By Frederick Quinn

<1> The Episcopal Church in Haiti (1959-1961)

The Haiti of François Duvalier was a brutal dictatorship that lasted from his election as president in 1957 until his death in 1971. No voices of political opposition could be raised, the legislature was dissolved, and the cabinet changed every few months. Duvalier (1907-1971), a former country doctor who attracted legitimate attention for his work in successfully eradicating yaws, declared himself president for life and the reincarnation of the Emperor Jean-Jacques Desallines, the black ex-slave who founded the Haitian republic following the defeat of the French in Saint-Domingue in 1802. People with leadership skills during his era fled into exile in various embassies or joined the Haitian diaspora in New York, Miami, or Caracas. Schools closed, teachers and writers sought jobs in Paris with UNESCO or in universities abroad. Haiti was a country with a troubled past, unstable present, and problematic future.

The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in downtown Port-au-Prince with its locally-painted murals of Gospel scenes in Haitian settings is what most Americans recognize first as the presence of the Episcopal Church in Haiti. During my two years in Port-au-Prince I was active at the Cathedral as a lay reader and lived just down the street from the Rt. Rev. C. Alfred Vogeli, Missionary Bishop of Haiti, who had a strong interest in promoting the visual arts, especially painting, and building the church’s local leadership to eventually replace a white bishop with an indigenous one. The Episcopal Church was a minority church in Haiti, even among Protestant groups. The state’s official religion was Roman Catholicism, regulated by a concordat, a diplomatic agreement with the Vatican; among Protestants the Methodist church was preferred by the mulatto elite for its good schools. Voodoo beliefs permiated the society; once, as a way of humiliating the President-for-Life, François Duvalier, his opponents slaughtered an ox on his father’s grave, a particulatrly heinous rite in the vodoo lexicon.

The center of diocesan life in Haiti was the Cathedral. Its main Sunday service was at 6 a.m., filling the large church with several hundred people, even during a tropical downpour. I once asked Bishop Vogeli, a collector of Haiti art, how the murals came about. He said the artists were refused permission to paint in the larger Roman Catholic cathedral, but that he had no hesitation in making the Episcopal Cathedral's walls available to them. Then he left for a long fund raising trip and vacation in America, and did not see the results until returning several months later.

The Cathedral murals depict biblical scenes in a rural Haitian setting. Surrounding the altar and looking down like characters in a cosmic drama. They were painted between 1949 and 1951 by artists from the Centre d’Art, founded by DeWitt Peters, an American painter and teacher who was quick to see the talent in the Haitian artists and encourage it. Peters was a Graham Greene-like character who had come to Haiti as an English teacher during World War II and stayed until his death in the late 1960s. He had impeccable taste and organizational skills, but also a thoroughly autocratic personality. Artists who wanted to evolve beyond the “primitive” accused him of holding them back. His response was that almost all who switched styles failed to evolve and ended up producing second rate French Impressionist-type works.

The Haitian church was experiencing a period of change in the 1960s. Bishop Vogeli was looking for a Haitian successor, and posts previously held by white American clergy gave way to Haitians. An unwritten rule, established in an earlier time, was abandoned, that no Haitian approached the communion rail until the last American left.

<2> Good Friday in Croix des Boisquettes

On Good Friday in Port-au-Prince in 1960 we held a service for the English language congregation in the Chapel of St. Vincent’s School for the Handicapped, run by the Boston-based Sisters of Saint Margaret. The small chapel held about twenty persons, and two of the nun’s dogs paraded about like vergers, and then slept under the altar. After the service, some of us visited Croix des Boisquettes, a hill outside town where Roman Catholic Good Friday processionals were held. On the way our car was stopped by a man in a red shirt blowing a police whistle, while dancers and musicians surrounded us. The strong smell of clairan, cheap local rum sold in old canning jars, perfumed the gathering. The leader did a quick step, then plopped his hat on the car for money, as his companions rocked the car, reminding us of what a lack of generosity might bring. I gave him a dollar, and the group danced off. The following week there were reports of a car being overturned by dancers at the same spot, unhappy that their overtures for payment were refused.

We left the car at Gantier, and walked along a dusty road. A large cross stood at the hill’s crest, and streams of people moved up and down the winding gullies to it. Fourteen wooden crosses as used by the Roman Catholic Church had been erected along the way. Soft drink vendors outnumbered the faithful in places. On the hilltop were three large wooden crosses, one with a large metal Christus figure. Faded paper and wax roses hung from its feet. To cover their bets voodoo followers had placed a pile of rocks and bits of cloth at the foot of the cross. A large woman stopped praying, drank from a jug of rum, and sprayed crosses, statues, and nearby stones like a fire hose.

Standing on top of the dusty hill as the wind whipped through the nearby scrub growth, I listened to the murmuring incantations and, in the fading light, watched a growing crowd carrying candles, descending like flowing lava into villages on each side of the hill. As we left, evening fires were lit across the horizon, glowing coals warmed heavy iron pots; a husky-voiced vendor yelled “paté chaud” and the evening’s voodoo ritual began in earnest.

<3> Visiting Rural Parishes in Haiti’s South

In early September of that year the Dean of the Cathedral, Roger Desir, and I went by mule and horseback through mountain gullies to some of the rural missions near Leogane in Haiti’s south. Lay readers ran most of the small white stone and cement churches in the absence of a priest. At one church, village women took turns using a sewing machine, donated by a church in upstate New York, to make clothes for their children. In another, the priest had just returned from a rural mission and a heated discussion ensued with a lay reader. The priest had refused to baptize a couples’ child unless they married. This was their second child out of wedlock. The lay reader took the couple to another priest, and after misrepresenting the case, presented the child for baptism. The original priest and Dean rebuked the lay reader, who was content to sit on the church step with a sheepish grin. They would soon leave, he would remain. I asked the Dean why such a person’s credentials would not be revoked, but the Dean said the lay reader had been a figure in the community for many years and the priest had only been there four months.

One mountain later we met Nepthalie St. Marc, a lay reader for forty years. He, and his father before him, had been active in St. John the Evangelist Church, Petit Harpon, where Nepthalie read services each Sunday, buried the dead, ran a school, and sponsored a medical clinic. In addition, he was a prosperous coffee farmer, as were several lay readers in the south.

