What I will say of my very brief encounters with Dallas in person, and with his teachings and writings in depth, is this: he was a man who lived humbly with his God.

In the times that I was able to spend with Dallas, what impacted me the most was not necessarily his great knowledge (although that was profound) or his incredible ability to communicate the complexity of God simply (which was a stunning gift) but the way that the gospel of Christ communicated itself so freely through his humble spirit.

I remember watching at a particular conference at which Dallas was a keynote speaker, as person after person came up to speak to him, to ask a question, to express their thanks. Although he was clearly traveling with a small carry-on suitcase, notably on his way to check out from the hotel and get to the airport, he stopped for each one that stopped him. He listened, intently, despite the fact that he inevitably had a plane to catch, a timeline to follow. He interacted with love, no matter how often people waylaid him. Just watching him made me feel as if Christ were in our midst.

At another event, where I was a minor speaker to his headline event, I traveled with him to a small gathering of students—students whom he exhorted to a dedication to the Truth, to Reality, to things that can be known, and the reality of the knowledge of Christ in that context. He listened to their eager visions, and gave leavening advice only when he was asked. Afterward, when he was shuttled to a teaching event, I asked him a question that trembled in the secret places of my heart:

“Dallas, given all of the struggle, all of the ways that the Church has gotten it wrong over the centuries, how do you still have hope for the institution as a whole?”

I remember holding the door for him as he entered the venue and answered my heart’s cry both kindly and clearly.

“I have hope in the Church,” he said smiling, “because I know Who her head is.”

Amazing, how a simple answer can resolve so many years of meandering within my own soul.

More amazing still was the gift that Dallas then gave me before he stood up to teach a room full of believers longing for more. In the shuttling to and from venues, I realized that Dallas’s time of teaching hadn’t received any prayer (not that God couldn’t or wouldn’t cover it). I noted this timidly to Dallas, and he, even knowing my question earlier, turned to me and asked me if I would pray.

In Numbers 12:3, we are given the only description of Moses’s character or physical attributes that explicitly appears in the Old Testament: Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth. Although Dallas would shudder at being compared to the greatness of a biblical character such as Moses, I know that I will remember Dallas both for the wisdom that he brought to us about the Kingdom of God and the Gospel of Christ, and, equally as keenly, his humility.

We are greater because we have known you, and poorer because you have gone, Dallas. But, over all, we are rich in Christ because you more fully cleared the path to His goodness and grace for us.

Thank you.

May you rest in peace, and rejoice with Christ.

April’s been the cruelest month in terms of the weather here in Colorado Springs. We’ve had more snow in the past four weeks than we’ve had almost all winter. But it’s also been a month of incredible creativity, change and hope in our home and in my ministry. There are good things pushing up from the under the soil, things long buried and some things thought dead.

So here’s what I’ve been into (and up to) this April.

Read and Reading:

When Women Were Birds—I picked this up several months ago for my book club, and didn’t get through it. I’m taking an incredible e-course called Story101 with Elora of The Story Unfolding, and the first week’s assignment was to read WWWB. I didn’t think that I’d get through it, but reading it with a pen in hand, interacting with the pages and engaging my own voice has been transformative. I recommend it.

Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes—another book club pick, most of this information is familiar to me because of some of the rabbinic study that I do, but it’s good to remember.

The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant—I feel a bit embarrassed sharing this title with you, but I’m reading it. It’s funny, although a little too desultory toward men for my taste, and just keeps me grounded as my husband and I continue along the journey of trying to conceive. I’m actually not feeling impatient at all, so don’t let the title fool you, but it’s full of grounded statistics and good advice in a way that random Internet searches are definitely not.

Blue Nights—I didn’t enjoy this as much as some of my respected friends, so I’m not going to effuse about it. I love her style and her voice, but since this is my first Joan Didion, I wasn’t as blown away as I expected to be. Perhaps I should have read A Year of Magical Thinking first.

Wild Mind—another from Story101. Loving.

Freefall to Fly—I read Rebekah Lyons on the plane ride to England. I’m going to be interviewing her for a piece in Conversations. Her book is lovely.

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought—short, meaty pieces to keep me thinking while I’m writing.

A Diary of Private Prayer—A stunning little book of daily prayer that’s humbling me before God.

