One cannot overemphasize how significant the answer to this question is for the Christian. As Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor. 15:13-19)

For Paul, it does not matter how much comfort or meaning one may find in religion. If Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, then the Christian life is one of pure futility that ends with a whimper in our own deaths.

Thus, for the Christian and the inquirer into Christianity alike, the veracity of the resurrection must be seriously investigated and contemplated. Having said that, however, it is not my intention here to try to prove the historicity of the resurrection. Others have laid out the evidence in favor of it. Of course, strong as I think the evidence is, it can never fully close the case on the veracity of the resurrection. There is good reason to think that Jesus rose from the dead, but it takes more (not less) than the exercise of our reason to actually believe that he did. No one has ever become a Christian on the basis of their intellect alone. To become a Christian—to believe in Jesus—requires all of your being.

To this end, then, I want to answer the following questions: If Jesus really did rise from the dead, what does that mean? What does it mean for me? For you? For the world?

In short, it means that none of us are complete. You, me, this world; none of us are in our final forms.

This pain, this heartache, this suffering, our experiences of the incomprehensible evils of this world are validated. We are still in the pangs of labor. This is as true of the evil within us as it is of the evil without us. The Christian term ‘sin’ applies to both, and to both, Jesus’ resurrection says this current state we find ourselves in is not the end.

We are not yet as we shall be.

Jesus’ resurrection also means that one day we—me, you, this world—will be complete, whole, healed, perfected. It means that in the incomprehensibility of this world there is something even more incomprehensible: hope. Hope for a future not outside of death, pain, or suffering, but through it. Hope for a future in which we ourselves are rid of the evil thoughts, desires, and actions that ever plague us.

Jesus did not avoid death. To rise, he needed first to die. And when he rose, the scars in his hands, his feet, and his side had not disappeared. The evil and suffering he had endured was not made light of or dismissed; it was transfigured and added to his glory.

This, writes Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, is the great hope of the Christian faith. Jesus is the first fruits of resurrection. Just as he rose so too shall we, and therefore our work and lives here and now are not in vain. They will be carried on and transfigured in some way that we cannot now comprehend—just as we cannot truly comprehend how a small seed, when once it has been buried, becomes a great beech tree.

Our lives and this world are headed somewhere. That is what Jesus’ resurrection means. We cannot understand that “somewhere,” but we know this much: it entails us and this world being fully united to God. And because he is the source of life, that means we can look froward to a fullness of life that we cannot yet even imagine.

But what then now? How do we live authentically in this present moment, knowing that we are not yet complete? Knowing we do not yet enjoy the fullness of life?

Jesus offers us not only the guarantee of this future fullness of life but a taste of it now in himself.

He says to us, to you and to me, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood.” Unless you do these things, “you have no life in you.” (John 6:53) This metaphor is meant to shock us. By eating his flesh and drinking his blood, Jesus means not that we should literally eat him but that we must spiritually feed upon him, that is, believe in him and his work. But this metaphor entails more than mere intellectual assent to the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection on our behalf. It means staking our entire lives on him and only him. This involves, in part, a continual turning away from our own evil towards the healing work of Jesus. Unless we do this, there is no life in us.

Because Jesus as God is the very source of life, it is simply a law of reality that we cannot taste the fullness of life apart from him. In fact, none of us, whether we believe in him or not, can take a breath without him upholding our very existence.

Jesus—and by extension Christianity—is, by nature, exclusive. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he has proven that life can only come through him. No other religion, as comforting, profound, or complex as it is, can lead to the fullness of life that Jesus offers. Mere spirituality or a sense of a vague connection to God—or even more profound experiences of the divine—can only lead us on the path to true life in relationship with Jesus.

A young girl lay under the great trees with her eyes closed. She was a rather small figure, her skin was coppery in color, like all the Smythians of Venus, and her hair was long and dark. There was the sound of feet slipping and sliding over the wet rocks, and the girl opened her eyes. She watched as a boy approached. He too was a Smythian, one of the few males left of their race, and he was tall and lithe.

He approached her and bowed.

“You’ve found me,” she said.

He inclined his head.

“What happens now?”

He extended his hand, and she took it, allowing herself to be lifted up from the ground. The beeches rustled around them as if in expectation.

“Grey,” the boy said. His voice was warm and deep like honey.

She laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

“I have long dreamt of you.”

“And you are Dusty. But it is not a romantic name.”

“It is only my first name.”

“And you think I am the one to give you a new one?”

“Can you not feel that we were meant for each other?”

The girl cocked her head and stared into the depths of his eyes. “Perhaps.”

“Then dance with me, and you will feel what I have seen.”

He began to lead her in a waltz around the lake, but she soon protested.

“Let us not be so serious!” She cried. “If we are to dance, then let us dance!” And with a laugh and a smile, she pulled him along into a rousing polka. They ran and leapt and danced ‘round the lake while the moon rose and set again, and the dawn began to break.

Then they lay side by side, with their feet touching the water, watching the sun rise high above them. The birds sang cheerily in the branches overhead, and deer meandered by, grazing happily on the tall, green grasses of the valley.

“Well?” Dusty said at last.

Rose rolled over and took a good, hard look at his face. It was quite young still, but there was something of the beginning of wisdom in it, and if rather serious, it was certainly kind. Rose looked out at the water.

“Do we go now?”

“There is nothing quite like the rising of the sun for new life.”

Rose stood, and so did Dusty. They took each other’s hands and waded into the water. Before long, it closed over them, and they disappeared. Where they had been was one large copper chrysalis, like that of a caterpillar. It shimmered in the morning sun and pulsed with a gentle rhythm. And there it remained for days on end, as the sun rose and set, and rose again, and as the animals lived and died, and their children walked where once they had trod.

And then, one day, the chrysalis was gone, dissolved back into the water. And there, shining like the sun, were two creatures shrouded in light. They stepped on the water, and it upheld their feet. When they came to the shore, the animals crowded around them in wonder.

It was the same Dusty and Rose, but yet they were not the same. They were transfigured. Great white wings spread from their backs, and they stood nearly as tall as the old beech trees they had once sat under.

“Everything looks so different,” said the woman who had once been Grey. And the man who had once been Dusty agreed.

You see, there is something quite special about the courting of the Smythians. When born, they see the world in black and white. But when reborn with their mate by their side, their eyes are opened to a world of color.

“And so you are not Dusty,” said the woman.

“And neither are you Grey.”

“You are Jasper.”

“And you are Rose.”

I have spent my entire life in conservative, evangelical, complementarian church spaces. I have never been in a church with a female pastor. I’ve never even seen a woman preach to men. I’ve been in Anglican churches where women can be ordained to the diaconate (and in a few churches where women can even be ordained to the priesthood), but I’ve never actually been a member of a church where a woman has been a deacon or priest.

As usual, I will structure this essay according to my own church journey. In this case, however, the practices surrounding gendered leadership are mostly the same across denominational lines.

My SBC Upbringing

I grew up in a SBC church whose lead pastor came from Adrian Rogers’ (one of the leaders of the conservative takeover of the SBC) church, so it is perhaps no surprise that complementarian structures were important.

In this church, women served in leadership in women’s and children’s ministries, but nowhere else. Women could be small group leaders and assistants or “associates” in youth ministry, but never directors (and certainly not pastors) there. My youth pastor, a giant among men (literally and figuratively), championed me in leadership roles in our youth group and fought to let me “speak” (in reality, preach) to fellow high school and middle school students, but he faced a significant amount of pushback for this. I have a friend who currently works in that youth group who continues to be denied equal roles to the equally young male directors of middle and high school. They are directors, but she is an associate, even though she’s the only one with a seminary degree.

On Sundays, women are virtually nonexistent in the leadership of the service (but then very few laypeople are represented in general). Women do participate in singing/playing instruments, as that does seem to be across the board the one place where, for some reason, female leadership is totally okay. Of course, women are not the leader during worship. Male pastors pray, preach, baptize, and even give announcements. (However, they have recently started having the women’s director give some of the announcements.) During the response time (think of an altar call without any pressure), one woman and two-three men stand at the front to pray with anyone who comes up. For a long time, there were no women at the front, until that same women’s director pointed out how many women may not feel comfortable approaching a man with sensitive issues.

When I went to similar churches in college, I saw the same things. Women could be women’s and children’s directors (never pastors, even if they did the same things as pastors), but they could not serve in leadership anywhere else, even in youth groups. I participated in a Baptist ministry whilst in college, and there, too, I saw the same divide. Though we worked only with middle and high schoolers at churches across the southeast (anyone familiar with DiscipleNow weekends?), I, as a girl, was never allowed to be the weekend speaker, while boys my age with equal or even less theological training were encouraged to speak. (This wasn’t because of our ministry’s own policies so much as it was a sensitivity to the Baptist churches we were working at.)

While I was consistently frustrated that I could not preach to students, I never really chafed against the idea that I couldn’t be a pastor. Complementarianism was all I had ever known; it was the water I swam in, and in this water, female leadership equaled liberalism, heresy, and a complete departure from faithful Christianity. I may have been uneasy in my heart of hearts, but I never really questioned this status quo.

I think, to many men, this doesn’t really seem like a big deal. Not all men have the qualification to be pastors; not all men are called to leadership in the church. The odds are, if you’re a man, you also aren’t a leader. Why is it so hard to be okay with male leadership as a woman? The thing is, seeing only male leadership formed a whole constellation of beliefs for me far behind the simple statement that only men can be leaders or pastors.

Never seeing a woman in leadership—scarcely seeing a woman participating in the service at all—made me begin to internalize the idea that women are less important in the church than men. If I looked at a staff directory, I began to believe that women were made not to be the allies of men but to be their assistants. I wondered to myself if that was how God saw me too. Was I less important to him too? Did he make me only to assist men? Was I valuable to him on my own? Why did he give me gifts and then tell me not to use them? Why on earth did he make me a woman if that meant spending my whole life trying to quench every gift and skill I was given?

I spent years shoving those questions down and trying not to face them. Because if I did, it was too painful. What if I discovered that God really thought I was less valuable than the boy to my left? That thought terrified me.

Of course, people in this church (like every church I’ve been a part of) said that men and women are equally the image bearers of God. But the whole point of these essays has been to show that our practices shape what we actually believe. You can say that women and men are “equal in being, different in roles” all you want, but when the only difference practiced is one of unequal leadership/authority based solely on sex, then that is inequality. When I saw men leading, praying, preaching, baptizing, serving communion, passing the offering plate, guiding worship, etc., while women were relegated to the shadows, I internalized the message that men matter to God and women don’t. Men can be used by God, but women can’t really.

It’s not that women didn’t do any important work. Women’s and children’s ministries are important (although most churches I’ve been a part of don’t actually put that idea into practice either), but they are segments of the whole church. When women are only allowed to exercise their gifts in those places (and mind you, leading children is a different gift than leading adults!), they are still being pushed to the side. Regardless of whether how we do church now is a good way or not, it is true that the whole body is being built up unanimously almost exclusively during Sunday services. If women cannot teach/preach/lead men too, then they cannot use their gifts to serve the whole body.

Such was my experience until the end of college, when I first entered the Anglican Church.

My ACNA Experience

If you’re not in the ACNA, you may not be aware that, at present, the ACNA leaves the question of women in leadership up to individual dioceses. There are no female bishops, but certain dioceses ordain female priests and deacons, others ordain only female deacons, and others don’t ordain women to any offices. This remains a highly contentious issue within the ACNA.

I began my journey in the Diocese of the South, which ordains women to the diaconate, but at the time I attended my specific church, there were no female deacons there. (There have been at other times.) The striking difference to me at this church was that there were more roles for the laity to play in the service. The most visible new role I saw for women was the public reading of Scripture. It may not seem like much, but seeing women read aloud the word of God to the entire congregation began to help me believe again that women could serve God just as well as men, that women too were full image bearers.

In other Anglican churches in other dioceses, I received communion from women, was led by women in communal prayer (and led that communal prayer myself), and heard women read the Gospel (a significant role in ACNA churches reserved for clergy). It is in ACNA churches more than anywhere else that I have seen women lead alongside men.

These experiences began to crack the beliefs about men and women’s roles in the church that I had thus far internalized. Was it actually true, I began to wonder, that only men could lead, preach, pray, read? What if the story I had been told about women and men was wrong? What if there was another way?

My PCA Experience

For the last two years, I’ve attended a PCA church. As I was beginning to finally research the many questions surrounding the roles of men and women in the church, the elders of my church were working on their own position paper on women in ministry. As with the leaders of all the churches I’ve mentioned in this post, I have the utmost respect for them, but I was not the only person disappointed by their one-sided research, heavy restrictions, and overall inconsistent approach in determining what women can and cannot do in our church.

The primary restrictions on women related to teaching. Women could not be one of the primary teachers of our Sunday school classes, though they could be invited to teach a one-off class if it was related to their own personal experience of if they had some unique level of expertise in the subject. (I, for example, was very kindly invited to speak on the Christian Imagination in one course.)

During Sunday services, women could sing or play an instrument, or give announcements, but they did not lead any parts of the service. It goes without saying that women did not preach, but they also could not pray publicly or read Scripture. (Nor, and this is significant, could any laity participate in these roles, which I personally find a larger issue with the PCA than if they were only limiting women from these roles.) In the last few months, they have started allowing women to pass the offering plate, but for most of my time at the church, even this was not done.