His hill top house had three rooms, one a bedroom with a small, lumpy bed, which I was offered, and an armoire holding three neat but well worn locally tailored suits. Nearby was his office with a hand-made table and several account books; in the dining room a glass-front cupboard held pictures of family, friends, newly-wed couples, and one of Christ standing behind President Duvalier, his hand on Duvalier’s shoulder, saying, “People, believe in him; I have chosen him…Peace to Haiti for men of goodwill.”

Our evening meal was stewed chicken. Our host insisted on keeping the windows shuttered to “keep the bad night air out.” Meanwhile, a mud-caked longhaired dog smelling like an open garbage pit huddled under the dining room table. I tried to gently edge him out and was greeted each time with a primordial grow; this had been his place for years. Twice I tried to open the window, saying I wanted to admire the evening sunset; twice Nepthalie, fast on his feet and quick to shut the window, met me. "The night air is bad for you," he said, puzzled that anyone would think otherwise.

The next morning we rang the old train bell an American parish had sent to Petit Harpon, and within half an hour, more than fifty persons walked slowly up from the fields for the communion service. The landscape resembled the setting of an Italian Renaissance painting set in the tropics. The Dean celebrated, using still warm freshly baked bread, and one of the lay readers read the lessons in the darkened chapel, wearing his wrap-around sunglasses with the price tag and brand name still attached, a sign of affluence.

<4> The Mountain Clinic of Bel Ange Désir

Later that morning we continued by donkey to another lay reader’s house. My donkey had been trying to dump me for three days and finally succeeded. As we crossed a ridge, I leaned forward, providing the moment he had dreamt of, and slowly lowering his front legs to the ground, he deposited knapsack, canteen, and me into a gully while the village laughed uproariously. In the late afternoon we arrived at the home of an herbalist and lay reader, Bel Ange Désir, who supervised an attractive chapel and small hospital where he gave his herbal remedies to ten patients. As we left Beautiful Angel of Desire’s place of healing, a man called the Devil’s Cowboy followed us. Sweating, and with glazed eyes and a loud voice, he mocked us. We passed a house where two men played checkers on the front porch, but both turned their backs to him. Across the path was the small chapel. Its interior decorated with voodoo emblems, and obviously used for a recent ceremony. The Dean angrily tore down the paper voodoo flags and told the Devil’s Cowboy to stay out of the church. Bel Ange Désir then chased the Devil’s Cowboy down a hill, threateningly waving his machete, and ending the confrontation.

<5> Bishop Vogeli is Expelled

Under Duvalier’s divisive leadership, bands of state-sponsored thugs, the ton-ton macoutte, roamed about freely as vigilante bands, loyal only to their sponsors, like the condottiere of Italian city-states. An Episcopal priest with political aspirations was among their victims. The principal of the Episcopal High School was jailed for several days without explanation. Pierre, a Haitian lawyer, whose life revolved around memories of a year spent in London as a law student, and whose treasure of treasures was a small British car he had purchased from his small stipend, disappeared during one of the times of martial law. Pierre had helped found the Haitian-American English Teachers’ Association, and his killing was my second, but not my last, encounter with a political death. Newspapers were closed, radio stations silenced. Bishop Vogeli was a strong leader in a difficult setting. Once, when the high school’s principal was seized by the police and disappeared without warning the bishop in full purple and white cassock, showed up at the school and sat in the principal’s chair for two days until the school director was released. A realist, he set out to maintain the church’s presence in a difficult political climate, seeking neither confrontation nor capitulation.

The Bishop was expelled from Haiti on short notice. The reason was he failed to appear on New Year’s Day 1966 with the civic leaders who each year were expected to come in person to publicly offer their greetings to the President. The presence or absence of individuals from the New Year’s ceremony at the Palace was an indication of whether or not they supported the President. In this case, Duvalier believed the Church was snubbing him. In reality, the invitation arrived at the Bishop’s office the day after the ceremony was over, as the Haitian mails were non-existent and messengers delivered all such invitations. When he left, the Bishop had every opportunity to castigate Duvalier, but he made no public statements, working instead for the church from exile in Brooklyn. He came to West Redding, Connecticut., for the baptism of our son, Christopher. Appearing in a red cope and miter decorated with embroidery of the plants and flowers of Haiti, he filled the small white clapboard New England church with color.

The Rev. Dr. Frederick Quinn served as an American diplomat in Haiti, 1959-1961. His reminiscences are taken from a forthcoming spiritual autobiography, Merrily I Made My Way. The author of fourteen books on law, history, and religion, he is a former chaplain at Washington National Cathedral.

By Sam Candler

I am glad that the Super Bowl occurs so closely to the Feast of the Presentation.

Tell the folks in Las Vegas that this is my wager: less than ten professional football players have ever used the words "Super Bowl" and "Feast of the Presentation" in the same sentence. While we're at it, let's throw in Groundhog Day. How many people realize that Groundhog Day is always on the Feast of the Presentation - or "Candlemas," or the "Purification of the Virgin," or whatever name our ancient and beautiful church gives to February 2.

I actually believe that all these events have something in common. They are ways that our community, our civilization, hopes for life and light in the midst of winter.

Let's start with the Super Bowl. That is where most of our North American culture will be focused this week. Consider the gatherings, the parties, the festivities around Sunday night. This is ritual at its most primordial. People plan schedules and change behavior and spend their resources for this event; in my book, such is the stuff of religion. The entities that change your schedules and order your lives and to which you offer your money are usually what we call "gods."

The Super Bowl usually falls right in the middle of winter (in North America). So does February 2, which is the Feast of the Presentation. The day falls almost exactly midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Though winter "begins," officially, on December 21, it is rarely as cold then as it is in the middle of winter - about February 2. Thus, our ancestors realized and devised all sorts of mid-winter feasts and festivals to remind them that Spring was coming.

