.
Babies don’t have what’s called ‘object permanence’, if I hide behind the couch, to them, I’ve ceased to exist. But we’re adults; we can’t pretend our sin just goes away, when we refuse to look at it. Even secular psychology admits that ignored pain will come back and bite you till you pay attention to it. No, to really go away, our guilt must actually go somewhere. At the cross, Jesus somehow – we don’t really know how – takes us and our sin into himself, and dis-members us from it while re-membering us to himself and his inextinguishable life.
Again, Lewis says that ultimately we don’t know how the cross works, we’ve simply been assured that it does. Whatever needed to be done to get us home, has been done for us. That’s the Christian claim.
And finally, I can’t help but think of my friend from India who grew up without any contact with Christians, no Bible, nothing. But somehow she heard through the grapevine that there was this god, just one among the millions of gods, called Jesus, whose specialty was healing. That was interesting because she was sick at the time, but she also heard that he had done something really strange. Just because he loved them, he had died for his friends. Why would such a grand cosmic personality lay down his life for his friends? To my friend, the concept of guilt or sin that’s so familiar to me, was nowhere on her radar. But, still, she was captivated by Jesus’s beauty, simply because he would do such an utterly graceful, beautiful thing for his friends. She picked up on the fragrance of the costly perfume long before she recognized her own need to be cleansed.
This is a hard day, because Jesus’s brutalized face, faces us with the truth about ourselves – asking us to face him with our true faces. We squirm; I squirm. How painful it is to maintain eye-contact with that suffering face. But it is my unmet sorrow and hatred I meet there that he is meeting. Oh God what a pain to witness your love for me! But, I must look, too, because he is so beautiful in his dying. And I know this beauty is of a kind from which ‘men hide their faces’, for it is terrible to behold that bright fixity of kindness. We’re life-long grave dwellers, with clammy palms pressed over our eyes to keep out the sun, which is our only hope if we’re going to get any warmth back in these cold bones.
At any rate, today, we look. Long and hard. Jesus received a kind of un-communion from our hands, he opened his flesh to receive our broken bodies, and he drank the cup of our bad blood, passed down from the first Adam. All so he can offer us the fresh, fragrant bread of his body, and new blood-warming wine of God’s forgiveness and everlasting life.
Psalm 22
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
I groan in prayer, but help seems far away.
My God, I cry out during the day,
but you do not answer,
and during the night my prayers do not let up.
You are holy;
you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel.
In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted in you and you rescued them.
To you they cried out, and they were saved;
in you they trusted and they were not disappointed.
But I am a worm, not a man;
people insult me and despise me.
All who see me taunt me;
they mock me and shake their heads.
They say,
“Commit yourself to the Lord!
Let the Lord rescue him!
Let the Lord deliver him, for he delights in him.”
Yes, you are the one who brought me out from the womb
and made me feel secure on my mother’s breasts.
I have been dependent on you since birth;
from the time I came out of my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Do not remain far away from me,
for trouble is near and I have no one to help me.
Many bulls surround me;
powerful bulls of Bashan hem me in.
They open their mouths to devour me
like a roaring lion that rips its prey.
My strength drains away like water;
all my bones are dislocated.
My heart is like wax;
it melts away inside me.
The roof of my mouth is as dry as a piece of pottery;
my tongue sticks to my gums.
You set me in the dust of death.
Yes, wild dogs surround me—
a gang of evil men crowd around me;
like a lion they pin my hands and feet.
I can count all my bones;
my enemies are gloating over me in triumph.
They are dividing up my clothes among themselves;
they are rolling dice for my garments.
But you, O Lord, do not remain far away.
You are my source of strength. Hurry and help me!
Deliver me from the sword.
Save my life from the claws of the wild dogs.
Rescue me from the mouth of the lion,
and from the horns of the wild oxen.
You have answered me.
I will declare your name to my countrymen.
In the middle of the assembly I will praise you.
You loyal followers of the Lord, praise him.
All you descendants of Jacob, honor him.
All you descendants of Israel, stand in awe of him.
For he did not despise or detest the suffering of the oppressed.
He did not ignore him;
when he cried out to him, he responded.
You are the reason I offer praise in the great assembly;
I will fulfill my promises before the Lord’s loyal followers.
Let the oppressed eat and be filled.
Let those who seek his help praise the Lord.
May you live forever!
Let all the people of the earth acknowledge the Lord and turn to him.
Let all the nations worship you.
For the Lord is king
and rules over the nations.
All the thriving people of the earth will join the celebration and worship;
all those who are descending into the grave will bow before him,
including those who cannot preserve their lives.
A whole generation will serve him;
they will tell the next generation about the Lord.
They will come and tell about his saving deeds;
they will tell a future generation what he has accomplished.
Imagine with me – Amy Baik Lee, “Blood bought gift of loneliness”
One spring afternoon eleven years ago, I boarded the bus on my college campus.
Virginia in the spring is a promise of a hundred jubilant displays of beauty: red tulips against a weathered white garden door, dogwoods spreading lacy plumage along serpentine walls, the slant of afternoon gold on red-bricked colonial promenades.
I vaguely remember the swaying dance of komorebi — that welcome Japanese word for the winking of sunlight as it filters through tree leaves — along my walk to the bus stop. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to walk under archways of that dappled light, but on this day, even as I stood right beneath the trees, the komorebi was only a distant impression.
I had made the decision to set a situation in my life right, knowing that the ramifications would affect not only me but the people closest to me. That afternoon, I put that penalty in motion, and braced myself to break the news to my loved ones. My imagination ran wild on the bus as I pictured the hurt and betrayal on those familiar faces, and for a brief, flitting moment, the terror of utter loneliness gripped me.
And yet, something within rose up in that moment to say, simply: No. As searing as my choice was, I realized I did not know the stark and solitary abandonment that signaled total separation. Later that week I jotted down my subsequent thoughts:
Even now as I pen the words I know that I will never fully comprehend it — the concept becomes so familiar in the story of Calvary — but He died that I should never feel such loneliness.
In the years since that bus ride, I’ve known different measures and concentrations of isolation: in postpartum depression, parental anxiety in the emergency room, and the general disorientation of a cross-country move. There was also a time, very long ago, that a deep-seated, fear-fed guilt whispered that I was past forgiveness and redemption.
But the silence of Gethsemane and Calvary reveal that I’ve never known what it is to be truly forsaken. And perhaps, until this moment, I’ve never recognized what Christ did to loneliness. As Donne says, out of His sacrifice “we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” Death and its power, crushed — but loneliness?
Loneliness has become our gift of grace.
For intimacy waits now where there should have been isolation. As dark as the days may become, the ears of heaven will never be shut to broken cries and tentative approaches. Pain begets it — exhaustion draws me into it — but loneliness is now and so often a merciful usher into the presence of God, there to be reminded of things I’ve forgotten. The blood of Christ, beading His brow in agony and cascading out of His side in death, transformed it into a gateway instead of a final clang of condemnation.
He died that I should never feel such loneliness as He felt.
And so I see how the world teems with overtures of His love instead. In the hope of a new morning after a night of weeping. In the laughter dimpling a baby’s face. In the sun fishtailing through the high boughs of elm and oak overhead, and even in every leaden moment of suffering that bids me view eternity with hope instead of denial. God-With-Us draws us in glory, in our rawest hurts, and in life to the full, always toward what lasts and fills better than our souls know to ask. His loneliness was taken up to redeem ours.
I clutched that truth that day, held onto it as the bus lurched through Grounds, and —
I dared to think it was no coincidence that it was Good Friday.
Poem – Brian Brown – T.S. Elliot – East Coker IV
IV
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
Song: Matthew Clark – “Follow you Down”
Philippians 2
Whoever would save their life, will lose it
CHORUS
I want to be in your story, Jesus
I want to follow you down
Whoever would lose their life, will save it
CHORUS
BRIDGE
Your love is teaching me a new story
Brian Brown – Collect for Good Friday
Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your
family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be
betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer
death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
* The collage featured above was created by Shannon Sigler.
The post S6:E18 – Holy Week: Good Friday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Holy Week: Maundy Thursdayby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Holy-Week-Maundy-Thursday.mp3John 13:3-5,34
Because Jesus knew that the Father had handed all things over to him, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, 4 he got up from the meal, removed his outer clothes, took a towel and tied it around himself. 5 He poured water into the washbasin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to dry them with the towel he had wrapped around himself.
“I give you a new commandment—to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
Matthew 26:26-30
While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after giving thanks he broke it, gave it to his disciples, and said, “Take, eat, this is my body.” And after taking the cup and giving thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, that is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, from now on I will not drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” After singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.
Song – Son of Laughter (Chris Slaten) – The Meal we could not make
Sit beside me now, there’s so much that we’ve shared,
like the comfort of our doubts and the safety of despair.
So many promises have just been tricks.
So many remedies have made us sick.
Do you even have it in you to savor something new?
Chorus:
Take and eat, all the work is done.
Stretch out your feet in the Sabbath sun.
With this bread, old ambitions break.
As we pour the wine, we feel our hungry hearts awake
to the meal we could not make.
Look around the table, behold your company.
See the needy and unlovable and many enemies.
I know that peace has never worked before,
but this feast satisfies the thirst for war,
for justice has been won, and mercy’s made us new.
(Chorus)
Do you recognize me now? It’s been so many years
since you laid me in the ground and planted me with tears.
We used to joke about the great hereafter.
Now he’s made each of us a son of laughter.
That little hope in you is finally coming true.
(Chorus)
Matthew 26:36-40
Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to the disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and became anguished and distressed. Then he said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death. Remain here and stay awake with me.” Going a little farther, he threw himself down with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me! Yet not what I will, but what you will.” Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping.
Imagine with me – Amy Baik Lee, thoughts on “Nondum”
When I read Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Nondum” earlier this year, I felt a curious sense of relief, the kind that only comes when you hear the details of your bleakest landscape described back to you from someone else familiar with the terrain. No two people travel the same road, but sometimes knowing that another has walked a similar valley is enough to keep hope flickering until the road begins to bend upward.
In the prayers that “[seem] lost in desert ways,” and the disoriented guesses with which “we clothe Thee, unseen King,” Hopkins shows that he understands intimately the pain of waiting in the face of silence, surrounded by seeming “abysses infinite.” The measured cadence of the first five stanzas picks up in the sixth like the sudden beat of a pounding heart — “And hosts confront with flags unfurled / And zeal is flushed and pity bleeds / And truth is heard, with tears impearled” — ebbing, afterward, into the rhythm of a checked sob, and then a prayer such as a weaned child might utter (cf. Ps. 131:2): “And lead me child-like by the hand; / If still in darkness not in fear.”
In two lines, Hopkins encapsulates my greatest request of my Father, coming out of this past year.
“Nondum” means “not yet” in Latin. So much has not yet come to fulfillment — so much that can only come to maturity in the soil of adversity and trial — but what the poem gives me is confidence that God, too, understands.
I’ve said too much already, but I wanted to share this poem this week in hopes it might encourage some of you, friends. The “morn eternal” will break, and He who bled agony in Gethsemane holds us in these long pre-dawn hours with a dearly bought word:
In the world you will have tribulation.
But take heart;
I have overcome the world.
(John 16:33b, ESV)
May peace be yours today,
Amy
Poem – Amy Lee, G.M. Hopkins – “Nondum”
‘Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.’
- xlv. 15.
God, though to Thee our psalm we raise
No answering voice comes from the skies;
To Thee the trembling sinner prays
But no forgiving voice replies;
Our prayer seems lost in desert ways,
Our hymn in the vast silence dies.
We see the glories of the earth
But not the hand that wrought them all:
Night to a myriad worlds gives birth,
Yet like a lighted empty hall
Where stands no host or door or hearth
Vacant creation’s lamps appal.
We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King,
With attributes we deem are meet;
Each in his own imagining
Sets up a shadow in Thy seat;
Yet know not how our gifts to bring,
Where seek thee with unsandalled feet.
And still th’unbroken silence broods
While ages and while aeons run,
As erst upon chaotic floods
The Spirit hovered ere the sun
Had called the seasons’ changeful moods
And life’s first germs from death had won.
And still th’abysses infinite
Surround the peak from which we gaze.
Deep calls to deep and blackest night
Giddies the soul with blinding daze
That dares to cast its searching sight
On being’s dread and vacant maze.
And Thou art silent, whilst Thy world
Contends about its many creeds
And hosts confront with flags unfurled
And zeal is flushed and pity bleeds
And truth is heard, with tears impearled,
A moaning voice among the reeds.
My hand upon my lips I lay;
The breast’s desponding sob I quell;
I move along life’s tomb-decked way
And listen to the passing bell
Summoning men from speechless day
To death’s more silent, darker spell.
Oh! till Thou givest that sense beyond,
To shew Thee that Thou art, and near,
Let patience with her chastening wand
Dispel the doubt and dry the tear;
And lead me child-like by the hand;
If still in darkness not in fear.
Speak! whisper to my watching heart
One word—as when a mother speaks
Soft, when she sees her infant start,
Till dimpled joy steals o’er its cheeks.
Then, to behold Thee as Thou art,
I’ll wait till morn eternal breaks.
Song – Matthew Clark, Gethsemane
It was a dark night a dark night
I saw the light of the world trembling on the ground
Saw the frightened flicker of that flame
And I held my breath and hoped for strength
Silent to the slaughter he remained
CHORUS
And Oh the sorrow I’m fearing for tomorrow
And though the darkness hide Thee I will drink the cup you give me
And Oh the sorrow I’m fearing for tomorrow
And though the darkness hide Thee I will drink the cup you give me
It was a cold night a cold night
In the garden the Vine, was crushed beneath the weight
I saw the cup he drank was bittersweet
To the dregs where joy and anguish meet
The poison strikes like a kiss upon his cheek
CHORUS
Prayer: Brian Brown, The Collect for Maundy Thursday
Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Holy Week: Wednesday, Mary does a beautiful thingby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Holy-Week-Wednesday-Mary-does-a-beautiful-thing.mp3Mark 14:3-11
Now while Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, reclining at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of costly aromatic oil from pure nard. After breaking open the jar, she poured it on his head. But some who were present indignantly said to one another, “Why this waste of expensive ointment? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor!” So they spoke angrily to her. But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you will always have the poor with you, and you can do good for them whenever you want. But you will not always have me! She did what she could. She anointed my body beforehand for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”
Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus into their hands. When they heard this, they were delighted and promised to give him money. So Judas began looking for an opportunity to betray him.
Imagine with me – Mary does a beautiful thing
Can you imagine the loneliness Jesus is likely feeling at this point? Every time he mentions to his disciples that he must die, they don’t get it, or they get it enough to try to stop him, which just reinforces the fact that they don’t get it.
We’ve all felt that sense of being lonely even in a crowd. We smile, make small talk, but our heart isn’t in it. Maybe we do dare to venture out and begin to speak about what’s really in our true heart, but it’s like being lost in the woods, crying out “Can anyone hear me, is anyone there?” with silence the only response.
I sometimes think at the center of life is a song of call and response, proposal and engagement. The most terrible, lonely thing is to fall like a tree in the forest and for no one to hear or take notice. Or to sing up from the street to your beloved’s window, and for her to peek out briefly, then close the shutters.
In the midst of this crowd, the man Jesus is carrying this unimaginable sorrow alone. But then comes Mary with a jar of perfume. As far as we know she spoke no word; she let her actions say everything, because only this beautiful act of love could say what she had to say.
The alabaster body of her vessel is broken open and the very costly perfume poured out entirely onto Jesus. I’ve heard the idea of anointing is to supply the means necessary to fulfill an assignment from God. Who knows what strength Mary’s anointing gave to Jesus? Finally, someone who gets him. Someone who hears and understands what no one else has.
And like loud flatulence in the middle of the most tender moment of the symphony, comes the voice of the wordly-wise disciples, “What a waste! We could’ve capitalized on that! Could’ve done something really useful – could’ve actually done some good in the world!” The text says they spoke harshly, threatening her. They’re not just mildly annoyed, in other words, they’re really laying into her.
And Jesus lays into them, saying, “You leave her alone! Stop beating up on her!” Meanwhile, Mary is silent like a lamb before her butchers. But Jesus speaks up, “She has done a beautiful, praiseworthy thing for me.”
It’s worth pointing out that immediately after Mary wastes her money on Jesus, Judas, in contrast, goes to turn in Jesus and makes money doing it. Interesting.
The disciples are all pragmatists, utilitarians. This is stupid inefficiency. What is beauty worth? It serves no practical purpose. Acts of pure grace, acts of prodigal affection are more than baffling or unaccountable in the eyes of the world; they’re a kind of idiotic and infuriating foolishness. Maybe they make us mad because they distract us from our distractions, forcing us to face our real human hungers – the ones we’ve defaced; because, in our despair that those hungers could ever even be met, they’ve become too painful to look at.
But what we’re really being asked to face is a humiliated, dead Jesus. John’s baptism was the perfect case of anointing for Jesus as he began his public ministry, and Mary’s is the perfect case of anointing to send him forth to his own crucifixion, where his body will become the alabaster jar, and his blood the priceless, fragrant perfume, poured out – entirely – on the world God so loved. (By the way, this means the Cross anoints us for an assignment, doesn’t it?)
And to the worldly-wise, that beautiful offering will always be infuriating. Grace tends to be. We say, “I don’t want your pity, your charity – give it to the poor – someone who really needs saving.” But we’re being asked to look closely at Mary’s offering, to endure the embarrassing truth it tells us about ourselves, and to let it lead us to the beautiful thing Jesus has done for us. He has “wasted” his priceless life on us, because we are, in fact, poor. We must face that truth. The truth that not one stinking drop of our useful, practicality can save us.
As one writer has said, in contrast to usefulness, “Beauty will save the world.” Yes, it is this act of beauty that has.
Poem – Grace Craddock, George Herbert’s “Mary Magdalene”
Marie Magdalene.
When blessed Marie wip’d her Saviours feet,
(Whose precepts she had trampled on before)
And wore them for a jewell on her head,
Shewing his steps should be the street,
Wherein she thenceforth evermore
With pensive humblenesse would live and tread:
She being stain’d her self, why did she strive
To make him clean, who could not be defil’d?
Why kept she not her tears for her own faults,
And not his feet? Though we could dive
In tears like seas, our sinnes are pil’d
Deeper then they, in words, and works, and thoughts.
Deare soul, she knew who did vouchsafe and deigne
To bear her filth; and that her sinnes did dash
Ev’n God himself: wherefore she was not loth,
As she had brought wherewith to stain,
So to bring in wherewith to wash:
And yet in washing one, she washed both.
Song: Taylor Leonhardt, Mission House – “I don’t have much”
How can I respond
To the love that You have lavished on me?
