Ask yourself what you would do if you had an unlimited supply of both courage and hope. Now begin answering that question with action. Take one step today — then repeat, repeat, repeat.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 153
Photo: Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, March 29, 2024
We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused. Repentance — tshuvah — is like the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold. You can never unbreak what you have broken. But with the sincere and deep work of transformation, acts of repair have the potential to make something new.
— Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair, p. 45
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, December 22, 2023
Take a look at Luke 13:10-17. Jesus is in a synagogue on the Sabbath. The rabbis had rules about what you could and could not do on the Sabbath, but Jesus sees a powerless and infirm woman there, feeble and frail, bent over. She’d been disabled, Luke says, “by a spirit for eighteen years.” “When he saw her, Jesus called her to him and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your sickness.’ He placed his hands on her and she straightened up at once and praised God” (verses 12-13). Can I tell you how much I love this picture of Jesus? He knows what he’s about to do is against the rules. Furthermore, he is in the synagogue and there is a religious leader there! But he cannot help himself. This woman has been in pain for eighteen years. This is one of the things I hope you will remember about Jesus: Jesus put people ahead of rules. The synagogue leader is undone and he chastises this woman and the crowd around, “There are six days during which work is permitted. Come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath day” (verse 14). I’ll let you read Jesus’s response in Luke 13:15-16 and how the crowd responded in verse 17.
Notice, though, that he saw the woman. Notice that he had compassion for her. Notice that he refused to let her suffer anymore, Sabbath or not.
— Adam Hamilton, Luke: Jesus and the Outsiders, Outcasts, and Outlaws, p. 67.
Photo: From Klosterruine Disibodenberg, Germany, August 23, 2008.
It was not just the rich young man who asked Jesus how to be saved. All sorts of people in the gospels got saved before Jesus died on the cross. When Jesus healed, they experienced salvus, God’s salvation. They followed him. Lives were changed, transformed. Disciples did give up riches and goods that they might inherit eternal life. Tax collectors abandoned their jobs and surrendered their social standing to eat with him. Children, slaves, soldiers, peasants, fishermen, farmers, prisoners, the sick, the blind, the lame — when they encountered Jesus, they found salvation, the wholeness, the healing, the oneness with God that had only been the stuff of longing. Every miracle, every act of hospitality, all the bread broken and wine served, everything that Jesus did saved people long before Rome arrested and murdered him.
It was all this loving and healing and saving that got him in trouble with authorities. He was not killed so his death would save people; he was killed because he was already saving them. He threatened a world based in fear, one held in the grip of Roman imperialism, by proving that a community could gather in love, set a table of plenty, and live in peace with a compassionate God. Jesus did at-one-ment long before being nailed to a cross. At-one-ment was the reason the authorities did away with him. No empire can stand if the people it oppresses figure out that reconciliation, love, liberation, and oneness hold more power than the sword. So Rome lynched Jesus: tortured him and hung him on a tree. That is the raw truth under all those sophisticated atonement theories.
Jesus was born a savior, and he saved during his lifetime. “Fear not!” “Peace on earth!” He did not wait around for thirty-three years and suddenly become a savior in an act of ruthless, bloody execution. Indeed, the death was senseless, stupid, shameful, evil. It meant little other than silence without the next act — resurrection — God’s final word that even the most brutal of empires cannot destroy salvus. This is no quid pro quo. Rather, Easter proclaims that God overcoes all oppression and injustice, even the murder of an innocent one. At-one-ment means just that. Through Jesus, all will be renewed, made whole, brought back into oneness, reunited with God. Salvation is not a transaction to get to heaven after death; rather it is an experience of love and beauty and of paradise here and now. No single metaphor, not even one of Paul’s, can truly describe this. We need a prism of stories to begin to understand the cross and a lifetime to experience it.
— Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus, p. 96-98.
Photo: Dunluce Castle, Ireland, July 2001
Consider what you’ve learned about yourself through grief: Now you know how strong you are. Now you know what you can bear. Think about this strange gift — being confident in what you are capable of. Go forward with that strength.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 113
Photo: Cooper’s Hawk, South Riding, Virginia, March 14, 2022
Do not give up on yourself, even if someone gave up on you. Choose yourself. Do something today, however small, to invest in your own happiness.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 107
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 28, 2022
Post-traumatic stress is a familiar idea. We have come to accept, if not expect, that trauma results in psychological and physical damage. But what about post-traumatic growth, “the positive change experienced as a result of the struggle with a major life crisis or a traumatic event”? Researchers have found that humans not only “bounce back” after traumatic events but actually push forward — taking professional risks, strengthening their relationships, and feeling a deeper sense of gratitude.
So often we think of loss as only destructive, but it is also generative — because every ending is also a beginning. When one thing vanishes, a space is created in its place. Of course, when we grieve, we are mourning a loss, but why not also ask what might grow in that barren place? Why not ask: What could I plant there?
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 94
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, November 1, 2021
Fight the urge to withdraw, to fold in on yourself, as if your pain is contagious and might infect someone else. We are here to take care of one another; the care is what’s catching, spreading person to person to person. So take — and give — care.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 71
Photo: Bluebell Trail, Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 8, 2021
Be thankful for your wounds, as strange as that sounds; the ways you’ve been hurt and the ways you’ve faltered make you useful to other people. Empathy is a kind of fellowship; be thankful that your wounds made this togetherness possible.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 70
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, April 6, 2021
Do not let loss drain the color from everything. Open your eyes to the brilliance around you: it’s still here.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 56
Photo: Keukenhof, Holland, April 17, 2004