Christians began to observe this mid-winter day as "the Purification,", or "Candlemas," or -now-"the Feast of the Presentation." According to tradition, the young child Jesus was to be presented in the Temple 40 days after his birth; other traditions have called this same day the "Purification of the Virgin" (following Leviticus 12:2,6). However, the tradition of "Candlemas" came closest to recognizing what is going on in our natural world. Whether they called it "Presentation" or "Purification," Christians lit candles on this day. At Christian churches across the world, people light candles and walk in procession; they walk toward the light, even in the deep mid-winter.

Something in our human condition will always long and lean for light. We yearn for its energy, especially when we miss it the most - in the bleak midwinter. Somehow or another, our secular Groundhog Day is also associated with the longing for this light. We are wondering just how long it will be before Spring comes. Will the groundhog see his shadow or not? Is there sunshine today -too early-or not?

I have no idea whether all the bellweather groundhogs across the United States saw their shadows or not. And, no matter who actually wins the Super Bowl, all of our country is strangely warmed on Sunday night watching the festivities.

It is wintertime now, but the world has turned toward Spring. Yes, there will be more cold snaps. There may even be an ice storm. But the earth has now turned around the sun toward Spring. I hope, and the Church hopes, the same thing about life today. Perhaps our health is bad right now. Perhaps our economy is bleak right now. But God has turned us toward light, toward health.

I encourage us, then, to present ourselves to this God of Light. Like the Virgin Mary and her husband, Joseph, present yourselves and your offspring to God in the holy temple. Go to that place which has preserved and proclaimed light even during the darkest times. Light your candles. May our lights bring forth more light, the Light of the World!

The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He chaired the House of Deputies' Committee on Prayerbook, Liturgy and Church Music at the General Convention. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral web site.

By Greg Jones

When Jesus proclaims the beginning of his ministry in his hometown synagogue, he offers us a nutshell of the whole Gospel itself. Obviously, there's more than merely what he quotes from Isaiah -- in terms of detail and how it comes to be fulfilled -- but a succinct microcosm of what the Good News of God in Jesus Christ is to be sure to be found there.

In Luke 4.16-21, Jesus says the ancient prophesy of God making the world right again is no longer a future thing, but a thing in the process of fulfillment in Him. He says that in Him the Spirit of God has anointed a savior to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and redeeming the fallen world.

Clearly, this is a work not yet finished, even in our own day. It is tempting, in our cynical moments, to say that this restoration project proclaimed by Christ in Luke 4 doesn't appear to have gotten very far. Again, we can look at Haiti, as just the most recent case in point for the cynical argument against Christ's message.

In Haiti, we are hearing that some 150,000 have died so far from the earthquake. It is an unfathomably high number, and is perhaps only the beginning. That's something like 1.5% of the population. Staggering. An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 on the Richter Scale killed some 150,000 people - so far. Yet, twenty-one years ago an earthquake of almost that size (a 6.9) struck San Francisco. Almost the same size, but in that instance only 63 people died.

What's the difference? Well, it's a question we must put to ourselves in terms of what Jesus is talking about in Luke. It's a question of the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed in our midst. It's a question of the fallenness of the world -- and I don't mean the planet itself.

No, it's a question not of plate tectonics or earth science, but of justice.

The reason 150,000 died in Haiti and 63 died in the U.S. is a question of societal injustice. Isn't it?

I believe that Christ has begun the redemption of a fallen world, and until He comes again in judgment, we who call Him Lord are supposed to join with Him in the saving work. This means not only feeding and clothing, but also working towards just societies.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ('Greg') is rector of St. Michael's in Raleigh, N.C., a trustee of General Seminary and the bass player in indie-rock band The Balsa Gliders — whose fourth studio release is available on iTunes. He blogs at Anglican Centrist.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.
Luke 30-31

By Emily Scott

You are invited to Dinner Church, our posters read, this and every Sunday. Dinner Church at St. Lydia’s. So you make your way to the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the East Village on a Sunday evening. It’s winter now, so you bundle up against the wind as you emerge from the bus or the subway and hurry to our door. Someone welcomes you, helps you put your coat away and gives you a nametag. And then says, “Would you like to help cook dinner in the kitchen, or help set tables upstairs?” And puts you to work.

St. Lydia’s is the just-over-a-year-old church start that I founded together with a whole bunch of friends and congregants, including my collaborator and now-colleague Rachel Pollak. If you asked us if we’re doing something experimental, I suppose we’d say yes, but we’d also say that we’re doing something incredibly traditional. Our liturgy is modeled after the Eucharist of the Early Church when Christians would gather for worship that took place around a full meal, blessed with the great-great-grandparent of our modern Eucharistic Prayer. When Paul writes to the Corinthians, hassling them to wait for each other and eat together at the Lord’s supper, he’s talking about an ancient potluck with its liturgical roots in the Sabbath Supper and Seder Meal. And this is what we do at St. Lydia’s, not because we’re liturgical purists, but because we find this ancient practice resonates sonorously in our context.

But where were we? Oh yes, you were working. Perhaps you’ve elected the kitchen, and find yourself industriously peeling a squash as directly by one of our lead cooks. We’ve found that working together helps build community, as we make worship together. Rather than seeing work as a burden to be shouldered by the unlucky or unwitting, we see work as an opportunity to participate in creating something amazing.

Around 7:00, someone hands you a casserole dish to be taken to the sanctuary, where the dinner table has been set by congregants and newcomers alike with a bright tablecloth and napkins. Someone uncorks the wine and sets out the bread. Then everyone gathers in the entryway for a prayer, a welcome, and the candle lighting. You participate in singing a simple, repeated song as we process to the sanctuary and light the candles on the table. You hum with the group as the presider (it’s Pastor Phil tonight, the pastor at our host church, Trinity Lower East Side) prays over the meal, tears off a big piece of bread and says to his neighbor, “This is my body.” A moment of silence, and everyone digs into the meal, passing wine and juice and serving dishes round the table. There’s a lively commotion as conversation sparks.