I don’t have much, I don’t have much
But I have a heart that beats for You
I have a heart that beats for You
Every part of me
Wants to love You like You’ve loved me, Lord
Every part of me
Wants to love You like You’ve loved me, my Lord
I don’t have much, I don’t have much
But I have a heart that beats for You
I have a heart that beats for You
Prayer: Brian Brown, Collect for Wednesday of Holy Week
Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
*The artwork featured above was created by Shannon Steed Sigler.
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Holy Week: Tuesday, Remembering Abrahamby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Holy-Week-Tuesday-Remembering-Abraham.mp3Genesis 22: 1-18
[God] said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am!” Abraham replied. God said, “Take your son—your only son, whom you love, Isaac—and go to the land of Moriah! Offer him up there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will indicate to you.”
Early in the morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took two of his young servants with him, along with his son Isaac. When he had cut the wood for the burnt offering, he started out for the place God had spoken to him about.
On the third day Abraham caught sight of the place in the distance. So he said to his servants, “You two stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go up there. We will worship and then return to you.”
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. Then he took the fire and the knife in his hand, and the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father?” “What is it, my son?” he replied. “Here is the fire and the wood,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” “God will provide for himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son,” Abraham replied. The two of them continued on together.
When they came to the place God had told him about, Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood on it. Next he tied up his son Isaac and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand, took the knife, and prepared to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am!” he answered. “Do not harm the boy!” the angel said. “Do not do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God because you did not withhold your son, your only son, from me.”
Abraham looked up and saw behind him a ram caught in the bushes by its horns. So he went over and got the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place “The Lord provides.” It is said to this day, “In the mountain of the Lord provision will be made.”
The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, “I solemnly swear by my own name, decrees the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will greatly multiply your descendants so that they will be as countless as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the strongholds of their enemies. Because you have obeyed me, all the nations of the earth will pronounce blessings on one another using the name of your descendants.”
Imagine with me – “Bringing home the Stars”
Jesus rubs his arms and hands in the firelight. Some muscle in his back strained a little earlier in the day when he was turning the tables of the money-changers over and driving out the animals. He clears his throat and feels the soreness from having raised his voice. He swallows a hard swallow.
A wooden ladle taps against a cook-pot and Andrew’s feet scrape the dry ground throwing little whirls of dust up to catch the warm flicker of the campfire.
“Rabbi, here, eat something,” Andrew says and hands him a little bowl. He’s not really hungry, but he takes the bowl and raises his face to his friend, “Thank you, Andrew.” Andrew nods and smiles a worried smile.
A few hours pass, and the various sounds of shuffling and chatter have dwindled down like the campfire itself has dwindled down to an occasional crackle from barely glowing coals peeking through their white ash mantle. They’re like old, old faces whose bright life is now buried beneath the layered detritus of age. Whatever warmth comes to the surface, comes, as it were, from a great distance.
Everyone is sleeping now. Everyone but him. His back turned to the coals, he faces the darkness… and the faraway stars. There they are dappled and blinking upon the face of the heavens. So many like scattered seed hovering in black soil, burning for the husk to break, waiting to hear their names called.
Jesus crinkles his bare feet in the grit beneath them and pinches little clumps of dirt between his toes. Tiny particles glimmer as he turns the earth. Bits of sand dispersed amidst the soil catch moonlight and starlight on their impossibly small crystalline facets and he glimpses them hidden there like nearly imperceptible pearls in a field. The air is still, but then the barest breath of a breeze brushes by, just enough to alert the little hairs on his arms and legs, and he remembers his own words to the Sadducees, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the God of the living, for to him all are alive.” And the muscles in his face tighten and a burning gathers to press from behind his eyes. He smiles and cries quietly there.
“Father, go tell Abraham, that the night sky is so full and beautiful. Tell him the Lord still provides on Isaac’s hill.”
He scoops up some of the dust and brings it close to his face, so close the breath of his nostrils stirs it a little. The dust smells and feels good, and he rubs it into his own hands and forearms, his feet are already covered in it.
He prays again, whispering, “Go tell Sarah – laughing Sarah – that her barren arms will be filled, Father. More children than she can count. We’ll laugh together before too long.”
The later it gets, the colder. Jesus stands and walks a little to get his blood moving. A little ways away from the camp now, he lifts his face and hands to heaven and gazes silently, slowly around, seeming to look every glittering star directly in its eye. Each of those pale little lamps seems glazed-over, clouded-over in blindness, seen but not seeing, lost but looked-for. Maybe like fruit fallen from a tree, hidden in tall grass.
Looking up to heaven, he says, “Faithful Father, I remember the face of Abram, that Chaldean of Ur. I remember how he listened.” Someone behind him in the camp snores, snorts, and rolls over. It’s quiet again. He went on, “Father, I remember the promise we gave, and that he believed. Tonight beneath these stars, I keep that promise and count it kept. I remember when Isaac was bound. I remember the ram caught in the thorns.” He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly through his teeth. “He will be caught again, I know.”
A restlessness grows as the cold night presses in, and his body is filled with mingled eagerness and anxiety, like a cliff-diver looking at the water far below from the precipice. He places both hands on his head, rubs his face and eyes, and crosses his arms, hugging his body. “All these years, Father. After all these years, it will finally be done.”
“Amen,” he says breathing in, “Amen,” he says breathing out.
All about his body the wind flaps his seamless garment.
Poem – Malcolm Guite – Before Abraham was, I AM
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. John 8:58
Oh pure I AM, the source of everything,
The wellspring of my inner consciousness,
The song within the songs I find to sing,
The bliss of being and the crown of bliss.
You iterate and indwell all the instants
Wherein I wake and wonder that I am,
As every moment of my own existence
Runs over from the fountain of your name.
I turn with Jacob, Isaac, Abraham,
With everyone whom you have called to be,
I turn with all the fallen race of Adam
To hear you calling, calling ‘Come to me’.
With them I come, all weary and oppressed,
And lay my labours at your feet, and rest.
Song: Matthew Clark, “Father without a child”
Abram, leave your life and go
to a land I will show you
A nation be born to sing a Kingdom song
a blessing for all mankind
CHORUS
You’re a Father without a child
I’m a Father who’s lost his children
Follow me Abraham
I will bring them bring them home
Faith is wearing thin Lord
hopelessly barren for years now
We laughed just to hide
the tears the years have dried
when will the son arrive?
CHORUS
I’m a Father without a child
You’re a Father who’s lost his children
Lord I am in your hands
Can we bring them, bring them home?
BRIDGE
While Abraham slept
in covenant darkness
With faithfulness crowned
the God of love moved
Poured out the blessings
and shouldered the curse
He signed on the line
by the ink of his blood
ink of his blood
CHORUS
Hear the Father of all cry out
See a son laid upon the altar
One day the knife will fall
Just to bring them, bring them home
Collect: Brian Brown
O God, who by the passion of thy blessed Son didst make an instrument of shameful death to be unto us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The post S6:E15 – Holy Week: Tuesday, Remembering Abraham appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Holy Week: Monday, Cleansing the Templeby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Holy-Week_Monday-Cleansing-the-Temple-1.mp3Luke 19:45-48
Then Jesus entered the temple courts and began to drive out those who were selling things there, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house will be a house of prayer,’ but you have turned it into a den of robbers!”
Jesus was teaching daily in the temple courts. The chief priests and the experts in the law and the prominent leaders among the people were seeking to assassinate him, but they could not find a way to do it, for all the people hung on his words.
Imagine with me – Cleansing of the Temple
I don’t remember what I said that day back in high school, but I’m ashamed to tell you, it was something cruel. My poor Mom had probably just been practicing some element of basic good parenting but I wasn’t having it. Whatever it was the original conversation was about, I was a blunt instrument ready to smash through anyone who got in the way of what I wanted, and I chose as my bludgeon cutting words of pure meanness. I am thankful I don’t remember them or what that conflict was even about. Here’s what I do remember.
Later that day, I was sitting on my bed in my room when I heard my Father’s characteristic footsteps coming down the hall, but faster than usual. The door flew open and my Dad was transfigured into a consuming fire, he burst into flames. He grew up a Mississippi farmer and at that time was around 60 and stronger than I’ve ever been or will be. His voice boomed and expanded to fill that room with righteous fury and I flailed and cried in astonishment and terror at the glory of his wrath.
Let me be clear; my Dad is in no way an out-of-control individual, nor is he a violent or habitually angry person. This was an outstanding occasion. That day, his Beloved Bride had been treated cruelly and my insults against my Mother had been to him like a flaming arrow shot into a haystack, and he became a Pillar of Fire.
I’ve seen people get angry and explode for all kinds of reasons, most of them selfish. Someone said anger is a good signal that something we care about has been threatened, it shows us what matters to us and urges us to protect things that need protecting. Sometimes we care mostly about our pride or we want to keep some power scheme in place that benefits us, even though it’s not right. Other times, like the one I’m describing with my Dad, the wrath is holy, because wickedness has been done against what God loves and desires to protect. In that way, wrath itself really can be the unveiling of a terrific glory.
How long does it take for an experienced craftsman like Jesus of Nazareth the son of Joseph to make a whip out of cords? I don’t know, honestly. I’ll speculate an hour to obtain the materials and tie them together while thinking about what he was going to do. Jesus had adrenal glands, synapses, muscle, blood, and bone. Sometimes anger makes the body almost vibrate and burn as it gathers, as the barometer spikes. Jesus had time, in other words; when he bursts into the temple this is not an impulsive act, it’s a careful, deliberate thing.
Zealous and Jealous are two words that come from the same root and generally have to do with a husband’s desire to protect the reputation of his wife. When, in the Old Testament, God says he’s a jealous God, it means he’s fighting for his marriage to Israel. It means he cares more about her well-being than she does. When I insulted my Mom, she cried I’m sure, but her response was nothing like the zealous response I witnessed in my Dad.
So, here’s where we are: Yesterday, Jesus entered the Holy City of Jerusalem and today he goes straight to it’s sickened heart, the Temple, and he absolutely wrecks it in his careful, deliberate wrath. Remember today, Jesus is no timid, passive aggressive, apathetic bystander. Understand that the humility that accepts a crown of thorns without raising his voice or moving a pinky finger in self-defense, is the same humility that weaves a whip of wrath ready to defend the ones this King has bound to himself with cords of lovingkindness.
Poem: Malcolm Guite – Cleansing the Temple
Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange
Restore in me my lost imagination
Begin in me for good, the pure change.
Come as you came, an infant with your mother,
That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come as you came, a boy who sought his father
With questions asked and certain answers found,
Come as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through
Face down for me the fear the shame the danger
Teach me again to whom my love is due.
Break down in me the barricades of death
And tear the veil in two with your last breath.
Song: Matthew Clark – Heart burning brightly
I had a vision so lovely
Of the tender taken in and given hope
But you prey on the people
Till the prayers of my people fill your pockets up
Collecting the toll at the door to my house
You sell off my children, and threaten my spouse
CHORUS
I saw the Lion of Judah leaping up from the steps
And the tables were turning
and the temple was wrecked
Saw the Son of God like a column of fire
He was leading the nations
he was opening the door
With a heart burning brightly
Till it burst into flames
He drew a line in the dust
Where the reign of terror ends
V2
A home for the hopeless
Reminding the broken that they have a prayer
But the time draws near
When the house of God will be the hearts of men
And to you robbers who’ve made
this temple your den
There’ll be no stone left on another
And your roof is caving in
The body for the Lord
The temple of the Spirit
Prayer – Brian Brown
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Holy Week: Palm Sundayby Matthew Clark & Friends | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/OTW_Palm-Sunday_2026.mp3Luke 9:51
Now when the days drew near for him to be taken up, Jesus set out resolutely to go to Jerusalem.
Luke 19:35-44
… And throwing their garments on the colt they set Jesus upon it. And as he rode along, they spread their garments on the road. As he was now drawing near, at the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the multitude said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
An excerpt from Frederick Buechner’s “A Room Called Remember”.
“Blessed be the King who comes in the name of the Lord,” the cry goes up. There is dust in the air with the sun turning it gold. Around a bend in the road, there suddenly is Jerusalem. He draws back on the reins. Crying disfigures his face. “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace.” Even today, he says, because there are so few days left. Then the terror of his vision as he looks at the city that is all cities and sees not one stone left standing on another – you and your children within you – your children. “Because you did not know the time of your visitation,” he says. Because we don’t know who it is who comes to visit us. Because we do not know what he comes to give. The things that make for peace, that is what he comes to give. We do not know these things, he says, and God knows he’s right. The absence of peace within our own skins no less than within our nations testifies to that. But we know their names at least. We all of us know in our hearts the holy names of the things that make for peace – real peace – only for once let us honor them by not naming them. Let us name instead only him who is himself the Prince of Peace.
“He shall judge between the nations and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” That is our Palm Sunday hope, and it is our only hope. That is what the palms and the shouting are all about. That is what all our singing and worshiping and preaching and praying are all about if they are about anything that matters. The hope that finally by the grace of God the impossible will happen. The hope that Pilate will take him by one hand and Caiaphas by the other, and the Roman soldiers will throw down their spears and the Sanhedrin will bow their heads. The hope that by the power of the Holy Spirit, by the love of Christ, who is Lord of the impossible, the leaders of the enemy nations will draw back, while there is still time for drawing back, from a vision too terrible to name. The hope that you and I also, each in our own puny but crucial way, will work and witness and pray for the things that make for peace, true peace, both in our own lives and in the life of this land.
Despair and hope. They travel the road to Jerusalem together, as together they travel every road we take – despair at what in our madness we are bringing down on our own heads and hope in him who travels the road with us and for us and who is the only one of us all who is not mad. Hope in the King who approaches every human heart like a city. And it is a very great hope as hopes go and well worth all our singing and dancing and sad little palms because not even death can prevail against this King and not even the end of the world, when end it does, will be the end of him and of the mystery and majesty of his love. Blessed be he.
Song: Matthew Clark – Walking to the Cross
Vs. 1
The way has been prepared
And now the way must be walked
There’s so much good you’ll dream to do
But I am walking to the cross
The world is full of withered hands
And the world is full of lonely souls
You may not understand what love can do
But I am walking to the cross
CHORUS 1
They’ll sing Hosanna
Oh Lord come and save
They’ll sing Hosanna
Oh Lord come and save
But the palm branches will only briefly wave
Vs. 2
Here I am Jerusalem
Like the mother that you wouldn’t have
So lost and yet I love you still
I am walking to the cross
My mind is set I will not stop
Till they break the bread and fill the cup
And every secret sin and misdeed dark
Is nailed upon the cross
CHORUS 2
So sing Hosanna, Well the lord has come to save
Sing Hosanna
For the broken and enslaved
For the saviour of the world
For the shackles have been shed
Hear the children they are singing praise
With voices clear and hearts are raised
And when my work is done I’ll bring them home
I am walking to the cross
And I will walk until my time has come
Until the river from the temple runs
Until the hope of men is all but quenched
I am walking to the cross
CHORUS 3
So sing Hosanna Well the lord has come to save
sing Hosanna For the death of the grave
sing Hosanna For the Holy One of God
sing Hosanna For the blood of Jesus Christ
sing Hosanna Cause I am walking to the cross
Poetry: Malcolm Guite – Jesus Weeps
Jesus comes near and he beholds the city
And looks on us with tears in his eyes,
And wells of mercy, streams of love and pity
Flow from the fountain whence all things arise.
He loved us into life and longs to gather
And meet with his beloved face to face
How often has he called, a careful mother,
And wept for our refusals of his grace,
Wept for a world that, weary with its weeping,
Benumbed and stumbling, turns the other way,
Fatigued compassion is already sleeping
Whilst her worst nightmares stalk the light of day.
But we might waken yet, and face those fears,
If we could see ourselves through Jesus’ tears.
Collect: Brian Brown – Collect for Palm Sunday
Almighty and everliving God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
*The artwork featured on this page was created by Shannon Steed Sigler.
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City Walls, pt 1by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereLittle Judah was bringing me his favorite rocks. He is six years old. Two of his older brothers and I were talking through the story of the Israelite’s slavery in Egypt all the way up to the Passover. It was a bright sunny day—everything in sight glad to be drying out and warming up after yesterday’s rain. Since it had rained, it meant the kids couldn’t play in the muddy yard. We all just had to be outside though, and so there we were on the front porch.
Judah would disappear for a few minutes, then return with another rock in his palm for me to see, interrupting the story in his delight. He was disappearing in order to go wash the rocks in the kitchen sink. He seemed to especially love the smooth parts where long tumbling and water-wear had made something as hard as stone feel soft to the touch. He would take my hand and guide my fingertips to the places that were particularly smooth, “Feel how smooth this rock is, Mr Matthew! Right here, see this spot here?” he repeated time and time again.
Judah’s stones remind me of the ones young David picked from the riverbed on the way to meet Goliath, and they remind of a lyric from a favorite album of mine by Matthew Perryman Jones, called “The Land of the Living.” From what I understand, Jones wrote the album after the death of his father. So, it’s a grief album. I was listening to it a lot during my own season of grief about a decade ago. The lyric I’m thinking of goes, “The stones for the city walls were pulled from the riverbed.”
In the opening song of the album, Jones describes being in that place of darkness after loss that feels like drowning. How will we survive this? He concludes that grief is a mystery, not to be solved, but to enter into, singing, “Fall into that mystery or it will pull you under.” Somehow, if we submit to that mysterious darkness, something like a baptism might happen to us, making a way for our hearts to be built into something new even after everything has been broken to pieces.
The best stones for the city God is building are the ones smoothed by the water-wear of baptismal grief. It’s these stones that will be lifted up by the Great Water-walker, Jesus, and incorporated into the structures that give shape and glory to the Kingdom of God, the structures that hospitably house the presence of our Wounded Healer, Christ.
Lately, I’ve been catching up on Bible Project podcasts, most recently a series on the theme of cities in the Bible. It was episode two of this series, “Why Cain builds a city,” that got me thinking along the lines of what I’m writing about today. Go give it a listen for all the nitty gritty details, but here’s the gist:
There’s a literary link built into the wordplay of the Hebrew of Genesis 1-4 that connects God’s creation of woman with Cain’s building of a wall around himself. After God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone,” he builds from the man’s side a creature that will make it possible for the human to rightly image God in the world. The word for this creature is Ezer, and Tim Mackie says a great translation would be “delivering ally.” This is what the woman is meant to be. The only other uses of this term in the Old Testament are in reference to God himself as humanity’s Delivering Ally, so it’s a beautiful and strong office to hold, isn’t it?
Tim and Jon go on to discuss how things fall apart, and Adam and Eve’s children suffer. Cain kills his brother Abel and is banished. Cain is terrified to go out into the wilderness. Why? Because it’s dangerous and people will hurt him. So, God offers him some protection. But the next thing Cain does is go and build a “city.” The idea of a city in the original text is very different from our modern idea. It just means a dwelling with a protective wall around it. So, Cain builds a wall around himself—that’s the idea. Why? Because his sin has left him lonely and afraid, and, even though God has offered him help, he can’t relax, so he takes matters into his own hands. He’s going to secure himself from his apparent vulnerabilities. He walls himself off.
