unforced rhythms of grace
“Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges.
The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.”
The sun was setting as I waited in my car in the parking lot of my friend’s apartment complex, jotting down some ideas for a poem in my journal. I looked up as two boys, probably about ten years old, came racing down to the dumpsters, laughing, hauling their massive bags of trash above their heads and hurling them into the giant metal bins with a joyous, clanging boom! Playfully shoving each other, the embodiment of commotion, they ran back to the rest of their evening, like this bit of their nighttime routine was the best part of their day. It was such a comfort to my weary heart, this glimpse of such resilient humanity, like a little message that even though things are exhausting and long and seemingly endless, there are still moments of joy and life—real life—happening each day. People persisting through this winter with grace, one bag of trash at a time.
For many of us, me at the top of the list, this last year has felt like an endless winter of trash bags. As we have recently passed the one year mark of our little friend COVID-19, we have endured an excruciating winter of the soul, an “always winter, never Christmas,” situation, to quote C.S. Lewis. We have plunged through months of suffocating darkness and isolation, of standing in the barren landscape facing the person we actually are, when everything else is stripped away. We have been asked to examine the holes in our hearts as things we thought we needed were torn out and we were confronted with our own faults and perceptions of our faith and hope and each other. And, perhaps the most remarkable of all, we have learned to persist.
I think one of the most shocking realizations of how long we’ve been living in this pandemic reality was the beginning of this last Lent. “Lent again?” I squealed. “We just had Lent! We’re still in Lent!” I remember thinking, one year ago, how appropriate it was that the pandemic had fallen during Lent, a time that is traditionally when we get in touch with our grief, a time of reflection on our humanity, fragility, mortality, and general need for God. Often, it is a time where followers of Jesus will give up an indulgence or take on a spiritual practice in order to grow closer to God. I, ironically, had chosen to actively de-busy my schedule and simplify my life.
And then God said, “I’m just going to help you out with that one…”
Though the last twelve months have felt like an endless winter, a year-long Lent, somehow, this language of Lent as a season for grieving as we await the hope of Easter has made the year seem possible, especially as we find ourselves back here, again, and as we gear up for what is seeming to be another year of constant change.
Last April, right after Easter, I heard a sermon by John Mark Comer, a pastor at Bridgetown Church in Portland, on having hope in a time of disappointment. I highly recommend listening to it because, at the risk of sounding corny, it changed my life. He spoke on the Paschal Cycle, which comes from the word pascha, another word for Easter, and is Catholic language for passover. Essentially, it is the cycle of feasts around Easter, or what the theologian Ronald Rolheiser calls the “Five Stages of Eastertide.” They are:
Good Friday, where we get in touch with our grief
Easter, where we get in touch with our hope
The Forty, the days of between the resurrection and Jesus’ ascension into heaven, days of uncertainty and fear for followers of Jesus
The Ascension, when Jesus entered into heaven, and
Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit in Jesus’ place
He spoke of these five stages as a practice for us, and a cycle to emotionally work through as we grieve, as it was beginning to be clear that this pandemic was not something that would be over in fourteen days as we had previously thought. He urged us to walk through the Cycle with Jesus, providing journaling and reflection prompts that mirrored each stage:
Name Your Deaths, reflect on what you’ve lost
Claim Your Births, reflect on what you’ve gained
Realign to a New Reality, grieve what you’ve lost and adjust to the new way of life
Do not Cling to the Old, let it ascend and give you it’s blessing, as Jesus did
Accept the Spirit of the Life you are, in fact, living
“We grieve,” he said, “but we grieve with hope.” For in this cycle, there is death and life. Light and dark. Heavy and light.
That stuck with me. The idea that God has bestowed upon us a cycle through which to grieve, to lament, and to journey through the seasons is such a moving concept. I especially love it because it helps us to practice the work of changing, to practice walking through one threshold to the next, even if our heart is not necessarily there yet. It also removes the shame of being stuck in a season—whether it be a season of loss, of doubt, of joy, of wilderness, of release, of change— because there is an appointed time for all of these things, and at the same time, provides a pathway through, by providing language to use, and a template of how to do the seemingly impossible task of moving forward. The Paschal Cycle helps us to practice annually for the inevitable time when tragedy or uncertainty or doubt hits us full on.
Ultimately, I find the cycle so beautiful because it allows us to have grace for ourselves and our inability to heal our own wounds of the heart. Like any cycle, as we are carried by the rhythms and practices and appointments that unfold in front of us, as we live day to day in the season that makes up our life, we can trust that the next season will naturally follow, in it’s own good time. Jesus ensures— his own journey as a model for ours—that the wounds slowly heal, though not without a scar, not without tenderness. The cycle heals us, and molds us, and turns us into people who know suffering, and, in turn, know joy.
In the Message translation of Matthew 11, Eugene Peterson writes:
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
That’s what the Paschal Cycle is all about. Learning how to rest in God, and those unforced rhythms of grace that are there for us if we choose to enter into them. We can be caught up in the current of it, if we let ourselves leap, if we dare to grieve, and begin it. If we open our eyes, if we fling open the curtains of our heart and let the generous sunlight pour in. If we walk and work with God and watch how God has done it, already. We don’t have to create something brand new. We are, instead, invited to join in.
the first ones, the brave ones
I think we can all boldly say that generally, things don’t work out if we try to force them. I’ve been wanting to write this essay for a year, and lately, have been trying to shape my writings into these profound things that will change your life. But, simply put, if that’s my objective, it won’t ever work. It can’t unfold into what it can be if I’ve already decided what it is.
As I read the title of this post blazing up at me from my to-do list, it was as if God asked me, “Alyssa, have you actually read any of the words you’ve just written?”
The answer was no. The breath, the rest, the delight in the words and the stories I feel so honored to tell I had lost by trying too hard. My piano professor in college used to say to me, “You’re working too much. The music is in there, let the music play itself.” I would sit on piano bench, confused, wanting to respond, “well, I am the one with the fingers, there won’t be any music if I don’t play it.” But, I realize now, he meant the same thing John Mark Comer meant when he spoke about praying through the cycle, and the same thing that Jesus meant when he talked about the unforced rhythms. That we are invited to join in to the good, defiant, brave work already happening, and that the true joy and beauty of our lives are birthed from that communion.
As the springtime dawns yet again, I’ve reflected on all those unforced daily rhythms that have pulled my family through this year of a grief like I’ve never known. Gifts and signs that I did not know were standing in front of my eyes until I looked for them. My acting professor used to call it discovering appointments— rhythms and patterns that you passed through each day, holy rituals in the ordinary that propelled you from moment to moment, the tiny things that make up your life, that shape you, that are the life saving grace of the divine hand that holds you together in one piece, in spite of everything.
what my tree will look like in one month
I have found the Paschal Cycle masks itself in our ordinary human rhythms— things like flopping on the ground after my run and staring up at my tree as it slowly buds, and lingering at the dinner table to talk with my mom as she does the dishes. They are small joys like making silly faces as I pass my friends through the aisles at work, yelling goodnight to my brother who I feel so lucky to get to live with for a little while, and writing haikus in my journal each night. They are soft moments of rest like sitting on the left edge of my couch in the quiet sunlight every Wednesday morning, and eating an oatmeal cup for lunch at work. They are everyday encounters like my sister calling us each evening to say hello, and calling my mom after my shift each day to see if we need anything for dinner. They are the healing of wounds through the passing of time, like the feeling of my wet hair on my back in the shower as it gets longer and longer, and watching the sun stay out longer than the moon, a shift so subtle we didn’t even notice it was happening.
tiny moon+springtime
In a podcast I listened to recently, Bethany Allen, another pastor at Bridgetown Church, said,
“All of us are impacted by change in every season of our lives, and while, for the most part, we can’t control what is happening around us… we can control our response to it. We can choose to enter into spaces of change with hands that are open to all that God has, even in the mystery.”
(again, I highly recommend listening to the whole thing.)
She then goes on to read the quote I began the post with: because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unaware. The cycle is steady, the heart-beat of the seasons, the “wakening up” of courage deep within our longings.
And so, as the springtime dawns yet again, I am struck by the goodness of our God, who does not leave us in the grief and the darkness, but gives us the tools to transition out with an unsung wildness, which is a terrifying practice in and of itself. Change is always fearsome. But as we watch the Earth unfold into springtime with a quiet elegance, it is like the Earth is saying, “look, friend, you can do it, too!” The Earth is practicing the shifts, the tremblings, the paradoxes, the sunshine, the rainstorms, and teaching us how to linger, and how to move on, every day. We can hold onto hope during our physical winter because there has never been a time where spring has not come, even if some years, it takes a bit longer. In the same way, we can know that the winter of our soul will eventually turn into a springtime again, even if the season is brutal, and ever so long.
“Change arrives in nature when time has ripened,” Allen says. “There are no jagged transitions or crude discontinues. This accounts for the sureness with which each season succeeds another. It is as though they were moving forward from a rhythm set from within a continuum. To change is one of the great dreams of the heart.”
gifts+signs
Through this last year, I’ve learned that to hope, to dream, is the most necessary terror. It is not safe to dare that things might change, to lift your empty palms to the sky, to continue waiting for things to pivot and pray to a sometimes very quiet God for the reality that restoration will someday come. Frightening, yes, and incredibly so, especially when the prayer we want answered seems too big to even pray for. Even in the glimmers of renewal, as pieces of our hearts begin to mend, there is a deep fear in stepping through the doorway, in daring to whisper a prayer for a“great dream,” in allowing God to balance our wobbly feet instead of leaning on our own understanding of things. Hope opens our heart to pain, especially when it feels like we are hoping for an impossibility.
Better to just give up, the Liar whispers every morning as we lie in the dark under the covers, trying to summon the courage to begin yet another day while the winter in our soul rages on.
But then, in the loving way he does, Jesus whispers right back: Better to open your eyes, and look up. The Earth is practicing hope right along with you. Look at my life. I did it for you, first. Walk with me, walk with your world. We will do it together.
And as we practice hope, as we ride on the rhythms of grace, we can start to dream again.
Hang in there friends. I’m learning to dream again right on with you. This year has been such a challenge, but you’ve made it here. And that is remarkable. You are remarkable.
all my love,
alyssa
p.s. an announcement:
Last year, after listening to John Mark Comer’s sermon, I began working on a series of songs around the Pascal Cycle. I’ve decided to share them here on the blog (under the Songs tab up top), starting next month. I’ve collaborated with my friend Jill Kuhlman, and we are so excited to share our hearts with you! Beginning on Maundy Thursday (next week) and ending with Pentecost (late May), the Paschal Cycle songs will be released in two parts. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss them!
a second announcement:
Last Easter season, I had the privilege of contributing to the collaborative anthology of poetry, Poems for the Great Vigil of Easter. It was complied by my friend Amy Bornman, and features my work and the work of many other friends. As the season nears again, I wanted to revisit it myself, and wanted to share it with you, too. It’s lovely, and free to download here!
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