Watch the Crane

Dear Friend,

Here’s how it happened: I was walking along a driveway adjacent to a field of very green grass when a car in front of me stopped. When I caught up, the passenger side window came down and the driver motioned to me across the front seat. Look, look, she said, pointing behind her.  Over the roof of the car, I saw it in the field, forty feet in front of us, the crane, poised and slender exuding its silence. It waited then ever so slightly it bent, and there was the grace-filled wingspan, and lift off, out into the air…

Lodged in memory, this icon of stillness and grace comes back to me as I ponder this week’s readings. What I hear is this: In Jesus Christ, God shepherds us again and again to precisely that place where we can spread our wings, individually and as a community, and be lifted up as instruments of grace. “I give them eternal life,” writes John, “and they shall never perish.”

With the Incarnation, eternity enters history as the breath of God in Christ Jesus. As Michael Sanem writes, we best come to know this God through prayer and belonging to a community of “pray-ers.” (“Becoming the Good News,” p. 68) We discover, along with our short-comings and our shadow-side, a God beyond our own delineations. In Acts 5, Paul and Barnabas inaugurate a mission that lifts them beyond previous boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. In Revelation (21) the prayer-powered vision of John reveals a multitude from “every nation, race, people, or tongue.” In our own moment of history, as forces of gravity threaten to pull us down into factions, our lives must be continually attuned through prayer-filled silence. Watch the crane.

Gratefully,

Father Dan ofm, Pastor