We humans need to be tended. Sheep are tended by a shepherd. Gardens are tended by a gardener. Even databases are tended by experts.

A local parish held a small procession, which included standing on the corners of a busy downtown intersection holding signs for an hour. These were not rabble-rousing parishioners; quiet and unobtrusive, they were the most diffident, retiring sign-holders who ever pressed themselves against walls. Many passers-by called encouraging words or honked supportively if driving. Many others shouted derisively, called names or yelled recriminations, one even throwing a soda can at one of the sign-holders — who, as she later reported, simply stood still praying for the can-thrower.

These are dangerously murky times. Passionate voices ring out all over; few listen to each other. We risk losing one another as forces pull and push us apart, like the sudden crush in a crowd, when people going different directions create forces by which some get suffocated and trampled. How can we find our way together amidst such forces?  

“Our manuscript has gone safe to the Printer.” So wrote Sheldon Vanauken (“Van”) in A Severe Mercy, after his beloved wife’s painful and young death.

It gives me pause to hear people say they “identify” as Christian, or see questionnaires and forms asking people to check if they “identify” with a particular religion or none.

In the animated movie Up, a shy lonely man knows joy, married to the love of his life and delighting in their little home, even with its sorrows. After Ellie dies, Carl becomes increasingly sealed in by grief and pain, his frown deepening into fixed furrows, the beautiful nest becoming an airless bubble. Soon, booming industry and development surround and dwarf the little house, until Carl becomes a bewildered, angry prisoner within the world and within himself.

It’s impossible to hold a real conversation when it’s peppered with mean, toxic words. The more our attempted conversation becomes thwarted by invective, the more we lose the ability to hear and speak at all. A silence creeps forth, not the sweet silence of life and growth but the terrible silence of contempt, disdain and denial.

Alleluia! He is risen! The only real sin, says St. Isaac of Nineveh, is not paying attention to the Resurrection.

On Good Fridays, I can find myself shivering in the night with Simon Peter, warming my hands at the charcoal fire.