For the most part, I honestly didn’t think too much about not seeing women in these roles. It did seem odd to me that laity couldn’t lead the prayers of the church or read Scripture aloud, since I had seen laity doing these things in various Anglican churches, but it was the clergy/laity divide more than the men/women divide that stuck out to me. However, a friend of mine told me recently that when her relative had visited our church, she asked, “Where are the women? Are there many women in your church?”

There are many women in our church, but when you only attend a Sunday service, they are largely invisible. Yes, they are there in the lobby and in the pews, but they aren’t actively doing anything or participating in leading the service. That question stuck with me, and when I saw the first few women passing the offering plate weeks later, I felt as if I had been struck. It was something so small, but seeing women participate at all in the service felt so…natural. And it made everything else feel unnatural.

My friend and I talked with each other about the difference seeing women participate in the service made for us, which made me wonder how other women (and men) were being shaped by practices of male-only leadership. I asked a friend what he thought of it, and he quite honestly replied that he had never reflected about it at all. This, I think, is significant. It took me a very long time to question male-only leadership, even though I am a woman who has felt called to teach, and even though it was eating away at me inside for years. Why should a man, who is not in any way knowingly affected by this, question it? It is, no doubt, affecting men’s beliefs just as it is affecting women’s, but unless a man has a wife, daughter, sister, or close friend who is called to teach or preach, he has no reason to question the beliefs or the practices behind those beliefs. And given that only men are in formal leadership, that makes any sort of change remarkably difficult.

This is not to say that men are not open to making changes once these things have been brought to their attention. The leaders of the church I went to in high school have been quite open to include women more often in Sunday services as the director of the women’s ministry has brought things to their attention. Yes, they still hold to a complementarian view of women’s roles in the church, but they have at least begun to include women more within those boundaries. I rejoice in this. The pastors of my PCA church have been open to talking through these issues with me, and have honestly listened to what I have to share instead of writing me off. I rejoice in this too. And yet, the church only even decided to look into the question in the first place because a woman asked about it (and no women were involved in the research, discussion, writing, or publishing of the paper). This all adds to my point that if the room is full only of men, they will almost never think to intentionally include women.

Men and women, but women especially, are harmed by this neglect. We all miss out on learning from what gifted women have to share, but women in particular miss out on the sort of pastoral care that comes from knowing and understanding them.

Conclusion

Last month, when I was back in an Anglican Church in South Carolina, I saw women process down the aisle with men. I heard women read Scripture alongside men. I heard a woman lead the prayers of the people and listened as she read the Gospel over us. None of it felt like some kind of performance for equality or the rights of women. After all, no one has a right to lead God’s people. It is a call by Christ to serve his body.

Seeing women fully participating in that call just felt right. It felt like a taste of the kingdom of God here and now, not because women are more significant than men, not because seeing myself represented matters, but because men and women were made to image God and fulfill the work he has given us to do together. I truly think there is nothing more beautiful than different people—men and women, in this case—serving at the altar together. I hope to be a part of churches that foster this environment, and I hope that in these days of tension and debate, churches will not continue to restrict women but will instead encourage them to flourish in the serving of God alongside men, hand in hand.

One Thursday morning, Mrs. Dogwood woke, as usual, at five o’clock. Mr. Dogwood, as usual, was still snoring over on his side of the bed. Mrs. Dogwood got out of bed slowly, slipping her feet into the soft, brown slippers lined up perfectly next to her bed, and wrapping her tattered white robe from some Mother’s Day long ago around her shoulders. She quietly padded off to the kitchen to start the coffee and then brushed her teeth and did her hair.

By the time Mrs. Dogwood was finished with her toilet, the coffee was ready. Mrs. Dogwood took in the rich smell with a long, deep sigh, and opened the cabinet door. The coffee mug was not there.

There were, actually, many coffee mugs in the cabinet: tall ones and short ones, wide ones and narrow ones, some acquired on trips (these were quite old), and others given to the Dogwoods by various friends and family members. But the mug was not there. Its special spot on the far left side of the upper shelf was empty.

There was, in Mrs. Dogwood’s mind, only one explanation. She ground her teeth and marched back into the bedroom where Mr. Dogwood was still snoring.

“Richard,” she said.

He snored.

“Richard,” she said again, this time with a sharp edge to her voice.

Still, he snored.

“Richard!”

The snoring stopped abruptly, and Mr. Dogwood, snorting, spluttering, and in general acting as if he had been not asleep but dead, finally opened his eyes and sat up.

“Whatever is the matter, woman?”

“What did you do with the coffee mug?”

“Today is Thursday.”

“You needn’t tell me what day it is. What did you do with the coffee mug?”

“Clearly your memory is finally gone. Today is your day for the mug.”

Mrs. Dogwood was rather tempted to throw a slipper at Mr. Dogwood.

“I can’t use the mug if I don’t know where it is.”

“On the left side of the upper shelf,” Mr. Dogwood replied quickly. Having asked this question himself many times over the years, he had at last memorized it and was rather proud now to show off his knowledge of the proper whereabouts of said mug.

“The. Spot. Is. Empty. You. Had. The mug. Last. Where is it?”

There were times, before now, that Mr. Dogwood had forgotten to wash the mug after using it. This would, of course, be the most rational explanation as to why the mug was not in the spot. But women, as Mr. Dogwood so often reminded himself, could not be counted on to be rational.

“Have you checked the sink?” He asked in a rather smug manner.

Mrs. Dogwood had, in her haste, forgotten to check the sink. She turned on her heel and marched out of the bedroom, followed by Boethius, who, though rather old and deaf, had at last been woken up by the conversation and was now eager to get his breakfast.

The mug was not in the sink, or on the drying rack, or even in the dishwasher. Mrs. Dogwood fed Boethius, shaking his food rather violently into his dish, before stomping back into the bedroom. Mr. Dogwood, hearing his wife coming, stuck his head out of the bathroom and, though a mouthful of toothpaste, said, “Found the mug, did you?”

“You blithering fool. You must have lost it.”

Mr. Dogwood spat out his toothpaste. “I didn’t lose it. In fact, I remember now that I left it on the drying rack. I don’t suppose you looked there?”

“It’s not there, and it’s not in the dishwasher either. It’s gone.”

“Well I don’t see how you can blame me. When my tenure ended last night, it was on the drying rack. I even saw it before I went to bed.”

“How lucky that you just now remember that.”

“The memory wasn’t of any use to me before,” grumbled Mr. Dogwood. He pushed past Mrs. Dogwood and poured himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

He sat, in perfect repose, in his favorite armchair, with his coffee in one hand, and his morning word puzzle in the other. He squinted through the spectacles on the edge of his nose and began muttering to himself.

Mrs. Dogwood, still stumping and stamping around, planted herself in front of her husband and stared at him. He didn’t look up. She cleared her throat. He set down his coffee, picked up a pen, and made a note in his puzzle book. Mrs. Dogwood’s stare was now noticeably a glare. Still, Mr. Dogwood remained intent on his puzzle.

Presently, Boethius dragged himself over and plopped down at his mistress’s feet. His tail thumped the floor, but no one paid him any heed. Mrs. Dogwood began to tap her foot.

At long last, after what must have been a good half hour, Mr. Dogwood set down his empty coffee mug, lowered his puzzle, and peered over the top of his spectacles at his wife.

“What do you want?” He asked.

“We need to find the mug.”

“I don’t see how it’s any of my responsibility. It went missing on your day.”

“If we don’t find it today, it won’t be there for you to enjoy tomorrow.”

Mr. Dogwood pondered this fact. The woman had a point. Gripping the recliner’s armrests tightly, he stood up. Then he extended his hand.

“Let’s solve this mystery,” he said.

Mrs. Dogwood took his hand, and they got to work.

They sat down together at the dining room table. Mrs. Dogwood pulled out an old, yellow legal pad, and Mr. Dogwood produced a pen from his pocket.

“Don’t you think we’d better use a pencil?” Mrs. Dogwood asked.

“Why?”

“In case we need to erase anything.”

“Just scratch it out.”

“That’s messy.”

Mr. Dogwood rolled his eyes. Nevertheless, he got back up, hobbled over to the kitchen, searched through an entire drawer of mostly broken pencils until he found one with a usable point, and then returned.

Mrs. Dogwood looked at the pencil and sniffed. But she did not reject it.

“We had better begin with a timeline,” she said.

“What about suspects,” Mr. Dogwood interjected. “Poirot always start with suspects.”

“Miss Marple doesn’t,” retorted Mrs. Dogwood.

As Mr. Dogwood couldn’t actually think of any suspects, they started with the timeline.

May 15th. 2:00 p.m.

Richard uses mug for his afternoon coffee.

May 15th. 3:00 p.m.

Richard washes mug in the sink and leaves it to dry on the rack.

May 16th 5:30 am.

Marianne discovers that the mug is missing.

Neither of them could recall if they had seen the mug on the counter in the many hours

between when Mr. Dogwood had left the mug on the rack and Mrs. Dogwood had discovered it missing.

Not having found much of any help from their timeline, they decided to turn to suspects. Mrs. Dogwood wrote,

Richard Dogwood

Marianne Dogwood

and then stopped.

“I’ve seen Francis eyeing the mug before,” said Mr. Dogwood. Mrs. Dogwood doubted that their neighbor much cared for such a faded old mug, but she added her name anyways:

Francis Lee

“Perhaps one of the local gangs stole it for a ransom,” Mr. Dogwood said gruffly.

“In Lexington?”

Mr. Dogwood shrugged. “Those boys down the street are mighty mischievous.”

The said boys were actually a group of boys and girls, all between the ages of five and nine, who played in the cul-de-sac at the end of the street.

Mrs. Dogwood sighed, but, if only for the sake of having a properly lengthy suspect list, she added their names too:

Miller Jones

Evelyn Lowell

Addie Davis

James Parker

Jonathan Smith

“Do any of these people have any sort of motive?” Mrs. Dogwood asked.

Mr. Dogwood thought long and hard, and then shook his head.

“The entire thing is nonsensical. Mugs don’t just up and disappear.” He rubbed his balding head and thought hard. “Is there anything we might be missing?”

Mrs. Dogwood cast her mind back over the previous day. Had she missed anything in that gap?

Next door, the neighbor started her lawnmower. Mrs. Dogwood sighed. It was now too loud to even think straight. She stood up and took her empty coffee mug to the sink. Then she remembered.

“Richard!” She spun around.

“Hmm?”

“Yesterday was Wednesday.”

“I am aware of that fact.”

“Luke always mows the lawn on Wednesday.”

“So?”

“What if he took the coffee mug?”

“What would he want with the coffee mug?”

“Surely nothing more than those ‘mischievous boys down the street.’”

Mr. Dogwood scowled. “We crossed those off, so we might as well cross him off too.”

“But,” Mrs. Dogwood was now getting excited, “Luke always comes inside for a lemonade after mowing.”

“He certainly wouldn’t use a mug for lemonade.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Teenage boys are not known for their propriety.”

Mr. Dogwood assented to this fact with a brief muttered tirade about “young people these days.”

“The question is,” Mrs. Dogwood continued, “where would he have left the mug?”

“Probably right outside on the driveway! Young people never think to clean up after themselves.” Mr. Dogwood heaved himself out of his chair and shuffled out the front door to take a look around.

After a few minutes, he came back inside and plopped himself down on his chair again.

“Well?” Mrs. Dogwood asked.

“Not there.”

But Mrs. Dogwood was not yet ready to give up on her theory. Luke was remarkably absent-minded. It would be just like him to thoughtlessly leave the mug outside. She decided to search the grounds herself, but, alas, the mug was not to be found in either the front or backyard. Just as she was resigning herself to never taking another sip of coffee from the best of mugs, she noticed something odd poking out of the side of Boethius’ bed.

Hobbling over to the large doggy bed in the corner of the room, she bent over and saw it. The mug was there, safe and sound, and covered in dog slobber. Mrs. Dogwood gingerly lifted the mug and carried it back into the kitchen. The inside of the mug was sticky and still smelled of lemonade.

With a triumphant grin on her face, Mrs. Dogwood presented the mug to Mr. Dogwood.

“Why, you’ve found it!” His entire body relaxed in relief.

Mrs. Dogwood nodded.

“Where?”

“Boethius’s bed. Smell it.”

Mr. Dogwood smelled the cup and shook his head.

“So that fool of a boy took it after all. But why was it in Boethius’s bed?”

Husband and wife turned to look at their dog, who was contentedly curled up by the fireplace. When he noticed them looking at him, he opened his eyes and began thumping his tail.

Mr. Dogwood smiled. “Come here, boy.”

Boethius shambled over, his tail still wagging. Mr. Dogwood scratched him behind the ears, and Boethius melted into his touch.

“Did you find Mommy and Daddy’s mug?” Mr. Dogwood asked the dog, in what could best be described as a baby voice. “Good boy.” He patted his head, and Boethius whined happily.

“That solves the second half of the mystery,” Mr. Dogwood said to his wife. “Boethius found the mug outside and brought it into his bed because it reminded him of us.”

Mrs. Dogwood gave Boethius a good rub and then went to Clean the mug out for her afternoon coffee. Mr. Dogwood returned to his puzzles, and the day went on.

When night came, Mrs. Dogwood put the mug back in its spot on the shelf. Mr. Dogwood shut the cabinet door, and together the Dogwoods went to bed.

