Author: kenwoodley3

I don’t know about you, but sometimes my memory for names can’t be called “memory” at all. “Forgetfulness” would be more accurate. On more than one occasion, for example, I’ve come around the corner of an aisle in a grocery store and heard someone call me by name.
I knew that person.
I knew I knew that person.
That person knew I knew them.
But I could not recall their name at that moment to save my life.
The explanation is one I understand: I was totally pre-occupied with my own thoughts, that had nothing to do with shopping, while simultaneously trying to remember all of the things I needed to buy. Had I seen the person from a distance it would have given my brain time to remind me of their name.
Or, that’s my excuse.
But I know it’s not just me. I’ve also been on the receiving end of “name non-memory.” I’ve said hello to someone and the look on their face tells me all I need to know. They can’t remember my name to save their life. I understand. Been there and not remembered that.
So how amazing is it that Jesus knows all of his sheep by name?
Totally astonishing.
Just think how many sheep Jesus actually has throughout the whole wide world, and has had across 2,000 years. Look at how many sheep he has a St. Anne’s. Yet, Jesus knows us all by name.
But he also knows more than that. Jesus is aware of all that we have been, all that we are, and all that we can be—if we follow our Good Shepherd.
Jesus knows when we need to lie down in green pastures. And when we feel, in our soul, the holy spirit of Jesus guiding us to a restfulness that feels like a green pasture it is more than okay for us to do just that—to stop being so busy, physically and mentally, and chill out in the abundance of the green pasture he has led us to.
Likewise, when we feel Jesus lead us beside still waters there is a reason for it. Pause. Refresh. Rest. Drink in the feeling of peacefulness reflected toward our soul by those still waters.
We mustn’t feel like we have to keep pushing ourselves and going and going and going. If we do, we run the risk of pushing ourselves beyond Jesus. We keep going and going and going past Jesus, like a sheep going beyond its shepherd.
Then we get lost and, let me tell you, life’s “wolves” love it when that happens.
Whenever Jesus seeks to revive our soul, there is a very good reason and we should let him do it.
Don’t feel guilty about it. Let it happen. Jesus knows better than ourselves what we truly need. We can see up to the bend in the road. Only Jesus can see around the bend.
So don’t worry about what’s around the bend, either.
The rod and staff of Jesus will comfort us and when we need it most we will feel our head anointed with oil and our cup running over. That is: we shall feel the certain peace inside us that passes all understanding.
Goodness, love and mercy will have followed us no matter where we went—even when we wandered off—and we will know deep down inside that we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
We may forget someone’s name in the grocery store next week and someone might forget our name tomorrow.
But Jesus never will.
Ever.

FAITH
Deep in the longest drought on record

one man stood

believing in rain

and splashing

—so skeptics declared—

in his own precipitation

that had nothing

at all

to do with the sky

and the clouds,

or other things

the man could not prove.

The sky is dead, the skeptics sang in unison,

and there are no more clouds, they added in refrain.

There is nothing up there at all, they swore on oath.

But still the man in the rain

kept splashing.

And his garden grew.