Between our core group, folks who wander in and out, and visitors, attendance at St. Lydia’s can fall anywhere between six and eighteen folks on a given Sunday night. This means that the character of our worship can change drastically from week to week. Some Sundays we’re a reflective, intimate group. Other Sundays we’re a boisterous crew singing in four part harmony. It sort of depends on who shows up. And who shows up is a source of surprise and delight. Often we’ll be joined by folks who make their home in the park across the street, or kids who were riding by on bikes, or 15 college students staying in the church on a mission trip. All are welcome at the table.

At the moment, Lydia’s has a core group of about 15 congregants. Our first gathering was at a congregant’s home in Advent, 2008. The group has shifted and changed since then, gaining members one by one. For the most part, the core group is between 25 and 35 years old. We’re tend to be fairly educated and creative: an artist, a few writers, some graduate students, a copyeditor. We have a varying degree of familiarity with church. Most of the visitors who show up at our doors have one thing in common: they are spiritually hungry. They have this sense of God at work in their lives, and they’re trying to figure out how to respond.

But back to worship.

Dinner is followed by the exploration of scripture. I preach a compact sermon and ask the group to respond from their experience. You might surprise yourself by offering a story of your own. Then the group takes hands, sings a song, and prays. After a poem is read, everyone lifts their cups as the presider blesses them, then clean up begins and you dry plates and glasses in the kitchen. The moment the dishes are done, folks crowd into the entry once again for announcements, an offering, a final song and a blessing, and after sharing the peace with your neighbors, you head back out into the night. There’s food in your belly, and perhaps even a song from the evening cycling around in your head. And a postcard in your hand. And some leftovers in the other.

We do church this way because people are hungry. People in New York have hungry bellies that may be filled with home cooked food. They have hungry souls that may be filled with holy text, holy conversation. And these hungers are sated when we sit down together to eat.

We do church this way because people want challenge. People want the challenge of sitting down next to someone, someone they don’t know, who may be entirely different from them in every way, and working, reaching, to see her as God sees her: perfectly and wonderfully made. And we are challenged when we sit down together to eat.

We do church this way because people are looking for Jesus. People are looking for Jesus and thinking that just maybe they see him, but then again maybe not. But when we sit down together and break bread, we glimpse him for a moment in one another’s eyes and say to each other, I see Christ at this table; I see him when we sit down together to eat.

Emily Scott is the founder and Pastoral Minister at St. Lydia’s , a new church start in Manhattan. She holds an M Div from Yale Divinity School and blogs at sitandeat.typepad.com. She invites you explore the St. Lydia’s website.

By Adam Thomas

Sometimes, I am too young to hear Jesus’ words in the Gospel. Or too old. Or too naïve. Or too refined. Often I wonder if God is holding a particular set of words in reserve for a particular time in my life — when I need those words I will finally hear them. Or perhaps I already have, and they have settled into the bedrock of my faith.

The words of Jesus are beautiful and dynamic. They grow in depth of meaning as I grow in depth of experience, emotion, and faith. Many of Jesus’ words mean something new to the disciples after the resurrection because the disciples are different after the resurrection. Likewise, the words of Jesus are the same, the chapters and verses are the same, but I am different every time I read them. In the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield says a similar thing about the natural history museum:

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finishing catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole…Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. You’d have an overcoat on this time…Or you’d heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way – I can’t explain what I mean.

In a recent bout of nostalgia, I read some of my old writings and found that I had discussed the same verses on three occasions. After he washes the disciples’ feet, Jesus says, “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” (John 13:34-35). The words were the same each time, but I was different. Here’s what I mean.

It’s May 9, 2004, and Easter season blooms on the domain of Sewanee. I’m a junior in college. I’m two or three steps into the exhaustive process towards ordination. Classes are drawing to an end; exams are approaching. With flagging energy, I am writing lectionary-based reflections on xanga.com (before people ever used the word “blog”). And Jesus’ words encounter me:

“Wow. [Jesus] could not have put it more succinctly, or more beautifully. It does not take mighty acts or wondrous miracles to show people that we are followers of Christ. Just love. But I would argue that love is a mighty act, it is a miracle. Loving with the love Christ taught us – the only true love – is more powerful than anything. […] When we love with the love Christ taught us, we bring Christ to others. This love is powerful, transformative, life-changing, irresistible. Paul tells in his letter to the Romans that nothing can separate us from it. And it is our duty, and it should be our joy, to spread this love to others.”

“This is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian – to love one another as Christ loves us. We are capable of love because God loves us. Indeed, Paul tells us, ‘God is love.’ So how do we love? I think that is an impossible question to answer succinctly. In a past reflection, I called love the ‘conscious or unconscious search for God in other creatures.’ Searching for God means searching for all that is good, right, true, and graceful about another. However, this does not mean looking past all the other stuff. When we love truly, we see the good and the bad and continue to be in relationship. Contact (spiritual, emotional, &c.) is essential for love – only by staying in contact with God and others can we feel the love that purges our iniquities from us.”

“

Life is only worth living when it can be shared with others. This sharing is another word for love. And love shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency. When the flu knocked me out, my friends served me. I had no choice but to let them serve me because I could not serve myself. And I am better for it. They showed their love for me by bringing me medicine and food. In their act of loving service, they washed my feet. I have a share with them, and we all have a share with Jesus Christ. We are his disciples because we have love for one another. There is no such thing as self-sufficiency. An inability to accept the service of others masquerades as self-sufficiency. But this masquerade is a dismal half-life. Christ came that we may have life, and have it in abundance. Washing each other’s feet, serving one another, and loving each other with the love of God brings this full, abundant life in Christ.”

I invite you to look for the gasoline rainbows in your life. You are a new person since you last picked up the Bible. How are you different from the last time you read a particular passage of scripture? What is new about you? How have Jesus’ words made you new? What are your gasoline rainbows?

The Rev. Adam Thomas, one of the first Millennials to be ordained priest, is the curate of Trinity Episcopal Church in Martinsburg, WV. He blogs at wherethewind.com.

By Frederick Quinn

The setting is spooky, a large, cold English room filled with furniture of different styles and periods crowded together and needing a good dusting. It could be the setting for Masterpiece Theatre or Mystery, with the voice of Vincent Price introducing another dark tale of intrigue, etc. But the voice was that of Rowan Williams and this was his December 18 four minute visual presentation designed to win friends for the proposed Anglican Covenant that is otherwise going no where.

