by Thomas Dukes

I need to testify. When my spouse and I got married twelve years ago, we wanted to do so in our Episcopal church. The rector at the time offered to bless our union in a private home but not in our church; I suspect he was afraid of losing his job, perhaps not without reason. The church I attend is indeed open, inclusive, and diverse, and far more entertaining than that would suggest, but at the time, some families—most have since left anyway—would not have been happy.

Henry and I went to Vermont first, where we were joined in civil union by a justice of the peace, then to Canada two years later, where we were married by a Unitarian Universalist pastor. Our own church got a rector who did her first same-sex blessing five days after she arrived—of course, all the proper preliminary work for and by the couple had been done long before—and the place was filled with people and love. By then, however, Henry and I, still feeling a bit stung, just shrugged off her kind and gracious invitation to do the same for us. After all, we were happy, we had two sets of paperwork: what more could we need?

A lot, it turned out. Our first five years were terrific, then for reasons too personal to go into here, we drifted apart. It took two years for me to work up the strength/courage/understanding/nerve to leave, but early this January, I did. The church was there this time, in the presence of the rector. She was of immense practical help, but that was almost beside the point. We lifted boxes together and discussed why I was doing what I was doing; I came to understand, later, that this was holy work: necessary, hard, and heart-breaking, but holy. My ex-spouse and I still carry the cross from this and will for a long time to come, perhaps for the rest of our lives, even as remain very close friends.

Thus, I offer one more reason that the Episcopal Church should perform same-sex marriages. Not blessings of same-sex civil unions or civil marriages, but the sacrament of marriage for same-sex couples, regardless of the laws of the state, for if the church is there at the start, the church can and will be there at the end, and the end always comes, either through the death of one spouse or separation and divorce. That the church may at times have failed heterosexual widows and widowers or divorced people is beside the point; the church always fails us at times because it is human just as it is divine. But if the structure is there, the possibility for the kind of necessary holy work and community that we all need at various points in our lives is also there.

So let us join in prayer and community and offer up a sense of the ending as well as a sense of the beginning to same-sex and heterosexual couples. Let us recognize again that God’s presence is everywhere, and our work for Him is everywhere, even or perhaps especially at a marriage’s end.

Thomas Dukes is a Professor of English at The University of Akron, Ohio.

by Heidi Shott

After the bomb went off, we pulled our chairs in a circle and looked at one another in stunned silence. It was a few weeks before the end of the fall semester at Tufts University and our class of about 15 graduate students in “The History of Educational Thought” had coalesced nicely - or so we thought.

That evening some trigger in the discussion caused a middle-aged student in the counseling masters program to flip out. I mean flip out. She stood, she ranted, she raved, and to our horror - she suddenly channeled her vitriol almost entirely at my friend, Beth, who was sitting beside me. Beth was very shy and kind and unassuming in a New England kind of way. The ranting woman began by berating her Beth for her Pappagallo shoes. Then she started in on what she perceived as Beth’s upper middle class status. Before long she folded each of us into her rant against the inequities of life in America and our personal culpability for it.

Beth protested, “You don’t know anything about me.”

I knew something about Beth. That fall we started together in the same small graduate program and became particular friends. We had things in common. Both of our father’s had suffered serious financial meltdowns when we were in our teens. She had worked hard to put herself through Boston College. Everything she had, she had because she had worked for it....including nice shoes.

The ranting woman scared us deeply. One moment she was sitting among us as we discussed some idea in the readings and the next she was on her feet, screaming, accusing, finger-pointing and gesturing dangerously. Everyone was afraid to approach her for fear she might lash out and hurt someone. Our professor, a tall, wise woman on loan from Harvard for a night class, stood at the front waiting for the right moment to intervene.

Then, just as suddenly as she flipped, the woman rushed from the room. A classmate, a keen counseling student, slipped out to assist her. Everyone remaining took a deep breath and instinctively pulled our chairs in a circle.

“I was born in October 1929, the day before Black Friday,” began Dr. Smith, after a moment. “As a child, during the worst part of the depression, I could have butter or jam on my toast. Not both.” She continued for awhile, telling us about herself and her childhood without the professorial reserve, before she turned to Beth. “No one really knows anything about our story. That wasn’t about you, and I’m sorry you bore the brunt of it.”

Our hearts heavy and bruised, our nerves jangled, we began talking but I don’t remember anything else we said.

Two years ago, 25 years after that evening at Tufts, an email arrived from my blogging software informing me that there was a comment from Anonymous waiting for approval. My blog, www.heidoville.com, is a less a blog than a online closet to hang personal essays that I write, according to myself, “about trying to live a life of faith in a complicated world from a small town in Maine with three guys and a rabbit.”

The truth is that since 2008 when I took on the job of Canon for Communications and Social Justice in the Diocese of Maine, I haven’t had much time to write reflective pieces. Most of the essays at heidoville were written in the mid-2000s during a particularly fecund period in my writing life. One of those is called, “Rich People,” and it is the one that Anonymous had felt compelled to comment on.

It began, “You sad and pathetic person,” and went on from there, quoting scripture and challenging my courage to post it. I didn’t think much more about it. In years as a diocesan newspaper editor and as a reporter before that, I’ve received many anonymous letters. I save the quirky ones, but I don’t hold truck with anonymity.

Without approving it, I posted my own comment below the essay. It read something like, “Dear Anonymous, When you show the courage to publish your name, I’ll show the courage to publish your comment.” I figured that would be the end of it.

Soon after, however, another comment showed up for moderation. This time Anonymous indicated that he or she had been a “friend” in college. Now that’s creepy. I don’t remember what else it said - I’ve long since deleted it - but it wasn’t friendly.

Two more years zoomed by. Yesterday morning, I received an email saying Anonymous had posted another comment about the same essay. The comment began, “You are a sad and pathetic person.” Oh bother, I thought, here we go again, and I instantly clicked, “Reject.”

However, last evening at home, I checked email on my phone and there was another comment waiting for moderation: “Heido, Cat caught your tongue?”

“Don’t read it,” called my husband from the kitchen. “The person wants to upset you.” His family owned a daily newspaper for almost 100 years, and he has a zero tolerance rule for unsigned letters. For him, it’s a simple matter. “Delete it. Disable the comments,” he said. “That person, even if it is someone you once knew, doesn’t know a thing about you.”

So I disabled the comment feature on the blog, which is sad, because I’ve received many lovely comments on various essays over the years.

But here’s the thing: I AM a sad and pathetic person. There are many, many things I’m sad about and there are too many things to count about my personal failings that could be deemed pathetic. Most of them aren’t too important, but some of them are and I’m not proud of them.

But here’s the other thing: Aren’t we all? Aren’t we all sad and pathetic and lonely and wounded in our own peculiar way?

What my past friend Anonymous and the woman who lost it in an upstairs classroom at Tufts 27 years ago, need to know is that we are not alone. They need to know that sadness and pathetic-ness (not a word, I know, but hang with me here) share our life stage with joy and wonder and hope. Not all at once, not in any sensical or balanced way, but ultimately if we open our hearts to God, to love, to mercy, to generosity for our fellow travelers, the balance shifts toward grace.

I think it’s interesting that Merriam-Webster’s first definition of pathetic is “having the capacity to move one to compassionate or contemptuous pity.”

In our recent discussions in the Episcopal Church about the correct definition of the word mission, and how we often use it interchangeably with the word outreach, perhaps the Church could define itself simply by serving those who move us to compassion, those whom the world regards with contempt. That is to say, everybody. Maybe the capacity to serve with compassionate, Christ-inspired intention is what separates us from other groups that do good works. Maybe that’s what the world needs to notice about us.

A few days ago on The Lead, Jim Naughton embedded a brief video of George Carlin talking about the oddness of the phrase, “in your own words.” Who else’s words do we have? No one’s, only our own. Telling our true stories allows others to take heart, to recognize similarities and common bonds of connection, to cast off the sadness and world-weariness and step into wonder and hope.

This fall, during my hour commute to the diocesan office in Portland, I’ve been listening to Philip Pullman’s, His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman’s one of England most articulate atheists, of course, but he has a lot to say that is wise and true. He’s telling a “make-like” story about a universe of his own creation and we would do well to learn from his vision of what makes a just and loving world.

At the end of the last volume, The Amber Spyglass, a physicist called Mary Malone encounters ghosts pouring from a rent in the world of the dead. Before one of the ghosts allow the remaining particles of her being to float away, she tells Mary, “Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.”

In the good, if strange, company of Carlin and Pullman, I guess I have no choice but to keep telling my story, even when it makes me feel vulnerable. It’s the only one I know.

By Kathy Staudt

I’ve never been a big fan of church fundraisers, but for various reasons I’ve spent the past few months helping organize a rummage sale at church. To my surprise, the process has been something of a spiritual practice for me and I think for others involved: A spiritual practice, i.e. something we do that helps us to be more open to the Holy Spirit at work in our common life, and to become more and more available to God.

Like many congregations, we had some history to challenge us in this area: for years, the women’s group of the founding congregation had run a monthly “opportunity shop” -- it dwindled in the late 1990’s when it became clear that there was not a sufficient critical mass of women in the new generation who could devote the huge amounts of during-the-day time required for the monthly sorting and pricing. If that was the only way to do a rummage sale, then the times for such events has simply passed. But after many years’ hiatus, some newer members had become established members, and wondered why we couldn’t have a rummage sale? Their experience of rummage sales came out of church experience in West Africa. A few of the “op shop” women were still willing to pass on some of their wisdom and to give generously of time-- a lot of daytime hours -- for this one event. So the challenge was to pass on the wisdom and still share ownership of new ways of doing this. It could not “belong” to just one small group, or it would be too much work. So we made it about participation: open to anyone: People could participate by coming to sort and price for an hour or two or by working on a Monday holiday, or by coming in the evening the night before the sale. There were still people who worked longer hours than others, but it was like the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: everyone who participated contributed something, and the rewards were the same for all. Meanwhile, energy grew around the emerging “rummage sale committee” and many of the women of the church -- now representing the many cultural backgrounds in our congregation -- began to offer time, cooking, ideas. Planning meetings started to happen - boisterous and disorganized by my own standards, but ultimately kind of fun.

Now, none of what we were doing looked particularly spiritual: the process involved organizational meetings, dickering over who was supposed to do publicity and how it should be done; navigating potential “turf wars,” and in our multicultural congregation, making sure we were really “hearing” each other, addressing perceived slights before they escalated, giving everyone a voice. We did pretty well -- not perfectly-- at this. There was tension sometimes, and there was also some hilarity: (I never knew how much the phrase “white elephant” belonged to my northern “yankee” tradition -- my Southern US and west African sisters were mystified by the term until I was able to show them how it applied to some of the more outrageous pieces of household junk we received!) Everyone will have feedback about what didn’t work, and I’ll chalk those up to “lessons learned” for another time. But my sense is that at the end of the event we all felt we had done something good together, and for the church. To quote some wise words of our friend the Rev. Rondesia Jarrett, “Everybody got fed. No one got hurt.” Not a bad mantra for any family event.

The other thing a rummage sale offers is what I’d call the “ministry of stuff.” Knowing it was happening allowed me to finally bite the bullet and clean out my closets and it has been great to lighten the load of stuff in my household. (the books, alas, will have to await another year). Some of what we sold included the possessions of people who had died-- a chance for widows and widowers to let go of those things and give them to the church. We spent hours and hours sorting through people’s stuff, a ministry in itself -- and deciding how to price and organize and present and publicize. There was potential controversy in all of these steps- - and it took a lot of good will for newcomers and old timers to work it out together. But we did. The process of pricing and sorting creates its own little women’s culture, where the things create stories: “Oh, that’s a dress I made of silk I bought in Japan in the 1970’s.” “Now there’s a clever gadget: I never thought of that before. . . “ etc. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re buying these plates: I really used to enjoy them when I did more entertaining!”

The day of the sale, people from the neighborhood came by, as well as people from all over the county who had seen our ad. A young adult woman from the neighborhood recalled Girl Scout meetings and community events from her childhood that happened in our building and shared a sense of “coming home.” Others remembered the “op shop” at our church building years before, and wondered if we were bringing it back. Meanwhile, Spanish-speaking members of the congregation came to shop and help interpret if necessary -- and reminded us that another year we should do a lot more advertising in Spanish because that’s who lives around here. All of this reminded us of where we are located in this community. I was glad of what some people saw when they came: - a multi-racial, cross-cultural community, working together and getting along. I hope there was a gospel word in just the way we were together.

When it was all over, the clothes went to a local clothes closet for the homeless, and the leftovers from the bake sale will go into lunch bags for the community shelter week: further reminders of how we are connected to our local community.

We made some money, too - a little over $1500 after expenses. I was glad of that and already reflecting on how to do better next time. But for me the experience was about working together in community. The fact that it was “for the church” was the bond: And in much of what we were doing here, we were learning how to be together, trying to be, truly the “church of Our Saviour” -- which is also the name of our parish. We may do better next time. But this time through, we worked together to make something good happen in our neighborhood, and we did it well. And I for one learned something about the nitty-gritty of loving one another, navigating interpersonal, intercultural challenges because deep down what draws us all here is the desire to be a part of a common life. Perhaps this will shape us. Perhaps our neighbors saw it, too. That is my hope and my prayer.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Maria Evans

"I believe in the sun even if it isn't shining. I believe in love even when I am alone. I believe in God even when He is silent."

~~Author unknown, allegedly found on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany which was a hiding place during the Holocaust.

Just north of my driveway, in a little rectangular tongue of my pasture, is an incredibly large and stately cottonwood tree--about 70-80 feet tall. Once upon a time there must have been other trees near it--it is not entirely straight but cants about 20 degrees to the east--but it presently stands alone in its magnificently imperfect beauty. One of the greatest joys in my remote country "home in the hayfield" is hearing the distinct flapping of my granddaddy cottonwood tree. I have a couple of smaller ones in other parts of my pasture, but they are not particularly close to the house. In the years I have lived here, it's served occasionally as both a home to Baltimore orioles, and a singles bar for un-mated male mockingbirds who carried on well past midnight. But its primary function in life has been simply to make the wonderful heavenly applause that only a cottonwood tree can make.

The waning days of fall always bring an auditory sadness to my day-to-day life. Each spring begins a cycle of sound to my world. The first cottony dusting of the seeds on my truck reminds me the leaves will be sprouting soon, and I start to train my ears to hear them. The first day the leaves have developed enough to be heard is always a joyful day in my life, no matter what tasks I have before me. Summer brings the constant companionship of its leafy song--so constant (the wind ALWAYS blows in Northeast Missouri) that I almost forget it's there. But it's fall--as the leaves begin to thin out and drop--that reminds me the most of the sound it makes.

Cottonwoods don't drop their leaves all at once. My tree undergoes a roughly five week process of leafy alopecia, getting thinner and thinner, green first mixed with yellow and then brown, my driveway turning browner and browner from the leaves. As it wanes, it seems the remaining leaves get louder and louder as they vigorously flap more openly without their neighbors--or is it my hearing that has become more and more keen?--until the day comes I step outside and hear nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Every year, that silence grips my heart. What if for some reason it dies over the winter? What if we have one of those late season tornadoes we are known for and it crashes to the ground, or into my garage, or even my house? I simply cannot do without the noise of my cottonwood tree.

I have come to changing the conversation of this silence in the last couple of years to take away my fear. When that fearful moment begins to tighten around my rib cage, I have started to loosen that grip with a single thought: Advent is coming.

One of the things I appreciate about the wisdom of our liturgical calendar is that it contains two seasons of planned silence--Advent and Lent. Both seasons remind me of a very important piece of the Biblical cycle of
Creation-->Sin-->Repentance-->Restoration/Resurrection --that for things to be reborn, they must often die to themselves. That we don't get to choose the nature of the restoration. That we will be given enough to make it through this time of silence. That what springs forth in the new season will most likely be better than we could have imagined or chosen for ourselves. That it is precisely when things seem the deadest is when the most diligent work of restoration is taking place. My cottonwood tree is not uncomfortable with its silence. I am.

The waning of Time after Pentecost is the perfect time for us to, like the slow five week thinning process of my cottonwood tree, ease into the silence of Advent with anticipation despite the dread. If we only focus on the dread, we deafen ourselves to the tiny stirrings of life inside the womb of Advent. I remind myself that when my cottonwood tree is silent, much is taking place in its outermost limbs, beneath the scaly plates of the little brown buds at their tips, and before long, those buds will swell to bursting and re-open. Even when I imagine my worst case scenario--what if my tree meets its demise?--I hear a voice asking me, "When you can no longer hear the rustle of the cottonwood leaves, what tree will you hear, that you've never heard before?"

What might God tell each of us in the silence, that we've never heard before, because the noise of the familiar was too comforting?

Maria Evans, a surgical pathologist from Kirksville, MO, writes about the obscurities of life, medicine, faith, and the Episcopal Church on her blog, Kirkepiscatoid

By Kathy Staudt

I was sorry that the triple insult of earthquake, storm, and the toppling of a crane forced Washington National Cathedral to move the events commemorating the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to other venues. On the one hand, this was a witness to the world of the way that the Cathedral’s ministry and mission goes beyond its beautiful building and grounds. But it is hard for me to let go of the place, even though I understand the spiritual point, especially after this weekend of remembrance.

I didn’t have tickets to any of the events (signed up too late) but I had planned to go over sometime during the weekend simply to be in this place, in the Cathedral and on the close, because 10 years ago the Cathedral, as a place, was very much a part of my life and my family’s, a kind of second home. Both of my children were at Cathedral schools, and my daughter, who had just joined the girl choristers in January of 2001, was among the children who sang at the service of remembrance on the Friday of that week, January 14.

What we learned at that time was something we’re learning again: that ‘safety” is not something we can guarantee ourselves. We hadn’t really seen that as clearly before September 11, 2011 as we have seen it since. I have written a longer reflection on what “safety” meant to us in Washington, as a spiritual value, after 9/11. It was published at in the 5 year 9/11 anniversary issue of Weavings and you can read it here.

I am remembering now, as I did then, the anthem the choristers sang at the cathedral service, which I suspect will be heard in some version in the commemorations this weekend. (You can see a video of this anthem here.

It was a simple, unison setting by Virgil Thompson of setting of the Isaac Watts' 23rd psalm paraphrase My Shepherd will Supply my Need. (Hymnal #664) The last verse, which moved me deeply then, now has an even more poignant ring in light of the recent damage to cathedral, church house and other buildings close. They sang:

O may thy house be my abode, and all my work be praise There would I find a settled rest, while others go and come No more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home

The Cathedral on that day did project an assurance of spiritual home-place for a newly traumatized nation, and it has been that kind of spiritual home for many of us in Washington and far afield. It was sad that the actual place was not be fully available this weekend. It is also an invitation, again, to reflect on those themes of safety and spiritual home in times of un-safety.

To that end I am remembering the other phrase from the liturgy that resonated for me in those days following 9/11, around the Cathedral close. It is from 1979 prayer book service of Evening Prayer, sometimes sung by the choristers in those days, though they’ve since tended to use earlier texts for evening prayer. It comes from the suffrages, when the officiant says “Give peace, O Lord, in all the world, and the people respond: for only in thee can we live in safety.”

Only in thee can we live in safety. It requires a great deal of faith and “letting go” truly to assent to that. Over this weekend that recalls so much loss and that brings back that strong sense of in-security and un-safety, I will be recalling these words s a kind of mantra. Perhaps the cathedral’s current woundedness, sad as it makes me feel, will help me to remember more deeply where our truest safety lies, during this weekend that calls us to both compassion and remembrance.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Donald Schell

I was folding laundry. My wife, international programs director of an NGO doing AIDS work in Africa, Ph.D. trained gerontologist, amateur actor, mother of three splendid grown children and stepmother to another splendid grown child, does her best to avoid using the dryer. We hang out our clothes year-round, which actually means that in San Francisco’s soggy November, December, and January and foggy July and August, we hang our clothes “in”; on a drying rack in the bedroom, one in her study and one in mine.

So, she was off at her work, and I was folding laundry before heading down to my office, and as I shook and hand-smoothed a pair of her black jeans, I found myself singing, “Love, your are love, better far than a metaphor can ever, every be.” It was a corny, enjoyable moment as I thought of her and remembered first hearing the musical “The Fantasticks” on the radio when I was 16 or 17. A lot of reading of philosophy and thinking about language lay ahead for me, and seminary too. I didn’t know Ellen then. Marrying her was a dozen years ahead of me. I also wouldn’t have imagined that I’d have some difficult experience and a failed marriage before between singing “You are love” and knowing she was the ‘who?’ I couldn’t yet answer. But the song stuck in my 16 year old brain because I wanted to know that face and because ‘better far than a metaphor’ spoke compellingly to me.

Better than a metaphor. I’m frustrated when my fellow theological liberals engage the literalist/fundamentalist dilemma with a blithe proclamation, “It’s all metaphor.” The things that matter most to me in life are themselves, real, immediate, compelling, and yet they point beyond themselves. Ellen isn’t a metaphor for love. She’s her own flesh and blood real self, the woman who decided we’d spare the environment a bit by hanging the wash on folding racks. That kid singing along with the radio knew that something called ‘love’ would have that kind of different meaning for knowing someone he didn’t yet know.

I imagine part of what prompted my recent singing moment with the laundry was the run of parables we heard this summer – the Sower (or the Miraculous Harvest), the enemy sowing darnel (or the wise farmer), and the mixed catch in the dragnet. Listening and talking with lay listeners before I preached on those readings and talking and listening with them after my sermons, I was intrigued at how hard we all found it to dislodge the allegorical tags the Gospel writers supplied for each of the parables.

Is the parable of the sower warning us about the cares of the world and exhorting us to be a particular kind of soil?

Is the parable of the darnel direction on how to deal with a diabolical spiritual enemy?