Enough to feed them all.
—By Ken Woodley

The Road to Emmaus is all around us.
There is no set formal path. No particular interstate highway or country lane.
The Road to Emmaus just is, stretching out in every direction.
North. South. East. And west.
We journey upon it each day. Whether we realize it or not. Whether or not we intend to do so. Every paved mile that we drive is upon the Road to Emmaus. Each sidewalk step that we take is upon the Road to Emmaus.
Left, right, left.
Through the woods.
Across a field.
Upstairs and down.
The Road to Emmaus is, consciously or not, part of the journey to every destination we consciously try to reach.
For our entire life.
Forward, or backward, day by day.
Curiously, however, we often fail to sense its presence. There are so many distractions along the way. One moment we are deep in contemplative prayer and the next we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of life’s often tumultuous cacophony of noises.
We become like the two disciples described in the Gospel of Luke, walking toward Emmaus and so busy talking about the crucifixion of Jesus and rumors of his resurrection that they fail to see that he is walking right there beside them.
The experience is not unlike walking out from a forest of wondrous peace onto the Las Vegas strip.
But even Vegas is part of the Road to Emmaus.
The Road to Emmaus is everywhere—no exceptions.
And Jesus is there—no exceptions.
Jesus is there, waiting for us to recognize him.
Waiting for us to recognize him in our hearts.
To recognize him in our souls.
Recognize him in each other when we walk his footsteps into the world.
Every day and every step we take hold such promise.
Every day and every step offer us the chance to make the dreams that Jesus has for us come true in this world that so desperately needs those dreams to come true.
But how?
Sometimes, we just need to pull over into a spiritual rest stop and let the tumultuous cacophony of the world’s traffic of distractions wash over us and away.
Often, we most readily recognize the Road to Emmaus—and who journeys upon it by our side—only when we stop for a moment to look around and feel the scenery of our soul and the sunrise of our hearts burning within us.
That is when Jesus is able to “break bread” with us, even if there is not a crumb or a crust or a loaf in sight.
Quite possibly, however, another person is by your side, walking the same steps on the Road to Emmaus. In close proximity physically, but also close in the spirit of friendship or love. So close that it is as if the two of you are one single loaf of bread. In opening up your hearts to each other—in breaking this human bread—Jesus is able to reveal his presence among you in a way that is impossibly palpable.
And there is true communion.
Because the Road to Emmaus is mostly inside you.

 

Happy Easter?

How happy can Easter really be for someone who has lost a loved one?
How happy was the first Easter for Thomas? He had just lost a loved one and Easter was one of the saddest days of his life.

While his best friends were giddy with astonished joy as they related the story of Jesus appearing to them in the upper room, Thomas was wrapped in sorrow.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus had told the disciples before showing them his wounds.
Imagine their joy at spending time with the resurrected Jesus.

But Thomas had not been with them. He’d missed out and Thomas was so unhappy that he went down in history as Doubting Thomas.
“We have seen the Lord,” his fellow disciples had told him, their faces undoubtedly split wide open by huge smiles, their eyes alight and sparkling with happiness—just as ours might be at the end of an Easter morning service, wishing happy Easter to all we see.
But how happy could Easter have possibly been to Thomas, who had lost Jesus to the hammer and nails of the crucifixion?
“Happy Easter” was just two words that meant nothing to him.
Or, worse, they rubbed salt in his wounds of sorrow.
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe,” Thomas had replied.
I might have spoken those same words if I had been standing in Thomas’ shoes.
But Jesus appeared again and this time Thomas was there. A week later, Jesus gave Thomas a chance to touch his wounds and “Happy Easter” suddenly became two words that meant everything to him.
Thomas joined his friends as resurrection witnesses, trying to convince others that Jesus had risen, that “Happy Easter” could pour its meaning into the deepest of our earthly sorrows—even into the place deep inside our heart where we mourn the loss of someone we love most dearly.
Easter matters because resurrection is promised to us all. Easter would indeed be a hollow mockery to our human hearts if it were just something experienced by Jesus alone.
If Easter was just a Jesus event it would be pointless. God rose from the dead? Big deal. But Easter is not just a Jesus event. Easter is a you and me event. Easter is an event our departed loved ones have already experienced for themselves. Jesus said so. Some day, we shall join them. Jesus said so.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that you may also be where I am,” Jesus tells us in the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John.
There are days and nights and weeks and months when our tears of sorrow will make it hard for us to read those words but there are no tears on Earth that can wash the promise of those words away.
Can I prove it? Probably not. But doesn’t the world—don’t you and I—desperately need something far more wondrous than anything I can prove? That is precisely what God’s love has given us. But it is okay to doubt it.
If we doubt then we are in good company. We are locked in that upper room in all of our sorrow with the disciples. And Jesus is coming to touch the mark of our deep wounds. Jesus doesn’t doubt our wounds. He knows we all have them. That is why he is on the way.

