Ring the bell, once for each name that walked ahead of us.
Light the candle, not for absence, but because love still knows how to shine.
*
Last night the streets wore masks. Laughter wandered under the moon.
Now morning lifts the veil.
*
Look to the mountains. From the high ridge color pours downhill, green, then rust, then red, then gold, gold fading into violet, until heaven lies scattered in the neighbor’s backyard.
*
Listen. Cicada gives way to cricket, cricket to the mockingbird on the high wire.
One reed falls silent. The same breath moves to the next.
*
Where are the saints?
Here. Behind us, beside us, within us, whirling through the stars, singing in the Ever-Now.
They live in every gift, every shared loaf, every heart left open, the remembered and the remembering drinking from one cup.
*
So I ask: Are you dead? Am I alive?
Or have we always lived in the same house of Love, where death is only a curtain between two rooms?
*
The leaves change color because they are alive.
And you, beloved saints, are changing in me too, into memory, into gratitude, into joy, into praise.
Six verses, small as a shepherd’s pouch, and inside it the whole night sky.
—
The Holy One is my shepherd. I shall not want.
The Holy One is my shepherd.
Echo it softly: is.
Not was, on the hills of Bethlehem. Not will be, when I am worthy. Is. Now, in the dark before dawn, in the old body, in the quiet house.
I remember Isaiah: God will feed the flock like a shepherd, and gather the lambs in God’s arms, and carry them in God’s bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.
And Ezekiel, against the false shepherds who fed themselves: I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep. I will seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, strengthen the weak.
I remember the many years I tried to be a shepherd, in many churches, and how often I fed myself instead, the applause, the performance, the strong years. Now I am only a sheep again, and it is a mercy.
I shall not want.
Echo it slowly: not want.
The soul emptied, like a cup turned upside down, and in the emptiness, no lack, only room for the Shepherd.
—
God makes me lie down in green pastures.
Makes me lie down.
Echo it softly: lie down.
I remember the bride in the Song of Songs, calling into the heat of the day: tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon.
Bernard, whom I studied long ago at Drew under Dr. Pieter de Jong, wrote that this noon rest is contemplation, the soul lying still in the full light, no shadow anywhere, the Bridegroom’s presence so bright it is like resting inside the sun.
Green pastures.
Not grass only. The Word, green and living, spread across the hillsides of Scripture, the sheep grazing slowly, chewing, tasting, sapientia from sapor, wisdom as tasting.
At three in the morning, I lie down in the green of a single verse, and do not move on, and the Shepherd sits beside me on a stone.
—
God leads me beside still waters.
Still waters.
Echo it slowly: waters of rest.
A pool in the hollow of the hills, so still the stars lie on its surface, the moon floating in it like a white petal, the sheep bending to drink and drinking the sky.
Perhaps the soul is meant to be like that, so quiet the heavens can rest in it, so clear God’s face is reflected the way the refiner sees his face in the silver.
I remember the river Ezekiel saw flowing from the temple threshold, ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep, then too deep to cross, and the trees on its banks whose leaves are for healing.
I remember the last page of the Bible: the Lamb will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life.
The Shepherd who is also the Lamb. The One who leads to the water once said from a cross, I thirst.
—
God restores my soul.
Echo it softly: turns my soul.
Like a sunflower turning slowly through the day to follow the light, and in the night, still facing east, waiting. Like the compass needle, shaken, trembling, always returning to north.
The soul turned, not by force, by beauty, the way a face turns toward music in another room.
—
God leads me in right paths for the sake of the Name.
Right paths.
The constellations wheel across the night along paths no one taught them, Orion, the Pleiades, the Bear with her children, each in its track, each held by an unseen hand.
So the soul is led, step by step, along a path it cannot see whole, lit only enough for the next footfall.
For the sake of the Name.
The Name written on the forehead of the flock, like a seal pressed into wax, like a star burned into the night.
—
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me.
The darkest valley.
Echo it slowly: the shadow of death.
