When people get together everything is possible in the room. Church life may have a stereotype that says only a few predictable things are going on. Everybody’s holy all the time, or people are constantly at prayer. Butter wouldn’t melt in anyone’s mouth, and the real world is left at the door, except for the chronically needy who hog the agenda.

    Who would want a place in a life like that? That has never been my experience of church life. Oh, you get some crazies now and then, but rarely people who would want to do you real harm. Most folk put their best foot forward, want to make a difference, and enjoy their life in the community. They really get something of value from it for facing the challenges of a lifetime.

     They are so interesting too. They have careers and families, holiday destinations, accomplishments and honours from the wider society. They also have hobbies, idiosyncrasies, pet peeves, single drum-beating passions and issues, with opinions they are most willing to share. I like that.

     Most are veterans of the changing scenes. They pack hard-earned wisdom. They drive miles to come to worship, are unruffled by bad weather, dig deep to keep the finances strong in times of need, chip in favourite recipes for pot luck, and open their hearts to those hurting around them.

     To have the privilege of working among such people, of opening our sacred texts with them, of standing with them in times of crisis, of engaging the mystery of our destiny, these things are pearls beyond price.

     When these people get together anything can happen in the room. We laugh and cry, and roar and sit in silence as the needs dictate. This style is older than any stereotype of us.

      Indeed it may well be the kind of first freedom know in the earliest Christian gatherings. God, in the story of the Christ, has thrown us the ultimate mystery, the most intricate of all puzzles, the grand-daddy of all squeeze toys. It takes the child, the sage, the gamer, the dreamer, the realist, and every other character-type in the gene-pool to pick at this most delightful central gift, the quest for the meaning of life, and life beyond life.

   “On Sunday morning some of us went to the grave. What a mess, the head stone gone, dirt scattered everywhere. Some workman was standing there talking on his Blue Tooth. “What’s going on?” he finally asked. “We came looking for Jesus.” “Nobody’s here.”

So we checked it out. No Jesus.

    Thank God, Mary had her cell phone and videoed this guy. He told us again how he’d just got there, figured out there was trouble, and was calling it in.

    Mary sent the video to Peter. He copied the group. Soon emails were flying; speculation, accusation, calls for justice and pleas for calm. We were raging. Jesus was set up and now they were throwing him away.

     James went into Facebook. “They’ve got Jesus.” Friends everywhere posted for details. Peter put Mary’s video on You Tube under the title “So Wrong”. It showed the wrecked grave, the stranger with the Blue Tooth, and all of us in tears. It went viral. All over the world thousands zeroed in on our pain.

    Getting together later, we took some comfort in fact that people realized that a great wrong was done. It will take time to get over the violence we’ve seen. But through it all Jesus is still our leader. He was amazing. We saw magic in him, too good a life to be lost in our silence. So we try and speak and live like him in the face of the fear.”

      Now that the big hockey game is over, and we can breathe again, I find myself fascinated by the power displayed in those moments. A world audience went wild. I can still see the final goal every time I close my eyes. That is power. That is us, the human animal, in full flight. You could win wars with such energy. Move mountains. Indeed you could fix the world.

      Returning to type, I now ask myself where Jesus would be in that scene. The church might make him the referee. After all, we set him up as peace-keeper, law-giver, and final authority. How does that feel, dressing Jesus in a striped shirt and sending him out with a whistle?

      Perhaps he is just a face in the crowd, high up in the cheap seats. Historically he was poor and had no friends in high places. Maybe he is working the concession stands giving people what they need to get them through the tension. His healing ministry and general air of approachability would fit that bill.

      Perhaps Jesus made the team. It is a gifted group, but it was said of him that he expressed an uncommon understanding of the big game and was a favourite with the fans. If so, which position would he occupy?

       Is he a center man making plays for his wingers to complete? He leads, we follow. He opens the door, we pick up the pass. He blocks an opponent, we slip through the gap. He takes the hit, we seize the chance.

       Is he a winger, putting his body at risk in the corners, taking the bruising that comes from intense contact in a hard-fought conflict? Good Friday seems to be from a playbook for wingers. The Sacred passes us a pivotal moment, and the winger chases into a dangerous corner.

        Is Jesus on defense? These days the churches would make him seem so. He is our muscular guardian to check all incoming threats. As long as Jesus holds the blue line, our ownership of the franchise is safe.

        Is he the goalie? No matter what happens, how poorly we play, or how the game goes against us, we have one more player between us and loss. Do we secretly take it out on him back in the dressing room when the other teams play better and win the day?

