Advent Wreaths and Lucia crowns

This is our funky subtropical Advent "wreath." It may be pretty non-traditional, but I love lighting it. It puts me in touch with all the warm fuzzy elements of Christmas preparations in my childhood.

Each year, families were selected each week to light the candles of the Advent Wreath at church. There was a small liturgy at the beginning of the main Sunday service. I'm sure it was created by the pastor each year to teach whatever theme he wanted to develop. One year, as I remember it--and my memory may have invented more of this than it actually remembers--the four candles were for Waiting, Patience, Hope, and Joy. The first week, there was a frank acknowledgment of how hard it is for a child to wait. The second week, we were invited to keep waiting, patiently. The third week we spoke of the hope that carries us through the hard times. And the fourth week we learned about how love makes it all worthwhile, because God's Love brings us the great gift of the Savior, coming into our world as a beautiful and innocent baby in the manger.

In the rarefied liturgical atmosphere of the Episcopal Church I used to be embarrassed about these homespun rites. They didn't seem to have sufficient gravitas. But Wikipedia says that Advent wreaths were invented in the 19th century in Germany as a teaching tool for boys and girls. So it makes complete sense that Pastor Wiens would use it as a teaching tool for us. It was very effective. It helped us look forward to the coming of the celebration of Christ's birth. The cumulative effect of lighting one more candle each week as we looked forward to greeting the Light of the World was to give our excitement a much better "container" than the commercial "Santa Claus is coming to town" that we heard in school and stores and on television.

Scandinavians love Advent. It's dark in Sweden this time of the year. When I visited my daughter Anna, who was studying in Sweden in December 2005, the sun never rose more than about 30 degrees above the horizon, leaving the countryside in near-twilight during the day, and utterly dark by 4 pm. Nearly every house and apartment had candles in the windows; and outdoors people made little shelters for candles out of snow in their yards. It is easy to see why early Christian missionaries to the Nordic peoples associated the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World, with the winter solstice. When it seems that things can't get much darker, the days begin to grow longer again. "The light shines in the darkness," we read in the prologue to the Gospel of John, "and the darkness did not overcome it."

December 13, is the feast of Saint Lucy, who is the patron of teachers because her name is associated with light and the enlightenment of the mind. Swedish girls in their white nightgowns wear a crown of candles and carry coffee and Lucia buns to family members early in the morning. They sing the beautiful if somewhat corny Sicilian "Santa Lucia" ballad. The Lucia buns have raisins in the middle, evocative of the eyes that St. Lucy carries on a platter in traditional iconography. (One story says that, the young Christian virgin Lucy, in refusing to marry a pagan husband--who admired her beautiful eyes-- in the time of the Diocletian persecution, plucked out her eyes herself and handed them to him, saying, "Here are my eyes. Now let me go and serve God.") Some Swedish congregations in the Lutheran and Covenant Churches have Lucia festivals. Ours did not, but I always wanted to process up the aisle in a white gown with a wreath of candles on my head, even though the thought of doing so always put a frisson of fear up my spine as I imagined my hair catching fire! Here is Carl Larsson's famous illustration of this tradition.

Almost Advent

(WARNING: Some readers may think what follows is a rant, and is ridiculously naive and blatantly political. I don't deny their claims.)


Tomorrow in the liturgical Christian Churches, we begin the season of Advent. It is not a way of getting started celebrating Christmas a little early. It is something else entirely. It ties together the comings of God into our lives: the startling and astonishing coming of God into human existence in profound vulnerability as the Child adored by the shepherds, to be sure. But also the coming that we sometimes call the Second Coming, the coming that represents the equally startling and counter-intuitive truth that, in the end, the God of justice, mercy, grace and love wins!

It is this Second Coming that is where our Advent observances begin. In that sense, Advent ties the beginning of each liturgical year to the end of the year before.
We read this year from the Gospel of Matthew, and so we get a "Joseph perspective" on the story of Jesus' birth. We also read during this season, as always, from the Hebrew Bible. And all our readings are from the prophet Isaiah. In each, Isaiah casts a vision of an alternate reality from what his hearers were experiencing. And in each of those visions followers of Jesus have seen his coming expressed as well.

So, in order to get a handle on how I will preach about the Comings of God this Advent, I pulled a wonderful book off my shelf. I’d started it about three years ago, but now is the time for me to read it in its entirety. It’s The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). He writes:

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface (2).

…The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us (3).

Brueggemann writes in this book both about the prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic elements in Jesus’ life and ministry. He says that the New Thing that God did under Moses’ leadership when liberating the Israelites from Pharaoh is paradigmatically prophetic. God’s radical and absolute freedom always challenges the institutions that kings and emperors put in place in futile attempts to domesticate and control God. In Israel, under King Solomon, God’s vision of justice was co-opted, and in its place there arose Solomon’s vision of a continuing dynasty. To that end, he developed a harem; tax districts; bureaucracy; a standing army; a close court-cult relationship with the Temple--Brueggemann describes them as a religion "in which God and his temple have become part of the royal landscape in which the sovereignty of God is fully subordinated to the purpose of the king" (p.28); and conscripted labor.

The prophet is the one who, in that context, speaks the poetry and sings the songs that allow people to envision an alternate reality. But we can’t even hear until the spell of the dominant culture is broken by the laments of the marginalized folk who know that something is terribly wrong with the way things are now. Out of lament and despair and tears comes, then, God's surprising hope.

About hope, Brueggemann writes:

Hope...is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk.

So, I got to thinking: what is it that I hope for, long for with intensity, but I'm embarrassed to admit I hope for so much, because it seems impossibly unrealistic? What is it, that when I talk about it to "reasonable and sensible" people, I sense that they think that I've got my head in the clouds and need to quit being such an idealist or such a bleeding-heart liberal?

To be very specific, I hope for a way for my 21 year old daughter, who has Type I diabetes (the kind where your pancreas doesn't make any insulin, and you die if you don't receive insulin via injection or pump), to receive the health care here in the United States, that she needs to stay alive and healthy. She could be on our insurance policy next year if we were going to have insurance ourselves (which we may possibly not have), and if she was in college or otherwise our dependent (she's living on her own and working a minimum wage job without insurance on offer). She has some other disabilities that, despite her high IQ, make her almost unemployable. She's not held a job for more than 3 or 4 months in her life, and she flunked out of college because she refused to avail herself of the assistance she was eligible for under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She's not merely being obstinate: her brain is just wired very differently from the rest of us, and her diabetes, when her blood sugar is too high or too low, also sometimes makes her so exhausted and miserable that she misses more work than a healthy person might. Her insulin, blood glucose testing equipment, and pump supplies would cost us about $500 per month retail. She's been told that, even if she was eligible for medicaid, there would be no coverage for the insulin pump that has made her very brittle diabetes more controllable and has kept her from life-threatening and irreversible organ damage. The provisions of the wimpy, terribly-compromised Health Care Bill that might help (no denial when applying for insurance for pre-existing conditions, coverage on parents' plan for children under age 26) don't come into effect in 2013.

