Category: Faith

Faith, Liturgy, Prayer, Writing

Anxious Hearts & Souls: A Lament & Blessing

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

Walking bridge over Lake Stumpf in Collegeville, Minnesota

Written during my recent participation in the Collegeville Institute’s writing workshop, Writing in the Age of Anxiety. Written for my fellow courageous writers and the welcoming staff who cared for us.

LAMENT

How long, O God? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul
            and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long will anxiety hold me? Enter into me? Surround me?

Consider and answer me, O God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death while still alive,
            and anxiety will say, “I have prevailed, I won, I am ruler of all”;
Rejoicing because I shake, tremble, and cannot move.

I trusted you, O God! Trusted in your steadfast love. Can my heart continue rejoicing in your grace and salvation during the depths of my despair?

I will sing to you, O God. Not because I feel your presence. But because you have dealt bountifully with me in the past and my hope lies in days soon to be. I stand before you now, wearing all that makes me anxious, sinking down. Not into the mire, but in humility to you. The One who created me in my entirety calling me “good” as I ask for your blessing.

BLESSING

God who knit all things together in the womb of creation bless my anxious spirit. Jesus who held hope for all of God’s people bless my grief. Holy Spirit whose energy guides me toward courage bless my meekness. +

SENDING

Beloveds, God’s kingdom continues to come near in our work of writing. Go and do. Amen.

(Adapted from Genesis 1, Psalm 13, Mark 1, & Matthew 5)

Faith, Trauma, Trauma recovery

FEAR

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

“For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.”

Matthew 28: 4 NRSV

MEDITATION

Mary Magdalene and Mary go to the tomb. They go on Sunday at dawn. Immediately, the earth shakes. An angel appears whose “appearance is like lightning.” (28:3)

Guards there, on the job. Ordered to keep watch. Commanded to commit atrocities. Feeling stuck in a daily nightmare. With no way out, except death. Theirs and their loved ones. Called moral injury now. No way to stop it. Culture and systems stronger than individuals. These men are merely human.

Guards succumb to ancient instinct this famous morning. In fear, they shake like wild animals. Falling dead like possums. While the women run with fear and great joy. Grounded in something greater than themselves.

PRACTICE: GROUNDING

Stand or sit. If possible place your feet on the earth. Or close to earth through the floor. You may also use hands for this action.

Feel your heels on the earth. Feel the pads of your feet on the earth. Feel your big toes on the earth. Feel your pinky toes on the earth. Feel all your toes on the earth. Feel your whole foot, both feet on the earth.

Now breathe up through the earth into your heels. Breathe up through the earth into the pads of your feet. Breathe up through the earth into your toes, one by one. Breathe up through the earth into your whole foot. First left, then right. Now both.

Breathe. Begin your dawn from here. Grounded.

PRAYER

God of all people and all living things, ground us in your creation. Ground us in your love. Regardless of our actions. Regardless of our past. Regardless of what we have done right or wrong. Regardless of when we were stuck. Regardless, love us. Then. Now. Forever. Amen.

Image by İ. A. from Pixabay

Faith, Grief, Healing, Hope, Trauma

Thoughts on Grief, Compassion, & Joy

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

From my journal, January 20, 2021

I think Jesus fished for people in need of compassion. Maybe he saw the disciples lacking in it. Heard this void in their words and actions. Knowing God wanted more for them.

Read an article by Nicholas Wolterstorff in The Christian Century magazine a couple of years ago, the January 16, 2019 edition. Struck once again how Christian doctrine often works against us in relationship to one another. Doctrine becoming a shield. Creating a wall of souls. Not allowing the other, the one holding up the shield, to step beyond entering into our pain. Embodying our experience. Creating compassion for and with us.

Wolterstorff was called heretical after writing honestly about suddenly losing his beloved son, Eric. A reviewer of Wolterstorff’s book, Lament for a Son , guarded something, maybe the vestiges of their own unresolved trauma with their words. Instead becoming a humanly righteous defender of the faith (as the reviewer saw it). But Wolterstorff needed a defender of his heart. From others. Especially Christians. I quote this man who endured profound loss here.

“I am not angry [at God] but baffled and hurt. My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.” *

As Christians, we do not hold a doctrine of grief. Of how we believe, even trust, and then act upon our belief in times of grief. On how to love others through the most profoundly painful times in life. Perhaps we need such doctrines. Doctrines of grief, sorrow, trauma, anguish. Small frameworks reminding us of our human responsibility to ourselves and to one another. Not just to God in abstraction. In human configuration. But to the holy within us or in front of us who ask merely for a small bit of compassion. Love. Understanding. Claiming there is nothing heretical about any form of human love including grief for the loss of what we love. Loved. Of a beloved.

My mind winds through these thoughts on grief and compassion leading me to joy. Not that joy should be the end result of grief. Perhaps only because I want as a giver of compassion to hold joy for those who hurt until they may reclaim it for themselves. Some claiming it for the first time.