         For me Jesus is just a kid who loves the game. Who plays it with a tennis ball on the street, or heads to the outdoor rink on really cold days for a few spirited turns around the ice. He never played in the system and never saw much of the big leagues, but he was such fun to watch, and so enthusiastic about the enterprise, that others remember him as a consummate example of us at our best. His legend grew from there.          

At dawn every morning I look at the clocks.

The sandman departs, and I search for my socks,

The kittens meow and the black dog still talks.

O isn’t it time to live outside the box?

I put on the coffee and scrape off the toast,

And push away scraps from the Sunday night roast,

And chat through the headlines to one I love most,

O say that its time to be more than a ghost?

The lot at the office is packed to the brim

With people out shopping or braving the gym,

Routine rattles on to the sound of a hymn,

I’m craving a time to go out on a limb?

Our Sunday convention is holding its own.

Our budget, though plenty, is trimmed to the bone.

Our Gospel takes on a conundrummer’s tone.

O please say it’s now we’ll get out of the zone?

The Bible’s a treasure of wonderful tales,

With Romans in numbers, and prophets in whales,

And lives there all weighed on high, heavenly scales,

O hunger with me for such winds in our sails?

I’d hate to find out that our truth was a lie,

That all we end up with is what we could buy,

And the box that we lived in won’t fit in the sky.

Is it time to decry, and deny, and to fly?

  An evangelical Christian organization in a large city is prepared to build and operate a youth center for its disadvantaged neighbours in the inner core. National and city governments seem set to guarantee the money. The site has long been derelict and carries the legacy of an eyesore.  No one else stepped up to the plate, and yet there is opposition to the plan. Underneath the foot-dragging and political posturing is one issue. The evangelical sponsoring group has, as its mandate, the desire to introduce young people to the story of Jesus Christ.

   I know there have been problems with this. I know the churches in their zeal have often delivered spurious messages and caused desolations still unresolved. We still do. I know too that spiritual teaching is a tender area in our culture. Indeed one spokesman on the issue said that if the sponsoring group had been called “Youth for Donuts” there would have been hearty support all around.

   My soul chills when I ponder this unfolding story. Have we so misrepresented the Christ, who came to heal and care and rescue discarded lives from the gutter, that he is only seen as a stooge or a trickster? Are we so culturally ignorant of the great legacy of church and faith that we now see its central figure as our enemy? Are we so willing to stand for our half-truths and unexplored prejudices in this area that we would rather see the dereliction than to have this group do its work?

    Christians in North America have lost immeasurable ground over the last two generations. That loss has made us timid, tyrannical or fanatical. Our richer story lies untold, our heroes stand unknown and our vision and practices are looked upon as secretive and odd.

    Welcome to the first century. It now costs us something to proclaim and live our faith. That cost will only deepen as the gap increases. We are not operating against “no faith”. There is another faith at work that opposes us and fights to eradicate us. That faith, a modern/consumerist/self-pampering mantra, mixes fear, ridicule, nationalism, manifest destiny, armaments, money, and the enslavement of social conformity to create a trap for the human spirit. Almost gone are the true rebels, sojourners and the mystics. What is left is a gummy, greasy culture whose only socially acceptable expression seems to be “Youth for Donuts”.

“There is a myth that denies suffering and the sense of pain. It acts as if they should not be, and hence it devalues the experience of suffering it. But this myth denies our encounter with reality.”(Ivan Illich)

     Although the opening of the fishing season is not yet upon us, I saw the mindset at work. It was at the auto show. Countless young fry swarmed around shiningly seductive lures and salivated for a good bite. One concept car proposed an engine of well over one thousand horse power. The street model would climb from zero to one hundred in under three second. I was comforted to know that a roll-bar was built right into the frame. (By the time I’d wound the thing up on my way to the supermarket I’d be in the next town.)

     I caught sight of it in a string of television commercials too, on one of those macho, edgy stations geared to the young. One offered slightly blonder hair, another, a pain killer just a little more effective, and another a face cream to hide those irritating little blemishes called reality

     That’s what it is all about. Reality. My son and I talked about this at lunch. It is the buzz we create in our heads that drives the agenda, and each of us creates his or her own.

