Author: kenwoodley3

“Jesus himself stood among the disciples and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.’”

—The Gospel of John

By Ken Woodley

Jesus wasn’t afraid of his wounds.
They plainly showed.
He did not try to hide them.
He points them out to his disbelieving disciples as proof that he has risen from the dead and that he is no ghost.
The disciples evidently believed that they were being haunted rather than visited by their risen Savior. That is why Jesus invites them to touch him, to touch his wounds, so that their haunted fears may vanish.
No, Jesus was not afraid of his wounds.
And he allowed others to touch them.
By touching his wounds, Jesus knew, his disciples would be healed of the raw anxiety that was so destructive to the life Jesus hoped they would live after his crucifixion and resurrection.
Jesus offers us a great lesson.
Like Jesus, we should not be afraid of our wounds, either.
True, Jesus is resurrected by the time he shows the disciples his wounds. These particular wounds are no longer something for him to fear. But, crucially, Jesus didn’t run away and hide from those wounds before they were inflicted upon him. Even though he knew they were coming.
So the example resonates, if anything, even more deeply.
Each of us is wounded in some way. Nobody goes through life wound-free.
Some are wounded more deeply than others but there are no trivial wounds. Wounds are terribly real. For that reason it can be easy to be afraid of them, perhaps even ashamed. We want to hide them from others. Hide them from ourselves. Pretend they don’t exist.
But running from our wounds is not the path toward healing.
Personal experience has taught me this truth.
Instead, trying to escape leads to us feeling hunted and haunted by our wounds, just as the disciples were hunted and haunted by the wounding loss of Jesus in their lives when he was crucified. That escapist mentality makes the wound worse, not better.
No, we don’t have to parade our wounds around or make a big song and dance about them. There is no “Wound Olympics.” It’s not a competition.
But we do need to acknowledge them, believe that we can live with them and, crucially, be open to the way God can bring healing through the loving touch of others in our lives.
Because, so often, that is the way God reaches out to us. The way the risen Christ is able to anoint our heads with oil and restore our soul:
By bringing someone into our life who is not afraid of our wounds and who seeks, through loving compassion, to bring us healing.
But, the healing of wounds is a double-edge plowshare. Sometimes the effect of our own wounding empowers us to be effective healers of others. Sometimes the shape of our lives fits perfectly into the wound of someone else.
Therefore, just as we must not be afraid of our own wounds, we also must not fear the wounds of others. We must not be afraid to touch their wounds with God’s loving purpose that can, if we allow the Holy Spirit to guide us, have our fingerprints all over that touch of divine grace.
And, sometimes, when we reach out with that divine healing grace toward others, we find God reaching out to us through them. Our reach meets theirs and in that moment God’s love for us is made most profoundly manifest.
That is a truth worth embracing with all of our might.
And I thank God personal experience has taught me that, too.

“Peace be with you. As the father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

                                                                               —-The Gospel of John

By Ken Woodley

Who hasn’t blown out a great gulp of air on a cold winter’s day and seen their breath hanging there in front of them like an early morning mist?
But it can happen during Eastertide, too. “On this day three years ago,” Kim told me early this morning, reading from one of her journals, “it was 26 degrees when the sun rose.”
A day when the blooming petals of April were coated in frost.
Breathing, of course, keeps us alive, but our breath does other things, too.
Ironically—or, perhaps, tellingly—we can use our breath to both kindle and extinguish a flame. After putting another log on a barely burning fire, we blow on glowing embers, hoping to re-ignite the flames. But we also use our breath to blow out candles.
Breathing also fuels our voices, and what we say in this world travels much farther than our frozen breath. So we should be careful about what words we set loose into the lives of others.
The most amazing thing we can do with our breath, however, is to save someone’s life through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
And, in a way, that is what Jesus is shown to be doing in the verse above from the Gospel of John.
The disciples, minus Thomas, are cowering behind locked doors after the crucifixion of Jesus.
Frightened out of their minds. Scared out of their wits. Trembling in terror at any sudden noise that might mean the authorities were coming to arrest them and put them to death.
The breath of Jesus provides them with the gift of the Holy Spirit and releases them from the grasp of deepest anxiety. The breath of Jesus kindles the embers of his disciples into flames to bring light into the darkness of the world.
The breath of Jesus empowers them to boldly go where they have never gone before: out into the world around them without the comfort of Jesus by their side to spread the Gospel far and wide. As far and as wide as to us today. So, Jesus saved the lives of his disciples, then and now.
Clearly, Jesus would have won any contest my childhood friends and I had over whose breath could travel farthest on a winter’s morning. The breath of Christ has been like the wind, blowing across the entire face of the Earth, thanks to those who do not keep the gift of the Holy Spirit for themselves but share it, through word and deed.
His breath is with us today, gently kindling us with God’s love, empowering us to carry the message of that amazing grace out into the world through what we say and what we do.
The daily challenge is to ask ourselves before every decision: will this breath of mine kindle a flame or blow one out?
If we share the breath that Jesus has given us then we are breathing life into the world for more than just ourselves.
And the light of love will shine more brightly.
Especially for those who have been dragged by life into a moment of fear that there is no more light of love at all.
Just as Jesus so lovingly did for his disciples way back then.
And now.
Because sometimes it is us huddled in some “upstairs room” where we feel distant from Jesus, when the “hammers and nails” in our lives seem to have won.
When all of the flashing signs say “Crucifixion” and hopes for resurrection away from our troubles seem paved over.
When ancient pains of sorrow and anguish resurface and speak in the present tense.
At times like that, we will not see the breath of Christ by our side but if we put one foot in front of the other and leave that locked room we will surely feel it.