In the dominant culture of Solomon's day, there were quite a few people with significant affluence. But their affluence, their full banquet tables, meant that others went hungry. In our day, the inequality between the richest Americans and the rest of us is greater than at any period since the Gilded Age. It is greater in the USA than in Nicaragua or Honduras, places we sometimes hear disparaged as "Banana Republics." My question then becomes: Who benefits from a system that allows my daughter to fall between the cracks? So many people out there would say (behind my back, if not to my face):

"Well, too bad! She has a pre-existing condition."
"No insurance company should be compelled to lose their competitive edge or fail in their fiduciary responsibilities by being forced to take clients with serious chronic disease."
"It's not MY fault, and MY taxes or access to health care shouldn't be affected by HER problem, or problems of other people like her."
"Don't bring Jesus or justice into this conversation. It's strictly a business decision."
"We don't need to have a nurse-maid society that takes care of people. That is their own responsibility."

How many millions of other people are there out there, who are either being bankrupted or being denied health care because the people of the United States can't see a way to do what the Europeans have done, and make health care available to everyone?

My hope, my deep yearning, is for a day when everybody here in the USA can get the care they need to be as healthy as they can be. When people won't have to decide between making a house or rental payment or paying for their medicine. (And just because my hope is specific to the USA in 2010 doesn't mean that I don't long for all the hungry, the sick, the poor, the imprisoned.. to be made whole and free.)

So what does this have to do with Advent? The coming of God, the fact that God entered our world as a fully-embodied human being, means that we may have hope for a time when justice will prevail. Bodies matter to God. Hungry bellies and sick people and the blind and the lame and the deaf all don't need to have their suffering ignored. Jesus proclaimed that healing was a hallmark of the coming Kingdom of God. The coming of God at the Eschaton, the culmination of all things, doesn't let us off the hook for doing what we can to live justly, to work for justice now. Rather, it allows us to do justice fearlessly, because there are no threats, not even the threat of death, that can shut us up.

Advent is about hope. Ridiculous, enormous hopes, however counter-cultural they are.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It's a cloudy "soft" day here in Orlando, and some rain fell earlier. This is a novel and wonderful thing after 42 sunny days without a drop of rain. It smells different now, more like it did when I first came down to visit Wayne on New Year's Eve last year. It's quite a subtle change, not nearly as dramatic as the coming of autumn in the North. But there it is! Even the Starbucks where I'm sitting has switched to its "holiday theme" cups with red trim and stylized snowflakes.

This is the week of All Saints and All Souls in the liturgical churches, including the Episcopal Church that has been my spiritual home for the last 30 years. This isn't your tradition. But it is the place where I have landed. You gave me a precious gift when you prayed with me, taught me to pray, told me Bible stories, showed me lives that were founded and centered on God. You raised me to trust that God is good, that God loved me more even than you did, that God created this beautiful world for us to explore and learn about, to live in in ways that were loving and generous. What a foundation! I have taken this foundation and carried it into my "new" spiritual home, the Episcopal Church. But it was in the Covenant Church of my girlhood, from Pastor John Wiens that I first was pointed to the Communion of Saints, surrounding us as a "great cloud of witnesses." So I am writing you a letter. It's a little act of pleasure. I loved writing letters to you when we lived far away from each other. It was a way of drawing near to you when I missed you. It was a way of sharing what was going on in my heart.

The last substantive, hand-written letter I received was from our cousin Joy. It was more than a year and a half ago. I have it in front of me, and I owe her a response. So much has happened in our lives in the last couple of years that every time I thought I would write, something big was in flux or changing, and I delayed until there might be some sort of resolution. It was also such an anticipated pleasure to respond to her letter with a hand-written letter of my own, written at leisure, that I waited (in vain!) for a good time to respond. Maybe this weekend???

I began this letter to you, as I usually did, with a description of the weather and the place I am sitting. It situates me concretely in one place, and invites you to imagine yourselves here with me. It invites or evokes communion, one might say. Dad, I remember all the letters you used to write on Sunday afternoons to your brothers and sister. There was lots of talk about weather in the letters from Norquay that you received, and in those you sent. I suppose that's because farmers are so affected by weather and attuned to its subtleties. You can take the man off the farm, but you can't take the farmer out of the man. (I remember a birthday card that said you were a man "out standing in your field"!) You used carbon paper before the days of easy photocopying. Over the years you would occasionally write me, too, more often with a word processor. Your writing got a little bit shaky at the end. Mom, your little letters on smaller pieces of stationery were also precious. Even though we could talk on the phone regularly and easily, there was something about a letter, arriving in an envelope, that lent gravitas and importance to the communication. I miss your letters, perhaps even more than the phone calls. I have a bunch of them in files.

You are now in a place beyond where letters can reach. I am counting, however, on time operating somewhat differently from the perspective of the heavenly realm than it does from my more limited perspective here and now. My prayers to God of love for you continue, and perhaps your prayers to God for me continue,too. After all, the scriptures say that the prayers of the saints rise like incense, and they do not specify whether those saints are in heaven or on earth. There were many days when the children were younger and my life was supremely challenging that your prayers, which I knew you prayed each morning at breakfast for all your children and grandchildren, sustained me.

Now, in my mid-fifties, my life seems--what? Becalmed, perhaps. I am not in the work force. Actually, I loved being the parent at home when the kids were younger. There was much to do and I loved having more time to devote to making meals, keeping the house more organized, being available for the children, etc. It seemed that I was adding value to the family by my contributions. Now, not working a regular "for pay" job, I feel guilty and unproductive. Yet I enjoy the rhythms of my present life: having time for regular exercise, prayer, and meditation; being able to read more widely and deeply, having time to travel to see the grandchildren, being able to make meals and entertain friends more frequently.

So, if you still pray, will you pray for me not to succumb during this time to laziness, passivity, or disorganization? to frittering away this less-structured time that is, in some senses, a gift? Will you pray that I not waste this precious time worrying, but will trust that the right work will come along for me AND that I will devote an appropriate amount of time to looking for that work?