I must admit up front that, unlike in the case of baptism, I have strong feelings about what Holy Communion is and generally how it ought to be practiced. This comes in part from my first experiences of Communion in the Anglican Church, but it is largely the result of my rather extensive theological study of Communion, focusing on how it has historically been understood and practiced by the church.

Still, this piece is a reflection more than it is an argument, and what argumentative elements it does contain are focused on orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy. As with my essay on baptism, I will roughly follow my own ecclesial journey, although, as every church tends to do things slightly differently, even when within the same tradition, I will include more on even the slightest differences between churches’ practices. The goal here is to think about how what we do in and around Communion, including what we say, how we take the elements, who gives the elements, etc. shapes what we believe about it.

Baptist Memorialism

As I’ve written about before, I was raised in a SBC church and stayed in Baptist circles until the end of college. While the various churches I went to did things slightly differently, they were similar enough that I can safely put them in the same category.

The church I attended for most of my childhood rarely celebrated the Lord’s Supper. It was done maybe four times a year. On the occasions that it was administered, it was taken extremely seriously. What always stuck out the most to me was our pastor’s warning against partaking of the meal incorrectly. If you had any unconfessed sin or any unresolved conflict with a fellow Christian, those things needed to be dealt with or you should not partake. Non-Christians, of course, were instructed to let the elements pass by. Their role, as our pastor described it, was that of witnesses to the proclamation of Christ’s death. Once these instructions were given, a tray of grape juice and crackers was passed down the aisles (like the offering), and then everyone held the elements while the pastor recited, “On the night that Jesus was betrayed, etc.” Together, we ate the cracker and drank the juice. Soft piano music played as we all had time to continue in silent reflection and prayer.

Other churches I attended similarly rarely celebrated the Lord’s Supper but emphasized taking it correctly when they did (almost to the point of causing an unnecessary amount of anxiety). At one church I attended, people ate and drank individually whenever they felt it was the right time while music played (Even then, I was NOT a fan).

Overall, my experience made me believe a few things:

1. The Lord’s Supper is serious. Intense soul-searching is required before partaking. If I’m honest, I still felt uncertain afterwards, wondering if maybe I wasn’t actually right with everyone. There was a real element of fear each time that I was in fact drinking judgment upon myself.

2. Though serious, the Lord’s Supper isn’t really important for normal Christian life. Only partaking of the Lord’s Supper a few times a year maybe made it feel more “special,” but it certainly didn’t make me believe that it was necessary for my spiritual growth and nourishment as a Christian.

3. The Lord’s Supper is communal. Taking the elements in unison at my home church taught me that this is a meal that we participate in together. When other churches had a “choose your own adventure” style of partaking, I was put off. I am still thankful for this early catechizing!

4. The Lord’s Supper is about proclaiming Christ’s death. And that’s it. I did not believe that Christ was in any way even spiritually present in the elements or in our consuming of them. I didn’t believe that partaking of the Lord’s Supper would spiritually nourish me. If anything, I thought it was a performance for outsiders that they might be moved by our proclamation.

Random Nondenominational Horror

This was a random church I went to one time, and their approach to Communion was so awful that I have to include it, if only so that everyone else who reads this can be amazed that such practices are actually happening. At this random church’s young adults service (a warning sign on its own), they distributed the little single-container juice and cracker combos to everyone, and then the pastor said, “You can partake of this whenever you feel that it would be most special to you. This is between you and God. You can do it here and now, or you can wait, take it home, and do it there.” If I’d already had the grape juice in my mouth, I would have spit it out. I was utterly horrified. Did this pastor truly just say you could take your elements to-go and have “Communion” on your own whenever you felt the most spiritual?

According to this church, the Lord’s Supper is:

1. About me and how I feel.

2. Something personal and private, not communal.

3. Something I can decide to partake of on my own and by myself.

A shiver still runs down my spine when I think about how atrocious this practice and the ensuing theology was.

Presbyterian Spiritual Presence

I’ve only been to a few Presbyterian churches, and I’ve only had Communion at PCA churches, so I’ll use my current church as my Presbyterian example. We only have Communion once a month, but I know I’m far from the only one who wishes we did it more frequently. There seems to be a debate in a number of churches between those who, like me, think we ought to do Communion weekly because we recognize it as a great spiritual nourishment (why then wouldn’t you want to have it as often as possible?) and those who think once a month or even less is better, because they feel that only by doing it rarely does it maintain some kind of specialness. I’ve yet to puzzle out why people think Communion ought to have this aura of specialness. I don’t refrain from eating on a daily basis to make meals more special. Neither do I restrict myself from the presence of my husband to make spending time with him more special. Nourishment just doesn’t get less special by limiting how often you partake of it. Why fast when you can feast?

When our church does Communion, one of our pastors briefly describes what this meal is, emphasizing that Christ meets us in it and spiritually nourishes us. He then says, “On the night when he was betrayed…” Communion here is a table open for all baptized Christians. As everyone comes forward in lines to receive the elements, non-Christians are encouraged to sit and reflect and are invited to speak to one of the pastors afterwards. Elders fan out across the room, holding trays with real bread (gluten-free) and wine/grape juice. People come down in lines to take the elements and then return to their seats. The elder that I always receive from says to me, “Sophie, the body and blood of Christ, given for you.” (Or something to that effect.) Once everyone is seated with the elements, we all partake together.

Here are a few things I believe from our church’s practice:

1. Communion is a feast. It provides real spiritual nourishment.

2. In Communion, we come into the presence of Christ in a real way.

3. Because of points 1 and 2, Communion is important.

4. Because the elder says my name, I believe that Christ’s body and blood truly is for me in a personal manner. I know it’s not always possible for the person handing out the elements to say the recipient’s name, but I have found it quite significant when it is done.

5. Everyone’s needs and consciences matter. There is gluten-free bread for those who cannot have wheat. There is grape juice for those who do not drink alcohol. And there is also wine for those who believe drinking wine at Communion is significant (as I do).

6. This meal is for all Christians, and it is only for Christians. At our church, because of how our pastors frame this sacrament and because we all partake of the elements together, I truly believe that Communion is a family feast.

7. Communion is something only ordained Elders can serve. In many ways, this may not seem all that significant, but I’m beginning now to reflect on what this means for a church. What do the people giving us Communion say about this meal and the Church? Is it significant if only ordained ministers or elders give it out? Arguments in favor of such an approach tend to focus on authority, who has it, and who doesn’t. Is it significant if I see men and women giving out Communion together, instead of only men? I’m starting to think it is. I’m starting to believe that having the whole Body involved in Communion—ordained and lay, male and female, etc.—is something of great importance. But that’s not something I’ve ever witnessed in a Presbyterian church.

I have, overall, loved Communion at my present church. It has nourished me and enriched my life in so many ways, and I am grateful for it.

Anglican Spiritual Presence

I saved my Anglican Holy Communion experience for last, because it has shaped my beliefs and practices more than any other tradition, and it was what first made me fall in love with Communion.

A typical Anglican Sunday service is called Holy Communion. In many ways, the service builds up to Communion, although it is important to recognize that there are two pinnacles in the Holy Communion service: the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of Communion. As good Protestants, Anglicans place a heavy emphasis on the reading and preaching of God’s Word, but they also do a better job than many other Protestants at avoiding the idolization of the sermon.

I’m used to the 2019 BCP’s Renewed Ancient Text version of the Holy Communion service, so that’s what I’ll be referring to throughout this section.

It’s hard to know where in the liturgy to being a discussion of Communion because all of it is necessary, from the opening words of the liturgy, to the reading of the Gospel, to the confession and absolution of sin, and so on. For the sake of brevity, however, I will begin with the prayer of consecration. In this prayer, the celebrant (the presiding priest or bishop) briefly recounts the core Gospel message and then, holding his or her hands over the elements, repeats the words of institution (Take, eat, this is my Body, etc.) Then, together, the congregation recites the core mystery of the faith: “Christ is died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”1

From here, the priest offers up the gifts as a sacrifice of “praise and thanksgiving” and asks God to sanctify the elements and the recipients, so that the elements will be to us the Body and Blood of Christ, and so that we will receive them worthily and come one day into the kingdom of God with all his saints.

Everyone prays the Lord’s Prayer together, and then comes the fraction, which is traditionally when the priest breaks the bread, saying these words, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” to which the people respond, “Therefore let us keep the feast.”2

Still, it is not yet time to eat! The people pray the prayer of humble access, in which we recognize that we are unworthy to feast upon Christ, and so we ask him that we eat and drink so that “our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood.”3

The Agnus Dei is then recited: “Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world; have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world; have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world; grant us your peace.”4

At last, the celebrant lifts the bread and wine and says, “The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.”5

The Communion elements are then distributed to the people with the words: “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven” and “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”6

It is at this point that the practices at various Anglican churches diverge. Some have wafers, while some have real bread. At some churches, everyone drinks from the common cup, while at others, people are encouraged (or at least allowed) to take the wine by intinction; that is, by dipping the bread in the wine and then consuming both at once. Other churches have individual cups. In some places, one stands to receive the elements, in others, one kneels at the altar. Sometimes the priest alone serves the meal; other times deacons or even acolytes assist. If the priest knows your name, they usually say it. At most churches I’ve been to, there are gluten free options, but one diocese I was a part of forbade gluten free wafers. (This was a frustrating issue at my wedding, where we had several family members with Celiac. My husband and I were so incensed at the diocese’s poor argument in favor of this policy that I wrote an entire paper in response to it for my Anglican liturgy class.)

At every church I’ve been to, the communicant (the person receiving the elements) eats and drinks at the front of the church just after receiving the elements and then returns to her seat. Additionally, non-Christians or those who have not yet been baptized are welcomed to come to the front to receive a blessing in lieu of partaking of the elements.

After everyone has partaken of the meal, the congregation closes with the post communion prayer, which thanks God for “feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ” and asks Him to “send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.”7

The priest blesses the people, recesses, and then says, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” to which the people respond, “Thanks be to God.”8

Here’s what I believe about Communion due to my experiences in Anglican churches:

1. Communion is significant in the life of the church and important for the nourishment of the believer. Because Communion happens every week and because it is given so much time and space in the liturgy, I believe that Communion is important and necessary. Without it, church doesn’t even feel like church.

2. Communion is beautiful. The only way to understand this is to experience it for yourself, or at the very least to read the liturgy for yourself.

3. Communion is about proclaiming the Lord’s death and resurrection and looking forward to his return. This is the very mystery we proclaim.

4. I am not worthy to partake of the Lord’s body and blood, and yet he graciously gives of himself to me anyways. This is repeated again and again throughout the prayers.

5. Christ is truly spiritually present in Communion. His body and blood nourish, sustain, and sanctify me.

6. Communion is a corporate act and an individual one. We hear the same liturgy together, pray the same prayers together, and yet the priest looks each person in the eye and says to them, specifically, that Christ’s body and blood is given to them. To me. To you.

7. Communion is serious. Confession and absolution is an important part of a Holy Communion liturgy and is one of the markers of the shift away from the liturgy of the Word (which convicts us) and into the liturgy of the sacrament. We repeatedly pray that God would give us the grace to rightly partake of the meal.

8. Non-Christians and the unbaptized are not left out. My Anglican liturgy professor made it a point that when we practiced officiating a Communion service, we said something along the lines of, “If you have not been baptized, you too are invited to come forward to receive a blessing.” Instead of being ignored, left out, and told to stay in their seats, the unbaptized are invited to participate by receiving a blessing. It’s wonderful.

There is much more I could say, but to do so would send me deep into the theological weeds, so I will leave off with those eight points from my Anglican experience.

Conclusion

Communion practices vary widely throughout the church, and those practices both reflect and shape what we believe about the Lord’s Supper. My journey has been quite significant, and I truly do believe that the Presbyterian and Anglican beliefs and practices surrounding Communion are far closer to the historic Christian tradition than what most Baptist and Nondenominational churches are practicing today. As I continue to spend more time studying the theology behind the Eucharist, I continue to be moved, delighted, astounded, and overjoyed by the Anglican liturgy. There have been few moments in my life comparable to my partaking of Christ’s body and blood, especially in seasons of great darkness. It truly is a feast.

“This way,” her aunt motioned, as she climbed into a rather worn-out pickup truck. “Don’t mind Hildegard,” she added, as the over-eager dog’s tail thumped against Luna’s legs, nearly knocking her off balance.

Luna climbed into the passenger seat next to her aunt, and Hildegard jumped into the bed of the truck. With a stuttering grind and a few loud bangs, the truck leapt forward, and they were off, winding their way along the island.

“Have a good trip?” Aunt Irene asked.

Luna nodded. “I saw a few seals from the boat.”

“You’ll see better than that here. There’s an orca pod nearby; if you sit on the porch in the mornings you’ll see them pass by.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence, interrupted only by the short excited barks of Hildegard whenever she happened to spot a deer through the trees. At last, they pulled off the main road onto a long gravel driveway. At the end of the driveway was a rather quaint two-story cabin peeking out from between the trees. On the other side of the cabin, Luna could faintly see the Salish Sea, glimmering in the setting sun.

They clambered out of the truck, Luna with her backpack over her shoulder and Aunt Irene pulling her suitcase behind her. Hildegard cleared the truck bed with one swift bound and raced around the house, sniffing the grass and flowers, twirling around in circles, and barking happily.