By Ken Woodley

I remember us gathered in that upstairs room somewhere in the secret heart of Jerusalem on Maundy Thursday.
The Garden of Gesthemane wasn’t far away. Neither were those coming to arrest Jesus as he prayed for some other way. Any other way.
We could almost hear the footsteps coming, like a pandemic making its way headline by headline, day be day, getting closer. Jesus knew they were coming but he did not run away. Jesus did not leave us even though he knew what those footsteps meant, even though he knew where those footsteps were going to take him.
The darkness was coming. It was falling all around us, and yet Jesus did not abandon us to the darkness of the world.
Jesus had one more thing to say to us in that upstairs room. One last word. And so it must have been of utmost importance to him. The one thought Jesus wanted to leave behind in our hearts, yeast for our souls, communion words for all those who will follow us, in later years, into “upstairs rooms” around the world with Jesus on Maundy Thursday.
“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus told us. “To love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Love?
Remember how disappointed Judas was by those four letters. Nobody’s going to kill the Roman oppressors with love, Judas whispered as he headed out of the door to collect his 30 pieces of silver.
But Judas never understood. This was no ordinary love. This wasn’t the everyday “luv ya” that people tossed about instead of saying “see ya.” This love couldn’t be abbreviated for Tweets and other social media.
Jesus didn’t say “luv ya” because God’s love isn’t a “luv ya” love.

The love of which Jesus spoke, and speaks, isn’t emotional affection that can be washed away by rains of disagreement or blown off course by the winds of disappointment.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross for “luv ya.”
Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead by “luv ya.”
And for sure Easter isn’t a “luv ya” day.
This is a love that cannot be crucified.
A love that Judas cannot betray.
A love that cannot be arrested.
A love that cannot be sentenced to die.
A love that cannot be whipped and beaten.
A love that no crown of thorns can touch.
A love that no hammer can nail to a cross.
This is a love that transports us and transforms our lives because it is LOVE.
The thing itself. The LOVE that lives and breathes, that blossoms in every unfolding flower within our heart, if we let it, because it was planted there by God, who is LOVE.
Remember, when we saw them nail Jesus to that cross, standing off in the distance, in company with our fear, we were terrified that the darkening of that day would soon fill the world to overflowing.
Never, ever, we feared, would we ever truly see the light of such love again.
But it suddenly dawned on me today that in actual fact the sun is constantly rising, every minute of every day. As our world spins, the sun is seen to rise above the dark horizon from a endless points of successive geographic perspectives.
That is what this LOVE is like.
My trouble is that sometimes I turn away from the rising and face the other direction, staring into all of my “setting skies” and feel my heart fill with tears as I cry because the sun seems to be constantly waving goodbye and leaving me in darkness.
Nor, I am quite certain, am I the only one.
That is how we all felt that afternoon on the slopes of Golgotha.
I think every time Jesus spoke of love Judas felt the sun set again and again and again.
Judas never understood LOVE.
The rest of us are eternally blessed by the LOVE that rose on Easter morning.
And every morning.
Every morning everywhere.