I remember John of the Cross, who wrote of the dark night, the soul led through a darkness so deep it cannot see the One who leads it, and yet the darkness itself is the presence, too bright for the eyes, experienced as night.
The valley not only of death, but of every unknowing, the years when prayer was dust, the grief of the church divided, the nights I could not feel God at all.
Across the world tonight, whole peoples walk this valley, under bombs, on long roads, in camps, the shadow of death not a metaphor. I cannot read this quickly. Walk with them, Holy One.
For you are with me.
Echo it softly: you.
The psalm stops speaking about God and begins speaking to God. In the dark, the Shepherd is no longer ahead on the hill, a figure to be described. The Shepherd is beside me, so close I cannot see the face, only feel the breath, only hear the voice saying my name.
This is the mystery of the valley: the dark brings the Holy One from he to you, from distance to embrace.
—
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
The rod and the staff.
Two pieces of wood.
I remember, by way of reflection, two other pieces of wood, crossed on a hill, the shepherd’s staff become a cross, the rod that drives off the wolf become the beam on which the Shepherd died for the sheep.
They comfort me.
In the dark valley, I cannot see the staff, but I hear it, tapping on the stones ahead, and feel it, sometimes, a gentle touch on the shoulder, turning me back from the edge.
—
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
A table.
Echo it slowly: prepared.
Not a crumb thrown down. A table, prepared, the cloth laid, the lamps lit, the bread warm, the host waiting.
I remember the upper room. I remember the road to Emmaus, the stranger breaking bread, and their eyes opened. I remember the wedding feast of the Lamb, the great banquet, the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame gathered from the roads and lanes.
In the presence of my enemies.
The table spread in the middle of the valley of shadow, the wolves at the edge of the firelight, and the Host saying to them too, come.
I think of the tables of the world tonight, divided by walls and borders, the church I love eating at separate tables. Let the table be spread until the enemies sit down together and find they are hungry for the same bread.
—
You anoint my head with oil.
Oil.
Echo it softly: anointed.
The oil of healing on the sheep’s torn face. The oil of gladness on the guest’s head. The oil of the lamp, burning through the night in the holy place. The chrism on the newly baptized, the oil on the sick, the oil on the dying.
I remember the Spirit descending like a dove at the Jordan, and Isaiah: the Spirit of the Holy One is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
The oil soaking into the hair, running down, the fragrance filling the room, the soul made a lamp, lit from within.
My cup overflows.
Echo it slowly: overflows.
A chalice brimming with light, pouring over the rim, running down the stem, spreading across the cloth, across the floor, out the door, into the valley, into the dark, until the whole night glows.
Grace does not measure. Grace does not retire.
—
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
Goodness and mercy.
Echo it softly: pursue me.
Two angels, two lamps, two hounds of heaven, running behind me down every road I have taken, across the sea, through every church, through the strong years and the broken ones, through the performance and the confession, never tiring, never losing the scent, gaining on me, closer now than ever.
At seventy-seven, I can almost feel their breath at my back. Soon they will catch me.
—
And I shall dwell in the house of the Holy One my whole life long.
I shall dwell.
Echo it slowly: return.
Not a visit. A dwelling.
I remember the One who said, abide in me as I abide in you. And, in my Father’s house are many dwelling places.
The house is not only a place. It is the Holy One. To dwell in the house is to dwell in God, and God in me, the sheep in the fold, the fold in the Shepherd’s heart, the tenelach by the hearth, the fire never going out.
My whole life long.
Echo it softly: the length of days.
The days beyond the days. The eighth day. The noon of eternity, where the flock lies down in full light, and there is no more shadow, and the Lamb is the Shepherd, and God wipes away every tear.
—
Before dawn, in the quiet house, I lie down like a sheep in the green of a single verse, and drink from the still water where the stars are resting, and listen in the dark for the tapping of the staff, and feel the oil on my head, and the cup in my hands spilling light, and behind me, very close now, the soft running of goodness and mercy.
And I whisper the bride’s question into the deep stillness: where do you make your flock lie down at noon?
