Holy 2016

The last enemy to be destroyed is death. [I Corinthians 15:26]

In my creative writing, my fiction, the recurring theme is death. There is seldom any violence in my writing, but there's almost always someone dead or dying.  I'm not interested, it seems, in pitting humans against humans. I'm endlessly interested, apparently, about how people approach death, how death affects them, how we look at loss of a deep, personal, permanent kind.

With Paul, I see death as an enemy, full of potential for conflict in the quiet stories I tell.

And somewhere, sometimes overtly, sometimes undercover, Jesus is lurking in that death. In grace, in grief, in hope, Jesus is in all these deaths of my imagination.

This is the day that we commemorate the time Jesus spent in the grave. Fully human, fully dead, deeply in a tomb.

Today, Jesus meets the final enemy. Today, we keep vigil, watching in grace, grieving, hoping . . .