Podcast Archives - Matthew Clark: Recent Episodes
Matthew Clark
Where the River Goes - Douglas Kaine McKelvey, "What is Not Costly is Not Hope"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E33_WTRGessays_McKelvey.mp3Douglas Kaine McKelvey grew up in East Texas and moved to Nashville in 1991 to participate in the early work of Charlie Peacock’s Art House Foundation, an organization dedicated to a shared exploration of faith and the arts. In the decades since, Douglas has worked as an author, song lyricist, scriptwriter, and speaker. His books include three volumes of the bestselling series Every Moment Holy: New Liturgies for Daily Life, and a critically-acclaimed middle-grade chapter book titled The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog. He has also served as a scriptwriter and story editor for the first three seasons of the animated series The Wingfeather Saga, and has penned more than 350 lyrics recorded by a variety of artists. Douglas and his wife Lise live near Nashville, Tennessee.
Find Doug’s work online: everymomentholy.com
Almost Time
by Matthew Clark
The cold is ending where the ground gives up its ghosts
The bones are mending I can see it happening
A thief came in the night tore through these bars of steel
War has sown the seed, but mercy owns the fields
Where the wick is smoldering, we tucked away the words
Paint the caves with martyr’s blood, whisper promises
I can see the dancers dance, they swing and pound and shout
The sword is double-edged, but mercy moves the mouth
I can feel them tumbling, such strong empires
Every cornerstone they laid was trap door
CHORUS
The Lamb who was slain is worthy of all praise
Now the winds are howling out, they’re twisting ancient oaks
Beauty whispers tenderly but the words are choked
The gates seem near to splintering, the rhymes they all unwind
The holy seed has split the husk, it is almost time
I can feel my heartbeat now where the stone sunk down
Barely breathed my dying breath when the Word called out
BRIDGE
The Lamb who was slain is worthy of all praise
CHORUS
ENDING
I can feel my heartbeat now where the stone sunk down
Barely breathed my dying breath when the Word called out
The post S6:E33 – Where the River Goes: Douglas Kaine McKelvey, “What is Not Costly is Not Hope” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Where the River Goes - Nicole Howe, "Prayers in Neon Chalk" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E32_WTRGessays_Howe.mp3Nicole Marie Howe is a writer, speaker, wife, and mother to three teenage mavericks, a ten-year old bohemian, and a rescue pup named Samwise Gamgee. Nicole is Director of Formational Community for The Cultivating Project and a columnist for Cultivating Magazine. She is also founder and co-director of OneStory, a creative collaborative that provides Bible learning resources for kids and families. She serves locally as lay teaching pastor for The Practice Church. Nicole holds a master’s degree in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University, where she discovered the power of the imagination to restore awe and wonder to her floundering faith. She is currently pursuing a Doctor of Ministry degree in Spiritual Formation and Relational Neuroscience from Western Theological Seminary.
Find Nicole on Instagram: instagram.com/nicolemariehowe
Strong Man
by Matthew Clark
I saw a great wave, it seemed to swallow up the sky
I felt the ground cave, I heard a burning angel cry:
Let the dragon spit out fire, let the strongest arms take aim
But there is no strong man stronger than the Lamb
I saw a great war, being waged while the people slept
I heard the sweet tongues, selling power from their poisoned lips
But the humble broke the spell, and the holy all proclaimed
There is no strong man stronger than the Lamb
I saw the blood boil, I saw the wicked dominate
I saw their grins fade, when the Author stepped on the stage
And the strutting began to fret, their destruction was near at hand
Cause there is no strong man stronger than the Lamb
BRIDGE
See the whole world in confusion, the diagnosis worse than you can imagine
There’s nobody left with eyes clear enough, we’re looking at the rubble but the blueprints are lost
Every well in the world is mixed with pollution, is there anyone left to untangle the ruins
I wept until I saw the clean light of dawn come, And Jesus the only holy unconfused one
Interlude
I saw the Judge stand, I heard Creation shout for joy
And every red hand, that touched the River turned white as snow
But the wicked I saw no more, and the dragon he met his end
Cause there is no strong man stronger than the Lamb
The post S6:E32 – Where the River Goes: Nicole Howe, “Prayers in Neon Chalk” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Where the River Goes - Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, "Also" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E31_WTRGessays_Kirstin.mp3Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson publishes and lectures internationally on George MacDonald, Victorian Britain, the Inklings, Faith & Arts, and Ecology & Community. She writes academically (such as chapters in The Inklings & Culture, Unsaying the Commonplace, and An Introduction to Child Theology), introduces MacDonald texts (such as Lilith, Hope of the Gospel, and the full-text graphic novel of The Golden Key), and crafts pieces for organizations such as The Rabbit Room, Radix, and ArtWay. She is on various boards related to academic work on the Inklings and George MacDonald, and is chair of the George MacDonald Society. Some of her lectures, teaching, and podcast interviews can also be found online. Kirstin directs Windstone Farm Linlathen, a non-profit that seeks to facilitate and encourage community through ‘Theology, Ecology, & the Arts’ in the Ottawa Valley, Canada.
Follow Kirstin’s work on her website: www.kirstinjeffreyjohnson.com
Sing like You Did
by Matthew Clark
The waiting is the hardest part
To hope for what you do not have
But faith is the evidence of things unseen
We have heard the prophets speaking
Say sin and death are only passing things
CHORUS
sing, sing like you did when the stars awoke
sing like you did when the tombstone broke
when every word you spoke came true
Sing, sing like you did on that silent night
Sing like you did when our hope took flight
When every word you spoke came true
So come and wake the sleeping hearts
Come and turn this stone to flesh
I believe the promises will all come true
But there are times I get so weary
Lord, is the night of waiting nearly through?
CHORUS
BRIDGE-verse
Make of us a willing womb
Brave enough to welcome you
Kindle in each winter heart a new-born flame
The post S6:E31 – Where the River Goes: Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, “Also” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Where the River Goes - Esther Moon, "Sea-Changed" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E30_WTRGessays_Moon.mp3Esther Moon lives in Irving, Texas where she enjoys life with her church community, practices holistic healthcare, writes interactive literature guidebooks, and avoids mosquitoes at almost any cost. Some of her favorite past adventures include exploring ancient Egyptian tombs and chaperoning high school students in Italy (while teaching them some Shakespeare). She earned a PhD in Literature from the University of Dallas in 2022; her dissertation explored Chaucer’s thoughts on poverty and wealth (including the spiritual and literary kinds) in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is still her favorite. She also loves to read George Herbert, Shakespeare, and Richard Wilbur; however, it must be admitted that her sci-fi and mystery bookshelves are the fullest.
Where the River Goes
by Matthew Clark
At the threshold of the temple
There a Gate stands like a man
And the music of his voice falls
like a river on dry land
On those steps that lead to heaven
There’s a long robe flowing down
And the hem is at your feet saying come
CHORUS
There’s mouth opened wide in impossible song
And the river flowing out it is clear and it is strong
Singing: Everything will live where the River goes
In this wasteland where the withered
Wait thirsty for a word
There’s good reason to be angry
where goodness seems absurd
But in a vision I went wading
In a stream that gathered speed
Till it brought to barren forests
Gentle fruit and tender leaves
CHORUS
I’ve seen you by the well dear
You are brazened by the noon
Every love you’ve put your hand to
Leaves you calloused and confused
But deep down there lives a question
It’s a thirst I recognize
Lover look upon my face
And rinse all that worry from your eyes
CHORUS
Do you fear the raging current?
Does it threaten like your tears
Swollen with the rapid rush
Of all your wasted years?
Now, it’s true this River takes you
It will drown you in its wake
And it takes a little courage dear
when dying’s what it takes
The post S6:E30 – Where the River Goes: Esther Moon, “Sea-Changed” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Where the River Goes - Micah Hawkinson, "One Short Sleep"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E29_Hawkinson-Essay.mp3Micah Hawkinson lives with his wife and four children in Topeka, exactly one mile south of the Kansas River. He makes stories, pharmacy software, and a mean quesadilla. He’s currently working on a novel set in the world of Beowulf and St. Brendan the Navigator. He enjoys reading, singing, teaching, playing games, and filling his shelves with more books than he is statistically likely to finish in his lifetime.
Even At the Grave
by Matthew Clark
I won’t tell you not to weep,
Yes, weep, like a mother in childbirth
For every mother weeps
and her labor, like a prayer in the chaos
It will all give way to wonder, once the newborn has appeared
And so we grieve the world we lost
Yes, grieve, like the Lord did for Lazarus
Who felt the sting of death,
And he was laid down in a tomb in the darkness
Then he heard the master’s voice, change a grave into a womb
CHORUS
Oh and every one of us, We all go down to the dust
Oh but even at the grave, we make our song
Though God will wipe away our tears
Still weep, like a soldier on lookout
When he sees the evil tide
Still he fights, and he will not retreat yet
Though he knows he cannot win, he will keep the long defeat
CHORUS
Oh and every one of us, We go down to the dust
Oh but even at the grave, we make our song
BRIDGE
When we are held we can hold on
And if we are held, we can let go
The post S6:E29 – Where the River Goes: Micah Hawkinson, “One Short Sleep” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Where the River Goes - Elisabeth Adams, "There in a Minute"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E28_Adams-Essay.mp3Elisabeth Adams has lived in five states, one Canadian province, and the captivating city of Jerusalem, where she studied Hebrew at Ulpan MILAH, historical geography at the University of the Holy Land, and taught English as a foreign language to university students, young professionals, and children. As a freelance editor and writer for the last dozen-plus years, she loves hearing and telling new tales of God’s faithfulness. Currently based in New England where she’s a cook and mentor for young adults, she’s also the smitten aunt of six, and instigator of tea parties for young and old.
Find out more at Elisabeth’s website: Elisabethadams.com
The Last Enemy
by Matthew Clark
I can see the places where the photos used to hang
The spaces on the wall made empty from the pain
Where the voice of those goodbyes still rings out in the night
Like a shotgun blast
I used to see into your eyes when your face was framed with light
But now I’m losing sight of the good things for the lies
And I wonder will I live to see this burden rolled away
And so I pray again
CHORUS
Lord, crush the stinging serpent who poisons all our joys
Pour into this shattered cup some quiet in the noise
We are weeping at the graveside wondering how the poor are blessed
But the last enemy you will defeat is death
I can see the faces shining like a field of countless stars
Scattered ‘cross the heavens each one a tingling heart
And you will gather them like sheep and fold them in your arms
Lord, I believe it
And the mending where the malice of the enemy took root
Will overtake the thorns that tore and mocked the tender shoot
The holy tree will give to tend the bruised its healing fruit
So we pray again
CHORUS
BRIDGE
And knowing it don’t make it right
Death is an intruder
And the sorrow will not sleep at night
I know you know, how could you not know
The post S6:E28 – Where the River Goes: Elisabeth Adams, “There in a Minute” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Where the River Goes - Ruth Naomi Floyd, "From Darkness to Dawn"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E27_RuthNaomiFloyd-Essay.mp3A vocalist and composer, Ruth Naomi Floyd has created a discography dedicated to a sacred jazz expression. She has been at the forefront of creating vocal jazz settings that express theology and justice for over 25 years. Blessed with a soaring mezzo-soprano voice, she leads her own multi-faceted ensemble. Her recordings consist primarily of original compositions, and critics praise Ruth’s music for its distinctive sound of progressive ensemble jazz that is seamlessly blended with messages of hope, faith, redemption, and love. Ruth has recorded and performed with such notable instrumentalists as James Newton, James Weidman, Gary Thomas, and many more. Rooted and grounded in a faith ethos, Ruth has been a presence and worker in areas of the arts and justice throughout her career. Ruth has lectured on the intersection of beauty, theology, justice, culture, and the arts at numerous performance centers, academic settings, and conferences around the world.
Find Ruth’s work: https://frederickdouglassjazzworks.com/
Where the Morning Dawns
by Matthew Clark
I had laid me down beneath, the waves of my own sin
I’d drowned my very last hopeful breath
When the sword of God’s own Word tore the darkness of those depths
His mercy passed through death to breath my name, oh breath my name
CHORUS
Where the morning dawns, Where the evening fades
You call forth songs of joy
Through the baptism of death, sings your animating breath
You call forth songs of joy
Every glowing coal grew chilled, only ash was left of love
And the burning bush lay frigid and consumed
When a mighty rushing flame from the very hearth of God
Bodied forth a burning better word, a better word
CHORUS
BRIDGE
Where the morning dawns, Where the evening fades
Mercy returns as praise
The post S6:E27 – Where the River Goes: Ruth Naomi Floyd, “From Darkness to Dawn” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Where the River Goes -Rachel Mosley, "The Father's Joy"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OTW_S6_E26_Mosley-Essay.mp3Rachel Mosley is an illustrator, preschool teacher, half of a musical folk-duo, and a sometimes-writer. Rachel has parented five kids with mostly-excellent results, survived one rare and bizarre heart attack, performed at Chastain Amphitheatre as the opening act for the 80’s band Air Supply, and lives in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, where she drinks several cups of (decaf) coffee daily. When not writing or drawing, Rachel can be found reading (poetry, lately), swimming in the Gulf, or, most likely, driving carpool. You can find Rachel’s art on Instagram (rachelmosleydraws) and her music on Spotify (The Mosleys).
Find Rachel’s artwork: www.rachelmosley.com
Today
by Matthew Clark
Oh God, who can survive in your presence?
I saw the smoke fill the temple
Angels of flame crying Holy, holy holy
Mercy! How can my sins be forgiven?
You and I both know I’m ruined
I heard a voice from the cloud say Listen, listen
CHORUS
This is my Son and the joy of my heart
He gives his life for the world
All who will call on his name shall be saved
Their every sin washed away
Jesus, bright comes the Word like an arrow
Aimed at the heart of this dark world
Long turned to stone but now beating softly beating
Look now! Here is the Lamb for the slaughter
Bearing away at the altar
All of our punishment, emptied out for sinners
BRIDGE
The ocean of sin like a flood across time
Passed over his lips till the sea-floor was dry
When Jesus became like a cup that was filled
And drained to the dregs so this sorrowing world could be healed
So today, if you hear him, today can you hear him?
The post S6:E26 – Where the River Goes: Rachel Mosley, “The Father’s Joy” appeared first on 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.
Stefanie Peters, "Walking into a Psalm"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/OTW_S6_E24_Stefanie-Peters.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 HereEight years ago, I walked the Cumbria Way in England—or rather, I walked most of it. The whole walk is 70 miles and goes from Ulverston in the southernmost part of the Lake District to Carlisle in Scotland, crossing several fells, or mountains, and a lot of glacier-carved lake valleys in between. I skipped the first and last few miles, the ones that took walkers out of and into the cities where the path begins and ends and walked for 45 miles over three days through the heart of the national park.
One of the lovely things about long distance walking (in America we call it hiking) in England is that the paths are usually designed so that each day’s leg ends at a bed and breakfast, and there are baggage services that will pick up your luggage in the morning and drop it off at your next stop so that it will be waiting for you when you arrive. You can set out in the morning with just your daypack and your lunch, although often, there will be a handily-placed pub or cafe where you can stop halfway for lunch and a cup of tea.
And then there’s the landscape—the valleys of hundreds of shades of green, the dry-stone walls, the rocky paths and waterfalls, the glacial lakes, the dark fells, the purple Scottish thistle, the brilliance of the sun when it finally emerges from the clouds and pours its golden light across the hills. The Lake District is still the most beautiful part of the world I have ever visited.
As I said, I skipped the beginning and the end of the trail. Part of the reason I decided to do so was that I wasn’t sure I could walk the entire 70 miles. I had spent my twenties dealing with an autoimmune disease that required two major surgeries. My health issues had felt like a long wandering away from the path that I had imagined my life taking when I graduated from college. Even those 45 miles felt daunting. But I hoped that the three-day hike would be a kind of pilgrimage, walking into the wild of nature in order to hear a word from the Lord and to say to myself that the rest of my life would tell a different story.
I discovered once I began walking that the Cumbria Way is known by locals simply as “the Way,” which, I knew, was also the name that the first believers in Jesus used to refer to Christianity in the book of Acts, before they had acquired the name of Christians. Instantly I felt like I was inside a metaphor for the Christian life, or even inside a psalm. Soon I encountered “living water” up in the fells—the little mountain streams that run noisily everywhere in the Lake District on their way down to the tarns, or lakes. The Lake District is the rainiest part of England, and I had accidentally booked my trip for the rainiest week of the year, so there were these little living streams everywhere, their babble the constant soundtrack of my walk.
