My pilgrim friends! Welcome to another issue of The Weary Pilgrim. Enjoy a few glimpses of beauty and words of hope for when life is crappy.
A Pilgrim Prayer
A prayer for joy in God’s creation from the 1928 U.S. Book of Common Prayer.
O Heavenly Father, who has filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to behold your gracious hand in all your works; that, rejoicing in your whole creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness; for the sake of him by whom all things were made, your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Through My Lens
Encinitas, CA
What I’m Reading
Web
- Don’t Lose Heart by Winn Collier. A reflection on Jesus’s parable about a widow and an unjust judge. “How does a parable about an oppressed woman having to twist and goad and harass to get relief provide any comfort to those of us who fear being abandoned by a deity’s inscrutable whims? But there’s striking good news at precisely this point. Here’s what Jesus wants to make certain we hear: God is not like that judge.”
Books
- An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood by Jimmy Carter. The 39th president of the United States was a skilled memoirist.
- Good News at Rock Bottom: Finding God When the Pain Goes Deep and Hope Seems Lost by Ray Ortlund. “During seasons of loneliness, betrayal, or loss, we may tempted to give up on God. But Jesus is often harder to find in the comfortable lives we prefer. Instead, he meets us down at rock bottom—where he is waiting for us with open arms.”
From My Commonplace Book
Something Strange Is Happening
A reflection on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, by Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis on the island of Cyprus (4th century):
Something strange is happening — there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hades trembles with fear.
A Poem
Veils
By Tyler Rogness
I think I smell a blackberry bush,
thought I saw a rabbit shoot away
like infants off to kindergarten.
I have to believe there’s a world
beneath the green pond muck—
a cosmos of need and met need—a path
beyond the curve in the path I missed. And
perhaps one alike in me. A lusty thing
always skittering away.
I want to dip my toes in the scum
and feel the fecund worlds I cannot see
before they slip away, sough
in the trees. It could just be me, but I doubt it.
I’ll always know the contours of blackberry juice
on the air. There’s a bush somewhere. Bet on it.
From The Rabbit Room Poetry Substack
A Closing Quote
Martin Luther says the church is the home of sinners:
May a merciful God preserve me from a Christian church in which everyone is a saint! I want to be and remain in the little flock and that church where there are the fainthearted, the feeble, and the ailing, who feel and recognize the wretchedness of their sins, who sigh and cry to God incessantly for comfort and help, who believe in the forgiveness of sin…
— Scott M. Manetsch, Timothy George, and David W. McNutt, eds., 1 Corinthians, vol. 9a of Reformation Commentary on Scripture: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 29.