“Settle down now, Hilda,” Aunt Irene barked in her turn. She pushed open the front door and beckoned Luna in behind her. “Your room’s just up this way,” she said, as she began to climb the narrow ladder that was immediately off to the right. The suitcase clunked behind her, but Aunt Irene seemed to have no difficulty lugging it up.

Luna followed close behind, and they emerged in a small attic loft. The walls and ceiling were painted a deep blue with the constellations of the summer sky glittering down. There was a small bed tucked up against one wall; it was covered in silvery hangings, and there was a round window above the headboard from which the dying light of day peeked in. On the other end of the room was a bookcase with such titles as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, Out of the Silent Planet, and Grimms’ Fairy Tales stacked neatly on its shelves.

Aunt Irene placed Luna’s suitcase on the floor at the foot of her bed and returned down the stairs.

“I’ll let you get settled now,” she said, as she began descending the stairs. “Dinner will be ready in about an hour.”

Luna was left alone. She looked admiringly at the room that was to be hers all summer. It was perfectly cozy; in addition to the bed and bookcase, there was a small, plush loveseat with a lamp next to it for reading, and a dark blue dresser decorated all over with images of the moon. Luna unzipped her suitcase and placed her clothes neatly in the dresser, then she took the few books she had brought with her in her backpack (Phantastes, a collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, and Piranesi) and added them to the shelf, where they looked as if they had always belonged.

Dinner was a quiet—but by no means unpleasant—affair. Luna and Aunt Irene ate grilled salmon and asparagus on the back deck, washing it down with fresh raspberry lemonade. When they were done, Luna helped her aunt clean up the dishes, and then Aunt Irene excused herself for an evening walk along the cliff’s edge.

“There are trails all through the forest and along the cliff’s edge,” she told Luna as she walked out the door. “You may explore any of them at your leisure, only don’t go along the cliff once the sun has set. Feel free to make yourself a cup of tea before bed if you like. I’ll see you in the morning.” Hildegard went with Aunt Irene, and Luna was left alone.

A cup of tea on her first night in this strange new place seemed a very suitable idea to her. She filled the kettle with water and turned on the gas stove with a few clicks. Soon, she was nestled up on her loveseat with a warm cup of peppermint tea in one hand and Phantastes in the other. The moonlight gleamed through the small round window and filled the room with a silvery glow bright enough that Luna did not even need the lamp to read by.

Time passed, and she grew drowsy. Eventually, the book slipped from her fingers and fell to the ground. Her tea, a few sips of it still left, grew cold next to her, and the moon shone brighter than ever.

It was then that Luna heard a strange noise, like a soft, playful singing floating in through the window, which, she now realized, was cracked open. She pushed it open all the way and stuck her head out. There was certainly someone—if not someones—singing, and their song seemed to beckon her to them. She did not hesitate, but swiftly climbed down the ladder and slipped outside through the front door into the night.

The moon shone as bright as day around her, so that she was able to easily follow the path that seemed to lead to the voices. It started out in the woods, but as she walked along it, she noticed that it was going steadily to the left towards the cliff. The trees grew steadily sparser, and it wasn’t long before she could see the sea again. For a moment, she remembered her aunt’s warning not to go near the edge, but the song was intoxicating, and so, in the end, she paid no heed to the instructions and found herself standing on the edge and looking down at the harbor seals playing merrily in the water.

The seals looked up at her and laughed, and she knew then that the song was coming from them, so she leapt into the water. As she plummeted through the icy depths, the water fell away from her, and she found that she was walking on solid ground. It was white, and the whole landscape around her was white, and there was a little old man with a white beard standing in front of her.

“Welcome to Luna,” he said.

“But I’m Luna,” Luna blurted out.

“So you are. Everything here is Luna!” He swept his hand around to gesture as far as the eye could see.

He was not the only other person within view. There were many little people frolicking about, some doing somersaults in the air, others sliding down powdery white mountains on white sleds, and still others cannonballing into a large glistening lake. All of them, from the smallest child, to the oldest little woman with pure white hair, were laughing.

A little girl no taller than Luna’s knee ran up to her and took her hand, and, pulling her along, said, “So you’ve come to play with us! We didn’t know if you would listen to our song, but we’re ever so glad you did!”

It was then that Luna saw little spots forming two dark spectacles around the girl’s eyes. “But, you’re a seal!” Luna blurted out. “I saw you laughing in the water.”

The girl only kept laughing. “Come on!” She cried, as she tugged Luna’s hand harder.

Luna obeyed. How long she played, she did not know, but she was soon clambering up mountains and screaming with her arms lifted high as she raced down on a silver sled, with a crowd of little people laughing and dancing in the air beside her. She swam for hours in the cool, silver water, where the children challenged her to all sorts of merry games. She did flips and leaps and loop-de-loops that she had never before been able to do, and when she climbed out onto the bank, more energized than before, she found that she was completely dry.

It was then that one little boy came up to her, cried “Catch me if you can!”, and darted off toward a large, foreboding mountain. Luna laughed, and, at first, refrained from chasing him. But then—where the sounds of laughter had once been filling her ears with merry glee—all went silent. All the little people—except for the boy running off into the distance—had disappeared.

Luna, suddenly quite alone, began to feel afraid. “Wait!” She cried, and she ran after the boy.

She chased him over the mountain, down through a valley, across a wide, wide lake that she thought would never end, but still he ran on. At last, she began to feel weary, and her legs slowed. The distance between herself and the boy lengthened, and soon he was nothing but a little speck in the distance. And then he was gone, and she was alone.

She sat down and had a good cry, berating herself for not following her aunt’s advice and staying away from the cliff’s edge. She did not know how to get home, in large part because she did not know where she was. It all seemed rather hopeless.

But, after a good long while, she dusted herself off, rose to her feet, and started walking again. She walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. Everything was white and desolate. She could not see that the little people were all still there, some watching her from holes and crevices just below the surface, others snoozing and snoring away. For they had all grown weary of play and were eager to rest, and they did not entirely care if that meant leaving their playmate lost alone (when they were the ones, after all, who had brought her to their land in the first place).

Luna trod on for what must have been many hours. Her eyes were bleary with exhaustion, and she stumbled forward without looking much at where she was going. That was why she did not see the rock jutting out of the ground in front of her. She tripped on it, tumbled down a little slope, and splashed into a small lake below.

The cold water jolted her awake.

She was sitting on the loveseat, her book was on the floor, and the last remnants of her tea had spilled on her lap. The sunlight was peeking in through the round window, and, yawning, she rubbed her eyes. Had all that had happened to her really just been a dream?

She threw her coat on, scrambled down the ladder, and snuck out of the house to peer over the cliff. There were a few harbor seals, playing as usual, in the sea below, and she could nearly have sworn that one of them looked up at her and winked.

I don’t wish to stir the pot too much by jumping into controversial topics, but I feel that I must be frank. Having grown up in complementarian circles, the thought of spiritual motherhood never once crossed my mind. I assumed that any sort of broader leadership positions in the church were reserved for men, and this assumption led to another. We might need spiritual fathers (even if they weren’t called that), but spiritual mothers literally could not exist. For a woman to be a spiritual mother in the church—to men and women—was a thought that I didn’t just reject; it was a thought so impossible that it would never have even crossed my mind.

God is our Father, not Mother, as I was taught, and so, if I did think about it, it didn’t seem like women had anything to offer the church as spiritual mothers, since their motherhood (or potential motherhood) revealed nothing to us about the character of God. I was, however, wrong. Even though God is our Father, and the Bible always uses masculine pronouns for him, God is also metaphorically depicted throughout Scripture as a mother, and this theme has been continued throughout Christian history. More on that later.

I had the first inkling of a change in my thinking when I took a week-long course on eschatology with Judith Wolfe at Regent College. Judith is a brilliant philosophical and systematic theologian, and she brought more than her brilliance to our class; she brought motherhood to it. We, her students, felt—in the best possible way—mothered by her as we learned from her. She was deeply caring and challenging as she taught on a very complex theological topic. I left that class wondering if it was possible to bring motherhood into teaching—and maybe also into ministry—in ways that I had never imagined before. That, however, was the extent of my thoughts on the topic for the time being.

Two years later, I found myself at last beginning the hard work of reading everything I possibly could on the “women in ministry” question. It was a question that had been tormenting my soul for years, but I had always pushed it aside before. Now, just having finished my master’s in theology with the prospect of a summer of being stuck at home pregnant with twins ahead of me, it seemed like the perfect time to begin. I read myriads of books and articles on the topic, but few, if any, seemed concerned with asking what women—precisely as spiritual mothers—might have to offer the church as a whole. Biological motherhood was obviously on my mind at the time, but I was curious how women more generally could be spiritual mothers, as both experience and history have taught me that women who are never physical mothers are often the best of spiritual mothers to those they have neither borne nor raised.

I want to pause here to offer a tentative definition of a spiritual mother. While a spiritual mother certainly can be a physical mother, she does not become a spiritual mother by virtue of being a physical one. That is, not all physical mothers should be spiritual mothers, and not all spiritual mothers are physical mothers. Rather, a spiritual mother is a wise and mature Christian woman who shepherds those in the church as her spiritual daughters and sons. If she happens to be a physical mother, it is likely that her experiences with her children will shape the way in which she spiritually mothers in the church, but being a physical mother is not and never should be some sort of prerequisite for the fruitful service of women in the church. In fact, I want it to be made abundantly clear right at the outset that you do not have to be a wife and mother to have value, meaning, purpose, and leadership in the church.

Jesus himself emphasizes a woman’s discipleship over and above her physical motherhood. When a woman approaches him, saying, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you,” Jesus replies, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” (Luke 11:27-28) If faithfulness to the word of God is greater than Mary’s physical motherhood, how much greater is it than any other physical motherhood?1

In all my research on women in ministry, one podcast episode with Anglican priests Tish Harrison Warren and Jonathan Warren stood out. Tish commented on her role as a formal minister available to women in the churches she had served at, and it made me suddenly realize how much women are pastorally missing out on in most evangelical churches. Though I don’t think she used this particular language, I saw that Tish was serving as a spiritual mother to her congregation, especially to the women, and that was a beautiful thing. (P.S. I highly recommend that podcast.)

One of the issues at stake in the complementarian vs. egalitarian debate is the uniqueness of men and women. Are they interchangeable? Are they not? Do they have specific roles in the church and family? And, if so, what are those roles? One danger of certain streams of egalitarianism is the collapsing of differences between men and women. One serious flaw of complementarianism is the assumption that the primary difference between men and women is one of authority. Tish and Jonathan offer, I think, a better way. Men and women are different, and that is precisely why we need both working together. It’s impossibly hard to spell out exact differences between men and women, largely because there are so many counterexamples to any generalizations, but I am growing ever more confident that all of us—women and men both—need spiritual mothers in addition to spiritual fathers.

For most of the rest of this essay, then, I want to make a theological case for spiritual mothers. There are obvious limitations to this study, and I know more work could be (and probably has been) done on a historical case for spiritual mothers, but I do think that what I have compiled can at least serve as a good starting point. I’ll start with looking at Scripture and then move to a couple of theological works from Christian history, concluding with a few reflections on what spiritual mothers could offer us in the church today.

God as Mother in Scripture

I mentioned earlier that God is metaphorically referred to as a mother in the Scriptures, and I briefly connected my lack of awareness of that to my lack of any conception of a place for spiritual mothers. Why is that? Here’s my theory: when a church has only male leaders, they naturally gravitate towards the masculine metaphors for God and don’t even think to mention or explore the feminine ones. By such men never mentioning these metaphors, and by people only seeing men in official church positions, we can begin to internalize (even if we would never say it aloud) that men are more like God than women are.2 That, somehow, if you want to know what God is like, you should look at men, not women. This is why I think the mother metaphors about God and spiritual mothers in the church are intimately connected. We need to recognize that God describes himself as a mother/in feminine language, which in turn reminds us that women really and truly are just as much the image of God as men are. This should, I think, motivate us to live out that dual image-bearing reality in the church; one way we do this is by elevating the role of spiritual mothers.

Let us begin with Scripture then. All of the following passages are quoted from the NRSVue.

In both the Old and New Testaments, God is imaged as a mother hen:

In Ruth 2:12, Boaz says to Ruth, “May the Lord reward you for your deeds, and may you have a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge!”

The psalms repeatedly pick up this image:

“Guard me as the apple of the eye;

hide me in the shadow of your wings.” (Psalm 17:8)

“Be merciful to me, O God; be merciful to me,

for in you my soul takes refuge;

in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,

until the destroying storms pass by.” (Psalm 57:1)

“He will cover you with his pinions,

and under his wings you will find refuge;

his faithfulness is a shield and defense.” (Psalm 91:4)

The imagery of a mother hen’s wings is repeatedly tied to refuge. When we think about how a mother hen covers her chicks with her wings, protecting them from predators and the elements alike and keeping them close to her own warmth, that tells us something about how God protects us. He is a place of shelter and warmth; and the imagery of a mother particularly relays the feeling of loving protection. God is not a dark cave protecting us from the elements; he is a loving mother who wraps her wings around her chicks to hold them close and keep them safe with her own body. He is a refuge. When you read these passages, try to imagine a mother bird in your mind’s eye, and think of the tenderness and safety that the image conveys.

Jesus uses this same language to refer to himself as he laments over Jerusalem:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’” (Matthew 23:37-39)

In this passage, we move from other people describing God as a mother hen to God describing himself that way. Can you not hear the tenderness and love in Jesus’ lament?

