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Sharon Adam

When Sharon was ten her baby sister Krystal was born whom Sharon would both love and suffer over for years to come, for Krystal would live a troubled life, dying before Sharon.

For the most part though, Sharon’s childhood was happy, despite frequent bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia and ear infections. She enjoyed family trips to Wildwood, and later enjoyed going there on her own with friends. She enjoyed school and did very well there, getting mostly “A”s throughout her time in the Parsippany school system. Afterwards she took some courses at Morris County College. Sharon was very bright, though often she seemed compelled to hide her intelligence.  She loved to read.

Lynn Agre relayed a story to me of a time when she and Sharon were working the toy booth together at the Happy Apple Bazaar in the mid-afternoon quiet time. To keep themselves awake the two women rummaged through the board games for sale and found a scrabble game, which they proceeded to play. Lynn prides herself in her love of words, as evidenced in her pursuit of a Phd in linguistics, but nevertheless, Sharon proved herself to be the superior wordsmith that day, beating Lynn by a substantial margin.

Sharon had a knack for teaching herself skills. She taught herself to be a key punch operator and how to operate a computer and do book keeping. She worked for a time with Dell Publishing where she met her life long friend, Fred Coleman. At one point she supervised an office at a company called Bases. During these years Sharon lived on her own in various apartments.

When her mother got sick, Sharon moved back into the family home in 1994 with Carol, George and Michael in order to help care for her mother. It was during this time that I met Sharon, who was keeping her mother company in a hospital room at St. Clare’s.  I was visiting Mae Thomas, a member of our congregation who shared a room with Sharon’s mom. I was struck by the family’s devotion to one another.   When her mother died in 1995, I was privileged to officiate at her funeral.  An unanticipated grace that came from this sorrow was that first Sharon, and then later Carol and George began coming to Church, and before long Sharon had become a very special part of our church family. She gradually coaxed Fred Coleman into the fellowship as well, which widened the ripples of grace that extended out from her life in ways far beyond our knowledge and understanding.

There was a loneliness hidden deep in Sharon’s soul.  Although she would often present a tough outward image, inwardly Sharon was in fact quite soft and tender. In certain ways she was a very private person, and yet Sharon longed to feel like she belonged.

Sharon’s church family came to mean a great deal to her; she felt like she belonged here. Having learned from her mother the principle of, “There’s always room at the table,“  Sharon appreciated the belief she found here that “There’s always room in the circle.”  She loved being a part of the United Methodist Women. Sharon played an important role in establishing the retreats that our church began holding each year for persons living with HIV/AIDS and their families, for whom the great compassion of her heat was movedly deeply.

Sharon formed a special friendship with Joy Frandsen whom she would talk with for hours on the phone, and she grieved for her friend when Joy passed from this world two years ago. As Sharon’s numerous health concerns made it more and more difficult for her to leave the house, she made a point of staying in touch with folks, talking on the phone to Lois and Doris and Ruthann and Grace Schlosshauer and Grace Agre and Ann Nye.  Betty Polen remembers how Sharon and her sister Carol brought dinner to her house the very next day following the death of her husband Ray, and how much it meant to her.  Whenever I would visit Sharon, I was always touched by the way she would ask about my family, remembering the details of their lives. Sharon developed a special place in her heart for the Gibson family, doing whatever she could for them. She gave special attention to the mother of her childhood friend  who became confined to the Care One Nursing Facility.

In the last nine years of her life, Sharon found her greatest delight in her nephew and niece, Matthew and Danielle.  She hadn’t seemed all that interested in children, but when Lurli got pregnant, something was drawn out of Sharon that had been hidden deep inside.  When Lurli went into labor, Sharon was too excited to sit still, so she took George and Carol out to breakfast at the Spa in Lake Hiawatha, where she proudly announced to everyone who entered how she was about to become an aunt.  Later that night, following Matthew’s birth, Sharon insisted that she would take George and Carol out to dinner to celebrate.

As Matthew and Danielle grew, Sharon would play games with them and read them books, as well as help them with their homework. She had the patience to wait out Matthew’s boy energy, recognizing in him an unusual intelligence, doing what she could to encourage his mind. She was so proud when Matthew was invited into the gifted program at school known as GRO .

