Young Harris College Campus Community,


I’ve heard it said that you can learn a lot about someone by asking what they’re waiting for. The next vacation, graduation, the perfect job. Too early to dream about retirement? Later, it’s good news from the doctor who is on the other end of the line. An early mentor told me to pay attention to my fantasies—that they’ll reveal my deepest longings. If you're dreaming about California's coast, maybe it’s time for a vacation. It’s another way of asking about salvation. What do you think is going to give you a sense of wholeness?

I’m guessing that the answer is college for most of our students. They've been waiting to come back to campus because they've spent the last six months cooped up in their houses with too much bad news and snapchat. Even after Carole Baskin and John B came to an end, college was still on the horizon, a carrot dangling at the end of a stick, to motivate them through another week. The college campus offers salvation from the reality of pandemic. It’s the Waffle House, a few interesting lectures, a good party—escapism. And that’s the risk. If we’re not careful, coming back to campus will become a mask that’s pulled over our eyes instead of our mouths.

Fear is normal as we return back to our campus home. Some in our community have trepidation about the health of our campus and the health of the community—the moment a loved one will contract the virus. Kierkegaard, my philosopher-superhero, says, "The person who has learnt how to be afraid in the right way has learnt the most important thing of all.” What's the right kind of fear? Some types of fear keep us immobilized, debilitated by irrational thoughts. But we need the healthy sort to keep us home when we're supposed to be home or lead us to strap cloth coverings on our faces when our droplets carry a deadly disease (even when they fog up our glasses).

​I’ve found myself in both camps within the same hour—excited and anxious. The whiplash from my excitement’s collision with despair has given me a crick in my spirit. Quarantine began as a social distancing competition and I was in the top third of the pack (the competition turned out to be light). Now, I have daily fantasies about eating with friends, dreaming for the kind of communion that takes place around dinner tables. The isolation is hard to bear, but our communion must remain modified, nonetheless.

In an earlier devotion I mentioned that the year 2020 is the ironic lens by which we are coming to see who we are as human beings, particularly the ways we are deeply intertwined with one another. A touch, a sneeze, a cough can travel all the way from China to Young Harris, Ga and take a life. We’re seeing the ways that our racial imaginations have travelled from the 16th century to the year 2020. We are being forced, amidst life and death, to acknowledge the ways that we can’t live apart from other people, nor can we tell our own stories apart from the story of another.

Think about this: what happens when you must make a deliberate calculus about whether to come to a college or university because it might result in the destruction of life? Or, forced to leave the house to satisfy an economy? What happens when must realize that Black and Brown people have been weighing that risk of leaving the house, weighing life and death, for hundreds of years? These are the pandemics at play in 2020.

I look around and notice people who are acknowledging our deep interlocking humanity and stories. But there are others, in a particularly modern way, who wish to insist that they have no story, but the story they chose when they had no story, to quote a former professor of mine.  We are learning—in a fear filled, violent way—what Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently: “We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all.” That’ll preach during pandemic.

Our life together must consist of physical distancing for it to be successful. Our community’s health is only as strong as the most selfish or obstinate student. This means we must wear masks and become vigilant in paying attention to the ways our bodies are taking up space. (Could this be a good exercise as we continue to think about racial justice?) But implied in our physical distancing is the antithesis—our deep connection and dependence on each other. We are a people who are so intertwined with one another that even our physical distancing is an act of human joining and solidarity. The body is broken, but it remains one.

Fall of 2020 might encourage us to go smaller and deeper. Young Harris College Religious Life will not let physical distancing lead to spiritual or social distancing. Rather, we’ll find a way to prune our gatherings so that they foster greater spiritual depth and flourishing. The United Methodist Church began as an 18th century movement of small groups—families gathered together, pursuing piety and mercy together. The church has always grown big by getting small. The first guideline of their gatherings was, “do no harm.” Can we modify our life together accordingly? It will be a challenge, but we’ll find a way to wrestle out a blessing.

We have reason to believe that we can do this safely, but it depends on your response on campus. President Van Horn calls this our ‘shared responsibility.’ My health depends on you. And yours mine. That’s frightening, but it’s the way the world has always worked.

