“…Both of these practices remind us that transformation is rarely about starting from scratch. It is about what happens when what already exists is taken up, worked through, and reshaped over time. I’ve named them as “cycles of transformation,” but in reality there is a kind of spiraling movement to it. Things return, but not in exactly the same way. They come back changed, deepened, made into something that can sustain life in new ways…”

On the journey to Emmaus there are no earthquakes.  There are no dazzling clothes like lightning.  And there are no descending angels giving a public service announcement about a startling divine rupture in the fabric of the universe.  But there is an earth-shattering change in consciousness, mediated through the most ordinary of encounters.

Everyone is waiting for something.  I wonder if our lives and actions are especially marked by what it is we’re waiting for.  And how we wait.  And who we wait with.  In his life, and in his death, Jesus opens up a space for his companions, even all these centuries later, to hold all this waiting in such as way that it is contained within a larger story.

Who are the easily-identifiable Zacchaeuses in our world, our nation-states, our cities, our neighborhoods, our families? Who are those people for whom we have lost hope, those we despise, those we avoid at all costs, those we have exiled from the nest of community?