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- SHERYL & STEVE FROEHLICH - LIVING THE STORY THAT GOD'S GRACE IS ENOUGH
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Fridays with Froehlichs #14 |
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Irish actress, Jessie Buckley, won an Oscar for her magnificent creation of Agnes, wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet. Clad in muted red Agnes is the heart both of William and of the film. At home in the forest, she summons her hawk and sleeps in the rooted crook of an ancient tree. Throughout the film director Chloé Zhao has us see Agnes always with a bit of the earth still clinging to her – even one of Agnes’ costumes is made of tree bark. Agnes asks William to tell her a story, and thereafter their lives are bound together. Part woodland sprite and part force of nature, she pours her life into William, their children, and their life together.
We know of William’s love of language and his creative energy, but until the final scene, his art is far away in London. For most of the film we see his plays through the joyful imagination of his children (Susanna and the twins, Judith and Hamnet) as they re-enact scenes of witches and swordplay.
But the Plague takes young Hamnet. Overwhelmed with grief, William returns to London where his sorrow gives shape to Hamlet. Hamnet the boy wanted one day to be in the play, to be one of the actors in the troupe. Now he is the play. Agnes travels to London to see this new production in the Globe theater. She is angry that William has taken the name of their son (Hamnet and Hamlet are variants of the same name) to parade their grief on stage for everyone else’s entertainment.
The play is more than emotional catharsis for William. The film is showing us that the nature of art is to heal and make sense, to be a beauty that confronts the chaos to bring salvation, to make us whole. As Agnes stands at the edge of the stage, looking into the face of the dying Hamlet (and seeing her son), she reaches out and takes his hand. “The play’s the thing to catch…” our imagination and bring the story full circle. So, Buckley, in giving us the extraordinary gift of Agnes, having drawn us close, reaches out and takes our hand and laughs with joy. |
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Beauty, natural and created, can explain things words cannot. From the beginning, in the Christian scriptures, God has always engaged our senses in the worship to which he summons us: the fabrics, the colors, the water and fire, the carvings, the touch and texture of wood, the glint of gold, the blast and lilt of instruments for song and dance, the aroma of the sacrifice, the flavors of the meal, light, dark, all of which form the space in which we hear the word. When Jesus says, “Consider the lilies…” When he invites us… No, when he commands us to fix our attention, to play the artist and let our gaze linger long on birds, on the creation, does he not believe that beauty has the power and ability to bring us his grace, a mercy leading to his salvation? He says “take and eat” that truly we may “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).
Dostoevsky tells us that “beauty will save the world.” By that he means that if beauty will save us, it must be through the greatest and highest of all beauty, the source of all beauty, the person of God. As Augustine prays:
“Late have I loved you,
beauty so old and so new.”
Augustine, Confessions
Yet as we reflect on Jesus this Eastertide, we realize that his love for us robbed him of all his beauty. He was stripped of his humanity, humiliated, dehumanized, violated, disfigured beyond recognition. No artist can capture the absence of beauty.
"He had no beauty or majesty
to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance
that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others,
a man of suffering,
and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised."
Isaiah 53:2-3
But his beauty is not lost. All the deep longings we have for the true, the good, and the beautiful are still found in him, in his resurrected body, the dust of this world still clinging to his limbs, the first fruit of the new creation. When that great new day dawns, we will see him. Our hearts will be full, and we will worship him even as he walks with us in the glory of the world made new.
Yet there is more, even as we create and let our artistic imaginations run wild, even as we wait together, we bear his image, and so we bear his beauty in the world.
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
Gerard Manly Hopkins, “When Kingfishers Catch Fire”
“Behold!” Jesus says. Are we patient enough to see? Are we still long enough to hear? Will we put our hand to the brush, the pen, needle and thread, cumin and thyme, the mound of clay slowly turning on the wheel? Will I hum with eyes closed to catch the tune, the lyric dancing in my head?
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The sweetest thing in all my life
has been the longing --...
to find the place where all the beauty came from.