The buzz is a way of living another life, a way of escaping the reality of the one we really live, our biological life with its brevity and sudden danger. The huge pitfall is that the projected picture is false. It does not exist. It is held at the expense of reality, a world of pain and suffering. Real people are living real lives of desolation, need and loss all around us and even inside our circle of friends. If the buzz in our head leads us to feel that suffering and pain should not be, then we have no sympathy for sufferers and no real drive to offer support. Step over them, they do not exist. Shut out all bad news. It comes from some alien universe.

     How suicidal this is, for all are mortal, all are frail, all are vulnerable and in need of support. Over coffee my boy and I noted the danger lurking in the false security of urban life. It presupposes that all our support systems will work well and without interruption. Add one major crisis and there goes the food, water, fuel, electricity, communications, law and order and social cohesion. We shall perish in vast numbers. (Keep Haiti in mind if you doubt this).

      In the decades ahead, as the world’s food supply comes under stress, its water more suspect, and its desolate poor too numerous and frantic to contain in their fenceless ghettoes, our ability to share, and care, and adjust to a much harder reality will be our primary human requirement. All those head-buzzes that keep us circling those shiny, barbed lures will need the relief of extra strong pain killers, as we dodge the speed-racers trying to escape the inevitable, while creaming their faces to hide the wrinkles of terror.

    The story of ancient Israel got it right. The whole thing is about discerning our place on a road and asking ourselves what we’re going to do about it. That road runs between slavery and freedom. Remember? There was first a time of tribal wandering, a relative freedom to be small, and mobile, and alive. Then  troubles came and the people headed for the walled security of Empire. It seemed a blessing. Then times changed. Familiar things became drudgery. Political advantages slipped away, and soon the people formed just one more cluster in large pecking order. Their spirit faded and their prospects shut down. It became a case of making bricks without straw. Where are you on that road? Where are we?

     Then they cried out in their entrapment, and from their own midst arose people with the courage to protest. “Let my people go!” Off they went with the empire in hot pursuit. No one leaves the pecking order without penalty. By miraculous means they found themselves out from under the heel of their oppressors. Now what?

     It wasn’t freedom they found, but wilderness, a time of tests and temptations, restructuring and digging deep into roots almost lost. Some yearned to go back. Other wanted to stay where they landed. Still others caught the spirit of the movement and sought to press forward. Where are you? Where are we?

    This old story gets it right because it names our lives. We are both slaves to something and pilgrims toward something. Intentional self-awareness gives us a sense of our situation in things. It begs the question of our satisfaction there, and our stretch towards destiny.

    The tale is wise. The people never reach a settled Promised Land. All subsequent destinations, no matter how glorious or hard-won, lead to the same cycle of enslavement and the battle for a measure of freedom. It is the process of moving, and the awareness we bring to it, that offer the only real freedom we will ever know. Yet knowing that gives a lightness within all captivity, and the rudiments of a song for the road. That very road opens to us, by miracle, when we sing in our chains, pack our things in our dreams, and dare to go.

   With Easter coming on, it is important revisit the Resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah. Ink has been squandered and blood split over this one, long before I waded in, so let us risk a little more for the sake of clarity. A dialogue between Bishop N.T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan has made the options clear for me. They are these:

JESUS WAS RAISED FROM THE DEAD. THEREFORE HE IS THE LONG-AWAITED MESSIAH. (This is the notion of HISTORY REMEMBERED).

   This conviction takes the heart of the Gospels literally. Jesus was a unique human being, and a singular, once-only thing happened to him at the end of his life. To go this route blows the end out of our expectations and experiences in living thus far. It says never mind the way the world works. Never mind the laws of science and the testimony of eons of history. When the right person arrives in the right moment, all bets are off. This is equal to the arrival of aliens from outer space. Upon their landing, all past history is out of bounds and out of date. But as we see, the old rules still apply and the old boundaries are firmly in place.

   If Jesus of Nazareth were literally raised from the dead then that would mean we are all at the whim of some unseen force somewhere who turns everything upside down to suit a display in the moment, or to complete some dark and hidden grand scheme. Oh, there is Mystery, and it is alive, but come on people!  It isn’t ham-fisted like that. We aren’t misguided in our general sense of things in the living world, and we aren’t fools. Whatever this story in the Gospels is about, it can’t be about that as presented.

The second option goes like this:

OUR THEOLOGICAL CONVICTION IS THAT THE MESSIAH SHALL BE RAISED FROM THE DEAD. WE BELEIVE THAT JESUS IS THE MESSIAH, THEREFORE IN TELLING OF HIM, WE INCLUDE THAT HE WAS RAISED FROM THE DEAD. (This is known as PROPHECY HISTORICIZED).