Are the undesirable fish caught in the net an allegorical warning of the perils of hell?

Several of the people I talked to around these three sermons were relieved to hear that many scholars tell us the allegories (red letters in such a Bible, officially “Jesus’ words”) were editorial insertions, probably the voice of early Christian preachers. They sensed that the hellfire threat skewed the parables. The logic of the allegory and the logic of the parable felt different. People felt relieved to hear how each of these parables begins with the storyteller’s trick of offering the soul-numbing familiars of hard work and bad luck in farming and fishing and then each takes the familiar to an unexpected place of abundance, grace, and ease. God is at work. As my youngest son says of so many things, “It’s all good.”

But whenever we talked about the parables, we kept falling into our own allegorizing. We did delight in these parables more-than-metaphorical (and vastly more than allegorical) vibrancy, and we wondered at what parts of our everyday lives and experience a storyteller like Jesus would seize hold of (“…a homeowner was building a new house and before the painters could come a gang member came with spray paint by night and tagged the garage door”).

But we found ourselves hooked again. We slipped back to thinking it was God sowing the seed or wondering that if the inedible fish didn’t go to hell, what happened to them?

What’s so compelling about this allegorical point-by-point Gnostic offering of the inexorable workings of the world?

First off, I think it’s that it’s amazingly difficult for us to even imagine ourselves into hearing these stories freshly. Two millennia and our many Sunday School and sermon iterations makes us know these parables cold, but that cools them. They were told hot, structured to surprise us and structured so the ending made us jump or nod a warm smile of unexpected recognition.

But additionally allegory lets us off the hook. That Ellen “is love better far than a metaphor” actually poses me some day-to-day choices that beginning with a more cosmic, abstracted or interpreted way of speaking of love would not. Because she IS love, I was folding laundry.

Jesus is challenging his hearers to feel their way into the pain and risk of seed-time, the anger and frustration of an anonymous hostile neighbor deliberately spoiling our best efforts to make something happen well, the back-breaking labor of hauling in a net full of fish knowing that there’s a bunch of fish in there that we’ll just be throwing back. Choices, the circumstances that make us resigned, bitter or cynical about life…and God at work in the mystery of seed growth, in our sowing, in our patience, and in a plentiful harvest of the sea.

What I find most life-giving in our church practice, things like singing, like the presence of Christ among us and in bread and wine, like offering one another God’s Peace, like sitting together in God’s silence, those things that are closest to my heart, what we’re doing in moments when we find God at work just won’t sit still to be reduced to metaphor. Neither heartless literalness and nor heady metaphor lives as they do. They’re better far than a metaphor could ever, ever be.

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

By Deirdre Good

In the series on the BBC's Radio 3, Something Understood, Tom Robinson this week considers the idea of waiting. This idea needs defending in today's world of instant gratification. One can indeed work towards something. Some things just take awhile. I might wait for the roses to bloom each summer. Or for the sun to rise. Or for a birthday. Or for a bird to appear at the feeder. This is expectant waiting. But it depends on an awareness of durative time. As a child, I remember saying to my Mother in frustration, "When will I be six?" and, with only a vague notion of time, finding the answer "next July" incomprehensible.

Of course one might wait in vain for something to happen. The roses might be infested with Japanese beetles. It might rain all day long. No bird finds the birdseed appealing. But waiting is part of life. Think of the waiting room in a railway station. This is a transitory place in which people wait expectantly. Perhaps the walls are covered with timetables. Perhaps there's a monitor showing times of trains arriving and departing. I've conversed with complete strangers in train waiting rooms on the basis of shared expectations. I expect delivery rooms offer similar experiences. I've been in gynecologists' offices abuzz with anticipation. But airports can be places of interminable waiting, only partially offset by retail opportunities.

There are professions involving waiting: waiters in restaurants and shop assistants in shops, for example. It can't be easy to wait on people, conveying the ability to serve at a moment's notice.

Servants must spend hours waiting even if they are paid for it. This can be a kind of passive waiting. Anyone in a relationship or a family knows that waiting for someone to get ready to do something is a frequent experience. We wait for our children to finish getting dressed; we wait for family members to join us in a trip to the shops. Or we wait for results of an examination or a test. This kind of waiting is about patience. There's less of it about. People used to wait far more than they do now--for letters, for phone calls, for visits. Remember the songs about waiting for the phone to ring or the letter to be delivered through the door?

The kind of waiting in relationships is negotiated waiting. I want to be patient but whilst I wait I am tempted to do something else. Julian and I once agreed not to begin something else whilst waiting for the other to be ready. It was only partially successful. We still negotiate with each other: "Be ready in five minutes!" "Can you wait while I finish this email?"

We want to eradicate waiting. Today we Skype our friends and families across the world instantly. We expect immediate results. We are impatient: New Yorkers want it yesterday, we say wryly. But waiting is about valuing someone or something else enough to put my life on hold even for a short while. Not everything is about me. Not everything comes at once. Waiting acknowledges the claim of the other and that there are worthwhile things that only come through waiting. I'm thinking of insight as well as cups of tea.

There is a kind of waiting that longs for something other than material objects: understanding or meaning or faith. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, wrote that the purpose of education was to develop the faculty of attention, of waiting. Such an attitude, she said, consists of suspending our thoughts and bringing our minds to a state of receptive expectation. We need not seize upon an idea too hastily, she advised, but rather train ourselves in eager waiting to receive truth. "Prayer consists of attention," she wrote. She thought of prayer as the highest focus of a soul toward God.

So next time someone we love asks if we'll wait while they get ready, or we are stuck with a delayed flight, let's not growl and open up the ipod. It could be a wonderful chance to improve our prayer lives and wait on God.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. An American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and keeps the blog On Not Being a Sausage.

This is the second of a two-part article.

By Donald Schell

From coffee at North Rim Lodge at 5 we took the shuttle to the trailhead. We were up ahead of the sun, but the soft light seemed to shine from the tall pines and pop from the snow beneath them. Our first two miles down were so steep my thigh muscles seemed to burn just above my knees. If my legs were already getting shaky had our training been adequate?

Then we passed through a tunnel, a passage for us or for a mule train cut through the red rock and the incline gentled. We hit a steady rhythm and walking felt good again as we descended in switchbacks and across cliff faces through pine and aspen forests down to the beginnings of shrub-like pinyon pine and desert scrub. Sometimes our trail followed natural stone shelves, where a layer of sedimentary rock withstood erosion better than other layers above it.

One of those sections, maybe a quarter mile, had me huddling closer to the edge. My companions were unfazed. “I’m okay, I’ll just be a little slow,” I called out as I switched my walking stick to my left hand, looked ahead and toward the cliff rising above us and walked deliberate steps, trailing my right hand against the smooth vertical wall of stone to my right. Even in those moments, the rich reds and oranges and gold of the rock seemed to sing.

The North Rim’s profusion of alpine wildflowers was behind us, and we moved into another band of flowers, spindly cliff-hugging flowering shrubs were also brilliantly in bloom, purples and whites. And the Century Plants were in bloom, their exuberant single stalks towering above the perennial that would remain for hikers later in the season. We chose to hike in May because it’s when the North Rim Lodge opens, and May and October (just before the North Rim Lodge closes for the winter) offer the most hope of temperate weather at the bottom of the canyon. But May gave us a constantly changing palette of wildflowers for our whole descent from 8000 feet down to the flowering cactuses at 2500 feet.

Truthfully the combination of physical challenge with a quiet reflection on mortality was part of what drew me to this hike. Park Service warnings sharpened the poignancy of that and pushed toward fear, but it wasn’t cheating death that intrigued me, it was simply feeling mortal and small as we descended into the overwhelming presence of something much older and more enduring than me or us or even mankind.

Hiking guides we’d read warned that the last four miles before Phantom Ranch could be brutal. The stone in The Box, as those four miles are called, is half the age of the earth, far, far older than any fossil. But the stone itself, twisted and sculpted of sediment and lava and formed and reformed under millennia of relentless pressure, looks as alive and organic as Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Church.

Bright Angel Creek continued to roar with the authority of a real river, but only from sheer volume of water. We were almost down to the level of the Colorado, following a gently descending path cared in the cliffside of The Box. And the grace of it? This narrow, dark-stoned canyon within the Grand Canyon could be stiflingly hot. Often, we read, people found the last four miles an eternity. On May 22nd it was only pleasantly warm, with a steady encouraging breeze masking and then accentuating the roar of the creek.

The Phantom Ranch staff greeted us with smiles, pointed us to a cabin with comfortable beds for the night, gave us the very welcome key to the shower house, and confirmed out reservation for sittings at their hearty dinner table.

We had made our descent in ten hours. Several people had passed us on the way. The four of us had talked and had taken some photos, greeted a mountain goat, reminded each other to drink plenty of water, took plenty of rests in the shade and had eaten our electrolyte-balancing snacks. We had also walked sometimes for an hour in awed silence. We were elated.

Days and weeks since confirmed what we felt that evening – that we’d done something that would continue to unfold in memory.

But we weren’t done. Next morning Phantom Ranch we took our places for the 5 a.m. breakfast service, thanked the kitchen for our sack lunches, and set out again before sunrise to cross the Colorado River on the Silver Bridge. From the river and the beginning of our climb, we watched the sun touch the cliffs far above us and hiked in cool shade for a couple of hours. We pushed to get to higher altitude before it began to warm up. We had nine or so miles to climb up 5000 feet up to the North Rim.

Many more hikers descend and re-ascend the South Rim, so there were more people on the trail our second day. And the higher up the Canyon we climbed, the more day-hikers and obvious excursionists we saw, people dipping into the canyon without water or hiking gear. My feet, by the way, felt great. And occasionally I caught sight of another almost barefoot Five Toe footprint ahead of us.

Sometimes people passing would say, ‘Ah, you’re the Yeti we’ve been following.’ ‘There’s another who’s a real big foot,’ I’d say, pointing to the larger foot prints when I could find them in the dust.

As we neared the top, the hikers and runners who were doing the whole distance, rim to river to rim in one day were passing us. They were doing in ten hours (or less) what had taken us twenty. I was glad for them and glad for our slower pace and conversation and the support and encouragement we’d given each other.

We emerged from the Canyon with plenty of time for a shower, a very welcome nap, and leisurely dinner at El Tovar.

At sixty-four, the oldest in our group, our passage felt like a timely descent into and beyond our mortality. Though we enjoyed greetings and brief chatting exchanges with others along the way, sharing encouragement and even shyly acknowledging our awe at what we were seeing and sensing around us, we knew we were passing through a place where death had come and would come again, and into a womb, passing through strata where life had evolved to a place that touched the beginnings of our death, a place of birth where our life and love felt renewed.

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

This is the first of a two-part article. Part two will appear on Tuesday.

By Donald Schell

On May 22nd and 23rd my wife and I and our friends Anna and Charley hiked the Grand Canyon from the North Rim, down to the Colorado River, and back up to the South Rim. We’d conceived the hike three years before, walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain with Anna. It took us three years to get the reservations we wanted at Phantom Ranch, the rustic guest lodge at the bottom of the Canyon. Then we cleared our work and travel schedules and began to train, to read up and talk to people who’d made the hike, and to equip ourselves.

Why had this journey mattered so much? I knew from walking the Santiago pilgrimage across Spain what a wonder it would be to stare back across the Grand Canyon and remember beginning at the far edge thirty-six hours before. And I knew that walking a long distance and watching the horizon change one step touches archetypal human memories and makes us feel as free on the earth and beyond encumbrance as our hunter-gatherers ancestors or some later nomadic people.

For me the steady walking rhythm that would cover a long distance gave flow and shape to stories of great-great grandparents who’d walked across the American continent in the 1840’s.

But I knew there was more too. What would our journey be? How would it stay with us?

Because Ellen and I and our two friends who would walk the Canyon were Episcopalians and Sunday liturgy regulars, we’d remember Jesus and his disciples, an itinerant preacher and his friends, literally “followers,” walking and teaching around Galilee. And maybe that touched or leaned toward, “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Grand Canyon is land that belongs to all and to no one. Park Service land. Though we were grateful we’d have a place to lay our heads, we were going there to make ourselves strangers, pilgrims, and guests.

After three years, after several failed efforts to get our Phantom Ranch reservations, after excited, anxious training, after a couple of shorter training hikes at altitude, we watched the sunset over the Canyon and sat down to dinner at the North Rim Lodge Saturday night May 21st. After dinner we didn’t linger to watch moonlight on the Canyon. We needed our sleep, so we turned in early.

We walked back to our cabins. Snow shone in the evening light. We double-checked our packs. Rain gear and a very light thermal layer for the morning, and a minimal change of clothes for the next day. Each of us would carry a gallon and a half of water, a minimal change of clothes. A first-aid kit. Lunch, and snacks for the trail. Lights out.

I said good night to Ellen and found myself mentally replaying scenes from the Park Service video we’d watched together, the DVD they sent as a warning to those with inner Canyon reservations. The Park Service wanted us to know that people had died attempting to cross the Canyon. Some had not carried enough water. (We were carrying five quarts each - check). Some hadn’t trained or been in good enough shape for a vigorous hike. (We’d trained well - check) Some had wandered off the trail and fallen. (Acrophobic me? Not a chance.)

When we checked in at the Back Country Office we’d also learned that the Park Service had flown 250 helicopter rescue flights in the previous year, averaging one rescue every other day. And I’d studied Back Country’s map with little marks next to brief stories of people, some younger than me who had died in the Canyon of heart attack or severe heat stroke. Men die in the Canyon about five times as often as women.

Younger men die more often than older men. Guys can be foolhardy. So, was I foolhardy? My grandfather, my mother’s father, was ten years younger than me when he’d died of a heart attack. But my grandfather wasn’t in daily aerobic training, and he’d talked with his doctor (not family) about chest pains and been warned by his doctor to take it easy. (I’d had a physical a couple of months before and told the doctor of my plans. He expressed no cautions or evident concern. Check?)

So, (check, check, check, and check?) we’d trained well, would be carrying plenty of water, and would stay on the trail. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but we knew we’ be walking a good trail and expected we’d have a manageable, enjoyable hike. And though we’re all mortal, strong odds were on our side.

I wanted to sleep, but my mental checklist kept rolling. We’d trained in California’s coast range, never getting above 2000 altitude - but we’d already done a couple of hikes in the previous days, and we’d been fine. I didn’t do well in heat – which is why we were hiking in May and why we were grateful for the weather forecast – breezy and partly cloudy.

And then there were my shoes. I had trained in “five finger,” my new near-barefoot hiking shoes, and knew I’d done all right with them on rough terrain. But our training hikes had all been close to civilization. I could explain to anyone why I preferred the Five Fingers to my good old hiking boots, and I knew a number of people had already gone rim to rim in Five Fingers, but…what? What if I injured my foot or my ankle?

The new shoes had a good safety record IF people trained in them ahead of a major hike. I had trained. But what if a rock cut through the very thin vibram sole? No, wait, was I staying awake to remind myself that emergencies were possible? Whatever we’re doing something can go wrong – of course, but everything I was thinking of was unlikely.

Finally with a rueful smile I found the perfect worry to put other worries to sleep. I remembered Harold Camping had predicted that the world would end at 3p.m. We were already six hours past the End of the World. I wondered how Camping was facing his different version of things going badly wrong. I’d heard plenty of Camping-style preaching growing up and cringed at a couple of haunting childhood moments of finding myself alone at home and thinking the Rapture had come and I’d been ‘left behind.’ Better that our end or ‘The End’ comes when it will - unexpected.

Finally ready to let go and sleep, I told myself we’d prepared well, and thought we were probably doing this hike because we were mortal, at least wanting to do it before we got too old or died, so not in spite of being mortal. Mostly likely the next day would bring joy, good conversation, a splendid weariness, a phenomenally good meal at Phantom Ranch and a great sleep at day’s end, and I closed my eyes and woke, eagerly in fact, a few minutes before the alarm went off at 4:45 a.m.

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

"And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Luke 9:58

By Ann Fontaine

The other day Jim, my husband, said, “I don’t know where home is anymore.” We are continuing the process of selling our home of over 30 years where we raised our three children. We have a home to move to but are in transition, still spending time in one place, keeping it up and tidy for prospective buyers – “staged” as they say in the realty business. Often when we wake up in the night we can’t remember where we are. Luckily the layout of our bedroom is almost the same in both places!

The process makes me wonder about the spiritual benefits of moving. Of course, I know we are lucky to have a home at all, much less 2 homes when many in the world live in refugee camps or have no place to call home. So the first thing I have learned is gratitude, gratitude for the privileges of place, education and support that make it possible to be in this situation.

Another pondering is about the nature of friendship. Friends of 40+ years are irreplaceable, people who have known me since I was young and seen me through thick and thin. Those who know I can be a bozo and still love me are not easily found in a short time of coming to a new place. It brings up the question of how much can I trust my new friends to really know me? Can I take the risk? Can I afford not to take the risk if I want to have real friends? And how much do I need to know about them? How much sharing is necessary and how much do we need to know about each other? I tend to be a pretty transparent person. As one man told me when he and I were interviewing candidates for a job, “Don’t try to make your living playing poker.” So maybe this concern is not one about which I need to fret.

I grew up on the Oregon coast, which is where we plan to make our new home. The ocean and the Pacific NW have always been the home of my heart. We moved to Wyoming and the high desert on the east slope of the Rockies in our 30s and have come to love the wide open spaces and blue skies (over 300 days of sunshine per year) but I continue to have the sense both physically and culturally that Wyoming is a temporary place. Though I have lived more than half my life under these blue skies, the ocean still pulls me back. Will I miss the freedom of the prairies and desert? I notice when we are in Oregon I chafe against all the rules in that more populated place.

And so I wonder, where is home? I wonder if Jesus had not had friends with which to stay, women to pay the bills, and had had to go really far away from his birthplace – would he have been so flip about not having a place to lay his head? Would he have thought it a good thing to be “on the road?” As his home was in God – perhaps he would still have said the same thing.

For me, home is place and knowing the cultural cues, not having to always translate. When I went to Tanzania and was in the midst of a Swahili speaking people all the time, hearing English spoken in a marketplace or café, made me want to rush across the room and embrace me new “best friend.” My grandparents all immigrated to the US as young adults – I wonder if they always felt that sense of dislocation. I have lived in Wyoming long enough that I rarely feel like I don’t know the “lingo” but still there are times. I try to have the attitude of Jesus – being at home in the world, but I need place and people to make it happen.

As to the answer I gave my husband, I said, “It’s easy, wherever we are together – that is our home.”

Moving I is here.

"But they urged him strongly, saying, 'Stay with us, because it is almost
evening and the day is now nearly over.' So he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; ..." Luke 24:13-35 (NRSV)

In the darkness of evening
we sat down to eat with the stranger.
As he broke the bread
our hearts saw the sun
rise between his fingers.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Interim Vicar,St. Catherine's Episcopal Church, Manzanita OR, keeps what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Donald Schell

Bicycling past a parked car, the bumper sticker caught my eye, ‘Don’t believe everything you think.’ I stopped to write it down.

Someone got it right - The bumper sticker’s ‘believe’ resonated with faith, not because faith is irrational, but because faith (trust) is inherently relational. Not irrational, relational – our thinking alone will never get us to what our believing (especially believing formed in community) somehow senses and ultimately knows.

All of us have all kinds of thoughts about all kinds of things (including religious and theological things), random thoughts, thoughts all over the map, opinions, tightly held certainties, ‘common sense’ and things “we all know.” But that bundle of thoughts and opinions is just that – our own bundle of opinions and thoughts.

Faith’s path of knowing (can I say “trust’s path of knowing”?) engages the world we see and know and feel and taste with our relationship to other people and our interactions with them. Trust’s path of knowing values sense, intuition, and hope.

A good dinner party, a holy liturgy, falling in love, a funeral, or any passionate, concrete commitment to work with and alongside other people in need offer us vibrant un-rationalized glimpses (touches, whiffs…) of an elusive something that looks and feels compellingly real. Our collage of those many glimpses guides our trust. But is relational knowing really knowing? I hope so, because it’s actually the knowing we’ll stake our lives on.

A simple example: what has changed straight people’s minds about the rightful, graced place of LGBT people in the church? What is moving our whole country toward support of gay marriage? I’ll speak for myself as an old straight, white guy. It’s personal knowing and relationship, knowing gay friends – it’s working and being in friendship and community with couples whose lives make sense, and welcoming love and support and understanding from what gay friends find in their relationship.

What changes our mind is our heart, not argument. The experience of knowing people changes our mind.

Have you noticed how our most compelling arguments on this or almost any other subject seem to fall on deaf ears when we’re arguing (no matter how well we argue) with people who disagree with us? Why do our eminently reasonable arguments provoke half-truths and irrationality from those who disagree with us? Why does their disagreement exasperate and provoke us so? And why does it seem to them that we’re doing the same?

We learn to care and respect other people by listening to their lives. We feel our way toward their experiences, and find something unfamiliar that nonetheless lives that looks and feels like the best self we know in ourselves. Sometimes it’s not best self but the most ordinary self we know in ourselves, so compassion for others comes from exercising the measure of forgiveness that we’d hope for ourselves.

How do we trust? How do we communicate? We have all heard the arguments for the ‘selfish’ character of the gene, arguments that our human character was simply shaped by competition. It’s a reductionist version of Darwin that claims that what survives most fiercely is what survives in the world.

The more we learn about the neural structure of the brain and as we continue to observe our near primate ancestors the hypothesis of ‘selfish genes,’ the inevitably selfish character of genes in a competitive evolutionary system faces overwhelming challenge from new observations, new contradictory evidence. Like us our primate cousins have innate tendencies to empathy and sympathetic. Researchers frame experiments to witness people and primates acting to help, care for, or serve others including strangers not in their own gene pool. This openness to others and care for the unrelated stranger gives us the receptivity that makes listening and collaboration possible.