CS Lewis, Till We Have Faces |
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"We need fighters today,
but to fight the world, not ourselves."
Reverend Delancy
"If you start fighting wolves,
before you know it,
everyone you don't understand is a wolf."
Father Jud Duplenticy |
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In a world of sound bites, character limits,
and over-simplified narratives,
I believe committing yourself to
the reality of complexity
is one of the greatest contributions
you can make to society.
Amanda Held Opelt |
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On Living Well While Dying Well
Ben Sasse is a former U.S. Senator from Nebraska. He has a Ph.D in history from Yale, served as the president of the University of Florida, and is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a husband and dad as well as an elder in his home church. |
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Just before this past Christmas, he announced in this letter that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The doctors projected he had only a few months to live. Since then, he has been talking about living well while dying well. We believe you'll find this interview with Ross Douthat both a humbling and encouraging recalibration. |
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Calligraphy by Timothy Botts |
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Zenger House Awards
Zenger House is a Christian foundation that gives awards to journalists of any religion or no religion for deeply-reported stories consistent with a biblical ethic. The five Zenger Prize judges, with a combined 170 years of journalistic experience, look for stories based on street-level reporting rather than reliance on reading and contemplation only. |
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Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study |
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“Not Dead Yet”
Waiting & Hoping |
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“This time to be alive stretches us,
in every dimension,
between tenderness and tumult.”
Krista Tippett
April 18, 2026 Substack
Saturday, April 18 marked two months since I found myself sitting bedside with Mom as she transitioned from this world to the next. For 48 hours I kept vigil; her breathing was labored and irregular; her body was emaciated; her eyes were hollow and vacant. Aside from a brief flicker of her eyes (recognition?) when I first arrived and greeted her “hello, Mom – this is Sheryl – I am here – I love you – there were no other indicators that she knew or heard, or that she found comfort in the Scriptures read or the songs sung and played or in the gentle touches given.
Watching the dying process was gruesome, the waiting grueling.
Her last breath Ash Wednesday 2026 brought great relief; Mom (and I alongside her) had finished with her dying. In the minutes after Mom’s passing I thought of the Ash Wednesday service we would be missing, the receiving of ashes on our foreheads and utterance of words “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” I doubt I will ever approach another Ash Wednesday without images of those last hours with Mom resurfacing, especially her nearly unrecognizable visage at the end.
As the weeks have passed, flashbacks of those last hours have bubbled up and I have felt weighed down with sadness. Jesus two words in John 11:35 have been my comfort: “Jesus wept.” Death is our enemy, not our friend. I don’t have to pretend to be unbothered.
As I was reflecting on how Ben Sasse is living amid his dying (Steve has already linked to the moving Sasse-Douthat interview), I came across this piece by Brent Beshore “The Unmistakable Freedom of Ben Sasse” in which he comments:
“What strikes me most about Sasse is that he refuses to sanitize any of it. He calls death a ‘wicked thief.’ He calls it ‘evil.’ He won’t dress it up with platitudes or pretend that suffering is beautiful in itself. He grieves it. He told his interviewer that death is ‘not how things are meant to be.’ And yet in the same breath he’ll say that he believes in the resurrection, that he believes there will come a day when there are no more tears, no more cancer, and no more funerals. He holds both truths at the same time and neither one cancels the other.”
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” (II Cor 1:3-4)
“There will come a day.”
Amen.
Meanwhile, I live between the already and the not yet, stretched between tenderness and tumult, on a pilgrimage that requires “a long obedience in the same direction,” to borrow the title of one of Eugene Peterson’s books. Sadly, death and dying are part of this long obedience but never the ending. “Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing." (Frederick Buechner)
“He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life… Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope.’”
Alexandre Dumas
Sasse has shared that his family practices a philosophy of “not dead yet” – a phrase familiar to Monty Python fans like Sasse. They attend church and visit both nursing homes and cemeteries in a desire to purposely embrace mortality. We are on a pilgrimage, a bridge to eternity, but we cannot place our hopes on the temporal. “We don’t build our dream house on a bridge,” he said. “I am dying, but I am not dead yet. I wait and hope.”