  This option sees the Gospels as church-sanctioned stories for teaching its deep theological convictions. They present, in incidental form, embellished portraits of life with Messiah in the midst. The Gospels show what the community of faith can and will look like when we are in the company of God. There is healing, teaching, political courage, social integration, and the rise of hope. The death of the Messiah previews our own inevitable clash with the forces that oppose such gracious things. The raising of the Messiah, in the story, expresses our hope that the sacred will be victorious, and the dead in faith, the martyrs and freedom-fighters, shall be recognized and restored.

   This understanding of the Resurrection makes the epic of Jesus a “rallying cry” around which to gather, and a “portrait” of the victory so deeply sensed in us even in the chaos.

This portrait sees us living until we die, and risking faithful engagement with the enemy whether we live or die. Its faith is in the progress of the Sacred in bringing deep and true things to fruition forever. This too is a conviction extrapolated from life experience, but to me, it keeps us right in this world as we explore the possibilities of faithful living.                                                                                                                         Jesus of Nazareth is as dead as any first century human being. But life for us was never simply about physical living and dying. The halo cast by of our living years and the patina thrown by our afterglow are also the stuff that feeds faith and hope. Jesus, the Messiah, is alive like that

  I know which Resurrection option I must choose. It goes with my nature and comes from my experience in life. The Resurrection of the Messiah is the best part of the tale for me. It says that braving faith is worth it, and that defending faith is our greatest human gift to the world.

Given the nature of the times,

We name ourselves in songs and rhymes.

Give us some rap we can devour,

Help us to spend another aimless hour.

Show us a film, and keep the venue dark.

Now, far away, we can imagine life as “lark”.

Watch the T.V., for sure in H.D.

The bigger the screen, the better the scene.

Go to the store and gather some more.

Though closets are bursting, our plastic is thirsting.

Boost our defences. The cry of the poor

Rankles for justice and beats at our door.

Let the Kings rule, to protest marks a fool.

There is nothing to do but make sure its not you.

Just eat and grow heavy, and drink and pass out

There’s no higher law, or Great Spirit to flout.

And soon, at the end, we surrender our song,

And know, deep and long, if we’ve been right or wrong..

Chaucer described us as beasts in a pen,

But he hoped that one day we would wake up again,

And claim that deep call to the Pilgrims we are

And rise to its echo and reach for a star.

  I read some of William Wordsworth’s poetry today to afford myself just a few moments of reverie in the presence of gracious language. I realized how little of it I hear around me, and how differently it filters through my perception when I do. My mind seemed to open neglected pathways to take in the splendour of Wordsworth’s phrases. How many other such pathways languish for want of good company?

  I do not wish to lament the pedestrian nature of language usage, how it simply gets us from here to there. Nor do I want to decry the surface application of words, images and ideas so easily thrown around among us. Only now, with my advancing years, am I able to begin to appreciate the wonder of words and the lush thickness of thought.

  There is something to be said for living long enough for reflection. There is much to be said for keeping the curriculum broad and the expectations for ourselves high. Shallow lives make for shallow cultures. Small, utilitarian contacts leave the soul desolate.

“That though the radiance which once was so bright be now forever taken from my sight; though nothing can bring back the splendour in the grass, glory in the flower, we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains.”

“The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants, and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty who does not know this.” ( William Wordsworth)

“If I’m going to sing like someone else then I don’t need to sing at all” (Billie Holiday)

The first need in getting somewhere is simple pleasantness, a kind, open demeanor that resists bristling and lashing out.

The second need is a childlike wonder. To be amazed and fascinated will take you farther than cynicism.

The third need is patience. You’re not the only one in line, and it can’t all be accomplished right away.

The fourth need is a valve for ventilation; a friend, or hobby, or favourite mantra will do.

The fifth need is a secret hideaway where you can be yourself, and say, and think, and dream whatever you like.

The sixth need is a bone-scraper; some way of paring down the barnacles, scar tissue and scratch marks people and life inflict on you.

They are not the whole story, and they are behind you now.

The seventh need is for longing. The roads you didn’t take hold treasures that temper their sadness with truths.

The eighth need is for a dialogue with Death. To feel the power of your mortality sweetens the good things, and orders your range of action and energy.

The ninth need is forgiveness, a deep sense of belonging to the goodness of things no matter what.