But what about our violence? What about selfishness? What about the fall? Isn’t that really what defines us?

Well yes and no, we and our nearest primate relatives do have a strong tendency to competition, and any of us are capable of violence and surprising, deliberate cruelty to our own.

And yes, war and conflict with our own kind was among the evolutionary forces that shaped our consciousness, but it’s not our sole, defining character.

We’re also deeply predisposed and neurologically wired to feel one another’s pain, to help, to collaborate, to comfort, to grieve. Love isn’t a cultural invention and it’s not confined to near kin. Reflecting on our own experience of love, any of us could refine and nuance this list of how we and other mammals are connected with each other.
The New York Times recently offered us another piece in the puzzle. It supports the wisdom of not believing everything you think.

In Patricia Cohen’s article “Reason seen more as weapon than as path to truth,” we learn that French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber are developing observed argument and data to crack the old puzzle of why logic so rarely leads to change of heart.

In fact arguments that are clear and satisfying to us will provoke resistance and skepticism in the listeners, even in sympathetic listeners, and certainly in people we think our arguments ‘should’ most appeal to. Mercier and Sperber’s science warns us (like the bumper sticker) that “Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions. It was [i.e. it emerged in evolution as] a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” In the summary of their research Times reporter Patricia Cohen says, “Truth and accuracy were beside the point.”

Mercier and Sperber offer their own summary in their abstract of a recent article - “Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis.”

The truths we sing and touch, the truths that move us and in which we move (and even dance) together are not the truths of win/lose competition. They’re glimpses of the great Truth of relationship of inclusion, of blessing one another. These are the truths we believe because we pray and think them with our mind in our heart.
Parker Palmer coined that phrase, ‘thinking with the mind in the heart.’ Any reader and friend of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of Early Christianity or of the Philokalia/Jesus Prayer tradition will recognize that Palmer has adapted from those ancient teachers’ injunction that we should pray ‘with the mind in the heart,’ a prayer that’s fully embodied, that rides on our breath and in God’s Spirit.

Why does our consciousness sometimes draw us to others? What makes us discard old thoughts and believe good of strangers and those we’d previously judged ‘unlike’ ourselves?

What of the thinking that divides, the thinking the bumper sticker warns us not to believe? Why does some thought push us to make bloody competition an article of faith? Why do some people put Scriptural arguments together to convince themselves and others that God’s wrath is the source of hurricanes, that “God hates fags,” that “Muslims are the enemy.” And why can’t we convince people that the real God is the

One whose “property is always to have mercy”?

We know the loving mercy of God in our experience of giving and receiving love and mercy. The thoughts we trust most deeply are those we think with the mind in the heart.

I wish I could thank the writer of that bumper sticker. Try it on for the day. Savor it as we continue on our way, ‘Don’t believe everything you think.’

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

By Deirdre Good

Anyone who is invited to give talks or public addresses or lectures or workshops knows that one will encounter complete strangers as well as a few old friends. The nature of these chance meetings varies widely but, given that I speak about biblical matters, the possibility of deeply meaningful interactions is always present. On one occasion at a church in Brooklyn, someone introduced themselves to me as a friend of my parents from the time they were in Kenya. I was able to call my parents that day and pass on greetings. People have asked me after talks if I would be their spiritual director, which I decline, having had no training. People tell me stories about their lives evoked by my talk and our conversation. Sometimes, people ask for my email to begin an exchange of information about a topic on which they have heard me speak.

On one occasion, I went to another part of the country to give a day long workshop at a church on how the Bible came to be. It was well attended, having been given good publicity by the host rector, and people came from considerable distances including neighboring states. After the morning talk, the church parishioners served lunch and I sat down at a table of complete strangers having been waved over to it by two friendly faces. We began to talk. I asked where this couple had come from. They named a town in a neighboring state which I have never visited but which holds the grave of my mother-in-law, buried far away from any family or friends. It's not a large town so I was quite surprised. And when I told them of her grave, they both immediately offered to visit it. An extraordinary connection came into being that day from a chance encounter. They subsequently sent descriptions and pictures of the grave and accounts of their visits to it on several occasions, and a beautiful gift handcrafted by the husband.

In today's post we received a letter from the wife describing the death of her husband and her year-long grieving. I myself was deeply grieved at the news but my own sorrow at his death is tempered by the knowledge that, just as our connection in a place unknown to us, which each of us reached only by traveling a considerable distance, was made through the long-ago death of a person unknown to either of us, it will be sustained beyond death. And at the same time, that one fragile connection we made became so deep not so much because of what we said to each other, but because of who they were and what they did for my spouse and me. That connection becomes a symbol of what all other future encounters with strangers at other talks might become.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. An American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and keeps the blog On Not Being a Sausage.

By Tamie Harkins

It took me fifteen minutes to walk the last 30 meters, so great was the pain in my feet. This was my fourteenth day of walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim path across northern Spain that culminates in Santiago. The doors to the albergue—the pilgrim hostel where I’d stay for the night—were thick as tables, great slabs of splintered wood, and they opened to a grass garth dotted with quiet, beer-drinking pilgrims, laundry flickering in the wind, and huge stone pots filled with flowers. Billy was there, and José, and the short Spaniard. There was also a clear blue pool of water. You’re here now, it all seemed to say. Welcome!

The hospitalero came out to meet me and immediately took me to a room without asking for my credencial or money. Walking that slowly is its own credencial. He chose a bunk for me and lifted off my pack. In Spanish he told me to wash and rest, and then we could think about credencial and money. I crept up the bunk and lay my feet on the railing so they would be higher than my head. I clenched my eyes shut against the pain of the blood leaving my feet, and when the pain was done I slept deeply.

It would often happen on the Camino that my sleeping bag became a cocoon around the soft and slowly transforming chrysalis of my self. Even after I woke from the always-deep sleep of my daily siesta, it often felt impossible to leave the sleeping bag, sometimes for hours. I knew I needed to be motionless. I watched shadows on the wall; I listened to other pilgrims; I lay very still. The huge, muscled animal of my mind was blindered and bridled. Something seemed to be being decided, brokered, healed.

When I was ready to leave my sleeping bag, the hospitalero of the albergue introduced himself to me as Hugo from Argentina. He and his Spanish wife bustled around me, concerned.

“Blisters?” They asked.

“Tendonitis,” I replied.

“Ah.” Hugo smiled his huge happy smile, invited me to sit down. Together they made me a sandwich for free and asked me to stay with them as I ate. His wife smoked one cigarette after another, and their daughter or niece perhaps lounged at the table, unburdening herself of gossip or woe.

The craft of these hospitaleros is hospitality and healing. Tens of thousands of pilgrims walk the Camino each year and I was clearly young and healthy; my burdens were bearable; my injuries were minor. Yet they welcomed me into their home with the same care with which they might have treated an ill or elderly pilgrim. As members of the Order of San Jacques (Saint James), they seemed to have gotten serious about Jesus’ teaching that the way you treat the poor and the hobbling and the insignificant is the way you treat Him.

On a day like that, I just wanted to eat a filling peregrino—pilgrim—dinner and sleep shoulder to shoulder with all the other pilgrims. What had been done—even what should have been done—had been done. I wanted to let it be, and rest. But the day was not finished yet. After I ate the sandwich, I checked my e-mail. I read through them one by one and just as my time at the kiosk was running out, I began reading an e-mail from Meredith, one of my best friends from college. She wrote that the doctors had just found a tumor, a rare form of cancer, the doctors did not know if she would live. Before I was done reading her words, the Internet time ran out, the screen went black, and I was suddenly alone in the dusty village of Boadilla del Camino.

I did not know what to do. Should I leave the Camino? Should I go home to the States? But what could I do there?

I sat very still; I was afraid. Inside, I thrashed around. I was the chrysalis still, but now the cocoon was a trap, not a comfort. I was stuck here in the middle of Spain, my broken feet my only vehicles. I was stuck here in a body, a mortal human among other mortal humans, some of whom I loved so much and did not want to die.

I wanted to purge myself of uncertainty and grief. I wanted to call someone else who could bear these feelings of powerlessness for me.

But grief and pain are not burdens you get to put down before they have lived out their life in you. Not-knowing was the shoes I walked in; solitude was the path itself. There may be distraction in this life, but there is ultimately not escape, and on the Camino there was not even much distraction.

I climbed back into my bunk, zipped the sleeping bag closed around me. I envisioned Spain, and that one little thread of a path through it, the Camino. I imagined myself, a tiny pilgrim on that path. Then I imagined that the whole country of Spain was the thumping muscle of the heart of Being, the Camino one vein through that heart. Every one of us are caught up in the life flow, I thought, whether we were good or indifferent, know it or not. The day’s walk came to me: I was being held in love, and the love was Being held in fire. The limitations of the pilgrimage are the same as the gift of the pilgrimage that night: to be hemmed in, encompassed, not yet done. I needed to walk the rest of the pilgrimage, and it would take time.

That evening, all the pilgrims gathered for a communal pilgrim dinner. These were rare throughout the pilgrimage. Pilgrims did usually eat all together, but rather in smaller clusters, and often in restaurants. That night we all feasted together under Hospitalero Hugo’s generous attentions. There were heaping helpings of beef stew, soft baguettes, clay cups of red wine. I sat across from Billy, José, and a new-to-us Argentine pilgrim who had begun the pilgrimage years before, riding horses through South, Central, and North America, then flying to Amsterdam and riding down Europe to the Camino. I vacillated between interest in the Argentine’s story, translated to me by José, and panic at the day’s events. I left the table early and hobbled back to my bunk.

For the last few hours my mind had been shrieking that I needed people to pray for me if I was to continue. Then a thought came to me. Perhaps I did not need my friends and family to know exactly what was happening. Perhaps the fact of their love had always been carrying me. Maybe their very lives were like prayers being lived through them, our lives held together, holding each other. Even our ordinary lives have the quality of reaching for transcendence, after all, for connection and hope. And maybe I could reach for Meredith simply by faithfully walking the Camino. Beginning the next day, I decided, I would offer my walking as a prayer for Meredith. I would follow the yellow arrows and learn to walk as one being prayed.

Tamie Harkins is working on her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. She lives in the small Alaskan town of Kodiak and will be commercial salmon fishing this summer.

By Donald Schell

I’d visited Joe in the hospital several times before he fell into the coma. The cancer was taking him quickly. Joe had co-chaired the parish search committee that had taken the big risk of calling me, a divorced twenty-nine year old priest from across the country, to be their rector. It hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped, I guess. After Joe died, I learned that he and his co-chair had taken the big risk of insisting that their good friend, my predecessor, retire for the good of the congregation. When I came, the congregation was mostly people in their 60’s (the age I am now). The search committee was looking for someone to lead change and attract new young families.

Joe’s co-chair on the search committee was mayor of a small town a couple of miles out from our parish. Small town politics and conflict in his police department had made him courageous even when he was a target, which was a good a thing, because change came hard to our little congregation. We introduced the brand new 1976 Proposed Book of Common Prayer to the parish, instituted every Sunday communion and shared it with young children, and sang more of the liturgy than some believed was appropriate. I was grateful that Joe’s co-chair was ready to cover my back; he and I talked over everything. Sometimes he counseled patience or steered me from crazy risks, sometimes he stubbornly made me see the good in someone in the parish who was angry, upset, and speculating that I’d come to destroy the church, and even when his friends made no sense to him or he thought I was being headstrong again, he stood beside me in conflict.

Joe’s particular goodness made him more shepherd than warrior or diplomat - Joe was faithful to his old friends. His ear was ready with sympathy for anyone who was upset, angry, or condemning of changes we were making. His heart went out to old-timers, and he made their pain and grief at every change his own. When the new younger adults began asking for a voice in running things, Joe reminisced with old-timers about building the church, brick by brick with their own hands twenty years before.

For a while he became their messenger
- They don’t know where you’re getting all this stuff.
- They just don’t feel like it’s their church anymore.
- We had our ways.
- Most of us chose the Episcopal Church.
- You keep telling us the church is change and we don’t see why.
- They don’t see why.
- They just don’t trust you.
- We built this church with our own hands.

The messages shifted back and forth that way between “they” and “we.” Eventually Joe’s being their ready ear and voice made him their leader.

Joe’s shepherding fit him well. Years before he’d literally spent a summer herding sheep. Before Joe and I quit talking, he’d told me of an early Rocky Mountain snowstorm that summer that had stranded him and the sheep in a high altitude pasture.

Sudden snow had made it impossible to get the sheep down the mountain and back to his camp. As darkness descended he drew the sheep in close in a tight circle on the ground, picked his way into the center of the circle, and wiggled in to lie on the ground surrounded by warm sheep bodies, sheep breath and wet wool. Snow continued to fall through the night. Joe recited the 23rd Psalm quietly to himself and then said his “Now I lay me down to sleep,” hoping he would not actually “die before I wake.”

Next morning he woke covered with a layer of snow, but alive and well. He stood in the radiance of morning sunshine and shook off the snow as the sheep did the same.

“The one good thing about this new Prayer Book of yours,” he’d told me, “is that we’ve got ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,’ in the words we all know.” He appreciated that the Rite I burial office included the King James Version of Psalm 23.

As Joe’s friends got angrier, and with me welcoming new strangers who volunteered for tasks and wanted to run for vestry, Joe found it harder and harder to talk to me. I called on Joe trying to talk it through. The last of those visits, when I knocked at his front door, Joe’s wife came to the door shaking her head. “He doesn’t see the point.” “You mean he won’t talk with me?” “I guess not.”

About a year later I got word of his cancer. It was probably that long since I’d seen Joe. I drove out to his place and knocked on the familiar door. This time he welcomed me himself. “I’m surprised you’d come,” he said smiling wryly. He invited me in to sit and talk and be quiet.

I watched him walk across the living room. He was hunched over with pain in his abdomen and his steps were slow and sitting down slower, but we talked, and from that day we fell into a routine of me visiting him a couple of times a week. I’d taken some risk knocking on his door. Joe took the bigger risk - he let me, the kid, the troublemaker, be his pastor. He began telling me stories again, rich stories of his life as a rancher and cattle broker, more sheep herding stories, memories of rocky desert and huge sky and mountain pastures that he loved, stories of ranching friends and homesteading farmer friends, memories of pulling over to watch a radiant red sunsets as he returned from a cattle buying expedition to a remote ranch. As he felt himself nearing death he told me stories of people he loved who had died well.

Eventually his pain got too great for him to be at home, and he was getting too weak to stand or sit. We didn’t have hospice care in our town. Getting adequate pain management meant he’d die in the hospital. I visited him there daily and continued visiting after he fell into a coma. I’d take Joe’s hand and pray aloud with him and then just sit for a little while longer holding his hand. When it was time to leave I’d pat his hand again and say “good-by” out loud. It was what I’d learned in CPE not so many years before - “Talk to people in coma. Hearing seems to be the last of our senses to go.”

The day I’m remembering was my second to the last visit with Joe. Something had changed. His breathing was labored. The nurse said death was close. When I sat with Joe and took his hand, something reminded me of Joe’s story of sheep in the snowstorm. With my free hand I opened my Prayer Book to Psalm 23 and slowly and deliberately read the version he loved -

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He began so quietly I’m not sure when I first noticed Joe’s voice speaking with me, his lips barely moving.

He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

We finished. He breathing was as labored as it had been. I turned to look at him and his eyes were still under his eyelids. Nothing in his face or presence reflected what we’d just done, what he’d just said, yet somehow those words he’d heard had bridged that unbridgeable gap between my consciousness in his hospital room and his wherever it was in his coma.

We spent that moment together somewhere far beyond our disagreements. I felt it as a moment of our seeing and knowing one another, a final remaking or restoration of care and respect for one another. And the moment was powered by memory, and by spoken words and by memorization.

The twenty-third psalm had become a part of Joe’s body and soul. He’d rooted it in his neurology where it became a means of our making peace.

I think on my startled hearing of Joe’s voice and remember finishing that evening as I left his room, walking the hospital corridor calling to mind prayers and songs I knew by heart to find what I could speak from coma.

Something from that night lives in questions I’ve worked on ever since: How do we form people in community? And what’s our liturgy for?

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

By Donald Schell

‘And death itself shall die’

As I write it’s two days before the second anniversary of my father’s death. Dad lived a good life. He was a generous and loving father and grandfather, and, as I heard at his funeral, he was also a very good physician to many people. He and I talked well. We didn’t have “unfinished business.” He died peacefully in his sleep, almost eighty-seven years old. All that sounds like the makings of good, clean, grief. Finding my way to that would be a grace suitable to such a man and such a life. I’m finding my way.

I was in my mid-thirties when my wife’s parents died. For the thirty years since I’ve been making slow discoveries about grief. My first startling discovery was noticing that the loving home I’d grown up in was drenched in grief. I was a prized firstborn, a first wave boomer baby. My dad was in medical school and our lives felt full of hope. When I was old enough to hear it, I felt proud to be named Donald for my uncle who had died in the war. Looking back, I see that to my child’s mind, ‘before I was born’ was a forever, long ago, unreachable place I didn’t even try to imagine.

My parents told fascinating stories about my uncle. He was imaginative, talented, an actor in high school, a college honors student. His life had been full of promise. Family speculated about what he’d have done had he come home. He felt like a presence with us. The stories I loved of Donald felt to me like the stories I loved to hear of my grandfather, George, mother’s father who had also died. I treasured the stories. The stories meant I was inheriting something of their gifts and their promise.

My grandfather died January 1, 1945. My uncle died June 15, 1945. I was born April 11, 1947. That chronology before I was born meant nothing to me as a child. I didn’t notice the assumptions that came with not understanding the chronology. Cherished stories of my grandfather and my uncle gave me comfortable ways of thinking about Donald and George that nothing but adult experience could break. ‘Before I was born’ hid from me that my mother’s two griefs were quite raw. And I didn’t notice that in my world, it was a given, simple, neutral fact that death could come at any time.

Eventually I learned of the other grief that shaped my parents. When I was judged ‘old enough to understand,’ I learned that my other grandmother, dad’s mother, was actually his stepmother, and I heard the story of his mother Goldie’s death. Stories of dying were familiar and this one was a very long time before I was born. So the plain given-ness of another death hid my Dad’s grief from me, his loss at never having known his mother, an old tear in the soul that time can’t quite heal.

Next summer Jonathan Moscone’s new play Ghosts Light will premiere at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I like Moscone’s work as a director and am looking forward to seeing his work as a playwright. His play unfolds with a young theater director named ‘Jon’ working on a production of Hamlet.

Jonathan Moscone was fourteen in 1978 when Dan White, the enraged city supervisor who also killed Supervisor Harvey Milk, gunned down Jonathan’s father, San Francisco mayor George Moscone. Jonathan Moscone calls Ghosts Light “a dream play.” As in a dream his character Jon, while directing a production of Hamlet, finds his work haunted not just by the elder Hamlet’s ghost, but also the ghosts of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.

I found odd comfort reading Jonathan Moscone in an interview say, “…there’s grieving, which is a form of stasis, and there’s mourning, which is an active form of moving through to another place.” Those simple, graceful words (and my wonder that mourning could move a fourteen year old boy beyond the static frozen grief at losing a dad to assassination) helped me think about old, stuck, grief.

I was sixty-one when my father died. I felt grateful that he died peacefully in his sleep and that we’d had so many good years together. I miss him terribly sometimes. But I’ve only shed a very few tears. Something resigned and fatalistic in me had thought for a long, long time – ‘It’s coming. They all die.’ Moscone’s distinction between “grieving” and “mourning” has me wondering about that resignation, wondering whether I really know how to mourn, to move through to another place. And as I wonder, Jesus’ beatitude, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,” hints at the possibility of feelings fully felt and of moving from grief through mourning to comfort.

The reason I’m remembering and re-thinking is that I suspect some of my stasis with grief belongs to some old, old stories.

The oldest part of the story goes back to 1921 when Dad was delivered by C-section. His mother, Goldie, had already lost her sight to the brain tumor that would kill her. Holding her premature baby after he was delivered, she asked, ‘is he beautiful?’ and my grandfather, the father who had been present for this C-section before doctors attempted hopeless brain surgery told his dying wife, yes, their son was beautiful. Two weeks later Goldie Schell died. She was twenty-six years old.

Now in 2010 – nearly ninety years after her death, three of my children have outlived their great grandmother’s short twenty-six years. When the first of our children passed that marker, something shifted, I felt a new frustration and not really knowing who my missing grandmother had been, what she’d been like, who she might have become, and what it could have meant to me to know her. And that began the quiet ache of wondering how dad had lived his whole life knowing he’d lost her before he’d known her at all.

We only have a couple pictures of Goldie. My favorite is a 1920 photo where she seems to be play-acting ‘farm girl,’ the sun catches golden hair – a dazzling silvery white in the photo - She’s got both hands jammed in the pockets of her overalls, a straw hat knocked back on her head, and something in her radiant, crazy-playful smile makes me want to laugh. She was nurse, like my wife Ellen, so I suppose some one took a solemn photo of her at her capping ceremony. But it was this playful photo of the mother he never knew that my dad kept in his drawer, a hidden witness to his unspoken thoughts.

After I was grown, Dad told me he’d learned not talk or ask about his mother. My grandfather had remarried when Dad was still a toddler, and Dad’s new, easily angered stepmother was as unlike that sunny picture of Goldie as a person could be. Dad was relieved when he learned the sullen, sharp-tongued woman who did her best to care for him wasn’t his mother. As a teenager he’d started to build some relationship with Goldie’s brothers. His dad quietly made those occasions for him. Was grandpa stuck in his grief too?