I had expected to find a lot of other walkers on the path with me, but I was told at my first bed and breakfast that it was the off season; most other walkers knew that the week I was there, it would pour down rain every morning, and the fell paths would be especially slippery. So I found myself walking almost completely on my own, encased in a waterproof jacket, waterproof pants, and mostly waterproof shoes, spending a lot of time meditating on Psalm 121 (“He will not let your foot slip”) and Psalm 94 (“When I said, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your unfailing love, LORD, supported me”).
And then there were sheep. So many sheep. The Lake District is known for its native Herdwick sheep, which are raised on the fells, and they were everywhere. I discovered that no matter how high you climb, there is no place where you can get away from the sheep. I remember crossing a high pass in the Langdale Pikes and thinking that I had at last climbed so high that I had surely left the last sheep behind, when of course I found one more lost, or at least wandering, sheep waiting for me.
The sheep made me laugh a lot during those three days. Their habit of getting themselves into the most unexpected places. Their soft white faces peeping at me from around a corner. The—there is no other word for it—sheepishness with which they encountered me on a narrow trail, backing up anxiously as they tried to decide how to get around this unwelcome stranger on their fell.
So of course I began to meditate on myself as a sheep. Now, I love having an itinerary and a map. When I go hiking with friends, I’m the one with the compass and the state park map, but that can often bleed into wanting to be in control, to know where I’m going, or to choose for myself where I’m going, rather than trusting the Lord. But I often felt myself to be wandering, like a sheep, not knowing where the map was that would keep me on the path of God’s plan for my life.
On the first day walking in the Lake District, I had left Coniston Water, the home of the critic John Ruskin, and walked past Beatrix Potter’s estate and on for about thirty minutes when I realized I was lost. I had been in a wood, but now I was in a field with a bull, and I was pretty sure that I was not supposed to be in a field with a bull. I gave him a wide berth and retraced my steps to the other side of the wood, where I found the problem. In the middle of a field, the path had been hard to see. I had taken what seemed like the obvious direction toward a path heading into the wood, but it hadn’t been the right path. After some searching and carefully checking and re-checking my compass and the map, I found the place where another, harder-to-see footpath split off from the one I had been on and led in another direction. I would find out a few times on that trip that it was easy to stay on the path when I was climbing up and over a fell: there was usually only one way up and one way down the difficult portions of the Way. It was in the valleys, in the easy places, where it was easy to wander accidentally astray.
I took a long time to walk each day’s section of the path. I stopped a lot, trying to pace myself, wondering if my strength would be enough for that day’s portion of the Way, but also sometimes just to enjoy the view. It would usually be sunset by the time I walked into the little town where my next bed and breakfast waited for me. I came to expect each B&B owner to greet me with a little anxiety, saying they had been wondering if I was OK, because I had arrived so late. At the end of the second day, I was walking slowly because I was stiff, and I had the beginnings of a blister because all my socks were wet from the constant rain. As soon as I reached Keswick that night and quit walking, all the muscles in my legs seized up so that I could barely walk to a restaurant for dinner. I stood under the shower for a long time that night, willing the hot water to loosen my muscles so that I could continue for the final day. I wasn’t sure I could.
The last day was the longest. I had to walk all the way around Skiddaw, the fourth-highest mountain in England, in other to avoid the hazardous weather at the peak. Even so, for a lot of the 17 miles that day I walked in cold rain, and at one point had to stop and try to shelter beside a boulder from a hailstorm. By the time I could see the final town in the distance, I knew if I stopped I would not be able to keep going. I passed a woman just as I walked into town, and she thought I had just come through a rain shower, because my face was wet. I hadn’t been rained on; I was crying. I had come to the end of my pilgrimage, and I almost couldn’t believe it I’d made it.
Earlier that day I had been walking about halfway up the fell when I heard a man calling out in the valley below me, a sing-song repeated call. I was too far away to hear what words he was saying, but I could soon see sheep dogs running up from the valley to help guide the sheep down to the shepherd. Suddenly sheep were bounding down the mountain all around me, their anxiety about getting close to me less powerful than their urge to obey their shepherd’s call. The sheep did not just know his voice; they knew the call he sang out that told them it was time to come home. And none of them, it turned out, had wandered too far away to hear the call when he came.
Roads Go Ever On and OnBy J.R.R Tolkien
Roads go ever ever on,Over rock and under tree,By caves where never sun has shone,By streams that never find the sea;Over snow by winter sown,And through the merry flowers of June,Over grass and over stone,And under mountains in the moon.Roads go ever ever on,Under cloud and under star.Yet feet that wandering have goneTurn at last to home afar.Eyes that fire and sword have seen,And horror in the halls of stoneLook at last on meadows green,And trees and hills they long have known.The Road goes ever on and onDown from the door where it began.Now far ahead the Road has gone,And I must follow, if I can,Pursuing it with eager feet,Until it joins some larger way,Where many paths and errands meet.The Road goes ever on and onDown from the door where it began.Now far ahead the Road has gone,And I must follow, if I can,Pursuing it with weary feet,Until it joins some larger way,Where many paths and errands meet.And whither then? I cannot say.The Road goes ever on and onOut from the door where it began.Now far ahead the Road has gone.Let others follow, if they can!Let them a journey new begin.But I at last with weary feetWill turn towards the lighted inn,My evening-rest and sleep to meet.Still ’round the corner there may waitA new road or secret gate;And though I oft have passed them by,A day will come at last when IShall take the hidden paths that runWest of the Moon, East of the Sun.The post S6:E24 – Stefanie Peters, “Walking into a Psalm” appeared first on Matthew Clark.
On the Building of Fortsby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/OTW_S6_E23_on-the-building-of-forts.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 HereThere used to be open fields, but by the time my parents built a house on the old family property, it was covered in trees. But many of the old furrows were still carved into the land. These may have been old drainage ways that over time became ditches for little boys to play in.
My friends and I would sometimes gather sticks, branches, leaves. We’d rake out the ditch of as much debris as we could, before laying bigger sticks across the top to make rafters. Next, we’d lay branches to cross-cross them, and finally we’d pile pine-needles and stray leaves on top to make a sort of thatch. If we did our work well, we could huddle up under the roof in a cozy little forest fort. Under there, we’d imagine we were in a hidden clubhouse, dreaming of some adventure we were on, some bad guy we were hiding from.
So much of the fun was just in the making of the thing. I still get a kick out of watching these time-lapse videos of folks out in the wilderness building little huts and hidey-holes with simple tools and whatever they can find in the woods. There’s still some childhood urge in me to build forts.
We even used to build what we called air-forts inside the house. We’d take an old box fan, a big bedsheet, and several stacks of books to hold down the edges of the sheet to the floor and tuck it around the box fan. Then, we’d turn on the fan and the sheet would balloon up. We’d crawl inside our inflated fortress and play for hours. It’s entirely possible that I’ve made an airfort as recently as the last few weeks. It’s still just as fun. Actually, it’s even more fun now.
Maybe that’s why when the odometer on my old Nissan rolled around to 300,000 miles back in 2017, I decided to sell it for whatever I could get, and buy a Sprinter van. I’d been nerding out over all these folks who were building tiny houses, but then it got even better. I started seeing people building tiny houses inside what looked like FedEx vans. Something about it absolutely captivated my imagination.
I should back up and tell you about my Grandaddy Sam. I never met him. He died about a year before I was born, unfortunately. But his residual presence loomed large in my imagination, mainly through the things he made. He had been a civil engineer who later started a business making milling moulding for houses, then he started a business building cabinets. Apparently, he was something of a genius, because he went on to come up with designs for modular cabinetry and kitchens, inventing many of the processes and even the machines for manufacturing them. His business, called Belwood Kitchens, grew until it became a sizable factory.
When I was little, and since it had only been a few years since his death, there were still lots of his things around, probably just how he left them. I remember his dressing room at my Grandmother’s house seeming untouched. I used to play with his shoe-shining machine. And he even had a James Bond style secret office in the house that was accessible through a hidden door in the garage. I’m serious. An ordinary peg board loaded with garden tools would unseal and slide away at the push of a secret button to allow entrance to this wood-panneled nook where stacks of odd old blueprints lay still, and a strange switchboard was mounted above a fancy built in desk.
Mom had his old drafting table at our house, and I used to sift through his old technical drawings. One was for an electric car design he submitted to Popular Mechanics sometime in the 1960s. I grew up surrounded by his woodworking tools, meticulously organized. I was cutting plywood on his professional grade table saw when I was probably ten or twelve years old.
All that to say, a sort of mythos accumulated in my imagination around Grandaddy Sam. Gadgets, craftsmanship, invention, the smell of wood, the sounds and feel of the machines. In my imagination he became a combination of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Gepetto. I’ve even had a recurring dream my whole life of finding a hidden door on my Grandmother’s property and discovering a massive unknown workshop filled with shelves of strange inventions, beautiful mysterious artifacts, and an array of tools for woodworking—all untouched for half a century, covered in a fine layer of silent, secretive dust.
So take all those things that populated my imagination as a child, combine them with a little boy’s fort-building impulse, add a dash of fascination with tiny houses, and the need for a new vehicle and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a Sprinter van build. Converting the Sprinter was like building the ultimate fort.
I spent about a year and a half building it from scratch in the driveway, but I’d spent the whole prior year building it in my head. Sometimes a dream takes such a hold of your imagination, you just can’t brush it off, you have to make something of it. And, it’s not that I knew how to do it. I had a little woodworking experience, a little home repair knowledge, sure. But I learned how true the saying, “Third time’s a charm” really is, since many times during the build, I’d build something incorrectly, do more research, build it a little better, and finally get it working the third go round.
There was also some hard-to-explain embodied reality to building it. I was still in a season of long grief post-divorce. There’s often such a feeling of helplessness that accompanies loss and grief, and a need to make some kind of meaning where meaning has been evacuated. I was spending so much time in my head. Something about the physical task and craft of making this thing was healing. A friend of mine who was a juvenile drug-court counselor used to say that, if a kid was panicking, he’d have them count the lines in the wood grain of the table. It would calm them. Something about designing and building the van involved me in a physical process of making that gave my anxiety and sadness something to lovingly attend to. It was calming, meaning-making, challenging, and fun. The non-verbal, embodied work of crafting a tiny house in a van helped rejuvenate my imagination that had grown so tired from sadness.
I built a grown-up fort in a van. Fort is part of the word comfort, and a fortress is a place where folks wounded on the battlefield can withdraw to have their wounds tended. I named my van fortress Vandalf the White. I’m a big Lord of the Rings nerd, of course, so it seemed natural. But that’s not the only reason. Another is because Tolkien’s wizard is a pilgrim sent to roam Middle Earth, bringing counsel, comfort, and healing strength in the midst of terrible trial. I wanted to travel with that kind of companion, and I pray my life might bring comfort and wisdom to someone along the winding road as we all navigate whatever trying times we must face.
Joineryby Matthew Clark
Can you find the hidden switch?
Where the toolshed wall hides
An inner world of crackling blueprints,
Dusted images stacked in corners,
Lost scraps, waiting for breath?
Run your hand across the rough
Wood rudely shapen, dry now,
Still useful under good attention.
Like the man waiting within the child,
There’s hope for pulling the beam,
Giving it place and structure
In the integral joinery of hand
And eye, love and material.
Smell the pine resin, feel
The resonant motions that turn the grain
And, with frightening power, growl,
Groan, and split the stuff for building.
Can you sense the sudden switch,
As the measured hours
Are saw-dusted and smoothed
By the sweat of prayer,
The good bones fitted again,
Fortified by the work, cleverly
Held together by the hand.
The post S6:E23 – On the Building of Forts appeared first on Matthew Clark.
The Invisible Threads of Our Storiesby 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 first thing I noticed was that the air conditioner was exhaling only hot air. Pretty soon my steering wheel sharply stiffened as my power steering went out. That scared me. I started looking for some place to pull over. “Lord, I know something is really wrong,” I prayed aloud, “but I have to keep driving… please keep the van alive a few more minutes.” Meanwhile, I was leaning my whole body into the reluctant steering wheel to make the curves as they came. The bewildering Florida sun blanched everything around me on the turnpike, and I squinted as I came over a little hill to see a roadside fruit stand with a food truck in the back. I put on my emergency flashers and slowly wheeled my weary Sprinter off the side of the road and into the parking lot next to a couple of sleeping semis.
I braced myself for the worst as I got out and popped the hood. What would I find? It was bad. The main serpentine belt on the front of the engine had shredded and as it flailed it had damaged several things around it. Another smaller belt had been knocked off, the radiator fan had been broken, and one of the pulleys that held the belt had not only bent, but had gotten so hot with friction it fused itself to the engine block. This was going to be a serious repair job. Meanwhile, I had no way to get to the conference.
I let out a long frustrated sigh, and called my friend Andrew, the organizer of the C.S. Lewis conference I was supposed to be working. I filled him in on the situation, before hanging up to try to find out where to tow good old Vandalf, who sat there dazed as if the Balrog responsible for this blazing Florida heat had taken a bite out of him. I made a few calls and the outlook was worse than I had feared. This was going to be a very expensive repair. But there was some good news too, I hadn’t known that my friend Clark was attending the retreat. He and his family had hosted me in their home for a house concert some years before. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but he called me up and offered to come get me and even to crash his hotel reservation, if I needed to. Clark was the superhero that day, it’s no secret.
I left Vandalf languishing in the lurid glare there on the roadside. Poor fellow. But I was glad to be on my way. The retreat was wonderful, but in between sessions I was juggling phone calls with repair shops, tow truck companies, and the fruit stand, which, as it turned out, rented the roadside gravel spaces to truckers. Vandalf was in someone’s spot. It was a wonderful and incredibly stressful few days, as you might imagine. But so many friends pitched in and helped me. In fact, one friend from back home found out about the whole situation, asked about the repair totals, which had grown to nearly three thousand dollars, and covered the whole thing. Let me say that again… this ministry supporter covered the entirety of the repairs.
There are times when, if you were just some stranger observing me in public, you might see me standing with my arms limp at my sides with a look of total bewilderment on my face. You’d think, “that poor fellow just got zapped with some kind of transporter beam. He just woke up in a totally unfamiliar place and has no idea what’s going on.” But the truth is you’d be witnessing someone trying to come to grips with the cascade of delightful, unexpected, and undeserved kindnesses pouring over his life.
This is something the Lord has done time and time again. I’ve been side-swiped by misery, but I’ve also been pounced-upon by gracious care. They often overlap.
One of my favorite quotes from Elizabeth Goudge’s beautiful book, “The Pilgrim’s Inn” is worth repeating here, “The supreme joy of childhood is the expectation that gloriously unlikely things are likely to happen at any moment.”
I have watched little children leap from dangerous heights into the arms of their father or mother without an ounce of hesitation. The expectation that they would be caught was so certain. I’ve just told you one story of God’s provision, I could tell you more. The point is that, whether I’ve leapt off some height because I was so full of the childlike expectation of being caught by my father, or I’ve clumsily tumbled over some cliffside into a ravine, Jesus has time and again met me with a love that sometimes feels overwhelming in the most wonderful way.
It’s been a year since Vandalf’s breakdown, and I’m back in Florida as I write this, having just attended the same C.S. Lewis conference again this past weekend. Last night, I played a house concert for a group of totally new friends. The folks who arranged it were the ones who last year gave me a ride from Orlando to Tampa for a concert I couldn’t reach because of the breakdown, and who kindly put me up in their home. More abundance.
The theme of the retreat this year was “On Stories.” In his essay of the same name, Lewis talks about how we long for a certain enthralling quality in the best stories. This quality is not coming from the mere presence of action or excitement. It’s not that Jack is in danger, it’s that he’s in danger from giants, specifically. There’s a very particular texture to the danger that the same amount of peril from non-giants couldn’t supply. Lewis goes on to point out that every story struggles to maintain that enthralling quality because it gets bogged down with the necessity of the ordinary sequence of events. But then, that’s how life actually is, isn’t it? We’re so saturated with the daily grind, that the wonder of the Great Story we’re actually living in gets lost. Maybe it’s best that way? If it weren’t we’d probably be enthralled by how enthralling our stories were.
Even in this podcast episode, if you feel any enthralling quality from the story of God’s provision after Vandalf’s breakdown, it’s not because I necessarily felt it in the moment. No, in the moment, I mostly just felt stressed out as I juggled work commitments and coordinated repairs. It’s more in hindsight I can perceive the threads of grace binding up all the disparate strands into something that resembles anything like a compelling narrative.