Poems for Easter by Ken Woodley

WINTERS

I walk across a field to where the frost

has painted shattered glass on the ground.

Summer must have looked in the mirror,

seen autumn,

and the reflection broke.

Even the clown trees cry,

dropping their circus leaves.

Soon the whole world will lie dead,

quiet as cotton, and cold.

There is an attic smell in the air.

I wonder if this is how our own winter has been born.

Have we forgotten spring?

I kneel now, touching an ice-covered blade.

The frost melts and turns into dew.

My shadow feels the silent, insistent barking of the sun.

THE STORM

I listen to my storm.

There are no words anymore,

no voice like winter thunder,

no lightning in my dreams.

It has rained for days and the only sound is the river

pulling at the roots of trees,

covering the tracks of animals that came to the bank for food

and the footprints of hunters who followed them.

Black birds look like punctuation marks

as they scrape their wings against the clouds

in search of a sentence the wind rearranged and then blew away

and I wonder about the missing words

and who wrote them.

The river, tumbling over itself,

sounds like sand being brushed off the sky

and I pray for this meaning to make sense.

A soft, distant voice echoes the unspoken

and I look up in time to see the small dark dot of a bird

calling me to follow

just before it disappears,

a final period erased

before the end could be written.

I cry uncontrollably, unashamed of this joyful sorrow.

Tomorrow the river may flood.

So might I.

SECRET AGENT

I shadow myself

in the long puddles from yesterday’s tears.

Bedouin clouds cross their blue desert;

the city loses its grip and the sand takes over,

seagulls singing as if they are deaf.

I will leave no tracks on the beach.

The wind and tide are my safe house.

I have come all this way to watch waves

defect from the sea.

They look like spies coming over from the other side,

breaking cover at the last possible moment,

spreading their secrets on this countertop coast.

I cup a foam cipher in my hands

but it soon disappears

and I am left decoding palms,

my own wrinkles and veins.

Translating myself into this new language.

SURROUNDED

The sentry noticed something peculiar:

he was surrounded.

Something must have crept up on him during the night.

He dropped to his belly

and wriggled around a large boulder

to see what it was.

He waited fifteen minutes and didn’t see anything.

When members of his platoon woke up

and were not shot as they stood urinating on the ground

the sentry decided he must have been

imagining things.

Still, something seemed strange.

He felt completely surrounded.

It was unearthly.

It was the trees, he told himself later.

Yes, it’s the trees, and the grass

and the sky.

They’re not fighting.

They’re not at war.

And then he wondered:

Can I surrender to peace?

CHRIST TIDE

A mirage appears in the desert:

a single dark fin cutting through the dunes of sea-like sand,

rippling straight toward the man

who continues walking over the motionless waves;

a shark torpedoing—as if launched by the earth itself—

at the path those steps are taking,

the man spreading his arms wide and cross-like

in greeting or resignation

to meet the unseen jaws

even as a school of porpoise—

their own finned backs breaking the surface of our disbelief—

swim toward his resurrection,

the heavy steel hooks of fishermen

unable to stop them.

EASTER

If I could

I would see the sun making sherbet in the sky

and children running along the edge of their lives,

wishing for bowls and spoons,

sand kicking up behind their heels like bullets just missing.

Each second would be a museum

as I look into their eyes

and see Ulysses in the wooden horse,

feel Africa touching Brazil.

Camels sip scotch through straws now,

trying to forget their humps,

but a whippoorwill calls its own name into the twilight

and leaves murmur, quietly praying.

A dream kicks the wall of its womb.

The sky bends.

I feel pregnant with myself.

And then it happens:

A herd of zebra lopes past me,

looking for the mountains of Peru.

“On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”

—John 14: 20

Poems For Holy Week by Ken Woodley

AFTER THE BOMB
The wind exterminates annihilation,

checks its pulse with a dried leaf or two

and climbs a hill behind the barn.

The barbed wire doesn’t stop it.