Numerous commentators have pointed out the document’s deficiencies, its misuse of Anglican history, and the dreary proposals in Section Four that would give us regulatory structures not dreamed of in Cromwell’s time.

Presumably the Williams video would assuage such apprehensions. The archbishop sat in what could have been a British railways hotel lobby chair, in a room out of Agatha Christie. His hands were pressed tightly together, voice was high and tense, and he tried briefly to be reassuring. A lot of work has gone into the Covenant, he began, I guess thinking that somehow such an opener would successfully paper over the numerous objections to the document. “It is not a penal code,” he continued, which immediately flagged that question. “We haven’t learned to trust one another,” he continued, and the leaden document being unrolled once more that December 18 would presumably “intensify our fellowship and our trust.” But does trust intensify from signing a poorly drafted document nobody wants, or does trust come instead from contacts built up over years of sustained sharing ministries?

The presentation was only four minutes long, ending in a flow of random observations that raised many questions and provided little reassurance of any kind. Parsing the individual lines serves no purpose, as the objections to the draft Covenant and the imperious way it has been presented have been chronicled elsewhere in Episcopal Café. What was most interesting was William’s body language, tense, imperious, and grasping at straws. It did not suggest the intensification of trust.

As a longtime follower of Mystery, I thought the video might end with a crow flying past or a suit of armor clanging to the floor, but the tape just stopped. Maybe what is needed is for some actors from Mystery or Masterpiece Theatre to film a set of short spots in period costumes ending with a line like “The Covenant really is good for you” or somesuch. But so far the Covenant rollout is unconvincing,

The Rev. Dr. Frederick Quinn has written extensively on law and Anglican history.

By Stephen T. Lane

Like many people, I’ve spent much of the last two weeks reflecting on my belief in God and on the nature of Christian hope. The seemingly inexhaustible horror of a magnitude 7 earthquake near Port au Prince, Haiti, has left something like 3,000,000 Haitians refugees in their own land. 1.5 million are homeless. All need water and food and medical care. Because most goods and services reach Haiti through Port au Prince, the whole country is at risk. As people flee the city, they take their needs, their hunger, to regions that have few resources to help. Television dissects the disaster in excruciating detail.

Observers have complained about the slowness of relief efforts, the lack of leadership and coordination, but the truth is that this is the greatest disaster to occur in one place at one time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if the world does the very best it can, it is an open question if the world can feed, clothe and house 1.5 to 3 million people on a daily basis for months to come. In the face of such a disaster, words fail. The only appropriate response is a deep sense of grief: grief for the dead, grief for the injured, grief for the loss and devastation, grief for those we know, grief for those known only to God. And it is no surprise if we wonder about the love of God.

What we’re talking about is called, in theology, the problem of theodicy. Simply stated, in the face of disaster, God is either incapable of acting and is therefore impotent, or God chooses not to act and is therefore indifferent to human suffering. An all-powerful and loving God would not permit such a disaster. As I read the press and blogs, pundits everywhere are pointing either to irrelevance of faith in God or looking for some way to explain why God might want to punish the Haitians.

But such an understanding of belief, in particular, of Christian belief, rests on the theological speculations of fourth century theologians, early fathers of the faith, whose view of the cosmos and knowledge of science was very different from our own. In the fourth century, many things that we now understand as naturally caused were ascribed to God’s actions. It was an easy step to theologize that God caused and controlled everything.

Yet if we look to our Holy Book, there is nothing in scripture that suggests that God was or is able to prevent people from experiencing the consequences of living in a real world. Indeed, most of scripture is an extended reflection on how to live with the pain and the suffering of life in a real world.

The fact is that God created an ordered and predictable universe. Scientists have been working for centuries to understand that order. But with or without science, we can usually predict what will happen in our world. We can predict what will happen if we step off a cliff or in front of a bus. We know what will happen if we build homes on a flood plan or a fault line. We know what will happen if building codes are inadequate or there’s too much sand in the concrete. We know what will happen if we put a lot of people in a place with too little water or food. The world that God created is open to us and allows us to learn about it and to grow and organize our lives so as to live better.

And in this ordered world things collide – tectonic plates, weather systems, people and objects, ideologies, and nations – and when they do the consequences are predictable and often destructive. The Bible is the story of a people who conquered Palestine and then were themselves conquered over and over again. They saw their cities and their temple destroyed. They were carried off into exile. They were restored by foreign powers. They rebuilt their cities and their communities. Then they were conquered and nearly taxed into oblivion by the Roman Empire. And through it all, scripture says, God was with them.

Our faith is not that God will protect us from life in God’s ordered and predictable world. Our faith is that in the midst of that life God is with us to help us endure and to encourage us to live in ways that are closer to God’s intentions. The question for us is how do we connect more deeply to that life, how do we live more in tune with God’s intentions?

For the exiles returning from Babylon to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and restore the Temple, it was the keeping of the Law of Moses. Indeed the physical walls were a symbol of the wall created by the Law. The Law was the gift of God through Moses to God’s people. It gave the people an identity and an ethic, a way of life. Keeping the Law kept the people in touch with God’s intentions and distinguished them from those who lived outside the walls.

Paul doesn’t speak of a walled community, but he does speak, in equally concrete terms, of a body. The Christian community is like a human body, and all who are parts of the body have a role. People have many different gifts, but all can be used and, in the context of the body, none is superior to any other. Being part of the body connects us with Christ and distinguishes us from those who are not part of the body.

But the question remains… is this connection with God enough. Can it give us hope? What about being a walled city or a body can give us hope?

Those who have the Spirit of the Lord, who obey God’s law, who join with Jesus in fulfilling God’s intentions for the world, proclaim good news, freedom and recovery. They proclaim a world in which every person is part of God’s jubilee, the shalom, the harmony, which God intends for the cosmos. And they and God are working right now to make it happen.

