Dea
r St. John's Community,
Today we have a guest reflection from the Rev. Savannah Ponder.
God's peace,
Rob+
Late the other night, I was not praying nor meditating on holy things, but rather sitting in my recliner chair eating pizza rolls. I picked them up at the grocery store, a store which was empty of so many things I needed, and yet, as I turned the final corner of the frozen aisle, the fluorescent lights guided my path toward a plentiful selection of frozen pizza rolls. Not much nutrition present, but something comforting, something familiar, something that tastes like being cared for, cherished. My mother would buy bags of pizza rolls whenever my childhood friends would come over for sleepover parties. It was a way to show love, excitement, something ordinary that, when hoisted in the air by eleven year old children screeching pop songs off-key, became extraordinary. This is my peculiar connection to pizza rolls. My sense of some familiar comfort in the midst of my life being turned upside down, of the communities I need to sustain me feeling just out of reach, of life as I planned it out of my control. Pizza rolls, of all the curious things on this planet, serving as a means to pacify my relentless thirst for security, for a touch of being cared for in a world that feels so dangerous.
And I was sitting there in my recliner chair, tasting these pepperoni pizza rolls when my phone lit up, and in came a message from someone who has been a priest to me. It was a note about building closures, with one direct yet tender line at the end: “You are the temple where God’s manifestation is revealed in this world.” That line confronted me. Over the last few weeks, I have not imagined my body as a temple, as a site of divine revelation. I have sensed these hands as more burden than gift. How could God be manifest in this body? This body full of fear and uncertainty, this body yearning to hear voices joined together singing praises, this body longing to taste the bread of heaven, this body unsure if or when it might betray me, this body that could unknowingly carry sickness or even death to someone vulnerable whom I love.
I don’t have any good cheer to offer you in the face of this pandemic, but I do instead have a promise. It’s okay to be afraid, to feel desperate. It’s okay to long for what is out of reach. And it is not in spite of your fear and limits that God draws close. It is within your very weary flesh, within your very human moments of impatience and discomfort that God has come to dwell in you. No matter what, no matter how hard today has been, no matter the weight of your frustration or loss, relish this: You—in the beautiful and fragile gift of your body—have always been the temple where God’s manifestation is revealed in this world. The question remaining is this—will you savor that promise?
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