I didn't keep up notes in February or March, but two envelopes covered with notes from April make up for that lapse.
In some meditations, scripture reminds Nakamara of people on the margins of life. Christ's call from the Cross, "Why have you forsaken me?" reminds her of memorials she has led for unhoused people who died of overdoses and related problems. Her efforts to alleviate pain in that population were never enough. No happy reassurances, here, just that Christ's suffering, too, was not alleviated.
In Acts, Peter and John "look intently" into the face of a lame man at the gate called "Beautiful." They heal him. She recalls a difficult man in the psych ward who was pacified when someone engaged him one-on-one. After that, he accepted detox and came back full of gratitude. Nakamara concludes, "Simply seeing God's people as beautiful and worthy is what we're called to do. Miracles... can follow later."
Why are there two angels at Christ's tomb on the day of Resurrection? Nakamara thinks that sharing news is "inherently relational," whether it's good or bad.
Nakamara has a lighter side. She observes that movie heroes never eat on screen. Mr. Darcy? James Bond? Bruce Wayne? Sherlock Holmes? She's right: we don't want our heroes to be too human. But the resurrected Jesus in Luke 24 asks his apostles, "Have you anything to eat?" Awestruck, they watch him eat fried fish. I love that. I imagine the only sound was his contented "Mmm-hmmm."
Like Nakamara, I shudder at the drowning of Pharaoh's solders and their horses. A lot of dads, brothers, sons, and animals who have no choice but to pursue the Hebrews go on to perish in the Red Sea. According to Nakamara, the Talmud commentators were also uneasy. Talmud says that angels did NOT rejoice with the Israelites. Can we, too, hold both gratitude for triumph for "us" AND empathy for "them?"
She is intrigued by the past tense in Col 1.20: "God was pleased to reconcile himself to all things." At this time, as we feel estranged from earth, family, friends, even our own capacity to accept and give, it is a comfort that God already reconciled us. "The question," she asks, "is whether we can believe and trust this enough that we can go and be reconciled to one another, to the earth, and to ourselves?"
Nakamara finds something good in the longest, most tedious psalm. It's 119:64, "The world is full of your love; instruct me in your statutes." She writes that the beginning of discipleship is to slow down to notice this ever-presence of God in all things and people.
Meyer goes off on memorable tangents from inconspicuous points:
- "The light of Christ" reminds her how concentric lenses in a lighthouse project a single bulb across 60 miles of Lake Superior. We are the lenses. Are we keeping the lens clean?
- A time to tear and a time to sew brings the admission that she could easily buy her husband new socks, but she sews "Frankensocks" from torn ones, valuing the time alone away from screens.
- Paul's admonishments come from a place of love, she says, based on the post script to one of his tirades: "See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!" His large, rough handwriting contrasted to the cultured scribe's. This is "almost light-hearted," she says, and endears Paul to her. And me.
- "Oh, how I love your law! All the day long it is in my mind." My least favorite Psalm, 119, includes dozens of lines like that. Meyer admits that, no, God's law is not in her mind all day long, and she doesn't even want it to be! But she can want to want to, can't she? The idea, from St. Ignatius, is her alternative to guilt.
The first aroma she deals with isn't pleasant: it's sweat. The church heroes honored early in July were Pauli Murray and Moses the Black, people who "wrestled" with failure and "stayed in the ring" when "bolting" seemed a wise alternative. In raising children and being married, staying is the most courageous thing you can do. In another meditation, one about the command to "be a servant," she wishes that she could be a servant in a "charming, non-sweaty way," but servanthood often "smells like bleach and hospital coffee colling in a Styrofoam cup." When you're getting grumpy, though, stay with it, because "joy sidles in -- quiet as a cat curling up in your lap."
One anecdote above all others hit home with me in her response to the apostles' question at the Last Supper, "Surely not I, Lord?" Francis said something harsh to her husband early in their marriage. He walked out of the room. Silence about the incident carried through dinner and evening chores, but the question was always "humming underneath: Was I the bad guy here?" The story doesn't end with a reconciliation, but another question: "What if there are no bad guys?" She concludes, "Love is the place where your damage shows up to testify."
Francis gets fear right, how "it can break your resolve in an instant, can root you in place or send you running." So Peter denied Jesus three times in one night. "And still," she observes, "Jesus called Peter 'the Rock.'" Grace doesn't throw you away, she says.
Like a small pebble in your sock, a small bad habit or a minor grievance can "wear a groove" into your life. Beware.
She remembers a mix of aromas and tastes from a street where Jews, Muslims, and Christians were neighbors. Their different kinds of bread and spices mingled in the air as their different holidays overlapped. "Maybe unity isn't agreement," she writes. "Maybe it's a feast table [where] bread is bread, no matter whose hands kneaded it." I like that, and I like how it ties in with Communion. The Scripture, by the way, was Paul's respect for others' differences over piety concerning foods and holy days.
Finally, She tells how joy and ache can be "braided" as with the women leaving the empty tomb, "with fear and great joy" (Mt 28.8)As a toddler, her son wouldn't cry right away after a fall, but would give her a look. "His eyes asked, Is this nothing, or is the end of the world?" Just asking that makes me smile, and I think it's probably a good question to ask at every bump in our journeys.
