Bread of Life

Nathaniel Kidd on August 5, 2024

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

John 6:35

The Bread of Life has come down from heaven.

The Bread of Life has come down from heaven!

Oh, let us hear it again: the Bread of Life. Has come down. From heaven.

Can you feel it? Can you grasp it? Can you let it take hold of you? The very sustenance of the universe, the bread of angels; a supersubstantial nourishment that can feed our eternal souls and bind up our broken hearts, has taken on flesh and dwelt among us. This is no mere metaphor, no poetic flourish – this is the raw, pulsing heart of reality itself.

From the whispered promises in Eden, rising up like a mist from the ground, to the manna falling like dewdrops in the wilderness; from the widow’s never-empty flour jar to the Bread of the Presence that sustained David’s rebel band; from miraculous feast for five thousand to the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb; the story is always, has always been the same. God, in His relentless, reckless love, is about the business of feeding His people. But now – oh glorious now! – the symbol has become substance, the shadow has given way to light, and the Bread of Life stands before us with arms outstretched.

In Him, we find a feast that never ends, a table that’s always set, a welcome that never wavers. In Him, all the families of the earth are blessed, drawn in, from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, because He has been lifted up from the earth; because this Grain of Wheat has fallen to the ground and died; because it has grown up and borne much fruit, and been ground afresh and baked into this One Bread that is his One Body. This is grace upon grace, love heaped on love, mercy flowing like rivers in the desert. With every morsel we taste, every crumb we gather, we are drawn deeper into the heart of the Divine.

And here’s the beautiful paradox: as we are fed, we become bread for others. As we are nourished, we become nourishment. Like the food which a nursing mother eats, which is transformed within her into the feast of love that sustains her suckling child, the love that fills us to overflowing spills out of us, spalshing wastefully on an irredeemably parched earth; yet all at once feeding a hungry world. We who were once scattered like grains on the hillside, are gathered and ground by grace, kneaded by mercy, and baked in the fiery love of God to become one loaf – the very Body of Christ in the world.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Come to the feast, you who are weary and heavy-laden. Come, you who hunger for righteousness. Come, you who thirst for love that will never run dry. The table is set, the bread is broken, and the cup overflows. Here, in this holy meal, heaven touches earth, eternity kisses time, and we are remade in the image of Love itself.

Let us marvel at this mystery, let us revel in this grace. For in the breaking of the bread, we find ourselves made whole. In the sharing of the cup, we find our hearts expanded. And in the simple act of eating and drinking together, we find ourselves caught up in the very life of God – a life of unending love, of radiant grace, of astonishing, world-transforming power.

This is the feast that never ends, the love that never fails, the grace that never runs dry. This is the Bread of Life, come down from heaven. Take, eat, and be forever changed.

Dark Cloud

Jim McNeely on August 3, 2024

The Dark Cloud

I live these days under a dark cloud of deep depression. I have days when I seem to have some courage, some color. But I live under a dark cloud. I have trouble believing that God loves me, that God has my best interests at heart.

Neuromuscular Disease

In Nov 2019, I began to have double vision. My eyes stopped working correctly. Ophthalmologists could find nothing wrong with my eyes, until a neuro-ophthalmologist determined that I have a neuromuscular disease called myasthenia gravis. I began to also have severe trouble swallowing and general weakness. I felt I was constantly choking. My nervous system does not communicate properly with my muscles because my autoimmune system attacks the biochemical juncture between them. During the pandemic, I was taking copious doses of immune supressant drugs to control this disease. Now I am taking infusions every 8 weeks to control this disease, infusions of what is said to be the most expensive medicine on earth. It costs my insurance company almost $500k a year to keep me going.

During that year, my wife did not seem to take this disease seriously. She really did not step in to help. She pursued her busy life. While I was suffering and immune suppressed during the pandemic, barely able to function, against my strong protests she decided to fly to Texas to visit her friends. It did not seem to bother her that I felt she would return to put my life at great risk, nor that I would be left alone in such a fragile state. Not only was I terribly ill, it felt that my own wife wished me dead.

In the following year I had to have surgery to have my thymus gland removed, a common surgery for people who suffer from myasthenia gravis. Then it took a lot of doing, but I was authorized to receive this new medicine, which has thankfully put my symptoms mostly into remission. I do still have struggles but they are manageable. My life is dependent on this medicine.

Cancer

In August 2022 my wife began to have problems eating. It turned out that she had stomach cancer. She could keep nothing down, and became so weak she couldn’t stand or walk. The days leading up to Christmas that year, our fairly new car blew a head gasket and needed a new engine. We had to borrow a car. It was the worst ice storm I’ve ever seen in these parts, and we live at the bottom of a steep and long hill. I would never have considered driving out in such weather, but it was literally life or death for her to drive her down to Seattle to get a feeding tube. That very day, a newly installed crown on my tooth fell off. Yes it did. Don’t think I had time to go to the dentist to take care of this. It was not easy to get her down the stairs, out to the car, drive down to Seattle, get her in and out of a hotel, and to the hospital. She had her surgery Christmas eve, and on Christmas day I received the news that her cancer had spread. A few days later we received the news that her cancer was stage 4 and that it was highly unlikely that she would survive.