Waiting for God—I dip into Simone Weil like I eat a piece of rich, expensive dark chocolate, or drink a complex red wine: slowly, one bit at a time.

Everything is Waiting for You—because I always need to be reading poetry.

On My Nightstand:

Benediction—I’m looking forward to this. I’ve heard good things about it from voices that I love.

Prophetic Imagination—I’ve read this before, but I’m looking forward to a re-read.

Journal of a Solitude & Zen in the Art of Writing—two more for Story101

Honoring the Body—a re-read for my book writing

Driftless—A book recommended by a man whose reading recommendations I would take any day, any time, even if he said the phone book was engaging in this year’s addition, Warren Farha of Eighth Day Books

Bread & Wine—I’ve heard great things about Shauna Niequist’s newest. I’m looking forward to tasting and seeing for myself.

TV:

I’ve gotten addicted to Call the Midwife, and started to watch Game of Cards. But generally, I’m watching TV less these days and reading more books. (Although I will readily admit that I’m super happy to have So You Think You Can Dance returning on May 14.) We’ve also been re-watching all of Firefly, and saw Serenity again—because. FIREFLY.

Music:

I’ve gotten addicted to cello music as the soundtrack for my writing this month. I’ve downloaded all of Yo-Yo Ma‘s Cello Suites and I’m checking out other more contemporary composers and cellists. I was also introduced to Page CXVI and their heavenly renditions of traditional hymns, and Anaïs Mitchell, whose pipes are just my style. We saw Great Big Sea in concert, and loved the sense of my homeland and the dancing all night.

Things I Love:

• Seeing so many of my directees fall more deeply in love with God
• Traveling for my niece’s first birthday, and watching her confusion over what to do with a cupcake turn to utter delight
• Preparing to celebrate my best friend’s wedding in England on May 11
• This video about making art
• Whit Wednesdays on the Anam Cara Facebook page
• The Story101 e-course and the women creatives there. To quote a friend, “Whoa-dang.”
• Seeing the word count on my book go up day after day. It’s happening, people!
• This free desktop image:

• The crocuses I planted last fall poking through the Spring snow:

Eventually, I’ll add a section on what’s been going on here on the Anam Cara blog, as well as around the web (but not today, I’m in England with my best friend, and I’m going to go focus on that now). I’m going to try to keep those lists focused on things sacred and beautiful, but I suspect I’ll throw in a silly gif or meme along the way—because I’m holding to my theory that Jesus *loved* to laugh, and laugh readily and heartily. It’s a discipline I’m learning, y’all. As a spiritual director, I get way too serious sometimes. It’s not me holding the world in place, after all.

So, how about you? How was your April?

What are you into? What are you up to?

I’m linking up with the wordsmistress Leigh Kramer. Join us, if you’re so inclined!

Erin Miller
&
Victoria Shepherd

If you haven’t taken a look at all the beautiful images that were posted in the group, please have a look! They are stunning.

And, to round out your Monday, here’s a quote from Catherine of Siena, whose feast day is celebrated today, April 29:

“He will provide the way and the means, such as you could never have imagined. Leave it all to Him, let go of yourself, lose yourself on the Cross, and you will find yourself entirely.”

Catherine of Siena

Christine, thank you so much for all that you do. Your resources and writings have consistently brought healing, life, resurrection and more of God into my life. My first question is this: Can you share with us a time that having “eyes of the heart” helped you to see something (a situation, a place, a person) in a different way, just as the disciples recognized Jesus in the Emmaus story?

For many years now, part of my spiritual practice is to work with family systems and the healing of ancestral wounds, especially those of my father.  He died seventeen years ago, but his death in many ways only amplified my grief over his emotional absence.  About five years ago my husband and I traveled to Riga, Latvia, the city where my father was born.  He later had to flee to Vienna, where his mother’s family lived, because the Russians invaded.  I knew this experience of being a refugee shaped the adult he became.  I walked along the shores of the Baltic Sea, the same beach my father played on as a child and I had a powerful experience of seeing him there in his innocence.  Years of contemplative practice, and learning to soften my vision, broke me open to a whole new layer in my father revealed by being in that landscape.  I came to see him differently and myself, bringing compassion.

You mention in your post that “receiving” pictures is different than “taking” pictures. Can you explain the difference?

We move through so much of life just trying to get by, to “take” what we need from our various encounters.  Perhaps our weekends are filled with purpose-filled activities, like cleaning the house, paying the bills, stopping by the bank.  Maybe we even set aside time to be with our children, but are always thinking about what else needs to get done, or the work waiting for us.  None of these things are bad in themselves.  We do need to navigate, as best we can, a world of demands.

The problem becomes when this perspective infuses everything we do.  We go to the grocery store and feel impatient with the checkout person moving slowly because our time is being wasted.  Even spiritual experiences can become about consuming as much as possible, rather than transformation.

So this becomes translated into our photography.  Taking photos, we often have the urge to grasp at our experience, to record it and mark it.  With digital photography we can take hundreds of photos without thinking twice.  But we sometimes miss the experience itself in our urge to seize it through the lens.

In photography as a contemplative practice, we approach things differently.  We slow ourselves down.  We soften into the moment.  We trust that there is more than enough.  We do not need to rush, or grasp, or seize anything.  We wait and see in a new way, so that we begin to attend to what shimmers in the world around us.  Contemplative photography honors that this practice is about receiving the gift of the moment, not something we are entitled to receive, but sheer grace.

I love the quote you share about the Transfiguration really being about the disciples being transfigured, rather than Jesus. How does living as a contemplative, as a monk in the world, help us to be open to those moments when God invades to help us to see differently?

Those moments are happening all the time, we just aren’t attuned to them.  I believe in a God who is generous and abundant, who cannot help but overflow grace into the world.  So my call as a monk in the world, is to open myself to this possibility: right here, right now, in the most ordinary moment of my life, grace might break in.  Grace is already available, but I might make myself receptive to it.  I might soften the defenses of my heart which say that there is “nothing new under the sun.”

We have a lot of artists and creatives in this community who are also contemplatives. Would you share with us a little about the process of writing this book for you? What was it like? What surprised you?

The writing journey for me is always a process of discovery.  I begin with an outline of ideas I want to explore, but in the searching, I stumble upon new connections and insights.  What I especially loved about writing this book in particular, is that I had taught the material in an online class format for several years.  When I began to work on the book, I was given the opportunity to go into even more depth with the themes and to find new themes.  For example, color wasn’t part of the original class, and yet such a rich avenue of visual exploration.  Then to begin to investigate all the ways color has been symbolically significant in writings of mystics, like Hildegard of Bingen, or in the liturgical calendar.  In my chapter on mirrors and reflections I stumbled on all of these wonderful readings from medieval mystics about the mirror as symbol of the soul.  Writing a book feels like a delicious excuse to lose myself in my subject and follow the threads to see where they lead.  They don’t always lead somewhere, but it is the journey itself that brings so much delight.

Thanks for being with us this week. Join us here to win a copy of Christine’s new book. And now it’s your turn…

Do you have an Emmaus story that caused you to see things differently?

Have you practiced “receiving” pictures rather than “taking” them? What was it like for you?

In celebration of Christine Paintner‘s new book, Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative, I’m hosting a photography party and book giveaway here on the blog.

I’m giving away two free copies of this beautiful book to anyone who wants to enter.

Here’s what author Jan Phillips says about Eyes of the Heart:

“Opening Christine Paintner’s Eyes of the Heart is like entering a garden in full bloom. It opens up all your senses so you see, smell, taste, and touch the world in a whole new way. Paintner has a gift for reuniting the transcendent and the immanent. She calls God home. She sees the Divine in the pebble on the path, hears its sound in the buzzing mosquito. This modern-day monk knows the essential secrets to sacred living and joyful being and she shares them freely.”

I love that!

So, here’s how you enter:

1. Go to the Flickr Group that I’ve created for this giveaway. You need a free Flickr account first (go to the Flickr home page and click “Sign up now.”) When you go to the link it will ask you to join the group first before posting.

2. Share up to five images (photographs that you’ve taken yourself, recently or in the past) that coincide either with the theme of Resurrection or of Eyes of the Heart.

3. Leave a comment below this blog post to let me know you have joined the giveaway and what your Flickr profile name is (you must include this to be entered into the book giveaway).

4. Post the invitation on your blog or Facebook page and encourage others to come join the party!

I’ll draw two names at random, and announce the winners on Monday, April 29th.

