Dear People of Christ Church,
After confirmation, parish arts day, the post office food drive, the Mother’s Day Walk, and whatever else I’ve forgotten that’s happened in the first two weeks of May, finally it feels like we aren’t sprinting toward anything.

(There is planting day on Saturday, but if the thing that’s making your life feel busy is a morning spent gardening, you have it pretty good).

ALL THE THINGS…where is there stillness?
Depends on what you mean by stillness. Longing for rest is one thing—too many Saturdays working makes Sara a dull girl—but stillness is different from inactivity. Both are necessary at ties, but stillness comes when the focus is on God, not on the outcome. Whatever brilliant or important thing that we think is so important is secondary to that faithfulness. Stillness comes when our interior lives aren’t determined by our external circumstances. That’s not to say that our external circumstances don’t matter—you have only to spend some time with the photos from the Day Center exhibit currently in the parish hall to know that material and spiritual needs are linked. But ultimate reconciliation isn’t in having the biggest team for the Peace Walk or the coolest Children’s Play Garden. It’s in how we are listening for where God finds us in community. We are called to be faithful to God’s nudging toward hospitality and solidarity—not to focus on the task to the exclusion of the call.

I imagine that our contemporary striving for stillness and comfort is not so different from the experience of the earliest church. Their anxieties were different, but there was still anxiety. Today is the feast of the Ascension—the church’s time of marking the end of Jesus’ resurrection appearances to his disciples. The Gospel story is a bit fantastical—he is raised up into the clouds out of sight—and while I believe the experience of the disciples, I’m not sure of what to make of the literalness of it—science and whatnot—but what I DO really get is the sense of uncertainty and fear that the remaining community felt. Living in the midst of uncertainty is hard. Chaos is hard. Grieving—hard. One moment the disciples knew Jesus to be there, and then he was gone.

Liturgically/poetically/metaphorically in the church we observe the ten days between Ascension (today) and Pentecost (May 24) as the time between Jesus ending his resurrection appearances, returning to the heart of God, and sending the Holy Spirit. Those tongues of fire at the wild parties of Pentecost were the promise of God’s active working in our midst for all time, sent by Jesus in God our Creator. In this time between, the absence is the presence; it’s paradoxically in this dark time that the light is being born in our hearts. I’m in the middle of reading Cheryl Strayed’s book, Wild, in which she chronicles her hundreds of miles hike on the Pacific Coast Trail from southern California to Oregon. After her life falls apart, she is reassembled on the trail, the exhaustion and pain giving way to grace and transformation. She didn’t make peace with her mother’s death because she ate dehydrated food and walked alone for four months and her feet were covered in blisters. But it was still in the midst of that adversity and loneliness that the peace came, finding herself near the end emptied of everything but gratitude to have arrived (274). Absence was presence. Even unable to see God or know God, yet God is present. It’s the stillness in the whirlwind, the intimation of rest even in the midst of striving and action. Not because we’ve fixed or changed what’s outside ourselves, but because we’ve listened to our God who whispers.

Where is your soul? Where have you found a moment of peace?

Blessings,
Sara+