But she fought to live! The chemo alone almost killed her. My life went completely on hold being her caretaker. I have never seen such suffering. It was a constant flow of false hopes and horrible news. In and out of the emergency room and intensive care. I recall coming home from one of these stays and just yelling the F-word at God for well over an hour. Every single F-bomb was for something different and fresh, some newly remembered outrage. I could have gone on but I was finally exhausted. It was impossible. She was finally OK’d to go into hospice, but she was actually too sick to enter the hospice facility! Finally after a nine month battle, she was admitted and in less than 24 hours she was gone.

Gut Punch

I had a car wreck the day she died. Yes, I did. I was left with debt from the funeral and medical expenses, which many people helped with through a gofundme. God bless everyone who helped me that way! I could not have gotten through it all without such help. But it was still overwhelming. We had been dependent on her income.

A few weeks after she died, I learned that she had been having an affair. It was like being punched in the gut. It explained a lot, the constant late nights away, my devastating loneliness over the last years of our marriage. I had been at the point of leaving her when we found out she had cancer. Now she was gone, and then this. My life was shattered. My grief was deeply tainted. I cannot say I actually blame her. Our marriage was a friendship over the years, not a romance. I don’t blame her for reaching out for love. She was a wonderful and even magical person, who loved God and had a deep and abiding faith. I forgive her, I really do. But I am beset now with profound guilt and self-doubt and regret.

Where was God?

I would like to know, where was God through all of this? I could point to various blessings. We were loaned a car to take Betty to get her surgery. People were generous to help us. I am in the strange position of being grateful for being released from what seemed to me to be a very difficult marriage. I am grateful for these things, I truly am. Perhaps I should not be grateful for the release, I feel guilt over it. What kind of man is grateful for his wife’s death? The debt is considerable. My disease and my need for this medicine hangs like a guillotine over my head. I am even more lonely and disheartened. I feel stuck in this bitterness like a fly stuck in amber. One cannot snap one’s fingers and produce a new and loving wife. I’m not even sure I’m a man who could have such a wife. I am still lonely as I was in the marriage. How exactly am I to understand that God loves me through all of these things?

I am afflicted, storm-tossed and not comforted (Isaiah 54:11 NASB). It does not help me to say that such suffering is the likely fate of all of us. It does not help me to say that I ought not be overwhelmed, that our true hope is in the next life. Our afflictions are momentary and light only in comparison with the weight of glory they are somehow producing (2 Corinthians 4:17) – which means that in the face of great affliction, we have the hope of an overwhelmingly great and enduring glory. It does not diminish the truth of our affliction. It remains true that while I may hope and imagine for the revelation of that glory, right now I have first-hand experiential knowledge of the suffering. And I do not like it. At all.

All the grief books that were offered me assumed only that I lost a great and perfect fairy tale love. Nothing I’ve read speaks to this complexity of a broken and sinful man grieving for a genuinely sinful and deeply imperfect partner. These false atonements do not speak to my soul. I own my affliction and my lack of comfort and my guilt. My affliction is my dignity. It is the place of God’s meeting. It is in our sufferings that Christ and I find fellowship and oneness. I feel that He understands me, because He has suffered and died. It does not do to try to cast all of this as non-suffering or minor suffering or common suffering. Christ’s sufferings were not trivial because our sufferings are not trivial. My soul and my conscience will not be satisfied with such answers. I don’t mean that I refuse to be satisfied with such answers. I cannot be satisfied with such answers. There is no justice in them. My conscience will not bow to such trivial solutions.

What is the Answer?

What then is the answer? I go to the cross. I do not go to innocently and sweetly adore Jesus at its foot. I go to judge God. He is the One I am angry with. It is difficult to escape the notion that He caused this. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that He set this world to such suffering and awfulness. I go to the cross to beat him bloody and nail him and mock him and kill him. I do not approve of the way He has handled my life. You say, no! You cannot blame God!!! God is holy and blameless, are you crazy? Perhaps He is, but you are not wise enough to know it. It is a mystery. But the world, of which you are a part, has crucified God’s only begotten Son. It is humanity’s place, each individual, to judge God. Someone must be judged. The blame must go somewhere. Perhaps my wife’s cancer and infidelity is all my fault! No, it’s her fault! It is the church’s fault. It’s her family’s fault. It is society’s fault. It is the doctors’ fault. It was a bad education! She needed a better therapist. What good does any of this do? It’s everyone’s fault perhaps. The blame is all interwoven – it is our sin. But, God made all of this. He made me. He made her. He foresaw all of this. He knew and He made it all happen anyway. God foresaw the holocaust, think about that. It does no good to blame someone else. It is a fool’s game to tease it out. The place all of this quest for justice and answers for suffering should lead to is to the cross. It is God’s answer. Our sin is not merely our errant sexual proclivities, our greed, our lying. It is our hatred and judgment of God. This is what the cross declares – humanity’s hatred of God. This is my sin.