The tenth need is for intersections with Surprise. When Surprise leaps out you know this whole thing is bigger and more intricate than you ever imagined. You are tugging on a another’s line, or else someone is tugging yours?

Sing like yourself. That’s why you’re here. We need all singers to sing like themselves.

                                                "The tyrant dies and his rule is over. The martyr dies and his rule begins"  KIERKEGAARD

 I am “a lover, not a fighter”, and, all my life, my understanding and expression of faith has reflected that. Give me the beauty of worship and the wonder of words. Take me to the dance of music and the seduction of candles in the darkness. That’s my world. That is where my soul delights.

   In that, I am living a self-created copy of the church of the Middle Ages. That church was never as I imagine it. Still, I live my days in the beauty of its theatrical set. I am not alone there because other people find it is easier to play with the beauty of Christ than to engage the implications of his presence.

   The Gospels, (the early churches’ own best self-understanding), place its life in the middle of a war zone. Politics is crooked. Empires are cruel. A great gulf exists between rich and poor. Sickness stalks. Specters haunt, and hope has drained away.  

    Into this scene comes Christ, the warrior. He tells the truth. He challenges the entrenched. He mocks the Emperor and belittles the emasculated priesthood. This Christ touches the accursed, moves among the despised, heals the hopeless, calls to service those who are branded “useless”, and looses everything in a grizzly bloodbath.

    Of course, the powers fight back. They stalked him, listening to his words to twist them. They threatened his team with bribes and torture. They mocked those who dared to open themselves to him. They used their powers to arrest him and squeeze him through the grinder of their legal system. They turned the crowds against his truth for the sake of crumbs and small favours.

    It is war, and that war is going on today wherever a nobler, broader better life for the many throws itself against the barricades of the few who have and hoard it all. That is a long way from my candles, chalices, tapestries and heady wines.

    There is nothing magical about faith in a time of war. It is not the stuff that captures the “madding crowd”. It is too hard, too dangerous, too ordinary and too fraught with threat and death. Yet this daily walk of risk and pain is the fruit of fellowship with Jesus Christ. It isn’t even “religious”. It is just thinking, feeling, daring humanity refusing to settle for lies and half-lives for itself, and for those who do not even realize their enslavement.

    I have much to answer for when my life is over and its robes and sampler-Sundays are laid aside.

“IF YOU KNEW IT WHY DIDN’T YOU DO IT?

IF YOU FELT IT WHY DIDN’T YOU LIVE IT?

IF YOU SAW IT WHY DIDN’T YOU FIGHT FOR IT?

IF YOU LOVE IT WHY WON’T YOU OWN IT?”

    Theatre is rich and rare. Then the play is over and the real world looms again.

Our way in its war is the way that tells the true tale.  

Wind from the west the fish and bread provides;

Wind from the north, bitter cold and flaying;

Wind from the east, the snow on mountain-sides;

Wind from the south, fruit in trees a-Maying.

So reads an old Celtic rhyme, and in the land of the Celts the wind was not just a poetic cornice. It was constant presence; companion, challenger, caresser and crippler. The wind could release your day and imprison your night. It could bring home your boat, or sweep away your herds. I was told that on the north shore of Scotland the winter gales will lift the swirling sea from its tumble-bed and hurl it over the top of a lighthouse some hundred meters above.

The wind is no mere decorative feature in our lives either. We know blessed breezes and heavy weather, cold blasts and parching licks. We can all name times when the winds shifted. All was well and then we moved. All was chaos and then quiet daylight came. All was peace until the illness struck. All was calm until the truth was told.

The wind can knock us down too. I once stood on the ruins of an old Roman wall somewhere in England. My yellow raincoat snapped in the heavy breeze as I challenged the powers of nature to do their worst against this rough and ready centurion. A quick gust rose and knocked me and my yellow coat right off the rocks and into a crumpled heap. A tourist, walking by, remarked “Nice going, Caesar!”  .

The power and presence of the Sacred have been described as wind. Even in the chaos before creation, the “ruah” (wind/spirit) of God moved upon the face of the deep. Chaos may begin a thing, but the Sacred completes it.

When the faithful Elijah, holder of the fort in a time of drift, was called to his place of  glory, it was the “whirlwind” that took him there. No horses and chariots of flame, with all their warlike powers, were worthy of that last call. It is the Holy itself that claims and lifts it own.

I am mostly content, in all the winds that blow through days and years, to trust the Spirit that broods over our deep and the whirlwind wraps us in promise at the end.