Salmon Cakes

I sent my Kansas cousin Paula a copy of one of Paula Deen's cookbooks, because so often, in my previous parish in Georgia, I'd discover that Paula Deen was the source for the recipes I'd liked the most at a covered dish supper or a luncheon. Of course before I sent the book I had to sneak a peek. And I soon ran to the library to pick up more Paula Deen cookbooks. The one that caught my eye was Paula Deen's The Deen Family Cookbook. A recipe for crab cakes inspired me to do something similar with salmon. Furthermore, I had this new bottle of hot sauce from my friend Carolyn. Called "Dat'l Do-it Datil Pepper Hot Sauce," it is the perfect combination of sweet and hot--plus it's got a very cute picture of a dragon wearing a pink baseball cap on the front! And it is from St. Augustine, Florida.

So this is what I came up with:

Poach 12 oz wild Sockeye salmon. I bought mine frozen and the skin was already off.

Meanwhile, combine:
1 egg
1/2 Vidalia onion, finely chopped
1-2 leafy stalks of celery, finely chopped
1/2 large tomato, finely chopped
3 Tablespoons of Dat'l Do-it
2 Tablespoons Grey Poupon Coarse Harvest Mustard
1 Tablespoon curry powder
Flake the poached salmon into this mixture.
Add enough Italian bread crumbs to bind the mixture so it can be formed into 6 patties.
Fry the patties in oil until nicely browned on each side.
Drain on paper towels.

Serve on a bed of greens with tomato slices, avocado cubes, and sea-salted almonds.
Drizzle with Lemon-soy mayonnaise*. (2 patties per person for a meal, 1 per person for a salad course)

*Stir zest and juice of 1/2 lemon and 2 Tbsp. soy sauce into 1/2 cup mayonnaise.


I bet you could make this recipe into little balls and fry them and serve them with Lemon-soy dipping sauce for an appetizer.

Wayne said "Remember this recipe. It's a keeper!" Between Friday night's pound cake and these salmon cakes, we're going to have to get more serious about exercising.

Moving On

I am at a Starbucks in Calhoun, Georgia.
I am houseless, but not homeless.
I have a check in my car to deposit.
I found a branch of my bank in Dalton, and I will soon get on the road.
I don't yet feel the sense of relief and closure I'd hoped I would feel when I left Jasper. Mostly I feel kind of blank and tired.
I could not have done this without the help of daughter Simone and friend Jo (aka Trixie)--or the vacuum lent me by Claudia and Sandy.

Here is a list of stuff that the moving van did not take:
Blender
Sponge mop
3 flashlights
suitcase in the corner of a closet in which I put:
Anna's 3 Billy Goats Gruff vase that she made when she was 8 years old
HEPA vacuum cleaner bags
2 saucers for espresso cups my mom bought the kids when she was in France
1 Ginsu-type knife that belonged to my dad
1 Apple Mouse child's plate
1 quart of North Dakota honey from the hives on Wayne's family's farm
some mail that should have been forwarded
a sheepskin duster on a long handle

The "flotsam and jetsam" at the end is what always wears me out when I move. We have had many corporate moves in our day, which are great in the sense that you just sit there and watch the packers pack until they say, "We need to put that chair on the truck now, Ma'am." You can move really quickly with a corporate move. But any disorganization that was in your life before you moved is there, waiting on the other end when movers unpack all those boxes, or stack them in the garage or basement.

This time, I had the leisure, for once, to sort, give away, throw out, file, organize as I moved. In a decade we've downsized from 5 kids at home in a 4000+ square foot house, via our house in Jasper, to 1 adult child at home with us in a 1000 square foot apartment. It feels really good. The one thing I could somehow not manage to downsize much was my library. I only managed to take about 4 boxes over to the Thrift Store in Jasper. There is a whole wall of books from home and office in our storage unit in Orlando.

I am grateful to God for the privilege of journeying with the people of Holy Family and the residents of Pickens County for a time. Now it is time to move on. I admit to envying people who have been able to put down permanent roots in one locality. It has not happened in my life. I am still confused when someone asks me where home is.

I am on a (very literal) journey to Ohio, Kansas, Denver, and San Antonio before I return to Orlando. It is wonderful to discover that our friendships seem to be standing the test of time and distance.

Christmas in June??? Marveling even now at the mysteries of the Incarnation

I am on retreat, staying with the Sisters of the Community of St. John Baptist whose convent is in Mendham, New Jersey. It is a cool, breezy summer day.

While I have been here, just since Tuesday, some things have happened in my life that are likely to open many more options to me. It looks like I have a contract on my house, which has been for sale in a pretty sleepy real estate market. I wasn't expecting, though I was surely hoping, to sell so quickly. And Tuesday evening, my husband called, exultant, because the verdict on the jury trial he had endured two years ago had been upheld on appeal.

These both are items of really good news. In thinking again about the way these two events are likely to open up possibilities for me, and in seeking to use my time wisely to discern next steps in my life, I turned again to my hand-written spiritual journal, re-reading entries from the past year.

In the month before Christmas last year, I was struggling mightily to discern what actions I was to take as I sought to be obedient to God in a very difficult time in my parish ministry. On November 30th, I'd written:

"So what am I supposed to learn from all this?

Here's what I'd like to learn:

1. How to talk people down from polarized positions in ways that will enable us to move forward in a better way, with a minimum of shame and embarrassment.

2. How to persevere. I have (in my mind) a history of quitting when things get tough. I'm still ashamed that I had to leave my doctoral program after Paul was born. The truth is, I might have found a way to stay in if it hadn't been for that crazy logic course.

3. 'Know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em.'

4. Know how to be unabashedly myself and to do my best at being me, while enlisting help from people who have interests and talents that fill the gaps where I have weaknesses.

5. Know how to pace myself so that I can have time in my life for things other than parish ministry.

6. Know how to hear and respond to and grow from criticism.

7. Learn how to confront people who are angry or disappointed with me in ways that enable us to hear one another.

Two weeks later I had begun to negotiate a severance package with the Vestry. Three weeks later, according to my journal entry, I was struggling to find a way to preach a Christmas sermon that had some integrity about it, knowing that in my congregation that night would be a fair number of people who were coming just to celebrate Christmas, who weren't part of our normal parish family, and knowing that the great wonder and mystery and Gift of the Incarnation trumped, in any case, our parish's internal political issues. I also knew that, while that was true, it was also true that if the Incarnation didn't speak to the very specific pain that many of us were carrying around--and note I said "speak to it", not "fix it"--then we weren't listening properly.