Last Wednesday, the eighth day after the quake, I watched as a search and rescue team from New York freed a young girl and her little brother from the rubble of their home. As the young boy was raised from a hole in the ground his face broke into a huge grin and his arms were flung open wide in a spontaneous expression of the victory of life. At the joy of this rescue, all gathered broke into a roar and applause. That, for me, is our hope: not that the world will suddenly become magical, not that we will no longer suffer the predictable consequences of life in our world, but that, in the midst of death, life will emerge again. And we will have a chance, again, to live in harmony with God and one another. That’s the Good News – that God brings life from death and we can share in that life.

In our Baptismal Covenant we commit ourselves again to work with God to bring life from death, to be signs ourselves, of the hope that is in us. Does it make our lives easier? No… Indeed, it may make them harder. Does it make our lives safer? No… it may prompt us to take great risks. But it aligns us with the One whose will is to free and to heal and to recover. It will join us with God in God’s hope for the world. It joins us to a world in which the lives of 3,000,000 Haitians are essential to the harmony of our own lives. It joins us to a world in which new life rises from a hole in the ground. May it be so.

The Rt. Rev. Stephen T. Lane is the Bishop of Maine.

By Donald Schell

My wife and I are expecting. No, our own baby girl grew up and now she’s expecting her own baby. So actually we’re expecting vicariously or at one remove. Our first grandbaby is due in April.

As grandparents-to-be we’re fascinated to watch our daughter and son-in-law think, plan, imagine, and feel their way forward. They’ve researched car seats. They took a hospital tour and checked out the hospital’s ob-gyn practice and c-section stats. They’re being particularly thoughtful of each other in their time together as a couple while they imagine how different everything will be soon as their family of two becomes three. And they wait, by choice now and some friends feel eccentrically, to see if the coming somebody will be a boy or a girl.

I saw a shadow cross our daughter's face as my wife was showing her pictures of the birthing clinic that our young friends Maggie, Andy, and Emily, and the people of eighteen nearby villages just completed in Malawi, Africa. Carrying a baby herself, our daughter sensed how frightening it would be to anticipate labor with no access to emergency maternity help.

Watching the soon-to-be parents moves us to gratitude. They ask us lovely questions about how we did things, and some practical questions too that are a pleasure to answer when we can. We share stories with them of our daughter’s own birth, and memories of her older sister and younger brothers when they were children. She’s imagining the long journey from birth giving to grand parenting days like we’re experiencing now. The mother-to-be is seven years younger than her big sister and ten years older than her younger brother. Storytelling feels very rich. We had lots of time to watch the children grow, and with four of them, we came to see how each child was his or her own self from the day each showed up and accepted (yes, sometimes re-made) the names they were given.

Now all our four are grown, each one someone we’d hardly have imagined when they were small. I pause from writing this to raise four fingers one-by-one – the history professor, the full-time youth-at-risk program director, the priest, and just grown, eight months out of college, our youngest, the actor, piecing together auditions, work, and what parts he can get.

Today’s expectant mom was ten years old when her youngest brother was born. She remembers our astonishment at her fierce little brother, the baby and child so prone to tears and rage. She remembers her “experienced” parents taking a multi-week Systematic Training for Effective Parenting class in desperation and coming home to try what we were learning in class on him and her and her sister and other brother.

“Expectant” is a funny word. It misses part of the experience. None of our four are anyone we’d expected. While we acknowledge that they graced and challenged us far beyond our imagining, we also must acknowledge that they’re not the children we imagined before they showed up. And it wasn’t even enough to ‘accept and know them’ when they arrived. They each did their own becoming. We had work to do, but our agenda as their parents came with each one, each different and distinct.

The whole family says the explosive baby brother has become our glue, the peacemaker, the one everyone can talk to, the one who makes us glad to be ourselves. All his intensity is still evident onstage where he can be breath taking, heart breaking, and even terrifying. Offstage he moves through life with a grace and ease that moves Ellen and me to say, “big improvement on his parents – just how did that happen?” He was our thunderstorm and tornado, now his smile is sunshine.

That reversal touches a part of the story we can’t tell our daughter completely because she’s got to live it herself as she becomes a mom. There’s more letting- go and letting-be to loving than we knew or now know how to tell her. She does glimpse it in her work where she’s practiced a lot of letting go and letting be with kids who have a parent in prison. And she was old enough to see her dismayed parents feeling everything they knew or had done before was useless with her second brother, and she joined her big sister worrying over him and loving him with us.

In these waiting months of watching her and her husband I’ve been thinking about the divine mother/father. If we actually think about parenting, what does that image tell us about God’s love?

In the beginning, it looks easy - all four children image the love they came from and the love that watched them grow. But their growing changes simple generative love into something more. Each of ours stretched us beyond who we had been before they entered our lives.

If God is parent, God is changing with us.

While calling God our ‘maker’ doesn’t seem to imply change to the maker, knowing a number of artists and having myself tasted the difficulty of writing what I hear in my mind’s ear or trying to remember and sing and teach others something I know, ‘creator’ does begin to hint at a more passionate relationship than control, something that partakes of both struggle and dance.

Any creative artist knows that material has its own energy and something like a ‘mind.’ Creative work counts on material, and material is unbalancing. It causes the artist suffering and ecstatic discovering as vision and skill meet what is, what’s becoming and what can be.

Calling God our mother or father takes the risk deeper still. Parenting images evoke the wildness of engendering, birthing, and the twists and turns of loving and raising one who is truly other.

I can’t tell this to my daughter in words that are big enough or strange enough, but she feels it. Mothering love and fathering love drive out fond hope and vanity’s imaginings to welcome a stranger, an autonomous person who is also wholly and unpredictably a parent’s joy. The coming stranger will give her, and perhaps even the grandparents, new becoming, new selves.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.

By Torey Lightcap

Sunday after Sunday, presiders at Holy Eucharist rise following the sermon and try to say something pithy about what is immediately to follow. Too often, this introduction to the recitation of a creed – generally the Nicene Creed – misses the mark by a mile or two, betraying potential discomfort. For as well all know, being pithy and being liturgical don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand; the words of the liturgy stand on their own even if they’re not complete until spoken.