In May of 1944, my parents left college. Dad had dropped out to join the Army Air Corps, and after basic flight school, they married, Mother took her leave from college to follow dad to Army bases around the country while he completed his flight training. When he earned his wings and shipped out to fly a B-17 in daylight bombing raids on German munitions factories, mother moved home, waiting and praying daily for Dad’s return. “It was what people were doing,” mother said. “I knew he might not come back.”

My grandfather George was a banker, and both my parents enjoyed telling stories repeating funny things he’d said or done; I loved hearing what a wry, rebellious church member he’d been, a lay leader in the church where he’d met and courted my grandmother, the church I grew up in. A few stories hinted at a workaholic whose very high standard of performance weighed heavily on himself.

They told stories of his wit, wisdom and foolishness with pride and affection. And the stories of his workaholism? Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether those were exemplary stories or cautionary tales. One story certainly was cautionary. George’s doctor told my grandmother as he lay in a coma from a heart attack that a few weeks before George had gone to the doctor with chest pains, and the doctor told him to slow down and rest. In December of 1944 his staff was closing the year-end books, George wouldn’t slow down when his staff was working hard. So he died on New Year’s Day, 1945.

My Dad never told me how he had gotten word of his father-in-law’s death. Dad was seeing a lot of death, watching for the German fighters after they crossed the channel, flying through anti-aircraft fire and shrapnel, relieved every time they got their plane back to England, wondering when the war would end, and hoping for the time he’d go home to comfort his bride. Dad was 24 when George died, and mother was 20. George himself he was only 55. Now that I’ve lived through all those ages, 24, 20, and 55 seem bitterly young.

Mother tells me that even now, sixty-five years after her father’s death, hardly a day goes by without her wishing she could tell him or ask him about something. I’m glad to hear that.

Feeling her love in that loss nudges stuck grief toward mourning.

I heard and memorized the stories of these absent people, but I didn’t know how to ask for the stories of mourning their loss. I did ask Dad about the war. “It’s why I became a physician,” was his preferred answer. If I pushed, the stories Dad was most willing to tell were of the people with whom he’d flown and of missing my mother and writing her, and sitting on an English park bench evenings after returning from a bombing run and wondering how it would all end.

The few air war stories dad would tell weren’t stories of heroism, but simply stories of seeing death.

He said precision bombing was difficult, the daylight made the bombers easier target for German anti-aircraft guns. When they arrived at a target, he had to take the plane low for bombing accuracy, into the range of the anti-aircraft guns, and fly a slow, steady course toward the target while the bombardier studied the winds. At that altitude shrapnel peppered the plane, sometimes sounding like a hailstorm, sometimes louder, metal banging against metal like the factories they were sent to destroy. Once the bombs were loosed, he’d put full power into a climb, not even pausing to close the bomb bays in the plane’s belly. He said he was continually amazed and grateful to learn how much wing or tail the B-17 could lose and still fly home.

One run he retold had targeted a ball-bearing factory adjacent to a German primary school. He said by observation their bombs had hit accurately, demolishing the factory. Even then he wondered if their bombs had blasted out the windows in the school. And were the children there? What had happened to the children?

And he told me that sometimes when he closed his eyes he’d see the moment a burning German fighter plane plummeted right through the next B-17 in formation to his, and how in that instant he’d seen the face of the German pilot and the face of his own friend. And harder, he said, than that was the next moment, when the plane had fallen out of sight, of knowing his friend was crashing with his crew to earth.

I don’t know what of the war Dad was able to write home to mother. I’ll ask her.

After VE-Day in 1945, Dad had flown his bomber back to the U.S. to be scrapped. He took the train home to California, to live in his widowed mother-in-law’s house and wait for a new assignment in the continuing war in the Pacific where Donald, my mother’s brother, was flying a B-24.

Dad had only be back home for a week or two In mid-June of 1945 when he answered the doorbell to a uniformed army officer wished to speak to Donald Campbell’s next of kin. Donald’s plane and crew were reported missing in action, just five and a half months after my grandfather’s death. It would take another eighteen more months of waiting (and hoping) before the Army would report finding the wreckage and remains of Donald and his crew.

More months passed, before the Army announced that the remains were being flown to St. Louis and buried in Jefferson Barracks, National Cemetery.

If grief is stasis, blocked, stuck, what Jonathan Moscone calls mourning is the deep feeling of loss that goes somewhere. Standing at my uncle’s gravesite a year or so ago, my first visit, I stared at the granite slab marker for that whole crew and tried to imagine my grandmother standing there almost two years after her son’s death and wondered where she found room to mourn.

Recently visiting Malawi with my wife’s AIDS work, one of Ellen’s Malawian colleague’s lost her husband, a diabetic about my grandfather George’s age. We attended the village funeral, the last eight or nine hours of the twenty-four hour funeral. When we arrived the wailing and singing had been going on from the previous day and all through the night. There were three hundred mourners. I’d been directed to sit with the clergy in the ritual place of greeting, half a dozen of us seated in chairs in the shade of a house where every newly arrived mourner would greet us one by one with a word and a handshake before proceeding to the mourning house across the stream where the body was laid out. Ellen was in that house with the widow, her colleague. When the woman’s sons arrived, home from university and from good work in South Africa, Ellen later described seeing what I heard from across the stream. When the sons appeared, the mourners began to wail with special intensity, putting a new sharp edge on their hours-long rhythm of silence, song. The high-pitched keening was sharp as a siren. Did it chill the heart, or simply touch it? The young men looked on their father’s body impassively for one moment, for two moments, and then the wailing broke their grief loose from paralysis and their mourning tears began to flow and their sobbing quickly followed. The clergy didn’t rejoin the crowd to begin the formal funeral liturgy until the sons’ tears were flowing freely.

I found some passages where St. Paul seems to acknowledge a distinction like Moscone makes between grieving and mourning:

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death. - 2 Corinthians 7.10

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters,* about those who have died,* so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.
- 1 Thessalonians 4.13

I remember preachers I heard as a kid saying Christians didn’t grieve because our hope wouldn’t let us. But I’m hearing something quite different in the Thessalonians passage they always quoted. We DO grieve, but our way of grieving (or mourning) isn’t like the grief of those who have no hope. Ah, what is it to grieve without hope? And how does it feel to let loose the feelings and grieve and move on to mourning in hope and finally mourn through to comfort?
I’m hearing William Billings’ raucous, life-affirming setting of these verses by Isaac Watts:

How long, dear Savior, O how long
Shall this bright hour delay?
Fly swift around, ye wheels of time,
And bring the promised day.
Lo, what a glorious sight appears
To our believing eyes!

His own soft hand shall wipe the tears
From every weeping eye;
And pains and groans and griefs and fears
And death itself shall die. .

I suspect many of us carry fragments of grief we don’t know how to finish. Isaac Watts’ promise of salvation, of deliverance, of freedom offers, with St. Paul and Jesus, a blessed comfort for those who mourn. The radiance and hope Watts’ scene of Jesus’ hand drying our tears (and recognizing the grace of those tears) even hints that we can hope for deliverance from the rest of it – “pains and groans . . .and fears” that, like grief, they will die with death itself.

In this living moment, before the wheels of time bring any promised day, I welcome this tender promise and hope that His hand will comfort, mysterious as that image may be, and give us freedom to engage the grief, shed the tears, feel the sorrow, and mourn, and that as we find the freedom to weep, we’ll each one let Him wipe the tears from our weeping eyes.

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

By Adam Thomas

When you listen to the Gospel, you might notice the trend that folks rarely answer questions directly. Instead, the responder either completely ignores the question or says something so profound that the question ceases to matter. Most things Jesus says in the Gospel fall into one of these two categories. Think about how often someone asks a question, and Jesus responds, “Well, let me tell you a story about that. Once there was a farmer…” Before Jesus enters the scene, however, John the Baptizer finds himself under interrogation, and he does just a good a job as Jesus in not answering questions with the expected answers. His unexpected responses to the folks interviewing him (as recorded in John 1) show John’s understanding of his identity, which helps us understand ours, as well.

The priests and Levites come to John and ask him a series of questions, the first being “Who are you?” This question seems to have an obvious answer: I’m John from over yonder, my parents are so-and-so. But that’s not what John says. Instead of saying who he is, he explicitly says who he is not. “I am not the Messiah.” And what’s more, he’s quite emphatic about it: “He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed…” By his answer, John seems to know what they are getting at, so he makes sure with his first response that any gossip about his messiah-ship is highly overrated.

So they try again: “What then? Are you Elijah?” He says, “I am not.” They try once more: “Are you the prophet?” “Nope.” John steadfastly refuses to play into any expectations these priests and Levites have about his identity.

I wonder to what degree our identities are based on the expectations of others? It’s not necessarily a bad thing for others to have expectations for us, of course. A community (family, church, team, circle of friends) plays a significant role in the development of our identities, and expectations are a natural part of that role. But if those expectations begin to suffocate us or make us begin to dislike the people we are becoming, then there is something wrong.

In the film Dead Poets Society, Neil Perry has a passion for acting. When he sees the flyer for auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he says, “For the first time in my life, I know what I want to do. And for the first time, I’m going to do it!” He throws himself into the role of Puck, and he’s good, he’s really good. But his father expects him to be a doctor and thinks this acting business is nothing more than a dangerous whim. Neil defies his father’s wishes and continues rehearsing for the play. After Mr. Perry discovers him at the theatre, he furiously tells Neil that he is not going to let Neil ruin his (Neil’s) life. Neil feels suffocated and trapped: he has found his calling as an actor, he has found himself. But Mr. Perry is stifling this identity with his expectations for Neil’s future. That night, Neil commits suicide.

Expectations like Mr. Perry’s can smother us. They can make us feel less worthy, less capable, less adequate because our worth and capability and adequacy fall outside the limits defined by those expectations. In their song “What a Good Boy,” the Barenaked Ladies lament:

When I was born, they looked at me and said,
‘What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy.’
When you were born, they looked at you and said,
‘What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl.’
We’ve got these chains hanging round our necks,
People want to strangle us with them before we take our first breath.

When we feel smothered, stifled, or strangled by expectations, troubling questions form in our minds. What if I’m not a smart girl? What if I’m not a strong boy? What if I don’t measure up? Then another question compounds these: Will they still like/love/accept/welcome me? These expectations that help shape our identities now morph into ultimatums. They signal the possible breaking of a relationship: This is who I am, and if you don’t like it then fine. And the door slams shut. In this scenario, we begin to define our identities by focusing negatively on the rebellion against expectations rather than by stating positively who we are.

Expectations themselves are neutral things. They surely can be used to spur us to excellence or to inspire us to continue to grow and discover who we are. But they can also be used to deny our self-worth or sense of belonging. When John the Baptizer refuses to be defined by the expectations of the priests and Levites, he is holding onto the identity he has as the voice crying out in the wilderness.

The priests and Levites are unable to pin their expectation on John, but they can’t go back to their bosses empty-handed, so they press John asking: “What do you have to say about yourself?” The Baptizer answers with a quotation from the prophet Isaiah: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’ ” Even here, when they ask him deliberately about himself, he answers by pointing ahead of himself. Their concern is based on his seeming lack of authority to baptize, for he is not the Messiah or Elijah or the prophet. But such trifles don’t worry John. He states dismissively: “I baptize with water.” And then he points ahead of himself again: “Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.” Everything John says about himself, he is really saying about Jesus. He only speaks in terms of Jesus; he deflects questions about himself, preferring to point to the one “who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”

Rather than playing into their expectations, John flourishes in his identity as an arrow pointing to Jesus. To change the metaphor, he shines because he lives fully into his own particular, God-given identity. Like the moon, he has no light of his own, but he reflects the light of Jesus who is coming after him. Even as we struggle with the expectations of others and with discovering our own identities as God’s children, I can think of no greater joy than to be a moon to Jesus’ sun, reflecting the light of Christ.

The Rev. Adam Thomas, one of the first Millennials to be ordained priest, is the assistant to the rector at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Cohasset, Mass. He blogs at wherethewind.com.

By Richard E. Helmer

If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.

Isaiah 58:9b-11

In a tense time like ours, the "pointing of the finger" seems to be one of the primal ways the world around us relates. This could not be truer in this season of contentious elections where partisanship is running rampant. Some point at Washington to place blame for all that faces us, others to extremists of every stripe, others to big business, others to various social policies and those who promote them. The threat of a single fundamentalist pastor to burn Islam’s holy book in a tiny never-heard-from-before church in Florida made international headlines recently. This incident broke open the raw areas in our collective consciousness where freedom of speech, religious conscience, and common decency meet. But it also reflected back to us our deep tendency to blame others for our ills. . . to point the finger, to shout past one another, to paint one another up in caricature until we lose sight of our common humanity.

Anyone who hangs around the Church very long knows that we are all too often no better. In a recent exchange of emails characterized as a Christian “Tea Party” moment, I watched the painting up of ecclesiastical tensions simply as a conflict of congregations vs. the diocese. The odd thing about that, of course, is that we are all the diocese, and moreover, we are all the Church together: congregations, dioceses, ministries, members, clergy, laity, staff. But the “us” vs. “them” mode is so much easier. It gives us someone to hold responsible for all our troubles.

It gives us a direction to point the finger.

One way of viewing Christianity is that the pointing of the finger leads ultimately to the cross. The crucifixion is our tradition’s ultimate expression of blame, heaped upon our God in Christ on the cross, who willingly bears that blame into death. Whether it’s the crowds stirred up by religious authorities and Roman imperialism in the first century; or it’s the clamoring for attention by blaming the other – from immigrants to Muslims – in our age, pointing the finger is an almost innate characteristic of our broken humanity, the summation of our hostility and our divisions as a people in search of a way out of our brokenness. And it is this brokenness that sacrifices Christ. And it is out of that sacrifice that God opens for us a new Way.

Our message as Christians is this: For the ancient prophet Isaiah and for us in community around Christ today, the life-giving alternative to pointing the finger is generosity.

Many of us in congregational ministries are moving into our pledge campaign season at this time of year. In the midst of a fractious world where people cling tightly to their resources out of fear, we are calling one another out to be generous in the midst of community. We continue with our ministries to feed those who are hungry. We continue in our endeavors for justice: to seek out and satisfy the needs of the afflicted. By living into a community of generosity, we help shoulder one another’s burdens, easing the pressure of the yoke. We learn to listen to one another with generous hearts, bringing healing and light in the midst of a shouting darkness. The generosity that is crucified rises again into new life, and we become like a watered garden – where the blessings of our baptism overflow into abundant grace.

If the world is calling us to the pointing of the finger this season, the Church is calling us towards generosity. For our hands were made by our Creator not to point in blame or cling out of fear, but to share. And it is in that sharing that we find God’s abundance for everyone. And that is good news: Gospel for a world that needs it now more than ever.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer is rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. His sermons and reflections have been published widely online, and he blogs about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, church politics, music, and the misadventures of young parenthood at Caught by the Light.

By Marshall Scott

I have long been a fan of the short stories of H. H. Munro, better known by his pen name of Saki. He has a wry, not to say vicious sense of humor, and a healthy disrespect for convention. One of my favorites is “The Unrest-cure.” As the story begins, an unwitting man is complaining to a friend about the rut that his life has become. It is largely taken up with work, and his avocations are so commonplace and regular that even he has begun to see them as tedious. The friend suggests that, just as the harried might need a “rest-cure,” perhaps our subject needs an “unrest-cure.” This conversation, dull enough in its own right, much less in its subject, would have been little more than a casual complaint, had it not been overheard by a young man with means and a moderately cruel streak; and thus there begins a tale.

Perhaps I should have been more conscious of that story on my recent vacation. I like to sail. I’m not a great sailor. I do know in most instances what I need to do, and we enjoy modest sailing, without injury to self or boat (if not as often as I would like). So, I was commenting to my wife one morning at anchor about my realization that part of what I sought in my sailing vacation was challenge – or at least a challenge different from that in my regular vocation. In every significant sailing experience I’ve had something go wrong, and I’ve managed to cope with it. However, part of what made it worthwhile to me was that the coping was not just intellectual or emotional. It required something physical, both in the sense of my own efforts, and also in the sense that it involved some engineering and responding to the natural world. It took a combination of intellectual and physical effort, and managing in the face of forces I would work with but not control. So, I agreed with her when she said, “There’s a lot of challenge in your work.” “But,” I responded, “this is different.”

Now, let me say that my wife sought something different. She wanted peace and quiet, and to be closer to nature. She does enjoy sailing, but she enjoys more watching eagles fly over anchorages. We both got what we wanted. She got closer to nature. I got challenges. And before it was over, nature kicked my butt.

Still, I appreciate her question to me: “Why would you want that (sort of challenge) on vacation?” I know that some folks take on more. My risks are modest and measured; and yet they are significant enough for me. They are significant enough that I feel proud when I succeed – and that I feel embarrassed when I don’t. These kinds of things are my “unrest-cure.” So, why would I – why would anyone - choose an “unrest-cure?”

Some of it is ambition – good, old hubris. I have said that “in most instances I know what I need to do;” but, of course, soon enough that begins to feel like I’m in control. I may tell others that control is an illusion; but I’m really as hopeful of controlling my world as anybody else.

In a way, too, it seems quite counter to the Benedictine tradition that is important to me, and, really, fundamental to the Anglican tradition. Isn’t this pursuit of excitement in what we claim to be recreational counter to stability? Isn’t there something sort of, well, gyrovague about it?

Perhaps, though, we pursue such an "unrest-cure" for a better reason. Perhaps we realize that we don't get recreation - literally, re-creation - without some disruption. We can't prepare the ground for next year's garden without uprooting this year's tomatoes. We can't prepare the field for next year's harvest without plowing under this year's stubble. If we want our schools and our hospitals to have up-to-date equipment and capacities, it's not just cheaper and faster to tear down and build new; at some point it's just not possible without tearing down and building new.
Our Hindu cousins are perhaps clearer about this. Shiva the Destroyer is also the one who prepares for new creation. But it is every bit as central to our Christian faith. If we've been paying attention, our Sunday lessons are reminding us of this. In these latter days of Pentecost, we traditionally hear more and more about "the Kingdom" and "the Day of the Lord." That is so great a theme in the Common Lectionary that our Methodist siblings in their calendar identify a new season of "Kingdomtide."
And though we long for the Kingdom, Scripture tells us again and again that the Kingdom comes in turmoil. The Kingdom offers great hope, but the Day of the Lord is no picnic. We will not gradually evolve our way into the Kingdom. No, God will bring it in the Day of the Lord, a day of darkness and not light, a day when two will be taken and one will be left. But, then, we of all people should be able to remember this; for we are those who know that unless a grain falls and is buried, there is no harvest. We are those who know that the only real way to resurrection is through the grave.

So, perhaps we can expect, and even seek some disruption in our pursuit of recreation (and, let’s be honest: just taking a family with two small children to see family can involve disruption and challenge enough!). Or, even if we don’t have that in mind, perhaps we might want to remember. There is some spiritual reflection to be found in recognizing the disruption and discomfort that comes as we seek recreation – literally, to be re-created. There is the opportunity to rediscover our limits, and to become aware again that, for all its promise, becoming renewed and restored also involves being disturbed, destabilized, and changed. And while there are differences of scale, that’s as true while we await the Kingdom as it will be when the Kingdom comes in fullness.

The Rev. Marshall Scott is a chaplain in the Saint Luke’s Health System, a ministry of the Diocese of West Missouri. A past president of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains, and an associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, he keeps the blog Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside.

Daily Episcopalian will publish every other day this week.

By Margaret Treadwell

Who was your first love? Ask this question of men or women and the response will almost always be thoughtful, moving and sometimes funny and quirky.

“I was in Ms. Bloss’s dancing classes, and I loved to dance. One day a dark haired, freckled, extremely attractive girl asked me to dance and later I invited her to go to the movies. When I took her home, she reached up and kissed me. I walked away with a particular lightness of step and I always remembered that kiss as my first love.”

“I was 15 1/2 and he was 22. He was the boyfriend of my friend’s older sister, and we met at her birthday party. I was an aspiring writer. He was writing his first novel while working odd jobs. We talked well into the night and I fell madly in love. Early the next morning I bicycled to my friend’s house where he and I were to meet up for a mini-golf game. I took my copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Later that summer he invited me out for my first grown up evening, and I didn’t get home until well after midnight. My father was furious with us and my first love disappeared – for a while.”

According to an article in Psychology Today (Jan./Feb. 2010) all “firsts,” especially first loves, affect us so powerfully because they are seared into our psyches with a vividness and clarity that doesn’t fade as other memories do. This is known as the primacy effect and “flashbulb memories.” Dan McAdams, author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, believes these experiences (first day of school, wedding day, first-born child) give us natural episodic markers to divide up the stories of our lives and make sense of how we have been shaped and developed over time.

Playwright Paula Stone has written “a bittersweet comedy about first loves” for which she interviewed 80 people from ages 20-80 in dozens of focus groups. It all began when she received a wedding invitation and realized her own first love would be invited too. She started telling her friends and discovered they had fascinating stories to share. She created an interview format asking, “Who does your heart tell you was your first love? How did you meet? What was the spark that attracted you? When did you know? Where is your memory lodged?”

Paula heard about pounding hearts and shortness of breath, love at first sight, a gorgeous smile, a delicious smell, a great laugh, a black stocking, and a particular coat. She says, “The interviews were meaningful, intimate and sacred and I wanted to create a safe place for people to share what they never had in a lifetime. I wanted to capture the power of the story and use it to honor the past – who we were and the ways we’ve grown.”

In her research Paula found that most first loves occurred around the age of 19 and in the early 20s and only a quarter of those interviewed married their first loves. One woman who did is presently watching her husband decline in a nursing home. She said, “No ending is a happily-ever-after for all must end, but I would do it all over again.”

Another woman who decided not to marry her first love said, “He was so sweet and boring. After all the drama in my marriage to someone else, I believe I could have lived with boring. I never was able to recapture that first love but I think I learned from him what love really is.”