My emotions were very close to the surface. I'd written: "The Pandora Christmas station has just played 'The Little Drummer Boy,' and it is amazing how that romantic (one might say saccharine) little song made tears come to my eyes. It is very hard to imagine what I will need to say to my congregation. The whole enterprise seems futile. Why do I feel a need to justify myself in the eyes/ears of the people who want to see me resign?"

Re-reading that question made me wonder what I HAD written in my Christmas sermon. As soon as I found it, and read the first line, I remembered. Good News of Great Joy!
I needed a reminder today of the same truth that I preached last Christmas.

Good news of great joy for all the people!

Really, really good news!

The profound kind of joy that transcends circumstances!

For ALL the people,
not just people like me,
not just people who live in my neighborhood,
not just people with whom I agree about politics,
not just people who look like me or who think like me,
or whom I like;
not just people who are rich,
not even just for people who need my help .

Tonight we are here to celebrate the truth that
There is good news
of Great Joy
for All the People!

The Evangelist Luke tells us that
that is what the Angel announced
to some herders of sheep on a hill
outside of a small town in Palestine
about two thousand years ago.

We don’t know their names.
But we know their story.

They were just doing their jobs.
Things were winding down for the night.
They were listening to the barking of a dog on a hillside,
and some out-of-season insects,
and the wind in the grass.
They were looking up into the stars.
They were looking across the hills
to the lights in a few windows
of the stone houses of Bethlehem.
They were telling a few jokes.
The grass and the dirt
and the smoky embers of the fire smelled good.
Their fingers were getting cold.
The sheep were settling down for the night,
chomping clumps of grass.

We know the story so well after hearing it for so many years
that we forget just how shocking it was to the shepherds
to have an angel appear before them.

Luke’s story doesn’t tell us how that angel got there.
Did he just appear at the perimeter of their firelight?
Did he fly in like some sort of shooting star?
Did he walk up and down a path on the ridges of the bare hills? However he got there,
there the angel was with the shepherds,
and the glory of the Lord was there with him,
shining like a light.

The shepherds weren’t ready
for this kind of direct encounter
with the God
in whom they believed in principle,
to whom they prayed
with the prayers their ancestors had taught. But here was this …..angel!

The shepherds did what people have been doing
for thousands of years when they meet up with angels.
They were terrified.

Before the angel could get them to listen,
he had to tell them
what angels always have to tell us mere human beings: “Don’t be afraid!”

Then they could calm down enough to hear the message of
Good News
of Great Joy
to all the people.

Here is what the angel said to the shepherds:

“TO YOU is born this day in the city of David a Savior,
who is the Messiah, the Lord.
This will be a sign for you:
you will find a child
wrapped in bands of cloth
and lying in a manger.”

Bethlehem was not very big, not very fancy.
But the shepherds never forgot
that it was the birthplace of the most beloved king of Israel. Bethlehem was the city of King David.

Prophets often spoke of God’s intervention
in the lives of the people of Israel,
calling it the coming of a Son of David.
One anointed by God as a king of Israel
was anointed with oil
to signify that God was present
and pouring out his blessing on the one anointed.
That’s what “Messhiach” means in Hebrew.
That’s what “Christos” means in Greek:
God’s Anointed One,
drenched in oil
to point to God’s rich goodness and mercy,
specially singled out,
to lead Israel as a nation
founded on justice
and on compassion for the poor,
the widow,
the orphan,
the slaves,
the prisoners.

Surely the shepherds thought
that such a King would be
a mighty,
wealthy,
noble,
royal figure.

Yet here the Angel says
that the newborn Child
is like the shepherds,
is one of them.
He is poor.
He is transient.
He doesn’t have a home of his own.
He doesn’t even have a bed of his own.

Before this amazing, even bizarre, truth
can even sink in for the shepherds there in the countryside, the angel is not alone.
You know the words of Luke the Evangelist:

Suddenly there was with the angel
a multitude of the heavenly host
praising God and saying
“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

We owe a lot to William Tyndale,
whose 15th century translation
of the Greek New Testament into English
remains largely intact
even in the New Revised Standard Version
of the late 20th Century.
The words have such majesty
and such a familiar cadence
that they lull us into forgetting
how explosive the image is that they present.

This “multitude of the heavenly host”
is a whole heavenly army
of bright and terrifyingly holy beings.
They look,
with their fierce and bright glory,
more ready to slay the wicked
and knock any enemies of God to their knees
than to be praising God
and singing about peace on earth.

A whole heavenly army
is praising God
and singing about peace on earth




-- and entrusting the news
to some nomadic sheep herders on the hills of Judea.

How like God to do the unexpected:
To come into the world as a baby,
totally dependent and powerless.
To depend on uneducated,
naïve,
nomadic peasant shepherds
for the proclamation of this good news.

They came to Bethlehem.
They found a newborn baby
wrapped in rags and lying in a manger.
They met his mother and Joseph.
They saw the tiny, miraculous, new life.

And then they went back to their sheep.

What kind of a crazy scheme was that
for God to come into the world?


Thirty years later,
Jesus had become an itinerant teacher,
preacher,
and healer.
He mentored a dozen disciples, uneducated peasants all.
He said strange, paradoxical things
that attracted crowds
and irritated the supposed movers and shakers
of Jerusalem.
He talked about God’s kingdom and its topsy-turvy values, the same values his mother sang about
when she was pregnant with him.
God’s kingdom is the kingdom
where the hungry finally get enough,
and the rich are sent away empty-handed.
It is the kingdom
where the prisoners are set free,
where the widows and orphans have a home.
Jesus was caught in the currents of Jerusalem,
its religious leaders,
and the occupying Roman governor.
He became the victim of a political assassination,
His broken body was put into a tomb.
But it did not stay there.
On the third day, God raised him to life.

What kind of a crazy religion is that??

It’s not a religion; it’s a way of living.

Here we are in Jasper, Georgia.
From that fragile start, here we are,
two thousand years later,
still intrigued,
still mystified,
still drawn by this story
of the Baby who was God coming to be with us.

Like the Baby’s mother, we ponder.

Like the angels, we sing his praises.

Like the shepherds, we go back home.

There are still all the ordinary responsibilities,
the bills to pay,
the children and elderly family members to tend to,
the houses to clean,
the jobs to go to—or to hunt for.

Yet if you and I, like the shepherds,
have been to the manger
and suspended our cynicism long enough to look,
we will be changed.
We will begin to hope.
We will start to see God’s hand at work
in small and wondrous ways.
We will notice that great joy is welling up in us
even when circumstances could hardly be called joyous.
We will find that God sets us free
to let go of old hurts and disappointments.
We will laugh and sing and dance
for the joy of being loved
by a God whose love is so powerful
that he can risk taking human form
as a tiny and vulnerable baby.
We will delight with the angels
for the joy of serving a God whose goodness and mercy
are so indomitable
that we can risk
loving even those who would wish us harm.

This is the story of Mary and Joseph,
of the Baby in the manger,
of the shepherds,
still dazzled by the glory of the angels,
bending over to see the sleeping child
in the dim light of a lantern
hung on the stone walls
of a stable in Bethlehem.

This is a chapter in God’s love story for us.
It is our story.
It is the story we take into the places
of greatest sorrow
and greatest fear in our own lives.
As we remember and ponder this story,
God begins in us a work of transformation.

This is Good News
of Great Joy
to you and to me, and
to ALL the people!

The Cost of Discipleship

Most mornings I pray the Daily Office of Morning Prayer according to the Book of Common Prayer as it appears online at the website of Mission St. Clare (www.missionstclare). In a sense, it is a lazy way to pray the prayers, because you don't have to bookmark passages in the Bible, or find the psalms and prayers appointed for the day in the prayer book. The selections (where there are options) are made by the editors at Mission St. Clare.

Today as I prayed the Office, the appointed readings included the marvelous Ecclesiastes passages about there being a time for everything. "...a time to speak, a time to remain silent..." In one of those strange and wonderful comings-together of Hebrew Bible, the writings of St. Paul (to the Galatians), and the writings of the Evangelist, Matthew, we have amazing and scary examples of the consequences of speaking. Paul speaks out, in Galatians, about what he perceives as the hypocritical behavior of his fellow apostle, Peter.

Peter had been talking a lot about the freedom of the Gospel. He had had a formative experience early in his apostleship. He'd been napping before dinner one day, and, perhaps under the influence of hunger and good smells wafting up from the kitchen, dreamed that, lowered down from heaven, foods that were ritually unclean and therefore forbidden to an observant Jew were being offered to him. "Rise, Peter, kill and eat!" said a voice from heaven. How could a voice from heaven possibly command him to break the rules that God had commanded in the Torah? Yet, the dream continued, and, folklorically, he was three times offered the food that he would never have considered eating. And a voice came again and said, "You must not call what God has cleansed 'unclean'." While he was trying to figure out what this dream could possibly mean, a couple of emissaries from a God-seeking Gentile, Cornelius, had arrived at Peter's door. It wasn't just about food. It was about table fellowship and all the cultural baggage that goes with it. The story in Acts says that Peter invited Cornelius's emmisaries in and they ate together. Peter "got it," and his behavior there in Joppa and Caesarea showed it. Something he would never have done before Peter now did without hesitation, welcoming into the fellowship of the Body of Christ a whole category of people, Gentiles, who he'd never imagined could become his brothers and sisters in Christ.

It was a time to speak. Peter spoke by words and actions. But it must have cost him something. Not all of his Jewish-Christian friends understood or appreciated what he was up to. When Peter was in Gentile Antioch, he was happy to eat with gentiles. But when Peter's Jewish friends came from Jerusalem, he didn't want to offend them. He suddenly became a lot fussier about keeping Kosher. And Paul, observing that behavior, called it hypocritical. It was Paul's time to speak. Paul spoke out, even though the man whose behavior he was questioning was one of the key leaders of the Church. Paul wanted to make it totally clear that God's grace obliterates distinctions between Jews and Gentiles that would keep them from sharing meals and fellowship. It was a time to speak. If Paul hadn't spoken, the power of the Gospel would have been compromised.

Then, jumping back in time to the days of the earthly ministry of Jesus, we read in the Gospel of Matthew today the grisly story of the beheading of John the Baptist. John was a courageous prophet, and he sensed that it was time to speak against the hypocrisy of the regime of Herod. Herod was essentially a puppet king of the Roman Empire. He was a Jew, but his behavior was not righteous. His court was famous for excess and depravity. What Herod wanted, Herod took. Even his brother's wife Herodias. For John, this was a time to speak. If he hadn't spoken, if he had remained silent, he would have tacitly been giving approval to Herod's total disregard for Torah. It cost John. He was put in prison. Then, in this reading today, we have the story of how he died. It is a perfect example of wretched Herodian excess, wrong on so many levels. Beyond the horrific killing of this righteous man, what would it do to that young girl to have allowed her to witness that terrible violence, to have some kind of indelible link between violence and young sexuality forged in her psyche?

A time to speak, a time to remain silent...

Then, as the Mission St. Clare editors publish Morning Prayer, what follows is the canticle known as the Song of Zechariah. It is what Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist sings, after the birth of his son, and practically the first words he speaks since nine months earlier he met the angel who announced that he would have a son. The canticle is full of hope and joy.

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel;
he has come to his people and set them free.
He has raised up for us a mighty savior,
born of the house of his servant David.
Through his holy prophets he promised of old,
that he would save us from our enemies,
from the hands of all who hate us.
He promised to show mercy to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant.
This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham,
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
Free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our life.
You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,
To give his people knowledge of salvation
by the forgiveness of their sins.
In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace."

The contrast between the joy of this Canticle and the tragedy of John's death is indeed jarring. The amazing thing about the Christian faith is that the Canticle of Zechariah expresses our hope, and events like the death of the man who had been the little baby held in Zechariah's loving arms are still the result of the clash between the radical liberty of the Kingdom of Heaven and the fearful "bread and circus" of Rome, the fearful "get enough for me" of our day.

We who follow Jesus long for Paradise--and in our eucharistic fellowship we get tiny hints of that deep and lasting joy and peace.

Comfort Food

My 19 year old son is sick. Paul is a guy who loves motors and motorcycles and dirt bikes. For the first time in his life he is attending a school that he loves. The Motorcycle Mechanics' Institute schedules classes so people with full time jobs can study at night. He attends class from about 6pm to 11:30. That's when his brain works the best. The classes are taught in short (2-3 week) segments. There is lots of hands-on lab work on real motorcycle engines. The work is practical and the theory parts of the courses are closely tied to real-time application. Paul is usually in his element. But this week he's come home dragging from his job at Sears repairing small engines for yard machines. His throat is so sore that he doesn't want to swallow, his nose is plugged, his ears have fluid in them. Finally this afternoon(Friday) he cried "Uncle" and had us schedule him in for a doctor appointment at the clinic at a nearby hospital where you get seen on time and the front office staff are as good and competent at their work as the physicians are at theirs. Paul was so tired that I drove him. He was seen promptly, and tested negative for strep. The doctor wants him to get blood drawn tomorrow to see if he's got mononucleosis. I asked him if he'd mentioned to his doctor that he left home soon after 6 am and returned from class at night just before midnight, with an hour to take a quick nap between work and school. That might explain the exhaustion. Hmmm. (Paul failed to mention it.)