Christmas a very special time for Sharon, during which she would get caught up in the spirit of giving. Sharon would spend all her money on Matthew and Danielle, making sure they found plenty of gifts under the Christmas tree. Her generosity extended beyond her family; through our church Sharon adopted a family from social services to whom she provided Christmas presents.  She gave donations each year when the Muscular Distrophy Drive was held.  She made a point of mailing in her church pledge when she couldn’t make it here herself.

Sharon loved old movies, with particular fondness for Susan Heyworth. She knew “The Godfather” by heart. She liked Disco Music. She taught herself to crochet and to knit, making sweaters and blankets as gifts to give to the people she loved. A Noah’s Ark tissue box sits on my desk, made for me by Sharon.  She loved cats.  She could be very, very funny, impish, like a little girl.

Sharon had a tough time living in a physical body.  She dealt with obesity, kidney failure and dialysis, breathing and heart problems, and eventual confinement to a wheel chair.  She endured countless hospitalizations. Considering all she was up against in her body, we often wondered if Sharon would make it out of the hospital, but she had a remarkable determination – a stubbornness – and eventually home she would come, ready to live and love some more.

For the entire past year we were amazed that Sharon was able to stay well enough to avoid the hospital. But a month or so ago she found herself back there again. She underwent two surgeries, and extended stays in the ICU. Somewhere along the way, the great fatigue that was always with Sharon finally got the better of her. She didn’t want to fight anymore. She wanted to go home to the Lord, go home to her mother and her father, to Krysty and Joy. And once she made her decision, it was only a matter of days before she was released from this world.

Lurli had a dream after Sharon’s death that blessed the whole family. In the dream it was understood that Sharon had indeed died, and yet she was there, alive and well, in fact looking quite different, her body no longer the great burden it had been for Sharon for so long. In heaven, everything is made new. All the tears are wiped away, and we are given a new body, one that can run and not be weary, one that can disco like John Travolta, if that’s your pleasure. It is a wonderful thing to think about Sharon with her brand new body, considering all she put up with in this life with her body.

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The following was written by Darren Yacenko and Andy Klekanos:

Anyone who ever met Sharon, even for just a few moments, would have to realize as we always did, that she was one of the sweetest, most gentle and caring individuals you would likely ever meet. Despite any physical suffering she might have been enduring at the time, or her learning of yet another health challenge that she must somehow cope with, Sharon always greeted us with a radiant joy, and a warm heartfelt hug; Her first words to us were always to ask about OUR health and our families’ health, and how things were going for US (despite the fact that our issues seemed to us to pale in comparison to the nature and extent of the issues that confronted her.) Darren especially remembers her deep concern, sympathy, and empathy upon the passing of his dad at the Christmas holiday time, since she also suffered a great loss during a Christmas holiday season. We will always remember the very touching phone calls we would receive from Sharon, so appreciative of a note or card we had sent her, or just to make sure all was o.k. with us and our family, since she hadn’t seen us in a while.

I don’t know how you can hear this story as any way other than well, Jesus, doesn’t come off too well, at least not initially. Commentators have often tried to find a way to suggest otherwise, implying that Jesus was simply testing the poor woman, or maybe giving his disciples some kind of lesson; that his intentions were good from the outset.  But I think that’s crap, and it arises from a need to make Jesus less than fully human — impose on him our notion of perfection.

The fact of the matter is that Jesus is rude to this Gentile woman; that he tries at first to ignore her, and when that doesn’t work, he becomes increasingly insulting, using essentially a racial slur, referring to her and her kind as “dogs” unworthy of sitting at the table with Jews.

If we back up a bit and look at what Jesus had been going through prior to this story, the fact of his meanness becomes pretty understandable.  He’s been pouring himself out to countless people who have come to him for healing.  He’s been battling with the Pharisees who are constantly trying to undercut his ministry.  And then there was the word he recently received regarding his cousin John getting murdered by Herod, leading him to want to get off by himself for a time to mourn. The crowds, however, just kept following him, requiring his attention.  Last week we heard about the nice relaxing stroll he tried to take on the water, only to be interrupted by Peter’s need to be saved from drowning.

Once more Jesus tries to get away, traveling to the region of Tyre and Sidon where there aren’t many Jews, and he assumes he won’t be known, and people will just let him be.  But somehow this Gentile woman hears about his being in town, and she comes begging on behalf of her demon possessed daughter.  At first Jesus tries ignoring her, hoping she’ll take a hint, but no, she just gets all the more in his face, and finally it’s like, “Listen, Dog, what part of No don’t you get!”