And the answer comes, not in words, but in the dawn rising, in the light filling the room, in the Shepherd’s breath beside me: here. In me. Forever.
—
Note: God who makes your flock lie down at noon in the full light of your presence, quiet my soul like a still pool until your stars rest on its surface, be you, not he, beside me in the darkest valley of every unknowing, spread your table in the presence of every enemy until all are fed, and let me dwell in you, as you dwell in me, the length of all my days.
Three mint leaves torn by my wife’s quiet hand, hot water, green steam — and something in my chest lets go.
*
John, exiled on Patmos, saw it at the very end: a river bright as crystal, a tree on either bank, twelve fruits for twelve moons, and leaves for the healing of the nations.
The garden gate where the flaming sword stood swings open again.
*
After beasts and bowls and Babylon’s fall, the last word for the nations is not ash. It is a leaf.
This week near the French border, a young linden goes into German soil, one of ten peace trees on an avenue planned from Paris to Berlin. Old enemies kneeling at the same root.
*
They will see God’s face.
Moses saw only the back from the cleft of the rock. Here the veil burns away like a moth’s wing in the Friend’s lamp, and no lamp is needed.
*
Twice John bowed at the wrong feet. I take comfort in that. I have bowed wrong more than twice.
*
Do not seal the book. Soon is not a date on a chart. Soon is the Beloved closer than my own breath.
Only the lie stays outside the gate, and the lie has lived in my heart too. But robes can be washed.
*
Seventy-seven years. Forty in the pulpit. Scales I tipped, words I said too roughly, prayers I let thin out, a church I watched divide.
I come to the last page a cracked clay jar by the river. Thirsty. Called anyway.
*
Come, says the Spirit. Come, says the bride. Not the worthy. The thirsty. Maranatha.
*
All Saints on Sunday, the vote just days away, and the last word of the Book is still grace.
Light comes through the mint on the sill. Her hand reaches past me again. The steam rises —
God said to Jacob, “Arise. Go up to Bethel. Live there.
Build an altar to the God who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau.”
Bethel. The place of the stone. The place of the dream.
The place where he once slept alone with a stone beneath his head and heaven opened above him.
Years had passed. He had wrestled with God. He had faced his brother. He had carried wounds through distant roads.
And now God called him back to the place where the journey began.
*
Jacob said to his household, “Put away the foreign gods among you.
Purify yourselves. Change your clothes.
Let us arise and go to Bethel.
There I will build an altar to the God who answered me in the day of my trouble and who has been with me wherever I have gone.”
So they gave Jacob their foreign gods and the rings in their ears.
Jacob buried them under the oak near Shechem.
Some things must not be carried into the next chapter. Old gods. Old fears. Old loyalties. Old ways of trusting ourselves instead of God.
They buried them.
*
And they went on. God protected them along the road.
When Jacob arrived at Bethel, he built an altar. He called the place El-Bethel— the God of Bethel.
Not merely the God of the place, but the God who had met him there.
*
Then Deborah died. Rebekah’s nurse. An old woman who had traveled through generations of the family. Jacob buried her beneath the oak. And they called the tree Allon-bacuth— the oak of weeping.
Even on the road toward promise, there are places where we must stop and mourn.
Faith does not mean we do not weep. Sometimes the holy place is also a place of tears.
*
Then God appeared to Jacob again. “Your name is Jacob. But you shall no longer be called Jacob. Your name shall be Israel.”
And God blessed him. “I am God Almighty.
Be fruitful and multiply.
A nation and a company of nations shall come from you.
Kings shall come from your body.
The land I gave to Abraham and Isaac,
I will give to you and to your descendants.”
*
God was repeating the promise.
Not because Jacob had forgotten it, but because human beings need to hear grace again and again.
*
Jacob set up a stone pillar.
He poured out a drink offering and oil upon it.
And he called the place Bethel.
Again.
The name remained.
But Jacob was not the same.
*
Then they journeyed on.
Rachel was giving birth. The labor was hard. The road became a place of pain.