At a recent reading of Paula’s play (working title “Woo is Me”), the intrigue of whether the old lovers will meet at the wedding is full of poignancy, lightness and humor. Auntie Ida, one of the wedding guests, talks about her “love pod” – a place inside where she carries memories of all past loves good or not. She says, “Stay in life fully and keep your heart open for one another, including yourself.”

Do you still think about your first love? Choosing to let our first love stories grow up with us rather than acting them out can be an immensely rewarding experience that enhances our present loves. Talking with someone you love and trust about what you learned from that first breathtaking experience can bring new insights and closeness to a relationship, despite the tendency to keep it a secret so as not to “hurt” the other.

And the woman whose father drove her first love away when she broke her curfew? She spent time playing detective to find him before internet technology made it easy, then allowed him to become her mentor. She said, “He taught me that the world was incredibly interesting and that I could enter the realm of grownups to be a different person from my parents. His life ended with enormous difficulties, but I know his love for me helped me create a good marriage.”

An anonymous writer said, “There are three kinds of relationships: 1) For a season, often those first loves that are right for the moment; 2) For a reason, often to work out a necessary healing. 3) For a lifetime, often when we know we have found a spiritual partner.”

Margaret M “Peggy” Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice.

By Margaret Treadwell

Departures takes on the tricky subject of death and won the 2009 Academy Award for best foreign film. Masahiro Motoki plays the protagonist who suffers a startling job loss after which he decides to learn the Japanese trade of being an encoffineer – one who prepares bodies for burial. The various families who gather to watch the beautiful ritual he creates for their departed loved ones are in various stages of acceptance, denial, anger or sadness, reminding viewers that when a person has unfinished business with the deceased he or she will struggle longer and more intensely with grief.

We often think of only one response at the time of death – grief, but it’s much more complicated than that. While director Yojito Takita focuses the eye of the camera on death, Departures paradoxically becomes a movie about the value of life and how we confront our own lives. It made me ask, “How can human beings prepare for the death of a parent, husband, wife, child or beloved friend in ways that add value to our lives as well as to the lives of our family members?” I think the film’s response is:

• Honor your own life and develop your passions
• Create the best possible relationships, especially in your family
• Believe in a Power greater than self
• Seek satisfying work that contributes to the well being of others, and learn to do it well
• Understand that all of the above actions will benefit future generations beyond your own

Four months after my mother’s death at age 99, I know that my years spent developing relationships with extended family have been an invaluable preparation for the loss of both my parents. In 1996, the year my father died, 18 of my first cousins from his family had never met or had only passing acquaintance with each other. Our fathers, seven brothers who lost both their parents way too young, married strong women who preferred their own family of origin. As my mother explained it, “I just liked my family and your father was contented with them too.” Drifting apart is the way many families solve the unresolved emotional attachment to their parents, siblings and larger family.

In our generation, we cousins of cut-off parents were repeating this pattern, joining our spouse’s family like an “appendage.” But now our fathers were dying and when a childless uncle’s bequests made it necessary to locate all of us, we began to bridge those distances out of legal requirement. My cousin Betty and I decided the fun way to fulfill this duty was to create the first McDonnell Family Reunion, a biennial event now since 1996.

For 14 years we have developed our friendships through sharing play, secrets, laughter, and celebration of joyous life events – new marriages, babies, personal successes and yes, death. I believe the lighthearted pleasure we share is what keeps us returning to reunions and staying in touch throughout the year. We’ve mourned the loss of our cousin Barbara through a tragic death and now my extended family has sustained my nuclear family during this tender time of my mother’s death. During these last fragile years, three beloved cousins from her side were consistent companions by telephone, and as my cousins from Dad’s family grew to know and admire “Aunt Flo,” she also developed an interest in them. They reciprocated with calls, notes and visits. Expanding the circle was life giving for both Mother and me.

Only children are especially susceptible to feeling like orphans when both parents have died, but on Mom’s Nov. 14 funeral day, cousins surprised me by coming from Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee and south Alabama and sending notes from Guatemala, Vermont, Illinois, Texas, Kansas and Florida. Their presence meant the world, and their continued involvement has prevented the orphan perception from taking hold.

As intimated in Departures, we can never really prepare for death, but we can prepare our lives to accept death as a further step in making important connections. When the going gets tough, one conversation with an extended family member can work wonders to give perspective, a smile and a sense of calm. How fortunate that this is the year for Reunion 2010 on Mobile Bay.

Margaret M “Peggy” Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice.

By Adam Thomas

I recently moved to one of the top ten most beautiful spots in the world. I live a three-minute walk from the Atlantic Ocean. I can see a lighthouse from my living room window. I bought a new car. I started working at a new church, which is as beautiful as the town surrounding it. The people at church are wonderful. The trees and flowers are exploding with spring colors. And to top it all off: it’s Easter, the happiest and most celebratory season in the church year. I know I am blessed, radically blessed.

So, why am I having trouble finding something to write about? Why am I having difficulty elucidating God’s presence in my life, at this, one of my life’s most idyllic moments? You’re probably thinking: “Adam, go back and read your first paragraph and quit complaining.” Fair point. But my difficulty is symptomatic of a deeper spiritual malady, which (strangely enough) a simple recitation of my blessings actually exacerbates. I’m sure this malady affects more Christians than just me, so let’s do a little diagnosing.

Our walks with God are topographically interesting. For the most part, we walk the straight path, which Isaiah and John the Baptizer proclaim is the way of the Lord. But sometimes, we meander through desolate valleys, in which simply finding the tiniest token of God’s presence is drink for our arid souls. Other times, we climb mountains, atop which we touch the very face of God and can never imagine a time when our spiritual energy will need recharging. The valleys and peaks, the lows and highs, are the times we remember.

We remember the smile the stranger gave us in the frozen food aisle when we’d forgotten that God was still around. We remember hearing the choir singing choral evensong and how our hearts soared into the very heart of God during the first chords of the Magnificat. We remember the smell of disinfected despair when we sat overnight in the hospital room. We remember standing on a literal mountaintop and breathing in the wind of the Spirit and seeing the patchwork creation spread out below us.

These valleys and mountains shape our lives as Christians. Some folks have Grand Canyons and Himalayas. Others have dry streambeds and foothills. But the slope of our lows and highs matters little. For this discussion, let’s agree that our walks with God have valleys and peaks. The spiritual malady I mentioned a moment ago severely limits our ability to process the peak category.

By removing the mountaintop receptors, the malady keeps our souls from gathering spiritual nourishment from the peak times in our lives. Our minds know that God must be moving in our lives for life to be so full of blessing. But our souls have trouble metabolizing that blessing into the nutrients that sustain us while we search for God’s presence. Without that sustenance, we cease our active awareness of God until there is a noticeable change from “good” to “bad” times. When the paradigm shifts from “good” to “bad” – that is, from mountain to valley – we enter spiritual survival mode and begin frantically looking for God, only to have the walls of the depression limit our sight.

The disciple Peter is patient zero for this spiritual malady. When Jesus calls him out of the boat, Peter walks on the water as if he’s ambling down a garden path. Walking on the water is a spiritual mountaintop, but the paradigm shifts quickly. Peter notices the waves around him, and he starts to sink. Only when he is floundering in the surf does Peter reach up his hand for Jesus to rescue him. Peter could have taken Jesus’ hand while walking atop the water, but he waits until his valley moment.

Like Peter, I forget to seek God when things are going well. When I’m on a mountaintop, I rarely open my eyes to take in the glorious view. Through an intellectual exercise, I know that I am blessed, but this blessing fails to filter into my soul. Only when the jaggedness of grief or deprivation assaults me do I begin my tardy search for God anew.

I know I’m not alone in dealing with the spiritual malady of mountaintop removal. If you suffer from it, then know that there are steps to address it. Take a few moments to look at your life. Orient yourself on the topographical map of your walk with God. Where are you in relation to your most recent valley? If you know that you are no longer in the valley, force yourself to do more than think about your blessings. Rather than an amorphous abstraction you call “blessing,” separate each small blessing into individual shimmering lights of grace. Write each one down. Then thank God for the blessings individually, and be creative. Thank God with action, not thought. If your blessing is having enough food, go feed someone who is starving. If your blessing is living near the ocean, go stomp around in the shallows. If your blessing is being a member of a loving family, go tell them how much they mean to you. If your blessing is the song in your heart, go sing.

Once you’ve acted out your thanks to God, don’t stop. Actively seek out ways to thank God for God’s blessing in your life. Every morning when you draw your first breath, decide to look for God’s presence that day. Then over time, you may see the ground beneath your feet rise into a mountain. And you will notice just how close is the face of God.

The Rev. Adam Thomas, one of the first Millennials to be ordained priest, is the assistant to the rector at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Cohasset, Mass. He blogs at wherethewind.com.

By Donald Schell

“. . .and the gates of Hell will not be able to stand against it.”

This Eastertide thinking of Jesus bursting the gates of hell reminded me of my friend Fr. Mark.

Mark was an Episcopal priest and in his conflicted, imperfect way, a very good priest. In 1986, as Mark lay dying of pneumocystis pneumonia, he told me, “I’ve had lots of sex, but never a lover.” AZT was licensed for HIV/AIDS treatment in ’87, the year after Mark’s death. Reading of AZT my first thought was that an accident of time had deprived us of one of the good ones.

I got to know Mark in 1980, going into the jail with him every Saturday morning to help him lead a Eucharist. Helping the county jail chaplain made a fascinating contrast with my first years of my adventure living my hopes and dreams founding St. Gregory’s Church, San Francisco.

Jail prisoners were purse-snatchers, brawlers, drunks, and homeless guys who didn’t keep a low enough profile and got picked up for ‘public nuisance.’ When I volunteered Mark was already pushing a book cart between the cell blocks every day, helping prisoners get in touch with people outside, and whatever Mark could do to ‘offer the prisoners God’s unconditional love.’ The Sheriff was working to improve jail conditions too. Mark and the sheriff were good friends.

We gathered for our Eucharist adjacent another open cellblock where “Soul Train” blared on an insistently loud TV. That TV, the echoing slam of steel doors in concrete halls, and the hum of fluorescent lights accompanied all our singing and everything else anyone said or did in the jail.

After prisoners asked us about the weather outside, because, they said, knowing whether it was sunny or overcast helped them remember about people outside and hope for eventual freedom, Mark would begin each Eucharist with this prayer: “O God we are here. And you are here. It is enough. Amen.”

Presence. “It is enough.” What Mark offered visiting prisoners was just that simple? He looked and saw them with open eyes. He seemed to expect nothing in return. ‘Mark’s nothing in return’ showed me how much expectation and attention to outcome I carried.

Week by week we took turns leading a Bible-study/sermon and celebrating, and we always ended our Eucharist with the post-communion prayer from the Rite II Burial Eucharist:

Almighty God, we thank you that in your great love
You have fed us with the spiritual food and drink
Of the Body and Blood of your Son Jesus Christ,
And have given us a foretaste of your heavenly banquet.
Grant that this sacrament may be to us a comfort in affliction,
And a pledge of our inheritance in that kingdom
Where there is no death, neither sorrow nor crying,
But the fullness of joy with all your saints;
Through Jesus Christ our Savior. AMEN.

“Comfort, and a pledge and foretaste of the feast where we’re all welcome,” Mark told me. “We say that prayer because it’s what we want to give them.”

Some week nights I’d return to co-lead a Bible study with Mark and meet individually with prisoners who wanted counseling, confession, or prayer. Bible study was fascinating and I was constantly surprised to recognize how forcefully fundamentalism can grip people who define themselves as ‘rebels’ or ‘born to raise hell.’ But I found the counseling hard. I’d get stuck, worried at what I was hearing and dismayed at how little I had to say in response. Though I admired what Mark was doing, with each visit to the jail I got more impatient to see prisoners’ new choices, some sign of growth, what a liberal looks for as conversion.

Finally, I told Mark I’d had a touching, truthful-feeling conversation with a prisoner. “How wonderful,” Mark said. “Isn’t is a privilege that we get to have these conversations with them in the jail where they’re sober? Jail makes it easier for us to see how beautiful they are. You can’t see that on the outside.”

“But Mark,” I protested. “Don’t you expect things can change for them?”

“Mostly they’re beyond change,” Mark replied. “Some have been hurt too badly. Others are too ashamed of what they’ve done, especially to people that loved them. And some can’t even see or do everything they can to keep from seeing.”

Mark seemed to sense how baffled I was by what I he was saying.

“Yesterday,” he continued, “I saw an old friend from in here sleeping drunk in a doorway… he’ll be back soon. Shoplifting, aggressive panhandling, drunk and disorderly, or one of those small troubles that will get him back here instead of prison. They hit it right on their crime again and again, just enough to come back here. Inside again, he’ll sober up and tell us more of his story and we’ll have a good moment with a beautiful human being. Can’t you see, Donald? It’s too late for some of us to change.”

I heard Mark’s ‘us’ loud and clear.

Another day Mark said that being like the prisoners made him patient with them.

Finally one day Mark explained that he understood the prisoners because he’d been in jail himself. Years before, serving as a newly ordained curate in another state, he’d propositioned an undercover cop in a public restroom. Mark phoned his rector, that is, his new boss from jail, and the rector and Mark’s bishop showed up to bail him out.

“I was glad to see the bishop,” Mark said. “Secrets don’t help. He told me to be more careful, and I learned that part pretty well, but there are times it’s hard. It can be pretty lonely being me.”

Mark drank when his loneliness got to be more than he could take, mostly on weekends. He drank and cruised bars in the Castro. He called it ‘my little drinking problem.’ I never saw him drunk, but I heard the results from his upstairs landlord couple, another priest and his wife. A couple of times they’d had to come very late when Mark had come home very late and too shaky to get his key in the keyhole. They’d let him in and put him to bed.

After about eighteen months of Saturdays in jail, Mark told me our bishop had asked him to found a board for jail chaplaincy in the diocese. He wanted me and a lawyer friend to organize the board. Mark’s invitation was a relief to me. Founding a board felt right.

I wanted to feel commitment and hear choices and see people and work maturing. Ten years of priesthood had taught me how exhilarating I found it to help people make tough, courageous choices like finding a new vocation as an artist or a social entrepreneur, or like leaving safe employment to start a new company. Founding the board felt like something with my name on it. It fit how Mark and I were different. It gave me lawyers and teachers and therapists to work with, people I understood.

“Don’t worry,” Mark said. “I’ll find other volunteers to go in with me.”

I learned a lot with the board and was pleased when we were raising enough to support Mark and do other jail work too. It felt good when the board elected me president. Mark was right - I enjoyed the board work.

Then a priest on the board who ran an alcoholism rehab program - a colleague that Mark had recruited - and two other board members - olds friends of Mark’s who were Cursillo stalwarts but also active in Alcoholics Anonymous – got to talking about our friend’s drinking. We talked to Mark’s upstairs neighbors. They were concerned too. So the six of us decided the jail chaplaincy and Mark himself were crying out for an alcoholism intervention.

The rehab program coordinator organized it; we got our bishop’s backing, we contacted the Pension Fund about getting Mark a temporary disability leave, we found residential rehab program that specialized in working with clergy, we purchased two plane tickets and one of us volunteered to fly there with him. Then we talked through the intervention and rehearsed our lines.

He thought he was coming to a board meeting, but instead we delivered our complete plan for Mark’s getting help, carefully lined out in all our voices just as we’d rehearsed it.

Mark thanked us profusely, and he said he saw how much we loved him, but he insisted that he would not go - he couldn’t walk away from the prisoners for a month because they needed him.

We said we could make his taking the month for the program a condition of his continuing work at the jail.

Mark shrugged and said he’d been surviving somehow before we’d been paying him, so figured he could find a way to survive without income. We’d thought his work was on the line. But he knew that all he had was offering prisoners God’s love, and so he asked our prayers as he said he’d worked in his own way to address the problem.

Our intervention was a failure. It saddens me twenty-five years later to write that. What if…

But I think Mark may have had an inkling of the hard drying out he’d be facing very soon, under an oxygen tent with pneumonia, the closest AIDS had hit so far for most of us. He welcomed us as we spent good hours with him in his hospital room. Sometimes he said his prayer, “Oh God, we are here…” He was peaceful, resigned, funny, and eager to talk about all he was doing to plan his funeral.

The funeral was a month or so after diagnosis stopped Mark’s daily rounds in the jail.

For Mark’s funeral, his first boss, the rector who’d bailed him out, flew in to preach. He laughed as he told us that Mark had dictated most of the sermon to him in phone calls from his hospital bed. It was a sermon about freedom in God. And imperfection. And loneliness. And healing. Then Mark’s old friend gave, in Mark’s words a Gospel charge to various people in the packed church. And when it came to Mark’s good friend the Sheriff, the preacher said that Mark wanted him to stand up. He did. “Sheriff, Mark said you’re a good Catholic and will know what Jesus said about this in Luke. Mark says, Sheriff, do the right thing - let the prisoners go free.” The packed, standing room only church exploded in laughter. One of several times we mourners burst out laughing. It wasn’t the only word from Mark that brought the crowd to shouts of laughter. Our liturgy ended with Mark’s favorite hymn from the jail Eucharist, ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’

Mark was a saint. Obviously he was a broken and flawed human being, but he was a saint in whom many of us saw the radiance of God. Knowing Mark made me notice something I’d never heard in Jesus’ promise to Peter that the gates of hell could not prevail against his Church. I’d always heard that text and imagined the church standing firm, holding its ground in battle as the gates of hell advanced. But the ancient gates are locked to keep the prisoners in. Orthodox icons show Jesus bursting into Hell and seizing Adam and Eve to draw them out. Often the icons show the broken gates tumbling into a dark abyss beneath.

In The Odes of Solomon, a second century Christian hymn, Jesus proclaims -

“I have shattered the bars of iron and the iron has become red-hot; It has melted at my presence and nothing more has been shut because I am the gate for all beings. I went to free the prisoners they belong to me and I abandon no one… I have sown my fruits in the hearts of mortals and I have changed them into myself…” (quoted from Olivier Clement’s Roots of Christian Mysticism)

Once again in October of 1986 Jesus had shattered the bars of iron and burst the gates of hell, and another prisoner God loved was free.

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

By Frederick Quinn

<1> Camelot Off Broadway – St. Mary’s Cabaret Remembered

It was like Camelot, and each Monday night the aging singers and dancers from St. Mary’s Cabaret did their lively imitations of Al Jolson or Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire. Between forty to seventy theater people gathered weekly for an evening of song, dance, and socialization in the former convent of St. Mary the Virgin, 145 West 46th Street, off Broadway and Times Square, then disappeared into their single rooms in the fading tenement houses nearby.

The Rev. Scott Helferty, a skilled pianist and former seminarian at St. Mary’s, led almost eighty such evenings for two years in the early 1970s. “Roseland Dance City, a few blocks away, was closed on Monday nights, so St. Mary’s was a natural word of mouth attraction for a gathering of theatrical people now in their sixties and seventies. On other nights, many spent long hours in places like the Horn & Hardart Automat, nursing a cup of coffee or a piece of pie, the sort of self-contained night people Edward Hopper painted. “These were people in Broadway when it was at its peak in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, on the fringes as chorus and dance troupe members. Some had regular, some had intermittent employment. They were pretty much disconnected from families, so the Times Square/Broadway area was their home,” Helferty recalled. Retired now in Salt Lake City, the musician-priest was most recently interim vicar in Provo, Utah, served parishes in Chicago, Illinois, Portland, Oregon, and New Bedford, Massachusetts after graduating from General Theological Seminary in 1973.

<2> Monday Night at St, Mary’s Cabaret

St. Mary’s Cabaret came at the end of an era when there were over a hundred live theaters in midtown Manhattan and tickets cost .85 cents. All that quickly changed with the coming of television, yet the St. Mary’s entertainers kept hoping for the big break that would find them rediscovered, remembering a few colleagues who had been called out of retirement for roles in Broadway shows.

“The Broadway—Times Square area was in a severe state of decline. A third of the Broadway theaters and most of the great movie houses had closed. Porn shops and cheap stores proliferated. The great building spree around Times Square had not begun and along the side streets there were numerous former tourist and resident hotels that were now welfare hotels, where people lived at a subsistence level in the era just before homelessness became widespread,” Helferty remembered.

The musicians performing on a given Monday night handed the pianist faded dog-eared browned scores with tattered edges, music from musicals he had never heard of. “I was a pretty good sight reader, and they were easy to work with,” Helferty recalled. There were Irma and Irving, who did Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire dance routines. Irma had a long glittery dress cut up the side so she could dance in it, Irving had his well-preserved top hat and bow tie. “They were really good, they probably could have taught at Arthur Murray Dance studios,” he remembered. Another aging dancer arrived with scratchy 78 rpm records and performed meticulously choreographed Isadora Duncan routines, complete with purple leotard, veils and feathered boa. Clarice, a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer, had been a dime a dance girl at Roseland. A picture of her standing in her hotel hallway in a striking dance costume once appeared in la Vie des Arts, a Canadian arts magazine. Harry Kadeson, a Grade B movie singing cowboy, showed up weekly in his Gene Autry outfit, carrying a scrapbook filled with memories.

Guests brought finger food deserts. Participants were mostly self-identified Jewish and there was no proselytizing, but Helferty did invite Monday nighters who might be so inclined to witness a solemn pontifical high mass one night when Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey visited St. Mary’s. “I thought it was just very enchanting,” Irma said afterwards. When one is living on the precipice all the time it takes its toll.”