• • •

The season of Easter spans 50 days of celebrating the resurrection and culminating in Pentecost.  Yet, for many of us, Easter Sunday comes and goes and we forget this call to practice resurrection in an ongoing way.  We, perhaps, aren’t sure how to bring resurrection into daily life.

The stories we hear during the Easter season highlight the resurrected life of the body – Thomas touching Jesus’ physical wounds, the nets being cast out from the boat to draw in an abundance of food, the disciples walking along the road to Emmaus with Jesus and breaking bread with him.  In this last story we read that their “eyes were prevented from recognizing him.”

When Jesus returns in resurrected form, he is fully embodied, yet hard for us to recognize.  The disciples do not expect their dear friend to be among them again and so they miss this truth with their limited vision.

To me, this speaks of an invitation to see the world in a different way.  Practicing resurrection is, in part, about becoming aware of how we see the world.  When we rush from thing to thing, never pausing, never allowing space, we see only what we expect to find.  We see to grasp at the information we need. We see the stereotypes embedded in our minds. We miss the opportunity to see beyond what we want. We walk by a thousand ordinary revelations in our busyness and preoccupation.

We find a similar emphasis on vision in the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration.  The burning light that once appeared to Moses in the bush now radiates from Jesus himself: “His face shone like the sun” (Matthew 17:2). For the ancient writer Gregory Palamas, it was the disciples who changed at the Transfiguration, not Christ. Christ was transfigured “not by the addition of something he was not, but by the manifestation to his disciples of what he really was. He opened their eyes so that instead of being blind they could see.” Because their perception grew sharper, they were able to behold Christ as he truly is.

Consider celebrating resurrection this Easter season with a commitment to deeper vision.  This kind of seeing takes time.  We have to slow down and wait.  We have to release wanting to see something in particular, so that we can be open to what is being offered in the moment. This is the heart of contemplation – to see what really is, rather than what we would expect.

For me, the creative practice of photography can be a powerful doorway into transformed seeing.  When we open ourselves to receiving photos, rather than taking them, we are offered a gift.  By bringing the camera to the eye and allowing an encounter with the holy to open our hearts, we might be transformed.

It can be any kind of camera.  Look through the lens and imagine that it is a portal to a new way of seeing. Let the focus of the frame bring your gaze to the quality of light in this moment or the vibrancy of colors. Even five minutes can shift your gaze to a deepened quality of attentiveness.  No need to capture everything you see, but simply an invitation to breathe in the beauty of this moment.

Let yourself be willing to see the world differently, so that what others miss in the rush of life, becomes transfigured through your openness and intention. Practicing resurrection means walking along the road and paying close attention, making space to receive the gift of bread, the nourishment of conversation, and a vision of the sacred.

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, is the online Abbess at Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery and community for contemplative practice and creative expression.  She is the author of 7 books on art and monasticism, including her latest, Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice (Ave Maria Press). Christine currently lives out her commitment as a monk in the world with her husband in Galway, Ireland.

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says “I will try again tomorrow.”

Mary Anne Radmacher

Take a five minutes in silence with God. Where have you exhibited this kind of courage without recognizing it? Let Him bring these times to mind. Let Him speak to you about how He sees you today.

I know it’s not necessary. I know you will understand. I know because of the beauty of your souls and the glory that is in each of you, the shimmer of God’s image that graces you every time you smile. I know.

But I wanted to say it (write it! per Elizabeth Bishop), because I had the best intentions for Holy Week.

Instead of writing out a reflection on each of the icons for Holy Week, a kind of guide and confessional, a sense of watching the mystery unfold together, I’ve been thrown into a living icon of this week. One I didn’t choose, but chose me, chose us—which is what Holy Week is all about anyway.

On Tuesday, my beautiful community of stumbling saints and sassy sinners lost one of our own in a horrible accident. Kevin leaves behind a deep-hearted wife and a 5-year-old pixie girl, and our community reels, our hearts smashed.

Kyrie eleison
Christi eleison
Kyrie eleison

That’s what we’ve been breathing in and out, what I’ve been breathing in and out—gasping, hoping, living this week together.

There are no meditations on icons here this week because I am living in one. It is holy. It is hard. It is hopeful.

