This phrase, meaning “in the middle of things” in Latin, is often used in literature to describe stories that start mid-plot, which aligns with the idea of being “born into the middle of a story.”

I’m fascinated with this idea, that we, you and I, are born into the middle of a story. Someone in my past used that phrase all the time — and how hilarious and scary that just now my sixty year old brain can’t track that person down. Nevertheless, reflection about this has always captivated me. Though I entered this world in a particular holy moment, there were circumstances and experiences in my Hawkinson and Larson families that shaped very much where I was born, and when, and the house and family I went home to. Emigration and immigration journeys, war experiences, faith stories, education chances and job switches. Pacemakers and leaky heart valves, old pandemics and polio. Birth order, chance meetings and blind dates, dreams and joys and tragedies and family secrets too. And that’s just scratching the surface!

We are born into the middle of a story which we learn about our whole lives, and which we in turn shape and mold further in both good and hard ways until we leave the scene. In this sense, we who are alive miss a lot of life’s marrow if we don’t look back and contemplate both the gifts and burdens that we pick up and hold and live with and through. It’s fascinating to think that a certain family moment I’m thinking about just now that took place 140 years ago on the other side of the world directly affects how I think about myself, and others too. I’d love to tell you more about it sometime.

In between hospital and home visits, I’m writing this blog in a Panera restaurant, and looking across the room I see about 15 other souls from a toddler to an elderly woman tenderly helping her spouse with Parkinson’s disease enjoy his soup. What stories do they have to tell? What’s the middle saga they were born into? How have they shaped that story through their life?

For now, I’m asking you to turn off the tv, and turn on your holy story. Every human journey is a sacred journey. What story have you been given? What realities were you born into? What more are you learning as you grow older? If you were a movie scriptwriter, what would be the 4 or 5 scenes leading up to your birth?

And then, looking forward, what are your hopes for how you can shape that story while you have the chance? What dreams do you dream for your family members born a century from now?

In Media Res. Here we are, in the middle of things. What a sacred privilege!

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

The Benedictine sister, theologian, and social activist Joan Chittister tells it like it is, or maybe even more like it needs to be. Someone put her book The Time is Now: A Call to Uncommon Courage in my hands, or rather on my widow sill during our pandemic isolation. It’s been sitting nearby, and I’m just now reading through it devotionally. It’s a great companion voice to that of James, who is engaging our worship life these days.

Her first chapter goes under the heading of Risk. Here she contemplates what it means to live a spiritual life, and finds unfortunate our distinction often made between an inward, personal spirituality and an outward socially active spirituality. Of this she says “To follow Jesus in a world on the brink of disaster — nuclearism, world hunger, egregious greed, civil breakdown, racial slavery, sexism, and planetary ruin, I began to understand– is surely about something greater than the development of regular spiritual routines or being a “Good Christian….the question “What will you do?” Is at the core of spiritual maturity, of spiritual commitment. To follow Jesus means that we, too, must do something to redeem our battered, beaten world from the greed that smothers it…in fact, we often ignore, resist, reject the idea that like Jesus, we have a role to play in righting a world whose axle is tilting in the wrong direction…Christianity requires that we each be such a prophetic presence that our corner of the world becomes a better place because we have been there…none of us has the right to quit until God’s will for the world is accomplished.” (p.23-32)

The Talmud, which is a compilation of ancient Jewish thought and contains centuries of rabbinical teachings. Of risk it teaches that “There is risk in every life. Those who risk nothing risk much more.” I’m thinking about so many of Jesus’s hard sayings, that seem to come in every gospel lesson week by week: “Find your live by losing it”, “The last will be first, and the first last”, “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me”, and on this sunday to come, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

In one way or another, it seems to all come down to the same thing, the same invitation, the same call, the same risky command — and that is to give up myself, to offer up my life, to put others first. In terms of the way the world works, it’s a risk not worth taking to be sure. But from the perspective of God’s Kingdom, it is in fact the very move that promises to bind up the world’s wounds. Jesus plays show and tell. His invitations bear a mighty integrity because his life bears witness. He said to his disciples one day, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and after being killed, he will rise again.” Hard to hear, but ends really well in new life after all.

Just think for a moment about what this posture of self-giving, of self-sacrifice could do to set the world right! I know, I know, it’s so utopian! Nevertheless, for us as Christians, it is to be our worldview, and call to arms, weaponizing love.