That may just be the way of it. We may never know what our lives mean. The Great Story and our place in it may, for the duration of our days, remain obscure and imperceptible. But, if you can imagine it with me, there will come a time, when all the threads of every story are gathered in, and the grand tale is revealed for all to see like a tapestry hung from the heights of heaven. The Great Storyteller himself will brush the cloth smooth, clear his throat and begin tracing every thread, every interweaving of love. And every mundane moment will glimmer with meaning in the light of heaven. You will see the dull strand of your ordinary days suddenly gild with incandescence, as you hear the tale you could not perceive told for the first time by the only one who knows it in full.
The post S6:E22 – The invisible threads of our stories appeared first on Matthew Clark.
City Walls, pt 2by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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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.
The post S6:E17 – Holy Week: Maundy Thursday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
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.
The post S6:E16 – Holy Week: Wednesday, Mary Does a Beautiful Thing appeared first on Matthew Clark.
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.
The post S6:E14 – Holy Week: Monday, Cleansing the Temple appeared first on Matthew Clark.
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.
The post S6:E13 – Holy Week: Palm Sunday appeared first on Matthew Clark.
City Walls, pt 1by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/OTW_S6_E12_City-Walls_pt1.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 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
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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.”
The post S6:E9 – The sweet poison of a false infinite appeared first on Matthew Clark.
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.
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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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A Tale of Two Trees - Jonathan Koefoed “Moonlight in the Desert: Singing the Sojourner’s Song”by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/OTW_S5-E17-Koefoed-Essay.mp3Jonathan Koefoed is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Belhaven University, where he teaches courses in American history and the history of thought. He is particularly interested in the dynamic relationship between ideas, their historical context, and the way that any historical idea or author can illuminate the ubiquitous human quest for a good life. His previous intellectual journey involved postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, a PhD in History from Boston University, an MA in Historical Theology from Saint Louis University, and a BA in Philosophy and History from Arizona State University. His scholarly research focuses on transatlantic intellectual history, particularly the romantic movement and its influence on US thought and culture. His articles have appeared in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations and Religions, and his reviews have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Transatlantic Studies and American Nineteenth Century History.
By The Rivers of Babylon
by Matthew Clark
The endless voices whisper,
all our hopes are only dreams
No Deliverer is coming,
that we are blind in our belief
but in the land where we all sojourn,
with its beauty and its ash
I will sing still for the Kingdom
and a King who’s coming back
CHORUS
by the rivers of Babylon
we will sing a gospel song in a foreign land
While the nations all are raging,
hear the Lord in heaven laugh
we will stand upon his promise,
the ways of men will never last,
and like a seed is to a tree,
in the twinkling of an eye
we will see the heavens open,
we will meet him in the sky
CHORUS
BRIDGE
there will be no word for lonely
In the Kingdom Jesus brings
Every fear shall be forgotten
and all will be made clean
all the merciful will know him
The pure will touch his face
See the children bear his banner
and the slandered share his name
Soon the river of our exile
Will become a holy spring
While the bent tree with its bitter fruit
It will never grow again
Now, the face that showed us kindness
Met our thirst by Jacob’s well
He will clothe us in his garments
He will marry us himself
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees - Susan Cowger, "Time Between the Times" by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/OTW_S5-E16-Cowger-Essay.mp3Susan Cowger is the author of a poetry collection, Slender Warble (Wipf & Stock/Cascade, 2020), and a chapbook, Scarab Hiding (Finishing Line Press, year 2006). Founder and editor emeritus of Rock & Sling, her most recent publications include Ekphrastic Review, Windhover, Perspectives, Crux, McGuffin, Presence, and In A Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets (2019). She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and her BA in Art with teaching credentials from Montana State University. Married to Dana for forty-seven years, she has four children and twenty-two grandchildren. (I know, she finds this rather shocking too.) Contact her on Facebook and at susancowger.com.
In the Waters
by Matthew Clark
I was scared for my life
Saw the ship was capsizing
And the Lord lay asleep while the storm raged
I was losing my mind
All the darkness was blinding
Till the Lord with a word stilled the chaos
In the waters, in the waters
I’ve seen life go so wrong
Seen the best sink in sadness
Till the dark seemed their only companion
But I’ve seen Jesus come save
Walking out upon the waves
With his feet planted firm in the madness
In the waters, in the waters
Interlude
And some days nothing makes sense
Lord, the still place is spinning
And the center can’t hold for much longer
So won’t you bring us your song
As the howling grows stronger
Your voice is an anchor, Your voice is an anchor, Your voice is an anchor to me
In the waters, in the waters
BRIDGE
I can hear it, I can hear it, I can hear it coming through
Through the storm, through the darkness (I can hear it coming through)
In the places I was sure your love had left me
Every night I was sleepless
But the beauty of the moonlight was you singing
When the flames tore the house down
There were friends who became my home and family
So I know you will not fail
That your love, my God, endures forever
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees: Anita K. Palmer, "Mercy in the Wind"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/OTW_S5-E15-Palmer-Essay.mp3Anita K. Palmer has always turned to pen and paper to figure out what she thinks, feels, and believes. That propensity launched a career when she fell into editing a Christian publication, which—unrelated to her hiring—soon went to magazine heaven. The experience failed to squelch an appetite for editorial work that included thirteen years in daily newspapers and five as a university media relations officer. For two decades she has worked with publishers and individuals on upward of 125 nonfiction books, and has written more web content, blog posts, newsletters and marketing materials than she cares to count. Born and reared in Southern California, she now lives in Colorado. She is blessed with many dear friends and one kind and brilliant adult son.
Take to the Fields
by Matthew Clark
I saw a man with a bleeding heart
A bleeding heart
Ragged as the wind, eager to begin
Oh, his eyes they were clear as gold
Searching out the crags
Tender, strong and sad
Gave up all he had, left his home behind him
Gone a-seeking
CHORUS
If you got eyes to see
Come keep watch with me
If you got ears to hear
I pray you know
The Lord is near
I saw a house full of shepherds in repose
Moths ate off their clothes
All naked emperors, wrapped in soothing words
But you skinned your knees when you slid to break my fall
I howled up at the moon
When the salt got in the wound, the fire licked my tomb
And fire rolled like water there to cleanse me
So take to the fields, oh take to the roads
Wonder at the thorns that bite into the rose
Cut down to the bones
Take your pail and gather where you can
The field is ripe with grain, and scattered sheep like sand
Too little callous on my hands, there is mercy on the wind
If you can hear it
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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Amber Salladin, "Singing the Feast of the New Creation"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/OTW_S5-E14-Salladin-Essay.mp3Amber Salladin is a conductor, pianist, worship leader, singer, organist, and educator based in Manhattan, New York. Amber has worked in churches and for professional choruses in Vancouver, Canada, and London, UK. She is the Music Director at Emmanuel Anglican Church, Arts and Ministry Director for the C. S. Lewis Foundation, Music Teacher at Geneva School of Manhattan, conductor of the Academy for Teachers Chorus, Online Leader for United Adoration, and Principal Pianist and Board Member of the New York Session Symphony. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Jim and their two boys Caleb (boy soprano) and Peter (future electric guitarist).
The Word Became Flesh
by Matthew Clark
Driving up to Memphis
A bitter winter night it was
When my engine froze to death
And I called you from the roadside
You left your bed and drove the miles to find me
The frozen street turned into home with family
CHORUS
The Word, the word, the word … became flesh
I sat down at your table
And the plate you set before me
In your small apartment kitchen
Was a simple meal you made
But the bread we broke flung wide the palace doors
And I tasted of the goodness of the Lord
BRIDGE
What you’ve got to give is what he gave to you
Like a still small voice, it may not seem like it’s enough
But you can let the song ring out in a wilderness of doubt
Ever since the word became flesh
God he opened up his mouth
The sun rose bright as a golden ring
When he knelt to say ‘I love you’
A bride awoke to sing
Don’t think your voice too poor to join the song
The smallest touch moves symphonies along
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees: Lancia Smith, "Reaching for the Unseen"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/OTW_S5-E13-Lancia-Smith.mp3Lancia E. Smith is an author, photographer, teacher, and business owner. She’s the Founder and Executive Director of Cultivating Magazine and its discipleship and creative team, The Cultivating Project. She has served in executive management, church leadership, school boards, and art and faith organizations for over thirty years. A recovering addict herself with more than forty years of sobriety, Lancia has done extensive support counseling. Her defining life focus is discipleship, expressed through mentoring, nurturing, and teaching. Lancia and her husband Peter make their home in the Black Forest of Colorado Springs.
Let your roots go deep
Sit with me and talk awhile,
Here while there’s a quiet hour
We’ll whisper with these witnesses,
These steady stars
Who shine out in the universe,
Marking out this path of ours
That only faith has eyes to see,
That ends in joy
CHORUS
Oh, let your roots grow deep
Is the word of truth you heard
beginning to grow faint?
Let your roots grow deep,
Let your roots grow deep
Don’t give up the fight just yet,
Fix your eyes on Christ and
Let your roots grow deep,
Let your roots grow deep
Drink deep from the Holy Fount,
Whom angels praise and heaven crowns
He washes weary pilgrim feet
with Riversong
And even though this riverbed
does not bear a river yet
These trees that grow know underground,
Deep waters wait
CHORUS
The Kingdom that we see ahead, t
he joy of our inheritance
Is built upon a Cornerstone
the world rejects
So, if today you hear his voice,
Still and small amidst the noise
Don’t miss the call to fall into,
His open arms
BRIDGE
Oh, let your roots go deep
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees: John Barnts, "Downside Up"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/OTW_S5-E12-Barntss-Essay.mp3John Barnts wishes he could spend all his time reading, writing, and talking about interesting things. Unfortunately, books cost money, and words are hard to sell, so he spends most of his time playing piano for schools and churches, and working as a case manager in a local Drug Court program in Madison, Mississippi. John and his family moved to Mississippi in 2011 to attend seminary, which led to five glorious years of teaching the Bible at the college level. Before Mississippi, he spent twelve years at a private K-12 in Los Angeles as a music teacher and administrator. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project, teaches a couple of home Bible studies, and makes short theological videos with his son on YouTube called Barnts in the Belfry.
Follow You Down
by Matthew Clark
Whoever would lose their life
They will save it
CHORUS
I wanna be in your story, Jesus
I wanna follow you down, down, down
Whoever would save their life
They will lose it
BRIDGE
Your love is teaching me a new story
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees: Jason Smith, "The Pit and the Power"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E11-Jason-Smiths-essay.mp3Jason Smith serves on the board of An Unexpected Journal, as a strategist for the C. S. Lewis Foundation, and as the senior editor for acquisitions and development at Wootton Major Publishing. In his spare time, he works a day job as a marketing director for a medical device engineering firm, where he writes about fun things like FDA regulations and embedded cybersecurity. As J. Aleksandr Wootton, he is the pseudonymous author of the much-loved young adult fantasy series Fayborn and reviews every book he reads at www.goodreads.com/mrwootton.
When I Cried Out (Psalm 40)
by Matthew Clark
When I cried out from the pit that I had dug
His song burst past the dead end grave
Isaiah’s burning ember came and kissed me on the mouth
And I knew there was still music to be made
CHORUS
After all that I’ve seen, I cannot seal my lips
Even when my heart fails within me,
For the Lord did not hide, no, he listened in his mercy
And his song of lovingkindness still persists
Though I do not understand it, I am standing on this
All my troubles when they swelled into a crowd
The shame of failures too many to count
Then I whispered through the tangle, and you looked me in the eyes
I found quiet that sang louder than those lies
CHORUS
BRIDGE
I thought I had to climb that holy hill to twist your arm
But when you bent to wash my feet, I knew that I’d been wrong
CHORUS
© 2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees: Steven Elmore, "Sustained by Joy"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E10-SElmores-essay.mp3
Steven Elmore is the President of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. He has over 20 years of experience working at nonprofit organizations and educational institutions, including serving as a community college adjunct professor (English composition), software instructor (basic to advanced MS Office), GED instructor (science, history), test preparation tutor, and in a wide range of office management and administration roles. His specific skill sets include event management, teaching/training, team leadership, program management, writing, communications strategy, strategic planning, and computer technology. He is also a writer for Cultivating Magazine.
Like A Lamb
by Matthew Clark
Fear and pride are just two sides, friend
Of Caesar’s tarnished penny
Quietness and rest belong to God
But who hasn’t studied warfare
On the battlefield of life here
Perfecting self-defense just to survive?
You know how good it feels, love
To scratch the itch of anger
But complaining only chains us up inside
Feels like safety and power
In a world so full of danger
It feels like danger to be grateful, small, and quiet
CHORUS
But Oh, I see the Mighty Word of God
Go silent to the slaughter like a Lamb
Oh, I hear the voices of the crowd
Grow louder as the buried kernel’s roots descend
Cause the roots beneath the surface
Search and listen for a music
That is and was and will be evermore
Like an acorn to an oak tree
Who would ever think it could be
That those little lambs might ever rule the world
But the meek will spread their branches
Above the clamour of the nations
The sons of God will rest beneath their shade
And the politics of power
That seemed so strong until that hour
Will fall into the traps their power laid
CHORUS
BRIDGE
Nobody’s free from hardship
And the briers in the garden
Can push their way so deeply down inside
Till what started out so tender
Is choked out by the winter
And gentleness don’t have a chance to flower
But don’t let your love grow cold, dear
or buy the lies they’ve sold here
For the fools of God will fiddle on the roof
All their lives they were the punchline
Now their laughing faces outshine
Every image Caesar thought would get him through
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees - Benjamin Holsteen, "Sing an Exile's Love Song"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E9-ToTT_Bens-Essay.mp3Benjamin Holsteen believes that a life spent in pursuit of awe, wonder, and gratitude in the midst of the everyday is the best preparation for an eternity spent in the presence of their ultimate Source. He spends his days thinking, writing, talking, and living out of this conviction, currently as a PhD candidate in Art and Theology at the University of St Andrews. He lives on the edge of the North Sea with his wife and two children. You can find him online from benjamin.omg.lol and subscribe to Transcendent Mixtapes—his forthcoming newsletter reflecting in writing on religious life in the 21st century, filtered through a lifetime of obsessive pop music listening—at transcendentmixtapes.substack.com.
How can we sing?
by Matthew Clark
Our captors cracked their whips and grinned
Down by the rivers of Babylon
They laughed and mocking bid us sing
Down by the rivers of Babylon
So we hung our harps upon a withered tree
Down by the rivers of Babylon
And we gave up songs about being free
Down by the rivers of Babylon
Pre-Chorus
Oh don’t let our love grow cold
CHORUS
But how can we sing the Lord’s song
How can we sing about home?
How can we sing the Lord’s song
By the rivers of babylon?
We wake up strangers in a foreign land
Down by the rivers of Babylon
Lord, dry as sand slipping through your hand
Down by the rivers of Babylon
Pre-Chorus
CHORUS
BRIDGE
Oh, his love endures forever
(Lord, don’t hide your face forever)
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees: Heidi White, "Two Trees, One Cross"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OTW_S5-E8-ToTT-essays_HeidiWhite.mp3Heidi White, M.A., is a teacher, editor, podcaster, and author. She teaches Humanities at St. Hild School in Colorado Springs. She is the Managing Editor of FORMA Journal and a contributing author, speaker, and consultant at the CiRCE Institute. She is a weekly contributor on fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare on the Close Reads Podcast Network and the CiRCE Institute Podcast Network. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Anselm Society and sits on the Academic Advisory Board for the Classical Learning Test. She writes fiction, poetry, and essays, and she speaks and writes about literature, education, and the Christian imagination. She lives in Black Forest, Colorado with her husband and children. She also hosts The Daily Poem Podcast
A Tale of Two Trees
by Matthew Clark
I dreamed I saw two family trees
They grew from very different seeds
One stood tall with flowered crowns
And one was bent and bitter
The bitter tree bore sour fruit
That made the people eating do
Wickedness upon the earth
Until they grew to love it
The flowered tree put out its leaves
Which perfumed faintly that bitter breeze
The bent tree’s branches shook like snakes
And did their best to kill it
But up the sweetness rose again
Like children rise from water cleansed and
Though the thorns tore at their flesh
They would not stop their singing
Well ages came and ages went
And it seemed the good tree’s strength was spent
While the bitter tree kept sprouting strong
And choking out its fragrance
Till one day evil’s wicked limbs
Entangled all the hopes of men
And struck that holy heartwood down
And felled the mighty timber
The crooked fingers of that tree
Took hold of earth and made it bleed
And most forgot what goodness was
Or where to go to find it
And holiness decayed to dust
The spinning world gave way to lust
And justice cracked like splintered wood
The world lay in confusion
BRIDGE
A tree is known by the fruit it bears
And every day we plant ourselves
In one of two families
In one of these two family trees
But no one saw the twist to come
The prophets of the stump of God
Were killed like fools and all ignored
But underneath the soil
A tender Word beneath the roots
Uncurled until a little shoot
Unfurled into the poisoned air
To raise the ancient family
To stir the dormant seed of faith
And water withered hearts awake
To die upon that bitter tree
And uproot it forever
And one day soon we’ll see his face
David’s branch will clear away
The stubble where the wicked grew
And Jesus will make all things new
©2023 Matthew Clark, Path in the Pines Music (ASCAP)
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A Tale of Two Trees: Emily Verdoorn, "Rain"by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/OTW_S5_E7-essay_Emily-Verdoorn_Rain.mp3
Emily Verdoorn is a mixed-media artist from Des Moines, Iowa. For as long as she can remember, Emily has loved drawing and making things. What was unselfconscious play as a child grew into a way of paying attention: to more deeply press into the life of the world around her, to grow in affection, to be awake to the world charged with the presence of Christ. After receiving her BFA at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, Emily spent some time participating in various intentional communities and ministries such as L’Abri, Brazos Fellows, and Summit Ministries which have also informed her work. You can find Emily’s work and process online at emilyverdoornstudio.com and on instagram @emilyverdoornstudio.
