Deborah Larsen Cowan

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever. John 14:15-16

Dear friends,

How comforting: the thought of an advocate being with us forever. This calls up another passage in Romans 8:26:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

Even more comforting that the Spirit is active within us. I love the thought of a real Presence interceding “with sighs too deep for words.”

But-- dang! We don’t know—in the middle of ordeals--the details of the sighing. I want to know the content! Maybe I have a chance at sensing it? I hope I will “see it feelingly” as the Duke of Gloucester--whose eyes had been gouged out--says in King Lear. Some of it, I sense, involves a prompting to extend myself to others.

What is the content of your own work in the world just now? The answers are different and I believe the Spirit of Christ glories in that--glories in actions all the way from someone’s work in the virology lab to another’s delivery of bread and canned fish, to yet another’s telling wildly funny jokes to get us to laugh out loud.

May we do the attentive work of sensing the Spirit who warms us and spurs us to action. Those unfathomable sighs also remind us: Someone knows more than we do. What a relief.

I also look eastward these early Eastertide mornings. Some lines by the great poet/priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, come unbidden and I say them aloud:

Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.

“Cresseted” puzzled me, so I looked up its etymology. A “cresset” is a holder for a burning lamp or torch. Now I think of the visible depressions in our mountain chains as cressets, as holders or hollowed-out bowls which at dawn contain a rising glow that announces the sun.

Deborah Larsen Cowan