CMP Review 2025-04-22

April 22, 2025

One beautiful spring morning in 2016 I entered St Mary’s Church in the village of Rydal. I was joined by fellow pilgrims to the Lake District, and I sat near the pew that William Wordsworth claimed as his own for prayer and worship. My friend Rev. Benjamin Bernier stepped to the pulpit and began to read from a paper. “What a grand opening to the Collect for Easter Day,” he began.

He was reading from the last known Scale How Meditation of Miss Mason. Composed less than 2 years before her death, it captured Mason’s mature thought on the relationship between this life and the next. I sat transfixed, transported by Bernier’s voice to a century before when Mason spoke the same words to her students.

Or perhaps it was not I who was transported. Perhaps it was simply that for a moment a veil was lifted and I sensed that Mason and her students were not really gone. They were alive in Christ, as alive as Mason’s own meditation on the Resurrection.

I invite you to take a moment this Easter Week to hear this same meditation read by Jennifer Talsma. It speaks about the wonder that a tomb could not contain, and it points to the day when all other tombs will be emptied too. Find it here.

@artmiddlekauff