Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:21)

 Today's reflection is by Kari Jo Verhulst
Lutheran Chaplain at MIT and Pastor at University Lutheran Church

It’s been a long, hard Lent this year, full of rough headlines and harsh silences. The untimely deaths of students at MIT and Harvard; the life-altering violence that shattered Fort Hood, Franklin Regional High School, and now the Jewish Community Center in Kansas. The gnawing sense that what is happening in the Ukraine, Syria, and Egypt is only going to get worse. And those are only the big-fonted stories. Add to these countless fine print or wordless experiences of struggle, longing, and bondage.

It’s been a long, hard Lent this year, and I am so glad it is Holy Week. This is the week that I get to act out my own sense of longing and sorrow through the words and stories and songs that tell of Jesus’ journey to the cross, and how his bearing of such sorrow weds the Godhead with the Creation that groans for the day when it will be set free from its bondage to decay.

The 14^th/15^th century mystic philosopher Julian of Norwich spoke of this as a “oneing.” She imagines that as Jesus hangs on the cross—the preferred Roman instrument of torture and humiliation—he is opened up to “every sorrow and desolation” and sorrows along in kinship. The poet Denise Levertov writes of this way:

The oneing, [Julian saw,] the oneing

with the Godhead opened Him utterly

to the pain of all minds, all bodies

—sands of the sea, of the desert—

from the beginning to the last.

I pray that you, also, will get to join your struggles with the way of the cross this week. And that through this, you will know the freedom of the glory of the children of God.