The prophets take feminine language even further by referring to God as a human mother:

“For a long time I have held my peace;

I have kept still and restrained myself;

now I will cry out like a woman in labor;

I will gasp and pant.” (Isaiah 42:14)

The image of a woman in labor is perhaps the earthiest metaphor possible. It is full of pain, sweat, tears, and blood. It isn’t pretty. It holds within it the fine line between life and death. And yet God chooses to evoke all that is entailed within that image to describe himself. How many times have you thought about a woman in labor and then thought to yourself, “That is a picture of God.”

“As a mother comforts her child,

so I will comfort you;

you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 66:13)

It is significant that God compares his comfort to that of a mother’s. It is not that fathers do not comfort their children; but there is something about the comforting embrace of a mother that is unique. Most children, when injured or sad, run to their mothers for comfort. Even when their own mothers aren’t around, I’ve witnessed as a teacher that children almost always turn to a woman, and not a man, for comfort. What sort of comfort, I wonder, might a spiritual mother be able to share with us?

“Can a woman forget her nursing child

or show no compassion for the child of her womb?

Even these might forget,

yet I will not forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15)

Here God shows that he is more attentive, compassionate, and loving than even the best of nursing mothers. The language here is so intimate. “Can a woman forget her nursing child?” Can she? That child depends on her mother for every single one of her needs, and the nursing bond is one of profound intimacy. So too is the language, “the child of her womb.” When I apply that language to my own children, I think of the months in which I carried them and felt their every movement, from their sweet little flips to their not-quite-so-sweet kicks in my ribs. I remember the heavy burden they were on my body (twin pregnancy is no joke), but the very pain reminds me of how much I loved them, and of what a gift it was to be their earliest home. How could I ever possibly forget these children of mine? And yet God—in all his motherly tenderness and compassion—loves his people even more. This is a distinctly maternal love, and it is profound. I dare say we can learn something by seeing women acting in such a compassionate role in the church.

“Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;

I took them up in my arms,

but they did not know that I healed them.

I led them with cords of human kindness,

with bands of love.

I was to them like those

who lift infants to their cheeks.

I bent down to them and fed them.” (Hosea 11:3-4)

Again, we see the gentle and tender maternal love of God. Can you imagine the gentleness and encouragement of a mother who teaches her child to walk? Or of a mother who lifts her infant to her cheek? Or of a mother who bends down and feeds her infant from her very own body? Is there any better metaphor for the love of Christ, who feeds and nourishes us with his own body? We do often talk about the love of God these days, but how often do we talk about it in such maternal terms? There is much we have yet to learn from this imagery, and I think that we have neglected it in our sidelining of women.

John Piper has famously (infamously?) argued that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel,”3 but, while he is right that masculine imagery predominates in many places, he nevertheless overstates his case. The fact that God does at all refer to himself as a mother should be significant for us. The fact that Mary, a woman, was the first to hear the good news of Christ’s coming, that the Samaritan woman was the first to whom Christ revealed himself as Messiah (and then was the first one to turn and preach this news to her community), that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the resurrected Jesus and spread the message he commissioned her with (hence her title “apostle to the apostles”), and that God created his image-bearers as “male and female” means that women and femininity have just as important a role to play in the church as men and masculinity. The church doesn’t flourish when women exist in a predominantly masculine space; it flourishes when men and women in union stand before God, serve each other, and proclaim God’s goodness to the world.

Spiritual Motherhood in Scripture

I want to shift then to discuss one significant biblical example of a spiritual mother: Deborah.

Deborah, the only female judge of Israel, was called “a mother in Israel.” (Judges 5:7) I find it rather funny—and significant—that we never hear anything about her biological children (if she ever had any). Instead, all that we know about her is from her position as Israel’s “mother,” a term that encompassed both political leadership and, since she was a prophet, spiritual leadership. Neither does her role seem particularly distinguished from that of a male judge. From all accounts, just like any male judge, she authoritatively led and judged the people. While she almost certainly did not fight in battle (the only potential difference I can think of), she still went to the place of battle with her general (I say hers because she certainly spoke authoritatively to him), Barak, exercising leadership even in war. Under her leadership, the land rested and the Israelites prospered for forty years. Her example—however brief it may be—points to the existence of an extra-physical motherly role as a wise leader of God’s people.

In addition to Deborah, Paul compared his own work in leading and caring for the churches to that of a mother. Why do I mention this, when he was a man? It is significant that a leader of the church describes his own work as that of a mother. Apparently, the characteristics intrinsic to motherhood are actually important for leaders in the church. (So much for Piper’s masculine feel.) We cannot sideline women in the church by saying they are, by nature, not fit to be leaders, when Paul himself describes his work in the churches as that of a mother.

Here are the relevant passages:

Paul says to the Thessalonians that instead of exerting his apostolic authority over them, “we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” (1 Thess. 2:7) To the Corinthians, he says, “And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people but rather as fleshly, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food.” (1 Cor. 3:1-2) He clearly recognized the various conditions of the people in these churches, coming to them not harshly but gently, as a nursing mother.

God as Mother in Theology

The image of God as a mother has been carried on and expanded throughout Christian history. Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Teresa of Avila are a number of big names who have used this metaphor. I, however, want to focus on two others: Anselm and Julian of Norwich.

In his prayer to St. Paul from his Prayers and Meditations, Anselm writes:

“O St Paul, where is he that was called

the nurse of the faithful, caressing his sons?

Who is that affectionate mother who declares everywhere

that she is in labour for her sons?

Sweet nurse, sweet mother,

who are the sons you are in labour with, and nurse,

but those whom by teaching the faith of Christ

you bear and instruct?

Or who is a Christian after your teaching

who is not born into the faith and established in it by you?

And if in that blessed faith we are born

and nursed by other apostles also,

it is most of all by you,

for you have laboured and done more than them all in this;

so if they are our mothers, you are our greatest mother…

And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?

Are you not the mother who, like a hen,

gathers her chickens under her wings?

Truly, Lord, you are a mother;

for both they who are in labour

and they who are brought forth

are accepted by you.

You have died more than they, that they may labour to bear.

It is by your death that they have been born,

for if you had not been in labour,

you could not have borne death;

and if you had not died, you would not have brought forth.

For, longing to bear sons into life,

you tasted of death,

and by dying you begot them.

You did this in your own self,

your servants, by your commands and help.

You as the author, they as the ministers.

So you, Lord God, are the great mother.

Then both of you are mothers.

Even if you are fathers, you are also mothers.

For you have brought it about that those born to death

should be reborn to life -

you by your own act, you by his power.

Therefore you are fathers by your effect

and mothers by your affection.

Fathers by your authority, mothers by your kindness.

Fathers by your teaching, mothers by your mercy.

Then you, Lord, are a mother

and you, Paul, are a mother too...

And you, my soul, dead in yourself,

run under the wings of Jesus your mother

and lament your griefs under his feathers.

Ask that your wounds may be healed

and that, comforted, you may live again.

Christ, my mother,

you gather your chickens under your wings;

this dead chicken of yours puts himself under those wings.

For by your gentleness the badly frightened are comforted,

by your sweet smell the despairing are revived,

your warmth gives life to the dead,

your touch justifies sinners.

Mother, know again your dead son,

both by the sign of your cross and the voice of his confession.

Warm your chicken, give life to your dead man, justify your sinner.

Let your terrified one be consoled by you;

despairing of himself, let him be comforted by you.

and in your whole and unceasing grace

let him be refashioned by you.

For from you flows consolation for sinners;

to you the blessing for ages and ages. Amen.”4

Anselm’s prayer scarcely needs explanation. His words form a beautiful meditation on God’s role as a mother. As I reflect on those characteristics, I wonder how both men and women, but women in particular, might exhibit such characteristics in places of leadership in the church.

Jesus as a mother is one of the central metaphors of Julian of Norwich’s famous Revelations of Divine Love. I hardly have the space here to give a proper treatment of her work, but I’ll include just a few quotes from her for your own reflections.

“The mother’s service is the closest, the most helpful and the most sure, for it is the most faithful…We know that our mothers only bring us into the world to suffer and die, but our true mother, Jesus, he who is all love, bears us into joy and eternal life; blessed may he be! So he sustains us within himself in love and was in labour for the full time until he suffered the sharpest pangs and the most grievous sufferings that ever were or shall be, and at the last he died. And when it was finished and he had born us to bliss, even this could not fully satisfy his marvelous love…He could not die any more, but he would not stop working. So next he had to feed us, for a mother’s dear love has made him our debtor. The mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament which is the precious food of life itself.”5

There is nothing quite like the faithfulness of a mother’s love for her children. To be the one who grows a child within herself and then feeds that child from her own body…is there anything like it in all the world? Only Christ’s own love and care for us, as he bears us into new life and feeds us with his own body is greater. What might it be like, I wonder, to see women, the only humans capable of feeding others from their own bodies, handing out the Lord’s body and blood? Might that help us better appreciate the gift of Christ’s body? Might that help us better understand how he nourishes us by his own being? How much are we missing out on by not thinking of Christ as a mother?

“To the nature of motherhood belong tender love, wisdom and knowledge, and it is good, for although the birth of our body is only low, humble and modest compared with the birth of our soul, yet it is he who does it in the beings by whom it is done. The kind, loving mother who knows and recognizes the need of her child, she watches over it most tenderly, and the nature and condition of motherhood demands. And as it grows in age her actions change, although her love does not.”6

Tenderness and wisdom reoccur quite often in Julian’s treatment of Christ’s motherhood. Though both mothers and fathers love their children, there is a tenderness that—generally speaking—seems specific to maternal love, and it is this tenderness that God holds toward his children. Mothers, however, do not “blindly” love. They lead their children with wisdom, and so too does God. As Julian points out, mothers tend to be uniquely attentive to the needs of their children. They are highly attuned to their children, ready at any moment to leap in and offer attention, nourishment, or comfort to the needy child. So too is God deeply and intimately attuned to our needs.

“But he wants us to behave like a child; for when it is hurt or frightened it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can; and he wants us to do the same, like a humble child…So then he wants us to take on the nature of a child which always naturally trusts the love of its mother in weal and woe…The blessed wounds of our Saviour are open and rejoice to heal us; the sweet, gracious hands of our Mother are ready and carefully surround us; for in all this he does the work of a kind nurse who has nothing to do but occupy herself with the salvation of her child.”7

This passage is perhaps the most beautiful of them all. Just as Jesus himself declares in his lament over Jerusalem, Julian writes that God wishes us to come to him like a child comes to her mother. When I ran to my mother as a child, I knew that she would lift me up and help me. I did not fear rejection; I did not fear disapproval; I knew only that I was frightened and that there was safety in her arms. Now, as I hold my own children, I simply cannot put into words the tenderness that I feel towards them. I will always remember the first day I held my daughter, five days after she was born. She had a rather rough start in the NICU (thanks primarily to the thickness of her blood), and she had clearly been restless and miserable (as with so many preemies, the nurses often referred to her as “feisty”). The moment she was placed in my arms, however, her whole body relaxed, and even with a CPAP on her face, a PICC line in her arm, and monitors all over her body, she managed to sprawl everywhere, sinking into the deepest, most relaxed of sleeps. She was, once more, held in the warmth of her mother, listening to that familiar tune of her mother’s heartbeat, and, for the first time since her entrance into the world, she so clearly felt safe. We are all like my daughter, poked and prodded, terrified and restless, and God is our mother waiting to hold us close in the warmest, most loving of embraces.

There is a reason God describes himself as a mother. There are characteristics specific to motherhood in contrast to fatherhood; Julian points to a special tenderness and wisdom along with a self-sacrificial and life-giving posture that only women can physically provide by growing and bearing children and then feeding them from their own bodies. God bears us and nurtures us in this way. But I never once thought of any of this whilst growing up. It is all still so new to me. How much are we missing out on by only having men as leaders and models in our churches? What characteristics of God are we not fully appreciating? How much more could we learn from seeing women more noticeably serving in the church, especially in roles of mothering leadership? How much more could we learn from women expounding on and explaining the character of God from their unique vantage point? Men and women alike have so much to learn from spiritual mothers.

Implications for Spiritual Motherhood Today

What then are the implications of this for spiritual motherhood in the church today?

There are, I think, two implications. First, though I said spiritual mothers need not be physical mothers, I do think that biological/physical mothers have something worth sharing with the church by virtue of their lived experiences.

It is no surprise to me that the medieval female mystics have been the ones most to play upon the image of God as mother. Women, especially those who have experienced physical motherhood, are simply more likely to think of the implications of these metaphors. I’ve never heard a sermon from a man about God as a mother. Aren’t we missing something there? Isn’t there space to learn from the unique insights women can offer about God’s mothering role?

Recently, I was participating in a group lectio-divina-inspired session on Acts 17:22-32. As I was meditating on the passage, I came back to the line, “In him we live and move and have our being,” again and again. During this session, my daughter was sleeping in my arms, and I suddenly thought of a womb in connection to that line. I remembered how, not so very long ago, my two daughters had existed as their own, separate beings inside of me. They had quite literally lived and moved and had their being within me. What might it be like to think about our existence as being metaphorically in the womb of God? How might that metaphor help us better understand our complete and utter dependence on God—a God who loves us like I love my daughters (which is a whole very lot)? Reflections like these are gifts that mothers could offer us.