The guy is just so stressed.

Read by itself, this morning’s Old Testament lesson can be a bit deceiving since it skips over what Joseph had to go through to get to the point where he was ready to reveal himself to his long lost brothers and forgive them.  For three long chapters prior to this passage, Joseph jerks his brothers around, withholding his identity from them. He has what will appear to be stolen goods planted in their pack donkeys, tormenting them with burdens of fear and guilt.  He holds the youngest brother Benjamin hostage, terrifying the older brothers that they will end up having to tell their father once more that his youngest has been lost.  He does all of this, of course, because it takes him that long to get past his anger and hurt from what they did to him long ago.

When we are stressed, our relationships with the people in our lives take on the quality of what one philosopher has called an “I – it” relationship.  We relate to other people as though they are an object, not a “thou” with a soul.

The people we interact with in public become “its;” reduced in our perception to the roles they play and nothing more — the clerk, the waiter, whatever.  The notion that they have lives apart from these roles, that they have feelings and longings and pain all their own — none of this occurs to us.

But we can do this with people closer at hand as well.  We come to see those nearest to us one-dimensionally, entrapped by the dynamics of our particular relationship. There is no mystery, no surprise.  All seems predictable.

So initially, Joseph views his brothers as objects, exclusively in terms of the capacity they once demonstrated so wretchedly for cruelty and deceit.

When our middle name becomes “Stress” (Jeffrey Stress Edwards) we see others one-dimensionally.  This guy’s a “jerk”, this one’s an “idiot”. Oh, and this one? she’s a “liar”.

The flip side of this is that we refuse to see the shadow in the people we decide to designate as the “good ones.” (For instance, if you have a preference for one of the two presidential candidates, take note of your tendency to impute only bad motives to his opponent, and to make excuses for any political deception perpetrated by your guy.)  There is, in truth, light and darkness in all of us.

It is this tendency, I think, that is at work when people hear this story about Jesus and refuse to acknowledge the mean-spiritedness he is expressing in the present moment — to deny the fact that he is relating to this woman as an “it”.

When we begin relating to the people around us as objects, we can be pretty certain that God has become an “it” as well.  No longer the great holy mystery — the one in whom we live and move and have our being — now God gets reduced to nothing more than the one who withholds what we want; the one who won’t give us a break, keeping us in a perpetual state of guilt for not doing more even though we are exhausted.

I read this simple but illuminating definition of stress this week by a contemporary writer on the spiritual life named Eckhart Tolle.  Stress, he said, is the desire to be somewhere other than in the present moment.

Well this certainly seems to fit for Joseph. For three chapters he has been avoiding the present moment which requires that he relate directly to his long lost brothers. When he finally does open his heart to the present moment, allowing his brothers to be once more his brothers and not merely objects defined by their cruelty of long ago, well, it opens Joseph to a great deal of emotional pain. He weeps so loud again that everyone can hears his wailing through the locked doors.

And stress as the desire to be somewhere other than the present moment also describes Jesus as well. He just wants to get away from it all, particularly the needy woman who is in his face.

The advice that went along with this definition of stress was, first of all, to simply become aware of it.  It’s helpful in the course of our days to ask ourselves, “What is my relationship to the present moment?” As we become aware of our desire to flee, we can try, as best we can, to return to the experience of the moment, reminding ourselves that the present is all we really have, and that if we are fleeing from the present, we are fleeing from life.

I find these two stories hopeful, because both Jesus and Joseph do not seem so very different from myself, and yet in the end, love conquers all.  The Gentile woman is so intensely in the present moment that she calls Jesus back to it as well. Last week we heard the story of Jesus calling Peter fully into the present when he invited Peter to step out onto the water.  Here, it almost seems as though this Gentile woman is playing the part of “Jesus in disguise” on behalf of Jesus himself, leading him into a grace-filled moment that permanently changes his understanding of the dimensions of God’s grace.

This is comforting, because I know there is hope for me, even in those places in my life where love has not yet conquered all.  In the great by and by, God intends to have God’s way with me, and with all of creation.

The best place to start in embracing this great love is in returning to the present moment.