You Belong
by Matthew Clark
Wait, wait, before you give up
Breath, breath remember what’s true
When feel like you’re a stranger
And you can’t find a friend
CHORUS
You belong to someone who loves you
You belong to someone who loves you
You belong, you belong
You were made to belong… to someone who loves you
Somedays the clouds will not part
Most days there’s a fog on your heart
But you’ve been around enough
To know the daylight will come
BRIDGE
Someone who’s written your name of his hands
Someone who laid down his life
Someone who waited with tears in his eyes
And kept watch down the road for his runaway child
I know with the world like it is
Hope tends to slip through your fists
But the truth is the truth
Though the whole world tell lies
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Encouragement: Saying the Good Thingsby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/OTW_S5-E6-Encouragement_fix.mp3I used to call myself a detrimentalist. I was half-joking. But, the truth is, for almost as long as I can remember I’ve had a nearly constant underlying sense that any idea I had was a bad idea, and any endeavor I thought worth trying would inevitably fail. Doesn’t that sound dramatic? Maybe so, but that feeling of detrimentalism – that, on some level, any move I made would be ruinous, or that somehow my very presence in the world was a problem – has been haunting and persistent.
Thankfully, I was also born with an innate stubbornness. If I cared about something enough, I’d typically press on, even though everything in me felt certain it wouldn’t work out. Needless to say, in my life the pattern has been one of being particularly vulnerable to discouragement. Discouragement feels, in many ways, like the most natural state.
A lot of writers for a long time have made a distinction between the mind and the heart. More lately, I’ve gotten into the work of a particular fellow by the name of Dr. Jim Wilder. He’s a theologian as well as a neurologist, and many of his insights into how God has designed the brain and body to be in union with the mind and spirit have been both fascinating and helpful to me the last six months.
Wilder says that the heart stores up relational experience while the mind specializes in intellectual data. There’s a kind of dissonance that makes peace impossible within us when what we believe to be true intellectually can’t be reconciled with our experiences relationally. But we have peace within our bodies and brains when what is (relational experience) and what ought to be (intellectual beliefs) agree with each other.
Wilder tells a story from his own life. He couldn’t figure out why he avoided church during Holy Week, particularly Good Friday. He was an adult, had completed seminary, was a committed Christian, but there was something about the crucifixion of Jesus that repelled him. As he prayed and asked for insight, he began to remember an early childhood memory. He was around five and had been taken by his missionary parents to a revival. Multiple preachers had been lined up to present, and, in their fervor, each one ratcheted up the next one, until they seemed to be trying to outdo the prior preacher in their passion. Particularly in their descriptions of the gruesomeness and horror of the crucifixion. Finally, one of the preachers, caught up in the momentum, drove his point home with special intensity, exclaiming as he glared at the crowd, “You killed Jesus! Your sin nailed him to that cross!”
Wilder explains that the neurology of a developing child doesn’t acquire the capacity to differentiate between reality and imagination, literalism and hyperbole, plain speech and figurative language until about age twelve. This is why scary movies are particularly scary to children under 12, their brains have not yet gained the capacity to distinguish between what’s real life and what’s just a movie. So, when the preacher said, “You killed Jesus!” Five-year-old Jim Wilder took it literally. That experience then moved in and became a permanent fixture in his heart. Ever since, and even though he knew better intellectually, his heart believed that his badness was stronger than Jesus’ goodness.
It was only later, as he sought healing in this area, that Jim experienced Jesus telling him that he was not, in fact, a threat or detrimental to God. Jesus had gladly gone to the cross for him, and stayed there out of love for that little five year old boy. Sin had not held him there, love had. That preacher, in his passion to drive home a point, had trespassed, unwittingly laying a burden on a little boy that even a full-grown man could never be expected to carry.
Interesting, isn’t it? Interesting how our hearts get broken. How the courage can be drained right out of them, while at the same time, our minds are doing their best to pick up the slack only to get more and more exhausted. Jim Wilder’s mind had been to seminary, but his heart was still, in many ways, that of a shamed five year old. Until, as an adult, he asked the Lord to give a better word to that part of himself that couldn’t bear to face a crucified Jesus. Jesus transformed Good Friday from a burden to a gift. Jesus said, “You didn’t take my life from me, I offered it up for you, because I wanted to, because you are so dear to me. You are not a burden to me, or a threat. No, the truth is I delight in you. I was more than glad to travel into suffering and danger to extract you from the grip of sorrow and death.”
What an encouragement.
When discouragement feels like the most natural state, it may be that we’ve absorbed and internalized some lie about ourselves. Even today, even this very week, I’m fighting against those places in me that have been so deeply burdened by discouragement given or by encouragement that was withheld.
We’d like to think we don’t need each other, especially if we’ve been hurt. And we may assume that other people don’t need us, and that our presence is not that important. Both are untrue. I need your encouragement and you need mine. I need your gifts and you need mine. Of course, there are times for healthy correction, and unpleasant honesty, if we’re going to grow at all. We can’t say or listen exclusively to the things that make us feel good. But I’d bet most of us are more or less aware of our shortcomings, and we’re in need of more encouragement than not. In other words, I don’t think you need to worry that giving encouragement will endanger the recipient. If you’re worried about that, then it’s very likely you’ve withheld a precious resource from them quite long enough, and I’d be willing to guess that it was withheld from you.
Which brings me to this… say the good things. Say them. Say them outloud to someone. Look for goodness and celebrate it. Make a big fuss. If you see something good in someone, get over the awkwardness (I mean embrace it) and tell them what you like about them. Sometimes we experience discouragement like a rock someone drops on our chest; other times we suffer from a void, a negation, from a form of starvation as love and good things are withheld, they simply go unsaid.
If you’re like me and late to the game, to express love and encouragement will be a skill you haven’t learned. You’ll feel like you aren’t good at it, you don’t know how to do it. Let me encourage you, you can do it. You have good things to give. You have the power to bless, to affirm, to help others see and sense their own loveliness and worth. You can look them in the eyes and say a good thing, pronounce a benediction, and call out of them goodness that Jesus gladly died to raise up from the ash-heap of shame.
Look, I’m writing this for my own sake, too. As one with a tendency toward detrimentalism, I know what a relief a few drops of deliberate, albeit awkward encouragement can be. As we walk along this pilgrim way together, we are given into each other’s hands, and our hands are given the power to touch and bless our companions as we smile upon them and speak aloud the good things, the better words, that Christ died to assure us were, in fact, true.
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The (understandable) lie of cynicism, and the reality of hopeby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/OTW_S5_E5-The-understandable-lie-of-cynicism.mp3Pre-Save "You Belong" on SpotifyPart 2 of the The Well Trilogy, “A Tale of Two Trees” releases June 2nd! And the first single off that album releases Friday, May 5th. Pre-save it on Spotify today. Just click below and follow the instructions…
Click Here To Pre-save "You Belong" on Spotify“In those latter days, because of the increase of wickedness, the love of many will grow cold.”
Chesterton said that taking in the news was the very worst way to gauge reality, because the whole point of journalism is to report on abnormalities. There are millions of people who enjoyed their bowl of cereal this morning, but the news reports the two people who choked on their cornflakes. The idea is that, if you watch enough news, you’ll start normalizing the abnormal. You’ll begin to believe that most people choke on their cereal in the morning, when, of course, the opposite is true. Most people don’t.
Cynicism works in a similar way.
Jesus says, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart I have overcome the world.” That’s a realistic statement from the most realistic person to ever live. No one is more aware of how bad things really are than Jesus. He is the most realistic person when it comes to wickedness and trouble in the world, and what’s wild is that in the very next breath he’s the most hopeful and encouraging person. It would be easy to read that verse sarcastically, wouldn’t it? Cynicism would tempt us to use a sarcastic intonation, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I mean whatever, if you’re still naive enough to believe in anything genuinely good.”
How can Jesus be both? How can he be absolutely clear-eyed and realistic about the wickedness of the world, and unironically hopeful and encouraging? By no means is Jesus naive, and yet he manages to escape the trap of cynicism. How? Because he sees the whole of reality in a way we don’t. He’s come from the presence of God to bring a better journalistic word about what is actually normative, and what’s normative is goodness, beauty, holiness, kindness, love, gentleness. From our vantage point these noble things break our hearts because we have become so worn down and wearied by evil; we see them as carrots dangled before our eyes, carrots we can never actually have. At best we talk about them with a heartsick longing, and at worst we scoff condescendingly at them, mocking them because we no longer believe in them anyway. We know better. Life has taught us to know better, hasn’t it?
But that is a trap. It’s the result of having our vision warped and skewed and overtaken by shadow. In this world you will have trouble, says Jesus realistically. But trouble is not the end of the world. There is some secret Jesus knows. He knows what’s actually normal. The Lord in heaven laughs, because he sees how puny the reign of evil really is, how temporary, how a single breath will blow it all away. There’s simply no contest. The eastern idea of equal opposites barely eeking out a balance between good and evil is ridiculous. When the moment comes and the Lord steps onto the field of war, the war will be over.
The crucifixion looked and felt so final, so absolute. Jesus’s death would have been cause for cynicism to claim primacy. But the resurrection of Christ makes a greater claim, saying that, no matter how convincing death and sorrow appear, don’t believe them, this vision of God’s light, life, and love triumphing in such a concrete way within the walls of our sorrowing world is what is most real. The word this beautiful resurrection speaks is the truest thing about reality.
Cynicism and despair are strong temptations in such a broken world. Hope and gratitude are sometimes easy, but very often they are acts of obedience and faith. Hope is often a decision we must make to actually believe what Jesus has said about life, that it is and shall be “very good”. But who hopes for what they already have? We’re told that love hopes all things, believes all things, bears all things, endures all things. Cynicism is a resignation to all the obvious evil in the world, as if it were the main thing, the primary reality. Hope calls us to bravely believe that evil is ultimately untrue. That evil is making an arrogant claim about its own primacy that is false. Jesus bears witness to that lie by being both absolutely realistic about evil, and at the same time keeping his heart open, vulnerable, and hopeful. He can stand with us in clear sight of all the the inevitable trouble of the world, and say, without a hint of irony or sarcasm, take heart, be of good cheer, don’t let your love grow cold, keep going, life is beautiful and good, rejoice always, lift up your hearts, keep thinking about whatever is noble and good, your labor is not in vain, nothing can separate you from the love of God, joy comes in the morning, I’m with you in the valley of the shadow of death, a bruised reed I will not break, I will bind up the brokenhearted, behold I am making all things new, come to me if you’re weary, I will give you rest. Rest from all that has beaten you down to the point that you can’t even believe in goodness anymore.
The rest Jesus offers is for those of us who, in order to understandably protect ourselves from more heartache, have taken up the cynic’s mantra. What is the cynic’s mantra? It’s this: “If you lower your expectations, you’ll never be disappointed.” Can you hear the hopelessness, the resignation, the despair and overwhelming sadness in it? What does it take to get us to that place? How much love must be withheld from us? How much harm must be done to us? I don’t think we’re born into this world expecting to be dropped, but at some point, if our cries go unheard long enough, we give up on expecting that the hunger and thirst to be held, celebrated, and meaningfully incorporated into a loving fabric of belonging is even worth the trouble of hoping for. Hope, if we’ve come to that sad conclusion, is just a reminder of what we’ve come to believe we can never have. Another dangling carrot, a trap door like all the others, ready to fall out from under us.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about cynicism is that, like many of our unhealed wounds, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a habit that tends to create a vicious cycle of self-sabotage. Someone told me once that what isn’t redeemed repeats. Wounds that don’t get the love and care they deserve, don’t remain neutral or benign. They continue to cry out for help, because the loss or the deprivation was real, which means the need for protection and love was real – and it still is. But if we’ve lost hope, we’ll spend a lot of energy protecting ourselves against it, typically by minimizing the good things we actually long for, that we actually do need. We may long to be enjoyed for our playfulness, but if we were punished for it by over-serious parents, we may repeat that punishment within ourselves and towards others. We lose our ability to enjoy the things we desire, because we can’t bear the pain of endlessly deferred hope, so we sabotage those good things in order to keep our expectations low, so we won’t be disappointed.
To lay more guilt and shame on the shoulders of friends around us who’ve lost hope is not my point. Lack of love is what has made it so hard to hope. How does Jesus respond to those of us caught in this cynical trap? There’s a moment in Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well that struck me just this week that I think has something to say about this.
Once Jesus has told her something that there’s no way he could have known (about her five husbands and the sixth she’s living with) she realizes he’s some kind of holy man. I think at this point she’s concluding that she’s being set up. A Jewish holy man has come to Samaria to dangle a carrot, then snatch it away. So she decides to go ahead and get it over with. She thinks she knows what’s coming. So she says, in essence, “Okay, holy man, where’s the right place to worship? Our mountain or yours?” She knows the answer. He’s a Jewish holy man, the only thing he can say is “at the temple in Jerusalem.” And she knows that’s impossible for her, a Samaritan woman with her track record. She’s trying to sabotage the situation, because her expectations have been shaped by the cynicism that, thus far in her life, has been necessary to survive all the disappointment she’s experienced. She’s saying, “Don’t waste your time or mine, holy man, yank the carrot, let’s get this over with. Don’t toy with me as if things could actually change, as if I could ever have access to God’s love. I know better than that.”
But Jesus, as usual, brings a whole new possibility to the table. He says God isn’t all that interested in a particular mountain, here or there. Something different is happening, and rather than people having to go to some certain place to meet him, he’s come to meet them wherever they are. Like, at a well at noon in Samaria, for instance. This carrot isn’t being dangled, it really is being offered. This is not a trap door. You can put your weight on this, all of your weight, and it will hold you.
We’ve all gotten used to being dropped. We’ve come to expect it. Can’t you hear the cynicism in her response? Her words are dripping with sarcasm when she says, “Oh, I’m sure that’ll all get sorted out and everything will be hunky-dory, once the Messiah shows up. Like that’s ever going to happen, or even if it does, like it’ll make any difference for someone like me.”
I can imagine that even as his heart was breaking for this woman, maybe with tears in his eyes, Jesus also couldn’t help but smile, knowing as he did all the goodness that was right there within reach for her. Did she see him smiling and feel puzzled? Was there some joke she wasn’t in on? Some punchline she missed? I think there was. That woman had no idea, just like most of us have no idea, how much love, forgiveness, goodness, beauty, and relief is sitting so very close to us. That’s the joke God is playing on evil, whatever bitterness Jesus touches is made sweet. Whatever soured well we’re drawing from, if we’ll sit there with Jesus, he can overcome it, and meet our disappointed thirst with the sweetness of living water. Of course you’ll have trouble in this world, he says, but don’t give in to it – don’t believe the claim it makes on you, keep up your courage, because I have overcome the world.
A Closing Prayer Against Cynicism
Oh Lord, we have been so hurt in so many ways. We have been dropped again and again, so that it is very hard to believe that we could be held, or that any good thing could be relied upon. Cynicism tempts us to resignation and hopelessness. Having experienced so much sorrow, cynicism feels most reasonable and safe. But, I feel my heart slipping away from me into a cold, paralyzing darkness. Lowered down into a pit of low expectations, where it is safe from the threat of more heartbreaking deferred hope. Safe, Lord, but cut off from the warmth of love and the joy of light. Come, Lord Jesus, and meet us in these low, cold, hurting places, like you met the woman by the well, and smile upon us here. Tell us again, for our sorrow makes us forget, the good news about how small evil and sorrow really are set next to your love for us — set next to your power to bring new life where death has made such arrogant, enormous claims. We are putting ourselves in your hands, Lord, do not drop us. We are asking to be held, do not let go of us. As we experience your reliable love, draw us out of cynicism into the solid reality of your inexhaustible goodness and care.
