Some years, some weeks, some days I can dig in deep. I can lose myself for hours in thinking about Easter and Love and Suffering. This year, mothering these two, it’s just not going to happen. This year Easter snuck up on us and here we are days in advance and very few preparations have been made.

I’m at peace with that. Theology is useless unless it grows feet and hands and puts itself to work. Unless it stretches and shows itself to be Love to the fever and headache that grow in the night that prove giants in little bodies. Unless it is expansive and warm like the moonlight love letter I received in the night, it is useless. Unless it has room for the most intense of suffering, the most dramatic and intense of the human experience than we are not living the truth of Easter. We’ve not yet become the Easter people.

There is a headache at five am and a request for me to kiss it. Little face is hot and dry and I can feel the illness settling into him. I pour myself onto his bed like a moon beam, wrap myself around him and pull him into safety embrace.

This act is theology enough for me. Even as this morning I have moments of more, the types of moments that make sense of the work and remind us the reason Jesus came, the way that ‘he calls us to total self-giving. He does not want us to keep anything for ourselves. Rather, he wants our love to be as full, as radical, and as complete as his own. He wants us to bend ourselves to the ground and touch the places in each other that most need washing. He also wants us to say to each other, “eat of me and drink of me.” By this mutual nurturing, he wants us to become one body and one spirit, united by the love of God.” (Nouwen).

Theology has to wear skin. It’s the only way to walk in truth.

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love”John 13:1