Sacred Connections: Times of our Lives
This week, cicadas were the topic at our neighborhood driveway dinner. We speculated on what their arrival might mean to our outside gatherings and tried to recall earlier experiences across these seventeen-year intervals. Our host remembered wielding a broom to keep cicadas away and create a pathway for her parents to enter and leave her home. I recalled being bombarded on 6Th Street trying to get from the car into the shelter of my office building. Others remembered the deafening sound outside or the crunch they heard as they went on their daily runs. We all had our tales to tell. Those were clearly memorable times.
“Every 17 years, cicadas are the bug we need.” This was the title of an opinion piece written by Molly Roberts and published on-line in the Washington Post earlier this week. Sufficiently intrigued, I wanted to read more and found myself captured by the different lens through which she considered cicadas. Molly Roberts offered perspective on their lifespans versus ours, what happens in human and cultural terms over a stretch of seventeen years, how cicadas have been written of by Plato and Aristotle, incorporated into Aztec death rites and included in the headdresses of Chinese nobility. The writer took me way beyond my anticipatory dread of this next incursion, to considering different views on time, the passage of time, and how our perspectives change.
This week I was also reorganizing my upstairs and shifting books, journals and papers from one room to another. It was a bit of a discovery process, particularly investigating which journals remained blank and which had been filled. In the midst of this, I stumbled upon a journal from 2006, a year when someone very dear to me had died. I read the poetry I had written during this time of grief. I read loving remembrances. And I read a letter I had written to God during a very painful time. Whenever I wrote such a letter, I allowed myself to also listen for a response and to write whatever came to me. Reading my own words and the assurance I experienced from God took me back to that place of raw pain and helped me see the gift of so much grace in the years since then. When we’re in the midst of suffering it can seem endless, enduring, and yet there is, in time, new life in Christ.
A couple weeks ago, my son had called from Utah and asked if he might come to visit, and I enthusiastically agreed. He and his wife have been fully vaccinated for some time, and now I am too, and I knew he would travel with every safety precaution in mind. I was so excited about the prospect of seeing him after fifteen months, and we talked and texted many times leading up to his arrival late at night. I heard the knock and opened the door. It was my nine-year old granddaughter standing there, for about one second, before she barreled through and gave me my first hug in over a year! My son gave me my second hug and one of the biggest surprises I’ve ever had – it was simply one of the best moments of my life. In the thick of the year we have all been through, moments of joy feel sweeter than ever before.
This week’s gospel reading takes us to the locked house with the disciples hiding inside. In the midst of their fear, enters the risen Jesus, with the words “Peace be with you.” Then Jesus shows them the wounds in his hands and on his side, and the disciples believe. But Thomas wasn’t with them and refused to believe until he had seen and touched Jesus himself. A week goes by, and in another gathering in the locked house, Jesus appears to all the disciples including Thomas this time. Thomas responds, “My Lord and my God.” Jesus answers, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.” We are among the blessed who have not seen and have come to believe.
Pandemics, Cicadas, grief, isolation are all very real and very challenging; and moments of joy are even sweeter in the midst of such strife. Jesus has risen! We are blessed indeed.