Joy often brings me to the verse from Psalm 30–words I discovered as a teenager full of feelings, hormones, insecurities, and fears.

“…Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 30:5 NRSV

I hope that the psalmist knows something I do not. Not that sorrow is an active ingredient of joy. Necessary to make joy rise. But that all feelings and especially intense feelings have an active lifespan which does not last in intensity and duration. Acute only for a period of time-an expanse we cannot predict yet must travel through. The longing never fully dissipating. Yet with the increase of self-compassion and compassion freely given by others, the longing has a sense of healing and a willingness to embrace other feelings, the ones supporting new life in the after time of sorrow.

Perhaps joy doesn’t come the morning after waking on and off, weeping. Or even the next. Or the next. Perhaps joy comes in small glimmering ways. Like the fall afternoon light dancing on rippling water. The steadiness in night’s sky of a shining planet. A dewy bud opening at dawn. The busy butterfly on summer’s flower. A moment of silence shared with an understanding other. Slight moments reflected off bits and pieces of the world, the natural world and sometimes even its humans. Momentary brightness showing us, reminding us of something other than sorrow. Which feels good enough. Better than what was. A particle of joy amidst what we cannot change.

A prayer.

God of all emotions, We wait for joy found in small gestures of human compassion and glimmers of life within our view or on their way. Weaving in and out of obstacles, sadness, shock. We wait while you hold hope for us in its coming. Slowly, through minutes, hours, days, months, years. Waiting. You in joy. You in sorrow. Amen.

* Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Baptism, Death, Faith, Grief

Creation Clothing

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

With each funeral or memorial service, I preside over as an ordained pastor, I speak about our role as the Church (the whole Body of Christ throughout the world). In this rite we give the recently deceased, the loved one, back to God having completed their earthly baptism. No longer needing to be clothed in the one for whom humans could not obliterate. The funeral, while also for the bereaved, is at its core a rite of the Church. And not only or merely the congregation’s or the gathered. But a rite of all of us, together as the Church throughout the world. Giving the recently deceased back to God going on around the world in all times and in all places. Praying without ceasing. As one immense Body of Christ.

How this giving back to God plays out after death, none of us fully know. The closest I get is when witnessing the transition between this life and death (or the next life). What I see when death is expected, is that there is a rhythm in this shift, one of slow peace. Creating an in between time (a space between full life and full death). And this space wears its own clothing. Even in the midst of tears, beeping machines, sterile walls, and suspended time, this space is cloaked in garments of so many human feelings as well as peace. I suspect this peace continues after death as well. I know the human feelings do here on earth.

I’d also like to believe, hope, and pray that in sudden, unpredicted death, there is also this peace. Even if the transition time is quick. Because it seems to me as a regular observer of the in-between, that this transition is part of the process. And as a sudden death griever my thinking here gives me comfort.

The other day I heard a story about someone who was baptized four times. Four times! As if the first one wasn’t good enough. But for whom? Not God so that leaves three sets of humans playing god. Reminding me of Job’s three famous friends–Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar. The talkers who suck the air out of the ash pit.

Once is all it takes to be given life in Christ on this earth. This life created out of God (Word) and the earthly element of water (unless there is no water and then another earthly element is used like dust or sand.). Something of the earth though as a reminder of both John the Baptist’s actions and words* and also that when God created the universe, God created human beings (our ancestors!) out of an earthly element, dust. Now in baptism, the water with the Word creates new clothing for us with the energy of the Holy Spirit. Creation happening again and again right in front of our eyes. And we are wrapped in Christ, Christ’s teachings, Christ’s healing, Christ’s ways. Christ in action on earth through us. Christ always.

Yet in wearing Christ, we bear a responsibility: To speak and act into what is not Christ while we are here. On earth. And there is a lot that is not Christ in this world that looks like not compassion. Not love. Not right relations with God and others or the earth. Not about the flourishing of all of creation, just a bit of it.

So, let us pray for our earthly Baptism. For feeling God’s lovingness enfolding us. Holding us so that we, each as a tiny bit of the Body of Christ, can be Christ in this imperfect world. An agent of God’s change like Jesus was and is and is to come. In this prayer, asking for what has been allowed to perpetuate that is not God and does not wear God’s garments to be diminished, eradicated. Forever.

God of each new day of your ongoing creation, bring us together, clothed in the saving grace of Jesus. Deliver this holy clothing on the Holy Spirit’s wind, wrapping us as on in you and with you. Reveal to us how to be your people without gender-based violence. Undo in us what humans have created in our name and not yours. Amen.

* “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. (Matthew 3:11, NRSVUE)

Prayer from “Being Clothed With Christ: A meditation on Ending Gender-based Violence” by Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez in Forgive Us and Transform Us for the Life of the World. ELCA, 2025. 57

IMAGES: Adult Baptism: Image by Ahstubbs from Pixabay. Infant Baptism: Image by Leonardo Espina from Pixabay. Font: Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay