Before I came to work here, I worked as director for a small intentional community affiliated with St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in the Cedar Cottage neighbourhood. An intentional community is just what it sounds like: a place where people come to live together as a collective, often with a set of shared values. This community was called Hineni House, “Hineni” being the proclamation Abraham and Samuel make to God when they are called – “Here I am.”
Hineni House was specifically geared toward young people exploring spirituality. Over the five years that I worked at the house, we hosted folks who were actively involved in faith communities and those who were seeking to reconnect, but the majority were folks who’d be categorized as “Dones,” those who were done with religion, often doing painful work to reckon with the effects of spiritual abuse. These were kids who grew up being told that dear Thomas, the disciple we just read about, was exactly the kind of person they shouldn’t be. There were some whose faith just needed to be re-imagined, and others whose faith required palliative care.
And then there were the mythical “Nones,” those who grew up with no faith at all.
One of them I’ll call Alice.
Alice was one of the most deeply analytical thinkers I’ve ever met. She was fascinated by philosophy and had studied the letters of Paul alongside the classical thinkers at university. She asked insightful and probing questions of everyone who made any kind of statement of faith – not in a mean way, but with profound curiosity. She wanted to know what the purpose of ritual was, and why sacred texts were important. I never managed to convince her that some of her questions might be better worked out in an established faith community. She was so caught up in her own personal thoughts about what the sacred might be, and yet she wrote ethereal songs and poems that betrayed a powerful hunger for it that went beyond intellect and analysis.
Every week, I went to a meeting at the house. We had dinner together, and then gathered in the living room to check in, debrief, discuss a topic. The topics ranged widely: conflict styles, the Enneagram, Neo-Paganism, recognizing signs of spiritual abuse, Kabbalah, chant, queering Scripture, and rosary-making were only a few. Once we were finished, we ended with a form of Evening Prayer. Depending on the make-up of the house, the latter could be more or less Christian, but mostly followed a format of an opening prayer, the reading of a poem, intercessions, a final song, and a blessing.
The blessing I used was adapted from a writing attributed to St. Clare. It goes like this: “Live without fear. Your Creator has made you holy, has always welcomed you, and loves you like a good mother. Go in peace to follow the good road, and the Sacred Three to save, to shield, and to surround you all your life, all the days of your life.”
When I offered this prayer, I looked at each one of them, and held my hand like this, as a sign of blessing. You see clergy do this often.
One evening, when I put my hand up to bless, Alice did it too. And kept doing it, every time.
My assumption was that she didn’t know the purpose of this gesture, and I found it so endearing that I didn’t want to correct or question her.
And then the others started to do it.
So eventually at the end of every moment of prayer, here we would be all holding our hands out like this. And I started to think, “Maybe this isn’t really a mistake.” Because now, the offering of blessing from my hand had become dynamic, a circle dance rather than a performance.
A mirroring.
There is a Sufi belief that the nazar or Evil Eye works both ways – that if you can curse someone with a withering look, you can bless someone with a loving one. Some also believe that within one loving glance is held every loving glance that a person has ever received. It’s therefore an incredible gift to look at someone with that glance and let that love become truly immortal.
So maybe my proffered blessing was being reflected back, and perhaps within it was every blessing those dear ones had ever received.
And indeed, how can we look at the work of the Cross, resurrection, and return to the disciples, and not see the same mirroring?
In Jesus’s betrayal, in his abuse, in his desolate cry from the Cross, in his entombment, we see a mirror of the human experience.
But then resurrection comes, and we are being invited to mirror God.
Jesus returns, in a wounded body, bearing externally wounds we may bear internally. Thomas, in his incredible wisdom, wants to see and touch – and Jesus grants his request, without a hint of anger. That’s because the truth Thomas seeks is, “Is this really the one we betrayed? Is it really the one we crucified?”
Because how could that possibly be true? How could Thomas’s friends tell him, “We have seen the Lord!” There’s no way it was really Jesus, he must have thought – because if it were, they wouldn’t be speaking to Thomas. They’d be piles of ash. There’s no way that their teacher would come back from execution speaking peace and sharing the incredible gift of the Holy Spirit with those who had abandoned him.
But he did – wounds and all.
Friends, this ain’t cheap grace.
And Thomas needs to see that. He needs to touch it. In this desire, I’d argue Thomas is playing on expert mode. He’s teaching the disciples that it’s so much more than even they imagined. He’s teaching them to take NOTHING for granted.
And then Jesus levels Thomas up even further: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Now it’s our turn to mirror.
Candler School of Theology professor Nancy Eiesland, born with a congenital bone defect, writes in her beautiful book The Disabled God,
“If Christ resurrected still participated fully in the experience of human life – including mysteriously the experience of impairment, we must be scandalized by our theological tendencies to perpetuate the myth of bodily perfection in our defense of heavenly (or, indeed, earthly) perfection. The disabled God nails the lie in our belief in a paradise in which we are ‘released’ from the truth of worldly and bodily existence.”
Jesus returns from death in a new body, an impaired, disabled body. Our wounds are still being mirrored in his own wounds. But in his return he shows us that we do not need to escape our bodies, our desires, or even our shortfalls and sins to mirror him back. We too can mirror resurrection.
In the Easter season, we forego the confession, not because we aren’t still messing up all the time, but because we’re being given the chance to reckon with the scandalous nature of wounded, broken, peace-breathing grace, and then to respond out of that reckoning. I have a Sufi friend, Raqib. When he looks at me with the nazar I talked about, it goes on for a long time. It gets uncomfortable after a while. But I do my best to hold that look, because when that much love comes at you, you don’t want to let it drop. When Jesus talks about sins being forgiven and retained, the words he uses are more like released and captured, or seized.
In mirroring, you do both – capture the image, but also give it back.
So: those wounds that we hide? They have to be named and claimed. Not to entrap but to liberate.
The goodness you get? Give back.
The hurt you get in a world too weary to believe in real resurrection? Name it. Show it. If you don’t expose it to sunlight it’s just going to rot and poison you.
And then? Rejoice.
Mirror the joy of every blossom you saw on your way here. Mirror the joy of the birds that sing in the morning. Mirror the joy of every springtime dawn and every lengthening evening. Mirror that joy that comes with laughter and the joy that comes with tears.
Be wounded. Be resurrection.