<3> Ministry to the Overwhelmed

How did he see this as ministry? “For a boy from Boise it was a whole new world,” Helferty replied. “We were all overwhelmed. The places where they were living were being torn down. They were literally living on nothing. The neighborhood was our meeting point and we were both feeling overwhelmed. My relationship with them was just to hear their stories. They certainly had a lot to tell. Some had had their moments, a fairly good part in a musical. They were very proud of that. None were famous or celebrities. The main fact is that they survived in an impersonal, cruel urban environment. The Monday night food may have been what they had to eat that day. Also, St. Mary’s was a safe place. Despite their well-kept, fading costumes and cheerful outlook, many of the guests had faces that showed the strains of life. “When one is living on the precipice all the time it takes its toll,” Helferty noted.

“It was fascinating, heart-breaking, endearing, and heart-warming. I think about these people more now than I thought about them at the time,” he concluded. Each Monday night cabaret ended with an upbeat song like “Sidewalks of New York.” “East Side, West Side, all around the town,” Harry sang with his cowboy twang, and Irma and Irving tapped along with the music. The others harmonized easily, sometimes a dining room full of elderly former entertainers closing the Monday night program, with Scott Helferty pounding out the tune on an upright piano.

The Rev. Dr. Frederick Quinn has written extensively on law, history, and religion. A former chaplain at Washington National Cathedral, his most recent book is The Sum of All Heresies, The Image of Islam in Western Thought, published by Oxford University Press.

By Frederick Quinn

<1> Camelot Off Broadway – St. Mary’s Cabaret Remembered

It was like Camelot, and each Monday night the aging singers and dancers from St. Mary’s Cabaret did their lively imitations of Al Jolson or Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire. Between forty to seventy theater people gathered weekly for an evening of song, dance, and socialization in the former convent of St. Mary the Virgin, 145 West 46th Street, off Broadway and Times Square, then disappeared into their single rooms in the fading tenement houses nearby.

The Rev. Scott Helferty, a skilled pianist and former seminarian at St. Mary’s, led almost eighty such evenings for two years in the early 1970s. “Roseland Dance City, a few blocks away, was closed on Monday nights, so St. Mary’s was a natural word of mouth attraction for a gathering of theatrical people now in their sixties and seventies. On other nights, many spent long hours in places like the Horn & Hardart Automat, nursing a cup of coffee or a piece of pie, the sort of self-contained night people Edward Hopper painted. “These were people in Broadway when it was at its peak in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, on the fringes as chorus and dance troupe members. Some had regular, some had intermittent employment. They were pretty much disconnected from families, so the Times Square/Broadway area was their home,” Helferty recalled. Retired now in Salt Lake City, the musician-priest was most recently interim vicar in Provo, Utah, served parishes in Chicago, Illinois, Portland, Oregon, and New Bedford, Massachusetts after graduating from General Theological Seminary in 1973.

<2> Monday Night at St, Mary’s Cabaret

St. Mary’s Cabaret came at the end of an era when there were over a hundred live theaters in midtown Manhattan and tickets cost .85 cents. All that quickly changed with the coming of television, yet the St. Mary’s entertainers kept hoping for the big break that would find them rediscovered, remembering a few colleagues who had been called out of retirement for roles in Broadway shows.

“The Broadway—Times Square area was in a severe state of decline. A third of the Broadway theaters and most of the great movie houses had closed. Porn shops and cheap stores proliferated. The great building spree around Times Square had not begun and along the side streets there were numerous former tourist and resident hotels that were now welfare hotels, where people lived at a subsistence level in the era just before homelessness became widespread,” Helferty remembered.

The musicians performing on a given Monday night handed the pianist faded dog-eared browned scores with tattered edges, music from musicals he had never heard of. “I was a pretty good sight reader, and they were easy to work with,” Helferty recalled. There were Irma and Irving, who did Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire dance routines. Irma had a long glittery dress cut up the side so she could dance in it, Irving had his well-preserved top hat and bow tie. “They were really good, they probably could have taught at Arthur Murray Dance studios,” he remembered. Another aging dancer arrived with scratchy 78 rpm records and performed meticulously choreographed Isadora Duncan routines, complete with purple leotard, veils and feathered boa. Clarice, a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer, had been a dime a dance girl at Roseland. A picture of her standing in her hotel hallway in a striking dance costume once appeared in la Vie des Arts, a Canadian arts magazine. Harry Kadeson, a Grade B movie singing cowboy, showed up weekly in his Gene Autry outfit, carrying a scrapbook filled with memories.

Guests brought finger food deserts. Participants were mostly self-identified Jewish and there was no proselytizing, but Helferty did invite Monday nighters who might be so inclined to witness a solemn pontifical high mass one night when Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey visited St. Mary’s. “I thought it was just very enchanting,” Irma said afterwards. When one is living on the precipice all the time it takes its toll.”

<3> Ministry to the Overwhelmed

How did he see this as ministry? “For a boy from Boise it was a whole new world,” Helferty replied. “We were all overwhelmed. The places where they were living were being torn down. They were literally living on nothing. The neighborhood was our meeting point and we were both feeling overwhelmed. My relationship with them was just to hear their stories. They certainly had a lot to tell. Some had had their moments, a fairly good part in a musical. They were very proud of that. None were famous or celebrities. The main fact is that they survived in an impersonal, cruel urban environment. The Monday night food may have been what they had to eat that day. Also, St. Mary’s was a safe place. Despite their well-kept, fading costumes and cheerful outlook, many of the guests had faces that showed the strains of life. “When one is living on the precipice all the time it takes its toll,” Helferty noted.

“It was fascinating, heart-breaking, endearing, and heart-warming. I think about these people more now than I thought about them at the time,” he concluded. Each Monday night cabaret ended with an upbeat song like “Sidewalks of New York.” “East Side, West Side, all around the town,” Harry sang with his cowboy twang, and Irma and Irving tapped along with the music. The others harmonized easily, sometimes a dining room full of elderly former entertainers closing the Monday night program, with Scott Helferty pounding out the tune on an upright piano.

The Rev. Dr. Frederick Quinn has written extensively on law, history, and religion. A former chaplain at Washington National Cathedral, his most recent book is The Sum of All Heresies, The Image of Islam in Western Thought, published by Oxford University Press.

By Margaret Treadwell

"Every night I pray that God will take me, but I wake up the next morning and he didn't!" My mother said this often during the months before her death on Oct. 28. On her good days, she was looking forward to her 100th birthday on April 17.

Suffering with her frail body, yet extraordinarily independent and unafraid to speak her mind, my mother was interested in all my adventures, whether it be an opportunity to teach or publish, an escapade with our grandkids or travel with my husband. Last summer she said, "Peggy, I don't have time to die; there's always something going on with you!"

When my father died in 1996 after a long bout with Alzheimer's, my strong mama got a whole new life despite her grief, made diverse friends younger than she, listened to them and us without judgment, refused to gossip, kept her lively sense of humor and stayed faithful to her Episcopal church and the priests whose ministries sustained her as she became more homebound.

With a beautiful community surrounding her in Alabama, I determined to help her remain in her own home. As her pain grew, along with her litany of complaints, I tried to stay emotionally present despite being physically distant. But how I worried I wouldn't be with her at her death.

So when Mother's rector Rick called to say, "Come down now. It's time," my daughter Glennon and I were blessed to be able to go for five remarkable days before her death.

During that time, Mother was either deeply asleep or completely awake and present, wondering why we thought she was sleeping when she insisted she was hearing all we said.

Indeed, her responses were right on. On the second day, when my husband Jay called from a business trip, she asked about the details of it. When my son Josh called from New York, she wanted to know about his baby's first steps. When Rick called to check on her, she told him she wouldn't be here much longer, then said, "Know that I support you in everything you do except when I don't, and then I won't!"

Mother's singing voice disappeared several years ago, but on the third day she pulled herself out of sleep to recite words to songs, which we then sang to her, especially "Now the Day is Over" and "I'll be Loving You Always." She said, "I dreamed about Will [my dad]. We danced together, and he looked so handsome with the sweetest smile. I've loved my life!"

On the fourth day, when Mother never awoke, we continued to sing and pray with two close friends and her three caretakers. Early morning of the fifth day, we observed the signs of death. We gathered around her to recite in her ears (hearing is the last sense to disappear) Psalm 23 and The Lord's Prayer. On the "Amen" Mother took her last breath.

I know now what "a good death" means.

Later, at her funeral and life celebration, my husband observed, "It takes a village to let a 99 ½-year-old go!" Indeed her community poured out that day with love, memories and delicious food to nourish us. Our grandchildren joined the chorus of "Always" when I sang it during my eulogy, and Rick's homily captured Mom's mind, spirit and soul, which continue to live even as she has been released from her ravaged body.

My cousin Francis, a retired Episcopal priest, officiated at graveside. He told the story of a Jewish funeral where the rabbi turned the shovel over (upside down) to place the first spade full of dirt on the coffin. This signified regret but acceptance, and Francis did the same for Mother. Then grandson John, 5, wanted to dig the hole deeper and be chief shovel man; granddaughter Nola, 4, rounded up flowers from nearby tombstones for Mother's grave, while her sister Lily, 6, made sure her toddling cousin Katja, 14 mos., didn't fall into the hole. "Life is for the living," Mom would say.

As we continue to celebrate Mom's life, I'm surprised at the waves of pain and exquisite grief, which unexpectedly "smack me upside the head," grab my heart and punch me in the gut. A long life well lived doesn't diminish the void and ache of missing. I'm giving myself permission to be sad, to sleep when I'm exhausted, to have patience with myself and others for assuming that there is little need to mourn a good death of one so ancient. There are signs that transformation is in progress but will take time – God's time.

Margaret M. "Peggy" Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice.

By Greg Jones

Can you go home?

A longing for home is a universal human thing. We all long for home...where it's safe, and warm, and comforting. Home's a place we were made for -- and we've tried to make them wherever we can, whether cave, caravan or condo.

Since God knit us together in our mothers' wombs, we have yearned to be connected, cared for, and expected at home. But, can you go home?

Home is what we long to go to -- and come from -- and work towards. And yet, so much of this life involves our leaving home. In good ways and bad. Certainly a big part of growing up is leaving home, and making a new one.

But, can you go home? Jesus had a hard time at home. Consider his home life. His first home was a barn. Then he lived on the lamb in Egypt as a refugee from Herod. Then he was raised in a podunk town. And in his religious homelife -- the synagogue where he knew them all and spent his faithful young life tried to kill him, and the Temple which he called "His Father's House" did eventually get him killed.

Yes, even Jesus had it hard at home (and his parents were saints.) What about you? Home, like life, can be a mixture of hopes and hurts. Maybe like Jesus you feel you cannot be yourself when you return home -- either to parents, family, hometown, friends, or whatever. Maybe you don't now. Maybe you've had to start a new life, away from too much hurt at home, and not enough hope. I think we all struggle to match the inner yearning for home with the realities of where we are.

Jesus presents the Good News in an interesting way. I believe he presents the Kingdom of God as the fulfillment of our longing for home. If one substitutes the word 'home' for 'Kingdom' you can see what I mean. Imagine if he said, "home is a place of enrichment, it is good news for the poor in body, mind and soul." Or, "home is a place of liberation, not captivity." Or, "home is a place of light and vision, not shadow."

Jesus tells us that God's dream is that all people have a home like this -- ideally on earth as in heaven. The Good News of Jesus is that He has come to build the way to that home, and to offer us the building materials for building such heavenly homes on earth (as best we can with God's help.) The building materials of such homes are grace, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, love. Love not for self, but for other. These building materials are precious, and of course, we can't forge them ourselves. This is where our prayer life and corporate life in Christ come in -- we must obtain all we need to build our Kingdom homes from the Maker himself.

Can you go home? Allow Christ to bring you by His way.

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.

By Bill Carroll

Snow brings out the best in people. Here in Athens, Ohio, I spend a dozen hours or so each winter clearing our driveway, sidewalks, and walkways. All around our neighborhood you can hear the familiar sounds of metal snow shovels on concrete.

The first year Tracey and I were married, we lived in Hyde Park, on Chicago’s south side. Like most people in that wonderful and bizarre little neighborhood, we parked our car on the city streets, observing arcane rules about which side of the street we could park on when the city needed to plow. We had to slow down and be very careful, because snow removal came late to Hyde Park (reportedly, because our alderman didn’t always vote with the mayor).

Sometimes, large sheets of ice would form and cars would skate through red lights or a four way stop, even if we were only going 5-10 miles per hour. We kept old cardboard boxes in our trunk, in case an ice pit formed in the gutter where we were parked. We’d layer the cardboard under the tires to improve traction, but sometimes that wasn’t enough. If we were still stuck, we could ask anyone walking by and they’d likely give us a push.

Hyde Park was by no means perfect. There were racial tensions and a history of difficult relationships between the University and the surrounding neighborhoods. Our neighbors, and we ourselves, had our vices and flaws, and we were involved in systemic injustices of many kinds. After a snowfall, however, we helped each other.

For most of us, snow brings out our latent tendency to live as neighbors. It summons us to responsibility. We look after snow removal, because we don’t want people to fall. We help one another, because one person needs help and another can provide it. We don’t count the cost. We don’t stop to ask “What’s in it for me?” Snow brings with it the possibility of moving from self-centeredness, for which we have powerful cultural inducements, to other-centeredness. As horrible as they are, natural disasters bring out similar good things in people. They awaken generosity of spirit, even self-sacrifice. Who would not risk his or her life to save a child, even someone else’s child? But snowfall seldom poses serious risks to life and limb. It gives rise to an ordinary level of caution, concern, and neighborliness. Most of the time, no sacrifice is needed, just a helping hand.

Snow also brings us opportunities for play. We throw snowballs and make people and angels in the snow. How difficult it is to contain the excitement of small children, especially when they have the day off from school!

When Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, he isn’t saying anything new. He is reminding the People of Israel of something God has already commanded them (See Leviticus 19:18). Even the pagan world knew nothing of our isolation and rugged individualism here in the contemporary U.S.A.. In the ancient world, people were bound by a set of social obligations to everyone around them. Sometimes, these were oppressive (there is a reason the Enlightenment fought for individual rights, however limited and imperfect its vision); nevertheless, these real obligations gave people a sense of belonging and meaning.

What is new with Jesus is the command to love the enemy, and, if necessary, die for those who hate us. This is what it means “to love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). Also new with Jesus is his insistence that the commandment to love our neighbor, together with the commandment to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, summarizes the entire law and gives us the key to understanding the whole of God’s will. Paul puts the same point this way: “Love does no wrong to the neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:10; cp. Galatians 5:14)

Just because a teaching is old doesn’t mean don’t still need to hear it. A functioning community involves obligations to our neighbor, but we often fail to fulfill them. Moreover, we also need Jesus’ radical redefinition of who counts as our neighbor. (See Luke 10:29-37.) Otherwise, we retreat into closed communities, impoverished by lack of difference, and help those who are sufficiently like ourselves.

The lessons of the snow are something we easily forget. Seeking our neighbor’s good, even when it conflicts with our own, is not something we have to wait to do. Every snowfall gives witness to the possibility of community and love. The Church, despite the teaching and example of Jesus, is not always good at practicing active, Christ-like love.

We could learn a lot about following Jesus in milder seasons by paying attention to what we do when it snows.

The Rev. Dr. R. William Carroll is rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His sermons appear on his parish blog. He also blogs at Living the Gospel. He is a member of the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis.

By Sam Candler

On the Saturday before the Third Sunday in Lent, I stood around helping my brother burn off some of the woods. My father was there, too. My brother-in-law, my mother, my wife were there. A family afternoon. Burning the woods is a regular affair on the farm where I grew up. I was glad to turn aside that day.

My brother had a nifty device filled with two-thirds diesel and one-third regular gasoline. When lit, its twisted nozzle functioned like a flame thrower, but it really just dripped fire out into the pine straw and bushes and sweet gum saplings. We always have to get rid of the sweet gums. My brother had already driven around the designated patch of woods with his tractor and plow, carving out a shallow fire line.

Burning the woods is critical to clearing out the underbrush that might start another, more serious, fire in those woods. But its main accomplishment is to clear out the underbrush for more birdlife and wildlife, and to provide for sturdier pines and primary trees.

We watched the wind, and we set the fire on the leeward side. That way, the fire would stay controlled and burn backwards into the wind. Fire likes to feed into the wind, probably like all of us do. And fire really does start quickly. I watched with my folks, mesmerized by the sheer chemical reaction spreading before us. We talked randomly about whatever was on our minds. Younger folks might call it "hanging out." Hanging out is much more enthralling when a fire is burning before you.

Occasional sparks drifted out over the fire line, and we put them out. A few of the larger pines caught fire at their bases. The water from the back of my fathers's four-wheeler put it out easily. That four-wheeler is really a mule, but it's a different sort of mule from the one that trudged through these same fields so long ago.

We heard a pileated woodpecker and then saw it sail through the glade in front of us. We listened to still another flock of sandhill cranes, but we never saw them, above the thick pines towering over us. We wondered why several deer sat nonchalantly in a nearby thicket, watching us, but never running away. Too many tame deer these days.

The next day I was at church, hearing about Moses, who turned aside from tending his family's flocks one day. He watched a bush being burned and yet not being consumed, He heard an angel remind him of his father's God. "I am who I am," Yahweh said. Holy ground.

Holy ground is where fathers and sons can stand around together. Mothers and daughters, too. With nothing important to do except burn something. With nothing important to say, except maybe "It is what it is." The standing around is more fascinating than the words. Something powerful is burning all around us. It burns, but it does not consume. Instead, it enthralls and inspires. Fire destroys the straw, but it germinates the seed. Fire creates fertility. Burning bushes makes for holy ground.

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 Kathy Staudt

Except for a brief grocery run between storms, I was “snowbound” for nearly a week, from February 9-13, with the two huge storms falling on the DC area. It took 2 days for our suburban cul-de-sac to be plowed at all – and then the second blizzard came. Unlike many in the area we have had our power on the whole time, so we were not materially deprived, apart from cabin fever. It was just a long stretch of time at being at home, mostly it’s been an experience of just being “stopped.”

At first we celebrated this time as an “enforced Sabbath,” something that is welcome in the workaholic culture of the DC area, when the weather conditions and the slowness of the cleanup process simply force us to let go of whatever important things we were doing. And for a day or so, yes, it was a welcome “sabbath time.” But after that a more insidious inertia set in.

Indeed, I have been wondering whether an “enforced Sabbath” is kind of a contradiction in terms. Sabbath is supposed to be a regular spiritual practice, a part of our routine – a way that we simply let go of busy-ness to acknowledge that God is Lord of all of our time and work, and that our work is not our own, but God’s. It strikes me that perhaps a more regular practice of genuine Sabbath would have been a good preparation for the spiritual challenge this snowstorm posed for me. For what I felt most of the time was a deep restlessness, a sense of being unhooked from any reliable routine or pattern, and so an inability to settle to much of anything – even settling down to read a good book, as I’d longed to do, and had time to do, or to write, or pray, or do anything much more than responding to what came: answering email, gmail chatting, facebook, grading the occasional paper.

By the end of the week I was snowbound both outwardly and internally. Unmotivated. Stuck. It is a place in life I recognize, and perhaps it has left me with a useful image, a new spiritual metaphor to remember when I do not have control over the way forward, and the place I’m in seems crowded, enclosed, confused, with too many competing demands. Outwardly, I kept busy, apparently “doing things.” Since I work at home, the work was all there, looking at me, and I picked my way through it, in an unmotivated way. But any substantive or creative writing was just blocked. With the rhythm of days flattened out, I lost the internal rhythm of prayer, study, work and rest that would normally steady and settle me. The computer was too alluring – a way of staying connected with people, emails and facebook posts that make me feel needed, important, not buried at the end of a suburban cul de sac. My spouse was at home, also working, we broke for meals together, and I did find that losing myself in the creative art of cooking does help to redeem a snowy day -- but even that grew old after 5 days.

Inwardly, my response to this snowstorm and the break in our routine was beginning to feel more like the kind of “stopping” of life that comes with illness, or grieving, or other unexpected interruptions. Times when we are “brought up short” – as theologian Richard Osmer puts it – where we come up against a break in our regular expectations of life and are not sure what to make of it.

Then there was the shoveling out: my way to freedom, once the roads were clear, thwarted by my own bad choices: I had parked the car in the driveway after the first storm, to save the effort of shoveling our whole driveway, which slopes uphill from the garage. But the second snowstorm buried the car under a snowdrift – so the work of digging it out doubled. In the end I needed to dig the whole driveway, roll the car back into the garage, and begin again. . No work saved, and hard to see how long it would take me – and no help in sight. The neighbor who had helped me after the first storm was tapped out; my spouse was laid up with bronchitis. My car would be free only when I could get it out.

The task itself was clear enough, but discouraging. I would dig away at the snow but there was nowhere to go with it – the piles blew back at me, and though I’m in decent shape it grew tiring, heaving each shovelful to the top of the growing snowpiles along the driveway. Gradually I’d begin to see patches of pavement, mingled with ice -- but I’d think: “this will take hours – maybe won’t be done by dark today. I don’t know how long my strength will last.” All I could do was to keep filling the shovels fullpiling snow high on the already deeply covered lawn behind me.” An unrewarding task for long stretches, but obviously the only way out.

Gradually, shovelful by shovelful, I began to break through to a way out.. It was fine as long as I could focus on the single task: lifting the next shovelful, moving the snow, pausing to admire the brilliant sky and the sparkling icicles around me. When I started to obsess about how long it would be before I was dug out, and whether it would be today or tomorrow, discouragement quickly overwhelmed.. There was no way of knowing how soon my efforts would pay off. I simply had to keep on. Knowing it would be done eventually. Not knowing when, or how long I could last, this shift, before taking a break.

Help came, finally, when I was about ready to admit defeat. – from someone with fresh arms and a fresh approach. He moved the last few shovelfuls and backed the car out for me, up and over the icy hill, and finally, I was free.