Tonight we will wash one another’s feet, and watch the cross covered as Christ is taken away to be tired. Tomorrow, we will gather in solemnity, knowing His is crucified. Saturday, normally a day of holy silence, we will break the hush to honor the life of a man we love, whose life has been cut short. And Easter we will gather again—holy, hopeful, broken and brave.

I’ve been here, in this place, and not with you all, on this blog. I know that you understand, that you will pray with us and you know I am praying with you as you each journey into Holy Week in your own way.

Thank you for your grace as my plans were taken over by His plan. May that always be true of us.

It is hard. It is holy. It is hopeful.

Maternal Womb by Sieger Koder

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” John 13:34

The image represents the watchfulness of Christ, His presence and His coming, as well as our own responsibility in keeping awake for His coming. The parable of the ten virgins will be our icon for tomorrow, but today, we gaze on Christ.

Interestingly enough, March 25 is also the Feast of the Annunciation—the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mary. The Church celebrates this feast exactly nine months before Christmas, which finds us on the first Monday of Holy Week this year (a relatively rare occurrence.)

I’ve been reading Luke 1:26-28 in light of this concurrence of events, and as I stay with this image of Christ, I’ve begun to wonder how Jesus would have seemed to Mary this week. Would she have known, deep in her somewhere, that just as the angel came to tell her of His birth, that this week’s events were foretelling His death? What would a mother’s love have seen in this icon? What does that invite us to see in Him today?

How is it, exactly, that I could possibly think linking Downton Abbey and the Passion of Our Lord Jesus might be, in any universe, okay? Shouldn’t I be acting a bit more, I don’t know, holy? Pious?

It’s like watching someone sidle up to the edge of the Grand Canyon. You’re pretty sure they’re going to be fine, but everything in you is twitching to rush up and snatch them back from the edge of death. I mean, it’s pretty far down there, right?

Bear with me. I’m going to dance on this edge for a little bit, because I think this edge is exactly what Palm Sunday is all about. We’re meant to feel uncomfortable, thrown off, maybe in a smidge more danger than we’d like to be.

Because it’s a long way down, friends, and Jesus is about to step off that ledge.

[Here's something I never thought to I'd say on this blog. Warning: Downton Abbey Season Three finale spoilers. All of you who have been living under rocks or existing in blissful ignorance of the invention of the television can thank me now.]

Palm Sunday is a day of contradictions. This morning our rag-tag community of earnest and tired, hopeful and despairing, bedraggled and beloved believers processed into the sanctuary waving branches. We cried “Hosanna to God in the highest!” and let holy water wet our cheeks, our bodies, our branches.

Hosanna means save or save us, and together we know what we’re crying when we say that.

We know what we’re crying, and we’re grateful, so grateful, that Jesus is here in our midst. We delight that He is making Himself known, stepping into Jerusalem, the heart of things, and we’re here to watch Him do it. This is the high point of the week because, until Easter’s celebration, we’ve got an inkling that things might not go exactly the way we were hoping they might. We cry Hosanna all the louder.

I’m a Downton Abbey fan. I’m pretty sure I haven’t crossed over into fanatic (I don’t own any pieces of clothing with any of the characters printed on it), but I may or may have received The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook as a Christmas gift this past year. That said, I wasn’t able to watch the finale of Season Three until nearly a week after in aired.

I tried, oh I tried, to keep myself from spoilers. I stayed off of Facebook. I shushed my friends whenever they brought it up, but I knew from the loud wailing heard from houses all over the United States that Sunday evening that SOMETHING terrible had happened. And it wasn’t just a little something, either.

I knew from the magnitude of the outrage, the number of thinly veiled references (Downton, you’re dead to me! pronounced more than one friend of mine), the sheer volume of emotion that it was probably a major character, and it was probably death. I knew who I didn’t want it to be, and I knew that it would probably be that very character.

When Bryan and I eventually settled down of an evening to watch the finale (coincidentally after I’d finished running a week long retreat meditating on the life of Christ), I braced myself. And I held myself, braced, until those last, fateful moments when Matthew began driving, joyously, recklessly, home to share the news. New life! It’s a boy! Life is complete!

Matthew’s death felt random and unfair to so many, I know. But when the credits rolled (and rolled, and rolled—how in the world did PBS think that anyone was going to give them money after THAT plot twist, I wonder?), my husband turned to meet my eyes. We’d both caught the tenor, the gist of the general outrage before watching the episode—How could something so horrible happen so suddenly! They didn’t prepare us! This isn’t want we wanted to happen!

