Jesus said to his disciples, ”I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” — John 15:1-8

Today, as I write, it is the Fifth Sunday of Easter, when we read this passage from the Gospel of John and see above it the icon it inspired. If we could see beyond the painting’s boundaries, would we see tendrils growing from the work of the apostles and ourselves leafing and bearing fruit?

It was a week ago, on Good Shepherd Sunday when I began to write this post. The image above was made in the middle of the third century on the ceiling of the Catacomb of Callistus in Rome. It is believed to show the oldest image of Jesus—as a shepherd.

The liturgical year offers distracted minds opportunity for noticing where they have been and where they are going. These weeks after Easter contain readings rich with parables and symbols for remembering who Jesus is and what the Gospels mean. It all began on Easter when Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, sought and found not the dead body of her teacher and friend, but an empty tomb, and cried, “They have taken my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.”

Every morning, I join Morning Prayer with a cup of coffee and an open sketchbook and pens—symbols of open heart and mind, and will to muster them. As I listen, the scripture and prayers offer images for the creation of a new day. My little practice reminds me that life and growth continue even when I cannot make a mark because prayer also works by revealing lack of love and will, “For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” (Psalm 30:5)

Working as a hospital chaplain, I know that on any day any of us might find ourselves like Mary, seeking our beloved and confused about what is happening to ourselves. There I study how the mind is also a body–storing, detailing, and wailing trauma in ways that terrify not only the holder of the mind-body, but also those it connected to it. Now we have epigenetics and books such as The Body Keeps the Score and My Grandmother’s Hands that detail varieties of trauma and how trauma repeats itself, and methods for somatic healing. This is also my prayer practice, as it impossible to grow in empathy for others without growing in self-awareness.

It is a common experience to feel betrayed by the body when health goes missing. As a chaplain, I feel this not only for myself, but vicariously. But when I visit patients on busy evenings, and am tired and blur stories and names, I remember there is no wave of humanity before God. Every grief is particular, like a single sheep among hills of flocks which God seeks to bring home. This self-reflection frees me to follow God—who is at work and unseen.

Below are a few recommendations for creative work contending with the body and offering an alternative to the heroic projects of the mind which neglect the project of healing in the Gospels. Most of these recommendations have been made by Cathedral Arts Blog readers, and I have used some in presentations for my chaplain residency (Thank you!).

From the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett: Nick Cave, post punk 80’s musician on Loss, Yearning, Transcendence. His recent book called Faith, Hope, and Carnage has been suggested for a Cathedral Arts reading group—any takers?

I recommend a 2023 On Being podcast with Canadian writer and theologian Kate Bowler, associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School, who was diagnosed with stage IV cancer.

I recently gave I and Thou by Martin Buber and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl a deep read and found these books to be bedrock as countless others have before me. Collective trauma bent on repeating itself (aren’t we about to have an election we already had—during COVID?) requires these works for making something new from it. In a similar quest, one of us is reading the late poems of Paul Celan who “in his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world…..saw that ‘reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won.’"

I also recently led my chaplain resident peer group in listening to a song about grief performed by Nina Simone, and in reading the first two pages of “On Being Ill” by Virginia Woolf, who identifies the need for a “robust philosophy” for facing the terrors of the body, and from philosopher Gillian Rose’s memoir, Love’s Work. On adjusting to her body changed by colostomy, Rose references Ezekiel 1: “Suppose we all awoke one day with four faces, each one going straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they go; and they turn not when they go.”

Of going, Rose writes, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not. A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster, could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the errors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose. A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries. To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds.”

Vulnerable, woundable, if not the miracle we choose, the miracle we pray for will come. Life’s binding and loosing will give shape to a “Thou” perceived with our love-ability—an image of God that is ineffable. Some would call it Beauty.