“Where do we go from here,” we ask ourselves on this Monday morning after Easter. It’s as if we took off smudged glasses and wiped them crystal clean, for a moment. “I have seen the Lord,” says Mary Magdalene, before she dashed off to tell the world. Yes, we see! Yes, indeed, we have seen the Lord. He is risen. I have been handed new glasses. I see everything differently!

I’ve been thinking a lot about church. What is church? What is the main purpose of church? Why do we continue to go to church in this age of skepticism and unbelief? And then there is this troubling question: Is the church dying, as statistics seem to indicate, truly fading, declining in influence, becoming a kind of curiosity to our society? We find ourselves scratching our heads about where church is headed. Sometimes we are deeply troubled.

Hooray, my new book is finally out! My fabulous publisher Wipf & Stock (Cascade Books) sent me the first copies of the book last week. Yes, this project has now come to fruition. I am delighted to let my blog readers know.

I woke up on Christmas Eve morning this year with child-like eagerness. After all the waiting through Advent, now it was time to enter, once again, into the mystery of the manger in Bethlehem. There we find the baby cradled in his mother’s arms. There too the animals chewing on the straw. And there those startling, celestial choirs breaking out all across the fields. Something big is going on here. Oh such mystery. I was eager to return, once again, to the manger on this Christmas Eve morning.

I’ve been thinking about that manger Christians revere at Christmas time. It is a remarkable scene, full of tenderness of a newborn baby, full of the harshness of a winter night, the smell of straw, blankets to cover the child and mother, the odd assortment of animals. And I ponder how this lowly, marginalized family, caught in difficult circumstances, has come to represent a new beginning for the world. And from a manger no less. It’s a mystery, isn’t it? We always lift up in awe the miracle of a baby born, but this baby, and this manger, have come to signal new birth for all of us, new beginnings, new hope. The whole scene spread out across the world with the dazzling speed of light. And from a lowly manger.

It’s cool to be funny these days. We love to watch the late-night-comedian commentators shredding their enemies with laughter. Twitter is full of poking fun at people, always, of course, from a safe distance. We love the chuckles we get from exposing inconsistencies, misstatements, flubs, especially for important people in the news, but sometimes even for those close to home. We get a perverse pleasure seeing others brought down to size, belittled, humiliated. There’s a certain power here. We think we render ourselves more righteous, smarter, more capable than the ones we ridicule. We love laughter, but we’ve got to admit, sometimes, funny is not very funny.

I’ve been trying to zero in on the heart of the Reformation. Good luck, I hear you saying. This is what so many capable writers are doing, books and articles all over the place, especially over the last couple of years leading up to the 500th Anniversary. How can you imagine getting your head around this sprawling, unruly, complicated, pivotal moment in history. Even the great Reformers disagreed on what it was all about.

In the ancient teachings of contemplative prayer, it is common practice to enter into a time of prayer by repeating a word, phrase, or line. As we calm down our breathing into a deeper natural rhythm, we say something like “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This oft-used line is called the Jesus prayer or the Pilgrim Prayer. This short prayer has a lot of history, a lot of meaning, packed into these few words. I have used this line often.

I began again this morning a new cycle through the Psalms. This has been my practice now for five or six years. I read one or two Psalms a day. When I come to the end of the whole book, I start over. This is an ancient practice, of course, likely what Jesus did, surely the pattern for the Apostle Paul. It is such a life-giving, nourishing practice that nudges us toward human flourishing. Each morning we wake up, get ourselves reoriented. We are fed. We drink deeply. We are nourished.

Most of the time we think we are in control of our lives, perhaps especially when we are younger. When people or circumstances seem to threaten our control, we are ready to fight back. We’re strong, we tell ourselves. We do things so people will not see our weaknesses or know that we are afraid. We’ve got it under control—that’s the look we want convey. That’s the way we want to see ourselves.

The New York Times last Sunday asked two contemporary American poets to reflect on the long days of summer. The poems were accompanied with photographs inspired by the poems. What a lovely idea, I thought.

I come to my prayer corner early every morning. I sink down into my prayer chair. I always come with some measure of restlessness, some yearning of soul. If I did not come with a needy soul, I suspect I would not return very often. I desperately needthis prayer. To pray one must take measure of the curse of self-sufficiency. We feel our brokenness. Yes, humility is required before something can happen in the prayer corner.

I woke up one morning a week or so ago with Twitter going crazy over some very nasty news out of Evergreen College in Washington State. The by-then-gone-viral video featured my friend George Bridges, President of Evergreen, under vicious attack by a swarm of angry students. You could hear things like “f *** you, George. Why don’t you just shut up, George. You talk too much”—this to their college president. It made my heart ache. It almost doesn’t matter, in my opinion, what the issue is—this sort of disrespect and disruption has never been the way the university carries out its purpose.

I feel compelled to return to the hot topic of the “Benedict option.” I wrote about this earlier just as Rod Dreher’s new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation, burst onto the scene. This is the book, you may recall, that David Brooks called “already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.” A whole host of respected writers have since weighed in, perhaps the best, amazingly, from The New Yorker, a fair, thoughtful article by Joshua Rothman. With all this attention, needless to say, you get the feeling something big is going on here. Dreher has his finger on a lively pulse.

I was struck the other evening with a sharp, painful stab of nostalgia. I didn’t see it coming. I was lying in bed catching up on the day’s Twitter chatter, when suddenly I caught a theme, reports from so many friends across the country announcing such joy on their campuses. Yes, I remembered, this is the season for graduation! Unexpectedly, I became deeply nostalgic.

I’m trying to depoliticize, unhook, maybe that’s a better word, from the incessant political chatter of our day. I’ve had it. I’m sick of it. I’m trying to shake the illusion that everything must be seen in terms of what is political. It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum, it seems we have all come to believe that politics will save us from danger and grief. Politics will surely usher in a new age of harmony, prosperity, and justice—those are the kinds of shaky notions that underlie our kneejerk turn to politics for everything.

Too often on Good Friday, we lapse into abstractions, grasping for a way to make sense of this horrifying scene. We talk perhaps about redemption. We say that Christ bears the burdens of the world’s sin, our sin. We lean on this event for a strange strategy of salvation. Sometimes we simply turn our heads, walk away.

In his magnificent book The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, Jean Leclercq calls St. Gregory the Great “a great pope, a great man of action.” Sometimes overlooked, though, he was also “a great contemplative, a great doctor of prayer.” I want to suggest this balance between these two sides of our lives is timeless, absolutely necessary. Tip one direction or the other and we get off balance.

Last night I finished Peter Brown’s monumental Augustine Of Hippo: A Biography. This is my second reading of this extraordinary work. St. Augustine, of course, is that towering figure from the fourth and fifth century who straddled the age of the Apostles and the unfolding of Christian Europe.

I woke up Saturday morning pondering whether we had become “a nation of no.” First we designated our polarized political parties as “parties of no”—they’ve each had their stint in that driver’s seat. After a flurry of intense activity over the future of health care, we came down to nothing, nada. Nancy Pelosi pronounced this as a victory for America. It was not a victory for America. It stuck us once again in the mud of paralysis. I am pondering this morning what we have become. We can’t seem to get anything done. It’s not that we are making the wrong decisions; we can’t seem to make decisions at all.