Jesus challenges his followers by saying, us with “there’s no greater love than one who lays down a life for a friend.” It’s a draconian charge to sacrifice your life, but we can start by laying down our comfort and wearing a mask, having smaller gatherings, put a hold on singing in chapel. We can avoid needless trips off campus or dining inside of community restaurants. The best engine for right living isn’t fear, but it’s developing empathy and love. In our selfless empathy for another we will begin to model the God who was emptied for our salvation.

What are you waiting for?

At the end of the pandemic, maybe we’ll have discovered that we’ve learned how to wait on the needs of another. And in learning how to wait for another, we’ve learned how to love.


Love to all of you,

But that’s beside the point. The real problem, and I take this from Sam Wells, is the word ‘back.’ You can never go back to anything. Our first (second—third—fourth) naivetes about the way the world works have been shattered. Our eyes have been opened.

This isn’t altogether worth lamenting.

The Bible is never too interested in going back to normal. 2 It’s always interested in envisioning a new normal. Thank God. I think of someone like Isaiah writing in exile, whisked away from everything normal. For fifty years, Israel said, “I want to go home.” I miss the way life used to be. But they didn’t stop there, right, they went one step further and dared to utter even more hopeful words, 'I want to go home—to a different kind of home.”

Our life together moves through disorientation, which paves the way for reorientation. What is cutback is used to provide the the life-force for new growth and change. A shoot will come up from the stump. The future that was cut off prematurely will be re-imagined. A new tree will grow that will provide shade for all of God’s creatures, with branches for all of the birds to perch. I want home to be different. More just, equitable, merciful.

We can start making adjustments to our life together—questioning our idolatry of the market, considering where our bodies will take up space on campus and who will take up space alongside of us. How can we abide by the necessary requirements to keep our community safe? Will our administration follow through on promises on diversity and equity? Ask yourself the question why you’re even attending college and who do you want to become when it’s over? And then, ask yourself the question again.

I’ll close with this: Is it a mistake to reopen? I don’t know. That’s the question we’re all asking. We have some reason to believe that we can do this safely, but it also depends on your response when you get here. Some say we could nip this thing significantly if we just wear masks for four weeks. You’re going to have to believe someone about COVID19. I choose to believe the ones who err on the side of love and humility. It also doesn't hurt to believe the ones who have degrees.

What I do know is this: eventually, the train will start moving again. When it does, I pray that we’ve not just changed the track or the speed. I pray that we’ve found ourselves on a different train altogether—one that’s moving toward a completely different city.

Don’t go back to normal. Go forward to the kingdom of God. ​

Oh yeah, one more thing: wear a mask.

Thomas tells his ecstatic friends, “I don’t believe you.” Or more emphatically, “I’ll never believe you.” That is, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side.”

The other disciples claimed they had seen Jesus. But that's hard to believe after he was nailed to a 2x4 and thrown in a stone tomb guarded by a Roman soldier. There are more reasonable explanations. Take conspiracy, for example. Resurrection was a grand plan cooked up by a leftist, religious movement on behalf of a failed messiah who was supposed to restore Israel and usher in the kingdom of God. It's just politics. In reality, he died a lonely and embarrassing death. That makes sense. Ockham's razor, right?

Thomas tells his friends that he needs to experience it. He needs to move his fingers along his raised, scarred skin.

John gives us this story about Jesus, of course, but it's also helpful as a parable about doubt and belief. Thomas, the patron saint of doubt, continues to live among us. Humanity will always be slow to believe anything that changes the status quo or demands us to reimagine the world and our place in it, particularly resurrection, which is scientifically unprecedented. But today folks are having an equally difficult time believing that morgues are really saturated with dead bodies from a pandemic.

If I'm going to believe it, then I need to experience it.

Thomas is the Easter saint we need to unearth every Earth Day--the vicarious representative of a numbed and desensitized, or plain resistant, population. Today, well-meaning climate evangelists will be standing on the street corner of Instagram and Facebook spouting statistics about sea-levels, soil quality, and biodiversity.

The coral reefs are disappearing at an alarming rate! Half of Florida will be gone by the end of the century! They might as well be holding a cardboard sign that reads, 'The End Is Near. Repent and Believe.'