Tim and Jon point out something very interesting at this point that is not visible in our English translations. The word for Ezer and the word for walling ourselves off have been intentionally chosen in the original language to sort of visually rhyme. In other words, the authors are playing with the words in such a way that we’re meant to pick up on the fact that what Cain is doing in walling himself off should be set in direct contrast against God’s way of addressing our vulnerability by providing an Ezer, a Delivering Ally. Walls and Ezers are opposing means of addressing human needs, limitations, desires, and fears.
It’s worth noticing that needs, limitations, desires, and a certain kind of fear are part of God’s design even prior to the arrival of sin in the world. Adam, before his Delivering Ally Eve arrives, needs another person if he’s going to get from the not-good of loneliness to the very-good of relational personhood, which is the only thing that can rightly image God’s true nature in this world, since God is three persons in relationship. The human, prior to the arrival of the Ezer and of sin, has limitations, desires, needs, and fears.
Could there be fear prior to the fall? If you think of fear as a type of healthy pain that helps us identify a legitimate need, I believe so. I’m afraid of falling off the cliff, so I step back. The food smells funky, I’m afraid I might get sick, so I throw it away. I’m afraid of being alone, so I call a friend. Fear is super helpful. Think about how the man felt after the naming of the animals failed to produce a proper counterpart. He may have felt a fear that he was doomed to loneliness. God takes that fear as a healthy indicator of a legitimate need, and then God, in his perfect love, meets the need for the man, alleviating the fear.
What I’m getting at is that humans were intentionally created as vulnerable. We need each other, and thrive only when given the opportunity to deeply attach in a loving context of collaborative care. We were never meant to be self-sustaining, or in any way complete outside of an interdependent relationality. I wrote a kid’s song for vacation bible school at my church years ago; the chorus says, “you can’t be a person without some more people.” The only way to be human is to enter into the vulnerability inherent in love, and have someone other than yourself meet you in those places of need, desire, limitation, and fear.
That’s the kind of life we were made for. And that’s the life that Cain refuses. Instead, he walls himself off. Like the lyrics of the song I mentioned above, Cain refuses to “fall into [the] mystery” of his own vulnerability, and builds a defensive, ragged rock wall of invulnerability around himself. But Christ is taken outside the city wall to be crucified, naked and vulnerable. He is our delivering ally, alleviating our fears through his wound-ability. Jesus does fall into the mystery of baptismal grief, and rises to build a city whose dazzling walls glimmer with smooth stones from the riverbed. The Gates of the City of God are made of pearls cultivated across the millenia, polished smooth and never closed, for the Lord himself will be its protector and provider.
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Patterns of Reality: Music and Richesby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/OTW_S6_E11_Patterns-of-Reality_music.mp3* Follow * Follow * Follow * Follow Sign up for the NewsletterThanks for signing up!First Name
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereThis morning I cranked up the van and my phone automatically began playing something I hadn’t planned on listening to. It was Boethius’ “The Consolation of Philosophy.” Just a few days ago, my friend Bubba and I had been working on projects around the house—he was cleaning the family van and I was fixing a screen door—and I’d been listening to a podcast interview about Boethius. The fellow on the interview said “The Consolation of Philosophy” was one of C.S. Lewis’ favorite books. At any rate, on pops the audiobook as I’m heading to the coffeeshop this morning to work, and here’s the bit that heard:
Come, suppose, now, the gifts of Fortune were not fleeting and transitory, what is there in them capable of ever becoming truly thine, or which does not lose value when looked at steadily and fairly weighed in the balance? Are riches, I pray thee, precious either through thy nature or in their own? What are they but mere gold and heaps of money? Yet these fine things show their quality better in the spending than in the hoarding… But that which is transferred to another cannot remain in one’s own possession; and if that be so, then money is only precious when it is given away, and, by being transferred to others, ceases to be one’s own. Again, if all the money in the world were heaped up in one man’s possession, all others would be made poor. Sound fills the ears of many at the same time without being broken into parts, but your riches cannot pass to many without being lessened in the process. And when this happens, they must needs impoverish those whom they leave. How poor and cramped a thing, then, is riches, which more than one cannot possess as an unbroken whole, which falls not to any one man’s lot without the impoverishment of everyone else! (Consolation, V)
In this section, Boethius is talking about the fickleness of fortune. Fortune is something random like chance or luck. It doesn’t have any intrinsic connection to wisdom or merit. Terrible people get rich, good people may wind up poor. So Boethius is searching for something solid to build a life upon. Riches are not precious in and of themselves, he says, and therefore having them doesn’t actually add to life’s value. They’re really only valuable when they’re given away, but, if you do that, you don’t have them anymore. If having riches is where you get your value, you’ll just keep losing it.
He points out that, unlike riches, people are intrinsically valuable. When we locate our value in things less valuable than ourselves, our ability to sense real value begins to slip away.
But there was one little word picture that grabbed me as I listened this morning. Boethius contrasts how money works against how sound or music works. He says, “Sound fills the ears of many [people] at the same time without being broken into parts, but your riches cannot pass to many without being lessened in the process.” See what he’s getting at? If I divide a hundred dollars among a hundred people, everyone gets a dollar and I’m left with zero dollars. But music doesn’t work like that. If I “spend,” say, a hundred minutes of music on a hundred people, all one hundred people have 100% of the music, and I haven’t lost anything.
It’s interesting to me that one of the markers of Christian worship continues to be singing together. Making music, says psalm 92:1-5, is just the right kind of thing to do once you’ve gotten a glimpse of God’s goodness. It’s only natural. It’s also something that a poor person is just as likely to be able to do as a rich person.
I’m a musician, so this example resonates with me particularly. But, what I’m guessing is that music is just one example of a whole category of things that work like this, and if we start digging around, we’ll find a pattern. If we find a pattern, then we’re starting to pick up on something good that’s just built into the fabric of reality.
What other things might work like music? What other things work in such a way that when you “spend” them, instead of diminishing, the supply remains stable or even grows? What about laughter? Heartfelt laughter may even be a kind of music! It’s hard to say what exactly laughter is, isn’t it? It’s a thing that enriches everyone involved, including the one giving it away.
What about a smile or the gift of warmth and affection? When these are freely given and freely received they make us rich in a way that material possessions can’t.
The family I’ve been living with the past month has a house full of kids, and I remember my friend Bubba saying that his love for his kids is like this. He said that fatherly love isn’t something like money that has to be broken into pieces so that each child gets only a percentage. No, it’s like music filling the house, and each child gets the whole of the sound.
Maybe what Boethius was picking up on was a pattern of reality. This is an idea worth stepping aside to look at more closely. There are some pretty fun word connections going on.
Let’s look at three related words: pattern, patron, and pater (which is where we get the word father). A pattern is “a part showing the figure or quality of the whole.” A patron is someone who, as a protector and encourager, models that bigger pattern for others on a smaller scale. And, a pater—or father—is the source of the pattern and thus the Supreme Patron, who is overseeing and resourcing the working out of the pattern.
Kind of interesting, yeah? A Pater provides patterns for life, which patrons model for others.
For a Christian, Christ is the one through whom Creation was made and in whom it subsists. So, the Pattern of Reality for this cosmos is Jesus, who models for us only what he sees the Father doing. Creation is intelligible (which means its meaning is legible) and we can read the presence of Christ patterned there and learn wisdom—I mean we can find out how things ought to work, which you could call righteousness, peace, or shalom.
This contrast between riches and music is an example of two patterns, but only one of them actually corresponds to reality, which is the Life the Trinity lives together. All material riches belong to God, of course, but what makes the life of God rich is something else, something more like the generous outpouring of music, of love, of God’s vulnerability as Christ lets go of what he has every right to cling to in order to die for his friends on the cross. My friend Ruth Naomi Floyd, a blues and jazz composer and historian, says that on the cross Jesus is singing the blues. The blues is a kind of music that even the poorest of the poor can sing, and Jesus, at that moment, is the poorest of the poor, pouring out his wounded heart unto death.
When Jesus says, “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it,” He’s not just wheezing out some thin moral platitude. He’s communicating a fundamental pattern of the cosmos. This is how reality, at its core, actually works. It’s the pattern the Son himself has personally experienced before the face of his Father, the Supreme Pattern-giver.
And now that we have the Holy Spirit (who Paul says gives us access to the mind of Christ) the places where the patterns have become tangled and unintelligible are slowly being healed. We have a clear-eyed Patron, restoring patterns in us, so that we can become “a part showing the figure or quality of the whole.”
A dance is a pattern, isn’t it? Music follows patterns, doesn’t it? God is opening our ears to the Great Music, teaching us the steps of the dance the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have shared since before the creation of this world. Where those patterns of reality have been lost, we get to be little patrons of reality on behalf of others. And the good reality God offers doesn’t work like money or possessions, it works like music, it works like laughter, it works like a father’s love for his children—somehow multiplying as it’s divided out, until the whole house is filled with joy.
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Unreliable Narratorsby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereA couple of years ago, I was in another city that I’ve visited many times over the years. It was Sunday morning, and I was walking into a church which I’ve also visited a good many times. As you probably know, most churches have greeters standing at the door of the sanctuary to welcome people and, often, they’re handing out liturgy bulletins and such. On this particular morning, I saw that one of the greeters was someone I knew. Now, it had been several years since I’d seen them, but they’re a songwriter whose work I admire and follow online. In fact, about a decade prior, some friends and I had even organized a small writer’s retreat with them.
Let me stop for a moment just to say that everything I’m describing took place in a few seconds and most of it entirely in my head.
As I walked up to the sanctuary door, something in me interpreted the whole scene in a split second. Here’s the interpretation: “This songwriter you admire doesn’t know who you are, so when you walk up and he hands you a church bulletin, just say thanks and move on. You remember him, but, to him, you don’t have a name or any particular meaning.”
Okay, so that’s the narration in my head, if I were to put it into words. I should say that it didn’t initially come in words—it was more of a sense, like something I just assumed to be the case. At any rate, it wasn’t an unreasonable or even bothersome narration. It seemed more or less plain and factual. So, I acted accordingly. I walked up to take the bulletin with the intuitive assumption that this guy had no idea who I was, wouldn’t remember me, and it wasn’t a big deal.
Can you guess what happened next?
As I approached, he smiled and said, “Hey, Matthew! It’s been a long time. Great to see you here!”
How about that? It turns out he did remember me. He even remembered my name. What’s more he even seemed genuinely glad to see me. But the surprises don’t stop there! Here’s what he said next, “Hey, next time you’re in town, shoot me a text, I’d love to get lunch and catch up with you.”
Well, that was just about too much. Not only did he correctly identify me. Not only did he fail to express displeasure at my sudden appearance, seeming glad instead, but he actually wanted to hangout. My internal narrator had completely dropped the ball on every single point and failed to prepare me at all for a whole bunch of unexpected good.
How about another example? I’ve got an embarrassing amount of these stories in my back pocket. For instance, once I was at a conference reaching for the door handle of the room I was about to enter—the noisy bustle of people all around me—when I heard a voice say, “Matthew Clark you can’t go in there!” I stopped in my tracks and looked around for a face to match the voice. It was yet another person, who like the fellow in the previous story, I would have thought maybe wouldn’t remember me. We had a quick, friendly conversation for a minute before we both continued with what we’d been doing.
But, I have to admit that after that little meeting, I noticed the same sense of incredulity that I’d felt at the door of the sanctuary when that songwriter I admired greeted me with such warmth and connection. I felt surprised that the voice who said my name from the busy crowd would even think to say anything to me at all. My internal narrator was really falling down on the job of aligning my internal sense of things with actual reality.
Would you like another story like this? Of course you do. Why not? So, there was another time that I showed up a little late to a party that I felt a little surprised to even be invited to. I’d arrived by myself and most everyone else seemed to have already found a conversational groove or grouped off into a comfortable corner of the room to chat with someone, and so forth. I, on the other hand, had just stepped into the room and was searching for something or someone familiar with whom I might connect. I was feeling a little bit disjointed, honestly, when suddenly a hand clapped me on the shoulder from behind, and a voice said, “Matthew! Hey man, glad you made it to the party, follow me real quick.” Before I knew it I was following this fellow through the twists and turns of the kitchen, a hallway or two, and finally into a little storage room where he produced a bottle of fancy whiskey and a few glasses—one for me, one for him, and one to be delivered to another friend elsewhere.
But here’s the thing, I was whisked up into this unexpected whiskey-run by someone who, two minutes earlier, my internal narrator was assuring me couldn’t possibly have any interest in me. But this guy was, in fact, one of the hosts of the party. Now, here we were on a mission together, which was followed by another half-hour of good conversation. He’d made a way for me to find a place in the life of that gathering. Or, I should say, he proved me wrong with regard to my essentially automatic assumption that I had no place in that gathering.
That’s three strikes against my internal narrator. Seems like the little storyteller that lives in my head is, more often than not, pretty out of touch with reality in a discouraging way.
Hmm. I was beginning to think the automatic narrative I was being fed might not be all that reliable. I could tell you more stories.
Something I have noticed with myself is that there is a little narrator living in my head who tells stories that aren’t true. And maybe the worst part is that this narrator’s voice has become so normal and familiar that I just take what it says for granted. Things like, “nobody knows your name” “you’re forgettable” “no one is glad you’re here” and so on. When stories like that get familiar enough, they don’t even necessarily feel all that painful or disturbing. What’s the right word for it? They feel like common sense. Nothing to get bent out of shape about, it’s just the way things are, and you adjust appropriately, right?
A few years ago, I read a book by Katherine Paterson called, “Jacob have I loved.” It follows the growing up years of a girl nick-named Wheezy in New England, who is the story’s narrator. I don’t want to ruin the book for you, but sometimes the experience of reading a story can actually create within you something like a lived experience of that story’s meaning. What I mean is, as I read Wheezy’s narration of her life, I didn’t just see it as interesting information, I felt it as if it were real. The best stories aren’t just things we’ve read, they’re things that “happen” to us.
Wheezy narrates the ways in which her prettier twin sister is favored by everyone, how her own desires, looks, and personality are not received or handled well by her family. And for most of the book, I was frustrated right along with her. But at some point, as Wheezy was narrating one of her many misfortunes, I sat up with a sudden realization and slapped the book down in my lap. Wheezy had been interpreting someone else’s reaction to herself, but I knew enough about that other character by now to know Wheezy’s interpretation was wrong. That’s when it dawned on me that Wheezy was an unreliable narrator. This is a book about someone misreading her own life. By the end of the story, something happens that sheds light backwards across the narrative and Wheezy begins to see it for herself. She’d been wrong all these years. Go grab a copy of “Jacob have I loved” by Katherine Paterson, and see what you think. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling it.
That book, though, and the experience of feeling that story so deeply in my own heart, brought about an important realization for me. I was a lot like Wheezy. I am an unreliable narrator with regard to myself and my own story. I have a regular enough habit of jumping to sad conclusions about myself and the way things are, and more often than not, those conclusions, common sensical as they seem, simply don’t correspond to reality. I have an unreliable narrator that lives in my head—one who has a bad habit of telling sad stories that just aren’t true.
These days, when some sad script begins to play out in my mind as if it were inevitable, I can say to that mopey fellow slumped over his keyboard, “Hey buddy, hold off on publishing that, let’s just wait and see what happens instead.”
Sometimes it takes more courage than other times, especially since that narrator is most likely trying his best to protect against some old and very real hurt being repeated. I can appreciate that. Still, here, in the land of the living, I’ve been surprised to see the goodness of the Lord and the love of the people around me enough times to push pause on that unreliable narrator. Sometimes, when I do, the scene changes pretty dramatically, and the face I’d been expecting to scowl or look past me, turns towards me, smiles, and says my name, almost as if love had kept a little place for it in their heart, after all.
Remember me? I don’t know that name of the man on the left—The one who later that day met Jesus in paradise.He was a thief, I recall, asking to be remembered.But no one had stolen that man’s name from God.Jesus had been on his way to meet himFor all those days, perhaps thinking of the time,When as a little boy, the not-yet-thief had wantedSo badly to have the bread, or the toy’s brightness,Learning to believe it could be his onlyBy certain secret means, sadly.Remembering how this sad story grewIn the thief’s mind, until he lost himselfIn the crime of believing it alone.There on the cross, seeingInnocence robed in blood,Did the thief dare to reach for recognition?Do you know me, Innocent One?Have you seen me before?Can you see me now? Still?Or is this sad story to be our name,Are we forgotten faceless bones alone?Quick comes a voice: Don’t you rememberthe bright toy? The bread?The funny nickname you gotWhen, laughing, your father tucked you into bed?The post S6:E10 – Unreliable Narrators appeared first on Matthew Clark.
The sweet poison of a false infiniteby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereThere is a four acre rectangle somewhere in the Ozark foothills where I walked last week with a longtime friend and fellow lover of C.S. Lewis. Just a week before, the weather where my friends Ashok and Neha live had been brutally cold, but this day it was creeping up from cold to cool, and the sun was out. I had had an errand to run near Little Rock, and since I was in Arkansas for a few days, I was able to enjoy a visit with these friends. One day, Neha and I were both working from the house, and she mentioned she and Ashok have gotten in the habit of making several laps around the four-acre fenceline any time the weather allows. So we decided to go for a walk.
As we walked, we talked about many things. Neha is a lover of stories, myths, and, like me, of the works of Tolkien and Lewis. She had been reading Ralph Wood’s “The Gospel According to Tolkien” and I had just finished listening to the battle between Sam Gamgee and Shelob the Spider at the close of “The Two Towers” on the drive up to Arkansas from Texas. So, that’s where our conversation started, I believe. We talked about how stories and art affect us in very deep and transformative ways—ways that mere information doesn’t.
I had also just been listening through The Bible Project’s series on Creation, and one thing they discussed was the way that we come to a Biblical text expecting it to answer the kinds of questions we’re interested in, when the original authors were interested in very different kinds of questions. Specifically, the opening chapters of Genesis are addressing Agency not Mechanism. What does that mean? I mean in the modern west we are interested in mechanisms, because we like to know how things work. But the original authors weren’t interested in the science or mechanisms of Creation, they were interested in the Agency. What is agency? It’s the question of who made this world? Why did they do it? What are the relationships between things that clue us into its meaning, regardless of whatever mechanisms may be at work?
The mechanisms are fascinating, of course, but the meaningful relationships among the significant actors on the scene are what the original authors were really interested in. They write the way they do, because of what they care about, and it seems they care little to nothing about the things modern minds tend to prioritize.
Somewhere in that conversation, my friend Neha tossed out a little phrase that had stuck with her from having read the middle book in Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy, Perelandra. The phrase was “The sweet poison of a false infinite.”
