Author: Maria Evans

“Those things in our lives that we wrestle with, those places where our old instincts and our evolving new instincts grapple head to head with each other, are precisely the exercises we need to have the chance to choose our own forks in the road where we discover what God truly had in store for us.  We seldom know it at the time we choose it, but time and insight often reveal them retrospectively.”

“That certain guy clearly was a follower of Jesus; otherwise he wouldn’t be part of the story.  Was he an innkeeper (that might have given him a tiny bit of a social pass to be toting a water jug around), well known in the community…or was he “just a guy,” a nobody on the streets of Jerusalem, blending in with the crowd, letting Jesus use an unused room at his house?”

“What are the things we are called to willingly and obediently participate in, when it comes to our national life, and what are the things we are called to change in our national life to better honor our Baptismal Covenant?  We’re seeing that tension on the ground everywhere we look.  It’s painful, yet at the same time, necessary, so that the voices that have been muted can now be heard.  The hope, of course, is that all of us will somehow end up better reflecting the image of God rather than the image of a hollow false god wrapped in the symbolism of flags and statues.”

“Psalm 88 also reminds us that even if it’s not our turn to be clinging to the face of Mt. Despair, someone out there is, and we might be called to be the one sliver of light that makes a difference in someone else’s darkness.  It might throw a rope to us to allow us to climb a few more inches towards someone, so they do not have to be plastered to the cliff face alone.  There are actually many places it can take us if we simply remain in the conversation…we just won’t have any idea where those places are or what they look like.”

“It also was a great comfort in my formation that I knew there were people out there in my “circle of supporters” praying for me on Ember Days, and praying with heartfelt words. It mattered to see it in the Prayers of the People on the Sundays of those Ember Weeks, and those little emails, notes, and the occasional trinket carried me through a lot of the droughts and floods. It matters to be prayed for while in formation–it really does.”

“Helena was not merely content to be a pious mom praying on the sidelines–when she was about 70, she went on a two year pilgrimage to the Holy Land and was the instrumental force in establishing what we now know as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The site was built on both the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and tomb, and contains the last four stations of the actual Via Dolorosa.”

“Julian’s visions, and the joy she got from them–not fear–became the impetus for her to cloister herself and get about the business of writing them down. It’s extraordinary that in a time in history in which ordinary life was dirty, brutal, and generally chronologically short, and Christianity is way more about sin, Hell-avoidance, penance, and flagellation, that Julian envisions a God whose fundamental DNA is love.”

“Almost half my week is still spent being an ‘essential worker.’  Yet at the same time, between our diocese temporarily closing our churches, and the very sobering realization that I’m the one most likely to infect our food ministry workers on Sundays, I’ve been in many ways ‘cut off from my congregation.'”  

“In our evening Gospel reading from John, we learn that Nicodemus brought a hundred pounds of spices to prepare Jesus’ body for the tomb. That’s a rather staggering amount of aloe and myrrh, when you consider the average Jewish burial in that time used between one and five pounds of spices.”

“That’s the beauty of the Office–it says for us what we can’t always say for ourselves, and when we say it enough times, it becomes part of us, packing itself away in the same place we learned to say the Lord’s Prayer, or the Gettysburg Address when we were forced to memorize it in the 8th grade.  Prayers like “Guide us waking and guard us sleeping” or The Song of Simeon or the Prayer of St. John Chrysotom become embedded in us in the same way a skin graft takes hold–not “us” originally, but in time, imperceptibly becoming us.”