Through your resurrected Son Jesus Christ, Amen.
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I have a confession to makeby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/OTW_S5_E4-I-have-a-confession-to-make.mp3I have a confession to make.
If I stop right now and give you ten seconds to notice how that sentence makes you feel, what happens? Let’s try it. Here’s ten seconds to think about this phrase – I have a confession to make.
Insert ten seconds.
Okay, here’s what I bet you felt. You probably felt excited, eager, relieved, calm, as if a breath you’d been holding in too long was finally allowed to exhale so you could relax, right? No? I’m being silly, of course. If you’re like me, confession brings up feelings that fit more in the category of worry and fear instead of comfort or relief. Why might that be?
Yesterday in a meeting with fellow writers for The Cultivating Project, we were talking about some of the themes that we wanted to focus on in upcoming issues. Over the course of a year, we tend to write around a progression of topics. Lancia Smith, who leads Cultivating, is very deliberate about designing the publication both as a ministry to readers and as a ministry to the writers. We’re each being asked to explore topics as a way to challenge and develop our own life of faith through reflection and the discipline of writing the essays that make up each issue. Lancia has said many times that The Cultivating Project is, first, a discipleship fellowship meant to raise up writers. Here’s an excerpt from the website:
The Cultivating Project is a nurtured fellowship of Christian writers and makers committed to cultivating holy character, deep-rooted community, and excellence of craft. Together we offer a type of Pilgrim’s Inn through our publications, workshops, and products ~ each one made to inspire, strengthen, and give courage to our fellow sojourners.
As a part of that, we were meeting yesterday to discuss our current topics, and a lot of folks have been struggling. We all carry so many wounds, so many fears and insecurities. It can be so discouraging on the one hand, yet on the other hand what a comfort it is to discover yourself nowhere near as alone as you had thought.
So, as our little fellowship of Cultivators confessed our common fears, something wonderful began to emerge. Voices of courage and support stirred and declared another reality – belovedness was assured, giftedness and calling were restated, capacity for beauty and the capability to bring about, by God’s grace, good nourishing things was acknowledged and affirmed.
Do you notice what happened? We confessed fears and faults to one another, and what followed was an outpouring of courage and possibility. But here’s the strange thing I want to say about confession in this instance – it’s that both sides of that experience – the fears and the encouragement – were instances of confession.
Earlier, when I gave you ten seconds to notice the feelings that come up when the word confession is mentioned, my assumption is that those feelings were most likely negative. At least, primarily negative and worrisome. I wonder if that might be because confession is primarily associated with sin? For most of us, confession means, maybe even exclusively, to acknowledge something terrible about ourselves. By association, then, confession is a fearful word.
What I want to point out though, is that it is a beautiful word. Let’s be a little curious about it, and look closely.
In Scripture, confession comes from a greek term (homologeó) that has two parts. The first part (homo) means ‘same’ and the second part (logeo) means speech. So confess is a word that simply means to say the same thing together. The word, in itself, is not negative. For instance, if I say, “I want a strawberry milkshake” and you say “Yes, you do want a strawberry milkshake.” You just made a confession. You and I are saying the same thing together.
Just this morning, I noticed that a usage like this was already sitting right under my nose in a famous passage about salvation, Romans 10:9. That passage says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” What feelings arise from that usage of the word confess, I wonder? My guess is that the phrase “I have a confession to make” and “If you confess that Jesus is Lord” call up two pretty different emotional responses. But it’s the same word.
To confess that Jesus is Lord is to join your voice to God’s and say the same thing together about Jesus. God has said, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased. Listen to him.” And to confess is to simply say, “Yes, I agree with you God. I’ve heard what you’re saying about Jesus and I’ll say it with you.”
In other words, confession is simply to agree with God about reality. It’s to admit the truth about the way things are, in general. If I say, “water is wet,” and you say, “Yep, it’s some of the wettest stuff around,” we’ve just made a good confession and we’re saying the same thing together about reality.
Now, here’s where sin comes in. We are out of harmony with reality, and if we’re going to be healed we’ve got to get in touch with what’s actually going on. God is being honest with us about the way things are, and confession is a move we make towards honesty. If God is saying, “Friend, you’re deathly ill,” and I say, “I’m fine,” then, I’m not participating in reality, and I have no way of accessing healing. But, if I confess and say, “I do feel really terrible, please help me,” now, I’m in touch with reality and all the resources of God are within reach. Confession is no fun, in that sense, but it puts us in touch with reality, so we can be cared-for by our Healing Redeemer.
But, remember, confession works the other way too. If God says, “You are very beautiful, worthwhile, dearly loved, capable of incredible good, gifted for good works, washed clean and joined to the family of God,” then the right response is also to make a confession in the joyful sense. God is calling us to confess, meaning to say along with him the same thing he is saying about us, the same thing he says is the state of reality, to say, “I confess together with you, God, that I am beautiful, worthwhile, dearly loved, capable of incredible good, gifted for good works, washed clean and joined to the family of God.”
That is also confession. Here’s ten seconds to notice how saying “Amen” and agreeing with God about the good things he’s saying about us feels.
Insert ten seconds.
God is telling us the truth about reality, about our situation, about ourselves. Confession encompasses all of that. Confession is, of course, to agree with God about our rebellion and woundedness, but it’s much bigger, because our sin and shame have been, not minimized, but swallowed up by God’s love. Confession, ultimately, calls us to hear God’s blessing over us, spoken through Jesus – the Word himself – and to allow ourselves to fully and deeply receive it.
We honor the love we’re given by simply receiving it. If God says, “You’re so precious and desirable that I would lay down my life for you,” you can take him at his word. If, as the Scriptures say, “the king is captivated by your beauty,” you can confess with God that (bizarre and unlikely as it feels) this is, indeed, the case.
Amy MalskeitAmy Malskeit is a lover of words and stories and people. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and Spanish, a secondary English teaching credential, and an MA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Lancaster University in Northwest England. Her years teaching middle and high school gave her a love for middle grade and young adult literature, and the awkward awesome that being a young adult means. She is a mother of two who plants her garden and makes her home in the foothills southwest of Denver with her best friend, Kevin. She loves the water, and feels most at home when she is near the Pacific Ocean. She reads broadly, and is passionate about exploring big questions and small moments through her poetry, essays, and stories.
Read more of Amy’s writing:
https://thecultivatingproject.com/author/amy-malskeit/
A Prayer for Nearness
by Amy Maleskeit
Oh God, I confess that I do not know how to confess. Thank You that this is not a problem for You. So come and open my eyes to see You, and to see with fresh eyes the story You are writing, to see myself and my story in light of Your redemption, hope and goodness. In light of You, who are most Real. Thank you that, because of the cross, my pain has a place to go.
Spirit of Jesus, You are not just with me, but in me. As You speak words of truth to my heart, I choose to align myself with them, and to name these real things into this beautiful, broken world, and to the hurting people around me. I welcome your nearness today.
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The Joyous Grace of Creative Incompetenceby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/OTW_S5-E3-The-joyous-grace-of-creative-incompetence.mp3My brother Sam and I are both artists. He works in ceramics and, though he’s proficient on the potter’s wheel, he has a special capacity for capturing personality and expression in humorous figural sculptures of dragons, trolls, and other wild creatures. Our house is full of these hilarious critters peeping out from nearly every corner. Even the urn that holds our coffee grounds is a grinning, fat troll wearing a yellow tie whose head is the lid.
The last few years Sam and I have both worked from home. The two-car garage is his ceramic studio where he sculpts during the day and teaches classes occasionally. My little recording studio is set up in the extra bedroom. We’re both coffee drinkers, and our routine is to spend the first hour or so of each day at the breakfast table chatting over hot mugs of coffee as we gear up for whatever we’re working on that day.
As you can imagine, one of the recurring topics of conversion is the creative process. We’re always comparing notes on art-making itself – the processes and materials and inspiration, the travails of trying to get some meandering idea worked out concretely in our respective materials, and the further travails of trying to make a living at it. On top of all that, we tend to land in a place of gratitude sensing that, as we subcreate (to use Tolkien’s term), we are entering into a great and abundant mystery of making that is ultimately sustained and overseen by God himself, and not our own powers or achievement.
The invitation to make stuff is fundamentally an invitation constituted by God’s grace. Now, that may just come across as a Christian-y thing to say, so let me push into it a little more. By “grace” I mean a few things. One is that the invitation is a form of hospitality – God is calling us to collaborate – to take up whatever raw materials we gravitate towards, whether clay, music, words, food, wood, fabric, decor, space, ad infinitum, and develop those given things into something new that honors their inherent nature and qualities, but that realizes in new ways their internal potentialities. God could do all of that himself, but he chooses not to. Instead, he has chosen to graciously, hospitably invite us in to share in the fun. God says, “Look at this stuff, I call it clay. Do you like it? Take some home with you, see what you can make out of it. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!” So that’s one thing I mean when I say the invitation to make stuff is constituted by God’s grace.
Another thing is that grace, by its very nature, is unnecessary. Grace is, you could say, “extra”. My friends from Louisiana would say lagniappe. Lagniappe means some extra unexpected goodness that comes after something that was already good. It’s overflow, more than what’s required. The fact that we are invited to work and make and love and sing and dance and cook – all that’s extra. As if creating the galaxies, gooses, and grackles wasn’t enough, how about topping it all off with people. And while you’re at it, Lord, how about topping that off with marrying those people, through Christ, into the life of the Holy Trinity? And, then how about topping that off with a new heavens and a new earth… and who knows what the Lord will top that off with? Our God is a most persistent topper-offer! He seems to get so caught up in the joyous overflow of making that he’s always doing more than is required, always pouring out grace upon grace upon grace.
That being the case, the invitation to live our lives contextualized by that overflow and to creatively collaborate with God through the materials at hand in this world is characterized by grace. In other words, because there’s goodness aplenty, you don’t have to be all that good at it to participate. Grace means we can take creative risks. It means we can get started before we have any idea how to do it well. We can jump in and learn as we go, because our identity and the cosmos, in general, are not dependent on our proficiency. Those have already been taken care of, so we’re free to be no good at it, but do it anyway. We’ll get good at it eventually, unless we never get started.
I remember something a friend said years ago when he was a new dad. He said that as he learned to enjoy his children, he was learning to be enjoyed by God. I can still hear him say, “Children are completely incompetent. They’re not good at anything.” One thing about little children though, they aren’t afraid to get started. They don’t mind getting born, even though they have no idea how to do anything. Be like a little child, get comfortable with your incompetence and go head and get started. The world is not at all depending on you, and it’s absolutely fantastic that you are in the world.
It’s worth emphasizing: if you are in the world, then it’s because the Lord, the Giver of Life, enabled your existence. Existence itself, because it is a gift from God, is valuable in and of itself, without any further qualifications. Now that you are here, the work of being a living person is only secondarily to be proficient or good at stuff. Competency isn’t where you start. It may not even really be the goal. I mean who will ever be as good at anything as God? The main work of being a living person is responsiveness. Your very existence is grace, which means the supply of goodness and love is a question that’s already been abundantly addressed. God has already proclaimed an endless chain of “amens” to your presence here, that’s what you’re made out of. Even if a person only made it a few days, weeks, or years in this world, that chain of amens will go on.
But for those of us here, now what? What happens next? Next, we open our eyes and ears, stick out our tongues, feel with our fingertips, sniff with our sniffers. We go exploring. We go on a life-long scavenger hunt, looking in every neglected field for treasures. And when we find them, we get very still. We do a special kind of work called beholding. Beholding means to sustain a loving relationship of true knowing, true perception. Beholding is what allows us to understand the nature of a given thing within the context of it’s preciousness to its Creator. Beholding is the patient practice of entering into and honoring the life of a thing and learning its true name. In other words, beholding places us in a position of humble wonder as we look for Jesus’s intention within the things that he has made and that he continues to bless and sustain.
Just like the first job of the apprentice is to do nothing but watch the master work, beholding is not about getting anything accomplished, it’s just about paying attention. It’s about reverence. Once reverence has taken root, it blossoms into response. Now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I start making attempts to respond. I love because I was loved first. That is where art-making best begins – as a response to having beheld goodness.
And different materials, different mediums, call for different responses, according to what we’ve perceived of their nature, through the practice of beholding. Clay calls for a certain response, because it has its own kind of given life. Paint calls for a different response that corresponds to its particular qualities, which are the things it “loves” to do. A good cook has reverently beheld the nature of ingredients and therefore knows how to respond rightly and creatively to their inherent qualities. In other words, how to work with them to realize and develop their potential, rather than work against or in spite of them. A true artist is a humble collaborator, who takes joy in lovingly listening to her materials as she nudges and nurtures them onward to unfold their potential in new ways. She sees how an alphabet can become a sentence, and a sentence might grow into a sonnet. He sees how a block of mute wood might carry silent songs, and he responds by crafting a singing instrument like a guitar or cello. In Lord of the Rings, the Elves taught the trees to talk and they became Ents, but even in this world, ordinary men and women teach trees to sing. To sing perhaps a song they knew but could never hope to sing without our involvement.
Art-making then, like life itself, is a call to mutual reverence and responsiveness. It is a call to love, and in loving to waken and raise up all that God has graciously given us to steward. The perfectionism that paralyzes us from getting started is a trap laid by our Enemy, who loves to block our participation in God’s life. Don’t beat yourself up about it, but recognize it’s based on a lie about the way things are. It’s based on the lie that we have something to prove, something to earn, that competency is what justifies our existence. But the invitation is especially extended to the bumbling and incompetent. Jesus was always telling adults to be more like children, not the other way around. To our heavenly Father, we are all little incompetent children anyway, and we meet the Most High God not by being really good at mountain climbing, but simply by our infantile reaching. Fellow children, in Christ, we have already seen him bend down to us, take us in his arms, and raise us up to his shining face.
I love how David Taylor writes this psalm in such a way that God as Creator, Christ as Redeemer, humans as sub-creators, and the Creation itself are all brought together so beautifully. Amazing.
A Collect Prayer for Creation
By W. David O. Taylor, from his book “Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life”
Maker of heaven and earth, all your creatures, animate and inanimate, stand before you.
In Christ, who stands at the center of creation, we see how mysteriously well-pleasing it is to you.
In Christ, the mediator of the whole world, we see how broken it is.
In Christ, the firstborn of creation, we discover its final destiny: new creation!
May we take pleasure in your creation as you take good pleasure in it.
May we care for the earth as you lovingly care for it.
And may we offer up all the creative work of our hands in praise of you, in service of our neighbor, and in anticipation of that day when the cosmos shall be made forever alive.
In the Triune Name.
Amen.
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The Threat of Gratitude? by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/OTW_S5-E2-The-Threat-of-Gratitude.mp3There is something frightening about gratitude. Does that seem like a strange statement? How could gratitude be a threat? How could it be frightening?
That’s the question that got lodged in my head today as I was out for a walk. Passing all the startling new green that is leafing out from every direction here in Mississippi as spring is kicking off, posed a challenge to the tired, gray thoughts that cloud my mind from time to time. Every tip of every branch is celebrating the return of newly grown joy. An irrepressible springing joy, that arrives just when you’d gotten used to things being skeletal and bone-cold. Oftentimes, right at the point when the chill has worked its way down and settled with a seeming permanence in our marrow, some newborn wind breathes into the nostrils of this slumbering world and wakes it again to the truth of an indomitable life, to hope, goodness, and beauty.
This pattern is built into our world. It’s so common that it’s easy to write it off as a mere material happenstance, rather than a tale woven into things that endlessly bears witness to something ultimately true. A deeper magic, as Lewis says, that ever abides, untouchable, incorruptible, beyond the reach of decay.
There is so much to be grateful for. But I do think that gratitude poses a threat to us, if we have gotten too comfortable with despair’s sad ability to soothe us. In my own experience, I’ve found myself getting so used to believing that goodness was out of reach, that, in despair, I wound up settling into sad substitutes for things like friendship, affection, joy, creativity.
God has built into us strong and beautiful desires, desires for a life of deep abiding friendship, attachment, generative creativity, and joy. What happens when, for a thousand reasons, those things are torn from us and held out beyond our reach? Maybe someone wounded us deeply? A trespass that traumatized some good thing in us, so that we can no longer see or feel it as good at all, much less hope that the good God created it for could ever be restored. That’s positive wounding – meaning something terrible did happen to us. Then there is negative wounding – something good didn’t happen or was withheld. Maybe no one hugged us growing up, no one listened when you had a real need, or encouragement was withheld. Often sins of omission do as much damage as sins of commission. In other words, to be starved is just as deadly as being poisoned.
