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)