Thomas is watching, eyes glazed over. I don't believe you. Didn't you hear about the conspiracy from the failed political movement that's desperately seeking power? It's always about partisan politics. Sounds like propaganda. His blood pressure is starting to rise. It's a little like trying to tell a sixty-five year old man that his pork sandwich will accelerate heart disease. Who wants to live longer, but sacrifice smoked ribs (or cheap clothes, nice cars, and convenient food)?

Or maybe there's another form of Thomas that's even more insidious: the jaded liberal. This is the Thomas who is dejected and numb, boarded up in an apartment of his own fear because he knows that any kind of environmental change is about as likely as physical resurrection. Evangelize all you want on Facebook, but statistics won't stop humanity from guzzling the gas and it definitely won't stop large corporations from chain-smoking fossil fuels.

"We can make a difference," the hopeful disciple might say. "Just look at the impact social distancing is having on our ecological life. We have seen new life: pollution is down and air quality has been improved by eight-five percent in some places. Forms of wildlife are returning to various habitats that they had vacated. Furbies, which haven't been seen since the early nineties, have re-entered the forests." 

Call me cynical, but a photograph of a happy dolphin and the sound of bird chirping isn't likely to create lasting changes in personal habits or deter an entire economic system that's premised on commoditization and consumerism.

"I want to see," Thomas says. "Unless I experience the joy and promise of resurrection, I won't believe. And I don't care."

Thomas, the first Christian existentialist, reminds the church that fear and facts aren't great catalysts for belief and changed behavior. A Christian ecological ethic must be based on something other than a judgment house. It must be about love and hope.

​In other words, Thomas needs relationship.
​

Most of us have some kind of intellectual understanding of our relationship with nature. We're either college educated or in the midst of a college education. We learn things like this: fossil fuels? Bad. Recycling? Good. Carbon footprint? Monitor. The problem is that many of us don't have any actual experience of being a part of a complex ecological system, though Young Harris is doing a good job to remedy that. We think we live in an urbanized, 'post-agricultural' world that is so separated from the land that we don't even recognize the smell of a cow. Why should we care about ecology when produce magically arrives at the grocery and water out of a faucet?

A professor of creation care and food, Norman Wirzba, once challenged our seminary class to grow a tomato plant. There's an easy grade, I thought. I'd much rather grow a plant than to write another paper. To my surprise, I learned that I knew nothing about the very soil of my life. It's much easier to memorize the facts and the figures about climate change than to be in relationship with the earth. Does one just sprinkle a little dirt over a seed? There are holes in the leaves, does that mean I should water it more? Less? Not at all? Did you know that soil has an acidity level?

Suddenly, I began to care about the dirt in my backyard. It's never about the facts and the figures. It's always about the relationship. One silver-lining of pandemic is that COVID 19 is teaching us about the vastly interconnected nature of the world, but we as Christians have known this all along. This is a distinctly Christian way of thinking about the world.

Wirzba taught us that the best way to make a significant change in our ethical framework is to put your body in contact with the 'other,' whether that's a piece of fruit or the farmer who picks it. Permit me to play with the Thomas story a little longer: unless we see the scars caused by monoculture farming and put our fingers in the soil, we won't believe in its crucifixion or its eventual resurrection. The earth is not the body of God, don't accuse me of pantheism, but the earth is pervaded by God's Spirit. It's possible that the church needs Jesus to guide our hands into the wounds we've caused on creation if we'll ever receive the hope that new life is possible.
​

The Thomas story reminds us that there's one other relationship that matters more than anything else, even more than our interaction with the physical world. It's our relationship with Jesus. Jesus' resurrected body gives us hope for a new world. We may have poisoned the earth, depleted habitats, and over-farmed the earth and seas. We've already caused irreparable and irreversible damage to the world and we will never go back to previous patterns of living. But sustainability isn't an insurmountable problem.

Resurrection reminds us that there is no end to God's creativity.  No crucifixion is beyond God's redemption. We can destroy the material, including ourselves and the created order, but we can't seem to destroy the life-sustaining force of God in 'whom we live and move and have our being.' Even a self-imposed extinction of our own species, wouldn't be the final line in God's story.

Jesus' resurrection appearance to Thomas reveals to us that God hasn't discarded the material world, even if we have, which has been the plot of God's story all along that comes to a climax in Jesus. Here, we discover a God who climbed into a woman’s womb to bed fed through an umbilical cord. In Jesus, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And God climbs back into skin and gives us a new way to imagine the world. Jesus doesn't reappear as a disembodied soul waiting to fly away to heaven. He walks out of the grave and looks for food until he scores some broiled fish.

When Thomas finally meets Jesus, and touches his nail-scarred body, he exclaims, "My Lord and my God." Our Catholic brothers and sisters say the same in Latin, Dominus meus et Deus Meus, whenever the Priest elevates the consecrated bread and chalice. Reveal to us the mystery of the divine in the material, O God. 

For Christians, Earth Day has no significance without resurrection. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus shows us that the material is infused with the heavenly and that the heavenly is infused with the earthly—a hypostatic union between the divine and the material. Christ resides in a particular flesh so that there might be no material where Christ's Spirit doesn't reside—in our neighbor, the streams and oceans, the mountains and fields of wheat. The bread and wine at the communion table.

We care about the environment because we've encountered the risen Jesus who shows us what it means to call creation good. And to be in relationship with Jesus is to be in relationship with the natural world he created, redeemed, and is sustaining with the very life force of God's breath. Resurrection was never about your soul. It’s about defeating death. It’s the healing of creation. God has not discarded creation for heaven. Neither should you. In the resurrection, God doubled down on the goodness of the earth. 

So come, touch and see that the world is good. 

​The other day I ran into a stranger at the college campus where I work, which is now like coming across a unicorn or more appropriately, Bigfoot. Most academics take their social distancing as seriously as they take themselves. He was on a morning walk and I was walking to the chapel to pray. The noonday stranger apparently thought that the pandemic was at least seventy-five percent exaggerated as he stepped closer to me and stuck out his hand--the very place where a virus might be taking a nap! I tried to mind my manners and talk with him about the weather. "At least it's sunny," I said, as I took a few, short steps backward. It's equally possible that he came to the well in the heat of midday starved for connection.

Much of the world is learning something that Christians have known all along: relationships make us human beings. When I say you are created in the image of God, I stand with Bonhoeffer and say that you are human because of your engagement with the other and not through some biological characteristic. It's part of the meaning of a doctrine like the Trinity, a three-in-one God in perfect communion with each other. The Trinity is hard to explain and three-leaf clovers don't make it any easier. Here's what I do understand: God is a perfect reciprocity of love and we're called into the same vocation. We're human because we attend to others. We're capable of loving and being loved.

The irony, of course, is that this pandemic calls us to sacrifice a part of our humanity to ensure our own survival and the health of our neighbors.  Look, we're living in strange times. I prefer to describe this period of life as a Netflix movie made on a whim with a cheap budget: COVID-19. Starring Nicolas Cage, of course. It's an imitation of a full, robust life where most people are on edge or depressed. Our friends and relatives are trapped in screens and Zoom meetings. Or, we go to the grocery check out line to pay for beer, the essentials, and the grocery clerk immediately sanitizes her hands and sprays the debit chip reader with a stream of Lysol. It's a bullet to our humanity. 

The travesty of pandemic is that the external world is transformed into a threat, fostering a climate of fear and distrust. Everything that breathes has the potential to spread disease. How's that for the image of God and the goodness of the world? It's hard enough to love the material world when it's not held captive by a flu on steroids. And now we have to love ourselves and the world while desperately needing a hair cut. When we're most alienated from each other, the physical world, and our very own bodies, it's only a small step to feel disconnected from the God who gave us a material world and called it 'good.'

How good is it, really?

At the apex of holy week, we cry out with Jesus, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Here's a God who dies on a cross, but we learn that the horror of the crucifixion is not the physical pain. It's forsakenness. The pain more profound than physical—it’s not just his hands and his legs. It’s the torment of an empty heart. Jesus doesn't have a hand to hold. The deepest form of suffering is the simultaneous alienation from the body, the community, and God. Jesus had the triple threat. So will many of us.
​

​My isolation is compounded by the lack of meaningful work to contribute to my community besides the development of two small children through microwaved chicken nuggets and watered down apple juice with occasional lessons on reading and good manners. The youngest is still trying to nail down the color 'blue.' The work is abusive and thankless. We frantically ask each other, 'what can I do to help?' And the best thing we can do right now is to stay home. To make matters worse, the world is still revolving, I think, despite my lack of contribution to the spinning. The vanity of life! Is this all there is? 

Where's the humanity, again? 

I started playing in the dirt, getting a summer garden ready. Nothing is safe, well, except the dirt. Not to mention that dirt is cheaper than CBD oil and possibly more effective for stress relief. I've learned that I'm not making a novel discovery as I take my evening walks around the neighborhood. There are kids rolling around in the dirt like dogs who have found the grossest spot in the lawn. I've also noticed that a spring quarantine is a middle-aged dad's dream come true—there's unlimited time for landscaping right as everything starts to bloom. It's seventy-five degrees and perfect and neighbors line their porches.

Look, it worked for Adam and Eve in Genesis. The land, more specifically the garden, was the first place we learn to become human beings. God the Gardener charges the first humans to till and love Eden. In other words, God calls humanity to plant, nurture, and celebrate the goodness of the material world. We become adamah by taking evening walks with God in the garden, paying attention to the sparrows and lilies, which have always been on the forefront of God's mind. Together, we put our hands in the dirt to co-create, nurture, and celebrate life. 

A friend recently shared a poem by Scott Cairns who describes the creation of humanity in a playful, midrashic way:

"Then, YHWH lay back, running His hands over the damp grasses, and in deep concentration reached into the soil, lifting the great handful of trembling clay to His lips, which parted to avail another breath.

With this clay He began to coat His shins, cover His thighs, His chest. He continued layering, and, when he had been wholly interred, He parted the clay at His side, and retreated from it, leaving the image of Himself to wander in what remained of that early morning mist."

This primordial story helps us climb back into the goodness of our skin. We are a clay cast of God, sculpted from the dirt that God animated with God's own breath. Of course, the unbelievable part of Christianity is that God later re-covered Godself in the mud to live among us. In the incarnation God has come and touched our lives to show us the true image of humanity. And if we give ourselves to the dirt, whether on the ground or in a more complex form called 'human,' we're reflecting the image of God. 

Most of us are estranged from the people we hold most dear, but a great way to look up to God is by looking at the ground beneath our feet. When the material is a threat to be feared, the world can still feel good again--at least for an afternoon. Grow a plant. Build a sand castle. Go for a run. Pick the tulips and smell them. You'll feel a little more connected to your body and the patch of land you call 'home.'

​There's this story in the Gospel of John, where Jesus picks up mud and lathers it on a blind man so that he can see again. May God lather our eyes with dirt, too, and give us eyes to see the blessing of being human even amidst disease and fear.
​

​This spring I've been amazed by the number of earthworms in the soil as I've tended to the garden. I'm continually surprised at the complex matrix of life under my feet, that which is seen and unseen. The worms thrash around, disturbed by a large metal spade they never saw coming. I was always taught as a kid to save as many earthworms as possible. "They're good for the soil," mom said. Unfortunately, I struck one or two with the shovel; it wasn't intentional. Regardless, there I am, a terrorist to whatever makes its home in the dirt. 

The world is not a safe place, not even the dirt, and yet it also produces ripe tomatoes and cucumbers. It's cognitive dissonance. There is a pandemic and there's the twilight hour when the sunlight is perfect and the kids are riding bikes around the neighborhood. I go for a run and the sweat drips to cool my body and that feels good, even in a body that has the propensity to carry disease. There are ways to climb back into the cast that God left behind, to feel the goodness of the material world again. 

In a couple months, there will be some kind of plant in the dirt that I disturbed--a defiant sign of hope and goodness. Disease will threaten to kill it, but I will watch over it with vigilance. I'll be human, again, fashioned in the image of a gardener God who watches over us even as disease threatens to take our lives. One day, even further down the road, this plant will bear some kind of fruit. The fruit will make its way to our dinner table where we will celebrate the goodness of life with friends. We will touch and laugh and bear God's image for one another. Invisible grace made visible. A sacrament and the material made holy.  

Easter begins in a garden, where the dead becomes compost for new growth and a body walks out of a tomb. It starts in dirt and ends in dirt. It will begin again from the ground because the earth, and all that is in it, is good. In the meantime, you can find me in the dirt—in all of it's fragility and wonder, just like you and me 
​