I’m appreciating some spiritual insights from this experience of being snowbound. It may be reaching a bit, but the metaphor works for me, I shall try to remember all of this next time I am aware of being spiritually “snowbound” – in that place of interior “stuckness” that is all too familiar for me.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

Daily Episcopalian will continue on an every-other day schedule this week.

By Adam Thomas

Here’s something you don’t know about me: I don’t own a snow shovel. This fact was unimportant until a few weeks ago when a record December snowfall dropped two feet of powder on Berkeley County, West Virginia. I woke up to a foot of snow outside, and the sky was dumping an inch an hour. I opened my front door, and the snow made an encroaching barrier to my front stoop. I went to the cupboard and pulled out my house broom. Sweeping the snow from the steps, I felt like Gandalf staring down the Balrog: “You shall not pass!”

But a broom is a poor substitute for a proper shovel, especially with the quantity of snow making islands of every vehicle on the street. And this is where the providence of God comes in. Providence is a tricky thing because one can easily over-define it to a point where we are simply chess pieces for God to move around the terrestrial board. To make matters trickier, one can also under-define Providence to a deistic level: God is merely an observer, having set events in motion with the winding of creation’s clock long ago. Neither of these definitions is satisfactory. Theologian Paul Tillich strikes a balance when he says, “Providence is a permanent activity of God. He is never a spectator; he always directs everything toward fulfillment. Yet God’s directing creativity always creates through the freedom of man and through the spontaneity and structural wholeness of all creatures.”

So what’s all this have to do with my lack of a snow shovel? I’m glad you asked. Sometimes, encountering the Providence of God takes something quite small. We shall enter this small story during the early months of 2009, when a dear man from my congregation purchased a new car. He had been getting tired of his old Buick, and so he went for a shiny, silver Japanese sedan. But within a month of driving the car off the lot, he fell ill.

The cancer had been growing slowly, and for a time, the doctors held it at bay. The man spent several weeks in the hospital, until the medical staff, his family, and he decided that being comfortable in his own bed at home was as good for his condition as any drug. For several more weeks, he held on, making his wife laugh and cry, joking with the hospice nurses, slowly disintegrating from the inside. Not until his final day did the awareness, the flash in his eye, fade. He passed on in July, leaving his loving wife, a daughter, grandchildren, a cluttered house full of memories, and a brand new, silver, Japanese sedan.

Fast forward from midsummer to mid-autumn. A deer ran into my little Korean car, and the insurance company whisked it away to the total loss center to be evaluated. For some foolish reason, I didn’t have rental coverage as part of my plan. But I did have something even better: the man’s wife, who is the dear heart I’ve mentioned many times in blog entries over the last year. She found out that I was without a car, and asked (in her sweet, typical fashion) if I would help her out: “You see, his car’s been sitting in the garage since summer and if it doesn’t get driven, it will start to fall apart. I would be very pleased if you would drive it for me.”

I readily agreed to the arrangement, all the while smiling to myself because she made it sound like I was the one doing her a favor. After two weeks, my damaged car finally made it to the auto shop, the insurance company having decided it was worth repairing. I hoped to have it back by Thanksgiving, but the mechanic found more damage than the original estimate covered, which necessitated another visit from the adjuster. So when will it be done, I asked; by mid-December, the mechanic promised.

“Keep the car as long as you need to,” the dear heart said, when I told her the repairs were delayed. I suspect that if my car had been a total loss, she would have simply given me the shiny sedan because she’s just that generous a person. But I really like my car, so I was willing to wait out the repairs. I called the auto shop on December 17th hoping to hear that I could pick up the car that day. The collision was five weeks before, surely enough time to repair some front-end damage.

“Well, we took the car for a spin,” said the mechanic, “but it needs realigning so we put it on the lift and noticed something. Did you say your insurance company took the car to a total loss center first?” Yes, I said, not liking where this conversation was going. “Well,” the mechanic continued, “at those places, they use this kind of crane to lift the cars… We’d’ve never noticed it if we hadn’t put the car on the lift, but it looks like the crane cracked the fuel tank. So I need to get your adjuster out one more time to look at it.” Great, I thought. How long, I said. Another couple of weeks, what with the holiday and all, came the answer.

Two days later, the snow hit. With broom in hand, I stood on the front stoop and looked at the snow-covered Japanese sedan. The car had been driven a total of 317 miles before I took the wheel. I had put nearly two thousand miles on it during the last month. I thought about the dear man, a practical fellow, who bought the car last winter. I trudged out to the car, swept the snow from the trunk, and opened it. Inside was a shovel.

Now that’s Providence.

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 Kay Flores

A few weeks before Christmas, my friend Andrew asked what time our Christmas Day service was scheduled. I hated to say we didn’t have one scheduled – but it was true, we didn’t have one scheduled. Our small congregation had decided to focus our efforts on two special services: the Banging-of-the-pans-to-drive-away-the-dragons-of-darkness service (followed by Compline) held on December 21, and our Christmas Eve service, and there wasn’t much energy around another service on Christmas Day.

Andy then had a great idea: Let’s take Eucharist to our new rehabilitation hospital, where our friend Kay Rohde is hospitalized.

Kay, an Episcopal priest, and until recently the Wind and Wings youth coordinator in the Diocese of Wyoming, was told in late November that the numbness in her leg was caused by a tumor on her spinal cord. By early December she had the surgery to remove it. A few days later she was moved to Elkhorn Valley Rehabilitation Hospital in Casper, and has been hard at work ever since as her body relearns the physical skills she needs.

I was excited about Andy’s idea, and immediately took it to Kay. She consulted with the administration at Elkhorn Valley. They enthusiastically agreed to host a 10:00 a.m. service, as long as we made it an ecumenical service. As part of her occupational therapy, Kay made and delivered flyers to the other patients. We agreed on a service from the Iona Community, and my friend, Temple, and I prepared the bulletins. Our altar guild packed a to-go box containing a chalice, paten, and wine. A neighboring church shared gluten free wafers.

Kay Rodhe tells the rest of the story.

Folks began to gather in the cafeteria. The altar was a bed side table, set with chalice and paten. St. Stephen’s had prepared the worship leaflets, and the two young people from St. Stephen’s, Elizabeth and Catherine Kerr, handed them to the patients as they began to arrive. The room was full of the Spirit as the 20 patients and 9 members of St. Stephen’s sang O Come All Ye Faithful. We read the Christmas story from Luke and reflected a bit on the wonder of Love coming down at Christmas, and that no matter what is going on in the world, Love always will risk to be present - based on a poem by Madeline L'Engle. I looked out at the congregation, most in wheelchairs, some not able to speak out loud, but God was there - in their eyes, in their smiles, in the Spirit of Love that connected all of us. We blessed the bread and the wine and as communion was distributed, we sang more Christmas carols. We thanked God for the meal and for sending Love down to dwell among us and closed with a rousing verse and chorus of Angels we Have Heard on High. For those of us there, Christmas had come once more - and the feeling spread down the halls as they returned to their rooms to get ready for Christmas Dinner -(served to us by the hospital staff).

The thing about ministry is that when you minister to someone else, you are being ministered to, also. That was certainly true for me today. With the help of St. Stephen’s, we were able to give those here in the hospital a gift - to be able to worship on Christmas, to hear the Gospel, to sing the carols, and for those who wished it, to receive Communion. But I received gifts also. I had been feeling a bit down last night - about the time that midnight services would be starting. I badly wanted to be there, to hear the O Come let us Adore Him, to hear the music and smell the pine boughs and feel that incredible sense of awe at being a part of the Christmas story. Today, celebrating in a rehab hospital cafeteria, no candles, no booming organ, no pine boughs or choirs, just a small group from a little church in Casper who were willing to share their worship with people they didn't even know and a hospital full of people in pain, just recovering from traumatic surgeries, people who are trying to relearn how to walk, people who may never walk again - that same awe was there. Love came down at Christmas and wrapped arms around each one of us - and you could feel it! And for me another gift: One of my rehab goals was to be able to continue to function as a priest - and I am!

This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war and hate
And a nova lighting the sky to war.
That time runs out and sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to be born,
in a land in the crushing grip of Rome:
Honour and truth were trampled by scorn-
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.

When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth
And by greed and pride the sky is torn-
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

~~Madeleine L’Engle

Photos by Elizabeth Kerr, click to enlarge, more photos here

Kay Flores, St. Stephen's, Casper WY, is soon to be ordained transitional deacon in the church she serves. She is a mentor and trainer for EfM both face to face and online and is an unemployment judge for the State of Wyoming.

By Sam Candler

The day had already been satisfying and successful. I had led a men’s retreat on a beautiful piece of property about an hour and a half south of Atlanta, Georgia. The crisp November air had nourished a new sparkle in the oak and poplar leaves. Some of us went fishing; some of us shot guns. The trailing wind and rainy remnants of a distant hurricane had came through and opened up the night sky, revealing a thick and lush panoply of stars.

Out in the open country, the retreat itself was also thick and delightful. I remembered how Herodotus described the war discussions of the ancient Persians. Apparently, when deliberating about whether to go to war, they made such decisions twice. First, in the steady light of reason and tempered discourse, they reached one rational decision. Then, apparently, they would engage the same question while they were drunk. If they came to the same decision in both situations, they would act on it.

So it went on our men’s retreat. After Thursday night, on Friday, we discussed manhood and spirituality. What are the masculine features of a healthy spirituality? What does it mean to be a liberated man in our current economic situations? What is the love of the father, and why are there masculine images for God? We considered the four archetypal “soul types” that Richard Rohr presents in his book, “From Wild Man to Wise Man.” (those types are king, warrior, magician, and lover; more about those soul types on another day.)

On the way back to Atlanta, I drove through the county where I had grown up. I was actually trying to get to the county airport, where my son was preparing for a two hundred and fifty mile cross-country airplane trip. He has been obtaining the necessary licenses to be a commercial airplane pilot. But I just missed him. By 2:00 pm, he had already left with his instructor, flying southward. I texted him with our familiar family lines: “Have fun and be careful.” Those lines have informed our family blessings for almost thirty years.

Back home in Atlanta, I sat outside to catch up on mail and necessities. Given the late hour of my previous evening, I thought perhaps I should take a nap. But then, I heard the sounds.

I heard the familiar, wonderful, and guttural sounds. They sound like gurgles first, so clear and so loud – especially so on a crisp fall afternoon in Georgia. But they cannot be true gurgles, for they come from above, from the air. I have heard them almost every year of my fifty-three years. They are as dependable as these flaming November leaves on maple trees before me.

They were sandhill cranes. I counted at least eighty of them, not far above me this year, undulating in the breeze, substituting the lead, flanking out asymmetrically and raggedly. They were beautiful. This year, with the crisp afternoon sun on them, I could observe astounding detail in their necks and heads.

They were flying right over the developed city of Atlanta, which is nevertheless still blessed with trees and some open land. No matter how congested the Atlanta traffic becomes, and no matter how frantic our daily human lives are at this time of year, the sandhill cranes are an annual prayer flag for me. God sends them fluttering southward in the wind. They are being led and piloted by a power that has existed long before I was born.

Inevitably, I always hear the birds before I see them. So it is, Jesus said, with those born from above, those born of the wind of the Holy Spirit. “You hear the sound of the wind, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes.” The Holy Spirit pilots those birds up and down the continent every year.

This year, I am waiting for that telephone call or text message or email from another pilot, my son. No matter how different he is from me, and no matter how much he faithfully differentiates himself from me, still, a piece of me is with him all the time. A piece of me is up there with him in the Cessna airplane right now, flying freely to the south.

This year, my spirit has leaped up to join the sandhill cranes. Maybe I can fly with them. I’ll try to catch up to that airplane that took off a few hours ago. It has landed now, and the cranes will catch up to him. I hope he remembers to look up, even after he has landed. Even after he has succeeded in the day’s challenge, I hope he remembers to pause and to look up.

I think he’ll see those same sandhill cranes flopping and flapping overhead. They are always there this time of year, but most humanity in this generation has never seen them.

The Holy Spirit, too, is flying over us – and maybe through us and among us; but we will not glimpse that power until we pause and look around. Maybe we will look up, on a retreat; maybe we will have to look down, toward our own children. Maybe we will hear the Holy Spirit before we see anything, and maybe the sound will seem like guttural foreign tongues. The Spirit speaks like that sometimes. But she always soars, and she always waves for us to follow.

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 Ann Fontaine

We are in the process of selling our Wyoming house and moving to Oregon. In the last few weeks we have been clearing out the cupboards, having a garage sale, donating to the local thrift shops, taking books to the used bookstore, and going to the dump, in preparation for whenever we sell this house. Who knew how much stuff we had until we started contemplating moving to a house that is less than half the size of our home here in Wyoming!! A house with lots of storage that has been lived in for over 30 years is a blessing and a curse. Thankfully our daughter, who is Attlilla the Hun when it comes to ruthless riddance, was here for a couple of weeks to help us stop dithering.

Moving and downsizing is a good thing overall but hard to get in gear to do. The process has many blocks for me. Most, like inertia and always finding more interesting things to do are easy to overcome. The biggest block is memory. The things I cling to are not of great value – valuable things are easy for me to sell or leave behind. The things that our kids made in pre-school, items that were familiar from my grandmother’s house, and things that were held in the hands of my loved ones, who are now dead, are the most difficult for me to toss. Once our children have taken the bits they want and we have sent them those boxes we have been storing for them since they left home after college, no one will want the items that hold the most meaning for me. At the garage sale, they sit unwanted even in the free pile. This is the time for a kind friend or compassionate daughter to step in to help with the separation. I close my eyes and don’t want to know what is in the dumpster or on its way to the landfill.

There is also a cathartic aspect to getting rid of years of accumulations. Thirty-three years of paperwork (3700 pounds!) from my husband’s medical office and all our personal financial records except those required by the IRS are off to be shredded. Paper of all sorts is headed to the recycler. Church conventions and meetings, Sunday School ideas, clippings saved for who knows why: all those things we kept saying we should look through – gone. Joy is finding a note from one’s first teaching job – that says that I did good work with those little 4th graders, even though all these years later I wonder what ever possessed me to think I knew so much about raising kids when I was 21 and had none of my own. Sadness is finding a photo of a family who were perhaps once close but now, who knows. We packed it all up - affirmations of life and bits of shame – all being turned into some new paper for some other purpose.

The process of moving has a death and resurrection sense about it but it is also like waiting for a birth. We are in the “soon but not yet” phase of leaving our life in Wyoming. We have no offers on the house (we are not desperate enough to bury St. Joseph upside down in the yard) and in this economy who knows when an offer might come along. We have stripped ourselves of many possessions but still have more to go. We have stopped volunteering to participate in things we will not be around to be affected by.

Perhaps it is most like Advent, a time of waiting. The old things that made our life are ending – the new has only made its presence felt with a few light kicks.

I hope this process is good for the soul. The baggage of years can block the Spirit. Cleaning house and ridding oneself of unneeded material goods can make way for space to welcome new life. This is what I have been told by others who have preceded me in this activity. It remains to be lived into.

A riot of riddance

closing my eyes

I toss it all into

the shredder

moments of glory

moments of shame

all the same

now – fine bits of confetti

perhaps for a party

I wait, not stagnant, just grieving and waiting.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Lauren R. Stanley

PETION VILLE, Haiti – The power went out – again – the other day, leaving me with little to do on the computer. No power, no Internet. No Internet, no connection with others.

So I did what I usually do: I washed my clothes.

Washing clothes in Haiti is arduous work. Most of us do it by hand, in round rubber tubs, sitting, in my case, on the edge of the shower stall. It’s not like washing clothes at home: There, we dump the clothes in the washer, add detergent, turn a few knobs, push a few buttons, and walk away. After a while, the washer stops, we take the clothes out, toss them in the dryer, turn a few more knobs, push a few more buttons, and walk away again. When the buzzer goes off, we take our clothes out, fold them and put them away.

Here, washing clothes is intentional work. You pour water in the tub, add soap, dump in the clothes (not too many at once), let them soak a bit, then start churning away. You try to replicate what the washer does back in the States, agitating and swishing and swirling the clothes around. You take the special bar of laundry soap and scrub at stains and dirt. You examine each article of clothing individually to make sure it’s clean. You rub the material together to get the clothes cleaner. Then you wring each piece out and put them in another tub. When you think everything in this batch is clean, you start the rinse cycle. Each piece of clothing gets dipped and swished and swirled through the clean water. You wring again and again. Then you hang up your clothes in your bathroom, or out on a line if you have one (but they’ll get dirty outside, hanging in the polluted air, so drying them inside seems to be the better option). Finally, you wait … sometimes overnight … for your things to dry. Haiti may be a hot climate, but in this rainy season, it’s also a humid one. Few things dry quickly here.

It can be a tedious job, doing the wash by hand, but even so, I’ve found some blessings in it. All this cleaning and scrubbing has become good prayer time. As I wash, especially those collars on my shirts, I find myself thinking about the people and places I love, and sending prayers to God for their well-being. I pray for the end of war and violence and oppression. I pray for others’ happiness. For peace in the world. For the people with whom I served for four years in Sudan. For my incredibly extended family, moving in my mind from place to place, hop-scotching across the country and around the world. I give thanks for the blessings of my life, and pray for guidance in my ministry. My hands do the work and my eyes watch for stains, but my heart and soul are with God the whole time.

And I reflect on how washing my clothes in this time-honored fashion is rather like being washed clean by God. You see, as I’m washing and scrubbing and agitating the waters, swirling the clothes around, I see all the dirt come loose. I watch the water, which is more or less clean at the start, turn gray, and then, sometimes, dark gray. Occasionally, the water turns almost brown. Haiti is not a clean place … we have dirt, we have dust, we have all the pollution from cars and trucks. It’s hot, and I sweat a lot. All that combines to make my clothes pretty dirty, sometimes after just one wearing. As I pour out the now-dirty water and watch it swirl down the drain, I think of how washing the dirt from my clothes is rather like washing the dirt from my spiritual life. Sometimes, I can leave my spiritual life to soak, and that’s enough. Usually though, I think God has to put me through a wringer, swirling and agitating and scrubbing hard at those sinful parts of my life, those times when I was not nice, when I hurt another person, when I have been frustrated and thought of tossing this whole ministry-in-another-country out with the wash water. I think that some days, God has to work especially hard to get me clean again, dunking me again and again into the waters of forgiveness, not because God has to work to forgive me, but because I can be so stubborn I don’t want to be forgiven, or I won’t forgive another for some perceived slight.

But God doesn’t give up on me. God keeps scrubbing away, keeps checking for hidden stains, keeps soaping up and rinsing and wringing me out until, when God is done, when I have finally acquiesced to all the God freely offers me, the stained, dirty parts of my life wash down the drain and God’s love and forgiveness make me clean again.

By the time I finish my wash, even a small load, I am exhausted. My arms get a great workout from all the wringing out, I’m covered in sweat and the clothes I wore to the do the wash are the next ones to go into the wash basket.

And each time, I am left to wonder: Does God have to work this hard to get me clean?

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Haiti, where she works on the Partnership Program and Development. Her website is http://web.me.com/merelaurens/GoIntoTheWorld.net.

By Heidi Shott

One morning a friendly man arrived at our house and, without much ado, climbed onto the roof of our enclosed porch and chainsawed it from the rest of the house. Even though we were paying him and the porch was on the verge of collapse, the effect was surprising – it’s strange to see cut adrift from its moorings a cozy space where you’ve cracked lobster claws, triumphed at Scrabble™ and enjoyed many a blissful snooze.

One lazy summer afternoon, a few summers before the chainsaw episode, my friend Christine and I sat on the rickety porch talking about absolutely nothing while our kids ran around outside. At one point she gazed over my shoulder and in her calm mother-of-five voice said, “Ah, you’re missing a window pane there, Heido.”

I looked behind me and sure enough a pane was just…gone. We stepped outside to the deck and the troops gathered around. Everyone had to stick a hand through the hole. At the base of the window the glass lay, unbroken but sheepish. “If you don’t fix that, Mom, the flies will get in,” my ever-helpful son Martin said, poking at the neighboring pane with a stick. It clattered to the deck. “That one too.”

Well, there was no way around it. It was summer. Maine has bugs. It had to be fixed before nightfall. Before long I was back on my deck with glazing compound and glazier points. I don’t know where I learned to fix window panes – maybe growing up on a farm or the summer I painted college dorms – but it’s something I know how to do.

Warming to the task, I began the fun of rubbing a snake of glazing compound between my palms. I relished the satisfaction of placing a little metal point in just the right spot to keep the pane snug against the sash and the expert flick of the putty knife smoothing the compound so pretty and even. Except that when I finished, it wasn’t. It wasn’t in the same hemisphere as pretty and even. What it was, was -- marginally -- okay. But here’s the truth: as homely and unprofessional as my panes looked, I was a little proud.

As I stood on my deck dodging annoyed bees and wielding my putty knife, I began to wonder if that’s how the gifts of God work: some of us have general ability in a number of fields, some of us are tremendously capable in one area. Some of us have strong minds, some of us have strong backs. Some congregations have a powerful call to one ministry, some are drawn to many missions of a limited scope. Some priests are gifted in pastoral work, some are drawn to other pastures.

If that is true, then there’s the beauty, the symmetry of our life as the Church of Christ – on the parish, diocesan, Church-wide, and Communion-wide stage. Each one, each entity has a niche but we need what the others bring to the table to be complete. We tend to think of gifts as big, bold offerings, but perhaps some of us are gifted with the ability to do a lot of things well enough. It’s not a flashy gift like preaching or singing or running a tight meeting, but what congregation could do without those few capable and willing souls who are there, day after day, doing what needs to be done. And how do we shake the crazy notion that a certain way of being a church or a priest or a saint is more valuable to the Kingdom of God than any other?