By Ken Woodley

On Palm Sunday, Christians around the world celebrate the apparently triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.
Many who saw or heard of the procession firsthand thought, “Ah, at last, the Messiah has come to gather his army and topple the Romans with swords instead of plowshares. Finally, Jesus will render unto Caesar a thrust of sharp metal.”
How wrong they were.
A week later, Jesus would be nailed to a cross, cruelly executed after being betrayed, abandoned, mocked and tortured.
This year, Palm Sunday will be celebrated in various way across our COVID-19 world. Some churches are open. Some are closed. Others have restrictions on seating. Many people will celebrate through a virtual service on line or via YouTube.
And then we will all go back to our own devices.
Back to our cell phones and social media.
Back to our TV remote controls and microwave settings.
Back to those things—and I know them all too well—that distract us from continuing on behind Jesus.
That prevent us from following the resurrected Christ, who stands beckoning us on to follow around the next bend into places we never imagined and things we never thought possible.
Good things that the world so desperately needs.
Things that only we can do.
Light that only we can shine.
Things that will be left undone if we do not do them.
Small, beautiful things.
Mustard seeds that only we can plant.
Because everyone has a sword with his or her name on it in this world.
A sword that can only become a plowshare for the planting of a mustard seed if it feels the transformational grip of our fingerprints upon it.
In reality, Palm Sunday has nothing to do with the palm fronds and crosses waved in the air.
Instead, it has everything to do with the palms of our hands.
With every tick of the clock all of us hold the fate of the world’s next few moments in the palm of our hands.
And so the fate of the world literally depends on us.
At least, that part of the world that we call home.
Will we give our palms to Jesus or will we make a fist?
And, if we do give Jesus our palms, what about our fingers and our toes?
Jesus needs them all.
Jesus needs our arms and our legs.
Needs all of us in our entirety.
Oh, and how much Jesus longs for our heart and soul.
But, no, not for himself.
Jesus was never about himself.
It was always about us.
It is still always all about us.
How far are we willing to take God’s great love for everyone on Earth?
Jesus took that love as far as his fingers and toes, and his heart and soul, would let him.
Now it’s our turn.

By Ken Woodley

Daylight Saving Time.
What a luminous trio of words.
And how simple it all was last weekend. Child’s play. We simply moved our clocks ahead. Sixty minutes. That’s all it took. And our digital devices performed that small task automatically, requiring no effort on our part at all.
Not even COVID-19 could stop the charge of this “light brigade.”
But what about our hearts and minds? What of our souls?
If we don’t move them further ahead into the light of God’s love then an hour of extra sunshine every day isn’t really going to change the world very much.
I imagine that when Jesus welcomed those who were regarded by society as sinners or unworthy—“the others”—they felt the return of an altogether different Daylight Saving Time.
Such people were kept in a kind of perpetual winter by the Pharisees and scribes of the world, kept in the utter darkness of disregard and the bitter cold of callous condemnation.
His companionship must have felt like acceptance and love suddenly blooming in the world around them, despite the marble hearts of others that seemed to be perpetually set to “Standard Time.”
Jesus wanted them to live their lives in the year-round Daylight Saving Time of God’s love and grace.
Standard Time is all too human. Standard Time is holding on to hurts and pain, to sins and grievances despite the fact that a turn of our heart would put us perpetually in a place far removed from the sleeting snowstorm of hurts and faults held onto. Including our own.
We can most truly come to life in God’s Daylight Saving Time.
Human Standard Time is just not worth synchronizing the clock of our lives to or the beat of our heart.
We all have a choice and this time of year emphasizes it in a dramatic and compelling way.
We can come to life.
Become a new creation.
Blossom and bloom.
Or hold onto darkness and winter within our hearts and minds, down in our soul.
Outside our windows and walls the ground is almost trembling with nature’s answer to the call of Daylight Saving Time.
A wondrous rash of flowers, of bird song, and sunlight, green leaves and lawns are on their way. Daffodils are already opening their petals. Forsythia buds are bursting.
The earth is going to keep tilting toward the light. Nothing can stop it.
We know our clocks are all set and synchronized with the path of the sun.
But what about all the deepest places in our often-wounded hearts?
None of us invented our skin or the chaotically challenging world through which we journey inside that skin. All we can ask of ourselves, and ask of others, is that we try to live in the world and inside our own skin the very best that we can.
Experience has taught me that from time to time it’s desperately important to forgive others, and also ourselves, for being human.
We are all human in every meaning of that word but if we are good enough for Jesus and for God, who created us, then we must be good enough for ourselves and each other.
We cannot be more than what we are, but what we are can be more than enough.
As difficult as it is to believe sometimes, all of us are the light of the world.
Jesus said so.
Let’s make absolutely certain, then, that we have sprung ahead not simply on our clocks but within our heart and mind, within our soul, as well.
Let’s strive to shine that light as indiscriminately and as brightly as we can.
The season is certainly changing all around us, re-shaping the landscape.
But a far more important season is waiting to change deep inside our own skin.
And it can transform the world.