Whatever the case, a lack of love can wear us down until we give up. Love and goodness are someone else’s fairy tale. Someone else’s fantasy. Maybe we’re not aware of the degree to which we’ve joined our hearts to hopelessness and adopted cynicism as the most reasonable position. Because, if we’re honest, if we’re in a position of such woundedness, then according to the evidence offered by our experience, cynicism is the most reasonable thing in the world.
And here’s the kicker. Once we get to that point, and I’m speaking from my own heart, cynicism and despair actually do become soothing. They feel good. If you’ve lost hope in ever accessing real goodness, hope is no balm, it’s salt in the wound. Gratitude has to do with hope which has to do with holding on to a faith that says we’re not cut off from the goodness God dreams of for us. That’s why gratitude feels threatening, because it holds up to our sad eyes a picture of the good thing we no longer believe we can have. Cynicism says, “I know better than to believe that fantasy.” And that’s why cynicism is so soothing, so comforting. And why it’s so frighteningly easy to get very comfortable with. It protects us from gratitude, from hope.
Things like gratitude, hope, faith, desire – these invite us to keep trying. They seem to taunt us with the possibility of good things, good things we’ve long since given up on. The Good News of Jesus’s love could feel like a cruel joke to us, if we’ve gone so far as to make peace with despair. The numbness is the only relief we believe we can have any realistic hope of attaining, and the call of Jesus to rise and follow him just makes us feel more exhausted than ever. We pull the sheets back over our heads.
Hopelessness is safer, more comfortable, soothingly familiar. It’s not good–of course we know that–but it kind of works, you know? Once you stop believing in steaks, you’ll settle for spam. It’s the best you can hope for, right?
It’s been a long, slow journey for me, as the Lord has patiently coaxed a wounded dove out of the crevices and crags. It’s still going on, of course. Learning to hope again is not pleasant at first. Faith, in the beginning, is nowhere near as soothing as cynicism, despair, and faithlessness. Trust and gratitude feel like they’ll kill us. The desires God himself planted in our hearts become so entangled with shame and starvation that we just wish they’d go away entirely. But those desires are what make us human, and it seems that to remove them would do more damage and be a greater sin than to leave them unfulfilled or even wrongly filled.
Jesus says that because of the increase of wickedness in the world, the love of many will grow cold. It’s an ongoing prayer of mine, that those places in my heart that have grown so cold would not shove away, in despair, the warmth Jesus is offering. That they would not freeze up. I pray that I would stop settling for the voice of a sad sarcasm that would offer to soothe a heart so easily resigned to loneliness and hurt. I pray that the temptation to a sleepy passive pseudo-rest would not pull the blanket over my eyes and keep me from seeing that face that smiles tenderly upon every one of us, inviting us to rise, pick up our mat and walk, knowing that the devastating power of our sins and sorrows has been fully embraced by Jesus. That we are carried in his arms, and where we’d believed ourselves hopelessly cursed, God himself persists in speaking blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace.
A Closing Prayer
Lord, whether it’s by something terrible done to us or by some good thing that was withheld from us, or even by our own failures, we’ve been hurt. Our hurts have gotten so loud and persistent that they crowd out your kindness. In fact, it feels scary to even give good things a chance, because they just remind us of what we’ve come to believe we can’t have. But you have made it very clear that you desire to be with us no matter where we are. You, Jesus, have pressed into every hurting place, bringing with you kindness and hope. You do not dismiss our hurt, you embrace it, even as you call us to bravely turn toward new goodness that you desire for us. Beautiful Lord, please keep up your gracious, persistent work in us; please continue to coax out from among the craggy crevices your frightened, wounded doves, mending the wings that we’ve learned to keep safely tucked away and flightless. Amen.
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Words that Make Quietby Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/OTW_S5-E1-Words-that-make-quiet.mp3Today, I don’t want to write anything. Is it possible to make words that make quiet? I think of the sounds rain makes as it falls on the house, the ground, the field. I like to listen to that sound and the way it quiets the world by way of its audible presence. A continual hush saying nothing but listen to this hushing as it shushes everything it touches. All the better if you’ve got a barn to shelter in – one with a tin roof. That sort of rainfall, for me at least, is the loudest, most quieting that I know. Listen to the word “wash.” It is that rainfall. It is a word that makes quiet, isn’t it? A hushing word.
“Let me wash you,” Jesus told Peter. May we be quieted by that washing.
What are other sounds – other words that make quiet?
I think of kitchen sounds, cooking sounds. What do you hear? Not the clang or clamor of pots and pans. My Grandmother used to softly whistle while she cooked. It was a gentle, breathy, unconscious whistling. Never any particular tune, as far as I know. Just a wandering, carefree tunefulness, happy to be making its quiet way around the room as the cooking got underway. I find myself whistling like that sometimes in a quiet kitchen. I’m doing it for a while, before I even notice, and then I am glad to notice and then go back to not noticing.
A favorite kitchen sound is eggs frying. Eggs cook quickly and they make the best music if you don’t cook them too hot. Just above a medium on the stove at my house is best. That’s right at the point when they’re hot enough to fry. I don’t know the temperature. When eggs are frying just right in butter, oil, or bacon grease, they make a flopping, warbling, murmuring sound. A low gurgle and slap alongside a crispy fizzing sound as the whites whiten.
Cooking is a place I go in order to quiet. I like the sounds, the smells, colors and textures, even the movement and dance of it. I’m not even getting into all those things right now, but it’s a whole world of goodness. Like many things cooking has become so professionalized as to become scary to normal people. But it’s worth learning to enjoy, if pressure can be alleviated.
“Go to the upper room and prepare a meal for us there,” Jesus told his disciples. May we be quieted and nourished by good meals.
So far we’ve got rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying… where else might we find? Other sounds and words near at hand that make quiet?
When I was a child, as the day wound down towards sleep in the evening, my mom would often read to me out loud. Being read-to out loud is a sound that makes quiet. A good story read to us by a loved one, especially if we’re warmly nestled next to them, is like wind bending the grass of a field, or the steadying murmurations of a little stream, or a crackling fire. To read aloud alone is wonderful too, but to be read-to in the evening by a beloved voice is a precious thing.
“Today, these words are fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus told the crowd. May we be quieted and blanketed by good words read aloud.
Rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying, reading out loud… What else?
About a week ago a friend and I went stargazing. The temperature had dropped pretty severely a few days before and the night-creatures were all too cold to chatter. We only heard a single shivering frog and a few far-away owls. We’d gone to a rural spot to escape the light pollution and so there were no highways or cities nearby. It was a clear night, without even any wind to reverberate among the trees. We noticed the quiet even before our eyes had adjusted enough to attend to the stars. Have you ever been in a room when the washing machine or dryer that you’d forgotten was running finishes its cycle? The sudden quiet can startle you because you hadn’t realized there was so much noise. It was like that under those stars. Living in a city or near one, we hadn’t realized what kind of quiet was even possible. It was coming up for air.
On top of that, now that we were away from the light pollution (it’s own kind of noise), the clarity and brilliance of the stars was like a music made of quietness to our eyes. Someone said that music, if it is to be life-giving, must begin in silence. Stargazing makes for quiet.
“Look at the stars, can you count them?” God said to Abraham. May we be quieted beneath the silent music of starlight.
Rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying, reading out loud, stargazing… What else?
I think of birdsong. Occasionally, I don’t sleep very well. I go to sleep early, sleep a few hours, then I’m up from 2 or 3 am till 5 or 6am. I’ve been up a few times to hear the very first bird wake up and start singing. But even on the nights when I do sleep well, I don’t set an alarm clock. I typically wake up as the sun arrives, and I love to lie still for a long while and listen to the birds. Some birds, of course, are gravelly squawkers. But, in our yard, we have mostly little singers who pipe sweetly at the edge of dawn to welcome the light that is both new and ancient. Some mornings their music is a special calming, cooing mercy, if there’s been a nightmare or a grief to interrupt sleep. They bring with them the lilt and lift of lightness, of “ah! Bright wings” as Hopkins says.
“And the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove,” say the Scriptures of Jesus at his baptism. May we be good perching places for the Holy Spirit’s blessing of quietness and rest.
Lastly, I remember a funny story when a buddy of mine stopped by to visit but we were both so tired that afternoon that the conversation drifted off slowly until he fell asleep on his couch and I fell asleep on mine. He said later, “now I know we are real friends.” That friendship required no entertainment, no performance, it didn’t even require being awake. One of the most wonderful things to me is to simply be quiet with someone and feel no need to fill the space with any distractions. That kind of quiet is itself a form of affection. It is a vulnerable, quiet trust in that other person’s love for us. It is a listening for a different kind of language, the quiet speech of simple, unadorned presence. The simple goodness of being with someone without any need to justify the worthwhileness of that presence.
“I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content,” says the Psalmist. May we be content in the affection of quiet.
Rainfall, washing, whistling, eggs frying, reading out loud, stargazing, birdsong, quietness together… What else?
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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".
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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New Single "Take me with you" releases Friday, Feb 26th! Click here to Pre-save the song.
“Take me with you” is a cover song that my friend Abbye West Pates wrote. Find Abbye at her website www.abbyewestpates.com and on follow her on Spotify here.
None of my business by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/OTW_S3-E7-None-of-my-business.mp3
Maybe there’s some irony in the fact that I read the book of Job during the last couple months of 2020? For many much more than for me, last year was a very Job-like year. A year of difficulty, loss, fear, lots of voices with lots of opinions and none of it doing much good.
Part of the irony of Job is that most of the book is taken up with these monologues that attempt to get a grip on the situation, make sense of it, but the truth is that no one knows what’s going on. Now, as readers we are given a look onto a bigger picture that the characters in the book are not privy to. For instance, as much as it looks like Job is being punished, weirdly enough and against all appearances – he’s not! Actually, as the readers we have this information Job and his friends don’t have. Yes, he’s being attacked by the devil and God is allowing it, but rather than being about punishment, it’s actually because God is proud of Job. The devil has said that there’s no such thing as goodness for goodness sake. According to the cynicism of the devil, it’s just not possible that Job is obeying out of genuine love for God; the only explanation is that Job is obeying because of the perks. So the devil’s proposal is simple: remove the perks, watch Job curse. Easy peasy. But, unlike the devil, God believes in real love and goodness; he knows what keeps Job steady isn’t some kind of holy bribe, but genuine love.
Job’s story is certainly strange, in many ways disturbing, but ultimately it is a shot in the arm that inoculates us against the cynicism and despair of a world that is tempted to give up on there even being such a thing as love with no strings attached. I don’t mean love without commitment and responsibility, of course, but love that loves even though it costs, even though it gets nothing in return. Love that can’t be bought, only given and received as a grace.
I have a hard time with that. I like to give this much and get this much in return. Or, if I can manage the situation, I’d prefer to get a deal: I mean, I’d like to give a little and get a lot. But the picture of Jesus on the Cross is so drastically different, isn’t it? He empties himself completely, “wastes” his beautiful life like Mary’s expensive perfume – an act of extravagant beauty worthy of telling and retelling around the world and for all time. But for what? For a handful of knuckle-heads who fall asleep when Jesus longs for companions in anxiety, who desert him when times get tough, for every kind of hateful, disgusting rebellion imaginable, for murderers, adulterers, swindlers, and on and on.
All told, Jesus had it way worse than Job, and, when it came down to brass tacks, his friends were about as helpful. But like Job he was rewarded in the end with an abundant inheritance. A restored family. But Jesus, like Job, had to do the right thing, had to stick his neck out, with no guarantees. He still has no guarantees, as far as I know, that he’ll get much bang for his buck. But here’s the amazing thing, Jesus died because love is real. No one bribed him, tricked him, twisted his arm, or cornered him. No one took his life from him, he laid it down. And as long as he lives, real love endures. Then the question is, “how long does he live?” Forever. His love endures forever.
Jesus, like Job, had to face the voice of cynicism. He was wasting away in the desert when, instead of three friends, three temptations were spoken over him. The same devil who attacked Job does his best to break Jesus’s spirit by offering shortcuts that harmonize with that familiar cynicism. Each shortcut opens a way for Jesus to give up on doing the right thing for the right reason. “The right way is too painful, why not numb-out? medicate instead – turn the stone into bread. The way of humility and love is too costly, perform for them and they’ll be forced to acknowledge you – hop off the temple. You’re getting a raw deal, Jesus, why pay so much? I’ll sell you the whole world for cheap – just bow down to me.”
But Jesus knows there is a more beautiful way. And, like Job, the suffering Jesus isn’t being rejected by God; he is suffering because his Father is proud of him.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about this with regard to the ways God has invited us into his life and work. Well, this could be a whole other podcast, but how crazy is it that God, who could obviously do everything much better by himself, chooses to ask us for help in getting his work done? It seems like such a terrible idea. It’s like Rembrandt handing out paint brushes to a bunch of four-year-olds and asking them to help him paint the Return of the Prodigal Son. This is a good idea how exactly? Apparently, it’s more important to the Lord that we be as deeply involved in his life as possible, than that we be terribly proficient.
At any rate, here we are: called to collaborate with God in his cosmic plan of redemption. Part of the difficulty is that we, like Job and his friends, like Rembrandt’s four-year-olds, have a hard time seeing the big picture. We don’t always know why we’re doing what we’re doing, more often than not we feel like it’s not making any difference at all.
I’ll give you a personal example and a quick story to illustrate our predicament.
So, I’m a singer/songwriter and one of the things that has always bugged me about that, and about the arts in general, is that their value is not quantifiable in any easy way. For instance, if I grow bananas, I can get so many dollars for so many bananas. The product is clear, the unit of exchange is clear – the value is easy to account for. I can get my head around it. But songs? What even is music? And what makes a song valuable? How do you quantify it? We are exiting the realm of industry and capitalism and entering the realm of mystery and beauty. Trying to combine those realms is like asking how much money does it cost to be a good friend? What are we even talking about?
Recently, I was feeling particularly insecure about launching into the recording of a new album. I prayed, “Father, how do I know it’s worth it? Will these songs do anything out in the world? What will they do? Who will they reach?” In that moment, I was reminded that what God has called me to is, to the best of my ability, to faithfully write and sing about Jesus, so far as I’ve met him in the Scriptures, life, and the church. Whether I ever see a return for my investment, or have any idea what good it did, is really none of my business. Do what you’ve been called to do as a witness to the reality of holy love. That’s it. Don’t wait till it makes sense – break the alabaster, pour out that beautiful, expensive perfume.
I remember one particular night when the Lord met me with this lesson in a powerful way.
I showed up to play a house concert in the Midwest. It was the last concert of a long tour and I was worn out. Standing there in a beautiful backyard with my guitar singing, I looked out at the faces of the folks gathered there, but instead of gratitude or wonder at their presence, all I could feel was that everything I was doing was totally pointless. And I transferred all my weariness, insecurity, and disappointment onto those poor folks. I was just sure they were all miserable. I was sure they were all wishing (like I was) that this concert would hurry up and be over so they could go home. But I had come there to do a job, and so I thought to myself, “Just get through the songs. Just put one foot in front of the other and it’ll be over soon.”
So I did. I got through the songs, told the stories, and then I went to hang out and talk to people at the merch table. I had a hard time believing anyone’s smiles or kind words, because my own heart was in such a poor state. But one young woman introduced herself. She said that she didn’t know anyone at the concert; she didn’t know how, but she had wound up on someone’s mailing list and a random invitation to this concert had showed up in her email. On a whim, she decided to come all by herself to a total stranger’s house to listen to a singer/songwriter she’d never heard of. She told me that she was not a Christian, but that tonight at this concert, something about the Gospel made sense to her for the first time.
I couldn’t believe it. You know, maybe if I had felt full of the Holy Spirit that night? Maybe if I’d been having fun or felt like there was a good connection happening with that audience? But this was probably one of the worst concerts I’d ever played. I phoned it in, I felt like. By my own account both the concert and I had been a total failure, and this whole night had been a waste of everybody’s time.
But I was wrong. Like Job, there was some other story I was a part of that I didn’t know about. There was a perspective I wasn’t privy too while I was singing those songs.
That was a powerful lesson for me. I think about it often. Because the truth is, most of the time I have no idea what my life or my work really means. Typically, we are not privy to how God is making us a part of his life and work; we feel like it’s making no difference. For me, that experience taught me that it’s none of my business to know whether or how it’s making a difference, my only responsibility is to show up with the beautiful truth again and again in any way I can think of. To sing every song and tell every story with my whole heart, because I have no idea who is listening or what they need in that moment, but the Lord does. And I can trust him that he will take the smallest thing offered in oblivious faith, and make himself available to someone through it.