And it is this sin that Jesus declares forgiven. He says, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” And it is true: I do not know what I do. It is the height of presumption for me to assume that I know what I do. I do not know what I do, but nevertheless I do it. We all do it. But in laying the blame at the cross, I am assured of an overcoming mercy and grace. From the outcome of my sin of blaming and hating God, of seeking justice ultimately at His expense, it is not His death which prevails. It is His resurrection which prevails. He raises from the dead and finds us murderous and hiding and guilty and fearful and defeated and unfaithful, and breathes forgiveness upon us. Upon me.

The Weight of Belief – Lifted

In this hour, I do not have the strength or the stamina to go on carrying the weight of having to believe that God loves me and is blessing me. Even though I ought, even though it is greater to always give thanks, I cannot see it. I am blinded in my sense of rightness about what my life should be like, and what it is not. In this hour, God Himself will have to carry the weight of loving me without my help. I am too busy crucifying Him. But I believe that quite apart from me, He does love me. He does carry that weight. Quite without my help, He is raised from the dead with love in His heart for me. I have absolutely no confidence that I can depend on myself to be faithful, to even believe these things, to follow Him. As Nathaniel, my friend and prolific contributor to this site has noted, (and thank God for this) the risen Christ is unfollowable. He appears when and how He wishes, He does and speaks what He wishes, and He disappears. No one summons Him, no one controls Him, and no one follows Him. He does as He wishes. I believe He wishes to love us, as He has said.

In that sense I am in Christ. He is the vine, I am the branch. I have died, and it is Christ in me who is the hope of glory. He has come and made His abode in me, and all of my rage and anger and rejection is tiny and futile and fruitless in the face of such persistent and enduring love. I don’t have hope for glory in myself. In the end I can only seem to muster theocide. We say, no no no! I love God! It’s the first commandment. The new covenant says,

10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

1Jo 4:10 NASB20

He is the resurrection and the life. I am not. We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19 NASB). I do believe this. What shall separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:35-36)? Shall our guilt? Not that! (Romans 5:8). Shall famine or peril or sword? If it depended upon us, yes, it would separate us. But through Christ we are more than conquerors. It is not up to us, He is the faithful lover. He is Hosea and we are the whore He loves. It is not our faithfulness and obedience which is the show of glory to the authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:10 NASB). It is the wisdom and love of God towards us and in us that is the show of glory to them. God can take even those who hate Him and want to murder Him, and love them and make them the very centerpiece of His good intentions. This is our assurance, our security, our treasure. This is the great great love God has shown us. This is the astonishing and lavish grace of God. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for it, I truly do not deserve so great a gift.

A Soliloquy on Identity

Nathaniel Kidd on August 2, 2024

O God, you are the foundation of all existence, the wellspring of every identity, the source of every personhood. How astonishing are your works! How unfathomable your ways! How excellent is your greatness! You have created us in your image, investing each one with the same essential dignity, and the same honor of your glory, the same capacity to be loved — that most fundamental gift of being human — yet each one of us is unique, a mystery to ourselves and to one another.

Who am I, O Lord? Who is this “self” that speaks, that thinks, that loves? Where does it come from, and where is it going? You have planted within me a seed of identity, a disposition towards becoming, but its blossoming is a journey of a lifetime.

I marvel, O Eternal Wisdom, at the intricate dance of your providence and my choice, of your design and my experience, your love and my lostness. For in every moment, in every breath, with every heartbeat I am becoming. This self, this “I”, is not a static thing, not an immovable stone, but a living, growing reality, as fluid as a river yet as enduring as the mountains.

And here, O Lord, I am struck breathless! For in this very fluidity, this constant becoming, I glimpse the vastness of your love! How is it possible that you, the unchanging One, love me in my changeability? That your steadfast gaze follows every shifting contour of my being with unwavering adoration? The thought overwhelms me, crushes me with its weight, then lifts me up on eagles’ wings! I am beloved in my becoming – what glorious mystery is this?

How can it be, O Divine Paradox, that I am both fully myself and yet ever changing? That I bear the indelible mark of your creative act, yet am free to shape the contours of my being? You have made me a co-creator of myself, a steward of my own identity. What a fearful responsibility, what a glorious freedom!

I see now, O Unapproachable Light, that my identity is not a possession to be grasped, but a gift to be unwrapped, a story to be lived. It is a process, a becoming, a journey towards you. For in you, O Christ, I find my true self, my ultimate identity.

Yet how often have I lost myself in the labyrinth of false identities, in the mirages of worldly labels and fleeting narratives! How often have I forgotten that my true name is written in your book, that my real identity is hidden with Christ in God!