As she struggled, the midwife said, “Do not be afraid. You have another son.”
But Rachel was dying. With her last breath she named him Ben-oni— “son of my sorrow.”
But Jacob called him Benjamin— “son of the right hand.”
A child entered the world through the doorway of death.
Rachel was buried on the road to Ephrath, near Bethlehem.
*
Jacob set up a pillar over her grave.
A stone again.
So many stones along Jacob’s life— stones of dreams, stones of altars, stones of remembrance, stones beside graves.
Perhaps our lives are also marked by such stones.
Places where something ended. Places where something began. Places where we learned that love remains even after death.
*
Rachel was gone. But Benjamin remained. The mother was buried.
The promise continued.
And Jacob walked on.
*
The story does not hide the complexity of his family.
Reuben violated his father’s concubine.
Jacob heard of it.
The family carried its brokenness into the future.
*
And then the sons of Jacob were named—
the children born along the journey, the children through whom a people would come.
*
At last, Jacob returned to his father Isaac at Mamre, near Hebron, the place where Abraham and Isaac had lived.
Isaac died at the age of one hundred eighty.
Esau and Jacob, the two brothers, buried their father together.
*
The story that began with rivalry
ended, for a moment, beside a grave.
Two brothers standing together.
Not young anymore. Not the men they once were. Time had changed them.
*
And perhaps that is one of the quiet miracles of Genesis:
God does not erase the past.
He carries us through it.
Jacob returns to Bethel, but Bethel is no longer the same place.
The stone is there. The altar is there. The memory is there.
But the man who stands before it has been changed by every road, every fear, every wound, every blessing.
He has learned that God is not only the God of beginnings.
God is also the God who walks with us through endings.
The God of birth and death.
The God of laughter and tears.
The God of dreams and graves.
*
The God who calls us back when we have wandered.
And perhaps returning to Bethel does not mean going backward.
Dinah went out to see the daughters of the land. A young woman, curious about the world beyond her tents, looking for friendship, for the ordinary life of a girl among others.
But the world she entered was not gentle.
Shechem, the son of Hamor, saw her. He took her. He violated what should never have been taken. And afterward he said, Let me marry her.
But love cannot be born from possession. Desire cannot make violence holy. A human being is never a thing to be taken.
Jacob heard. His sons heard. Their hearts burned with anger, not only because their sister had been wounded, but because their family had been shamed in the eyes of the land.
Hamor came to speak of marriage, of daughters and sons given and received, of land and wealth binding two peoples. But beneath the language of peace lay the wound no one had faced.
Jacob’s sons answered with deception. Let every man among you be circumcised, and we will become one people. The men of the city agreed.
And on the third day, when their bodies were weak, Simeon and Levi entered the city with swords. They killed Hamor, Shechem, every man. They took Dinah from the house. Then the other brothers came, and plundered the flocks, the herds, the wealth, the women and the children.
One wound became another wound. One violence opened the door to more. The brothers wanted justice, but revenge swallowed its meaning.
Jacob said, You have brought trouble on me. The people of this land will hate us. His sons answered, Should our sister be treated like a prostitute?
Their question rose from a real wound. A wrong had truly been done. But Scripture leaves us standing in the terrible space between justice and revenge. The pain was real. The violence was real. And the violence did not heal the pain. It multiplied it.
No altar. No embrace. No reconciliation. Only a family carrying the weight of what happened.
And perhaps God’s silence in this chapter is itself a warning: when violence answers violence, the wound spreads wider, from one body to another, one household to another, one generation to the next.
Dinah’s voice is almost absent. That absence should trouble us. Everyone speaks of her, fights for her, avenges her, yet she herself is given no word.
So let us pause here, before honor, before revenge, before family pride, before swords. There is a woman who was hurt. And no one should disappear behind the anger of those who claim to defend her.
Genesis 34 stands like a dark stone on Jacob’s road. The God who met him at Peniel did not make every road after it easy. A new name does not erase an old world. The night at Peniel taught Jacob to let go. His sons were still learning. And so are we.