We pour out the expensive perfume like Mary, we trust like Job, we empty ourselves like Jesus – even though it all seems to be a total waste. Only it’s not. It’s a beautiful thing offered in faith. And, whether we know it or not, like songwriter Bruce Cockburn sings, God will make us “a little of [His] breath moving over the face of the deep” or “a particle of [His] light moving over the hills of morning.”
Hills of Morning Bruce Cockburn Underneath the mask of the sulfur sky
A bunch of us were busy waiting
Watching the people looking ill-at-ease
Watching the fraying rope get closer to breaking
Women and men moved back and forth
In between effect and cause
And just beyond the range of normal sight
This glittering joker was dancing in the dragon’s jaws
Let me be a little of your breath
Moving over the face of the deep
I want to be a particle of your light
Flowing over the hills of morning
The only sign you gave of who you were
When you first came walking down the road
Was the way the dust motes danced around
Your feet in a cloud of gold
But everything you see’s not the way it seems
Tears can sing and joy shed tears
You can take the wisdom of this world
And give it to the ones who think it all ends here
Let me be a little of your breath
Moving over the face of the deep
I want to be a particle of your light
Flowing over the hills of morning
The post S3:E7 – None of my business appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Poetry and Impossible Possibilities by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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I grew up in church. I grew up hearing the stories and the language of the Christian tradition, of Scripture, and I sang all the songs. And for that I am deeply grateful. I wouldn’t trade it for a more dramatic testimony. Still, there is an effect that happens to people like me as well as folks who may have met Jesus later on in life through dramatic means. That is, we become dull to wonder. The strangeness of ordinary things is lost on us through over-familiarity, appropriation, basic human weariness, and inattentiveness.
In his famous essay “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien terms “Recovery” as one of the chief powers of fantasy stories (like his great work, The Lord of the Rings). He says,
“Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining – regaining of a clear view… We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity–from possessiveness.”
Tolkien goes on to describe how works of fantasy help us recover from the “drab blur of triteness or familiarity” allowing us to see the world again clearly; and clearly means to see it again as the wonderful, strange, and striking thing it really is. Fantasy, in particular, does this by taking us the long way round on an excursion into a world strange and unfamiliar to us, only to return us to our old familiar world with “clean windows”, as Tolkien puts it – eyes that now see the old, drab things again as if for the first time. For those eyes, the ordinary is renewed in all of its extraordinariness.
Another way of putting all this is to say that we build up a sort of tolerance for wonder, like we do for any pleasure. A kind of murky film accumulates on our eyes that subdues the world. Wives and husbands lose sight of the astonishing alien creature sitting across the table from them, hardly explored. Men and women shut their eyes to sleep beneath a silent blanket of scattered gas giants, careening comets and stars whose song goes unheard night after night. We swim on the surface of an ocean full of creatures so strange and unimaginable they seem beyond reality when discovered.
We depend on forces like gravity, music, and mathematics so taken for granted that, though we have devised forms of notation to refer to them and we are accustomed to participating in them as a matter of course, we no longer take note of the wild inexplicability and mystery of their existence. For, like gravity, humans did not invent music or math, they are given properties of the creation in which we find ourselves. What we’ve invented are only ways of talking about and cooperating with these things. They seem to be transcendent strands woven into the fabric of created, immanent materiality in order to be made accessible to creatures like you and me. The “natural” is shot-through with the supernatural. Honest philosophers continue to boggle at the question of what these things actually are.
Who knows? Thankfully comprehension isn’t a prerequisite for participation and enjoyment, all you need to join in the fun is gratitude, apparently. Like Tolkien’s power of recovery through fantasy stories, it may be that simple gratitude (even if it takes a lot of work to be grateful) has a similar restorative effect. To be thankful for something is to begin to see something. Most likely it’s something that was already there, but only made obscure by our habit of looking everywhere else for satisfaction, everywhere except right in front of us at what God has already given.
You might say that the last of the ten commandments (do not covet) is a last desperate attempt on God’s part to redirect our attention to the good that we already have, but have lost sight of. If the first commandment (no other gods) is really all that you need, then each subsequent commandment seems to reach a little further out from the center to those of us who have been incrementally drifting from the core of reality. For instance, if you are far from God, the least you can do as a first step is to begin to notice something in your life to be thankful for, if you are to begin your journey counting down from 10 back to 1.
The “world is charged with the grandeur of God”, says poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, famously. He’s onto something. A Hopkins poem may as well be a work of High Fantasy like Tolkien’s writing, because the world he apparently sees feels so different from the one the dull eyes of our present culture have so emptied of transcendence. To enter a Hopkins poem is to have the windows of your eyes cleaned, and new capacities grow, capacities for seeing the wonder of this Creation as well as the transcendent Presence of this world’s life-giver as immanent and intimate. You can hear it in a Hopkins line like this one, “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
We all have to deal with the lethargy and dullness that are part and parcel of living as fallen beings in a fallen world. Chesterton says we no longer have the energy to keep up with wonder; we’re too tired to exult like a child in monotony; we’re bored, not because the world is boring, but because sin has worn us down and we’ve become boring ourselves. Scripture says “to the pure all things are pure”; well, to the boring all things are boring. In contrast, Chesterton says that our Father has the “eternal appetite of infancy”. To a child, everything is so new and astonishing, strange and wondrous. But we are worn out and drab, even our appetites are exhausted and puny, says Lewis; we settle for mudpies, having lost our appetite for apple pie. Like the parents of a toddler who never sleeps, we’re too tired to keep up with a God as energetic as the Creator of the Universe, “for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we are.”
Maybe that’s why Jesus comes offering us rest? Because we’re exhausted. We’re just plain worn out by evil. Evil in real enemies, evil in the world, and evil, that if we’re honest, seems to have been inextricable from our very being for as long as we can recall.
I think there’s a thread that traces through Tolkien’s explanation of recovery through fantasy, Hopkin’s poetry, and Chesterton’s writings. It shows up in Jesus’s words too. It’s a strange way that a man from another world might be trying to clean the windows, to draw our gaze to something astonishingly good that’s right in front of us, and to waken us from our lethargy to give us real rest.
In short, Jesus uses poetic language. He puts words next to each other that don’t seem at first to belong together. Curious word couplings like “born again”, “living water”, and “living bread.” These are old dusty church words, aren’t they? But Nicodemus’ response to Jesus in John 3 makes it clear that, when he heard the phrase “born again” for the first time, it seemed like total nonsense. An entirely alien combination of words was suddenly interjected into his imagination, and there was no room for it. It was incoherent, those two words could not cohere; “born” and “again” jostled and shoved away from each other in Nicodemus’ imagination. Nothing of Nicodemus’ experience could make sense of them, those two words repelled each other.
But they could not be unheard, and Jesus did not withdraw the phrase, apologize or explain it away. He took what Nicodemus tried to brush aside and he set it right back down before the confused old man, front and center, as if to say, “If you are to ever find rest, old man, if there’s any hope for you to enter the Kingdom of the one true God, you’ve got to deal with this repellant, incoherent bit of poetic juxtaposition until the poetry itself ceases to be merely something you’ve heard with the ears of your flesh, and becomes something that actually happens to you. You must enter the poetry, it must be written into your very spirit by my Spirit. Listen now, again, to these two words as they throb and throw sparks, as they pull and tear at the corners of comprehension, rending the old threadbare cloth of all your prior conceptions, as they sew a new invisible thread of thought into the lining of the world’s limitations.”
Those two simple words, that infinitely potent yet miniscule poem, enter like a tiny seed and attach to the dark, hidden walls of the mind. Their poetic oddity itself brings previously un-thought-of meaning that serves to amend the depleted soil of the imagination, and over time they grow, making space for impossibility. Something beautiful and mysterious as music grows in that womb, graceful and messy as faith, conceivable by the Holy Spirit alone, who is the Lord, the Giver of Life.
The astonishing poetry of the Word Himself has entered this world, and he has been dropped, a dead seed, into our depleted soil. The soil of a world that has lost its charge of grandeur, like a dead battery; what’s a dead battery good for? It’s about as much good as salt that’s lost its saltiness. Can the world be recharged? Can salt be made salty again? Can something naturally impossible truly be supernaturally possible? Can two incoherent words like “born” and “again” miraculously cohere?
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Song and Story: Gone Too Long by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Last Friday, I released a new song called “Gone too long”. And I want to talk a little bit about it this week. This can be a sort of story-behind-the-song episode. But as much as this song talks about specific instances of missing places, people, and closeness with the Lord, it has also come to be about a vague sense of distance and yearning that I don’t exactly know how to describe.
My friend Amy Lee, who has been a guest on this podcast several times, introduced me to a word this week. It’s a Greek word called splagchnizomai (splawnk-NITZ-oh-my). This verb is used of the Father in the Prodigal Son story Jesus tells; when the Father sees his lost son far down the road finally heading home, the Father’s heart “goes out to him”. Splagchnizomai is sometimes also translated as “filled with love and compassion”. Literally, it’s a word that describes a kind of aching and burning in your gut, a kind of deeply felt, bodily lovesickness. Thanks for pointing out this word, Amy!
When Jesus wants to tell us a story about how our Father feels about us, this is the word he chooses. The Father sees us a long way off, and his gut burns with compassionate longing for us to be near, to be home again with him. We’ve been gone too long. If that’s how God feels about us and if “deep calls unto deep”, it makes sense to me that a corresponding, incessant ache would tug at us from within too. With that said, let’s walk together through this new song. Verse one goes like this:
I’ve been gone too long
And I’m beginning to feel it
I miss the field beyond the porch
And the western facing fence
Where the sun flares like a robin
When his breast is full of song
I am weary of the roaming
Cause I’ve been gone too long
There are two chairs set against the back of the house where I live with my brother here in Mississippi. One is a chair that used to sit on my Grandmother Mal’s back porch, and the other is a new chair that happens to be identical to the kind that used to sit on my Grandmother Clark’s front porch. Somehow the chairs themselves invite me to take a load off and feel the sap of past generations move slowly through the family tree. But here my brother Sam and I sit many mornings and evenings when the weather is nice. This porch faces West, and over a cedar plank fence (which is in a terrible state of affairs, which we don’t mind), lies a large field occasionally mown and rolled into big hay bales. We watch the birds and squirrels in the mornings, and in the evenings we watch the sun “Flare like a robin when his breast is full of song.”
There are more beautiful spots in the world to sit and watch birds and sunsets that I could ever count, but sometimes there’s a certain chair, a certain porch, a particularly shabby cedar fence that you long for. I remember coming home from a three month tour a few years back, and for the first week or so I felt like I just needed to walk around and get to know my own home again. Every little corner and knick-knack deserved eye contact and some work of re-acquaintance. I had been gone too long.
The second verse of the song says,
I’ve been gone too long
And I miss the people’s faces
When they stand to pass the peace
When we bow beneath the mercy
And I am tired of the race
Of my heart from place to place
I want to linger slow in song
Cause I’ve been gone too long
I know for some people passing the peace in church is their least favorite part of the liturgy. I get that. I am definitely an introvert. I won’t lie about the fact that I sometimes choose the longer way through a building to avoid having to meet people, and that I ignore phone calls somewhere close to 100% of the time, just because I don’t feel that I have the energy to make contact with another human being.
At the same time, I long for deep connection. I feel that splagchnizomai – that burning in my gut when my heart ‘goes out to’ others yearning for their presence. I long to discover myself situated in a family, with a place in a story that is larger than me. I’ve mentioned before on this podcast the concept of strandedness, and I ache to be woven into a fabric of meaning, mutual affection, narrative, and fruitful interweaving. Worship, in the words of Walt Wangerin, Jr., “weaves a world around me”, recontextualizes me when I feel that my life belongs nowhere and to no one. Worship also reminds me that if my life doesn’t belong to someone, it might as well not even belong to me. I want to sing and to be sung, to listen and speak, I want to linger slow in song, when I’ve been gone too long.
Next, the bridge of this song says,
And maybe it sounds too simple
But it’s the simple things I miss the most
Like the faces of my friends over dinner
How the laughter washes over us
The bridge to this song comes from a very specific moment, maybe 10 years ago, when I was living with some friends, Abbye and Jeff Pates, in Memphis, TN. One night after having cooked and eaten together in our shared home, the Malcomb House, we were all in the kitchen laughing and talking and washing the dishes together. Now, have you ever experienced, in the midst of a particularly sweet moment, the sensation of time stopping? Everything freezes as you seem to step back from the situation and see it as from the outside, with an overwhelming awareness of its beauty? These are golden moments, aren’t they? God’s goodness and presence, often in the simplest of moments, can fill that moment with a transcendent glory, breaking and filling our hearts simultaneously. There’s no use in demanding these kinds of things, they are a grace; but when I’ve been gone too long, it means I’ve not tended to the sensitivity needed to receive the appearances of that grace in this world.
The last verse says,
I do not close the shade at night
I like the sun to wake me slow
Once the birds have shook the night off
The dawn makes coffee steam glow gold
Then I sink in grandad’s chair
To read the never-fading words
When I can’t find the room to pray in
I know I’m gone too long
Lastly, we come back to sunlight upon the world, birdsong, and places of encounter with the slow-flowing sap of our family tree. The night comes, but it also goes; the gracious light appears within coffee steam turned gold, old chairs, and ultimately in the words that come from the same mouth whose Word established this world. There are those things that endure forever.
Have I been gone too long? Has the way to that holy meeting place that I once knew like the back of my hand, been forgotten? Have I been gone too long? Have I hidden my heart so long from God that I don’t even know where it is any more? Maybe if I’ve been gone too long, the burning ache in my gut can itself be like a prayer that hovers out from the lips of birds, sunsets, old chairs, the faces at my church, and the Scriptures like a slow song that lingers over my life.
That lingering song is an invitation to be quickened for the dance of life with God, to see more beauty than I have eyes to see right now, it is the Father’s grace looking down the road for us, the burning ache of splagchnizomai in the gut of God – as his heart “goes out to us” and as ours “goes out to him”.
The post S3:E4 – Song and Story: Gone Too Long appeared first on Matthew Clark.
Pre-save my new single "Gone Too Long" on Spotify, releasing this Friday, 1-29-21I’ll be releasing a new song every month, so be sure to click the “Follow” button on Spotify, so you don’t miss anything!
Click Here to Pre-Save "Gone Too Long"
Open the Windows, Let In Some Air by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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It’s been quite gray and overcast the last few days; the clouds have brought the limits of the sky closer to the ground by making a sort of foggy barrier between us humans on the earth and the sun. Though the sun illuminates the clouds from the far side, it might be possible to mistake the dim solidity of the clouds for some final compressed ceiling; it might be possible to begin to think the circle of the world had truly constricted, as if sky itself were becoming scarce.
The cloud cover has been solid; in other words, I could not see any edges and, if there was any movement to the clouds themselves I couldn’t detect it. But just since I’ve been sitting here under this morning of unchanging gray, a sudden burst of sunlight dropped straight through some fissure in the firmament and woke up the world with startling yellows and bursts of orange. The whole static monochrome came to life in vibrant color. The sky was rolled back for a moment like an old scroll to reveal another sky beyond the small cloud compression, a window onto worlds upon worlds beyond this world was flung wide open.
For several years now, every Sunday night that I’m in town, a handful of friends and I meet to drink tea, visit, read, and pray together. This time each week has become such a strong strand in the fabric of my days, and such a source of comfort and stability, that I really miss it when I can’t be there. God gives us many homes-away-from-home in this world, or “pleasant inns” that, far from ceasing our pilgrimage, become reminders and places of rest that strengthen us for our continued journey. So, Lewis says,
“The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and [provide] an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bath or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”
God gives us pleasures and pleasant inns along the way that work like sunlight breaking through the clouds to remind us: there is still a glorious destination to which we are called. There is some sense in which the meal of bread and wine both meets our hunger and thirst while at the same time deepening our appetite for God. It’s not that the Lord, in order to draw us deeper, withdraws as we approach, but that the more we take in of Him the more capacious we become, the further you go the further there is to go. And so the pleasant inns, the homes-away-from-home in this world, by providing places to stop, keep us going.
But, for me, I confess, there is another helpful thing that happens on those Sunday nights that is like the Sun breaking through the clouds, and that is simply that my world gets bigger. The overcast is no longer allowed to set the limits of the sky.
Last night, those friends and I read chapter two of G.K. Chesterton’s classic “Orthodoxy”, which Chesterton calls a sort of “slovenly autobiography” or a record of his “elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.” More or less, Chesterton lines up for us the train cars of thought that he rode to arrive at faith in Christ. And it’s a really fun ride, especially if you read it out loud with friends.
What struck a personal note with me in last night’s chapter, was the idea that we all have a tendency to get stuck in small circles of thought that constrict our hopes, limit our imaginations, wither our joys, and drive us crazy by trapping us in the tiny cosmos of believing only or primarily in ourselves. In those constricted circles of thought, we can spend our energy working out all the rationale of our small vantage point until, as Chesterton says, we have a theory that “explains a large number of things, but that does not explain them in a large way.”
For instance, I may become fixated within the small circle of thought that says that when I walk into the dinner party everyone is silently judging me for wearing a blue shirt. All the reasons to support my paranoia are present, I’m the only one wearing a blue shirt, everyone is silent about it, and I’m in the room with them. The fact that no one mentions my blue shirt can mean one thing and one thing only – they’re all judging me for wearing it.
The failure to allow any larger explanations is the definition in this case of madness. The circle explains everything, but it’s a very small circle. “How much larger your life would be, if your self could become smaller in it,” says Chesterton, “how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you.” (and your blue shirt, I might add) The larger explanation is that no one has noticed my blue shirt in the least. As solid as my little conspiracy seems, the truth is that I have no fellow conspirators, just me, me, me, and me. With such a small world with such a small atmosphere, and me taking up all the air, it’s bound to get awful stuffy in there.
I know what that feels like. I know what it feels like to be running in circles in my own head without any good idea of how to break out of the tiny echo-chamber world of ‘believing in myself.’ The hardest part about getting out is that I can’t supply what I need, because “a man cannot think himself out of a mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased.”
What hope is there then? What hope of breaking out of that logically comprehensive, though tiny, round rut? Chesterton’s answer was helpful because it was so counterintuitive to me; we don’t need for our arguments to be defeated by better arguments, necessarily. Rather, we need someone to open a window and let in some fresh air. Chesterton says, “if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”
This morning, as I sat beneath the low-lying clouds in a world grown small and gray, I could feel the circle constricting, when a window in the cloud-rack burst open. My little bedroom opened upon a wide universe of bright possibility. Sometimes going for a walk is enough. Often I like to break a spray of cedar leaves in my palm, and the scent arrives like a blessed apocalypse. A good book, story, or poem, a song, meal, show of affection, or laughter can often open a window that lets in the air of a larger, more beautiful world for me. What about you? What breaks the spells that shrink your world?
Of course, the Gospel is the good-spell that flings every window and gate wide that the King of Glory may enter. The Gospel is the good-spell that pierces the fume that wreaths and chokes us like Sam Gamgee in the belly of Mordor when he is smitten by the starlight. Sam knew better but forgot, just like we so easily forget that our whole world rests within a circumference so large we can only speak of it in terms so mysterious, vast, so capable and tender as God’s hands. And, now that Christ has come, we may think of those hands as wounded ones. Our small circles of thought are encompassed by those wounds, held in those hands. Or as my friend Bubba likes to quote one of his favorite profs, Dr. Blakemore – when we ask where exactly is the universe in relation to God, we enter into a mystery that if we try to get our heads around, our heads will split; but that we may rest our head upon – that “God made room for the universe within himself.”
I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. I pray that according to the wealth of his glory he will grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person, that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith, so that, because you have been rooted and grounded in love, you will be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you will be filled up to all the fullness of God.
Now to him who by the power that is working within us is able to do far beyond all that we ask or think, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:14-21
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MLK Day: How to make an apple pie by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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I remember being a little kid and my Mom would occasionally make apple pies. Nobody makes a better pie crust that my mom, in my opinion, and when she made apple pie she’d weave strips of pastry in a lattice laid over the sugared apple filling to make a pie that was both delicious and beautiful.
As much as I love her pastry, what makes an apple pie so great are the apples. Can you imagine making an apple pie without apples? I can just see some reality TV cooking competition where the contestants are given the challenge to make apple pies and then told they will not be allowed to use apples! Can you imagine their startled and incredulous faces? It’s just not possible to make an apple pie without the primary ingredient.
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day here in the USA, and Dr. King’s bright dream for a unified vision of human dignity among the races in this country is still shadowed by the nightmare of racism. It is easy to despair that any such vision might ever really take root deeply enough to bear a sweet fruit, knowing the state of the wounded soil of our culture, where so much blood cries out from the ground like Abel’s.
Over the last year or so I’ve thought more about it, and I’ve thought more about apple pie, too. What’s the connection? Well, I’ve been considering ingredients. What is the recipe for reconciliation? What ingredients are necessary to prepare the shared meal of peace Dr. King dreamed of?
For starters, just like you need apples to make an apple pie, you’ll need a real reason to start seeing that other person as somehow joined to you in a shared dignity that transcends but includes you both. Siblings call each other brother and sister, because they see themselves as belonging to the same family. Likewise, Paul can say in Ephesians 3:14,15, “I kneel before the Father from whom every family on earth derives its name.” And also, “Here there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.” (Col. 3:11)
Christianity supplies the apples for the apple pie; in Christ there is a transcendent basis for a unified vision of shared human dignity, regardless of race, class, or any other divide, because, if you are a human, you bear the dignity of the Image of God. That dignity, bestowed by God, goes higher than all our climbing and deeper than all our falling. Which, incidentally, is why Christianity is the most inclusive of all systems – race, family, background, criminal record, nationality, bank account, physicality, class, pedigree, achievements or failures – none of that matters; the only requirement for eligibility is that you’re a human being.
This is the genius of Dr. King’s approach to healing; he understood that the recipe for reconciliation required certain ingredients, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ could supply them. So it’s worth asking whether our culture has the resources, or ingredients, to adequately address its own wounds? For instance, does a purely materialistic, evolutionary worldview provide for our healing? Or are there no apples on that tree? If the basis of reality is just survival of the fittest, then all we’ve got to fill our pie is the competition between strong and weak, rich and poor, powerful and vulnerable – and whoever is stronger, richer, and most powerful, according to that system, has the right to do whatever they want to those less fit than themselves.
What about moral relativism? Say there’s no God to provide an external, transcendent moral example to which we are all called to reach for, but instead, each person makes their own truth. Can this provide the resources we need to heal? Relativism obstructs relationship, because it obscures any shared vision of reality; how can we bake a pie together if we can’t even agree on what apples are?
The last of our cultural resources I’ll mention in this much too short essay, is legalism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Christian who was persecuted under Russia’s Communist Regime last century, describes legalism in his 1978 speech at Harvard,
‘Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.
I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.
And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure’.
Solzhenitsyn affirms the legal system in one sense, but also points out that it’s not enough because we tend to equate right and wrong merely with legal and illegal. That devolves into a battle of technicalities, where as long as we’re doing what’s legal we don’t have to feel any guilt about doing what is ultimately unloving. In other words, legalism becomes a way to excuse ourselves from the call of God to always be reaching toward the highest good for our neighbor. After all, the man in Luke 10:25 who asked Jesus “who is my neighbor” was an expert in the law.
Paul goes into more depth in Romans and points out that even that good Legal system given by God himself in the Old Testament to the Jews at Sinai could not in itself supply the ingredients for the necessary transformation of the human heart. The letter of the Law is a kind of temporary guardrail and an indicator of our need for a better resource that can bring real reconciliation and healing – namely, the forgiveness achieved by the dying Jesus and the Holy Spirit breathed into us by the risen Jesus.
“For he is our peace, the one who made both groups into one and who destroyed the dividing wall of hostility, when he nullified in his flesh the law of commandments in decrees. He did this to create in himself one new man out of two, thus making peace, and to reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by which the hostility has been killed. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, so that through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Eph. 2:14-18)
That’ll make a good apple pie. In Christ a new thing can happen, a new resource for healing and reconciliation that supplies a real basis for seeing one another with a unified vision becomes available to us. Suddenly, we can love our enemies, because we understand how we, enemies of Christ, have been loved so well and forgiven so much. We can look at those who look so different from ourselves and recognize the same blessed image bestowed upon us both in the deepest part of our being. We realize we both are being called to learn a language of love that is as awkward and difficult to us as our sin is comfortable and easy.
The Cross of Christ does not belittle but takes very seriously the evil we have done to one another, the blood we have spilled, the deadly words we have hurtled, and the comfortable detachment from righteousness we’ve secured for ourselves whether it’s through legalism, moral relativism, or materialism’s denial of a transcendent and holy God. And, the Cross of Christ offers the supernatural ingredient of grace and companionship with God that can rebuild the human heart from the grave up. Impossible things become possible with God.
And at the Table King Jesus sets, you will see faces from every tribe, language, and ethnicity seated together in a beautiful vision of absolute harmony, absolute unity and love. I’m praying today that the vision Dr. King caught of Jesus’s Kingdom might be caught again by us here in America – that we could sit and smile beside one another at the table as we taste the shared goodness of that sweet apple pie.
The following two Prayers, written by Dr. King, are taken from “Thou, Dear God: Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits”.
1) Forgive us for what we could have been but failed to be.
O Thou Eternal God, out of whose absolute power and infinite intelligence the whole universe has come into being, we humbly confess that we have not loved thee with our hearts, souls and minds, and we have not loved our neighbors as Christ loved us. We have all too often lived by our own selfish impulses rather than by the life of sacrificial love as revealed by Christ. We often give in order to receive. We love our friends and hate our enemies. We go the first mile but dare not travel the second. We forgive but dare not forget. And so as we look within ourselves, we are confronted with the appalling fact that the history of our lives is the history of an eternal revolt against you. But thou, O God, have mercy upon us. Forgive us for what we could have been but failed to be. Give us the intelligence to know your will. Give us the courage to do your will. Give us the devotion to love thy will. In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. Amen. (p. 7)
2) In unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life
O God, the Creator and Preserver of all mankind; in whom to dwell is to find peace and security; toward whom to turn is to find life and life eternal, we humbly beseech Thee for all sorts and conditions of men; that thou wouldst be pleased to make thy ways known unto them, Thy saving health unto all nations. We also pray for Thy holy Church universal; that it may be so guided and governed by Thy Spirit, that all who profess and call themselves Christians may be led into the way of truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life. Finally, we commend to Thy Fatherly goodness all those who are in any way afflicted or distressed in mind or body. Give them patience under the suffering and power of endurance. This we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen. (p. 57)
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A Brawl in the Jazz Club by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words
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Everyone has their little pet peeves, which tend to speed to the forefront of the mind when we’re in a living situation with someone who does things very differently than we do. Or to put it positively, we all have fascinating particularities that we may not even be aware of until they’re thrown into contrast by a spouse, roommate or sibling who doesn’t share our idiosyncrasy. I had a mentor once who called these kinds of preferences “quirky loves” and he loved to gather two or three people around a dinner table where he’d ask everyone to share at least three quirky loves.
One of my quirky loves is for things in a house to have a place. Coffee mugs have a place. Plates have a plate place. Yogurt goes on the same shelf in the same spot every time. It gives me special delight to go to the place where something should be and find it waiting there for me. Now, one of the most mystifying and frustrating realizations for me over the last six or seven years of living with my brother has been that he does not share this quirky love of mine. In fact, it’s nowhere on his radar. For Sam, things in the kitchen go, for the most part, almost anywhere they happen to randomly wind up. Coffee cups where the glasses go, a lone pepper shaker all the way across the room from the spice cabinet in the pantry with the canned goods! Can you believe it? Absolute chaos!
A wise man once passed on to me something he learned from a counselor about expectations in marriage; he said, “No expectation is valid unless it is communicated and agreed upon by both parties.” You can’t get mad at someone for failing to read your mind about where the pepper shaker ought or ought not be. I must admit I harbored some secret resentment toward my brother that first year or two, because my quirky love of “thing placement” was an uncommunicated and unmet expectation. A time or two I even thought the randomness of his placement was just to get my goat. But it wasn’t, of course. Over time, I’ve learned to relax, move the coffee cup to its proper place and go about my day.
That’s a bit of a fun story to set up a more serious conversation. That is, what happens when things aren’t where they’re supposed to be? One of the glories of the opening chapters of the Scriptures is that we find God ordering chaos into cosmos; God is giving everything a place, a proper context and habitat. Creation is not haphazardly thrown together; it is very carefully crafted through the infinite care and intention of God. There’s a logic to it, later described by St. John in the prologue to his Gospel in personal terms – Jesus himself is the very logic or Logos of Creation. That means the second person of the Trinity holds in himself the rationale for all things. The wisdom about the right placement of any given thing within creation in relation to all the other things is in Christ.
This order is what makes wisdom possible, since wisdom is getting good information that enables good decisions. The Father, through his Son in Creation and Incarnation, has made good information available. The expectations have been communicated – we don’t have to read God’s mind; Paul says, through the Spirit, the mind of Christ has been revealed. Truth is knowable, because God has opened his mouth and sent forth the Word himself. That’s great news, because it means we have a reliable basis for decision-making in this world. Reality is accessible, so we can make an informed response to it as we go about our lives. We can participate in reality or not.
Let’s try all this out in a musical analogy. We have been given the sheet music so we can learn the tune. Once you learn the tune, you can sit in with the band. Once you know the tune and have done the work to learn the logic of your instrument well enough, something really amazing can happen – you can get inside the music, so to speak, you’re set free to improvise. Improvisation is all about practicing wisdom by entering into a relationship of love and attentiveness to the rationale of the song, which leads to mutual submission with the other players and the life of the music itself. The joy is made complete when everyone is ‘in the pocket’ together. God has composed a vast and elaborate music, each one of us is an instrument, and our very lives are an opportunity to learn the tune and grow wise enough to sit in with the Band and jam with the Original Jazz Trio, the Holy Trinity. Or as Peter puts it, to “participate in the divine nature.” You may even think of this whole universe as the long-play record and result of an epic jam session, and the Big Bang itself as the first cymbal crash of God’s Big Band careening across an ever-expanding dance floor where stars and planets learned to swing.
Let’s take the music analogy and switch over to a story analogy. This world has an Author with a capital “A”. Hebrews says, Jesus is the Author and the Perfecter of the story. He started this whole narrative project, and he’ll have the final word as to how it all winds up. That means all this is truly going somewhere, and that we have a place and living role in a Great Tale. The more we can familiarize ourselves with the Story God is telling, the more we’ll be able to participate as little collaborators in its telling. The Church is a great book club I recommend joining.
Let me move the analogy once more. This time imagine you’re standing on the prow of a great ship. The salty ocean air is tossing your hair. You have set sail expecting adventure. But the seas will be treacherous and it will be many days before you are likely to see land. Still, your heart beats confidently and joyfully to a rhythm that seems to be grounded not in yourself, but in some distant country yet to be revealed. In fact, you set sail because you sensed that music calling you. As the sun sets the stars are revealed, and you raise your eyes to admire their beauty and fixity. You can navigate by these immovable celestial lights. Though the earth itself moves through the heavens, and though the undulating waters surrounding you offer no orienting points of reference, you have what you need to make your destination. If you know where to look, the path is, in fact, marked out for you. The path is ancient as the stars and true.
But what if the very stars wander? What if the Song ceases to be sung, and it’s tune is rewritten, obscured, lost? What if the Story goes untold or the details are changed? How can we be wise? How can we follow the narrative to its glorious end? How can we navigate through lies and half-truths to our homeland? Friends, this is an age of great anxiety, and you can see why, can’t you? Nothing is where it’s supposed to be. Proverbs warns us not to move the ancient boundary stones, because they were set there to help us discern Reality and our placement within it.
But there’s a brawl in the jazz club and no one can hear the band over the ruckus. Pages are torn out of the book, whole sections rewritten. Great fixities that we once could rest easy about have become shifty, so that our bearings are constantly being thrown off and we despair of ever seeing our homeland appear on the horizon. We’re going in circles. It’s enough to drown in – a whelming flood of disorientation, a boiling mob of anxious anger.
Here, at the outset of the third season of this podcast, I am praying this may be a little place where we can remember the fixities – the stars that don’t wander. That we can search for the Song God is singing amidst the noise. That these episodes might be like little threads that re-weave the raveled fabric of God’s story around us. And even if we are pilgrims in rags traveling the ancient ways toward the Joy set before us, we will be clothed in goodness, truth, and the beauty of holiness, which readies our hands to work peace and opens our eyes to see God.
O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and
light riseth up in darkness for the godly: Grant us, in all
our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what thou
wouldest have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save
us from all false choices, and that in thy light we may see
light, and in thy straight path may not stumble; through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A Prayer for Guidance, Book of Common Prayer
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