O Love that will not let me go, I marvel at your patience as I stumble through this journey of becoming. For you see not only what I am, but what I shall be. In your sight, O Eternal Now, my identity stands complete, even as I experience it as an unfolding mystery.

And here again, O Lord, I am undone! The realization crashes over me like a tidal wave – you love not only who I am, but who I will become! Every potential, every possibility, every future version of myself is already encompassed in your love. How can this be? The vastness of this love terrifies me, then comforts me beyond all understanding. I am known, I am seen, I am loved – in all that I am and all that I will be!

What then shall I say of others, O you who are Unity in Diversity? For if my own self is such a mystery, how much more the identities of my fellow pilgrims! Teach me, O Lord, to honor the becoming of others, to see in each person the sacred journey of a soul coming to know itself in you.

And what of eternity, O you who are the Beginning and the End? Will I know myself fully then, or will the adventure of becoming continue forever? I tremble with joy at the thought that in your presence, I shall at last be fully myself, yet ever growing in the knowledge of you.

And even now, even here, in all my incompleteness, you know me fully! This truth blazes forth, blinding in its brilliance! I am fully known and fully loved, not in spite of my unfinished state, but because of it! Your love doesn’t await my completion but revels in my becoming. O unfathomable grace! O love beyond imagining! I am undone, remade, born anew in the light of this love that overshadows all, that encompasses all, that redeems all. In this love, I find my true identity, my eternal home, my everlasting becoming.

O you who are Being itself, I praise you for the gift of identity, for the mystery of personhood, for the adventure of becoming. May my journey of self-discovery always lead me closer to you, until that day when I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Greathidden Grace

Nathaniel Kidd on July 30, 2024

Grace is a great and terrible paradox. Although hidden, it is ever-present. Beyond our grasp, it is intimately close. Being unearned, it is not right to presume or expect it, and yet it is poured out with a reliability that exceeds our receiving even of what we do justly deserve. Like a game of divine hide-and-seek, grace invites us by the troubling fact of its present absence to engage more fully, look deeper, and experience the thrill of discovery; to seek with wonder and awe, rather than with anxiety or shame. “If with all your hearts you truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me,” saith our God.

The playfulness of grace is not trivial. It speaks, rather, to the nature and depth of God’s desire for relationship with us. Like a parent playing peekaboo with a child, delighting in the joy of each “revelation,” so too God seems to delight in our discovery of His presence in a world around us where he seems to be absent; to be found by us, shrouded in “clouds and thick darkness.” There is no glory – no fun! – for Him in being revealed in the merely glorious. He delights in being discovered in ruination and disaster. He shrouds Himself in a form in which there is no beauty nor comeliness that we would desire Him, indeed, a visage nearly too terrible to look upon.

Grace permeates existence. Even in moments of doubt or darkness, when the Divine seems most distant, grace is there. It is the very air we breathe, the ground beneath our feet, the steady rhythm of a beating heart. It doesn’t require earning or performance. It simply is, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be noticed and received. In it, we live, and move, and have our being.

The Gospel, viewed through this lens, is not a set of doctrines to be believed or propositions to be accepted, but an adventure to be embarked upon. It is an invitation to dive deep into the mystery of divine love, to lose oneself in the unutterable, immeasurable riches of grace. No one needed to tell the man who had found a treasure hidden in a field to go sell all that he had to buy it. He went with joy. With joy! His feet were carried on wings of desire. His heart pounded with all the passion of a lover, whose instincts attach themselves to the possible impossibility that there might somehow, some way be a way to attach himself, to unite himself to the object of his love, if he only throws himself into it with utter self-forgetfulness and abandon. 

But such is our forgetfulness, that we forget it is His idea, and we (being fools) think that WE must pierce in into the veil, that WE must run, WE must persist, forgetting that He has hidden Himself for the sheer delight of His Love. This is the strangeness of it! That even His hiddenness is a pursuit of US! O what wonder, what strangeness is this! But this is the length, the breadth, the height, the depths of His love, that is beyond any boundary or boundlessness. “O where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”

We have a strange way of transforming everything into a law. But how can there be a law in this? That God is so delighted to delight in us? That He laughs, whose throne is in heaven; that He desires to play thus with us? That it is He who pursues us, with the vigor of a Lover whose Love is spelled in stars and galaxies, in the ceaseless dance of quarks and atoms, hidden in every strange dance of love and loss, desire and discovery? Every strange motion of reality is His, and every cadence, a part of this one, secret ineffable poetry, whose theme is our Belovedness, a Belovedness so deep and so secure that He has fully poured out His Blood for it, turned Himself inside out, given Himself over to destruction, and defeated death and hell and all the terrors of nonbeing to transform our mortality into ever being capable of ever-receiving the ever-unending, molten magnitude of all the rapids and cataracts of the sweet ceaseless tides of HIs all-creating, all-sustaining ominamor.