I can hardly begin to say how nice it was to be able to step in and take care of him without having to juggle work responsibilities. When we got home, he climbed into bed and we didn't see him for about 3 hours. I bought his nasal spray, throat lozenges, applesauce, ice cream, popsicles, and ingredients to make him things that would slide smoothly down the throat.

Like this custard that I improvised, that is perhaps the best custard I have ever made.

Ghirardelli White Chocolate Custard

3 1/3 cups milk
2/3 cup heavy cream (nothing sacred about these proportions, but I had 1% milk and wanted something richer)
1 pkg. Ghirardelli white chocolate chips
1/2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt

3 eggs
2/3 c sugar

Heat first 5 ingredients in a heavy saucepan, whisking vigorously as the white chocolate chips melt.

In a separate bowl, beat eggs vigorously with a whisk. Add the sugar and beat some more.

When the milk mixture is just beginning to boil, turn the heat way down (gas stove) or off (electric stove).

Add the egg-and-sugar mixture in a thin stream, whisking continually. Add heat VERY GENTLY if by now the custard is not coating a spoon and thickening. Quit while you're ahead.

Pour into dish, and cover surface directly with parchment paper or plastic wrap to prevent development of a "skin."

Spoon over fresh sliced strawberries or raspberries.

Paul almost didn't wake up in time to get any because I had some ("just to see if it was okay") and Wayne had two helpings. It is VERY sweet, and really needs some fairly tart fruit for the contrast. When Paul did wake up, he thanked us for getting "all that stuff" for him. I hope he feels better soon, but I admit to having had fun mothering him. Maybe 48 hours of rest will help.

Re-united with Old Friends

Sunday afternoon the movers dropped off all the things from my house and office in Georgia that I thought would be useful or fun to have in the 1000 square foot apartment here in Orlando that I will be sharing for the foreseeable future with my husband and youngest son. About two thirds of the boxes that left Jasper actually went into storage here in a weather-controlled storage unit a couple of miles from the apartment.

Two walls of our bedroom (apart from doors and windows) are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. For the first time in many years, I have nearly all of my "literature" books close at hand. Those who saw my FaceBook post yesterday know that I was struggling to focus on getting all those books on the shelves in some orderly fashion, when what I really wanted to do was to read, to re-acquaint myself with old friends, to make another attempt at making friends with some of the books about which I've had "good intentions" (sometimes for decades!), to make new friends, even to have a good argument with some of the writers with whom I have a bone to pick.

My present unemployed status has given me an amazing opportunity to read widely without having to produce any "work product." No sermons, no adult education class outlines, no formal continuing education, college, or seminary papers. This gives me a degree of freedom which is making my head spin. This is more freedom than I know what to do with! My Hebrew Bible and several grammars and lexica (lexicons??) are on the shelf, as is my side-by-side Greek and Latin New Testament. I could re-establish my former habit of reading the Daily Office lectionary in Hebrew and Greek. Volume 2 of my Oxford edition of War and Peace, which I read on the Schwinn Airdyne one winter when the little ones were napping and the big ones were at school is right there, beckoning. I remember spending EXTRA time on the stationary bike because I got so caught up in Tolstoy. But I lent my father the first volume. I think Volume 1 is in the boxes of books from my parents' home that I put into storage. If we're talking Big Projects, Anthony Powell's series, Dance to the Music of Time is on the shelves, too, as is Proust.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are some small books that I loved and that are worthy of further attention. Marguerite Yourcenar's novellas are surely worth a second read. And all that poetry! Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, R.S. Thomas, Billy Collins, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman (whose work I've barely spent any time with!). And a bunch of Shakespeare plays I'd love to read again.

I'd like to spend some more time with Augustine's City of God and On the Trinity. I remember once discovering in Trinity a passage in which Augustine is listing the amazing things in the world, including a friend of his who can fart tunes. I've never been able to find it again. (Did I dream it??)

I'm ready to re-consider the works of some of the feminist theologians I discovered over the years and put aside to read "when I had time." In particular, in light of my growing interest in Mary, the Mother of Jesus, I'm looking forward to sitting with these sisters, arguing with them, being instructed by them, being disturbed by them, growing and stretching as I consider their work.

Something a couple of days ago sent me to C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce. It is short, brilliant, stylized, with all the virtues and flaws of Lewis. I found my heart rejoicing as Lewis writes of the possibility of the most ordinary human beings, basking in God's love and goodness, yielding to God's grace. Of non-Orthodox writers I've read, he perhaps comes closest to being an exponent of the Orthodox notion of "divinization." Lewis is also at his best in his trenchant capturing of the banality of evil in domestic dialogues between "well-meaning" spouses and old friends who cling to old hurts, who elevate "mother love" or romantic love to idolatrous heights. He's spot on, and though his dialogues are dated and very regional, one can easily recognize the types in 21st century America. His image of heaven as infinitely more "real" than Hell is marvelous, as is his way of summarizing the limitations both of the doctrines of free will, choice, and predestination in light of the perspectival problems of time and eternity. Lewis puts into the mouth of his Guide for his tour of Heaven, George MacDonald, these magnificent words:

"Ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "N future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. and that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven," and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.
...There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened."

I, like George MacDonald himself, hope that salvation is universal, and that nobody ultimately chooses Hell. But I see Lewis's point. The choice must be there, truly offered.

Anyhow, reading this short work by Lewis makes me think I need to add Dante's Divine Comedy to my "read soon" list. I have Robert Pinsky's translation of Inferno.

The Orlando Chapter(s)

This beautiful Sunday morning, having arrived late last night "permanently" in Orlando, I walked to the Cathedral, almost on time for the 8 am Eucharist. The lector was reading the passage from Revelation appointed for this 5th Sunday of Easter. The psalm, Psalm 100, always brings me back to my childhood chorister days, when we sang "O be joyful, joyful in the Lord, all ye lands!" Then, reading a shorter portion from the same passage of John's Gospel that we hear on Maundy Thursday, the Deacon proclaimed the words of Jesus: "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." The preacher quoted the late 2nd Century Father of the Church, Tertullian, who, in his Apology, remarked that it was observed in the Roman Empire that the Christians loved one another, and shared all things in common-- except their wives. (The feminist listener in me wondered about the language that simply assumed that those engaged in this apologetic conversation were males.) He commented that these Christians were living in this community-building way at a time when the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble, when the fabric of all the formerly strong institutions was starting to fray.

