A Reading for the Beginning of Lent (but also other times, too)

a theological meandering within the arms of my understanding of God as Trinitarian Embrace

This piece seemed fitting for it’s big reveal during the season of Lent. It is, in a sense, a creative reflection on the current state of my faith. It’s a theological meandering within the arms of my understanding of God as Trinitarian Embrace. It’s a musing on the path we all walk in some form, during some season, and I propose, maybe life is a circle. And maybe, hopefully?, there is nowhere we can go to escape the loving embrace of God. Let me know what you think!

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Embrace

Where am I? Besides wandering some unnamed trail winding through the desert wilderness of the Superstition Mountains, living in my imagination. Besides rooting around for the Embrace to feel like an actual embrace.

Why does it seem like countless humans are on the outside of the Hug, traversing harrowing paths, parched and lonely, on a quest to be held close? Why am I among them? Why are we in the desert together unaware we are together? 

I have lived my 37 years encountering God and walking away, receiving an embrace and standing outside the party. Where am I today? How far have I come, if any distance at all? Is the well worn path a loop? 

At the core of who I am (or believe I am) is the pulsing reminder that I am a transformative path-walker. Yet, confronted with the question, whispered from the mouth of God - where are you? - I wonder, have I been hiding out along the path? Sulking behind the ocotillo? Assailed by a saguaro?

This sensation is what I seek to destroy, or wish to allow the consuming Embrace to obliterate within me. I have never walked away. In fact, none of us have walked away because the arms stretch too wide and too far and too gently. To deem the path I’m called to tread a sort of hideout is to fall victim to the “sterile kind of heart-searching, which leads to nothing but self-torture, despair and still deeper enmeshment.” The twisting, nameless path is liberating because wandering, with intention among us, is the Great Embrace itself. 

Perhaps we are all walking our way to and from a proverbial Emmaus on a loop, and home is along the road. In the most grief-stricken, fear-bending, bewildering moments - Jesus is with us. The thing about it is, we don’t always know this. Our perception is muddled by the adversity of life. Still, all I hope to know is at some point along the way, round and round and up and down, we’ll collapse at a table set for us. And there we’ll find the One who has been with us all along, stretching those ever-stretching arms toward us, and pulling us in. 

I belong here, we’ll say. 

We all belong here, together, with the One who is the Embrace of Love. Take and eat, take and drink, be revived. We are alive together.

But what of those who’ve done us harm? Is this table only set in the presence of our enemies, or will they be eating, lavished in an embrace, too? What does the ever present presence of God reveal to those who sow destruction? Have they been on the path too? 

Perhaps a rescue awaits and the table is so full of beloveds, so full in fact that we won’t have to sit by the ones who broke us.