It was Descartes who said, “I think, therefore I am.”  Who am I? I’m the one thinking my thoughts. Well, that seems clear enough.

But if we can slow ourselves down enough in order to spend a little time simply observing ourselves thinking, this “I” who is thinking our thoughts shows itself to be quite puzzling.  In our limited control of them, our thoughts resemble wild horses, or perhaps more accurately, wild squirrels in that they jump so quickly from subject to subject.  In the course of a few seconds of observation we will likely notice contradictory thoughts running through our heads.

For instance, the thought “I want to lose weight” may exist in close proximity to, “I’d really like a bowl of ice cream right now.” Or the sincerely expressed thought, “I want to be an instrument of God’s love” may be followed closely by some petty, mean-spirited thought regarding somebody we know.

All of which points to the difficulty involved at trying to define this “I” who is thinking all these thoughts. We might attempt to identify our self with the aspirations of our more noble thoughts, but we realize that any description of this self that fails to acknowledge the whole range of thoughts that race through our minds isn’t really telling the whole truth.

The good part of this, however, is that, on the positive side, there is also always more to us than our self-limiting definitions acknowledge.

When we hear this morning’s Gospel lesson, the thing that many of us latch onto is the walking on the water.  Did this really happen?  Did Jesus really do that?  Frankly, I’m not sure.  Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.  I don’t know that it matters, though, and if we focus on this question, we may miss the larger point being made here.

What we do get in this story is a pretty accurate depiction of the mind at work, specifically the mind of Peter the apostle.  First, you see his capacity to hold contradictory thoughts in close proximity.  There is Peter’s trust of Jesus — his desire to follow Jesus wherever he leads.  But there is also Peter’s fear — his compulsion to focus on the wind and the dark, cold water beneath him and his feeling that he is in way over his head, so to speak.

What we also see here is a portrayal of how the mind creates its own reality, for better or worse. In this case, there is the reality that has formed in Peter’s mind regarding his expectation of what will happen if he steps out on water.  Ever since he was a little kid, Peter has believed that to do so will result in his getting drenched.  His repeated experience and his repeated interpretation of his experience have reinforced the pathways in his brain that correspond to the thought, “I will always sink.”

Brain scientists could tell us in much greater detail how this all works with brain synapses and the organic chemicals involved.  But the point here is that having thought these thoughts repeatedly, it becomes mighty tough to stop thinking them — to see reality in a different way.

So it is to Peter’s credit (especially given we don’t see any of the other disciples willing to question their pre-existing view of water reality) that he is open to at least give this new possibility a try, which is what he does when he steps out of the boat.  For a brief shining moment, he experiences this new way of being in the world before the wind picks up and triggers all his old assumptions back into place.

And it was the presence of Jesus that made this new reality possible.

Now it would be a waste of time, I think, to give much thought to the possibility of our walking on water. There are, however, plenty of other assumptions that all of us carry around inside our minds that limit us and our capacity to live in the kingdom of heaven even while we are yet here on earth; beliefs we simply assume to be true which might not necessarily be so, at least always, at all times.

Consider, for instance, the beliefs we hold about our families, which our Old Testament lesson this morning calls to our attention in describing Joseph getting sold into slavery by his brothers.  What is a family?  Well, we could say it is a network of relationships that follow blood and marital lines. But that doesn’t tell us much, because in reality, families can be experienced as wonderfully good or terribly bad, and sometimes both.

And so let’s say a particular family comes to be defined over time by strong negative emotions, for instance anger, jealousy, resentment, and a desire for revenge.  If we remember that in a certain sense our minds create realities, what we are saying is that the experience and interpretation from past moments of these particular family relationships have come to define the experience of the present moment.  Which, the story of Jesus walking on the water, and Peter stepping out there with him, suggests doesn’t necessarily need to be so, especially if we acknowledge Jesus’ presence in the present moment.

In the present moment, for instance, forgiveness could be the new reality, where holding onto a grudge has been the unquestioned assumption.

Or speaking the truth in love could be the new reality, where shared denial has been the governing supposition.

Or feeling strong and capable, where it fell to one person to always play the part of the helpless one; to be the leader, where before one family member was always the passive follower.

The possibilities are endless, and what we’re describing is not only applicable to families, but to workplaces, to classrooms, to churches, wherever, not to mention our experience of ourselves in our solitude.