I was almost beginning to let down my guard and think that I might hear a sermon in this cathedral that didn't derive its primary energy from being against liberals, gays, or abortion. I should have seen it coming....

The Canon continued. We are in an age that is much like the end of the Roman Empire. The institutions of our day and age are also crumbling. The Church tends to grow and thrive when it is persecuted. The institutions of the family, of marriage, and of Nationhood are being assailed, and the Church has the responsibility for living differently, lovingly, showing a "better way."

I agree--almost. But I deplore this use of insider code-language. I am pretty sure that the Canon really believes that what threatens marriage is any definition of such a union that could extend it to committed and faithful life partners of the same sex. I am pretty sure that the Canon really believes that what threatens the family today is any definition of family that could extend to configurations other than husband-wife-children. About our nation--I don't know what he thinks, but I might venture to guess that he thinks that a concept of us as anything other than a Christian Nation, a Light Set upon a Hill, would threaten a true understanding of American Nationhood.

I am excited about the possibility of the Church showing the world a Different Way to love one another in our marriages and families, and in how we live as citizens of the United States while owing a higher allegiance to the Reign of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.
What if we turned away from the values of a Consumer Culture?
What if we were to strive for a balance between work and family that allows time for conversation, laughter, the sharing of dreams for the future, and stories of our past--regardless of whether there are two mommies, two daddies, or a mommy and a daddy in the family?
What if we were to turn off the TV, to refuse to let advertisers dictate to us what kinds of bodies are attractive, to remember, as the Beatles famously said, that "money can't buy love"?
What if we elect and support government officials that don't assume that the American Way is the only way, and that our nation's self-interest is not the final arbiter of what is right and good in the world, that the United States must have an endless and easy supply of consumer goods and oil at all costs?

So....I'm starting to develop a hypothesis about preaching. Most of us who preach, even those of us who are in traditions that preach from a lectionary, find in the texts confirmation of the things we already believe. I walked in too late to notice whether the Cathedral used the Revised Common Lectionary reading from Acts this morning or the Book of Common Prayer Lectionary. The RCL reading is a passage about Peter's encounter with Cornelius, the Gentile. If ever there was a passage that shows a person's beliefs blown wide open and re-oriented by an encounter with God, it is this story of Peter and Cornelius. This encounter radically changed how Peter read and interpreted his Bible. A whole category of people: Gentiles, who had once seemed to be beyond his concern, beyond God's love and care, designated ritually "unclean"--now were on the same side of the clean/unclean divide that had loomed so large in his religious landscape.

When I read these passages, I see how God calls us as Christians, by virtue of his radically different kind of love, to function as agents of transformation. I would prayerfully consider whether we may be called to lead the way in recognizing that the blessings of marriage and family might now be extended in Christ's name to couples without regard for the gender of the partners.

But, I confess, I brought these ideas to the lectionary readings, too.

How do we clergy prayerfully prepare to preach in such a way that we are as open to the Spirit of God teaching us new ways to love, leading us to see whole new categories of people whom God calls us to walk with as sisters and brothers? How do we remain open to the possibility that, in addressing our sinfulness and our own darkened minds, God may turn our hearts and minds in a whole new direction? And, having let these texts speak to our hearts, how do we craft a sermon or homily that invites our hearers to meet God by "chewing" on those same texts? How do we do this while humbly leaving open a place for God's Spirit to be at work in our hearers' lives? Every preacher has had the experience of having someone mention at the back of the church that they thought the sermon was just for them, that it blessed and encouraged them--but the sermon that the parishioner heard was not the one the preacher remembers preaching.

Springtime

We are just about to arrive at the Vernal Equinox. Astronomically speaking, spring begins in the next day or so. When I drove to Orlando from Jasper, I was intrigued to see how much further spring had progressed as I headed south. This got me thinking about the years of my childhood when I lived in Wisconsin. The winters were cold and much longer than even the unusually long winter we experienced this year in North Georgia. When the snow finally melted, we would sneak outside in our shorts to ride our bikes. It might only be 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but we were sure summer was coming. There were hints even before the snow melted that spring was on the way. I wrote the poem below, prompted by an image of my father on Sunday afternoon in late winter, writing to his brothers in Saskatchewan. I didn't realize it was about springtime and hope until I'd nearly finished it. My father struggled some with depression, but he was also a man who believed one should always have hope.

On Sunday Afternoons

On Sunday afternoons my father sat
with clipboard on his lap, and fountain pen.
His carbon paper, crinkly-blue from weeks
of use, was interleaved between the sheets
of typing paper, watermarked and smooth.
Each week he wrote his brothers far away
in Canada—with carbon copies for
his sister, in Tacoma, where she lived.
His tie was off, his dress shirt sleeves rolled up
still. (Dad washed dishes, Mom went off to rest,
we sisters dried. Those years we were too small
to reach the shelves that stored our Sunday plates.)
My sister had her crayons, and I a book.
We took them to the rug at Daddy’s feet.

So, from Wisconsin—which was cold enough—
he’d make response to Halvard’s spidery script
reporting days of Thirty Two Below,
that soon the skating rink he’d built us girls
beside the driveway, banking up the snow
and flooding it a little more each night,
would be a Lost Cause. And the crocuses
were poking up their heads; and robins, too,
were flying south in flocks—he’d counted ten
last evening, chirping near the maple tree.
And then he’d add that he was sad to hear
that Aaron’s dad was laid up once again
with flu—and hoped pneumonia wouldn’t lay
him low again, like last year. And, he hoped,
that Phil and Halvard managed to succeed
in fixing that old seed drill one more time.
And, please greet Pastor John. And give his best,
besides, to Ioleen, and let her know
that we all prayed for her, and hoped that soon
the Baby would be born, and all be well.
Aloud, he’d read us what he’d written down.

We marveled that our Dad could write these things
With squiggly lines on paper with his pen.
We sisters knew that then our dad would say,
“Let’s go outside and see if we can make
just one last snowman. Bring a carrot out,
that old, moth-eaten scarf, two mismatched gloves,
and no! You may NOT have my hat. Let’s see
what we can do outside to give your Mom
a rest.” We never thought that she would have
those dripping piles of mittens, snow pants, scarves
and hats to deal with when we came back in
our faces red, our laughing voices shrill.
The sun was going down. Our mother’s nap
was over. Soon the day of rest would yield
to weekday tasks.
--but now we basked in love.

