Sneaky reference

She had accompanied the glory.  She had been with him in the unsurpassable intimacy of the pregnancy and the birth, an intimacy that none other could ever know. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

- Charles A. Miles, In the Garden 

I completely missed the allusion to this hymn on my first couple readings of this book.  Maybe someone who has sung this song their whole life rather than the relatively few times I have might have gotten it right away. 

There are a pair of truths here that are mysterious in their contradiction and harmony.  It is true that Mary shared an intimacy with Jesus that is distinctive from what any other may experience with him.  It is also true that no mother, no matter how much she may have experienced maternal intimacy with her own children, has done so with God in the same way that Mary did, and this truth is a thing good for us to marvel over for a while. 

Yet while Mary's intimate relationship with Jesus is the unique result of their mother/son relationship, it is likewise true that no one else can ever know the intimate relationship that each of us are called into in and with him.  Rather than lament that we cannot know Jesus in the same way Mary did - which is not Fr. Neuhaus' point at all - we should immerse ourselves in the intimate relationship with Jesus which is uniquely ours to enter into.  No matter how close another person may be with me and how close that person may be with Jesus, neither of us can have the same relationship with him.  Each person's relationship with God in Christ is different, is unique, because we are each different and unique and God responds to each of us uniquely.  While it is true in one sense that God loves all of us "the same," that is, that God loves no one more or less deeply or greatly than any other, it is also true that he loves each of us as he loves no other, for love is always rooted in the unique characteristics of each lover and each beloved.

Pondering the significance of "Woman, there is your son . . . There is your mother" also means recognizing that the beloved disciple was not Mary's child in the same physical way in which Jesus was, nor are we. But thinking of all the implications that this makes in our relationship with mother whom we gain when we accept Jesus as our brother, and in our relationship with Jesus, and in our resulting familial relationships with each other, is making my under-rested brain hurt, so perhaps I shall return to this later.

Or perhaps it may be best for the reader to consider the implications for themselves.

Passage, continued

I can't seem to recall the specific moment, near the end of the program, that I offered a quiet "thank you" to God for the privilege of proclaiming his love, a response which grows out of the more fundamental privilege of being his adopted son (or daughter).  I never got choked up on Yours is the Kingdom before, though.

As I abide in you - as you live in me - may others see your glory!

What a gift, to be part of such a powerful ministry, but God Himself is the greater gift, and the more deeply we receive him the more we realize this is a gift too great to be kept to ourselves, and yet the act of sharing him becomes another gift, or perhaps more accurately is the means to more fully receive him ourselves.  

It wasn't until later that the emptiness began to take hold.  But I receive this, too, as a participation in every disciples' experience of Christ's passing, knowing that there is no death in him that does not bring a greater resurrection, even if our three days in the tomb can seem to stretch into timeless eternity sometimes. 

I don't know what God is going to do next - even when we have an inkling of what comes next, we rarely know what it truly holds - but I trust it will manifest his glory in some marvelous way.

A passage

Tonight will be bittersweet, and we must be careful.  Jubilee's final Way of the Cross service, the end of my fifth season with the group, has the potential to get focused on the wrong thing.  What we pray about with reflections and songs is more important than the fact that we are concluding this service tonight.  We have shared a great privilege together, and yet the truth we have acknowledged each week of Lent over the years is a far greater privilege.

Christ has delivered us from death, has redeemed our lives with his own!

Today's word

A word I've seen before without knowing its meaning:

atavism - 1a. - recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination  b. - recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity  2. one that manifests atavism : throwback

Today's word

I knew what today's word meant as soon as I saw it:

zoomorphic - 1. having the form of an animal  2. of, relating to, or being a deity conceived of in animal form or with animal attributes

I was familiar with it's cousin, anthropomorphic.

What E5 means

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church. - Eph 5, 25.

It has been paraphrased Husbands, go the way of the cross for your wives.


I know that this is not a negative thing, not some burden that we should avoid as much as possible, something we just have to trudge through.  Fr. Neuhaus has reminded us that the way of the cross is the way of glory. It is how we become who we are to be! My license plate says E5 MAN, for crying out loud, as a reminder.

So why can't I remember to stop focusing on my own needs and wishes in our relationship?

Musings, hopefully turned useful

Sometimes I find myself spending entirely too much time considering things like this:

• Am I am the lowest priority in your life?
• Is there any thing in your life, any activity to which you give your time, which matters less to you than taking care of our home and nurturing our life?
• Is there anything that you would just think on your own that it might be nice to move around in your schedule so that we can just spend some quality time together instead?

But this question is more important for me to focus on:

• What do I need to do to be the person I want to be, in the way that best helps us become the couple I want us to be, too?

Two unrelated thoughts in this regard:

1. The corollary to "you can't forgive someone for being who they are," has got to be "you can't expect anyone to change in the ways you wish they would."  Of course, we're all going to change.  The essence of life is change.  "You're not the person I married" has to be the most self-evident statement ever made, even if what we really mean more often is, "You're not the person I thought I married."

While it's true, as Matthew Kelly says, that the essence of Christianity is change, it's a particular type of change that is the core of our faith.  But our journey through time is a series of changes from one moment to the next, with the large ones we focus on being made up of a series of smaller ones that we can't even perceive.  Here's the rub: I can never expect the changes that another accepts and embraces to be the ones I would choose for them, even if my desire to do so isn't chiefly my own self-interest, which I think it too often is for most of us.

2. Suppose a couple has spent decades of their life with one primary strength that has come easily to them and sustained their relationship through turmoil. Even when they have - by choice or circumstance, and mutually or unilaterally - stepped away from that area for a while, it has been a harbor to which they ultimately relished returning.  Everything else good about their relationship has been something that one or the other of them has had to work at, sometimes quite hard. Then suppose that, for reasons completely beyond either of their control, that one strength is taken away from them, very possibly forever.

That thing that has always come so naturally seemed to serve as patching cement for the cracks that have occurred through the years, but maybe it has become so prevalent as to cause them to wonder whether it has become the chief material on which their life is built.  It may then be revealed to have been mere filler, not able to serve as a strong undergirding for their house.  In fact, this is likely if it has been anything other than their commitment to become, each of them, the best version of him- or herself, the reflection of Christ's presence in the world.

If that happens, it seems to me that they'd better both be ready to jump into some serious structural work.  But they should be relieved, and count themselves most fortunate, if some of those areas over which they've previously labored, individually and jointly, have in fact formed a stronger foundation for them than that one area ever was on its own.