It needs to be acknowledged, however, that these kinds of changes to our personal realities can be mighty tough to pull off; indeed, sometimes it can seem pretty near impossible.  Having thought and rethought those old self-limiting thoughts so often the grooves in the highways of our brains seem darn near unavoidable for the tire tracks of our consciousness.

But to quote Jesus, “with people, it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.”

So keep an eye open to visitations from God — those moments when Jesus comes walking on the water to us — making changes possible that didn’t seem possible before.

This past week I was up at the hospital, trying to visit June before she went into surgery, but fortunately, or unfortunately, depending how you look at it, she was taken into surgery early, so I didn’t get to see her.  But because I was there I did bump into a friend who was at the hospital at the cancer center having just finished a yoga session.  (Did God arrange this?)  We sat and talked.  She described how during the past year her world was turned upside down with the diagnosis of cancer. The striking thing, though, was how, like Joseph getting sold into slavery by his brothers, the un-asked-for obstacle brought about possibilities that might not otherwise have been recognized.  She described finding herself able to change in a positive way on the level of her moment by moment thought processes.

Realizing that her priority now was life and health and staying focused on that which nurtured these gifts, she was finding herself better able to keep her focus, choosing not to pursue dead end thought processes that led her into fear and worry and despair, choosing instead to keep her attention on thoughts that embraced hope and love.

Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. Whatever affirms life and love and wholeness is aligned with Jesus. There he stands on the dark waters, bidding us to come. And in response we suddenly find the ability to step out of our old boats, and, at least for a moment, experience something of our birthright — the glorious liberty of the children of God.  We catch a glimpse of the wholeness to which Jesus is leading us.

The story begins with Jesus withdrawing from the crowds for a time of retreat. Matthew alone places the motivation for Jesus’ initial withdrawal in his grief and dismay regarding the news he has just received of the death of his cousin and friend John the Baptist; murdered — beheaded, in fact, at the hands of Herod and his dysfunctional family, the outcome of Herod’s bizarre, drunken birthday party.

In Mark and Luke’s version of this story, although the death of John is recorded in the passage immediately preceding, the connection between the two stories is not drawn. They portray Jesus as acting on behalf of his disciples, motivated by concern for them and their need for rest.

Not so in Matthew’s account. Here Jesus comes across all-the-more human, vulnerable, seemingly incapable at the moment of giving much thought to what his disciples might need, because his own needs overwhelms him.

And so Jesus goes away by himself, drifting quietly in a boat along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, lost in his thoughts. In Matthew’s version, the crowd that follows along on the shore apparently includes his disciples, and when, far from the villages, Jesus finally notices the crowd, he comes ashore moved by compassion and begins tenderly touching people, healing the sick among them.

One other detail that is altered in Matthew’s accounting: here Jesus does not teach. Apparently he doesn’t feel much like talking.  Words, at such a time as this, feel hollow and empty. And yet there is in the scene a profound sense of tender intimacy, of compassion, and in this bittersweet, silent communion, healing takes place.

Matthew’s version led me to think about a similar experience everyone of us here today shared in nearly seven years ago, and that is the common grief we felt on that terrible day in which the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania.  It was a horrible day, full of sadness and much fear, and yet there was something holy about the day as well.

Life suddenly slowed down in those days immediately following the news.  So much that had seemed so important was suddenly discovered to be not so important at all. Perfect strangers we’d encounter on the streets were revealed to be not strangers at all, but rather sisters and brothers connected to us by common grief, our common humanity and fragility. Our hearts were suddenly wide open.

This sense of communion extended beyond our borders as well: we soon began hearing of candlelight vigils being held in every corner of the world, including places we might not have expected to hear of vigils; in Iran, for instance.  For a time, we weren’t seen as the invincible nation, the richest and most powerful of nations; we were seen as a nation of people weeping for lost fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, murdered by the same sort of evil that took the life of John the Baptist long ago. We were the recipients of compassion, an unusual place for us self-reliant Americans to find ourselves in.

And so as horrible as such times are, they also provide an opportunity to experience a deep communion of the spirit. As Matthew tells the story, this is part of what Jesus recognized that day, and what his disciples seemed to miss.