The cows couldn’t chew it.

The wind plays the sound of crickets eating silence

and there is something else

along the wide black hearth,

tugging back at last syllables,

inventing the new language;

sheep will clothe themselves.

The wind stretches,

yawns and lifts a feather for examination,

blowing it against a sky

that cannot keep it.

The wind blows it north for the summer,

south for the winter,

looking for a season that fits.

The wind blows inside out,

climbs a mountain and falls off.

The hurricane bends everything to its knees.

FUTILE GESTURE
I

raise my hand

to keep the sun

out

of

my

eyes,

not realizing

that I am

waving good-bye.

THE CANNIBALS
There are no stars,

no moon,

just hearts beating in the darkness.

Somewhere

twigs snap underfoot.

Wild beasts scream their way

into human silence

and hide among the eaves, waiting.

The armies sit in darkness,

looking for some braille

to tell them this is just

a really black night.

Soldiers smell the enemy coming.

They feel the enemy touching,

the enemy panting,

muscles straining.

The heartbeats quicken

and sound like Morse code,

somebody sending signals

from behind enemy lines.

The arms of the enemy encase them.

The soldiers bite back.

The pain is wet and hot.

Their hearts suddenly sound

like a pantomime.

They taste their own body,

their own blood,

wondering whose skin it is

they’re wearing,

who they used to be.

THE SERPENT (For Judas)

I shed

my skin,

looking

for someone

else,

but keep crawling

on my belly anyway,

tempting myself

to believe

there could be something worse

than turning yourself

inside out

and finding the end

of

paradise.

IN THE CATACOMBS (For Mary Magdalene)
My hands find the ghosts of wind and water

which haunt the world with their smoothness.

Such soft fossils in the stone;

my fingers feel like they are touching themselves.

I reach for an indentation and find my broken-mirror reflection.

I pick up one of my eyes along with some of the ceiling.

They become my nose and a piece of lip.

My hair and a look of pain

stick in my fingers and I hurt and bleed.

I am just as much a grave in this room as I am me.
But I remember opening my eyes for the first time.

Buildings were not broken by the colors.

Neither were people.

Children ran through fields with their parents

who were also children,

picking flowers that did not burn them.

We spoke sky.

We spoke clouds.

Our accent came from everywhere

and we sang songs that made the elephants dance.

The world grew round and we rolled it to each other.

Nothing growled.

Everything kept growing.
I remember the sound of the first cannons.

It’s mice in the attic, we said, eating cheese.

We’ll get traps when we go to town in the morning.
I remember footprints in the snow.

I remember following.

It seemed like a prayer.

WAITING ON THE FALL-OUT
On the edge of everything

I catch a taxi to the harbor

where the boats lay still

and the gulls don’t speak.

Even the pier

holds tightly to its splinters,

giving nothing away

but my own drumbeat steps

as the mist tries me on for size.

I sit along the end of this half-bridge

and wait for anything else,

hoping the stars

rule out the total winter.
A ricochet of light

and one has become like us.

There is no splashing,

only ripples

and the echo of my own slow dripping.

I stop remembering now,

only listen to the resonance.

Touch me.

Lose this definition.

Backstage. Up close and personal.

Being a journalist granted me access to “behind the curtain” experiences I still treasure.

I sat a few feet from Gene Drucker—the world-renowned violinist who has won a bushel of Grammy Awards with the Emerson Quartet—as he rehearsed for the Hampden-Sydney Music Festival.
I was in the Penske pits at Richmond International Raceway during testing and got a true sense of the loud, roaring power and speed—along with the inherent exhilaration and danger—of Indy Car open-wheel racing.

At spring training in Lakeland Florida, it was just me and Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson in his clubhouse office talking baseball. Then I was leaning on the batting cage with the Detroit Tigers during batting practice before finding myself sitting next to my childhood hero, Hall of Famer Al Kaline, on a sofa in the players’ lounge where we talked about his storied career.