That’s a phrase worth lingering over. But, if you haven’t read Perelandra, it needs a little context. Perelandra is an early sci-fi story from C.S. Lewis, the middle book in his Space Trilogy, or as some call it after the main character, The Ransom Trilogy. Edwin Ransom is carried by an angelic courier to Venus, where the first two human-like people have just been placed in a fresh, unfallen world. But he’s not the only person from earth who’s managed to get there. A demon-possessed man has also made the trip with the intent to cause this still-edenic planet to fall just like earth by tempting the first couple to sin. The devil and fallen humanity want to spread fallenness everywhere, if possible. Lewis, in the narrative, says this taste for spreading evil is fueled by “the sweet poison of a false infinite.”
A false infinite is a life that isn’t really life at all. It’s a false-life whose pursuit tastes sweet in the beginning, but can only ever end in bitterness and death. Lewis goes on to say that the “sweet poison of the false infinite” is born out of the combination of two things, 1) our hatred of death, and, surprisingly, 2) our fear of true immortality.
That’s interesting, isn’t it? The first one–the hatred of death–is obvious, but the second one did surprise me when I first read it…true immortality is kind of terrifying to us. We don’t really know what it looks like. We don’t know, if God were to have his way with us, how we might be changed from what is familiar to us. And we tend to prefer familiar, even if it’s miserable, since, at least, it’s predictable. The unfamiliarity of true immortality requires us to entrust ourselves to Jesus, whom we can’t control, which is to be vulnerable.
Okay, so there’s that.
Then, in my morning reading, I ran across the passage in 2 Corinthians 3:7-4:6. Since it’s long I won’t quote it here, but you can go read it for yourself. The gist of it is that Paul understands his ministry (and that of Christians, in general) to be one of unveiling or exposing any place where we thought there was glory that could give us infinite life, but, in truth, that glory has faded away. But wouldn’t we notice that the glory was gone? Not necessarily. We may not know it’s faded away, since a veil is covering it. In the context, Paul’s example is the Mosaic Covenant, which at one time had real life-giving glory, but was only temporary while we were waiting for “a better word than Sinai” —the enduring glory Jesus would bring through his death and resurrection.
Paul says that, since Jesus has come and removed the veil, we are made able to see what has real glory in it and what doesn’t. The Spirit can teach us to tell the difference between what masquerades as life and the “life that is truly life,” as Paul encouraged Timothy.
We can sure it’ll be tempting to cling to old familiar things that used to have glory, since the fear of this true immortality that only comes through entrusting ourselves to Jesus, makes us feel so vulnerable. On top of that, there are those things that still do have some participation in real glory but can’t in themselves give life that captivate and distract us. This is a major theme in Lewis’ writings—that good things, if they’re not rightly ordered under Christ’s rule, can poison us. Anything that isn’t God that we treat as if it were, becomes a false infinite poisoning us, no matter how sweet that poison tastes. That’s the message of Psalm 115 where the worshippers of man-made idols with unseeing eyes and unhearing ears become just as blind and deaf as these false infinites to which they’ve devoted themselves.
To be honest, this idea came in a moment when the Lord was pulling back the veil on my desire for a kind of success that I envied in other writers and musicians. In my own heart, I was grasping at a desire for acknowledgment or affirmation that promised glory, but in reality, had no glory to give. The true immortality Jesus is calling me to, may in fact feel more like failure, foolishness, and obscurity. I have to go on trusting that Jesus knows what makes for life that is truly life. Surely, Jesus himself was in a similar position as he, trusting his Heavenly Father, walked willingly towards the foolishness of his own crucifixion? His death tore through another veil, you’ll remember, and the fading glory of the Old Covenant went to its grave with him, until, being fulfilled, it burst forth in Christ’s resurrected face with a new and everlasting brightness.
And now, Paul’s work, the freedom-bringing work of the Holy Spirit, and the work of Christians everywhere is to “pull back the veil” on anything that tempts us to sip on the “sweet poison of a false infinite,” and lift up instead the Cup of Salvation. As Jesus said, “…unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is real food, and My blood is real drink.”
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Please, don't mind your own businessby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereIt was a chilly day in the Northeast, and I was bundled up and out for a walk on a narrow town road with a couple of friends. We walked past the houses and little fields of this small town, as they told me about the history of the area and their recent move there from the other side of the country. Winter was longer here, the temperatures lower for longer, and the culture was different as well from the warmer climate where they’d raised their children. It was such a joy to hear their stories and get to know these friends better. In fact, the Lord gave me the wonderful gift of discovering that these folks I had only known as acquaintances until now, shared some significant common experiences with me, but were further along in their journey of joy and hope.
Somewhere in the midst of our walk, we could hear a big pickup truck approaching. Soon enough, there it was and even sooner there it wasn’t, as it zoomed past us on the narrow road. It was a little startling, as the driver didn’t seem to slow as he barreled past us. My friend signaled gently with his hands for the driver to be careful, but now the truck was out of sight. We kept walking, resumed our conversation, and after a time, turned around to head back towards the house.
On the way back, we veered off onto a side road to look at a few things, when the big truck was apparently returning from wherever he had gone. He saw us and turned down the side road where we were standing. He stopped, rolled down the window, and called us over. He asked whether we had been trying to signal for him to slow down earlier when he had passed us on the road. Yes, my friend said kindly. What happened next startled me. The man quickly and angrily replied, “Well, next time mind your own business!” Then he sped off.
The shock of unkindness was just that, shocking. However, my friends didn’t seem too surprised and took it in stride. They said that they had been noticing that the culture of the region, in general, seemed to carry a lot of hurt and harshness like that. Their prayer was that their presence in the area might carry some of the hope and kindness of Christ in this place where they had chosen to make their new home. Their compassion opened my heart to imagine more generous responses than I was inclined to have.
The more I thought about it, there was such an irony in the man demanding that we “mind our own business.” We were sharing a public road, after all. If he had run over us, I don’t think a judge would dismiss our deaths as entirely unconnected, since really us getting run over by him was none of our business. To go one step further, the fact that the man stopped to involve us in his frustration shows that he couldn’t escape the fact of our mutuality. In a way, by kicking against it, he was acknowledging the inextricability of our lives. Why bother about it, if he actually believed our presence and his had nothing whatsoever to do with each other?
Our lives and his, our choices and his, whether either of us are willing to admit it, are inextricable from the other. My life is the angry stranger in the truck’s business, and his life is my business. To think otherwise is to be out of touch with reality.
If there’s a spectrum of responsibility toward others, and on one end there’s strict individualism and on the other is strict interdependence, where would you say you fall? Look, I’m an introvert, and I can be very selfish. But I have to admit that I need other people, and I’ve learned that our lives, even when we wish it weren’t the case, deeply affect one another. Strict individualism just doesn’t seem to reflect the reality of my experience in the world.
There’s a story early in Joshua that caught my eye this week. The context is that Moses has died, Joshua has been given the mantle of leadership, Israel has crossed the Jordan River and begun to claim the promised land, beginning with Jericho. But, in secret, one guy (Achan is his name) disobeys the clear instructions of the Lord by taking some of the forbidden plunder. This causes a disaster in Israel—their next battle should have been easy-peasy, but instead it goes terribly and thirty-six men are needlessly killed. Achan may not be directly responsible for those deaths, but he is culpable. The Lord tells Joshua about Achan’s secret, and Achan and his family, who seemed to have known about the treasure, since it was buried in the floor of their tent, are called out in front of the community and killed. The curse is lifted from the community and things are back on track.
I wonder whether at least one thing that’s going on here is that Achan is thinking selfishly, and individualistically. He’s fallen out of touch with the corporate, interdependent nature of reality, and God is trying to protect the larger community from thinking that any one family’s actions are “no one else’s business.” Achan’s secret disobedience sure was the business of those thirty-six men who should not have died, and by extension the fear and discouragement sown across the whole community at the very outset of this difficult mission to claim the Promised Land. The valley where Achan and his family are buried is named The Valley of Achor, which means the Valley of Trouble or Disaster.
Can you see how God is trying to get us in touch with the way things actually work? Our selfishness never hurts only us. Whether we like it or not, “mind your own business” won’t hold up in the final analysis. Maybe we don’t like the vulnerability of admitting that other people’s choices affect us, or maybe we don’t like the responsibility of admitting that our choices affect others. Either way, we are bound up in one another’s lives, and the Lord is working to educate us on how to live well and wisely in a world that requires of us both responsibility and vulnerability.
The flipside of saying your bad choices matter to others is to say that your choices really matter! If your selfish choices inevitably affect the lives of others, so do your charitable choices. The reality God has placed us in comes with high stakes, since hurt is possible, but it’s the cost of living in a world where we can be sources of real kindness and blessing. We can be death-dealers or life-givers. It’s our choice.
And God sets the example for us to follow, since he, too, is a choice-maker whose choices matter. In fact, remember that valley where Achan was buried? Disaster Valley? It shows up again in Isaiah and Hosea. But guess what, God is stepping into Disaster Valley to reclaim and rename it. What does he name this place that for centuries has represented nothing but trouble? He calls it a Doorway to Hope. What!? Disaster Valley is going to become a Doorway to Hope? Yep. This is just the kind of thing God loves to do. This is the cross, the empty tomb. Potentially, this is every grief and trauma we’ve ever suffered at the hands of hurtful humans, if we let God accompany us in that disastrous place.
One last fun connection along these lines this week came just last night. I was watching a youtube channel called Veritasium with my buddy, and I saw this same pattern of reality at work as the host talked about the science of Network Dynamics. I’ll put a link to the video on the podcast homepage (matthewclark.net/podcast), but the gist is that we’re so much more connected than we might imagine, and our choices, research shows, reach so much further than we’d think. Not only that, but both hurtful and kind choices have a sort of domino effect. Surprisingly large numbers of people can be influenced toward harmful choice-making by a surprisingly small number of hurtful people. But the opposite is also true; if someone is brave enough or stubborn enough to make a choice like, say, forgiving the angry guy in the big fast truck, forfeiting the treasure for the sake of the larger community, or, if we want to get really crazy, going silently like a lamb to the slaughter, they might just change the world for the better. Maybe this burnt out world of disaster could be transformed into a doorway to heavenly hope, like the darkness of a torture-filled tomb opened and emptied by the light of resurrection.
The Nighttime Windowsill
There is a droplet on a petal;
In the droplet the whole forest curves
Like a child curled up with and in a book,
The big trees sway in the little clearing,
In the nighttime windowsill.
I have not seen the droplet,
I have not seen the forest, or that flower.
In fact, no one has. Well, no one
But the Lord who, because he sees all,
Sees all into blessed being.
But I love the petal and the droplet,
And the forest I have not seen.
I live and pray along that same curve,
Tracing the lines in the storybook,
In the nighttime windowsill.
I am seen, therefore I am,
And I see the little thing that I can’t see—
A furling world of stories whose tracings
Intertwine, curving along the lines
Of the story of all that is seen,
Which (almost) no one sees.
And so, in the nighttime windowsill,
I push or pull a ragged pen
And shape from ragged breath
A drop of nectar—guessed-at rest—
Or a blotch of bitter, darkening the dark.
I can’t see where either goes,
And yet, the whole world knows
Such stories either go to the bitter end,
Or the lost garden, where
A forest of kindness grows.
The post S6:E8 – Please, don’t mind your own business appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Growing up wise and innocentby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereThere’s a story in our family that doesn’t belong directly to me, but I’ll share it, because my grandmother loved to tell it. It’s really my sister’s story, and it happened when she was probably around four years old. I can guess the time-frame, because she’s five years older than me, and it’s a story that concerns our grandfather’s death about a year before I was born.
My grandmother was in the kitchen looking out the window at the backyard in Ackerman, Mississippi. She noticed my sister Angela standing near where the big oak tree used to be. Angela was just a little thing, but she wasn’t playing in the yard. She appeared to be engaged in a serious conversation with an invisible presence. Grandmother could see her pointing her finger at someone, clearly addressing this unknown listener. Her animated gestures showed she was making an emphatic point.
Eventually, Angela came in from the yard, and Grandmother asked her about the scene she’d been observing from the kitchen. “Honey, what were you doing out there in the yard?” My sister’s response was clear and plainspoken, “I was talking to God.” Maybe my grandmother fought off a little laugh at the funny things kids say before going on to ask, “Oh, really? What about?” Again, the response came back clear and simple, “I told God he needed to send Grandaddy back.” Here, I imagine Grandmother pausing for a moment; the death would still have been fairly recent, the sting still close at hand. Maybe her eyebrows knitted as a shadow of sorrow passed over her face, but then she relaxed, curious what this little toddler might come up with to say next. “Oh, you told God to send Grandaddy back? Well, what did God say about that?” For the third and last time, the little four-year-old stated calmly and matter-of-factly as could be, “God said, no, he wouldn’t do that. Grandaddy is with him and he’ll take good care of him.” Even though it wasn’t the answer she’d wanted, Angela had been more or less satisfied with God’s response, it seemed.
I don’t know that Angela remembers this experience, but it’s been preserved in our family, mainly by way of my Grandmother’s delightful penchant for storytelling. If it weren’t for her, we’d have forgotten that my brother Sam, as a child, famously exclaimed,“Voila!” followed by the knowing aside “That’s chinese, you know.”
Recently, a friend told me the story of a woman who approached her at church with a curious expression, wondering whether she might ask a sort of strange question. She wanted to know whether my friend’s four-year-old daughter was in the habit of exhibiting any kind of unusual spiritual insights, even if they might exceed the awareness of the child. It turns out my friend’s daughter had asked if this woman was pregnant just a few days before the woman herself discovered that she was.
I’m not trying to be spooky. That’s not the point. It could absolutely be nothing more than a coincidence. I’d even say, the most likely thing is that it was only that. But, I also had to comment on the story with a big, “Who knows?” Who knows what kind of perception little kids have in those very early years before they’re eyes have adjusted to the world. Who knows what, in their proximity to their origins, they can still see before “these sandpaper eyes [have rubbed] the lustre from what is seen” as the songwriter Mark Heard puts it in his song “Worry too much.”
Somewhere I think I remember G.K. Chesterton saying that the goal of maturity is to keep childhood’s way of seeing the world, but to draw it up and into the higher capacities of adulthood. For him, these things were not mutually exclusive. The child’s way of perceiving need not be anathema to adulthood, instead it might be one of the keys to it, if the two could be rightly integrated.
The stories and thought of Tolkien and Lewis seem to me to be working along those lines, asking, “What happens when the child and childhood’s tales grow up together, but do not part ways?”
And, if we’re on the right track, this mature union is hinted at in the Scriptures. Children and those who can be like them, have line-of-sight above the crowd of grownups to perceive the God-man approaching. From the mouth of babes, we say, and there’s Zaccheus, the old tax collector who remembers how to climb trees again like a kid. Zaccheus was a wee little man, a childlike adult, who climbs the branches of a tree to perceive the approach of the unimaginable from a vantage point above the more seasoned and reasonable heads below. In this case, the man’s shortness opens the way for a higher vision, his low state opens the way for his state to climb. When he gets up there, the humblest of all men tells Zaccheus to come back down to meet God all over again, for God has bent down low to be in the midst of his children.
Who knows what a man or woman might see, if they were to become like a child? A man might become more man-like, if he were to glimpse the Father’s form through the life of the only begotten Son. A woman might become more woman-like upon contemplating Jesus, from whose wholeness both manhood and womanhood are disbursed in order that the goodness of interdependence might be imaged on earth.
A friend of mine once said that you have to be taught to disbelieve the gospel. That has stuck with me. Failing to see and believe the gospel is not our natural state, it’s a learned thing. We live in a world that makes obvious things very hard to see. A world where we’ve learned to call evil good and good evil. A world where good and evil are confused, like a field planted with both wheat and weeds that look so much like wheat it’s impossible to sort them out ourselves. We need someone clear-eyed and unconfused, someone who was there before the world’s birth, who still remembers what it was like in its infancy, before the luster was rubbed off. Before, as Chesterton said, sin and unbelief made us old, tired, and closed to the wonders of God’s life in our midst.
There’s one correction to the formula for maturity I mentioned earlier that is worth mentioning. I said, with Chesterton, that we want to keep the child’s way of seeing, but draw it up into the wisdom and capacities of adulthood. Here, maybe we could make a distinction between the childlikeness we want to preserve and the childishness we ought to be working to leave behind like clothes that no longer fit. Paul says, when he grew up he rightly left childish ways behind, so we know the glorious destination God dreams of for us is not characterized by selfishness, irresponsibility, sulking, naivete, and the like. There’s no room for those in the realm of mature love.
Yet there is all the room in the world for the characteristics of childlikeness—those of wonder, trust, innocence, delight, affection, deep and joyful desire, playfulness, lack of pretense, and the like. These things, Jesus seems to say, ought to be recovered and magnified in our estimation, so that, as we grow up into the fullness of our Father’s perfect love, we might be both shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.
By the power of the Holy Spirit’s ministry in our hearts, we might become mature in Christ’s way of seeing and loving—that as children in the good care of Jesus’ perfect Father, we might grow up to be, not so much big and strong, as wise and innocent.
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Building forward into something that will never endby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereThe highway west of Ft. Worth is crammed with vehicles doing their best to wade through the thick construction. I’m in the passenger seat of the family van, with my buddy driving and his teenage son, Thomas, in the back. There’s a phrase coming to mind just now that Thomas said. He was asking about having some friends over on a certain day next week, but his dad reminded him they had a lot of work to do that day, which meant he was asking to have his friends over on a day when he would be too tired to enjoy them. What Thomas said next stuck with me. He said something like, “My future self is telling me that’s the wrong day to have them over.”
That was wise, wasn’t it? And isn’t it interesting that you and I are the kind of creature that can, in some sense, imagine forward into the future, read a possible outcome, and make decisions now that will benefit us then? In short, we can make plans. We can pull together what we know from past experience, what we know of how things work, and plot some kind of a course forward that, rather than being random, is wise and thoughtful. We can imagine our way through the ways a certain decision may affect us and the people involved. That’s the kind of thing we are, and that’s the kind of world God has made for us to live in.
For the most part, this is so obvious we don’t even think that much about it. We just do it, most of the time, on autopilot. Although, the ability to rely on autopilot, of course, didn’t come pre-programmed. It is something we learned from a natural apprenticeship to older humans in our sphere of interaction during the course of our developmental years. Someone taught you not to run with scissors, to butter the bread after it comes out of the toaster, not before, or to plant this seed if you want to wind up with tomatoes.
Other things we learn the hard way.
Back when I was building Vandalf the White, the sprinter van I converted into a camper, I was doing a lot of woodworking. Sometimes I’d get so into a task, but it was really more than that day could cover. Still, I’d push to wrap it up before the sun went down. I’d get worn out, and when you get worn out you get careless. Careless is not a great thing to be when you’re around power tools. Well, one day, the light had nearly worn down to evening, and I should’ve called it quits. Instead, I heaved one last piece of plywood onto the table saw in order to split it. I got about halfway there and somehow I caught an edge. It was enough to suddenly shove that big plank right back into my stomach and just about knock the wind out of me. I don’t remember whether I wound up on the ground or not, but I threw my hands up and stepped back from the tools. That day was over. I learned the hard way, I was too tired to work anymore. But that was a lesson I carried with me for the rest of the build. I started to pay attention to that invisible threshold that marked the difference between whether it was wise or foolish to proceed.