Among the many ways of mishandling this moment, my favorite is this: “And now let us stand and affirm our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed.” (Wait … you want me to affirm my faith in what, now?) I enjoy this moment not only because it makes me cringe (as indeed I am a fan of the awkward), but more to the point, because it accidentally shows how unsure of the content of the Nicene Creed we can be. (If we affirm our faith in the words themselves, perhaps we needn’t affirm much else besides!)

As one who presides (and as a stickler for liturgy), I suffer likewise, having attempted lots of workarounds to what often feels like a ham-fisted half-attempt at leading a community at prayer:
• Lofty: “Let us rise in historic witness to our faith and say together the words of the Nicene Creed.”
• Unapologetic: “Turning to page 358 in the Prayer Book, (pause) we say together (pause): ‘We believe in one God…’”
• Invitational: “Would you stand, please, and join me in saying together the Creed.”
• Or I say nothing at all: pausing, standing, and starting the recitation.

In truth, in their execution not a single one of these ideas improves on the situation in the slightest, and we all know it. By allowing us to over-announce the obvious, they simply reveal our sometime dis-ease with what is about to happen.

The simple fact is that for many, the content of the creeds these days provides a stumbling block where once, and in many times, it was foundational to faith. It feels like a stumbling block, perhaps, because it seems to sound tinny and unenlightened in the ears of moderns, who busily ask themselves, Does this statement reflect reality? rather than the postmodern question, Is it lovely enough to be true? (So perhaps it’s not even a question not worth flagging – something generational due to pass its own way after a few decades of “parallel development”!)

But then, what other foundational statement invites any higher level of agreement? A friend relates that the originators of an emergent project to construct a contemporary-language version of the Bible required assent to the Nicene Creed among collaborators; he writes that it “was the linchpin that we could all assent to – liberals and conservatives, Catholics and Protestants, evangelicals, progressives, denominational and non-denominational.” Yet for all the consensus it generates, the Creed’s placement within Sundays, for me, has always felt like something of a sore thumb – the thing we do because “it’s what we’ve always done.”

I most assuredly speak out of both sides of my mouth, for I say all this as someone who is relieved that the Creed follows the sermon. If my homiletical foot has slipped out of place, or if I have broken a boundary on the way to making some point, I take great comfort that the Creed is there to suggest what is normative. In that moment, the Creed is the remembering of a grace-giving Law.

Still, to any parish priest with an open office door and a confirmation class to teach, these tensions aren’t new. Something better is longed for; nothing better is advanced; we fall back into what we know; and omitting the element from worship only makes things stranger because we miss it so. Meanwhile, we’ve been hearing these complaints for years about the longsuffering Nicene Creed. You know:

• it reflects a cosmology whose structure is not supported by science (i.e., heaven is “up” and death is “down” and “we” are somewhere in between);
• it holds the value of baptism as being salvific for Heaven only, having little or nothing to do with entering into earthly communities of believers;
• it allows only for the bodily resurrection of Christ;
• it turns the prophets into predictors of the future only, and takes away their function as critics of the society, religion, and government to which they were contemporaneous; and
• it envisages God, in both God’s one-ness and three-ness, as being strictly male.

If it wasn’t meant to do these things, we certainly have not been careful to point that out. That would be an equal failing of seminaries and priests.

Whoever’s at fault, in other words, the Nicene Creed can at times feel like a limited and limiting instrument of faith – proscribed, dogmatic positions rather than the kind of lively thing we hope for, and know, our worship can be.

Even so, when it comes right down to it, we tend to grit and stand and recite with everyone else. The instinct to do so is practically reptilian. It’s just written on our liturgical DNA.

We tell ourselves,
• “This is all just one big metaphor, one approach to a larger and ineffable truth, which I can ‘believe’ because I can spiritualize it; I don’t need it to really be true.”
• “It’s beautiful and poetic.”
• “I’ll say this part but not that part” or “I can cross my fingers for the next three lines” or “I shall stand, but I shall not speak.”
• “Maybe if I do this I’ll be a better Christian. After all, everyone has to have a place to stand.”
• “Saying the Creed puts me in line with history.”
• “The sermon was so heretical, we have to have something to get us back on track.”
• “If this thing has been around as long as they say, it must be worth something, so I’ll give it a shot.”
• “I dare not leave the crowd.”
• “Thank God for the communion of saints. If I can’t say this Creed with a straight face, perhaps my neighbor will do it for the both of us.”

We negotiate the creeds, wrestle with them; revere their supposed historical capacity for creating compromise; use them as personal theological counterbalance to weigh and sift belief. But too often – or perhaps this is only one priest’s imagining – we do not employ them in the actual worship of God. And all this interior negotiation is happening (must this really be said?) in the supposed context of the worship of God.

Talk about awkward.

A few congregations have elected to deal with this situation by simply setting the Nicene Creed aside, not saying it at all, or saying it only sporadically when it suits them (say, when the sermon is shorter, or when voices clamor for it), or not saying it when it doesn’t suit them. You can never tell which way that wind is going to blow. But really, that’s just the exception proving the rule.

Others have tried to write new creeds, but their chief characteristics are not primarily credal; that is, their first goal is not to set out the scope of believing, but rather to react: to not offend, or to pack it all in, or to correct the theology and language of existing creeds. These artifacts, such as Jim Rigby’s “A New Creed,” aren’t so much creeds as they are alternative creeds (heavy on the alternative):

I trust in God, universal parent, source of all power and being;
And in Jesus Christ, a unique expression of God and our guide for living:
conceived by the spirit of love,
born of Mary’s pure trust,
suffered under political oppression….

The fact remains that for most of us, the Nicene Creed is not a commodity up for editing: it’s part of what makes worship essential and whole. Even if our understanding of it is less than complete – even if its recitation is like swallowing medicine drawn from an unlabeled bottle – nevertheless we need it (or should we say the collective mood or feeling requires it) to make the worship experience seem complete. For most, it must be like the blessing or the Gospel reading or the Peace: the air we breathe at worship, the ground on which we stand.

Only the air and the ground are so common that we forget they’re even there. No wonder it seems so awkward: certainly we need air to breathe, but in this case that air consists of the recitation of the terms of a theological deal struck nearly 17 centuries ago in a vain attempt at unifying a religion that was being fitted for servanthood to the Romans. That could be some pretty stuffy air.