No press pass on Earth, however, could have gotten me beyond the veil of a Jewish temple during Jesus’ lifetime and inside the Holy of Holies—the “backstage” place where God literally dwelled, according to Jewish beliefs. Only the High Priest was permitted go beyond the thick curtain that separated God from Man. Anyone else would die.

That all changed with the crucifixion of Jesus.

“Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment,” the Gospel of Matthew tells us, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”

Humanity was given an all-access backstage pass that continues to this day.

Jesus teaches that there is no curtain, no wall, no veil, no law that can separate us, as children of God, from the God who loves us. For each of us, it is a uniquely personal journey of deepening intimacy with God, and with Christ.

As Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”

The only thing that can keep us out in the audience, hoping to catch a glimpse of God’s love, is if we refuse to leave our seats, if we dare not go backstage into the clubhouse or the pits.

A few hours after I typed the words you’ve just read I experienced one of those coincidences that can seem like no big deal except to the person who experienced what, for them, feels like a definite “God-incidence.”

My wife and I were listening to the first album by Christian rockers Jars Of Clay, released in 1995. I usually turn the CD player off after the final track, “Blind.” This time, as Kim and I played backgammon and talked, I left the CD player on. Suddenly, from the silence, came music we’d never heard before—a “hidden song” not listed on the CD, followed by a 20-plus minute recording of the studio session where string and woodwind instruments were added to “Blind.” We could hear conversations in the studio. It was like being there with the band as the album was being recorded.

After 22 years of listening to the CD without hearing any of those voices and notes, we unexpectedly found ourselves behind a curtain that had been open and waiting for us all the time. The moment uncannily illustrated what I’d been writing about just a few hours earlier. It was impossible not to feel the message of grace.

God’s love is waiting for us in the back stage of our heart, which is sometimes the hardest place to find. The door is open. Jesus is holding it wide. No barriers remain, but ourselves.

The song is never over.

Unless we refuse to sing.

We are not April fools. The joke is not on us.

We can wait with Lazarus in Bethany.

In faith.

With certainty.

Jesus is coming.

Jesus is on the way.

Look into the distance and see the dust rising from the road, punctuating his approach on foot.

His footsteps are a drumbeat of purpose.

We didn’t have to strain to hear Martha and Mary dictating their message to Jesus. “Lord, they whom you love are dead,” they had told him.

They were talking about us.

You and me.

We’ve been in the “tomb” four days.

Mary and Martha have given up hope.

Their hope has been left for dead.

Martha runs to meet Jesus.

“Lord, if you had been here,” we hear her tell him, “my brothers would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

We look at each other.

You and me together in this “tomb.”

Our eyes meet.

Our hearts know the answer.

Martha is right.

Now, Mary joins her, kneeling at the feet of Jesus.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brothers would not have died,” she tells him, speaking of you and me, together in this tomb, knowing both Mary and Martha are correct.

But Jesus is here now. And with Jesus it is never too late.

“Where have you laid them?” Jesus asks, wondering where he will find us, you and me together in this “tomb.”

Jesus is deeply moved. He weeps. The tears roll down his cheeks.

Now he stands there, just outside our “tomb.”

Remove the stone, Jesus tells them. The stone that seals us in this “tomb.”

We don’t just see the stone being removed—we feel it. The lifting of the weight that was so ponderous, the burden we could not bear, the mountain-high stone that held us prisoner in this “tomb.”

Jesus now calls us. “Come out,” he cries.

We move into the light of his presence, the light of his love.

“Unbind them,” Jesus says, speaking of you and me, “and let them go.”
We are, in that moment, resurrected. You and me. Freed from this “tomb” and able to rise back into the fulness of our lives.

That is the promise that Jesus offers to everyone.

There are moments in all of our lifetimes when we feel “entombed” by a deep wound or sorrow, by fear or anxiety, or a dream that has come undone. There are so many “tombs” of loss in our lives and the exit often feels sealed by a heavy stone that we cannot move.