A few days earlier, I’d been caught by a post by a friend of mine. I didn’t know at the time that he’d spoiled the plot completely (and I didn’t really care). Thing was, he’d summed it up so well:

Sometimes you get the girl you wanted and she gets pregnant and then has the child you both dreamed of and you’re driving back in your coupe to tell the family and the future’s so bright you have to wear something along the lines of X-men goggles but you don’t see the truck coming and you flip the car and that’s it. Does is seem a soap opera like ending, and could the writer have done a better job with your exit? Sure, that’s possible, but Sunday night’s Downton episode shakes us back into the reality that things do happen all of a sudden, out of nowhere, often at the sun’s apex, and the bigger barns we were planning and designing, be they literal or figurative, will be inherited by someone else or possibly even torn down to make way for an Eddie Bauer outlet. That can leave you asking ‘well, what’s the point then?’ or it can spur you to suck the very marrow out of this one wild and precious day while it is still called today.

I quoted this to my husband, sitting on the couch as the credits rolled, and he agreed. We sat, hushed by the only thing that really hushes us well, the solid presence of one another, and Bryan turned to me again and said, It’s sort of like getting a voicemail message in the morning, a message that your wife left telling you how much she loves you, how proud of you she is, how much she loves the life you lead together because despite all the sweat and tears and financially scraping by (and oh, how we scrape), we get to help people, love people, care for the hearts and lives of those around us, we get to see healing and hope and restoration. We get to see the Kingdom of God—Hosanna in the Highest!—advance because this is the life we choose together, and she’s crying because she’s so thankful. She’s crying and she loves me, and it’s all worth it. And then, she goes to her office for the day and has a heart attack.

And I nodded, because I was that wife, and because that’s what happened. I wasn’t driving in a coupe with the wind in my hair, but I might as well have been, and, yup, that was my heart attack. I could say that’s the day things tilted off the axis for us, and in some ways that’s true, because it was the beginning of a very hard set of years.

I could also say, though, that was the start of our Hosannas really being tested.

It wasn’t that they were insincere before, not at all. We’d both seen our share of heart ache, both had our share of time in the valley of the shadow of death. We knew some of suffering, to be sure, and to say we’ve known more than a taste since then would be flippant and false.

But that day—the day the coupe gets hit by the truck, the day the 33-year old gets driven to the nearest emergency room with chest pains, the day life seems to go off the rails (whatever that is for you)—that day is the day you stop asking “Who is Jesus to me?” and start asking “Who is Jesus, really?”

That day in Jerusalem, everyone had an agenda for Jesus. Many of them were good, many well meaning. Many of them He seemed to be agreeing with—I mean, He was retracing the route that David took as he returned to reclaim the city for God nearly 1000 years before. His disciples were still hoping for something flashy, for the reign of God to be made manifest through this Messiah in a physical way. They had some expectations for the way the plot should go. Hosanna in the highest!

But then things started going off the rails. People were getting angry, the character that they wanted to take over the estate, He kept talking about a lower way. Their agendas, their anger, trumped what was really happening. And, to them, their way was the better way. You’re dead to me, Jesus! You’re disappointing, this isn’t the way it should go.

The way Jesus saves us doesn’t always feel like saving.

This place, this week, is where the Hosannas get tested. Our expectations get dashed, our view of Jesus get disrupted, our images of Him get complicated by something that doesn’t make sense.

In the middle of that mess, we—you, me, us together—get invited to see Jesus how He really is, not how we want Him to be, or how He has been to us in the past. We get invited into the now, the today, the Real.

It’s troublesome, this being forced to see things are they really are. It’s troublesome, having to ask who Jesus is really, instead of who Jesus is to me. But asking those questions leads to some real answers (as well as a few more good, disruptive questions.) Asking those questions leads us to the Upper Room, to Pilate’s courtyard, to Golgotha, to the Cross. Asking those questions leads us to the empty tomb, to the One disguised as a gardner, to the realization of the Resurrection, and to more story than we know what to do with. Asking those questions, the questions about who Jesus is really, leads to life out of death.

No offense, but take that, Downton Abbey.

Wave that palm, Matthew Crawley. Wave that palm.