‘Knock, and the door shall be opened.’
—Jesus

By Ken Woodley

Wisps of steam rise
from a morning cup of tea
like a secret
coded message from
far away beyond the foothills
as I sit waiting in the shrouding darkness
for the risen light,
praying that a new day will dawn
bright enough
for me to finally see it
and believe.

Deciphering the translation
of this ticking moment,
wisps of my desperate spirit follow
because they want no other choice,
rising through my earthly clouds
like Everest dreamers
touching the bottom
of the sky,
but no longer
as if they were doubting disciples
fingering the wounds of heaven
to see if they are real.

Atop this summit
I plant my flag.

Your peaks are all around me now
pointing toward the sun.

By Ken Woodley

In the course
of my human event
I fall
so deeply into the tightest crevice
of the furthest chasm
of my wounded yesterdays—
the anguish so familiar,
like the contours of my own shadow—
but your ricochets of gentle light echo ahead,
always,
untwisting me,
turning me around,
calling me forward,
out of the tear-stained darkness of torn places.
I put one foot in front of me,
and then a dozen hundred more,
through the puddled shards of shattered memory
toward your open meadows
of blooming flowers
where even the bees don’t sting
and the sky is filled with things to say,
always believing in the hopes
you have given me to believe in today
because your love has shown this truth to be self-evident:
there is velvet sunshine
on this side of barbed-wired yesterdays.

Taking my shadow by the hand now,
understanding that its contours
are defined by your light,
I feel the risen wings of these butterfly fields,
unwrapping the present
you have given me again today
for this caroling moment
of embracing comprehension,
knowing that even when this fleeting music fades
I will feel the resonance
of its calling echoes
throughout my soul
where your harmony still sings
its saving grace around me,
and though my liberation bell
be always cracked from constant ringing
it shall forever peal.

By Ken Woodley

Many years ago, an anonymous author wrote these words: “Jesus did not come to make God’s love possible, but to make God’s love visible.”
My own experiences have taught me over and over again that those words are true.

But there are times when I need to remind myself that the light of God’s love is not a myth, nor can any words of human theological dogma and doctrine put it on a leash and lead it this way and that.
God’s love runs free.
The darkness of fear and doubt that so often fills the world with turbulent emotions, however, can make it hard for me to fully feel that love.
The darkness can make it hard for me to have faith that even one small flicker of light can feel to my soul like a sunrise of love.
Sometimes it is hard to keep genuinely and actively believing that one small twinkling of light can always lead me back to a truth that, in my life, was born in Bethlehem.
And can do so in the middle of any season and any month or week.
Because every day can be Christmas.
Just as every day can be Easter.
God’s love was always there, but, for me, it took Jesus to break through the darkness and illuminate the truth about the intimacy of that love.
My journey toward and then with Jesus brought that sense of love to me until the feeling was palpable. I was inundated by it. This morning, I experienced a renewed soul-understanding of that fact.
I’ve been going through quite a difficult time lately and the winds, rain, thunder and lightning of that “storm” had, like clouds, obscured my awareness of God’s constant love. I’ve been like a small boat on an angry sea.
Today, just after sunrise, I was overtaken by a feeling or awareness, by a calming presence that reminded me I am loved by God. Not because of any good works I may have done in the past or might do in the future. I am just loved. Unconditionally. I don’t need to hold on to it to keep it from running off. This love is always there.
And certainly not just for me.
No matter who we are, where we live, what we believe or disbelieve, this truth stands, unfaltering:
Jesus carries the light of God’s love into even the deepest, darkest caverns of our lives.
I believe Jesus hoped to change the way all of us think about everything, but especially the way we think about ourselves and God.
He strove to bring us into a personal, loving relationship with God. There are so many times he tried to make that point in the Gospels.
The kingdom of heaven was always around me. But, like so many people in the world, I just never saw it in the blinding darkness.
Until I saw it.
I never felt its reaching touch, my soul’s skin too calloused by the darkness to feel such determined gentleness.
Until I felt it.
God’s love is like an unquenchable light shining in the world—with us and for us all.
The darkness only seems unbeatable when I close my eyes in anxious fear and keep them tightly shut.
When I open them the darkness has no chance.
Because God’s love is all around me.
Just as it is all around you.
There is nothing else any of us can believe that will change that fact.