But the voice of Jesus in our heart is never as far away as we think. We will feel it one day—maybe today—telling us to leave the tomb behind.

In the quiet of our soul we may hear him speaking these words:

“Leave now.
“It’s time to go.”

“Bombers Take Off From Golgotha”

The last shade of something

stalks the rim of night,

barely touching the tops of things,

sniffing the moonlight for food.

The stars are surrounded by burnt tea

and there is drinking.

Darkness stalks past the ruins,

spreading like damson

toward the crusty edge.

One by one the constellations are unborn

and the Milky Way becomes a beautiful scar.

From the jungle comes the sound of drumming

and the moon is swallowed by clouds

that look like an exploded letter bomb to God.

There are subtle chantings

that seem to be, or not.

People rub their ears

and graze further toward the edge of something.

Some prey is taken

and the night moves on.

—By Ken Woodley

There was nothing else left after the sun set on Good Friday.

The sky had become the roof of a cave.

The sky sometimes does.

Or appears to.

When bombers take off from Golgotha in our own lives we are desperately challenged. Two choices await our decision. We can sit down and give up, believing there is nothing beyond the cave. Or we can stand up, gather our crayons, and color stars and a moon on the cold hard stone, believing the sun will surely rise.

As it will.

In our hearts first.

And then the sky.

From blindness to sight. In a flash of light.

Blind from birth, your world of darkness dissolves into amazing colors.

Previously, the entire world had been in your imagination—the way everything looked—fed only by what your sense of touch told you about how they might appear if you could only see them.

We can close our eyes and touch a lamp or a chair or another human being and understand their appearance—but only because we have the memory of them in our minds. Someone blind from birth would have nothing at all to go on.

So imagine how the man felt in the Gospel of John after receiving his sight from Jesus. My imagination can’t come close to appreciating the man’s astonishing experience.

Jesus had been walking down a road when he saw the man and declared “I am the light of the world.” Then Jesus spat on the ground and made mud with his saliva. He spread the mud on the man’s unseeing eyes and told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam.

Ironically, this man is able to see but many of those around him suddenly suffer from a kind of blindness. The man who was once blind can see them but they cannot see him.

“The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’” the Gospel of John tells us. “Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’”

The once-blind man insists, “I am the man” but some people simply refuse to believe him.

There is an old saying that applies to these doubters: No one is as a blind as those who refuse to see.

Jesus has worked a miracle but some people simply refuse to see it.

That got me thinking about life and my own experiences in this world. It struck me with sudden forcefulness that we, too, are sometimes blind to a miracle that Jesus or God has worked in our own lives.

And what struck me most forcefully was the realization that this blindness doesn’t always come from disbelief. Most of the time, in fact, this form of blindness comes from the fact that we have become too familiar with a miracle. We have lived with it for so long that it no longer strikes us as miraculous. We take it for granted. Like our spouse, for example. Choosing to live with someone, for better or worse, for a lifetime—and then following through with it—is not un-miraculous.

I imagine that within a handful of years, the man in the Gospel of John also came to take his sight for granted. Not intentionally. He wasn’t ungrateful for the miracle that Jesus had worked in his life. Through the years, every day he woke up and saw he sun rise made that new dawn seem gradually less and less miraculous. Every color emerging from the darkness of night was so familiar to him.

The same thing can happen when Jesus leads us through and out of one of life’s deep, wounding pains. It seems miraculous at first but in time we take the gentle scar for granted. Or, worse, we grump about the scar, forgetting how the wound, itself, felt.

Every now and then it’s a good idea to close our eyes and remind ourselves of a miracle worked in our own lives. Then, keeping our eyes shut, give thoughtful, meditative thanks for that miracle. We might imagine Jesus by our side. We might hear him spit on the ground, and then sense him kneeling beside us, making mud with his saliva.

We might feel his touch upon our closed eyes, the mud warmed by his caring hands.

Then, when we next open our eyes—with Jesus as the light of our world—we might see the miracles in our life more clearly.

That includes the reflection in your mirror.