day 24 - grimy grace.

Tomorrow night I have the opportunity to help lead our Lenten evening worship. As part of that contemplative worship, I'll be helping to lead the sung liturgy and shape a small reflection time based on last Sunday's gospel lesson. I'm so excited because the lesson for this week is about mud, something I've been thinking a lot about. I love the paradoxical way that Jesus works, using dirt and spit to make someone clean, turning our ideas about what makes a person good or whole or clean upside down.

For me, this healing story has helped me to ask how I am seeing people -- am I seeing with the vision of muddy grace that loves people just as they are, and transforms them with radical acceptance? Or am I blind with my own judgement and expectations? Am I joyfully reaching out with my own muddy hands, or am I so busy trying to keep my own life clean that I don't even notice the people around me?

Jan Richardson from Painted Prayer Book offers up this wise and beautiful poetic reflection:

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the dirt.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the earth
beneath our feet.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the dust

like the dust
that God scooped up
at the beginning
and formed
with God’s
two hands
and breathed into
with God’s own
breath.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the spit.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the mud.

Lest we think
the blessing
is not
in the mire,
the grime,
the muck.

Lest we think
that God
cannot reach
deep into the things
of earth,
cannot bring forth
the blessing
that shimmers
within the sludge,
cannot anoint us
with a tender
and grimy grace.

Lest we think
that God
will not use the ground
to create us
once again,
to cleanse us
of our unseeing,
to open our eyes upon
this ordinary
and stunning world.