By Ken Woodley

So this is Ash Wednesday?

Again.

It sometimes feels that the world has had 12 months of Ash Wednesdays, to go along with Ash Mondays and Tuesdays that preceded Ash Thursdays and Fridays, that came just before Ash Saturdays and, sadly, Ash Sundays, as well.
I’m not going to miss having ashes rubbed into my forehead tonight because the past year has covered me with its ashes from head to toe.
Instead, I want those ashes washed from the entirety of my body.
But even if it were possible to wash them all away, they’d only come right back because there are ashes everywhere.
The ashes have touched everyone and everything in some way over the past 12 months.
The pandemic has seemed to take all of the biggest and brightest colors in the world and break them into little pieces.
Broken pieces for the broken days and broken weeks and months in a broken year.
Indeed, there have been times when it felt like the relentless and remorseless ashes were the alpha and the omega. That in the beginning there were ashes, only ashes, and that ashes covered the day, that ashes smothered the sun, turning the day into night.
But that is not the truth.
That would be a lie.
We will not fall prey to that deception.
We will pray and rise in truth.
For there is, as always, one among us whom we cannot see but we can surely feel.
Right here. And now.

So let the ashes remind us of the flame.

Because the Lord is our shepherd, we shall not be in want.
But let us not lie down in green pastures alone,
nor sit in solitude beside the still waters,
because the valley of the shadow of death
is filled with countless souls who need to feel
the comfort of his rod and staff,
who need to eat from the table
and feel their head anointed with oil,
their cup overflowing,
and that they, too, have goodness and love
dogging their every footstep
on the way to the house of the Lord.

So let our ashes help remind them of the flame.
For surely one day the wolf will lie with the lamb,
And the leopard shall lie down with the goat,
The calf and lion and the yearling together.

And may the wolves and the lambs,
the leopards and the goats,
the calves and the lions and the yearlings
begin their journey toward one another,
not just out in the world,
but deep within us,
because that is how the kingdom of heaven
begins to enter the world.
And oh how the world needs that.

So let the ashes remind us of the flame.

Because COVID-19 has not been alone in dumping ashes across our landscape here in America. Even when hope about effective vaccines began to blossom as 2020 was coming to a close, the flowers of our democracy were trampled.
The results of the presidential election were questioned and then attacked by those who sought to overturn the will of the American people. The horror movie we’d all been living since last March took on even more apocalyptic dimensions with mob violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 that threatened the very foundations of this nation.
The scenes, and what they meant, were truly frightening. It was a domestic 9-11. I heard words spoken and saw misdeeds done that I never could have imagined taking place in this country. COVID-19 wasn’t the only virus stalking our land.
But there are other words calling us to other deeds and the voice of Jesus in the The Beatitudes has never rung with deeper resonance.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons and daughters of God.
May the wings of those angels have our hearts and minds,
may they have our arms and legs
on our Lenten journey, and on every journey.

And may the ashes remind us of the flame because, while there are vaccines for COVID-19, there is no vaccination against the dark side of human nature.
Yes, the pandemic did seem to take all of the world’s biggest brightest colors and break them into little pieces, and subsequent political events broke them even more.
But that gives all of us the chance to turn them into stained glass windows so that the sun may shine through us all into a world too filled with darkness.
So let the ashes remind us of the flame.
And may we all flicker brightly as a light for all the world.
As Jesus hoped we would.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

By Ken Woodley

Sometimes,

when the moon seems skillfully slung

to skip across the rushing clouds,

I wonder whose wrist and fingers

give this crescent light its motion

and if the heart behind the hand knows I’m watching,

wading toward the deep end of the sky,

up to my neck now

and wanting to swim

in communion

with the reflection of the sun

along the surface of the lunar song

being sung across the skin of heaven.

Sometimes,

the light splashes

and I feel its current all around,

lifting me for a moment so brief

that it seems unreal,

as if it were only a fantasy of my own desperate yearning.

Sometimes, I feel the heart behind the hand

send me skipping, too, across the clouds

in the wake of the singing moon.

And then my wondering turns to wonder,

turning sometimes into

always

until the shouting, weeping, tumbling world sweeps always aside

and I find myself

looking up into the night-time sky

when the moon seems skillfully slung

to skip across the rushing clouds,

wondering whose wrist and fingers

give this crescent light its motion

and if the heart behind the hand knows I’m watching.

And that is where I find you

finding me

again.

Always.