How am I, how are you, how are we together doing with the risk of all this following Jesus business?

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

“He (an angel) said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kings 19)

Yesterday I kept vigil with you. It was September 11, and together we grieve the terror of 23 years ago. I took time in the morning to follow the events going on at ground zero, and at the pentagon building, and in a farm field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Bells were being rung at the exact moments in the morning that the events took place, and so news coverage would suddenly stop when those moments came…8:46, north tower hit, 9:03 south tower hit, 9:37 pentagon, 10:03 flight 93 crashes….

What I noticed is the silence’s power. The news reporter in the middle of some other conversation said repeatedly, “Excuse me, but let’s tune in and listen to the silence…” and then at each moment a bell, and then silence, long extended silence before the recalling of the names would begin again. Likely you saw or have seen this through the years, and we have many “Join me for a moment of silence”, especially when remembering those who’ve died. Those silences are powerful because they locate our collective grief. For a moment, we are unified, and silent, and it is as though the silence speaks, we can listen to it. It’s better than any words we can find.

It brings me back to that day when Elijah (scared to death and hiding in a wilderness cave) gets a holy messenger sent to reassure him that God is near, in fact, is passing by, and that he best get himself up mount Horeb, where wind, earthquake, and fire appear, all former links to God’s appearing. But then there is “a sound of sheer silence”. And Elijah “hears it”. What does sheer silence sound like?

Somehow in the silence the prophet is reassured. And sometimes, especially when the moment is one in which any words come up short, it’s best to just be still (Ps 46), to be silent, and to listen to what the silence has to say. Maybe now, because of our modern sound-byte saturated lives, we need sheer silence more than ever! You may have noticed that recently we have been allowing silence to be a line in our worship liturgy. It’s uncomfortable, I know!

Somehow silence is not at all the absence of sound but the presence of deeper meaning. We need to work on hearing the silence more often. God, it seems, is found there.

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

This blogpost is dedicated to those 2,996 human beings who died on September 11, 2001, and and their loved ones. As people of faith may we always be seeking peace and pursuing it. (Psalm 34).

“Jesus Wept.” (John 11:35)

It has stayed on the left edge of my desk, always in eyesight just over the top of my laptop computer. It’s a tree of copper wire and green pencil erasers rooted around a stone, created by Rev. Kari Lindholm Johnson, who seven years ago now came and shared a month with us, teaching us with love and passion about our connection to God. “We might be, we could become like that tree planted by streams of water” Kari reflected, as we read Psalm 1 together. “We might become, we could become like a fragrant fruit-bearing tree” Kari reflected, as we read the Gospel of Jesus together. Then vine and branches, and finally, as we grow old with the Spirit’s help we can grow tall, and wide like a mighty oak tree to give shade and home. It was a blessed time of dreaming together.

Well, Kari died earlier this summer after a quick and mighty struggle with cancer that cut her life short at 60 years. At least that’s what it feels like, still, when I look at that wire tree she made while she was teaching us. I’m finding my grief growing, and staying, putting down roots like those I’m looking at wrapped around the stone, seemingly choking it.

I know, I know, “we grieve but not as others do who have no hope.” (1 Thessalonians 4). I know, and I do believe that “weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Psalm 30). I know that Jesus weeps in John’s 11th chapter because his friend Lazarus is dead, but then calls him to come out alive, and he does. I believe that this weeping Jesus is in fact resurrection and life. I have faith. I keep faith.

But that doesn’t mean that grief goes away, or that it’s just a brief problem to be worked through and done with. No, the truth is that grief stays, and even grows, for all the sorrows that come with the years, and the nature of the human journey. And I’m trying to learn to let that grief just stay, without expecting it to be over soon, and surprisingly even see it as a continuing part of life’s most beautiful journey of loving and being loved. My heart aches because of love, and in this sense I experience love for Kari (and the sacred memory of those sabbath mornings together) still as I allow myself to miss her and grieve her life’s loss.

Is it possible to believe deeply that the best is yet to be — that Kari is in a better place and that I’ll see her again in some bright shining glory someday — and at the same time feel a growing grief for her distance and absence? Can they co-exist for now?

My point, I guess, is that whether it’s right or not, they do. Grief comes, and stays.

Peter Hawkinson