How to name a wrong without becoming the wrongdoer. How to seek justice without worshiping revenge. How to protect the wounded without wounding others. How to break the ancient chain: you hurt us, so we must hurt you.
Every generation must decide whether a wound will become a scar or a weapon.
And somewhere between Dinah’s silence and her brothers’ swords, God waits, not in the violence, but in the hard work of breaking it.
Perhaps holiness begins there, when we refuse to let another’s suffering become permission for our own violence.
The story ends without resolution. The wound remains. The road goes on. And Genesis asks us to keep walking, toward the day when justice no longer needs a sword, when dignity no longer needs revenge, and when the children of a wounded generation finally learn to leave the weapons on the ground.
Morning came over the Jabbok. Jacob lifted his eyes, and there was Esau, with four hundred men raising dust behind him.
The night of wrestling was over, but another night still lived in him. Fear remembers everything, the way a scar remembers the knife.
He divided his family and his flocks, and hid the ones he loved most at the back. Then he went forward alone, limping, and bowed seven times into the dust.
But Esau ran. He did not bring a sword. He opened his arms, fell on his brother’s neck, and kissed him, and both of them wept.
Twenty years of ice broke in one embrace. Reconciliation needs no speech at first, only two wounded people standing face to face at last.
“Who are these?” Esau asked. “The children God has graciously given,” Jacob said, and what he once grasped with his fist now lay in his open hand.
“I have enough, my brother.” The robbed one says enough, and the old theft dissolves like salt in the river.
“Please accept my gift, for to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” Last night he saw God at Peniel and lived. This morning the same face looked at him through his brother’s eyes.
The mirror of the heart, once wiped clean, shows the Beloved everywhere, even in the one we ran from and in the face we feared most.
We do not find God by escaping the one who wounded us. Sometimes the veil is thinnest where the old wound is deepest.
“Go on ahead,” Jacob said. “I will walk slowly, at the pace of the children and the nursing lambs.” Peace does not have to walk the same road. It is love without control, forgiveness that remembers the past honestly.
Esau turned toward Seir, and Jacob toward Succoth. They did not become what they had been, but the hatred no longer ruled the road.
He built shelters for the flocks, then an altar at Shechem, and called it El-Elohe-Israel, God, the God of Israel. The name was new, the man was new, and the limp remained.
The wound is where the light enters. Blessing does not take our wounds away. It pours through them, like lamplight through the crack in a clay jar.
He had died at the river before he died, and the grasping self lay buried in the Jabbok’s stones. Now, emptied, he could receive what he had spent his life trying to seize.
The night changed him, and the morning showed it. A drop that had fought the ocean all night let go at dawn and found it was already home.
Note: This is what coming home means. We do not go back to who we were. We walk forward with our wounds, until the face we feared becomes the face through which God teaches us to see.
God who wrestles with us in the dark and meets us in the morning, empty our clenched hands so we can receive Your grace. Wipe the mirror of our hearts until Your face shines in the brother and sister we have feared. Teach us to say enough, and to walk at the pace of the smallest among us. Let light enter through our wounds, until every road between us is free.
You can hear Bach drifting from a young mother’s earbuds, her baby asleep in the cart at Walmart, a quiet cathedral in the middle of ordinary aisles.
You can hear a lullaby rising from an underground band in an empty building, after their loudest scream set, tenderness blooming after thunder.
Ah, there are singers beyond the lines of soldiers, voices crossing borders no army can close, giving a comfort deeper than the simple shape of their song.
Beauty is born every moment we step past ourselves into the still pond of the eternal.
Music, painting, dancing, writing, all flow toward that one pond, a language everyone knows, each an echo of the Creator’s beauty.
Ah, so much of heart and soul is woven together this fall, joy spilling over into the dark caves of war and ruin.
Can you see it? Can you listen long enough to taste the peace hidden in this season full of surprises?
It lies beyond the reach of human words, spoken only by nature’s instruments, painted only by nature’s hand.
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