More importantly, however, spiritual mothers can offer us care, comfort, wisdom, and leadership in ways distinct to women. That is, spiritual mothers could have similar church “roles” as spiritual fathers, but they would fulfill them uniquely and so add to the encouragement and building up of the church.

I want to give an example of a spiritual mother from my parents’ church. This older woman, who I’ll refer to as Jane, continually gives of herself in service to the women of the church. Though she has been battling cancer for the last few years, she has never once stopped pouring herself out to encourage, support, nurture, and teach the women in her life. She consistently speaks into others’ lives, offering a love that is both tough and gracious. Even in the midst of her own cancer treatment, she has stayed with other women in the hospital, helping to care for them as if they were her own daughters. She is deeply knowledgeable in the Scriptures and has served in various teaching capacities, but based on my mother’s descriptions of her, it seems to me that her chief gift is one of exhortation. Exhortation involves encouragement and teaching, but it is uniquely focused on action; one exhorts someone to do something. Jane exhorts the women in her church to love and serve God in all the particular ways that their particular circumstances call for. She is an invaluable member of that church body, and though she holds the unofficial position of “Spiritual Mother” in the women’s ministry, she holds no formal title within the church. I doubt she would want to, and people are clearly being blessed by her without her holding any formal title, but I wonder what might be the benefit if more people like her were given formal roles (see the Tish Harrison Warren podcast for more on the particular value of having women in formal ministry positions). Even were women like Jane to remain in informal positions, I can’t help but think that surely men are missing out by not being able to learn from them. We all—thank goodness—have access to spiritual fathers, but are not men at a disadvantage for not being allowed (or not even thinking it worthwhile) to sit at the feet of spiritual mothers?

To some hard to define extent, women think about things differently than men, feel differently than men, process and explain things differently, and certainly have different lived experiences. There is so much we have to learn from wise women exhorting, teaching, and shepherding in their unique manner alongside men doing the same things in their unique manner. It seems hard to envision that men and women were created for anything less than to work together, not one in subjection to the other, barred from certain tasks, but truly in union with each other.

As surprising as it may sound, I think literature may be able to help us in teasing out this need for spiritual mothers and fathers to image God and aid the church. I’ll use the great-great-great grandmother from The Princess and the Goblin and Aslan as my examples. Both are meant to be images of God in their respective stories. Both are glorious, both hold clear authority and expect obedience, both are stern, and, at times, even frightening. Both are also gentle and kind, and both suffer on behalf of and/or with the children under their care. And yet, despite their similarities, a great-great-great grandfather simply wouldn’t work in The Princess and the Goblin, and Aslan wouldn’t be Aslan if he was a lioness instead. In some way, their feminine and masculine natures are necessary to the specific ways in which they image God and guide the children, and yet it’s almost impossible to pinpoint why that is. You just have to read both books to see it.

I rather think it is like that in real life as well. In addition to aiding us in recognizing the fullness of the image of God in humanity, spiritual mothers can minister to us in ways different than spiritual fathers do by nature of the real distinctions between women and men. In what manner (besides biology) are men and women different? I’m not entirely sure; I think I have to see it to understand it, and even then I can’t quite put it into words. We run into dangerous ground if we say that all women and no men are, by nature, nurturing, or that all men and no women are, by nature, strong. Even if those hold true generally (and I’m not sure exactly how much they do), they certainly don’t hold true on the individual level. And yet—and yet—men and women are different. And that is why we need both—in stories, in the home, and in churches.

It had now been many years since the minotaur seized the Oak Throne, and he was himself greying with age. So it was that the young lion, remembering the days of joy and warmth under his father’s reign, decided to fight for his throne. He battled his way through the icy winds, hammered open the door of the minotaur’s stone palace, and came to stand boldly before the Oak Throne.

The minotaur, grown fat from his many years feasting upon the produce of his subjects, stared down over his long, wispy beard and large, protruding belly and laughed.

“What do you want, little cub?” He asked, his beard wagging. “Come to admire my throne?”

“I’ve come to challenge you to a game of chess,” the young lion replied. “If I win, I take back the throne.”

The minotaur laughed again. “Very well,” he said. “But if I win, you die.”

The lion inclined his head.

“Like father, like son, no doubt,” the minotaur chuckled, as he pulled out his chess set from beside the throne.

It was an old wooden chess set, with lions as the kings and queens, herons as bishops, horses as knights, trees as rooks, and mice as pawns. The pieces were covered in dust, which the lion blew off with one deep, guttural roar. It unsettled his opponent ever so slightly, but then he imagined how delightful it would be to checkmate another lion king, and all was well within his mind.

Taking white for himself, the minotaur started the game by pushing forward his queen’s pawn. The lion responded with his matching pawn, and so the game went, each smoothly countering the other’s moves.

After about half an hour had passed, the minotaur was left with two pawns, a knight, and a bishop, while the lion was left with two pawns and a rook.

“This is just where your father had me,” the minotaur said with a cold gleam in his eyes, as he forked the lion’s pawn and king.

The lion silently moved his king to protect his other pawn, and the minotaur took the forked pawn with his knight. He quickly followed up on his advantage by taking the lion’s other pawn with his bishop.

With scarcely a change in his facial expression, the lion took the bishop with his king, only for the minotaur to check him again with his knight. A large, grotesque grin was now spreading across the minotaur’s face. He had his opponent, and he knew it.

The lion moved his king out of check, and the minotaur, rashly ignoring the presence of the lion’s rook below, moved his own king to the far corner.

All at once, the game was over. The lion skewered the minotaur’s king and knight with his rook, and checkmate was just a few turns away. As the lion made his final move, the minotaur, pale with anger, lifted his paws to overturn the table, but it was too late.

“Checkmate!” cried the lion. And even as the words left his mouth, the minotaur—outmaneuvered by the very same tactics he had once used on the lion’s father—fell in a heap of dust.

The lion blew the dust off and let loose a series of great and powerful roars that shook the entire planet from core to crust. He ascended the steps before him and took his seat at last on his very own Oak Throne.

Outside, the icy winds ceased, the sun came out, and, for the first time in many years, the animals of the planet stepped outside their homes into a land full of the warmth of spring.

The lion invited all of his subjects to the palace, and they feasted and made merry for many days together. And for as long as the lion lived, he played no more chess, and all was well.

It is never wise to bet one’s kingdom over a game of chess.

Opening Prayer

O God of the living, on this day your Son our Savior descended to the place of the dead: Look with kindness on all of us who wait in hope for liberation from the corruption of sin and death, and give us a share in the glory of the children of God; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Poem 1

Medieval English Poem

My folk, what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

I led you out of Egypt free,

But to the Cross you now lead me:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

Through the wilderness I led you,

Forty years in safety bred you,

With the food of angels fed you,

And at last to home I sped you:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

What more was left for me to do?

What gift have I not given you?

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

Of food and clothes I made you free:

With eisel now you drink to me,

And with a spear you jab at me:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

I conquered Egypt’s land for you,

and killed their first-born young for you:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

For you I cleft apart the sea,

For you, drowned Pharaoh in that sea;

And yet to princes you sell me:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

I led you with a pillar of cloud,

But you led me to Pilate proud:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

I fed you all with angels’ food;

You strike and scourge me on the Rood:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

Purest water I gave you all;

You drink to me with bitter gall:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

Canaan’s kings for you I beat;

You beat my head with whips of reed:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

To you I gave the heavenly crown,

But you gave me a thorny crown:

My folk what have I done to you,

Or in what matter injured you?

Trick me not, but answer true.

Lessons

Psalm 130

From the deep water I cry out to you, O Lord.

O Lord, listen to me.

Pay attention to my plea for mercy.

If you, O Lord, were to keep track of sins,

O Lord, who could stand before you?

But you are willing to forgive,

so that you might be honoured.

I rely on the Lord.

I rely on him with my whole being;

I wait for his assuring word.

I yearn for the Lord,

more than watchmen do for the morning,

yes, more than watchmen do for the morning.

O Israel, hope in the Lord,

for the Lord exhibits loyal love,

and is more than willing to deliver.

He will deliver Israel

from all their sins.

Matthew 27:57-66

Now when it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut in the rock. Then he rolled a great stone across the entrance of the tomb and went away. (Now Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there, opposite the tomb.)

The next day (which is after the day of preparation) the chief priests and the Pharisees assembled before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember that while that deceiver was still alive he said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give orders to secure the tomb until the third day. Otherwise his disciples may come and steal his body and say to the people, ‘He has been raised from the dead,’ and the last deception will be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, “Take a guard of soldiers. Go and make it as secure as you can.” So they went with the soldiers of the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.

Visual Art

The Harrowing of Hell by Fra Angelico (c. 1430s)

Reading

What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam’s son.

The Lord goes into them holding his victorious weapon, his cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: ‘My Lord be with you all.’ And Christ in reply says to Adam: ‘And with your spirit.’ And grasping his hand he raises him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.

‘I am your God, who for your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise.

‘I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.

‘For you, I your God became your son; for you, I the Master took on your form; that of slave; for you, I who am above the heavens came on earth and under the earth; for you, man, I became as a man without help, free among the dead; for you, who left a garden, I was handed over to Jews from a garden and crucified in a garden.

‘Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image.

‘See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one.

`I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you.

‘But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.

The cherubim throne has been prepared, the bearers are ready and waiting, the bridal chamber is in order, the food is provided, the everlasting houses and rooms are in readiness; the treasures of good things have been opened; the kingdom of heaven has been prepared before the ages.

- Ancient Homily (maybe by St. Melito of Sardis)

The Anthem

Man born of woman has but a short time to live,

and is full of misery.

He springs up, and is cut down like a flower;

he flees like a shadow,

and never continues the same.

In the midst of life we are in death:

of whom do we seek strength,

but you, O Lord,

who for our sins are justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy,

O Lord most mighty,

O holy and most merciful Saviour,

deliver us not into the pains of eternal death.

You know, O Lord, the secrets of our hearts;

shut not your ears to our prayer;

But spare us, Lord most holy,

O God most mighty,

O holy and merciful Saviour,

most worthy Judge eternal,

do not let us, in this our final hour,

through the pain of death, fall away from you.

Music

“He’s Gone (Holy Saturday)” by Paul Zach

Poem 2

The Agony

George Herbert

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walked with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:

But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know Sin, let him repair

Unto Mount Olivet, there shall he see

A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,

His skin, his garments bloody be

Sin is that press and vice, which forced pain

To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay

And taste that juice, which on the cross and pike

Did set again abroach; then let him say

If ever he did taste the like.

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

Closing Prayer

O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Unlike my daughters, I wasn’t baptized until I was 11 years old. I was raised Baptist and consider myself Anglican now, though my daughters were baptized in the Presbyterian church we currently attend.

In my middle-school years, I was a fiery defender of believer’s baptism (or credobaptism). I thought all arguments in favor of infant baptism (or paedobaptism)—and by extension infant baptisms themselves—were absolute hogwash. As with many positions that I ardently defended in middle school, I have since done a good 180 on the topic. At least, I don’t think infant baptism—or the arguments in favor of it—is hogwash now.

Surprisingly enough for someone studying theology, I wasn’t persuaded of the legitimacy and beauty of infant baptism by argument. I still think that there are many good Scriptural arguments in favor of credo baptism. I still remain doubtful of some of the Scriptural arguments in favor of infant baptism.

Instead of an argument, I was initially persuaded by an experience. I don’t mean by that that it was not a thoughtful change. What I do mean is that our practices are intricately tied to our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our practices, and our practices in turn shape our beliefs, though often in ways that we are not consciously aware of. We may even say that we believe one thing while our practices reveal that we actually believe something quite different. It is thus of great importance that we think about and evaluate our practices as much as we do our conscious beliefs. Orthopraxy is as important as orthodoxy, and I wonder if you can ever really have one without the other.

Thus it was that witnessing the practice of infant baptism revealed to me a different way of thinking about what baptism essentially is. What I want to do in the rest of this essay is not rehash the same old arguments in favor of paedo- or credobaptism but reflect on what beliefs I have held about baptism based upon the two forms of baptismal practice that I have been a part of. These are necessarily theological reflections, but this is far from a definitive argument in favor of one or the other. Instead, this reflection is deeply bounded by my own subjective experiences, and I am certain that many others have witnessed paedo- and credobaptisms and come to quite different conclusions. Nevertheless, I offer up these tentative thoughts as a way of thinking about how the practices we participate in shape our beliefs.

Credobaptism

Having grown up Baptist and remained so throughout my college years, I’ve witnessed my fair share of credobaptisms. They were quite similar across churches, so I will use a typical baptism at the church I grew up in as my primary example.

Our church was in a refurbished warehouse, and the sanctuary had a modern and slightly industrial (hard to avoid in an old warehouse) look to it. On Sundays on which baptisms took place, a movable baptismal pool—about the size of a jacuzzi—was pulled up to the front, just below the stage. The baptismal candidate, clothed in a black t-shirt, sat in the pool, while the pastor stood beside it. Family members and close friends were invited to come up front and stand near the pool. The pastor would then briefly introduce the baptismal candidate to the congregation, affirm that candidate’s faith from their own private discussions, and then ask the candidate to publicly profess their faith. The profession having been given, the pastor lowered the candidate into the water and lifted her back up, saying, “I baptize you my sister, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Occasionally, they might also say, “Buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life.”