To be sure, it’s discomfiting to think that we are “toyed with” by God. These are not encouraging thoughts when we find ourselves in our deepest pits and lowest hells, when we are perched upon the dungheap of the destruction of all our dreams and desires. Often we feel ourselves the victim of fate or circumstance – at best! if we are able to crawl out from under the suffocating intuition that we might in fact be directly and immediately under the flame of some sort of sadistic Divine persecution; our troubling suspicion that God – for some reason – likes to watch us squirm. “Like a moth, you eat away all that is dear to us! … O turn your gaze from me, that I may be glad again, before I go my way and am no more.” And again, “Why do you hide your face and consider me your enemy?”

But these are exactly the words we are given to cry out! We are given – it is a gift!! – groans unutterable; a grief that seizes, our heart, our mind, our soul, our whole being. The invitation is not to some project of self-improvement, or even peacemaking with the terrors of existence. In fact, the impulse of terror and the impulse of love are one and the same, one torrent, one ecstasy, one experience of being utterly torn apart and reconstituted by the all-suffusing, incomprehensible, and unbearable Beauty that hides itself in the heart of existence.

In this way, even atheism itself is a gift from God – that we would be graced to descend to such a place of utter meaning-evacuating, reality-bending depths of paradox, as to deny that the life with which we curse our life has source or cause. God loves us, not only in our unlovability, but in our unloving, when we rail, with every fiber of our being, against Goodness and Truth and Beauty itself; when we with fervor deny, not only that these things exist, but that they are even possible; when we swear in our anger, that even if they did exist (which – just to be absolutely clear – we do not believe), we would mercilessly and recklessly and with full, ruthless abandon pursue them and tear them apart. 

There we are, in the midst of the storm, struggling all night, in our little tempest-tossed boat (for it is shortly before dawn) against the wind and the waves, bearing His terrors with a troubled mind. We are not comforted – we are terrified! – to see that figure walking upon the water; His familiar face, luminous and serene. It must be a ghost! It must be a demon! A lie! A delusion! He comes to us: and we cannot stop our struggles, even to look up and contemplate this coming vision; if we let go, even for a moment, we will be submerged in these darkcrashing terrors; the thunders, and the lightnings of this darksome night will tear us full apart. 

He comes to us, and it is as though He is going to pass us by. As though He would add His impassivity to the impassivity of all nature, and all humanity: no one cares about our little storms, and our struggles. This is not a global flood, but a tempest, as it were, in a teapot; a little weather system, over a little lake, in a little corner of the world, appearing in no almanac, unknown and unnoticed. And God is in it, and God is through it, and God is present to us here, in spite of all this? In spite of both the struggle, and the smallness?

Yes. Yes, Beloved. Yes. The Lord is here. Here. Even here. Especially here. His Spirit is with us.

This is precisely the full playfulness of theophany. That the Lord is not in the wind nor the earthquake. That he would hide us in the Rock, and pass us by, and allow us to see the backside of His Glory as it recedes, in its strange, unknown, and unknowable majesty, before which we remove our shoes and veil our faces.

A Theophany of Becoming

Nathaniel Kidd on July 29, 2024

All you who have ears to hear, let them hear! If you have eyes to see, behold! I have seen wonders that are beyond telling; I have heard of mysteries that set the foundations of the world ablaze. I will speak of them now in words that burn, but flicker like candlelight. I am not ashamed to praise Him in the great congregation. (The poor shall eat and be satisfied, and those who seek the Lord shall praise Him.) (Little Benjamin is at the head, leading the throngs of the princes of Judah!)

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

Friends, beloved of God, and heirs with me of his inestimable, ineffable riches: can you fathom the depths of this truth? Its height? Its length? Its width? Its breadth? The Creator of all things, Source of the source of galaxies, the Ancient of Days and the Lord of Time; the one whose Almighty “BE” resonates still in the quivering strings that vibrate at the hidden heart of existence, seeks to dwell within us! To penetrate the hidden depths of our heart! To be to us, not an unknown god or a distant deity; not a cold judge or an anonymous force, but as Love Itself Love Incarnate, reshaping us from within to be a forge of pure passion!

I have tasted of this mystery, I tell you. I have watched its honeyed dewdrops swell with heaviness, and drip down with the swirling lightsome dark of this deep mystery, and I have tasted, the rich fruit of this Strange Tree; the bursting summer-ripe ambrosia of the well=blossomed celestial mysteries. Sweeter than honey it is, to be sure; and finer than gold, yea, than much fine gold. It is more intoxicating than wine, a fire that burns but does not consume, a light that pierces the deepest darkness of the hiddenmost chambers of our hearts.

Can you imagine, being in that boat on the stormy sea, straining with the oars against the wind and waves? The wind howls, the waves crash, and fear grips your heart. Then, through the mist and spray, a figure approaches: a light above the waters. Is it a ghost? A demon? No! It is the Lord Himself, walking on the waters of chaos, proclaiming, “Take heart! I AM!”  Oh, the astonishment! The terror and the joy! In that moment, we realize that the One who commands the wind and the waves seeks to enter the fragile vessel of our hearts. But ah! It tears open a deeper terror still. How can the finite contain the infinite? How much less this sorry and sinstained vessel the fire of his absolute purity? Yet still he comes … but we are afraid (we did not understand about the loaves, and our hearts were hardened).

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

What manner of calling is this! That we should be filled – FILLED! – filled with the fullness of God! The FULLNESS!! Not a portion, not a taste, but the very essence of Divine Love itself; the infinite outpouring, pouring out into the infinite void of our boundless brokenness. 

Groaning, I have felt the mantle of this calling fall upon my shoulders. I was a fool to press in. Three times did my father say, “Turn back!” but I pressed on. I knew where I was going, and I did not know. And the flames and the whirlwind and the strange hoofbeats of metaphysical horses; the transfiguration that makes a man an angel, and I cried out (yet not me, but this voice torn out of me by the strange and terrible ecstasy of the act of witnessing it itself) “My father! My father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” And falling to my knees weeping in holy terror and ecstatic joy, I felt my old self torn away like a garment (and I was tearing it myself, but I did not know what I was doing) while his mantle fluttered downward, and landed soft and heavy on my shoulders, this strange new identity forged in the crucible of Divine Love.

This mantle. This strange, story-woven, many-colored new self. It is wet with the dew of heaven and steaming from its contact with the Holy Fire. It echoes celestial songs, sung by fire-beings and angel tongues. And rolling it, into a tool of my possession (though I am myself possessed) I strike at the waters with it, and find them cleaving open … (the waters of reality themselves, parting open, paring the veil between the seen and unseen, heaven and earth, things temporal and things eternal).

What lies beyond? What secret inhabits this most secret place? What unutterable words are spoken there? What reality-shaping words of pure fire and lightening, the unbearable birthing heat of the primordial darkness? My friends, it is a realm of such beauty and terror, such wonder and awe, that all human words falter and fail. Every symbol becomes molten, all is a riot of absolute being (even as it Is Not); every atom sings with the music of creation, every moment is pregnant with the possibility of transfiguration. And here, in the midst of it, in the deepest, most precious, most inscrutable bowles of all; beyond the third heaven, beyond the seventh heaven; the Koh-i-Noor atop of the Throne of Glory itself: here is the deepest, most terrible, most real, most unimaginable, most sacred truth: 

I am beloved. You are beloved. We are ALL beloved. We are loved with a love so vast, so profound, it shapes and reshapes the very fabric of our being. 

In all the noisy heavens, among the choirs of angels, rank upon rank, who cannot keep their voices quiet, and all the thunderous praises of creation, the voice of God Himself: “I rejoice over you with gladness. I will quiet you by my love. I exalt over you with loud singing.”

It is no mere sentiment. It is no fleeting emotion. This love is the fundamental force of the universe, the power that spins galaxies and splits atoms. And with its secret and relentless passion, it makes and remakes us in its image.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Can you feel it, dear ones? The stirring in your soul, the quickening in your spirit? It is the touch of the Divine, calling you to the endless furnace of becoming, a becoming that will never end. We are not static creatures, frozen in time and space. Our stories are not once written, but unfolding yet. We are dynamic, ever-evolving expressions of God’s creative love.

Let us embrace this holy becoming! Let us step out of the boat of our comfortable certainties onto the wild waters of faith. Let us allow the Divine Fire to consume all that is false within us, leaving only the pure gold of our deep and endless belovedness. It is here, in this becoming – in this endless unfolding of our God’s Love, in us, and for us, and through us – here we find our truest purpose, our deepest joy, our purest love – love unfolding, ever unfolding into love – and we, living, breathing icons of this selfsame everoutpouring Divine Love, portals through which heaven touches earth, and mountains melt like wax, and all reality smokes.

Oh, the mystery! 

Oh, the wonder! 

Oh, the astonishing, breathtaking, heart-stopping beauty of it all!

Beloved, take heart. The I AM is here, walking on the waters of our little chaoses, calling us deeper into depths of love we have scarcely even begun to imagine. Dare we answer? Dare we become?

A mantle is falling. The waters are parting. A new world beckons.

Let us step out. Let us become. For love’s sake, become!

gather up the fragments

Nathaniel Kidd on July 26, 2024

Let’s pause for a moment and marvel at the breathtaking expanse of God’s grace – a Love so vast it reshapes the very fabric of time and space.

In the whispers of the ancient stories of Scripture, of God’s dealings with His people; in the legends of saints and martyrs of old, who did “greater things than these,” we catch glimpses of a truth so radical leaves us breathless: God’s redemption in Christ isn’t just a future hope or a present reality – it’s a power so potent it even flows backward through biography and history, transforming every moment with its touch.

This may seem to big to contemplate, but in fact, it’s exactly what the Bible teaches. Jeremiah tells us that God chooses to “remember your sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:34, Hebrews 8:12). Let that sink in for a moment. The Creator of the universe, the One who knows every hair on your head (Luke 12:7), deliberately chooses to forget your failures. But what does this mean for us? If God – the ultimate arbiter of reality – chooses not to remember our sins, in what sense did they even happen? This isn’t about pretending or denial. It’s about a love so powerful it doesn’t just cover our sins, but in some mysterious way, it undoes them: God’s forgiveness in some sense reaching back through time, unraveling the very fabric of our mistakes.

In Christ, we’re not just forgiven sinners – we’re new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17), with pasts rewritten by grace. The prophet Isaiah declared, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more” (Isaiah 43:25). Shame whispers lies about our worth, but remember this: in God’s eyes, that shame-inducing event is not just forgiven, it’s forgotten. You stand before Him fresh and new, your slate wiped clean not just in theory, but in the deepest reality that matters, “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).

Imagine with me the weight of human history – every misstep, every tragedy, every broken promise, every cry of anguish. Now, see that entire tapestry bathed in the light of Christ’s love, each thread illuminated and made new. Imagine the fragments of human life and history and experience, gathered up, and reintegrated into a new mosaic in the light of the Cross.This isn’t about erasing the past or pretending our wounds don’t exist. No, this is about something far more beautiful – it’s about God taking every frayed thread, every ruined aspect of our broken lives and reweaving them into a masterpiece of grace.

We can’t help but wonder about our failures, our blunders, our sins; the many times we’ve fallen short, where we have been negligent, or even deliberately done what is blameworthy or shameful. Beloved, hear this truth sung from the heights of heaven and the depths of your heart: in Christ, there is no such thing as a life too broken for God to make whole. There are no stories that are simply over. Your worth isn’t measured by your accomplishments or your adherence to rules. Your belovedness is an unshakeable fact, established by God’s delight in you before time began.

We often cry out for justice, for God to act against those who break His law. But in Christ, we see a response so unexpected, so scandalously loving, it turns our understanding upside down. Instead of condemnation, God offers healing. Instead of punishment, transformation. This is grace that doesn’t just forgive – it recreates

And here’s the truly astounding part: you’re invited into this cosmic dance of redemption. Picture the grand cathedral of creation, filled with the praises of angels and saints. At the center stands Mary, the God-bearer, leading the chorus. But this isn’t a performance for you to watch from afar. No, there’s a place prepared for us – for you! right in the heart of it all.

Your voice, with all its unique tones and textures, is a unique and  irreplaceable part of this heavenly symphony. And here’s the liberating truth – you don’t need to perform or prove yourself worthy to join in. The price of admission was paid on the cross. Your seat at this divine concert was secured by Christ’s “it is finished.”

Let’s let go of the exhausting need to earn God’s favor. Release the burdensome idea that our spiritual life is about meeting a divine checklist. Instead, let’s open our hearts to the love that’s already embracing us. Let the reality of our belovedness sink deep into our bones.

As we do, we might find something miraculous happening. The very things we once strained and stressed to achieve – purpose, success, transformation, holiness – begin to blossom naturally, like flowers turning to face the sun. This is the paradoxical power of grace: true change comes not through our striving, but through surrendering to Love.

Beloved, wherever you are on your journey, know this: the God who holds the universe together is tenderly, passionately committed to your flourishing. Every moment of your life – past, present, and future – is being woven into His grand story of redemption.

So today, let’s take a deep breath and rest in this outrageous, limitless grace. Let it wash over every part of you – your triumphs and failures, your certainties and doubts. And as you do, may you find yourself swept up into the joyous, never-ending song of God’s love – a love that has already claimed you as its own.

Christianity as a Way of Love

Nathaniel Kidd on July 25, 2024

Beloved, let us bask in the radiant warmth of a truth so magnificent it threatens to overwhelm us with its beauty: Christianity is not merely a way of life, but a way of love. It is a love so profound, so transformative, that it shatters every preconception we’ve ever held about our worth and our place in the cosmos.

At the very heart of our faith lies an astonishing reality – the self-giving, vulnerable love of Christ on the Cross. This is not a distant, abstract concept, but the very womb from which all flourishing flows. Can you feel it? The pulse of divine love beating through the universe, calling you by name, declaring your belovedness?

Oh, dear ones, release yourselves from the shackles of performance-based faith! The Gospel of Jesus Christ needs no prerequisite but openness to receive. There are no asterisks, no fine print, no hidden clauses in God’s love contract. It is freely offered by the gracious, initiating power of the Holy Spirit.

Let us stand in awe-inspired wonder at how Christ reconciles and makes whole all that has been fragmented. In Him, we find a sure and certain source of vibrant becoming. No longer must we be driven by a sense of deficiency or shame. No more shall we toil under soul-constricting narratives that burden us with impossible demands.