So today, I am standing on the bridge of hope, eyes wide open to my mortality scanning the horizon for glimmerings of goodness. I am not dead yet.
"Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain.
Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure."
G.K. Chesterton
The night before mom passed, Steve penned this sonnet: |
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Ash Wednesday Vigil
The bedside vigil stretches into days.
Her lids and lips unmoving as the grey
skin draws the features tight. A hollow gasp.
Again. We speak to her as if she's here.
"We love you mom. It's time to take your rest."
The life that giving life to us recedes
Does she within this gnarl, a withered root,
still cling to life? Friends come and go, the touch
and prayer of presence: "You are not alone."
Is she now watching us, more full of life
than she has spent these ninety years upon
the earth? What do we see there on the bed?
Mere lifeless throes, a glory trapped between?
Sin's cursèd dissolution - dust to dust.
The Maker kneels again and wets with tears
the clay, like Christ, that once again will live.
sdf |
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Personal Updates
XXX
Family: XMuch of our life this past year has been dominated by care for Sheryl's mom. Since her passing in February, we have experienced a sad relief. She is well and safe with the Lord, but the challenge of long distance care is behind us.
XXXXXSteve's contract to serve part-time as interim pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Rock Tavern, NY has been extended through June. That will likely conclude his 14-month term of service except for occasional return visits. He's made some lovely new friendships.
XXXXXChristopher completed his in-resident VA PTSD treatment program. He has been focused on projects at his house as he applies what he learned.
XXXXXWith winter mostly behind us we've enjoyed getting back on the bicycles exploring some of NY's fabulous rail trails. We also took the train into NYC to see an off-Broadway production, Marcel on the Train, based on the famous mime, Marcel Marceau's work with the French Resistance during WWII.
Travel: XIn March through the generosity of friends we had the joy of returning to Albuquerque to reconnect with the Mosaic family. Their new pastor, Shaynor Newsome and his wife, Heather, have become valued friends. Shaynor invited Steve to preach. We got to see NLPC alums and eat good food. We were able to visit more of NM's history and beauty: several Pueblos, Tent Rocks, the crest of the Sandias, the Bio-Park. Sheryl was able to soak up 10 days of sunshine. |
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NL alums in ABQ: Joanna at Acoma Pueblo, Kira & Gabby at Tent Rocks, Gary & Kira at breakfast |
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This artwork was in one of the shops we visited in Old Town ABQ. |
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"Sangre de Cristo" by Brandon Maldonado
Christ is depicted as the Sandia Mountains
which protect the eastern border of Albuquerque. |
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Care for Sheryl's mom meant we had to reschedule our trip to Chicago to visit NLPC alums clustered there. We are in the early stages of putting that trip back on the calendar along with visits to Minneapolis and the Pacific Northwest. We are exploring the possibility of making the trip by train. Visiting our NLPC alums is very important to us in this season of life. We will keep you posted as plans develop. |
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NLPC alum, Tiffany Wexler, has done it! Ask ChatBCP anything, and it will reply with a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer. |
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Website Updates
Grace Unscripted is now on Substack. Fridays with Froehlichs will be posted there as well as here via email. We're trying out this platform to see if it's a good fit for hosting our more personal writing. Sign up - the subscription is free, and you'll get a notice whenever we post anything new.
If you are new to Fridays with Froehlichs, you can catch up on previous editions at the Fridays with Froehlichs page.
Speaking & Travel has been moved to its own page under Who Are We? |
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Benediction
May a dying Saviour's love,
a risen Saviour's joy,
an ascended Saviour's power,
and a returning Saviour's hope
rest upon your hearts and homes.
Amen
From Grace Be With You
by Dale Ralph Davis
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Grace Unscripted.
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Visit the Support page.
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