Passion Week

artwork by bobby janz

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"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stand about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide."

--A.E. Housman

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This time of year brings many things: rains, flowers, deep-dyed Russian Easter eggs, open windows, plant sales, top to toe cleaning, sneezes, and the kind of optimism which comes from surviving winter. Consumer confidence rises and shopping bags begin to fill. Store windows display comfortable easy-care clothes one might actually be interested in wearing. Not all of these apply to me. For instance, cleaning fits come over me on Tuesdays regardless of the season and I am consistently confident consumers will pay a passel of pennies to eat out. The mortgage may fall behind but a latte a day is the last to go. From whence this confidence? Passion Week is a clue. Pastor Ray gave a sermon on "knowing." "Be still and know that I am God." I've thought in the past that people come to knowing through experience; enough incidents add up to an aha! moment. It happened to Charles Wesley and John Newman that way. But now, I think there is also a brain/visual component. You either "see" it or you don't, the way some people see turquoise and others don't. Maybe faith is akin to cataract removal--suddenly there is clarity. I always feel sad when a person doesn't understand my cosmic connection. It's like someone saying, "I don't believe in quarks." What to do? What to do? Go forth. Do good. Hope. I have a constant need to tell all. "Did you know that at a Moravian Lovefeast the service is all music and the Communion elements are a mug of coffee and a sweet bun? Did you know that in southern Mexico, a church serves 7Up thinking it is a sacred mineral source? Did you know that gossip ranks right up there with murder as a sin? Did you know that the definition of sin is to be separated from God?" The drawing above is my brother's from when we lived in Jerusalem. How did we get there? A miracle plain and simple. I love the exuberance of those sketches which I keep in a special box. I regret that his faith changed as well as his art. Mine didn't. It couldn't. I was there. I had been led there. I knew what there was about. I was healed there. My mother said we were there because I "asked." I wanted to go to the Holy Land more than anywhere else on Earth. The complications said journey entailed could only have been managed by a loving hand. My brother was faster paced than I and yet he took me for jaunts all over Palestine with a running monologue. "Solomon ruled here. Right on the very spot you are standing on. That's Rachel's tomb. It's not as fancy as the pyramids. She was modest and dutiful." I've been walking in that beauty ever since. In high school my friend, June Till, sang what might be called my anthem, "I Know that my Redeemer Liveth." A woman named Clara Scott wrote the hymn, "Open my eyes that I may see" and Fanny Crosby, the blind hymnwriter from New York wrote 9,000 hymns! including Blessed Assurance. Oh, oh. Here I go telling (well, telling it like it is necessitates calling it preaching) again. Bon Jovi says he wasn't born to follow. I, on the other hand, was.

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...may the blessings of knowing that all is known be yours...