Once the freshly-baptized person had been raised back up, the entire congregation clapped and cheered. She climbed out of the pool, was given a towel by a nearby volunteer, and left the room to go dry off and change.

There is much I still greatly appreciate about this baptismal practice. First, no matter the “dunking” jokes that some paedobaptists make, I still think the symbolism of going down into the water and coming back up out of it is far more meaningful than the act of sprinkling or pouring water over someone’s head. I can imagine the dunked person (and imagined it of myself when it was my turn) going down into the grave with Christ and coming back up out of it. That is powerful. In my Baptist days, I had no doubt that baptism had something to do with death and rebirth.

Such baptisms are also supremely joyous occasions. The congregation truly does cheer. The happiness on the baptismal candidate’s face is contagious. You simply cannot help but clap along at the sight of a new brother or sister. I believed that Baptism was a joyous family affair.

Finally, I certainly believed that baptism was about the Lordship of Christ. Through both the pastor’s brief words and the candidate’s confession, I was certain that baptism had something to do with submitting one’s entire life to Christ.

Other parts of this baptismal practice now bother me. As joyous as the congregation may be, they play little part in the baptism. There is no communal remembrance and confession of faith and no sort of communal vow to help this new sibling in their discipleship.

Furthermore, I often hear in people’s testimonies that they were baptized as infants, and now that they feel their faith is their own, they feel they must be rebaptized. This certainly reveals the Baptist belief that only credobaptisms are valid, which particularly irks me, as it seems to stand in direct denial of the Nicene Creed’s “one baptism for the remission of sins.” But then “the remission of sins” also plays no part in Baptist baptismal practice either. I certainly would never have connected the two in my Baptist days.

While sharing one’s testimony is certainly a good thing, the testimonies I heard revolved around people’s feelings. They wished to be baptized because they felt close to God and wanted to tell everyone else that they were now following Jesus. Those aren’t bad things, but I was often left wondering, “When this person hits a rough patch a few years from now and doesn’t feel close to God, what happens next?” If baptism is a communication of my feelings, then it is a very tenuous thing. That, perhaps, accounts for the proliferation of rebaptisms in various credobaptist circles.

In the brief class I took before being baptized, baptism was compared to a wedding ring; it symbolized that I was committed to Christ. That made sense to me then, but now I find myself questioning such a metaphor. I’m married now, and I could choose to never wear my wedding ring, but that would have no bearing in the slightest on my being married to my husband. At worst, other people might ask me if I was married, but such questions could easily be put to rest by a quick answer. Is baptism really the same? Is it only an outward sign of one’s own commitment to another person? And, if it is, how good of a sign is it, considering it only happens once? A wedding ring is a constant visual symbol of my marriage, but baptism leaves no lasting physical mark.

Aside from one’s profession to follow him, Christ’s “role” in baptism was significant insomuch as he had commanded baptism, but no one ever seemed to have a good reason as to why he had commanded it. Responding to a similar sentiment about loving our neighbor, George MacDonald writes,

“Why should I love my neighbor as myself? We must not answer ‘Because the Lord says so.’ It is because the Lord says so that the man is inquiring after some help to obey. No man can love his neighbor merely because the Lord says so. The Lord says so because it is right and necessary and natural, and the man wants to feel it thus right and necessary and natural. Although the Lord would be pleased with any man for doing a thing because he said it, he would show his pleasure by making the man more and more dissatisfied until he knew why the Lord had said it. He would make him see that he could not in the deepest sense—in the way the Lord loves—obey any command until he saw the reasonableness of it. Observe do not say the man ought to put off obeying the command until he sees its reasonableness: that is another thing quite, and does not lie in the scope of my present supposition. It is a beautiful thing to obey the rightful source of a command: it is a more beautiful thing to worship the radiant source of our light, and it is for the sake of obedient vision that our Lord commands us. For then our heart meets his: we see God.”1

God is hardly arbitrary. Surely there must be some reason he commands baptism, and yet I was never given a satisfactory answer whilst in Baptist circles. Everyone I heard from was quick to assert that baptism was only a profession and symbol and played no significant role in one’s salvation.

Ultimately, I concluded that we believed baptism to be nothing more and nothing less than a public profession of one’s pre-existing faith. It was fundamentally about me and my decision, even though that decision was to submit to Christ.

Paedobaptism

For paedobaptism, I will use both my godchildren’s Anglican baptisms and my daughters’ Presbyterian baptisms as examples, as they were quite different, but, I believe ultimately reveal the same fundamental belief about the meaning of baptism.

Four years ago, my godson was baptized in the Anglican Church. It was the first infant baptism, and the first Anglican baptism, that I had ever witnessed, and I was astounded. There could not possibly be a baptism more different than his was from the ones I had witnessed growing up.

I could write many paragraphs about the beauty of the liturgy, but the most startling difference of all to me was how long the baptism was. The very fact that there was an entire liturgy devoted to it set it apart from any other baptism I had been a part of. Such a lengthy and thorough liturgy demands its own essay, so I won’t try to discuss it all here. Instead, I’ll just briefly summarize the highlights.2

The baptismal candidate is presented by his Sponsors, baptized Christians who endorse and promise to support the candidate in his Christian journey. The Sponsors of an infant are his godparents. The godparents and parents vow on behalf of the child to renounce the devil, trust God, and serve him. They also promise to help instruct the child in the faith as he grows older. The child is then prayed over by the priest, and the godparents and parents confess their faith. The entire congregation promises to support the child and then together confesses the faith in the words of the Apostles’ Creed. Specific prayers (well worth reading!) are prayed over the baptismal candidate, and then the priest prays over the water,

“Now, Father, sanctify this water by the power of your Holy Spirit. May all who are baptized here be cleansed from sin, be born again, and continue for ever faithful in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior. To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit, be all honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.”

The child is then named and baptized in the Trinitarian formula, and the priest makes the sign of the cross (with oil, in my godson’s case), saying, “Child, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever. Amen.”

The liturgy concludes with a prayer of thankfulness and a formal welcoming of the newly baptized into the church by all the congregation. Holy Communion follows immediately upon its close, and, at least at my goddaughter’s baptism, as congregants came forward to receive the elements, they were encouraged to make the sign of the cross on their foreheads with the baptismal water to help them remember their own baptisms.

There is almost too much to say about such a rich baptismal practice. Here, however, are my main reflections. I believe that baptism is beautiful. I also believe that it is serious. Renunciations, confessions, and vows are made by everyone participating in the service. One does not say those words lightly; it was impressed upon me that we were all making a serious commitment. Part of this seriousness derives from the clear connection between baptism and discipleship. I certainly believe that it is expected that all who are baptized (whether infants, older children, or adults) will continue to be instructed in the faith, and, in the case of infants, expected one day to make their own profession. I believe also that baptism is communal; when one is baptized, one joins the family of God, and everyone is involved in welcoming and instructing the new member.

In addition to these significant but smaller reflections, were two major divergences from what I had believed about baptism whilst in the Baptist church. First, it was clear that Baptism was more than just a symbol. As a sacrament, baptism is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The BCP explains the particular grace of Baptism as, “Death to sin and new birth to righteousness, through union with Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:1-11).”3 While I don’t believe that baptism saves, I do believe now that it is—in a mysterious way—intimately connected to salvation. Second, it is clear to me now that baptism is chiefly a gift of God to us. It is something we are given, not something we do, and God is the primary actor in it.

My daughters’ baptism in a Presbyterian church did not include a similarly lengthy liturgy, but it did include parental and congregational vows, a communal confession of faith, and a passage of Scripture chosen by our pastor to be prayed over each of our daughters. As our pastor lifted each of our daughters to show them to the congregation that spent months praying for them, and as he spoke to them of all that God had already done for them—namely saving their lives in the womb and carrying them through the NICU—I found myself near to tearing up over the grace of God. Has he not already shown himself to be with my daughters? This baptism, like every breath my daughters have taken, was a gift from God. Our daughters could not possibly have earned it, and yet here they were, alive and well and welcomed into a family eager to journey with them further up and further into the love of God.

Anglican theologian W. H. Griffith Thomas writes that, “the meaning of baptism is God’s designation or consecration of the recipient for the purpose of entering into union with Him in a life of discipleship.”4 I have found this to be the most helpful definition yet, and, alongside my experience of paedobaptisms, it places God at the center of the meaning and act of baptism. When we practice baptism in Anglican or Presbyterian churches, I have concluded that we believe baptism to be fundamentally a gift of God’s grace given to the church.

As for infants in particular, Thomas writes,

“Surely the truth is that all children are included in the great atoning sacrifice, and belong to Jesus Christ until they deliberately refuse Him. This is the great spiritual fact at the root of the practice of Infant Baptism. It is our testimony to the belief that childhood belongs to Christ and has its share in the great redemption. We baptize a child not in order to make it Christ’s, but because it already belongs to Him by the purchase of His sacrifice on Calvary.”5

I would guess that there are plenty of paedobaptists out there who would disagree with this conclusion, but I can’t help but find it of great encouragement, especially when I think of how my daughters’ lives have already been saved more than once, long before they could ever make a profession of faith and so enter the church by that means.

Conclusion

Having reflected on the two different kinds of baptism I have witnessed over the years, I was surprised to discover that credobaptists and paedobaptists differ on the nature of baptism at a more fundamental level than I had hitherto believed. It is not just about whether or not one has repented before one is baptized. At its core, the difference seems to be about whether baptism is something I primarily do or whether it is something that God primarily does. Is it an act of profession, or is it a gift from God? It is no wonder that credobaptists fear any language linking baptism with salvation. If it truly is about my act of profession, then it is dangerous ground to tie it to salvation. But if it is a gift given to me by God, a truth most obvious when it is given to infants, then how could it ever be seen as a necessary work to earn one’s salvation?

There are, of course, many facets of baptism that I have not discussed. Credobaptists may ask me what right I have to say that there is something profound happening in baptism when many people who were baptized as infants walk away from the faith. I suppose I must reply that one’s life must be taken as a whole to see the efficacy of one’s baptism. I certainly believe that God works through baptism, and I certainly also believe that baptism must be followed by true faith and discipleship. I was once talking with an AirBnb host who, having realized recently that he had been baptized as an infant, was now convinced that he was walking around with a special protection, though he did not in the slightest hold the faith of the church in which he had been baptized. That is not how baptism works. It is certainly not a magic spell. And yet neither is it “just” plain water. In some mysterious way, God acts through it.

These are but preliminary thoughts, and I remain particularly open-handed as to the practice of baptism simply because it has seemed to vary so much in Christian history. What I am confident of is that “I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins.”

The journey itself was delight enough for Jane. She had seen many wonderful sights thus far: stars pulsing with a radiant silver light, comets dashing through space— seeming at once faster than the eye could behold and yet at the same moment appearing never to move at all—, majestic planets looming in the cosmic sea, and gaping black holes sucking in and obliterating all that ventured too close to their open maws. The black holes still sent a shiver down her spine each time she imagined them, and she was grateful that there were now none nearby.

She pressed herself up against the window and peered out into the darkness. At present, the view was dominated by a vast misty surface of some sort. It was rather cream-like in color, with a variety of shades ranging from white to brown all spilling over and bleeding into each other. A faint music filled Jane’s ears, like the tinkling of chimes in a summer wind.

The spacecraft suddenly began to shake violently—as it always did when it entered the gravitational pull of a planet. Jane ran to the control room. Looking out of the small window there, she saw that she was in the midst of a thick ring of icy rocks surrounding a large, gaseous planet.

She glanced down at the controls. They were just as dead as they had been the past three days. There was nothing to do but hope that no chunks of ice hit the craft on its way down. For better or worse, her destiny lay with this planet.

Jane returned to the viewing room and resumed her position up against the glass. Hours passed, and the surface of the planet grew gradually more distinguishable. There seemed to be multiple layers of mist: some white, some grey, some blue even, some thick like a curtain and others almost too thin to distinguish at all.

The gravitational forces slowly increased and pressed down on Jane’s spine. She soon lost interest in the sight of the planet and stretched out upon the floor. Pictures of home filled her mind as she forced her lungs to rise and fall. Eventually, exhausted by the weight of gravity and the effort it took to resist it, she fell asleep.

By the time Jane woke, the craft was dark and no longer moving. The gravitational forces were much lighter now that she was on the surface of the planet. She crawled to the centre of the craft and lifted the hatch. A faint mist seeped in and filled the air with the smell of old books and withered grass. Jane took a deep breath, and her lungs filled with air. She slipped out of the craft, and her feet hit hard ground.

A cold wind whipped around her, wrapping her in a thick, grey mist and obscuring the ground from her view. She stepped forward carefully, testing each bit of land with her toes before committing her entire weight to it. The whole place was eerily quiet, quieter than even the most desolate places on Earth. The smell of decay hung in the air, and Jane felt that she must be the only living thing on the entire planet.

Out of the silence there suddenly came a rushing sound. Jane saw two black wings beating back the mist, revealing the body of a giant raven. It hung in the air in front of her, and though it moved, it appeared quite dead. Its feathers were withered and all bent out of shape, the flesh beneath them was putrid and rotting, and where its eyes had once been there was now nothing more than two empty holes. Jane pulled her eyes away in disgust and, for a moment, she saw the ground under her feet. It was black, but it hardly looked like the dirt of Earth. It was something else entirely. Rock, perhaps? But before she could give it much thought, her attention was pulled back up to the raven. It was speaking, and though her disgust intensified, Jane wondered why she felt no surprise.