The Nicene Creed may have settled the collective hash of the Arian camp, but those who study history know that the Creed came with its own ultimatum: endorse it or be exiled.

If any of this seems oddly familiar, it’s because we are currently standing upon the crust of exactly the same precarious moment in which propositions are being thrust upon us with the demand of assent or exile. In the propounding of an Anglican Covenant, Anglicans have been asked worldwide to state, codify, and commit to a set of beliefs and the practices that inhere in such behaviors so as to determine who is and who is not Anglican, and that’s just not how Anglicanism works.

A powerless and hollow citizenship in the Anglican tribe may be offered to those who cannot sign the Covenant in good conscience, yet who hold the common purse, and that might make them out to be Judas when all they ever wanted was to state with clarity what Christian justice looked like within their own province.

Who among us would imagine that a few hundred years hence, Anglican catechesis (if such a thing there be) would include the memorization of a binding juridical formula for the purposes of recitation in worship? Will it be set to music?

Of course not. This Anglican Covenant – so long as it is primarily concerned with discrimination – would have about as much flavor and pith as last week’s gum. It would be made into footnotes and studied by those with specializations in history and theology, and it would be remembered not as compromise, but as con. It would be novel in the worst sense.

In short, it would reflect its own limited worldview, proscribe rather than describe Anglicanism, and be largely misunderstood. It would certainly not be used in the actions of praise. Really: under what circumstances would it become an instrument of faith and evangelism, or further clarify the meaning and intention of Christ?

All of which returns us to the Nicene Creed, with its limitations and imperfections and our great, inexplicable, and admittedly rote need for it.

Whether and how we handle particular articles of faith says a lot about us. Sometimes, in a sense, they say more about us than they say about God. And yet here is this thing that provokes both theological anxiety when it is present, and personal anxiety when it is absent. What more can be said of it, than that it has held us together as much as it has pricked at our ideologies and politics.

May we handle with great care not just what is already in print and has been recited for generations, but what has been set before us to shape for the generations that follow.

By Leo Campos

What is the basis for any community to be considered a community at all? In my own family, for example, is it sufficient that we all inhabit the same house? As it is with different schedules (after school activities, church activities, personal pursuits, chores, and what not) the amount of time we spend together as a unit is very limited indeed. Even the ideal of sharing a meal is not always possible - sorry can't stay for dinner gotta go to church for the 630p Healing Service. Sorry can't stay - yoga class starting in 15 minutes. Sorry can't stay, drumming lessons begin at 7 p.m. And so on.

But still we would consider ourselves a family or no more so than the vast majority of families these days. We have to fight for every scrap of time available. Without a doubt a community, be it a family or a larger organization is more than a collective of individuals. A community is a flexible and dynamic set of relationships. These relationships themselves are driven by the attitudes and behavior of its members, but they are themselves fed by and altered by the other attitudes and behaviors.

So what constitutes a family or a community? First of all a community is artificial. There is no such thing as "community," it is a construct which delineates, more or less arbitrarily, a space for relationships. This much is obvious. Even the "nuclear family" so beloved a myth in America is artificial. Growing up in Brazil I tell you that my "nuclear family" was way larger than what Americans consider their nucleus. It is inconceivable for me that the nucleus of the family should stop at one generation. In our family we make concerted effort to make sure that grandparents are involved in the children's lives. We also want to include cousins, aunts and friends into the mix.

Second thing to keep in mind is that what motivates individuals is not what affects communities. The community as an artificial phenomenon has a life of its own. There will be as varied reasons for members of a community to be together as there are members.

But we must be careful not to take this idea too far and end up thinking a community is some sort of Frankenstein's Monster - an artificial being with a life of its own. We cannot either assume or give what are human characteristics to a non-human thing. For example, while it makes sense to say that a my cats have a family, it is dangerous to think that way because "family" is a human construct. Cats most certainly do not see their own associations with each other and with non-felines in that way. Anyone else here who has ever watched the Dog Whisperer show on TV knows what I am talking about. The same way a community (or a family) is not a creature: it is an abstract entity which "moves" and "behaves" responding to different forces than the creatures that make it.

Some questions which arise when I think of communities: what is it that holds a community together? How is interdependence achieved, fostered, cultivated?

Without good answers for these questions I am afraid we spend a lot of time worrying about things which are less important, things like numbers. How many conversations have I had or heard where the defining characteristic of a church was its size. Sure it is by far the easiest thing to measure: one head=one person. But study after study of mega-churches has shown that the quality, the depth, and the impact of the church on the individual is in no way related to the size of the church. I would probably venture to say that it is in small churches is where you find the true disciples - after all the 5 people that show up for a Wednesday night Healing Service really want to be there.

I have no particular secret advanced monastic technique to increase community. But I can tell you what we do to try and foster a communal environment. First, everyone rows. There cannot be (especially in small groups) any tourists. I remember some time ago a wise priest pointing to me a horrible truth about the church: there are no volunteers in church. It is true! Everyone who calls himself a Christian is a disciple - who is obligated by evangelical commands to roll up their sleeves and work. Volunteering is a secular thing, for those who are idle and searching for something meaningful to fill up the time between lunch with friends and bridge club later that night. So at our Community, from day one, we talk about everyone being responsible for the whole. Second, we throw away rules. I do not mean that anything goes, but rather we try to do away with regulated and regimented verse-and-response communications, and instead hope to foster a more tenuous, sometimes embarrassing, often funny, informal dialog. This allows everyone to talk in their own way, in their own voice. Finally, we are rabid defenders of each other's individual and unique call. By destroying all cookie-cutters, we hope to emphasize to everyone that they are held in unique respect by all of us.

By keeping these three aspects in creative tension we have been able, so far, to maintain both a healthy interest in the global community as well as excitement about each individual's call. Surely there must be a way to do so in the church as well?

Brother Leo Campos is the co-founder of the Community of Solitude, a non-canonical, ecumenical contemplative community. He worked as the "tech guy" for the Diocese of Virginia for 6 years before going to the dark side (for-profit world).