This morning I woke up before daylight. Bubba, Thomas, and I were driving up to the church to meet a bunch of other guys to help unload some chairs. Before we left, I was thumbing through the end of 1 Corinthians where Paul talks about whether or not the Resurrection is real. This is a favorite chapter of mine, and I appreciate how honest Paul is about the implications, if Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead. The long and short of it, he says, is that if there’s no life coming after this one, then there’s not much to live for. Eat and drink while you can, then die.
Now, forgive me, I don’t mean to sound cynical or depressing, but I’ve been around long enough for some of the shine of life to be rubbed off. In the scheme of things, my life has been easier than many, of course, and I have much to be thankful for. But I’m also not under any illusions that life is as it should be. There’s a kind of optimism that is really closer to self-delusion, to denial. Life really is hard. It is an interweaving of wonder and grief, astonishing tenderness, and astonishing sorrow. There are hopes whose ache I thought might be eased with time, that I now begin to suspect can only be borne as gracefully as a broken heart can manage for the time being.
Nonetheless, I am absolutely convinced that the flesh of reality is sweet and only its tough, thin rind is bitter. The rind will be peeled away one day, and it won’t amount to much compared to what’s left once it’s gone. The center of Reality is inexhaustible Joy and Life.
Paul assures us, that hard as it may be right now to imagine where this world is going, it is going somewhere very very good. In fact, one example he gives is of a seed and how unlike it is to the thing it produces. Would anyone in the world ever guess that this gigantic oak and that little acorn are related in any way? But the long apprenticeship of life has shown us the bizarre linkage over and over again. I don’t think we’d believe it otherwise. It’s not intuitive. It’s quite a leap, actually. If it weren’t so astoundingly normal, there’s no way I’d buy it.
Paul says, that’s the situation we’re in. Jesus is the first person to have been resurrected, he’s the pioneer, the firstborn of a new kind of human. They planted his body like a seed, watered by the Holy Spirit, called forth by the Father. So the pattern is set for us by our Master, and the apprentices follow.
Friends, this life is painful. It is crammed with good and bad — a thousand species of death, alongside a thousand reasons to keep going. The resurrection is not a metaphor, or some sentimental image to paste over life’s ultimate meaninglessness til we finally expire. It is a real, concrete hope. Paul seems to suggest it’s a foundation we can build wisely upon, knowing that no work we do in that direction will be a waste of time. He encourages us to lean into it, as if you could hear a loving voice from the future urging you not to let your hands droop at your sides in sorrow. This is not empty work. Your life is not a waste. Jesus is calling you and me to build forward into something that will never end.
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Come live in my driveway!by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereA year ago in February some friends and I started a new tradition. I drove six or seven hours to their house and parked my camper van in their driveway. These folks were some of the very first friends I made when I moved to the Jackson, MS area over ten years ago. I met them at church, and then discovered that they lived just down the street from me. I could just about walk to their house, and although I never did walk there, I dropped in a lot. They assured me that they really were the kind of people who actually meant it when they said, “Just drop by anytime.” So, I tried them out, and, it turns out they weren’t lying.
For the few years they lived down the street, we had a little small group that met at their place. It wasn’t attached to any particular church. Instead, it was just made up of people this couple had met out and about—at the coffeeshop or at work. I did go to church with them, but I don’t think anyone else in the group did, and some didn’t go to church at all. At any rate, that small group became a lifeline in the early days of living here, and this particular family became like family to me.
Time sped on, and eventually they moved to another state. We missed each other a lot, but we kept up and I made short visits whenever I was passing through on house concert tours. Then, about two or three years ago, a January rolled around that was particularly lonely around here, and I felt like I needed to get out of town and go see some friends. So, I called up these friends, the Humphreys, and they said, “Come live in our driveway.” I thought, “Well, I’ve always wanted to live in your driveway! I’ve even got a tiny house on wheels that would do the job quite nicely.”
Not long after that, I rolled out of Mississippi and headed West to Texas. Before long, I was nicely situated just a few feet away from the friends I had so missed. Originally, the idea was to stay a few weeks, but by the end I wound up staying over a month. It was hard to leave when the time came. I had gotten so used to being included in the rhythms of their family and household. They made me feel right at home. Maybe more at home that I was able to feel in my actual home during that season.
It was such a wonderful experience, that we decided to make it a bit of a tradition. I’m heading out tomorrow to spend the month of February living in their driveway again.
But this story reminds me of a few things. For starters, it is good for me to remember that it’s always possible to begin brand new traditions. I mean, if there’s some good idea about something I wish was a part of my life, I can try to think of ways to start building it into the way I live. And friends can do those kinds of things together, as well. Friends can come up with new creative constructs that benefit and continue to cultivate their connections with each other. I’ll admit, in my case, the Humphreys are unusually hospitable, flexible, and even adventurous in that way. And the friendship accumulated for years before it was ripe for an experiment like ours.
I’ve tried other traditions that didn’t quite work. That’s good to be realistic about. Sometimes the timing is off, the relationship isn’t quite there, or who knows? For whatever reason, the spark doesn’t catch the kindling. But here’s the basic idea: life is, and friendships are, opportunities for creativity, imagination, and adventure. Like any art-form in any medium, making something new takes risk and vulnerability, and sometimes doesn’t work out. But be on the lookout for friends who might be willing to collaborate on new ways on connecting, or making new traditions.
I have another friend who had a significant birthday approaching, and she asked herself, “If I could do anything to celebrate this birthday, what would it be?” She decided to ask a few friends to spend a long weekend at an airbnb near her favorite national park. Did it feel like a crazy idea? Was it a risk? Yes. What if everybody said no or couldn’t make the trip? She bravely took that risk, and created a new tradition—even connecting friends of hers that didn’t know each other. In that way, she facilitated the creation of brand new friendships. We can do things like that.
The second thing I think of, is the simple fact that we really need friends. I know I do. I need substantial real-life presence with people who know and love me. With the Humphreys, for example, one of the biggest blessings is simply being around as they’re living their normal day-to-day life, so much more so than any big interesting thing we manage to do while I’m there. Maybe we’re just chatting on the porch, watching big, noisy trucks drive past, or working on a puzzle box in the kitchen while the kids eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. One day last February we spent a whole day taking apart a clothes washer to replace a water pump. It was so fun just being together working on something.
It’s been deeply important to me to find those folks out there who take friendship seriously. The Humphreys aren’t the only ones in my life. There are many delightful people who have loved me so, so well, and in whose homes I’ve been made to feel like a part of the family.
One of my favorite verses is from Psalm 68:6. It says that God sets the lonely in families. For me, that has not primarily meant blood relatives, though I am very thankful for my biological family, especially my brother Sam with whom I live. My life hasn’t always taken the shape that I expected or hoped it would. At times that has ranged from frightening to disappointing, from sad to frustrating. But, what I have seen over time, is the truth of that little verse. God has never stopped working to lead me to people and help me discover ways to find friends who’ve made a place for me in the world. The Lord has been persistently kind in his efforts to supply me with kindred, even across all my wanderings. He knows better than I do that it is not good for a human to be alone.
A Liturgy for FriendshipLord, you said that it is not good for a human to be alone.
You have made yourself clear; it was never your intention that we should endure loneliness. Rather, your dream for your children was that they should be held— always and ever embraced—always and ever embedded in the fabric of belonging love.
But, Lord, we are lonely!
The brokenness of the world, the schemes of our diabolical Enemy, and our own bent and bruised natures, drive wedges where there ought to be wonder, dig graves where there ought to be gracious welcome, breed fear where there ought to be faithful love, sow weariness where you long for us to find rest.
Hear our cry: “Lord, when will you set the lonely in families!”
Lord of kindness, make for us ways towards finding kindred. Warm-hearted Savior, gather us to those you know can warm our own hearts, before they grow too cold. Oh Holy Trinity—you who are our true home—make for us a place and home in your presence with those who have found their abiding place in you.
Oh Holy Trinity, you are, in yourself, the pattern of family and loving belonging we were created to image-forth in this world, would you weave the stranded threads of our lives into the living fabric of reality that is your very life.
Strengthen our hands to serve, our ears to listen, our mouths to speak wisdom and courage, and grace us with creativity and hope as we venture out towards those lives you have made to cross our path. May we seek first to offer belonging, and in so doing, learn to receive it.
Bless your people with the gift of friendship, Oh Lord. May we offer a taste of your kingdom to a lonely world, where Christ has already come, calling all who would listen, to be set within his everlasting family.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.
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We're going to need a new song, Mosesby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereThe branches are covered with ice down here in Mississippi, which is unusual, so most people I know are hunkered down indoors. We made a big pot of chicken soup a few days ago that’s been keeping us warm as the temperatures have dropped.
Speaking of dropping temperatures, a verse that has come to mind over and over again the last handful of years has been a line spoken by Jesus after his disciples got him talking about the destruction of the Temple, and the hard times to come as the world’s end approaches. Jesus says that because of the increase of wickedness in those days, the love of most will grow cold. You can find that whole conversation in Matthew, chapter 24.
I have felt it in myself. I have felt the creeping coldness. When I see how wickedness seems to flourish in the world, climbing and climbing to the top of the heap again and again, when I see how selfishness and scarcity have chilled the air in the habitat of my soul, I know Jesus was right. He was, as usual, deeply realistic about things, not to mention insightful of the human heart, meaning he always sees into it clearly.
And, yet, his own heart did not freeze up, somehow. Jesus remained, incredibly, both clear-eyed about the wickedness of the world and the tendencies of the human heart, and he remained warm-hearted about the future. He wasn’t blindly optimistic, it’s worth noting. I mean, he didn’t pretend like everything was going to be fine. In fact, Jesus’ realism can be pretty uncomfortable. He sees the cross coming, he sees the eventual destruction of the temple and all the misery to come. But, he also sees something else up ahead. Something so bright, beautiful, and substantial that it thaws the ice. Or, if it doesn’t thaw it, allows him to somehow skate on top of it to his destination. He, as Hebrews 12 says, sees joy up ahead. And the writer of Hebrews says that if we can get a glimpse of that joy Jesus came to make available to us, it will fortify our hearts against the creeping chill of evil in this world.
It won’t remove it, of course. That joy didn’t remove the experience of evil even for Jesus himself. He was still murdered all the same. Joy doesn’t spare us heartache. Doesn’t spare us suffering—even unjust suffering. But it does give us something to contrast against evil, and joy gives us a promise of God’s loving accompaniment in the midst of suffering, since joy is a fundamentally relational reality. Joy means someone good is glad to be with us. That good presence clarifies the difference between the works of God and the works of the Enemy.
The story the Bible tells is, in large part, that of a God who suffers unjustly at the hands of cold-hearted humanity. A God, who through a long, complicated process of relationship over time, continues to move with warmth towards those very people who treat him with such coldness. It’s the story of a God, who against all odds and a world of opposition, holds onto the hope of saving the world from drowning in the waters of chaos because the surface of the lake had become an impenetrable layer of ice. He is always working to melt that barrier and call us up and out of those waters, making our passage through chaos a baptism into new life, rather than a permanent prison.
And so, Jesus laments the wickedness of the world that is always threatening to freeze our hearts, steal, kill, and destroy our joy, and drown us in despair.
This week, I’ve been watching the news. It is chilling. I am praying for my friends in Minnesota. And this morning, I was reading the end of Deuteronomy, where I found something that surprised me. Let me back up for a little context… in the history of God’s relationship with his beloved (and broken) world so far, he’s reached out to a man named Abraham, whose family is going to become a sort of custom-made people-group. In order to save the whole wide world, God is going to make his focus really tight, and work with one family. This family, over the next few generations, is going to get bigger and bigger while they’re enslaved in Egypt, then God will rescue them in Exodus, and at Sinai, he’ll begin shaping them into a nation with a totally different cultural form from everyone around them. They’re going to be weirdos, honestly, because the God who actually made the world, has become strange to the world. So Israel will be a custom-made nation whose culture God will shape in such a way that it will provide all the contextual structures for later on, when Jesus comes, so the things he says and does will actually be intelligible to the people he’s trying to talk to. It’s a long play on God’s part.
When we get to Deuteronomy, this is the second time God has brought his people to the very edge of the land he’s been preparing for them. This is where, once they’ve settled here, God can continue the work of shaping them culturally as a curated context to support the salvation he’s planning to pull off when Jesus comes. That context is necessary, for instance, without it, John the baptist calling Jesus “the lamb of God” is meaningless gibberish. With it, all kinds of meaning clicks into place.
But I mentioned something that surprised me about the end of Deuteronomy, right? Yes, at the end of the book, Moses is preparing to die, even as he is preparing the people to enter the promised land. And God is realistic about how this is going to go. Like Jesus in Matthew 24, he is clear-eyed about human hearts, and he’s very honest with Moses about it. He knows these people’s hearts are going to grow cold and wicked, even in the promised land. In fact, the promised land may just be the place where they get cozy enough to take the old warmth for granted, allowing the fire to die.
But the thing that surprised me was God’s tactic for addressing the coldness. After chapter upon chapter of listing all the laws he knows the people will eventually forget, God says something like, “Moses, things are going to go badly just so you know, but I’ve got this great idea: let’s write a song for them to sing.” What? A song? Yep. God commands Moses to teach the people a song for when they’re love grows cold and they begin to slip away from the warmth of God’s ways. Embed this bit of sung poetry into the culture, so the people have something like an “axe for the frozen sea” to quote the title of a Ben Palpant book.
As a songwriter that caught my attention. This song is God’s protest song against the coldness of his people’s hearts toward him and toward one another. It’s a song that lays a picture of joy in contrast to evil, it’s a song that wafts like smelling salts under the nose of a numbed out brain, it’s a song that’s brutally honest about the terrifying consequences of giving in to the chill of wickedness, as well as, beautifully hopeful about the God who never stops inviting his frigid lovers to sit by his hearth and learn the ways that lead to life. And it is a song that promises God will meet anyone that is ice-bound along the way, to break them free of death’s overwhelming grasp.
God sings a protest song against our enemies, and even against us, when we have taken up the battle banner of rebellion against God’s ways. He invites us to listen, because if we do, this song will, “descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants.” Can you hear the warm rain fall, like ice melting, caught up in the cupped hands of the crucified God? The God of perfect justice and abounding mercy?
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Horse-sense and the Meaning of the Worldby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Become a Patron PartnerI depend on the support of Patrons like you to make podcasts, music, books, and more. A one-time or monthly gift makes a huge difference!Click HereThere’s an anecdote attributed to Beethoven, at least as I heard it somewhere, that I love. The story goes that after playing a certain piece of music, someone asked him, “Maestro, what does this piece of music mean?” “Ah!” he said, “good question,” and immediately he sat down at the piano and played the whole piece again from start to finish. You get the idea. The meaning of a piece of art can’t be separated from the art itself, as if, in the case of a story, for instance, a so-called moral could be extracted from it, such that the story could be discarded. The meaning of the music, or the story, or the poem is not separate from its medium, but bound up with it. Can you imagine a smile meaning something without a face? No, the meaning of the smile can’t be separated from the medium through which the smile is made available, the peculiarities of a loved one’s bodied expression.
Often it is the medium or mode of the communication that shapes us as much or more than the message itself. It was philosopher Marshall McLuhan who said, “The medium is the message.” What does that mean? Neil Postman, in his book “Amusing ourselves to death,” applies McLuhan’s phrase to television, specifically Sesame Street. Now, I grew up loving Sesame Street, but Postman argues that, for all its merits, even a wonderful show like Sesame Street, can’t help but teach us to love its medium, which is television. He explains that if we love a TV show, at least one thing that’s happening is we’re being trained to love television, which is the show’s medium.
Nowadays, even if this (hopefully beneficial) podcast is what you go to your smartphone for, you’re still being trained to love the medium, which, in part at least, is the device itself. It’s just a pattern of reality, not itself bad. For instance, like we mentioned above, if the message is love through a hug, smile, or loving words from a friend, the medium is that person, and you’re being trained to trust and attach to the medium. The medium and the message are inextricable. That’s why what is said and how it is said go together. Like music and its meaning, like language and the people who speak it, like a smile and a face.
I love to read outloud. One reason is because words don’t come from thin air, they come from people. People with bodies, body language, voices, gestures, and expressions. They have a way about them. The best writers make their characters real as you read—you can see how they move, you can just hear how they would say such and such.
I’ll give you an example from a song I wrote called “Looking for you.” Here’s the first line of the song, it goes, “what if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time?” It depends as much on how it is said, as much or more than what is said. You can imagine other ways of saying that line, can’t you? Let me try it out with two different ways of saying it:
What if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time. (with a threatening tone)
or
What if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time. (with a comforting tone)
That lyric could get creepy real fast, right? The non-verbal music or tone of the phrase matters to its meaning. I’ve heard it suggested that something like 85% of communication is non-verbal, implicit, and intuitive. That non-verbal 85% is one of art’s sweet spots, and it’s reflected in God’s artwork, the Creation.
So, let’s look at an example from nature… Like Beethoven’s music, you can dissect a frog and catalog all the parts, but what you’ll miss entirely is what a frog actually means. You might analyze what it is, but not why it is. George MacDonald, who wrote a whole essay about how the images in nature are meant to supply our imaginations with ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves and God, puts it this way:
In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things; we see in them, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology. So Nature exists primarily for her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man’s further use.
Isn’t that interesting? Nature doesn’t primarily exist to be analytically autopsied, as if the message could be extracted from the medium, without destroying both. Gandalf’s comment about Saruman fits well here, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.”
John Ciardi says the same of poetry, citing Charles Dickens
…the language of experience is not the language of classification. A boy burning with ambition to become a jockey does not study a text on zoology. He watches horses, he listens to what is said by those who have spent their lives around horses, he rides them, trains them, feeds them, curries them, pets them. He lives with intense feelings toward them. He may never learn how many incisors a horse has, nor how many yards of intestines. What does it matter? He is concerned with a feel, a response-to, a sense of the character and reaction of the living animal. And zoology cannot give him that. Not all the anatomizing of all the world’s horses could teach a man horse-sense… So for poetry.
So meaning is not about mere information. It’s not about extracting the message. That means art has something to say about the inseparability of orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxy (correct living), for instance, since art-making emphasizes that meaning (or truth) only arrives when what is said and how it is said—the verbal and the non-verbal communication—harmonize. Christ says to obey (orthopraxy) is to love, which may suggest that the non-verbal how of our lives—the part that art tends to specialize in—is actually primary. Which is another way of saying I’ll know what you believe by how you live, not by what you say you believe. I’ll know what a frog is by watching how it frogs, not by reading the autopsy report. Or, in the case of Ciardi’s jockey, I’ll gain some horse-sense by being around horses, not by listening to a lecture about their characteristics.