“Welcome, traveller, to the domain of Saturnus,” the raven said in a gravelly voice. “All who come here come to sleep the sleep of death. May you not wander in vain.”

With a few more beats of its gigantic wings, the raven disappeared into the darkness. The mist closed back in, and Jane was alone.

She took a few hesitating steps forward. The raven’s dire words hung in her ears, but she did not consider returning to the craft. She lifted her hands and attempted to push the mist to the side. It did not part but began instead to swirl around her fingers. The swirling intensified, and the mist broke away from her fingers. She peered into the centre of the storm and saw a strange vision. There, not ten feet away from her, was herself, looking as real and solid as her own body.

The other version of herself was bedecked in a dazzling attire, and all around her were the signs of wealth and success: piles of money, walls of awards, and everything else she could have ever dreamt of. Jane lunged toward the image. Perhaps her death upon this strange planet would not be a waste after all? Perhaps this image meant something; maybe she would be celebrated and remembered upon Earth. But as soon as she closed her fist around success, it vanished.

Jane stumbled backwards, panting hard. What was this place? She shook herself, cleared her head, and took a few more halting steps in the opposite direction. The mist swirled again, and this time she saw her family: her father, mother, and brother.

“At least I will not have to die alone,” she cried, forgetting what had happened before. She ran forward into the open arms of her mother, but the moment she touched her hand, her mother disappeared. In the next breath, her father and brother too evaporated back into the mist.

Jane stood rooted to the spot and rubbed her eyes. But it did not matter what she did; her family was gone. Her loneliness sunk in, and she felt the horrid weight of her fear. She fell to the ground and wept for some time. It seemed that she was, after all, to die alone and forgotten in a strange land.

“Come here, my child,” a voice called through the mist.

Jane lifted her head and dried her eyes. Not far off, the mist had parted again, just as it had done when the raven came to her. She saw there a small table and two chairs. In one chair sat an old man, presumably the owner of the voice that had spoken to her. He had long white hair and a long white beard, and he held a scythe in his hand.

“Come and eat,” he commanded.

Jane realized quite suddenly that she was starving, so she came. On the table was a single cup of wine and a small hunk of bread. She took and ate the bread and drank the wine, and all the while, the old man said nothing.

When she had finished eating, he rose from the table and declared, “It is time.”

Jane stood up too, and the table and chairs disappeared. The old man advanced towards her with his scythe lifted high. Jane braced herself to die. Why, she thought, had she ever set out upon this adventure? What was the point of it all if it was always meant to end this way? She closed her eyes and held her breath, but the strike never came.

She heard instead the soft bleating of a lamb. She opened her eyes and there indeed was a lamb lying at her feet. It was dying, and the blood flowed freely from a wound in its side. The lamb looked up at her.

“Take my blood,” it said. “Mark yourself with it, and you shall never die.”

Jane knelt, dipped her fingers in the blood, and wiped it across her forehead. The next instant, the strike came. She saw the scythe swinging through the air, and then all was dark.

Jane opened her eyes. They were filled at once with a glorious, golden light. She blinked a few times and looked around. No longer was she surrounded by darkness and mist. Instead, she stood in the middle of a lush forest. Everything was green – from the ferns that covered the forest floor to the thick moss that coated the trees. Even the stream that ran through it all appeared faintly green, so perfectly did it reflect the scene above it. Birds called out in happy melodies overhead, and deer, rabbits, and squirrels scampered by in riotous play.

In the distance, through the trees, Jane caught sight of an open gate and of a garden beyond. There, in the garden, stood the lamb who had, only moments before, been bleeding at her feet. Only he wasn’t a lamb anymore, but a man, and he was looking at her. He lifted his hand and beckoned to her.

*********************************

This story started with a creative assignment for a Christian Imagination course I was in a few years ago. I knew I wanted to come back around to it, expand it (I still haven’t done that yet), and turn it into a series of short stories based around each of the seven heavens of medieval cosmology. Each story takes place on a different planet, is centered on that planet’s themes, and fits into a different genre. This story, for example, takes place on Saturn, and so it focuses primarily on death, borrowing much of its form and content from morality plays. The next story is a fable set on Jupiter!

I must have said those words hundreds of times over the last few years until they were—without my really knowing it—seared into my brain. Perhaps that does not sound all that impressive. It is a simple phrase, really. Lord, have mercy. It’s not exactly something that requires memorization.

And yet, in moments of crisis, we humans are not often creative. Driven to and fro by fear, we turn to what is easy—to the habits we’ve engrained, and to the words and phrases we’ve repeated.

I encountered my first proper crisis when my unborn twins were diagnosed with TAPS. For those unfamiliar with the term, TAPS stands for Twin Anemia Polycythemia Sequence. For twins like mine with a single placenta, the sharing of nutrients between both twins is constantly in danger of becoming unbalanced. In TAPS, one twin “donates” red blood cells to the other twin, causing the donor twin to become increasingly anemic and the recipient increasingly polycythemic. Both are at risk of illness and death.

By the time the doctors diagnosed TAPS, my twins were already at Stage II, so we rushed up from South Carolina to Johns Hopkins Hospital for a consultation with their fetal therapy team. That was how my husband and I found ourselves in a hospital conference room preparing to sign papers for the only treatment that could save our daughters’ lives.

The immensity of that day lives with me still. The procedure was not without its risks, hence all the papers, but what choice did we have? Within just a few hours of sitting in that conference room, I underwent the first of five in-utero blood transfusions. Guided by ultrasound, doctors inserted a needle through my abdomen, first to give blood to our donor twin, and then to take blood from our recipient twin, replacing it with saline. We all experience something in our lives that we cannot possibly put into words, that we cannot in any fitting way describe to someone who has not experienced the same thing. Watching the doctors, nurses, and sonographer save the lives of my unborn children while I lay as still as I could and tried not to pay attention to the lengthy needle sticking out of my body was —. I bit back tears of sheer awe at the mercy of God.

The nurses often asked me how I stayed so calm during the procedures. I told them the truth: I recited over and over again every snippet of the Psalms I had ever memorized. I used all the strength of my imagination to visualize them—the Lord leading me beside still waters, longing for God as a deer panting for water, looking up to the mountains crying for help. And in between and under and wrapped all around each line were the words countless days of prayer had seared into my soul: Lord, have mercy.

They may only be three words, but those three words would never have come to my mind had I not spent the last few years living in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Like many others in recent years, I wandered into the Anglican Church at the end of college. While the beauty of the service certainly appealed to me, it was the repetitive narrative that kept me coming back. As Julie Lane-Gay writes in The Riches of Your Grace, a book about her own journey of living in the BCP for many years, the service of Holy Communion “embodies the story that holds our lives, God’s continuous love for His people, the same story that places us within creation, rebellion, redemption, and restoration. To learn this story so well that it becomes our daily reality, it’s a huge help to act it out.”1

By dipping my toes in the liturgical waters through Sunday mornings and the broad movements of the church calendar, I eventually came to get more acquainted with the BCP and began to pray an ever-changing combination of Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline. Before I knew it, I found that I had begun to memorize large chunks of the services, and these chunks began in turn to shape my thoughts throughout the day. Unbidden, phrases like, “without your grace, there is no health in us” and “Lord, have mercy” would pop into my mind. Having these phrases ever bouncing around in my head began slowly but surely to shift my perspective on life, to move me in the direction of conscious dependency on God. Little did I know how desperately I would cling to such words when the crisis hit.

Though the majority of each TAPS procedure day was filled with waiting, there was a special moment of a particularly charged and expectant waiting when—after assembling all of their tools and instruments—the medical team stepped outside our room for a brief huddle. My husband and I would take those brief minutes to form a huddle of our own, and, after the first two procedures, when we did not know the words to say, I went home and wrote a liturgy. There are, after all, moments of calm even in the midst of our crises, and these can become spaces for creativity. This liturgy flowed from my hand fairly quickly, for I had grown used to the forms of written prayer in the BCP, to their rhythm and structure, and to their allusions to and dependence on vast portions of Scripture. Though, yes, this was a creative work, it was and is a work built upon years of living the prayers of the BCP. For the remaining procedures, these were the words my husband and I prayed:2

Both: Creator and Savior of all,

two of your children—as yet unborn—

are in need of your healing hand.

Mother: You are the one who has

knit these children together in my womb.

You see them and love them.

All of their days are written already

in your book.

Father: You say, Lord, that the life is in the blood,

and it is blood that our

child so desperately needs,

and blood that our child has too much of.

And without your gracious aid,

they will not live.

Both: We thank you for the grace

you extend to all people—

for the knowledge, wisdom, skill, and compassion

that you have given these doctors, nurses, and sonographers.

As we enter into this procedure,

we ask that you would be with them,

guiding the healing hands of doctors, sonographers, and nurses

with calm assurance and skill.

We ask also that you shield these unborn children—

your beautiful creations.

May their bodies respond well

to the giving and taking of blood;

may their heartrates remain strong;

and may they feel your comfort in the midst of fear.

Finally, we ask that you would be with us

in these long moments.

Grant us your peace that passes all understanding—

Mother: As the doctors carefully insert the needle

through my abdomen,

and as I lie on the bed in their hands,

knowing that should an emergency arise

I may have to be rushed into a C-Section.

Father: And as I wait and watch,

trying to comfort and reassure,

while also in need of comfort and reassurance myself.

Both: Into your care, O Lord, we deliver

our unborn children,

as yet unheld by our loving arms

but held already by you in each and every moment.

Bring us all safely through this procedure, O Lord,

that we may one day soon hold

both of our healthy children in our arms

and marvel at the creative and healing

work of your hands.

We lift up ourselves,

our children,

and this medical team

into your hands, Father, Son, and Spirit.

Lord, have mercy.

Hear our prayer.

Amen.

Eleven days after our final procedure, my daughters were born. They were 32 weeks old. One of them is laying on my chest right now. Admittedly, the interruption is a tad frustrating after a long day, when all I wanted to do was finally drink a cup of tea and read a book. She should be asleep in her bed, but she woke up crying, so I scooped her up in my arms, and now she’s asleep on me instead. As I look down at her peacefully sleeping face, I realize I’m not really all that frustrated. After she was born, she spent seven weeks in the NICU, and the memories of all the days when I could neither hold nor comfort her as she cried still pierce my heart.

Our journey through TAPS was fast-paced and physically exhausting. Our journey through the NICU was long, slow, heavy, and soul-wearying. We lived for seven weeks in a small room an hour away from home at the Ronald McDonald house (ten of those days with an infant too). Each day when we visited the hospital, we rode the elevator up fourteen floors, called in our names to get through security, and came to look at our daughters through the plastic walls of their incubators (eventually we were able to hold them for most of our visiting time). A friend of mine, who was a NICU parent before I was, warned me that the NICU journey was a marathon, not a race. And so it was.

I was worn to the bone, too weary to come up with any prayers of my own. Each new day it felt less and less likely that we would ever bring our daughters home, and while their stay was mostly uneventful, there were days that I woke up anxious for the doctor’s call about my daughter’s latest x-ray, and days that I paced to and fro by her bed, waiting and watching.

Lord, have mercy.

I turned to the one place where I wouldn’t have to think, where there were words already written to express all the thoughts and feelings bubbling inside me, where my hopes and fears might be answered, where I might be reminded that I was not alone, that somehow God was with me, suffering alongside of me, and caring for my daughters when I had to leave them day after day at the hospital. I turned to the Book of Common Prayer. Not every day, not near as often as I should have, but many days. I would pray Midday Prayer with whichever daughter I happened to be holding at the time, and before I left them for the night, I would pray Compline with each of them, marking their heads with the sign of the cross as I read the final blessing over them.

My daughters were born in Roanoke, and you could see the mountains from the NICU windows, so Psalm 121 (a staple of Midday Prayer) became the psalm I returned to again and again, and I added it into our Compline reading:

I will lift up my eyes unto the hills; from whence comes my help?

My help comes from the Lord, who has made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved, and he who keeps you will not sleep.

Behold, he who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord himself is your keeper; the Lord is your defense upon your right hand,

So that the sun shall not burn you by day, neither the moon by night.

The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; indeed, it is he who shall keep your soul.

The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in, from this time forth for

evermore.3

I had read this psalm many times before; it is a popular one, and for good reason, and yet I had never paid all that close attention to the words. They had never gripped me before, and yet suddenly they had become my only lifeline. Day after day I reminded myself and my daughters that the Lord is our keeper, that he does not sleep, that he defends us and preserves us from evil, that he is with us wherever we go, both now and forever. Every day these words were like water in a desert to my parched soul, and I hope that my daughters too felt the peace of the Lord as I read to them and blessed them. Perhaps they knew in some fashion that though I could not always be with them, they were not once ever alone.

Lord, have mercy.

My daughters have now been home longer than they were ever in the NICU. I still read Psalm 121 over them, and I still pray Compline with them—still not every day, though I continue to try. But even when we don’t manage to do Compline together, before I kiss them, I bless them with these closing words from the service:

The almighty and merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bless us and keep us, this night and evermore. Amen.

I make the sign of the cross on their foreheads, and I imagine it as if they are being sealed with a cross of fire—for is that not what Christ’s cross is? We have, all four of us, been through the fire, and I have found that we were not alone—not once. Christ has stood there with us in the flames, and he has lifted us up. He has blessed us and kept us, day after day, night after night.

Lord, have mercy.