The centurion in me will flail and fall many more times before it’s over, but the child in me will lean into the winds of any single day, safe within the spirit of eternity.

   How about all those vampires these days? Why, this new movement could soon make us a gun shy about donating blood, or “sticking your necks out” in a needful situation.

I nicked myself shaving the other morning and couldn’t run fast enough to lock the bathroom door.

   Maybe vampire talk comes from our secret love of being frightened now and then. Another set of hormones and muscles gets involved when were shocked or afraid. Perhaps our hot-wired, highly technical and personally isolating age is making us hunger for real bites out of real flesh. We need to touch, and feel both ecstasy and pain.

   Perhaps our souls keep asking those big questions that have always attracted human interest. What is the meaning of life? What happens to us when we die? How strong is the hold of one life upon another? The age of scientific accuracy with its clean, precise edges may not allow the poetic, dream-driven part of our psyche to do its work. So we create tales of mystical encounters and murky intrusions and flock to them in record numbers.

    I don’t plan to spend a lot of time among the “undead”. At my age keeping my own blood flowing to my extremities is work enough. A bigger worry is spending time among the “un-living”. That to me takes us much closer to home and is far more a possibility. Indeed I am sure that I am often “un-living”.

    Too patterned a life…a “rut”…un-living! Too little touched…isolation…un-living! Too small ideals and ideals…myopia…un-living! Too nationalistic…”jingoism”…un-living! Too driven at work…addiction…un-living! Too much time among the toys…mesmerized…un-living! Too much fear of death…terrorism…un-living!

Too many truths swallowed down…drowning…un-living! Too tired for the long haul…enslavement…un-living!

    Our lives were meant for living. Each stage of them from vulnerable infancy to vulnerable old-age is filled with hours, and days, and people, and turns in the road, and thoughts, and gains, and losses, and everything else this world can throw at us. We are seldom as strong as we think or as weak as we imagine. All we have is the certainty of our mortality, and the presence of all around us and within. That’s life, and its good!

   So here it is. What would you have frighten you more, the “undead” on the big screen, or the “un-living” everywhere else?

I need living people to help me live, to challenge me when I die too young, and broaden me when I think too small, enchant me when I dream too light, and lift me when I fall into a pan of my own juices. Only the living can inspire the blood of living.

Those are the ones I want to see, for whom, I will open my locked doors and send my heart’s delight soaring outward to my extremities.    

    Somebody sent me a video-clip of the “King” on his 75^th birthday. I have it at home on an old tape, but I still couldn’t take my eyes off it. To see him alive and moving and making his magic is everything. No book can match it, no photograph can touch it, and no lecture series take its place.

    Then I got thinking about Jesus, because there are many similarities. Both were born poor. Both lived brief lives. Both found themselves discovered by a hungry public, and neither could have imagined the lasting impact of his brief appearance. Far more importantly, some special magic weaved its spell through them, and the rest of us have been at sixes and sevens trying to figure out what it was and what it means.

     But we’ve lost something along the way. For far too long we have contented ourselves with sorting through our own press-clippings. For two thousand years we have written volumes on what we felt about him, and thought about him, and how we have conducted ourselves in order to resurrect him, protect him, employ him and make ourselves feel important because of him. These are the things we read and place front and center. These are the things by which we name ourselves. In other words, we are what we say we are, and the “King”, the real king who unleashed the lightning, is lost in there somewhere. What to do? How do we recapture something of the public performance that stirred the soul?

    First, let us get out of our own way. We are not intimates of the king. Indeed we never even met him. We are dependant on the recollections and heart-swoons of those who saw him in action. So let the Gospels speak without crowding them with our preconceptions and commentary. Let the early letters, sent fan to fan, shine with the brilliant transformations that the King engendered.

    Secondly let us approach the theatre of God’s gracious engagement with a sense of awesome expectation. Perhaps then we shall see and experience something so surprising it will blow us away. When you arrive, ticket in hand, sit low, keep silent and let your wits and your pours lie open. This is someone else’s time and you may be just lucky enough to get close to it.

    Thirdly, stop the war. It doesn’t matter who sits up front, how long they’ve been fans, or how much they feel they know. In these moments of public wonder we are all hungry, all learners and all able to be transported to a new world.

     Somewhere, underneath all the stuff, and all the talk, and all the fortresses, there is the life of someone so magically great that to see him and hear him and watch him in ordinary time has the power to open eternity to us; a world where all bets are off, all joys increase and all hearts are set ablaze. Long live the King!