This week Eastertide runs into Ascensiontide, and, to mark this important segue in the Church calendar, I posted this essay at Lantern Hollow Press’s blog. I conceived the Eastertide essay as a sort of companion piece to this one on the Ascension. Meanwhile, my friend Carrie Givens had taken my short post on baseball and, like a master gardener turning a few seeds into a bed of flowers, written this essay, published yesterday in The Curator.
I add this brief postscript to point out a common thread that runs through the four posts: namely, they all have to do with heaven and earth, and their relationship to one another.
Now one might look at what is impressed upon what — heavenly patterns impressed upon earthly things — and say the heavens lord it over earth, imposing upon her a killing perfection. But, as Carrie duly notes, that doesn’t take into account the strange, resilient scrappiness built into earth by God from the beginning: “Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?” (1) Neither does it account for the faithful Priest who has entered into heaven itself — who was made like to his flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters, and gained admission to the heavenly of heavenlies precisely by means of marks and blood.
The prodigal made it home indeed — by a perfect hook slide that avoided his elder brother’s tag, and left dirt on his pants and a strawberry on his elbow. And the elegant heavens received the gritty prodigal with open arms, and blessed the dirt and the strawberry. No soap or band-aid necessary.
(1) Ecclesiastes 7:13 (AV)
Morning at the Brown Brink 