Beloved, hear this truth and let it seep into the very marrow of your being: You are worthy. You belong. Not because of anything you have done or failed to do, but because of who Christ is and what He has accomplished. Your identity as God’s delighted-in Beloved is unshakable, grounded in the work of Christ alone.

Can you imagine the freedom that awaits when we truly grasp this? Or rather, when IT grasps hold of US? It’s a freedom that expresses itself through radical self-surrender and joyful reliance on Christ’s spacious love. It’s a defiant gladness that releases all compulsions to merely shape external form. Instead, we trust the power of Love to do the gentle work of healing and nourishing our thriving interiorities.

Beloved, this is not a call to joyless, fear-based conformity. No! It is an invitation to the liberated life of whole-self integration through contemplation of Christ’s absolving gaze. As we behold His selfless beauty, repentance blossoms not as a self-punishing prerequisite, but as the natural fruition of being loved so completely.

Let us celebrate this astonishing grace with every fiber of our being! Let gratitude, worship, and ever-deepening liberation in Christ be the song that rises from our hearts. For in Christ, we find not only forgiveness but a cosmic, life-altering transformation that makes all things new.

Dear ones, this is the Gospel in all its stunning simplicity and profound depth. It is a love that will not let you go, a grace that knows no bounds. So come, just as you are, and be embraced by the One who loves you with an everlasting love. For in this love, we find our true selves, our deepest fulfillment, and the power to love others as we have been loved.

This is Christianity as a way of love. This is the radiant grace that changes everything.

Defiant Truth: You Are Radically, Irrevocably Beloved

Nathaniel Kidd on July 24, 2024

Listen up, dear ones, because I’m about to drop a truth bomb that will shatter every false gospel you’ve ever heard. Are you ready? Here it is: You are beloved. Period. Full stop. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

This isn’t some feel-good platitude. This is the raw, unfiltered Gospel truth that will set you free if you let it sink into your bones. Your essence – the core of who you are – is defined by one thing and one thing only: you are loved by God with a fierce, unrelenting love that nothing in heaven or earth can shake.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But what about my sins? What about all the times I’ve messed up?” To which I say: What about them? Do you really think your sins are more powerful than the Cross of Christ? If “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword” cannot separate us from the love of God in Christ, do you think your mistakes and blunders can? Do you believe your failures can somehow negate the finished work of Jesus? If so, I’ve got news for you: that’s not the Gospel. That’s a lie straight from the pit of hell, and it’s time we called it out for what it is.

Let’s get one thing straight: your identity isn’t found in your performance, your beliefs, or even your own sense of worthiness. Your true identity – your essence – is hidden with Christ in God. It’s unchangeable, unshakeable, and utterly secure. No amount of sin can tarnish it, and no amount of good works can improve it. It simply is, because God says it is.

Now, I hear you asking, “But what about how the world sees me? I am a nobody, I feel my nobody-ness every day. I’m trying to become a somebody, but it seems so difficult, so impossible.” Here’s the liberating truth: yes, you need tactics to navigate this world, and we wear masks, we wear personas to navigate this life. But your personas don’t define you. They’re just the roles you play. Some of them might be helpful, others might be harmful, but none of them touch the core of who you are in Christ.

The world will try to tell you that you need to craft the perfect persona to be accepted. Religion will try to convince you that you need to believe certain things or behave a certain way to earn God’s love. Both are lies that chain you to a treadmill of endless striving. But the Gospel – the true, defiant, liberating Gospel – tells you that you’re already accepted, already beloved, already enough.

This is the truth that sets us free: We don’t have to earn God’s love. We can’t earn God’s love. It’s already ours, given freely in Christ. Our job isn’t to try to become beloved; it’s to wake up to the stunning reality that we already are.

So let this sink in, beloved: Your essence is beloved. Your identity is secure in Christ. Your personas are just the ever-changing surface of a deep, unchanging ocean of belovedness.

This is the Gospel. This is freedom. This is the truth that will change everything if you let it. So stand tall, throw off the shackles of performance-based acceptance, and live in the wild, radical reality of your belovedness. Because you, yes you, are loved beyond measure, beyond reason, beyond change. And nothing – absolutely nothing – can ever take that away.

The 33 Chapters on Gospel Asceticism of @MossyMonk86

Nathaniel Kidd on July 17, 2024

It is said that, besides residing in the bowels of the internet (where they hiddenly craft cathedrals for the metaverse), @MossyMonk86 spends their days in the wild and rugged wood, imparting arcane liturgical knowledge to the Sesquac, that they may impart this knowledge to the strange tribes of the future, long after civilizational collapse.

1. The root and heart of Christian asceticism is the asceticism of Christ.

2. The asceticism of Christ is an asceticism of delight, for “the Son of Man came eating and drinking,” as it is written. (Matthew 11:19)