Justice, Mercy, and the task of Church

At a retreat for Episcopal clergy from the Diocese of Atlanta last month, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the disconnect between what the Church is and what many parishioners, accustomed to a consumer model, expect.


T. S. Eliot once was commissioned to write a play called "The Rock." It was to be performed, I believe, to raise money for a church in London. He suppressed the publication of the entire piece, but the Choruses from "The Rock" appear in The Complete Poems and Plays. There is a lot of polemic about the movement of the church out into the suburbs, where the comfortable bourgeoisie were congregating, at the cost of abandoning some inner city parishes that were doing important work. These choruses were written in the 1930's, but they speak to our condition in the 21st century, as well. While consumerism and a sort of pernicious cynicism are more developed in our own time, Eliot saw and commented on the beginning of this trend. He decried the increasing irrelevancy of the Church, both in the city, largely empty on Sundays; and in the suburbs, where people, exhausted by long commutes and long working hours, had no energy for or interest in attending Sunday worship. I quote only two little segments from this long poem.


The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.


And later...


A Cry from the North, from the West and from the South
Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;
Where My Word is unspoken,
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."

...Why should men love the Church? why should they love her laws?
She tells the of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.


The Church, says Eliot, "is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft." Robert Frost said something similar at the very end of his life, in a letter he dictated just before he died: "How can we be just in a world that needs mercy and merciful in a world that needs justice." (Quoted in Harold Bloom's introductory essay to Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Robert Frost 2003. Bloom is explicit that this apparent question was dictated as a statement. Hmmm....)

This brings me to the Collect in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer for the Fifth Sunday in Lent:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: "Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The task of the Church is to turn us from "decent godless people" into people who "love what [God] commands, and desire what [God] promises." That transformation happens as we journey by way of the Cross.

Bejeweled

Bejeweled


When my heart gets too full of joy
and the words long to spill out
in torrents of love and delight…
when my heart gets too full of longing
for the fire of the Spirit…
when my heart breaks in prayer
for us poor banished children of Eve,
here’s how the Devil, in my 21st century world,
conspires against me:
He makes it easy to while away my time
--God’s time given to me as a great gift--
playing, instead, a banal game on my computer,
specifically, Bejeweled Blitz.
Its “jewels” cascade in gaudy,
even ugly, plops, onto the screen
where I must group them into threes, fours, or fives
where I must match green ersatz emeralds, tawdry brown topaz, or gaudy yellow coins.

If I am cooperating especially well
with the Powers of Darkness,
the sound will be on,
and an imperious stentorian voice
will call out “One Minute!”
before metallic, ringing sound effects
accompany the rain of bright plastic forms,
and, as I match them, they disappear, explode,
or coalesce into burning jewels or mysterious pearlescent boxes;
and the Voice utters ridiculously encouraging commentary:
“Excellent!” “Awesome!”
Thirty or so minutes later, it dawns on me that

I have been bejeweled.
Thirty minutes, in which to live in gratitude,
in which to see the beauty of a topaz-winged flying bird,
in which to feel the gentle breeze in a sapphire sky,
in which to write a note to a friend whose love and loyalty are worth more than gold,
in which to make loving order in my home…

Gone.
Wasted.
Score two hundred thirty three thousand for that wily Satan.

Heschel, Prayer, and Home

I'm writing from Wayne's apartment in Orlando. I got here last night to surprise him for his birthday. He got here in December, and it is a perfect environment for him to create beautiful and functional software. He can walk to the grocery store, the bank, the cathedral where he sings tenor in the choir, the public library... He can get out and take a brisk walk around Lake Eola if he finds that his mind is getting sleepy or distracted. He can drive to the University of Central Florida for research that he can't do online.

Paul is living here with him, attending the Motorcycle Mechanics' Institute and working part time at a sub shop for pocket and gas money.

This is my fourth visit. It's still "visit," though I may well be living here soon. Last fall I hit the perfect storm in my parish. Gender, politics, the anxieties of our region's financial climate, leadership style--all conspired to make it possible for a vocal and influential minority in my parish to force me out of my role as rector. My last Sunday was January 24th. My diocesan bishop was very supportive during the crisis, and I believe he will continue to be helpful to the parish as they look at some of the systemic issues that led to this outcome.

The county where my former parish is located is quite small and rural. Consequently, the set of my friends and the set of my parishioners is very nearly overlapping. The Episcopal Church wisely expects former rectors to stay out of the business of their former parishes, giving time for parish leadership and new clergy to establish their own leadership and authority without interference. This means that, at the moment, encounters with parishioners are more than a little bit awkward for me (and probably for them). It is time for me to get out of Dodge.

So I have been cleaning, organizing, and sorting things in my Jasper house. Every day I was making trips to the storage unit, to the dump (we don't have garbage service in Jasper), and to the Thrift Store. The painter is coming Monday. We will need to re-carpet the upstairs, do some rudimentary landscape spiffing up, "stage" the house, and get it on the market.

Jasper is not really my home any more. Orlando is not quite my home, either. The last hymn in the Lutheran Hymnal that we used in 3rd and 4th grade at Zion Lutheran School in Hinsdale, Illinois was not a German hymn. It was an English hymn by Arthur Sullivan: "I'm but a stranger here; Heaven is my home. Earth is a desert drear; Heaven is my home. Danger and sorrow stand round me on every hand. Heaven is my Fatherland, Heaven is my home."

So this morning, reading at random in one of the books I gave Wayne for his birthday, a collection of essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel, I read:

Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. all things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home. Weary, sobbing, the soul, after roaming through a world festered with aimlessness, falsehoods, and absurdidies, seeks a moment in which to gather up its scattered life, in which to divest itself of enforced pretensions and camouflage, in which to simplify complexities, in which to call forhelp without being a coward. Such a home is prayer. Continuity, permanence, intimacy, authenticity, earnestness are its attrivutes. for the soul, home is where prayer is.

...Everybody must build his own home; everybody must guard the independence and the privacy of his prayers. It is the source of security for the integrity of conscience, for whatever inkling we attain of eternity. At home I have a Father who judges and cares, who has regard for me, and, when I fail and go astray, misses me. i will never give up my home.
What is a soul without prayer? A soul runaway or a soul evicted from its own home. To those who have abandoned their home: The road ma be hard and dark and far, yet do not be afraid to steer back. If you prize grace and eternal meaning, you will discover them upon arrival. (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity,, pp. 258-9)