Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

The incarnation was not a one-time event for Jesus. It is a springboard for entering relationships with us – relationships that are lasting, relationships that are timeless.

If we let ourselves be drawn toward the mystery of the God who has no adequate name, we might also let ourselves be drawn toward the mystery of each other. Because your name is inadequate to who you are in the depths of yourself as well, as is the name of the person you think you know best in this world and the name of your oldest and archest enemy.

Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.

For all of Eli’s flaws, he is surely a model for any of us called to hold space for anyone else to doubt whatever settled certainty is keeping them from hearing the life God might be calling them to live.

The question Jesus keeps pressing upon me and upon all of us is What does it look like for us, here and now, to set aside our confident, violent visions of what we think would set things straight and ask what love requires? Ask perhaps what these strangers to us might actually need in their lives to make them a little more whole.