As the day grew late, the disciples’ considerations turn practical: the crowds of people should be sent away so that they can find food and shelter for themselves. Jesus, in contrast, seems to realize that at this tender time where hearts are wide open, the usual practical considerations don’t apply. It is good to be together — perhaps not to speak much, but to touch one another and cry with one another and perhaps even to laugh with one another. Along the way the practical stuff gets taken care of — everybody gets enough to eat. More importantly, a sense of holy communion is shared that the people present would never forget, and which the Christian community remembers every time we share the Lord’s Supper.

The other story we heard this morning from Genesis has a striking similarity to the way Matthew told his story. In this case, it is Jacob who finds himself compelled to be alone, spending a night camped out by himself on the shore of the Jabbok. He has sent his two wives and his children and all his possessions ahead of him, and so it is just him, all alone.

In this instance, Jacob has not received word of a loved one’s death, but nonetheless, it is grief of a sort that he grapples with in his solitude that night.

With the exception of another night spent alone long ago in which Jacob was blessed by a vision of angels ascending and descending a stairway to heaven, he has been largely disconnected from the interior life of his soul. A man of action, Jacob’s focus has been on making his mark in the external world.

Twenty years earlier Jacob abruptly left his home: leaving behind his dying father, his mother, and his twin brother Esau with whom he once shared their mother‘s womb. Jacob’s departure had involved a particularly cruel betrayal of his brother, deceiving him and his father out of the old man’s blessing. But in the years since, Jacob has been preoccupied with acquiring wealth, leaving himself little time or space to confront the grief and guilt buried inside him.

Now, however, he can put it off no longer. He has heard the call to come home, and tomorrow he will be reunited with his brother. He remembers how he treated Esau, and he suspects his brother will meet him full of rage and the desire for revenge. And so Jacob is afraid.

What happened that night on the shore of the Jobbok is full of mystery. Jacob wrestles through the night with an adversary variously described as a man, an angel, and the Lord himself. Jacob is doggedly determined, and though he has no hope of overpowering his opponent, he refuses to give up. In the course of the night, his adversary asks him his name,

“Who are you?”

It is a question asked of each of us in those long nights we too find ourselves alone, wrestling with God.  Beyond our possessions and all the roles we play, who are we really?

Through the course of the long night, Jacob asks to be told the name of his divine adversary, but receives no answer, for to possess the name would represent gaining control, solving the mystery of God and this cannot be.  Jacob does, however, receive a blessing.

At daybreak, he comes forth a changed man, with a new name. Now he will be called “Israel,” which means, “One who strives with God.” He is no longer afraid, though he is distinctly humbled. For the rest of his life he will walk with a limp, a reminder of the enormous power at the disposal to the night time adversary, demonstrated by the ease with which he put Jacob’s hip out of joint.

In this tender-hearted state, similar I think to the one Jesus found himself in alone with his grief and discouragement, Jacob’s reunion with Esau turns out to be full of grace, and he declares to his long lost brother that seeing his face “is like seeing the face of God — since you have received me with such favor.”

As we go through life, grief is unavoidable, and guilt, too. These powerful emotions frighten us, and there is much to be done on a practical level to engage the external world, and so instead of allowing ourselves the time and space to feel their power, we harden ourselves, deceiving ourselves into believing we are stronger than we are.  At times we are confronted with a choice we may not even be conscious of — a choice between experiencing our grief or lashing out in anger, and we choose the latter, preferring the momentary sense of power the anger provides. The wounds remain buried in our souls, and our grief simply compounded.

And so it is important to consider the model set by both Jesus and by Jacob, of taking time to feel our grief, and to find the tender gifts that come as a reward for such courage — the remarkable sense of communion that is ours with all living creatures.

In a certain sense, life is about learning how to die; which means learning the art of letting go. Buried grief and guilt keep us in bondage. Jesus sitting alone in that boat with his great grief, and Jacob alone by the River Jabbok facing his grief and guilt, were both doing the work necessary to be able to die peacefully, with nothing but love present.

It is striking that this sacrament that we will celebrate once more this morning, the Lord’s Supper, also known as “Holy Communion,” is at once an invitation to grieve — to remember, after all, Jesus’ last supper and his death — as well as an assurance of God’s extraordinary grace and willingness to provide for God’s children, calling to mind a remarkable miracle performed long ago when poor, fragile, vulnerable people came together in mutual compassion, discovering themselves to be mysteriously One.

The miracle is re-experienced, every time we dare to trust God with a fragile hearts.