Am I saying that truth-claims are secondary and not important? No. I’m saying the natural order of things is that truth claims are literally second, in the sense that, in real life, they don’t happen first. First the stranger smiles at you, then you meet them and learn their name. The relational experience of the person precedes the propositional conclusions we arrive at. I smell the flower before I set down my doctrine stating how pleasant it smells.
Recently I heard someone describe the moment they began to take Christianity seriously. They said they were tasked at their job to interview an old man, a believer in his late 90s. As the old man began to tell stories of God’s work in his life from over fifty years before, tears ran down his wrinkled cheeks and praise tumbled from his quivering lips. The young man realized he was in the presence of someone not just conveying information, but bearing witness to a relational reality. This old man really had met and come to love a living Jesus.
It’s interesting that Jesus invites his disciples to follow him long before he asks them “who do you say that I am?” In some sense, the experience of discipleship precedes conversion. You get to know someone before you make truth-claims about them. And the truth-claims of the church are the result of the cumulative witness of many who’ve heard the deep, throbbing music of God’s lovingkindness, steeped themselves in the poetry of the holy heartbreak of covenant history, experienced the forgiveness, kindness, and beauty of God’s healing work, and they’ve come to know its meaning. They’ve come to put a name and a face to it all. “The meaning of the world?” they say, “It is Jesus.”
Having said that, can you detect the idea we began with—that the medium is the message? The main mediums God uses to communicate himself are the beauty and intelligibility of Creation, humans who embody his ways, and art that narrates his relationship with the world, by which I mean, firstly, the Bible, and secondly, the things that people make, whether books, music, poetry, etc. If television shows are really forming in us an attachment to television, for instance, and instagram is really training us to love our phones, then how might God choose to be deliberate in the mediums he uses to form and teach us to love and attach to himself. He needs to be deliberate, right? Since the medium needs to correspond rightly to the nature of the message, which is personal connection with himself.
The loving faces and touch of God’s people are the medium that teach us to love, not TVs and phone screens, but faces and hands. Jesus has a face and hands that heal. The medium is the message. The excellent artwork people make, can shape a “horse-sense” of reality in our very bodies that directs hearts toward what is ultimately real, and even how God relates to what he has lovingly made. That’s one of art’s sweet spots. The Scriptures involve us in the history of how God has gone about involving himself in history, how he has painstakingly crafted a beautiful story for God and humanity to inhabit together.
This principle is also the problem with idolatry, because if the medium conveys a message that doesn’t correspond to what is actually real, the sense of reality taking shape in us will be rooted in a lie. We’re all beginning to notice, aren’t we? That whatever our devices, as a particular medium, shape in us, it isn’t really true. Our devices aren’t making us more human, the medium of a screen can’t satisfy the deepest needs of our personhood for the presence of another living face and body with us. No machine ever could, because we’re not machines. Because the medium is wrong, so is the message.
Screens don’t prepare us for deeper relationships with people, but for deeper dependence on screens. On the other hand—and let this be an encouragement—protected time with actual humans in real life practicing God’s love, slow contact with the beauty of the Creation, and meditation in the presence of Scripture and good art—these all offer us points of contact with what God, and therefore life, is actually like.
May we, with all the saints across the millenia, when asked, “What is the meaning of the world?” answer, “It is Jesus.”
All the music that has ever moved you, All the light that’s reached your eyes, every touch of love consoling, every scent to wake delight, The tastes that stirred the longing,The sleep that bathes our weary limbs, Each embrace that held the crumbling heart together Borrows life from the God who is Its meaning and its essence, Who is the light that makes light shine, Who is the face the world is hiding In every good and lovely sign. The post S6:E3 – Horse-sense and the Meaning of the World appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Sitting very still, very cold, for a very long timeby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Click HereThe last few weeks I’ve spent the better part of my days out at the family farm near where my parents live. It’s deer season until the end of January, and I grew up hunting with my Dad, so that’s what’s on my mind lately. Honestly, I didn’t exactly relish deer hunting as a kid. I wanted to be with my Dad, but as a wriggling eight-year-old boy, I didn’t get particularly excited about being set in the woods and expected to sit there alone and perfectly still for, on average, three hours. Also, my Dad was pretty gung-ho about hunting back then, and so we were usually up and in the woods well before sunrise.
And it was usually very cold. I could never get warm enough. Now, as you can imagine, that made sitting still that much harder. Shivering and wiggling were means of survival in the midst of a long, chilly morning, I reasoned. Being just a young’un, I didn’t yet partake of a morning cup of coffee, so I’d also get really sleepy on the deer stand a lot of mornings.
One of the only times growing up that I actually saw a buck of any size, was when it woke me up from a nap. I had climbed down from the twelve foot high ladder stand to sleep a while on the ground. Better to interrupt a hunt with a nap, than snooze your way off the side of a high platform and wake up dead. At any rate, I woke up on the ground eventually, with a big eight-point buck just a few feet away inspecting the strange creature he’d discovered laid out at the base of a tree. I gasped upon waking and startled the big fella, and we both froze for a moment. I don’t know what he was thinking. I was thinking, “can I get to my gun?” But it was a few feet away leaned against a tree. No chance. As soon as I moved, the buck darted away. I don’t remember if I told anybody about that until much later. I’d fallen asleep on the job, and, almost to rub it in, a prize buck had stopped by to make sure I knew it.
You may think, if you’ve played any deer-themed video games or watched a hunting show, that deer hunting is action-packed. You may be under the impression that the woods are positively crammed with the critters. The truth of deer-hunting is that it is wonderfully boring. It mostly consists of sitting incredibly still, totally silent, for a very long time, while nothing much happens. You begin to memorize the trees. Your eyes catalogue every twig that looked like a deer for a few seconds, but wasn’t. Your mind marks every twitch of a leaf that wasn’t, in fact, a deer’s ear or tail, and learns, over time, to disregard the sound of all two-hundred deer footsteps that wound up just being squirrels dashing through leaves or birds hopping across the forest floor. It takes a long time to learn that you almost never hear a deer coming. In fact, you almost never see the coming either. Deer don’t walk up, they materialize. They are silent forest shadows creeping warily across tree trunks, just darkening the world around them enough to graze the eye.
I hunted for six-and-a-half hours in one day. I saw one bobcat. I memorized a lot of trees. But every hunter knows that most deer encounters last a few seconds. It’s like waiting hours in line for the rollercoaster, and, when those few seconds finally arrive, I’m not exaggerating when I say that the feeling is the same. I cannot explain why the human heart beats like it does when shadow-buck materializes out of nowhere in the woods, like this creature slipped through some fairy-portal that happened at that moment to criss-cross our dimension. I can’t explain how impossible it is to slow your breathing, keep your hands from shaking (even twenty minutes after the deer has vanished again). I also can’t quite explain why you want to kill something so clearly majestic and gentle. But, for whatever reason, you do. You feel like, if I could just stop that thing in its tracks, I could get at that beautiful magic—hold onto it somehow.
They call it buck-fever. It’s enough of a rush to keep you coming back to sit painfully still for ridiculously long amounts of time, in extreme discomfort. You go hunting for that. You go hunting for the pulse-pound so loud only the crash of a gun can out-boom it.
But, truth is, you also go for the stillness and the quiet, which is 99.9% of what hunting is. For instance, I’ve hunted entire seasons and not killed anything. In fact, seen almost nothing. And, I have grown to love the very things that, as a child, frustrated me. Sometimes I actually enjoy getting up that early and climbing a tree stand before the sun is even up. It can be kind of game to slip through the woods as quietly as you can. And I have developed a taste for sitting as still as I can and memorizing trees for three hours at a time. I never would have thought that could be the case.
It’s only been in the last year or two that I decided to buy a few trail cameras to leave out at the farm. They’ve got fancy ones that’ll send instant videos to your cell phone anytime a deer passes by, but I bought a couple of the cheapest, simplest ones I could find. Now, it’s part of my schedule to go switch out the SD cards on the trail cams, come home, and check for deer videos. It’s like Christmas morning, y’all. You never know what may have walked past in the last week or two! A pair of racoons waddling by? A coyote startled by the infrared lights? A big buck? A brand new fawn barely getting his legs under him? There is a whole world going on that would otherwise go unseen, but there’s a tiny portion of the forest where the goings-on of that secret world are whispered.
Your whole life your own two eyes may only be able to see a tiny portion of the good that’s going on in this world. Buechner famously said that, “what’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
From the deer stand I can hear the jets overhead and some big motor rumble down the gravel road not far off. There are horrible things going on in the world. Things that keep me from sleeping some nights. But they won’t amount to anything in the end. I am hunting for the things that will. I am out in the long stillness picking out the slender trail of the quiet, enduring things. Up before daylight, keeping watch in the cold for the dawn that may bring a longed-for glimpse of the Forest King with his spreading crown, as he steps from another world into this one.
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Reclamation: Fixing up a Four Wheelerby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Click HereI’ve been trying to get the grease out from under my fingernails for a few days. There have been hours spent researching to find just the right parts, scouring youtube for videos on how to fix this or that axle carrier, install a new carburetor, or what size spark plug socket to use on this 1986 Honda four-wheeler. It surprises me sometimes, but I can get delightfully lost in these details. My brother called it detective work. Restoring an old machine takes some sleuthing to see if you can puzzle out all the components to bring a rusty old farm implement back to life after years and years of neglect.
I was telling my sister, Angela, a few days ago that I have a very specific memory of clinging to her as she drove this four wheeler around a pasture when my Dad and Uncle first purchased it. I wanted to drive it so badly, but I wasn’t allowed. I was only six. However, my older sister was eleven and I could ride behind her as long as my Dad could see us. This past week, as I’ve been working on the old rust-bucket, I can see that field where Angela and I rode the gleaming new vehicle back then, except, it’s not a field at all. No, not anymore. It’s a stand of pine trees, nearly fully grown now. I can see the tall, golden grasses waving in my memory, where now pines stand straight and tall. Back then, I dreamed of the day when I’d finally be old enough to ride this thing all by myself.
About this time last year, I saw the old four wheeler languishing in the pole barn out at the farm. I’m not sure when it had last been cranked. The airless tires drooped like melted wax, mud and rust mingled to cover the frame, and the seat cracked and peeled like gray paint curling on an abandoned shack. The red plastic body had faded to dullness over the years. I felt sorry for it. But more than that, I felt like it was some piece of my childhood, some old joy and combustion that no one had tended to for such a long time that it was slowly decaying into nothing. If something weren’t done about it, it would be irretrievable before much longer. The question arose in my mind, was it already too late?
That set me to researching. I discovered that this particular model of fourwheeler (A 1986 Honda Fourtrax 250) had, in its day, been a fine machine. I was surprised to find more than a few folks on youtube excited to get their hands on one in order to fix it up. Could it be that this old thing was somewhat prized? I hadn’t expected that. So far so good. I had a good machine — good material to work with, it seemed. I guess that, because of that, I was able to find a good bit of information on it, and, what’s better, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find parts for the repairs.
But then, I got busy with other projects. The last book of the Well Trilogy was wrapping up, and the launch process needed attention. I put a bookmark in the story of reclaiming the old fourwheeler, and set it aside, where a stack of other books inevitably piled on top of it. On went the year, I was away from home for most of the second half, gone all of July overseas, home for three weeks in August, before spending the rest of the Fall on the road touring with the songs and stories of The Well Trilogy. When this December rolled around, I was out at the farm again, and there it was: the lifeless old thing—tired and forgotten.
It would feel so good to hear that thing crank up again after all these years. How fun would it be to ride the old paths through these woods again? The ones that I haven’t even ventured upon since this thing broke down? To crash through some mud-puddle like a rain-tromping toddler, to weave through the acres, get to know this place better. It was just a week ago as I was pulling the old, gummed-up carburetor from the heart of the machine to transplant a new one, that the word reclamation popped into my mind. Entropy is always groping at our hearts. The long lazy slump of decay, disregard, and carelessness seems to never tire of letting the air seep slowly from the tires. Here’s this old thing that used to boom with ignition, spin out on the turf with a kind of eager combustion, like a horse eager to run the race.
Is it too late to pay attention to that old liveliness? To see where the rust has crept into the bones, and to fight back with a little axle grease, and TLC? For me, working on this fourwheeler feels like a way of practicing another kind of regard, another kind of healing maintenance. It’s a work of hands-on reclamation. A choice to be a present, deliberate participant in not giving up to the easy deflation of life through the pin-holes evil quietly pokes through the tires. To keep caring. To keep believing that life, hope, joy, and love are ultimate and indestructible realities. However, they are not automatic or passive realities. They are living, relational realities that depend on patience, trust, and persevering in the ongoing and vulnerable work of repair and maintenance.
Ultimately though, it is God’s regard, his hands-on care that will accomplish the grand work of reclamation in us and in this world. He has not forgotten us like old farm implements crumbling in the corner of some derelict barn. He has big plans for this little plot of earth, and there is a plot to earth—a story, a frame, under all this rust and decay.
When the long-exiled Israelites returned to their homeland under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, the whole place was a hopeless ruin, and the state of the land mirrored the people’s broken down hearts. I’ve always thought it was interesting that the way to reclaim the people was to fix up the place. They got to work, stacked the stones, patched up the walls, put a fresh coat of paint here and there. For me, it’s been changing the oil, putting fresh tires on, a new carburetor, greasing the joints. It’s messy work, but, strange as it may sound, it sparks something deep in me to work at it. And, it’s hard to explain how good it felt, after years and years of absence, to hear the raucous old joy of the engine’s rumble when it finally cranked again a few days ago. I was a little boy out on his daddy’s farm, eager to hit the trail.
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Meet professor, scholar, and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees," Jonathan Koefoed. Jonathan chose the last song on the album, "By the Rivers of Babylon," and wrote a rich personal essay exploring, in the midst of a broken world, Christ's command to practice a peculiar hope.
The post S5:E17 – A Tale of Two Trees: Jonathan Koefoed, “Moonlight in the Desert: Singing the Sojourner’s Song” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
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Meet editor, encourager, book coach, and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees," Anita K. Palmer. Anita chose the song "Take to the Fields" from the new album, and she gives us the great gift of her honesty and vulnerability in an essay entitled, "Mercy in the Wind."
The post S5:E15 – A Tale of Two Trees: Anita K. Palmer, “Mercy in the Wind” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet singer, conductor, pianist, and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees," Amber Salladin. Amber chose the song "The Word became Flesh," and wrote a stunning essay on how singing together, whether lament or praise, shapes us both body and soul into the likeness of Christ.
The post S5:E14 – A Tale of Two Trees: Amber Salladin, “Singing the Feast of the New Creation” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet Founder and Executive director of Cultivating Magazine (& The Cultivating Project), and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees," Lancia Smith. Lancia chose the song "Let Your Roots Go Deep," and wrote an essay about longing and holding on in places of "mending and rooting."
The post S5:E13 – A Tale of Two Trees: Lancia E. Smith, “Reaching for the Unseen” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet John Barnts, YouTuber, Bible translator, and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees." John chose the song "Follow You Down" from the album, and wrote an essay tracing his personal journey of understanding suffering, not as something God does to us, but something we do with our wounded God.
The post S5:E12 – A Tale of Two Trees: John Barnts, “Downside Up” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet Jason Smith, story-gatherer, YA novel author (Fayborn Trilogy), and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees." Jason chose the song "When I Cried Out" from the album, and wrote a wonderful essay about a God who hears us, meets us, and works with us through every hard place.
The post S5:E11 – A Tale of Two Trees: Jason Smith, “The Power and the Pit” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet Steven Elmore, President of the C.S. Lewis Foundation, teacher, and essayist number four for "A Tale of Two Trees". Steven chose the song "Like a Lamb" from the album, and wrote an essay exploring the joyfully surprising love revealed by our crucified Lord Jesus.
The post S5:E10 – A Tale of Two Trees: Steven Elmore, “Sustained by Joy” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet Benjamin Holsteen, songwriter, PhD Candidate at St. Andrew's University, and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees". Ben chose the song "How can we sing?" based on Psalm 137, and wrote an essay (that just made me cry) about the longing for home and trusting Jesus to get us there.
The post S5:E9 – A Tale of Two Trees – Benjamin Holsteen, “Sing and Exile’s Love Song” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet classical educator, author, and essayist for "A Tale of Two Trees", Heidi White. Heidi chose the album's title track and write a myth-intoned essay exploring the storied history of cross of Christ, and how only the crucified Lord can transform us and the world.
The post S5:E8 – A Tale of Two Trees: Heidi White, “Two Trees, One Cross” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet visual artist, world traveler, and essayist number one for "A Tale of Two Trees", Emily Verdoorn. Emily chose the song "You Belong" from the album, and wrote an essay called "Rain" exploring a new kind of thirsty longing that often follows having tasted Living Water.
The post S5:E7 – A Tale of Two Trees: Emily Verdoorn, “Rain” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I had a conversation this week about the need for encouragement, and how we often keep the good things we could say to each other to ourselves for a variety of reasons. They go unsaid. But no one can fill their own cup; we need to say the good things out loud to one another.
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A friend asked about how to deal with cynicism, and it's been on my mind since. What an important question. This week, I'm sharing some thoughts on that, and I'll close with a prayer.
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So often, good things are made to feel bad. But the Lord is always redeeming words and ideas that have gotten muddied by bad experiences or deceit. This week, I'll share a recent occasion of that for me, and my friend Amy Malskeit will close us with a "Prayer for God's Nearness."
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I make terrible art all the time. I think what keeps us from making stuff, is feeling like we ought to be good at it first. But that’s impossible. So, this week, I’m thinking about the invitation to art-making as a way God extends grace to us, which frees us to just start enjoying it.
The post S5:E3 – The Joyous Grace of Creative Incompetence appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On a walk this week, I felt a reluctance to acknowledge the goodness of the emerging springtime beauty, and I wondered why gratitude felt a little dangerous to me. This week, I'll be exploring how gratitude is connected to hope, and how hurt can make hope scary. I'll close with a prayer for God's healing kindness.
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Welcome to Season 5 of "One Thousand Words - Stories on the Way!" This week, I felt like I didn't want to add to the noise, but instead to point to words and sounds that "make quiet."
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Meet teacher, poet, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings", Rex Bradshaw. Rex chose the song "Meet me at the Well" from the album and wrote a wonderful essay called "The Digger's Tale". In it, Rex explores the wells we all dig on our own that run dry, and a meeting with One who is himself the wellspring of Living Water.
The post S4:E19 – Only the Lover Sings: Rex Bradshaw, “The Digger’s Tale” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet educator, author, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings", Junius Johnson. Junius chose the song "That won't stop Him" from the album and wrote a gut-wrenching essay of the best kind called "All you have to do is die: the power of abiding in death". In it, Junius walks with us to the shadowed valleys of our hearts, where we discover Jesus is more than willing to meet us with his redeeming care.
The post S4:E18 – Only the Lover Sings: Junius Johnson, “All you have to do is die: The power of abiding in death” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet writer, gardener, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings", Amy Baik Lee :) Amy chose the song "I See a Light" from the album and wrote a rich essay called "The Sound of Eucatastrophe". In it, Amy leads us in story as she goes looking for the ways Jesus, in the midst of our darkness, meets us with a sudden, unexpected turn towards joy from "beyond the walls of the world."
The post S4:E17 – Only the Lover Sings: Amy Baik Lee, “The Sound of Eucatastrophe” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet artist, writer, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings", Adam R. Nettesheim. Adam chose the song "The Return of the Prodigal Son" from the album and wrote a hope-filled essay called "Learning to Walk Again". In it, Adam, a father himself, reminds us that Jesus has shown us the true heart of our Heavenly Father who takes joy in even our wobbly-est steps towards him.
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Meet delivery nurse, writer, and essayist for “Only the Lover Sings” Jessie Todd. Jessie chose the title track of this project “Only the Lover Sings” and wrote a great essay called "Excavation”. In it, Jessie tells the story of her Scottish miner ancestors to offer us a picture of Jesus as one who goes digging for buried treasure: you and me.
The post S4:E15 – Only the Lover Sings: Jessie Todd, “Excavation” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet... um... me! :) Surprise, I wrote an essay for my own book! I chose the song "The Heart of Our God" from the album and wrote an essay called "The Way Home". In it, I'm looking at the death of Jesus - asking not necessarily how it does what it does... but what does it do? Was it necessary or just a loving gesture? Does the cross really have anything to do with my actual life?
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Meet teacher, editor, podcaster, author, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings" Heidi White. Heidi chose the song "Trying to get my heart back" from the album and wrote a fantastic essay called "Embracing a New Name: St. Photini". In it, Heidi fills us in on the Samaritan woman's story after meeting Jesus, and shares how his face gently coaxes our hearts out of bondage to fear, giving us a bright, hopeful name.
The post S4:E13 – Only the Lover Sings: Heidi White, “Embracing a New Name: St. Photini” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet singer/songwriter, poet, author, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings" Adam Whipple. Adam chose the song "Everything But You" from the album and wrote a great essay called "In the Darkness of Noontide". In it, Adam sits with us beside Jacob's well as we reach the end of ourselves and assures us there is another source of life beyond self-esteem, beyond ourselves in Christ's love.
The post S4:E12 – Only the Lover Sings: Adam Whipple, “In the Darkness of Noontide” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet writer, editor, children's book reviewer, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings" Théa Rosenberg. Théa chose the song "The Well" from the album and wrote a wonderful essay called "Below the Tideline". In it, she tells the story of a walk with her daughter beside the vast ocean, reflecting that Jesus brings us those unknowable waters in a way we can know: as a Well.
The post S4:E11 – Only the Lover Sings: Théa Rosenburg, “Below the Tideline” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet author, lecturer, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings" Lanier Ivester. Lanier chose the song "Every Beauty" from the album and wrote a responsive personal essay called "Eggardon Hill". In it, she invites us to join her and her husband Philip as they make a trip through the English countryside looking for confirmation of God's goodness and love in the beauties they encounter.
The post S4:E10 – Only the Lover Sings: Lanier Ivester, “Eggardon Hill” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Meet poet, pastor, and essayist for "Only the Lover Sings" Andrew Roycroft. Andrew chose the song "Looking for you" from the album and wrote a responsive narrative essay called "A Stranger on the Road". In it, he imagines what it's like to be led down the paths of despair shackled to the legion voices of shame and accusation. How could that story end well? It can't unless a "Stranger" comes seeking us where we are hopelessly lost.
The post S4:E9 – Only the Lover Sings: Andrew Roycroft, “A Stranger on the Road” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week on the podcast, I'll share an excerpt from the introductory essay to the new book, tell you more about the project, and read a favorite related psalm to close. Over the next weeks, the amazing essayists who wrote for the book will share excerpts from their essays written in response to the songs and the woman at the well.
The post S4:E8 – Only the Lover Sings: Matthew Clark – I want to see what she saw appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I just released my own book and album "Only the Lover Sings" last Friday, but this week I want to tell you about another book: "Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children" by Square Halo Press. I'll share the essay I wrote for the book about George MacDonald's "Sir Gibbie".
The post S4:E7 – The Fragrance of the Blessed Realm appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, writer, poet, photographer, and editor Amelia Friedline asks, "Are quiet little thumbnail sketches of my particular corner of the universe worth anything when the world is rent by war, injustice, and all other kinds of evil?" Find Amelia at www.innocenceabroad.com
The post S4:E6 – Amelia Freidline, What is Poetry for? appeared first on Matthew Clark.
It is costly to love, isn't it? But, because of what Christ has revealed about reality, we can afford it. This is what I'm looking at this week on the podcast. Also: I've got a new single releasing this Friday, March 25th! Visit matthewclark.net and click the pre-save on Spotify button!
The post S4:E5 – What superabundance affords us appeared first on Matthew Clark.
It's no small thing to keep doing the small things. Last night, our small group started reading Richard Foster's "Celebration of Discipline" and I was reminded that willpower will disappoint us, but keeping at the little practices that keep us close and open to the Lord, cultivates healing by keeping us in contact with the Life of our life.
The post S4:E4 – Like a tree planted by the streams appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Recently, a friend on facebook asked "why is it so hard to apologize?" Well, that got me thinking, "Yeah! Why does it feel so scary to admit we're wrong and as for forgiveness?" I know that feeling, and this week I'll share some thoughts on and close with an original song off my "Beautiful Secret Life" album.
The post S4:E3 – Why is it so hard to apologize? appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, I'm sharing a concept I learned in counseling that has stuck with me, and some reflection on what makes change and healing possible. How do we grow? I'll end with a favorite G.M. Hopkins poem. In other news: the first single from my new album releases March 4th! Stay tuned!
The post S4:E2 – Open System/Closed System: Welcoming New Hope appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Welcome to Season 4 of One Thousand Words! This week, I'll be sharing about one of the surprising last things Moses did before he died and the rabbit trail it led me down, and I'll read a few lyrics from one of my favorite old Rich Mullins' songs. Subscribe and share, if you enjoy this episode, and sign up for my newsletter over at matthewclark.net.
The post S4:E1 – The Furious Love Song of a Dying Man appeared first on Matthew Clark.
What is a face? What does it mean for someone to face us, for us to have to face ourselves, and how does facing and being faced by Jesus change us? It is scary to turn and face Jesus, because we’re afraid God doesn’t really love us. But the one who dares to look finds out the shocking good news and comes away singing, “God has made his face to shine upon us!” Seeing Jesus see us as his beloved, changes the way we see ourselves.
The post S3:E30 – Season 3 Finale: The Light of a Face appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, guest essayist Maribeth Barber will explore what Wendell Berry means when he implores us to “do something that won’t compute”— arguing that it’s less about rebelling against the culture for rebellion’s sake, and more about living and loving well. Maribeth's debut novel "Operation Lionhearted" releases 10/13/21, find out more: maribethbarber.com
The post S3:E29 – Maribeth Barber, The Defiance of Laughter appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week we'll welcome a guest essayist from Norway, Erling Rantrud. A trained gardener, husband, father, and pastor in Sandefjord, Norway, Erling will share about God's life-giving invitation to both His work and His rest in a place where heaven and earth meet. And he'll sing a benediction for us in his native tongue!
The post S3:E28 – Erling Rantrud, There Was a Garden appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Jesus says, “The Father is seeking worshipers who worship in spirit and truth.” What does that mean? What kind of relationship does God hope to have with us? I'm looking at Psalm 88 and John 4 for clues about life, God, and real connection in love. How do the (often uncomfortable things) God chooses not to edit out of his book demonstrate his vulnerability and invite us to be vulnerable with him?
The post S3:E27 – Showing Up in Spirit and Truth appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I just finished reading Stanley Hauerwas’ “The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson”. In it, he describes the virtues as the characteristics formed in us by practices that accompany a particular narrative in which we have been located. How then does inhabiting the Christian story transform us as we bear that story out in our very lives - our bodies, decisions, and so on?
The post S3:E26 – Your Place in the Story, Pt. 4 – Virtues: The Heartbeat of Reality appeared first on Matthew Clark.
In Part 3 of "Your Place in the Story", having already talked about the necessity of church participation, I’m looking at how saturating ourselves in the Scriptures and in Prayer gives us the wisdom to joyfully and beautifully improvise... to enact this storyline on the stage of our lives alongside others, to jam along with the song God is singing over us, or to join the Trinity in their conversation of holy love.
The post S3:E25 – Your Place in the Story, Pt. 3 – Here’s the Script; Have Fun! appeared first on Matthew Clark.
How do we find our place in the Story Jesus is telling? Beginning last week, I started a series of episodes exploring that theme. In part one, I talked about how, broadly speaking, liturgies are simply a human phenomenon (even apart from religion) that work a story into our bones. And this week, I’m jumping off from there exploring how the unnoticed narratives we involve ourselves in name us - for good or ill. Names are how we understand our essential relation to things, the truth of our being.
The post S3:E24 – Your Place in the Story, Pt. 2 – A Beautiful New Name appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Everybody does liturgies - inside and outside the church. I’m thinking of a liturgy as any shared practice or discipline that situates us within a particular narrative that gives our life context and meaning. Liturgies provide language, images, events, and storyline. They work that stuff down into our bones, until whatever story we’re practicing becomes the measure for everything. The next few weeks, I'm exploring things that help us find our place in The Story Jesus is telling.
The post S3-E23 – Your Place in the Story, Pt. 1 – *or Anybody Want a Peanut? appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, we welcome singer/songwriter Nicole Kelley. Her disarming and wise way of talking about Jesus made me think how much I’d love to get her to share something here, and this week she’ll be talking about Peter’s faith and failures and how Jesus’s steadfast grace gives us permission to let go of regret and "press on toward the prize" as Paul says. Nicole's new album "Canyon Wide" is available everywhere online. Visit her website: www.nicolekelleymusic.com
The post S3:E22 – Nicole Kelley, “Peter and His Personal Record Swim Time” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Sometimes we forget that God works through regular people to get things done. The Bible didn’t just magically appear out of nowhere; God invited real people throughout history to join in his long redemptive work. In the Bible, we see evidence of it. This week, I’ll share how I’ve experienced that personally, and some thoughts on how God provides for us through Creation, wisdom, and friendship.
The post S3:E21 – God’s Friends Getting Stuff Done appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, I wanted to read a letter I wrote almost exactly one year ago today. I was feeling all the dismay and bewilderment of that moment as lockdowns began, and I wrote this piece for the Spring 2020 Issue of The Cultivating Project. The Lord can enter into and redeem absolutely anything, if he can transform the cross and the grave. So, though I don’t see how, I know he’s not dismayed or bewildered. Jesus will bring life and eucatastrophe in a thousand little ways as we continue our Pilgrimage toward the Joy set before us.
The post S3:E20 – Dear Friend, A Letter appeared first on Matthew Clark.
...But wait, there's more! It's still Easter, or Easter-tide, all the way till Pentecost on May 23rd! So, today I'm sharing two interrelated readings on the theme of Easter Joy. One from Alexander Schmemann that I'll read, and one from Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" read beautifully and joyfully by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson. We may weep, yes, but since Christ has come we have a "secret strength" and participate in a "deeper magic". This changes everything.
The post S3:E19 – Easter: Secret Strength and Deeper Magic appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia! Well, friends, thank so much for walking through this week with me. I've really needed it, personally. In this last Holy Week episode, Amy Baik Lee will read her piece "In the space of a single word", Son of Laughter (Chris Slaten) will sing "The Gardener", Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson will read John Updike's poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter", and Brian Brian will close us with a prayer. "One Thousand Words" will be back as usual every Monday.
The post S3:E18: Holy Week: Easter Sunday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
What do we do with this strange, suspended Saturday? This in-between time, this "Nondum" or "not-yet" time, after Jesus's death but before his Resurrection? For his first followers there was no certainty of what was to come. Surely, this silent Saturday is a part of Jesus's gift to us, too, right along with Friday and Sunday? I'll talk a little about that, read a poem, Taylor Leonhardt will share an original poem and her song "Lights gone out", and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us again tomorrow on "One Thousand Words".
The post S3:E17 – Holy Week: Saturday, The Gift of the Quiet In-Between appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This is Crucifixion Day, Good Friday. This is a hard day, because Jesus’s brutalized face, faces us with the truth about ourselves - asking us to face him with our true faces, and discover that an unexpected new life is possible in Him. Amy Lee will share "The Blood-bought gift of loneliness", I'll sing a song, and Brian Brown will read T.S. Eliot's "East Coker IV" and close us in prayer. Join us every day this week on "One Thousand Words".
The post S3:E16 – Holy Week: Good Friday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
It's Maundy Thursday. "Maundy" means mandate or command, and this is the day Jesus washes his disciples' feet and mandates that they love as he has loved them. The Last Supper takes place today, after which Jesus prays at Gethsemane in anguish as his disciples fall asleep. Then he is betrayed with a kiss and arrested. Today, Chris Slaten (Son of Laughter) will sing for us, we'll hear from Amy Baik Lee who will also read a G.M. Hopkins poem, I'll sing a song, and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us every day this week.
The post S3:E15 – Holy Week: Maundy Thursday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On this Wednesday of Holy Week, I wonder how lonely Jesus felt? No one really gets what he's doing. But then Mary breaks the jar of costly perfume. She gets it somehow, and is promptly attacked by the others for her "foolishness". Today, we'll look at Mary's beautiful act, Taylor Leonhardt will sing a Mission House song, my friend Grace Andrews will read George Herbert, and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us every night this week on "One Thousand Words".
The post S3:E14 – Holy Week: Wednesday, Mary Does a Beautiful Thing appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On this Tuesday of Holy Week, I'm trying something different. I'm sharing a fictional imagining of Jesus as he camps outside Jerusalem, remembering the promises made to Abraham so long ago and how they are about to be fulfilled, finally in himself. I'll also share a song, Malcolm Guite will read a sonnet, and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us every day this week as we walk our story together with Jesus.
The post S3:E13 – Holy Week: Tuesday, Remembering Abraham appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This Monday of Holy Week, we continue walking with Jesus to the cross. So far he's wept over Jerusalem, entered to short-lived praise, and now he makes his way to the City's broken heart, the Temple. I'll share a reflection and a song, Malcolm Guite will recite a sonnet, and Brian Brown of The Anselm Society will close us in prayer. Join us every day this week.
The post S3:E12 – Holy Week: Monday, Cleansing the Temple appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This is Palm Sunday. Our Story begins today with Jesus, having resolutely turned his face toward Jerusalem, entering that City to shouts of praise that he knows will quickly change to shouts of condemnation. But He knows exactly what he is doing; he has come to die. I'll read a passage from Frederick Buechner and sing a song, Malcolm Guite will read one of his sonnets, and Brian Brown will pray from the Book of Common Prayer to close.
Join me and my friends every evening this week for this special Holy Week series.
The post S3:E11 – Holy Week: Palm Sunday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Yesterday around a friend's Sunday Dinner table, I tasted "Luella's Rice" for the first time and saw that it was good. My friend's old family recipe brought something good from the past into the present and awakened a hungry hope for a future feast. This week, I'm wondering if the church is like a kitchen where we apprentice, through Scriptural doctrines, practices, and fellowship, learning to cook up good things, setting the table for a coming Feast?
The post S3:E10 – Old Family Recipes appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, I'm remembering something Eugene Peterson said that showed me how we take on a lot of pressure to perform like machines; but we’re not machines, we’re people. Christianity’s emphasis on the grace revealed in Jesus - who, at the crucifixion, puts the locus of human identity on the fact of our belovedness, means we are precious completely independent of our performance, productivity, or achievement.
The post S3:E9 – Man or Machine? (Or How to Relax a Little) appeared first on Matthew Clark.
A dear friend of mine was asked, “What is the most lovely and beautiful future you could possibly imagine that the Lord might provide for you?” This week, I'm asking if the imagination might be a place where we keep pictures of what life could be like, and how good relationships, stories, and art can help ‘hang hopeful pictures’ on the wall for us. And I’ll end with Holly Ordway's sonnet "A Sudden Goldfinch" as a benediction.
The post S3:E8 – Redecorating the Imagination with Hope appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, I’m thinking about how we are called to work in faith, because we rarely are able to see how our part fits meaningfully into any larger story. Life and love can feel like a waste of time, but even at our lowest points God is at work in and through us, bringing his Great Tale to life in this world. I’ll share a little from the Book of Job and one personal story of how Jesus has encouraged me to show up but leave the results to him.
The post S3:E7 – None of my business appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Welcome to special guest essayist, Leslie Anne Bustard! Leslie is a mom, wife, writer, and a publisher with Square Halo Books. She'll be sharing an original poem and essay. Regarding her essay, Leslie says, "When I was a homeschooling mom of three daughters, I believed I could manufacture, through the right schedule or the right books, perfect days of learning and loving. But God had deeper lessons of his long view work in his children for me to learn." Find Leslie online: facebook.com/leslie.bustard
The post S3: E6 – Leslie Bustard, “He Who Began a Good Work” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
David Lyle Jeffrey says, "God is a poet" and quotes John Donne, saying ours is "'a very figurative and metaphorical God.' How he speaks, not just what he says, becomes an important measure of who he is." This week, I'm thinking about how poetry, and the arts in general, are practiced by Jesus, and given to us as a means of making our imaginations more roomy for Himself and the things His love makes impossibly possible.
The post S3:E5 – Poetry and Impossible Possibilities appeared first on Matthew Clark.
A few days back, my friend Amy Lee introduced me to the Greek New Testament word "splagchnizomai", which is a kind of gut-wrenching ache of compassion and longing for someone. That helped me think about my newest release "Gone Too Long". So, this week, I'm ruminating on "splagchnizomai" as it relates to the story behind that song, and I'll share the song itself to close the episode.
The post S3:E4 – Song and Story: Gone Too Long appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Last night, my friends and I that meet weekly started reading one of my favorite books - Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. This is one of the main books that I go back to again and again when I get stuck and can’t believe in joy. There are few books I find as refreshing. So in this episode, I’m thinking about how easy it is to get stuck in a world that’s no bigger than the globe of my own head. How I need a revelation - I need someone to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
The post S3:E3 – Open the Windows, Let In Some Air appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, I'm wondering about the ingredients that make seemingly impossible healing possible - how did Dr. King point to a Resource greater than any human as he proclaimed a dream for humanity? I'll close with two prayers written by Dr. King. All of that somehow relates to apple pie, obviously, right?
Please subscribe, comment, and share. Thanks!
The post S3:E2 – MLK Day: How to Make an Apple Pie appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Welcome to Year Three of the podcast! I'm excited to get things started up for this season. In this episode, I'll share one of my "quirky loves", and explore three analogies - jazz improv, storytelling, and sailing - as we talk about how to discern reality in the midst of so much confusion. Please subscribe, comment, and share.
Read the essay text: www.matthewclark.net/onethousandwords
The post S3:E1 – A Brawl in the Jazz Club appeared first on Matthew Clark.
The title of this season's finale is a play on words: "Radiant" as a noun is the source of light, and "radiant" as an adjective is whatever is being illumined by that Radiant. Jesus is Creation's Radiant, the Light and Logos who makes it radiant. This is too often a lost connection that must be remade again and again, since without it, the wisdom of God that signals life's dignity is broken.
The post S2:E31 – Season 2 Finale, “The Radiant” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, special guest essayist Amy Baik Lee shares about her "personal quirk": grapheme-color synesthesia, and how its "joint perceptions" may offer an encouraging clue toward developing faithful sensitivities. How do the body God has given us and the world we live in intermingle so that God's promises and presence "make sense to our senses"?
The post S2:E30 – Amy Baik Lee, “Synesthesia” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Lately, life has been a landslide and I've felt exhausted by the false-light of information and the apparent darkness. A people without vision perish, says Proverbs, and Jesus in the sermon on the mount appeals to those whose lamps (eyes) have gone dark without their realizing it. This week, I'm writing as a sort of prayer for renewed vision - a vision of God alive and at work in the world giving faith to those who seek the light of his face, a face that remains at peace amidst the storm.
The post S2:E29 – The Bluebird, the Landslide, and a Fool’s Hope appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week is a departure from the normal podcast. I decided to revisit an old, familiar nursery tale and it went in a direction I hadn't planned.
The post S2:E28 – Storytime: Of Wolves and Piggies appeared first on Matthew Clark.
As an artist and in everyday life, perfectionism can be paralyzing. Afraid I'll fail to do the best thing, I wind up doing nothing. Of course, I believe in excellence, but there's no way around the fact that there will always be a "gap" between what we hoped to do and what we were able to do. But, in grace, Jesus invites us to bravely, humbly offer up whatever we can, and he will fill in the gaps.
The post S2:E27 – Good enough is more than enough appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I was worn out last week, so I didn't make a podcast. Then, I had a great conversation with a friend which helped me remember (again) that salvation is not a thing to get, or do, or achieve. Rather, Jesus is our salvation. That sets me free to be a person in abiding love with a Person - ever becoming a living character in God's story - rather than a task machine.
The post S2:E26 – He has become my salvation appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I need sobering reminders that snap me out of the spell of apathy, passivity, and disengagement with life. This week, I've been hearing Jesus's call to stay present and to participate deeply through talks given by friends during Anselm Society's "Imagination Redeemed" online conference (imaginationredeemed.com). I'll talk some about that, and close with a passage about bravery from Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead".
The post S2:E25 – The Yoke of Glorious Engagement appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Psalm 135 says, "The idols of the nations are silver and gold, Made by human hands. They have mouths but cannot speak, Eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear... Those who make them will become like them, And so will all who trust in them." But what happens when we worship Jesus - a person with eyes that do see, and ears that do hear? Do we become like him? Do we have a real shot at becoming fully alive and human again?
The post S2:E24 – You become like what you worship appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, I'm sharing a live song and story from a house concert I played last Fall. The song is "Meet me here", and it was written for the Easter season as a reminder of the joy that Jesus has set before us - literal bodily resurrection and subsequent deathlessness forever. "You can meet me here in 10,000 years, and I'll know your face, and you'll know mine." Also, I'm premiering the Song & Story video at: youtube.com/matthewclarknet tonight at 7pm Central. Come join me and chat a bit!
The post S2:E23 – Live Song & Story: “Meet Me Here” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
...But wait, there's more! It's still Easter, or Easter-tide, all the way till Pentecost on May 31st! So, today I'm sharing two interrelated readings on the theme of Easter Joy. One from Alexander Schmemann that I'll read, and one from Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" read beautifully and joyfully by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson. We may weep, yes, but since Christ has come we have a "secret strength" and participate in a "deeper magic". This changes everything.
The post S2:E22 – Easter: Secret Strength & Deeper Magic appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia! Well, friends, thank so much for walking through this week with me. I've really needed it, personally. In this last Holy Week episode, Amy Baik Lee will read her piece "In the space of a single word", Son of Laughter (Chris Slaten) will sing "The Gardener", Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson will read John Updike's poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter", and Brian Brian will close us with a prayer. "One Thousand Words" will be back as usual every Monday.
The post S2:E21 – Holy Week: Easter Sunday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
What do we do with this strange, suspended Saturday? This in-between time, this "Nondum" or "not-yet" time, after Jesus's death but before his Resurrection? For his first followers there was no certainty of what was to come. Surely, this silent Saturday is a part of Jesus's gift to us, too, right along with Friday and Sunday? I'll talk a little about that, read a poem, Taylor Leonhardt will share an original poem and her song "Lights gone out", and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us again tomorrow on "One Thousand Words".
The post S2:E20 – Holy Week: Saturday, The gift of the quiet in-between appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This is Crucifixion Day, Good Friday. This is a hard day, because Jesus’s brutalized face, faces us with the truth about ourselves - asking us to face him with our true faces, and discover an unexpected new life is possible in Him. Amy Lee will share "The Blood-bought gift of loneliness", I'll sing a song, and Brian Brown will read T.S. Eliot's "East Coker IV" and close us in prayer. Join us every day this week on "One Thousand Words".
The post S2:E19 – Holy Week: Good Friday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
It's Maundy Thursday. "Maundy" means mandate or command, and this is the day Jesus washes his disciples' feet and mandates that they love as he has loved them. The Last Supper takes place today, after which Jesus prays at Gethsemane in anguish as his disciples fall asleep. Then he is betrayed with a kiss and arrested. Tonight, Chris Slaten (Son of Laughter) will sing for us, we'll hear from Amy Baik Lee who will also read a G.M. Hopkins poem, I'll sing a song, and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us every night this week.
The post S2:E18 – Holy Week: Maundy Thursday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On this Wednesday of Holy Week, I wonder how lonely Jesus felt? No one really gets what he's doing. But then Mary breaks the jar of costly perfume. She gets it somehow, and is promptly attacked by the others for her "foolishness". Today, we'll look at Mary's beautiful act, Taylor Leonhardt will sing a Mission House song, my friend Grace Andrews will read George Herbert, and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us every night this week on "One Thousand Words".
The post S2:E17 – Holy Week: Wednesday, Mary does a beautiful thing appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On this Tuesday of Holy Week, I'm trying something different. I'm sharing a fictional imagining of Jesus as he camps outside Jerusalem, remembering the promises made to Abraham so long ago and how they are about to be fulfilled, finally in himself. I'll also share a song, Malcolm Guite will read a sonnet, and Brian Brown will close us in prayer. Join us every day this week as we walk our story together with Jesus.
The post S2:E16 – Holy Week: Tuesday, Remembering Abraham appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This Monday of Holy Week, we continue walking with Jesus to the cross. So far he's wept over Jerusalem, entered to short-lived praise, and now he makes his way to the City's broken heart, the Temple. I'll share a reflection and a song, Malcolm Guite will recite a sonnet, and Brian Brown of The Anselm Society will close us in prayer. Join us every day this week.
The post S2:E15 – Holy Week: Monday, Cleansing the Temple appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This is Palm Sunday. Our Story begins today with Jesus, having resolutely turned his face toward Jerusalem, entering that City to shouts of praise that he knows will quickly change to shouts of condemnation. But He knows exactly what he is doing; he has come to die. I'll read a passage from Frederick Buechner and sing a song, Malcolm Guite will read one of his sonnets, and Brian Brown will pray from the Book of Common Prayer to close.
Join me and my friends every evening this week for this special Holy Week series.
The post S2:E14 – Holy Week: Palm Sunday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
How do we learn to identify and desire goodness? What's something you love, and who taught to you love it? This week, I'm remembering my Grandmother Mal - her storytelling, her laughter, the things she taught me to notice and love. I'm giving thanks. On the other hand, I've also learned to love many things that aren't, in reality, good, and so I'm joining in an old prayer that the Lord would turn my affections towards reality in Christ.
The post S2:E13 – Whatever is Lovely appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Guest essayist Rachel Mosley shares about time with her family, facing death, crawfish boils, and finding oneself at a table set in love by those who've come before. And we'll close with a poem by contemporary African American poet Jacqueline Woodson called "lessons".
The post S2:E12 – The Cloud of Witnesses, Rachel Mosley appeared first on Matthew Clark.
When our fragility becomes uncomfortably apparent, what rises to the surface? Fear and anxiety certainly do, and for good reasons. But also, in times of weakness and need, a kind of tenderness rises that teaches us to move out of ourselves towards others in care. This week, I'm sharing an essay I wrote last Fall, and poet and fellow-podcaster Susan Mulder (susanmulder.com) reads her poem "What if?" for our closing benediction.
The post S2:E11 – Need is a gift appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I like feeling and appearing competent, having the know-how, looking like I know what I'm doing. But holding too tightly to those things, or expected them to generate real life often keeps me from trying new things and trusting in God's care for the childlike. This week, I'm experimenting with a fictional imagining of how Nicodemus may have felt as he wrestled with becoming a child of God.
The post S2:E10 – Being a beginner again appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Being a Patron is so much more than being a customer; it is partnering as a family member with God and our brothers and sisters in Christ to bring good things into the world. This week, guest essayist Tresta Payne, shares her passion for arts patronage as a way of being in ministry, along with some practical suggestions and a prayer that we would both "make good art, and make good art possible."
The post S2:E9 – Tresta Payne: Patronage – Making good art possible appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Songs can really be little welcoming habitats where souls gather to make contact with each other, themselves, and the Lord. This week, I'm sharing a live recording from a house concert last November of both the song and the story behind "Kumalo" from my album "Beautiful Secret Life". The video that goes with this will premier on my YouTube channel tonight at 7pm Central.
The post S2:E8 – Story and Song – “Kumalo” Live appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Henri Nouwen said, "Keep returning to the road to freedom." That little phrase has been a big help to me the times I've run off the road and felt like giving up and making my home in the ditch. Failure, rebellion, and sin are "empirically verifiable" realities, and this week I want to spend a little time remembering the even bigger reality of Jesus's wild and tender welcome toward us.
The post S2:E7 – Get back on the road appeared first on Matthew Clark.
A very special welcome to my friend Erin Turner, our guest host this week! In a world of commodification and utility, it's easy to lose our humanity. Erin will be talking about how she's come to discover the riches of being called to a kind of work than can feel 'unuseful', and she'll share with us some of the treasures of a George Herbert poem, "The Forerunners".
The post S2:E6 – The Scholar’s Call: Sharing the Treasure appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I visited my parents last week, and spent a good bit of time out at our farm. So, this week, I'll share some reflections on place, memory, planting and hope. When you talk about that stuff you have to end with a Wendell Berry poem, so we shall.
The post S2:E5 – The Daffodils appeared first on Matthew Clark.
There are so many ways we, as hurting humans, try to put the broken pieces of life back together, but we never can quite pull it off. Still, even though our ways of coping don't ultimately work, maybe they are our best effort at simulating the healing that Jesus's work on the cross supplies in reality? This is an idea that fascinates me, and this week, I'll feel my way around it some.
The post S2:E4 – Actual or Simulated Atonement? appeared first on Matthew Clark.
"Story" has been a buzzword the last few years, maybe, in part, because our sense of being in God's story has been lost and we're looking for a way to contextualize our lives meaningfully. This week, I'll be thinking about the stories we believe, as well as, how, as humans, we are called to be storytellers/artists, and co-storytellers with God. I'll close with a favorite passage from good ole G.K. Chesterton for good measure.
The post S2:E3 – You belong in this Story appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Lewis said anxiety is an affliction and a way to feel with Jesus his pain, not a sin. This week, I'm thinking a little about that idea, and closing the episode with a reading of and Oliver Wendell Holmes hymn "O Love Divine, that stooped to share."
The post S2:E2 – Anxiety and Sharing in Christ’s Sufferings appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Welcome to Season Two! This week we'll look at how good words help us participate more truly in reality. And I'm very happy to have Poet/Priest Malcolm Guite close this episode with a reading of his poem "Spell" from his book "The Singing Bowl".
The post S2:E1 – Good Words appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Wendell Berry says that every day we should "do something that won’t compute". In this episode, I'll talk about how certain practices help us keep a hold on what Josef Pieper calls "true riches" in a world that tends to reduce life to mere utility, valuing only usefulness, and I'll end by reading a Wendell Berry poem.
The post S1:E23 – Being Beautifully Unuseful to God appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, I'll explore how envy teaches me to fear, keeps me from growing, and makes wonder impossible. And I'll talk about a hopeful alternative. Then, I'll close with a One Thousand Words exclusive performance of an original song.
You can find the text from this podcast here: https://www.matthewclark.net/s1e22-making-envy-scarce/
Learn more about hosting a house concert here: www.matthewclark.net/houseconcerts
Follow the tour: www.matthewclark.net/shows
The post S1:E22 – Making Envy Scarce appeared first on Matthew Clark.
After a June break, here's a new episode about my favorite habitat for sharing songs and stories - the house concert. I'll talk about what this special kind of concert means to me, and close by sharing a new poem.
Relevant links this week:
www.matthewclark.net/houseconcerts
www.matthewclark.net/onethousandwords
www.thecultivatingproject.com
The post S1:E21 – What is a house concert for? appeared first on Matthew Clark.
My friends Abbye and Jeff were in town this weekend, and I was reminded of what a deep gift friendship is. This week, I'll explore how friends ignite our own hearts, how being made in the image of a triune God gives a family-shape to our destiny, and, obviously, a bit about... horcruxes? Yeah.
Show notes and links on the homepage: www.matthewclark.net/onethousandwords
The post S1:E20 – At The Table With Friends appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I got stuck in the Houston airport for several days last week during bad weather, and I had a chance to cross paths with some strangers and hear a few stories.
The post S1:E19 – Connecting Flights appeared first on Matthew Clark.
"We only know who we are when we find ourselves caught in the loving gaze of another person." In part 2 of last week's episode, we'll explore what it means to pay attention and discover that someone has been lovingly paying attention to us. This is how we find that we are surrounded by a Story and invited to join in its telling.
Ep. 18 is part two of a talk given by Matthew Clark at Cofferstowe 2016 called, “The Costly Craft of Paying Attention”.
The post S1:E18 – The Costly Craft of Paying Attention, Pt. 2 appeared first on Matthew Clark.
"Listening evokes stories" says epistemologist Esther Lightcap Meek, and the common call as God's image-bearers might be to become attentive, if we are to dwell deeply in a Great Story, which is critical to becoming storytellers ourselves.
Ep. 17 is part one of a talk Matthew Clark at Cofferstowe 2016 called, "The Costly Craft of Paying Attention".
The post S1:E17 – The Costly Craft of Paying Attention, Pt. 1 appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Today, and Old Testament story from Elisha the Prophet got me thinking about the strangeness of Easter and last week's mercifully baffling story of Jesus walking to the cross. I'll also share a new single called "Meet Me Here" that I recorded and released this Easter.
The post S1:E16 – The Conquering Power of Mercy appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I talk to myself when I'm alone (and I bet you do too)! I'm a verbal processor, and this week I'm sharing an imagined conversation about "Magic Words" and learning to live in the story God is telling.
The post S1:E15 – Quieting The Magic Words – Listening For The Tune appeared first on Matthew Clark.
I sing like a bird about birds singing on this week's episode. I'll tell the story behind an original song called "Come True" and share an live-in-studio recording. The song is from the album "Beautiful Secret Life (Bonus Songs)", available on my website (www.matthewclark.net) and all online platforms.
The post S1:E14 – Listen to the Birdsong appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Here's the second half of Christa Wells' talk on Imagination from Cofferstowe 2016. Visit www.cofferstowe.com to learn more and register for Cofferstowe 2019 this June 14-17 in Cincinnati, OH!
The post S1:E13 – Christa Wells, “Imagination: Seeing the Far Side of the Mountain”, Pt. 2 appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Singer/Songwriter Christa Wells is featured this week sharing part one of a talk she gave at Cofferstowe 2016 called, "Imagination: Seeing the Far Side of the Mountain". Cofferstowe 2019 is coming this June. Visit cofferstowe.com for more information and to register.
The post S1:E12 – Christa Wells, “Imagination: Seeing the Far Side of the Mountain”, Pt. 1 appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week my brother Sam suggested I write about joy and obedience - a word-pairing that seemed strange me for a long time, and registration is open for the Cofferstowe Art & Faith retreat at cofferstowe.com!
The post S1:E11 – Joyful obedience? What am I missing? appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, on Episode 10, I'll share about a hard and normal part of everyone's life and creative process, hopefully light a little votive candle in some way, and close with a poem about remembering that we're not alone.
The post S1:E10 – A Smoldering Wick appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Episode 9 is my first "Etymology Episode"! This week, I'll talk about being a sixth grader, we'll look at the word "diabolical" and its surprising opposite, and, as a closing prayer, I'll share a draft of a poem I'm working on.
The post S1:E9 – Etymology Episode: “diabolical” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
So what IS a Cofferstowe anyway? So glad you asked... this week's episode features an essay about the heart behind this "Creative Kingdom" retreat coming up this June, and closes with a few words from one of our featured speakers Lanier Ivester.
The post S1:E8 – What IS a Cofferstowe anyway? appeared first on Matthew Clark.
In Episode 7, writer, poet, and fellow G.K. Chesterton nerd Amelia Friedline shares an essay on the holy ache of homesickness, and I'll close by reading a couple of Amelia's poems as a benediction. As always, visit the podcast website (matthewclark.net/onethousandwords) for the essay text, to comment, and for links to more info.
The post S1:E7 – Homesick at Home appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On Episode 6, I'll recount a conversation from a hotel shuttle that took place just before I arrived at Bruce Herman, Malcolm Guite, and JAC Redford's "Ordinary Saints" exhibit at Laity Lodge, and we'll hear Malcolm Guite share a snippet of poetry to close.
The post S1:E6 – An Abandoned Piano appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Here, in the fifth episode, I'll share an essay about learning to see and we'll hear a George Macdonald quote.
The post S1:E5 – The Shy Deer and The Fence appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week, special guest Rachel Mosley shares the story of her Grandmother's passing, we'll hear original music from The Mosleys, and close with Jane Kenyon's poem "Let Evening Come".
The post S1:E4 – The Speeding River Of Light appeared first on Matthew Clark.
This week we'll walk through the old hymn "Come, Thou Fount", explore the etymology of "inoculate", and end with a live in-studio recording.
For more, visit: www.matthewclark.net/onethousandwords
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