My late father, who insisted that knowing how to shingle a roof was a life skill his children needed to possess, used to say of himself, “A jack of all trades, master of none.” He always said it with a self-deprecating chuckle, but we knew he wore it like a badge of honor. I think God has created a lot of people like my dad and me, those who can do long division in a pinch, tie on a fishing lure, roast a turkey, comfort a friend or write a heck of a good letter when the need arises.

Those among us with tremendous ability or a singular talent are dear to us for showing us God’s image so clearly. Those with broader gifts sound the daily gentle hum of the Spirit of Christ in our midst, and they sure are handy to have around when a window pops out.

Heidi Shott is canon for communications and social justice in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

By Jean Fitzpatrick

What a treat it's been this summer to take my walks at Croton Landing, a brand-new park along the Hudson. Honeysuckle and beach plums there provide a foreground to sailboats and kayaks floating on sparkling waves. The river is tidal (the original inhabitants called it Mohicanituck, or "the river that flows both ways") and on the brackish water you see gulls, cormorants and even great blue heron. It's all part of what will one day be a 50-mile RiverWalk from the Bronx to Peekskill, where there used to be not much more than old factories, trash-littered industrial sites, and the Amtrak and Metro North railroad tracks, built a century ago to transport the robber barons from Wall Street to their palatial homes overlooking the Palisades. The place isn't paradise: Trains still rumble by every so often, horn blaring. Jetskiers slap against the waves. Mosquitoes nosedive straight to my ankles. But our new park is a giant step toward reclaiming the river's breathtaking natural beauty.

Actually, human nature may well be the most wonderful part of the scene. On a recent afternoon, flocks of ducks and geese paddled across a rocky inlet while kids on the path zoomed by on bikes, scooters, training wheels and skateboards. A middle-aged South Asian couple strolled along, deep in conversation. Teens sunbathed on the grass as poodles and terriers strutted past with their walkers. A small boy in a yellow T-shirt clutched a fishing line; a group of men talking in Spanish unloaded tackle-boxes and coolers from their car. Under a weeping willow a man in short sleeves and headphones played electric guitar. Near some girls playing with hula hoops, a woman I'd never seen before called me to the water's edge and pointed to a hawk on the rocks who'd captured a small brown animal; neither of us could see his prey well enough to identify it. Everyone nodded or said hello. As we watched the sunset put on its show -- purple-tufted clouds with undersides fiery pink -- perfect strangers smiled at one another, saying, "Isn't this park great?" It's as though we were not only happy to have our stretch of the river back, but also grateful for the opportunity to experience it together.

Walking along, I found myself thinking about healthcare. With 45.7 million uninsured -- roughly one out of 6 Americans -- I tried to imagine who that one vulnerable person was: the kid on the scooter? The guy with the guitar? The woman watching the hawk? Strange to think how easy it is in a public park -- and how hard, apparently, in a town hall meeting -- to recognize that what benefits some of us benefits us all, that when we work for the common good we're all better off. Discouraging to see how so little compassion can exist in a nation where some 80 percent identify themselves as Christian. Sad to realize that the all-too-widespread emphasis on personal salvation -- the product of our individualistic age and not of the biblical vision that calls us into covenant with one another -- must surely contribute to this sorry state of affairs. How important were the words of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's opening address in Anaheim, when she spoke of individual salvation as "the great Western heresy." "I am because we are," she said, "and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others."

We're recognizing this every day at Croton Landing. Watching those flocks of ducks and geese paddling by is humbling, in a way. They've been smart enough to know it all along.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By Greg Jones

For most of my life I have gone to Maine in the summers. It is a place of vast wilderness, rocky coastline, and just a touch of civilization. Downeasters are few relative to the square miles of woods and lakes and coast, and so the human being can quickly feel very small in Maine, even when you add in the large tourist population each summer. In many years of walking in Maine woods, canoeing lakes and rivers, and puttering on vast beaches loaded with cobbles not sand, I have also felt naturally humbled by Maine. God has made a beautiful place in Maine -- just as of course he has done all over this great planet.

Have you ever been humbled by nature? By God's creation - to be more precise? We live in a vast world, amidst a vaster cosmos, and if one becomes even for a moment thoughtful, one quickly realizes how small one is in comparison. It is tempting when one contemplates his smallness to become depressed, perhaps, or even insignificant. And yet, the Good News of God in Jesus Christ leads us to a very different conclusion. Indeed, Scripture indicates to us that we are very small compared to all that God has made (and will make after we are gone) -- but -- nonetheless, the gospel also tells us that the God of all things loves us even as much as he loves himself. We are small, and yet, we matter. To the biggest One of all.

Wisdom, Scripture says, for we small specks in the vast cosmos comes not when we pretend to comprehend our universe or our place in it, but when instead we humbly seek union in our selves, souls and bodies with the Lord of all. Wisdom, the fulfillment of soul and mind, comes not in the consumption or comprehension of the world's stuff, but in seeking God: in prayer, song, care for others, thankfulness, and the seeking of peace amidst the strife of life.

This Fall, it is my prayer that we Episcopalians continue to be among those wise ones who make the most of the time, and seek God together in these ways.

By Kathleen Staudt

My spiritual practice in the summer is to begin each day on my patio, in the cool of the early morning, sip my first cup of tea of the day, sometimes write in my journal, and watch what is going on in my back yard. We have a regular wildlife sanctuary this year, on our fifth-of-an-acre suburban lot. In the yard of the abandoned house next door (awaiting new construction), grass and shrubs have grown up, and a family of deer has taken up residence there. There’s now so much growing next door that they don’t even come into my yard any more. The rabbits, on the other hand, have eaten down just about whatever will grow – and yet there is something lovely, peaceful about them, browsing on the clover in the grass, in the early morning light. As I watch them, and the growing light, the sound of birdsong around me increases – cardinals, catbirds, crows and mourning doves, gradually drowning out the not-so-distant hum of cars on the capital beltway, half a mile away.

But what I most love is watching the birds on the feeder each morning. Though the English sparrows and grackles can be aggressive, a wonderful variety of birds visit each day, sometimes fighting over the black oil sunflower seeds, sometimes perched beside each other, simply being fed. Purple finches, goldfinches, house finches, cardinals, sparrows, downy and hairy woodpeckers, a flicker and occasionally a red-headed woodpecker, the occasional blue jay – and, this morning, hovering briefly over the bright pink and orange potted zinnias beside me, a tiny hummingbird!

I don’t get tired of watching them, even when they’re fighting over roosting spots or charging each other off with a flap of wings. Rather, I have the sense that I am being admitted into another world, watching them from my patio. They have their issues and their competitions but there is such a variety of species, colors, shapes among them – all birds, but abundant in their diversity. I find myself delighting in just seeing them all there together in all their variety – and I wonder, sometimes, how they see each other – across species and families yet within their bird-world. My feeling, watching them from the outside, is delight. They seem to be giving to another way of being, beyond my understanding. They invite me to watch and pay attention.

William Blake wrote somewhere, “How do you know, but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?” He’s on to something there. Watching the birds each morning is a contemplative practice, bringing me to the limit of what I can see and observe, fascinating me, offering a glimpse into a beauty, a mystery, I cannot name, and teaching me to sit still and pay attention. In this way it is a contemplative practice. It is one of the things that I love most about the summer months –this time to sit outdoors, before the air becomes too warm, to watch and wait for the birds to invite me into the mystery of prayer.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Donald Schell

Mundaka, Spain, Midsummer Eve 2009

On vacation last month, I attended a witch burning. She wasn’t real, of course---it was the local village festival. It started in the plaza. People milled around, talking and gossiping with neighbors, greeting new arrivals, but mostly waiting.

By ten, as the long dusk finally yielded to darkness, we heard shrill fifes and snare drums. Musicians strode into the square each one deftly playing a fife with one hand and drumming their snare drum with the other.

The crowd listened impatiently, and cheered when the witch flew out an alley and into the crowded square.

Her bearers were four very athletic young Basques; it was their skip-dancing that catapulted her into the square, flying on the broom to which she was shackled. The dancers carried her on a bier-like platform on their shoulders, a comical, but credible and somewhat eerie, life-sized bit of straw and black taffeta sculpture. Was she flying around the crowd or were we seeing a memory of how someone would be carried to the execution? I put the question aside.

The crowd offered our ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ at the witch’s long white hair and flowing black dress rippling in the breeze and the tiny white Christmas lights eyes that flashed on and off in her plastic witch mask face. Riding on her back, the black cat’s red Christmas light eyes seemed to flash their own effigy of anger at the helpless, dizzying ride the bearers gave witch and cat as vigorous prancing steps rocked the effigies crazily from side to side, backwards and forwards.

The leader of the bearers shouted something in Basque and they skip-danced headlong into the crowd, driving us laughing and screaming in all directions.

Now musicians led us all out of the square and into Mundaka’s narrow twisting streets. It was a full hour before the bearers had to pause, panting for breath. With just one fife giving them a little, lighter music, they marked time slowly in place while the score of little witches who had been following (six to ten-year-old village girls dressed all in black) danced a circle around the bearers and bier and then turned back to dance under it, cutting a giddy figure eight around the brawny bearers and their burden. Then down more twisting streets, past the harbor and up the hill. Finally, they danced the witch into Atalaya Park where the huge pyre of discarded wooden furniture, bedsprings, and even a surfboard stood on the lawn beside St. John’s Church. They pyre made me wonder, was this ritual like spring cleaning or redecorating? Like new years’ resolutions?

The musicians took their place to one side, and the villagers danced—some expert in the traditional Basque dances, other just beginners—all were welcome. Everything felt deliberately, teasingly prolonged, but finally the four carriers climbed the pyre and placed the witch on the very top. She was the stillest she’d been since she appeared. For a moment I wondered how exhausted and nauseated a human prisoner would have been from that two-hour tortuous dance. Was I being too serious? I didn’t pursue the thought, but the image and memory stayed with me.

The music had stopped. The young men who had carried the witch lit the pyre with torches. The witch’s electric eyes flashed in near silence. The crowd was quiet. There was no sound but the sea breeze that lifted the edge of the witch’s dress to show her straw stuffing and faint crackling of fire. Small fires joined together and the flames grew taller.

I’ve found it hard to write about this and capture my confusion. I will confess, somewhat reluctantly that the event was quite wonderful, haunting, and yes, beautiful. We stood, enjoying being part of a tiny human gathering of dancing and firelight in the vastly larger stillness of midsummer night on Spain’s rugged coast.

But it troubled me too. We were celebrating and re-enacting a terrifying, violent death. My first pass at the frightening part was whispering to my wife, Ellen, “I wonder if anyone here knows the old stories about the last time this really happened. How did it become a party?”

But I was speaking a question that made no sense on a magical evening.

Close to 1 a.m. as the fire burned itself down, the musicians finally stopped and the little witches and traditional dancers danced the last steps in their circle dances and bowed to one another, laughed, and scattered.

As we walked back to our hotel, I said to my wife, “Imagine what protests a playful re-enactment like this would produce in Salem, Massachusetts – or Berkeley!”

Remembering the evening as I write, the delight and wonder remain. This was emphatically NOT a human sacrifice, though it imaged one. Somehow remembering and retelling violence won’t sit still to be told straight. Is that a grace or our dilemma? Off and on as we watched I’d wonder whether an outcast woman had ever been burned as a witch in Mundaka, here in this specific site. And watching the exuberant event I heard a faint echo of political rhetoric of wartime ‘sacrifices.’ We have a hard time being honest about death and particularly so when the death we’re remembering is someone dying at others’ hands.

But something else in this play, this turning from violence, the logic of fire on the shortest night of the year felt, I have to say this - holy. I remembered friends’ description of the annual Burning Man encampment in the Nevada desert that ends with the ritual burning of the old man and that year’s temple. Ecstatic play, stillness, fire and the night come together in something haunting and beautiful.

Now remembering my first-time experience of this old piece of folk liturgy, I’m drawn back to the contradictions and my unease at not knowing where I stood. What I was consenting to? And did asking that question cut me off from the atonement, the healing and reconciliation and renewal people were finding in the play of it?

Even not quite getting it, I saw that this village-wide party was turning long-ago real-life horror into something freeing. The witch burning was a kind of liturgy. Had it reconciled or united us by letting us embody something dark in ourselves and celebrate letting go of it?

A couple of villagers had explained their sense of it the afternoon before, ‘The witch is really the dark side of all of us, so on Midsummer Night we let her out to see her and laugh at her, and then we consign her to the light.’ Hum. I sort of got that. Maybe.

But I was also feeling how post-Christian Spain has become. Most of the village would probably claim Catholicism, but only a fraction of the village had been at the very satisfying Catholic mass we’d attended. Spaniards’ Catholicism gets acted out in their huge Holy Week processions (with a few people going to mass afterwards) and in Fiesta events like the witch burning.

What did such Catholics think about Jesus’ death?

That question brings me closer to my unease. What sense does our talking of Jesus’ death, our re-enacting it in Holy Week, and our gratefully recalling it each Eucharist make to an inquiring stranger? How like this lovely but uncomfortable evening is going to our liturgy for the first time?

How does ‘showing forth his death’ make us free? I get it in my gut, and I can talk about it easily with someone formed in our church culture, but are we making sense to people who come to church hungry for God and community?

Do any of us really know how to tell Jesus’ death so that strangers hear Good News? Struggling with these questions for two thousand years the church has proposed many, many answers.

Europe today is very secular. In Europe, the witch (and maybe Jesus) live as part of folklore, custom and fairytale. The human pleasures and even the sense of awe that emerge in their rituals touch no story but our present moment – a house cleaning and a symbolic letting go of dark aspects of ourselves.

Sometimes I hear us ‘proclaiming’ his death in so formulaic and orderly a way that I wonder whether we’re making an effigy. Do we make any connection at all between Calvary and Abu Graib? Does our telling of Jesus’ death touch our own and others’ hearts? And is Jesus’ real teaching and courageous living still in it?

I’ve known moments of heartbreak meditating on Jesus’ suffering. I’ve known gratitude for knowing him and feeling his presence and teaching living in me or in another who loves him, and I’ve felt that living presence in some who don’t know to name him. But I haven’t got a neat ending for this. I’m still wondering.

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

By Leo Campos

The office where I work is being moved. The whole corporate office is being boxed up and we are moving to a new building. While this is wonderful news, it is also cause for much weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is amazing to me the amount of stuff that people can collect in their tiny cubicles. They look like a clown car - boxes and boxes of stuff keep coming out of each of these small workspaces.

Together with the sheer volume of stuff accumulated, there is also a large amount of discontent and stress which is associated with any move. Psychologists tell us that issues of work, and moving houses are among the top three or top five (depends who you ask) most stressful things in life. When you have an office move you are pretty much guaranteeing a perfect storm.
So I walk around trying to simultaneously stay out of people's way and reassure them that the servers will be functioning just perfectly the day after the move, that none of their highly important emails, all 1,527 of them, will be lost - even though I not-so-secretly suspect that the majority of these highly important pieces of data refer to cookie recipes or hangover cures.
I also try to be prayerful or at least cognizant of my own need for prayer during these times. I grab on to my prayer beads like a drowning man to a rope.

As is gets closer to the day of the move I find myself praying against all sorts of possible, probable or completely ludicrous things that might go wrong - from a clumsy mover dropping a server on the floor - deliver us Lord. From having another meeting so people can vent their frustrations - deliver us Lord. From a meteor striking the Earth - deliver us Lord! And on and on.
This whole petition for delivery tends to be one of the most overlooked or over-used of the lines in the prayer the Lord gave to the disciples. Usually it gets translated in our hearts as "Lord protect me and do not allow anything bad to happen to me." There is a tone of fear and trepidation. There is recognition of weakness. there is also a petition for the opposite to happen - don't let me get fired, don't let me get robbed, don't let me be injured. The request for deliverance from the Evil One or just generic, garden-variety evil is also common in Jewish prayers of the time.

But is this how I should read it? Or is this the only way to read it? There is an interesting story from the Desert Fathers which goes like this:

There was an old man living in the desert who served God for so many years and he said, "Lord, let me know if I have pleased you."

He saw an angel who said to him, "You have not yet become like the gardener in such and such place." The old man marveled and said, "I will go off to the city to see both him and what it is that he does that surpasses all my work and toil of all these years."

So he went to the city and asked the gardener about his way of life. When they were getting ready to eat in the evening, the old man heard people singing bawdy songs in the streets, for the cell of the gardener was in a public place.

Therefore the old man said to him, "Brother, wanting as you do to live according to God, how do you remain in this place and not be troubled when you hear them singing these songs?"

The man said, "I tell you, Abba, I have never been troubled or scandalized."

When he heard this the old man said, "What, then, do you think in your heart when you hear these things?" And he replied, "That they are all going into the Kingdom."

When he heard this, the old man marveled and said, "This is the practice which surpasses my labor of all these years."

In this story it is clear that the evil I am asking to be delivered from is not the other, but rather myself. To be able to say with all certainty that "I have never been troubled or scandalized" would be amazing.

Take a leap of imagination and pretend for a second that you are not and will not be troubled by the behavior of others (or your own); that your environment will not have any effect on you, that you can truly say with Paul that you have nothing though possess all things (2 Cor. 6).

The next part, "Scandalized" is a lovely word which comes to English via the Old French "scandale" which means "cause of sin". It in turn comes from the Latin "scandalum" which means a trap, stumbling block, or temptation. And, as usual, these words come from the Greek.

Imagine and pretend for a moment that you are not and will not be scandalized by others. That their atrocious behavior will not bother you in the least. And, perhaps harder, that you will also not be impressed by their apparently flawless behavior either.

Hold on to this image. See how easy it is to then be able in your heart of hearts to know, not just believe or hope, but be certain that they are all going into the Kingdom?

Every day I sit at my boxed up cubicle, listening to the semi-hysterical prattle of my co-workers about the latest moving crisis and let try to let this be my prayer: they too are going to the Kingdom. Followed quickly by only 5 more days Lord. Only 4 more days Lord…

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).

By Derek Olsen

I stood in the kitchen. I stared at the beets. They stared back at me. Wilted greens descended a darkly crimson stem to the three large bulbs that looked more brown than anything else. I’d seen beets in jars; they were a ruby red and looked nothing like this. The crimson of the stems evoked memories of rhubarb growing behind our shed at my boyhood home in suburban Ohio. I never really like rhubarb, but at least three recipes floated to mind that used it. Nothing for beets.

My family, like many young families these days, is interested in making healthy and environmentally sound choices. We exercise regularly, make most of our meals from scratch, and prefer local and organic ingredients. When we heard that a nearby community supported agriculture (CSA) organic farm would be selling shares and that our church would be a drop-off point, it was a no-brainer for us. We jumped at the chance.

Which led to me in the kitchen with the beets. My dad hated them, so my mom never cooked them. And since I learned the basics from her, I’ve never cooked them. In the aisles of my local supermarket this isn’t an issue—I just don’t buy them. But that’s not the way it works with a CSA. Beets came home in the bag; what was I to do—send them back for carrots? Eating local doesn’t just mean eating food that’s grown nearby—it means eating the food that’s available at certain times. I had no conscious expectations on that first day that my wife brought our share home, but I sure didn’t expect nothing but five different kinds of salad greens (the beets came later). Where were the cucumbers and tomatoes I had unconsciously expected to see? It was obvious when I took the time to think about it—of course the greens would mature fastest, especially the tender young ones. I just hadn’t counted on it and, as a result, didn’t start working salads into our meals that week until the arugula had already gone limp. I quickly learned that our Tuesday drop-off date meant that Tuesday and Wednesday were arugula and leaf-lettuce salad days. We get into the Romaine on the down side of the week; sautéed spinach is great with weekend pizza and roasts. I’d like to say that we round it all out with the cabbage—but we still have four heads of cabbage stuffed into our fridge. I keep swearing I’ll make some cole slaw or boiled cabbage—it just hasn’t happened yet.

At this point, halfway through our first CSA summer, I find myself pondering discipline, abundance, and opportunity. I expected to discover good greens, to support the local economy and sustainable food production. I didn’t expect to discover an alien discipline in eating. I’ve only been buying my own groceries since the 1990’s. All I know are supermarkets where all manner of fruits and veggies are available in all months of the year. Sure, I knew December’s ethylene-gassed tomatoes were unnatural and a little scary, but I’ve never before been so starkly confronted by the realities of seasonal eating. You can’t just go to the garden and get what you want. Despite our consumer-coddled ways, everything has its season and time and you get what the garden gives.

And if you think there’s a larger theological point hidden there about grace and God as the giver of good gifts, well, I’d suggest you’re right.

Too, that leads to abundance—even when it’s abundance you neither request nor know exactly what to do with. Like my surfeit of salad greens or the unexpected presence of beets, the abundance that we receive may not be the abundance we expect. In church parlance when we speak of God’s abundance and flourishing it always comes off sounding like a good thing. Are we missing the fact that sometimes it can be a downright challenge? I mean, what are you suppose to do with a bag full of lettuces? The answer is actually simple: start eating salads—even if that wasn’t part of the original plan. One of the repeating themes in the Scriptures is the miraculous abundance of God. From the manna in the wilderness to the oil in the cleansing of the Temple, from Peter’s great catch of fish to Jesus’ multiplying loaves, God’s privileging of love and life have been signaled through signs of plenty, literally, metaphorically, and spiritually. But are these gifts always received and utilized as the Good Giver intends?

And that leads into my third place of pondering: opportunity and its cousin, creativity. Sometimes we fail to embrace the disciplines that lead us to recognize God’s abundance. At other times, we see only a plague where we should be welcoming plenty. Opportunity and creativity are necessary to seize the possibilities freely offered. Sometimes this means throwing caution to the wind and embarking in the direction of where you see God’s fullness and promises of more. Sometimes it’s much more mundane and means taking some time to learn new recipes.

As for me, I’m still figuring out what to do with the beets.

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He has taught seminary courses in biblical studies, preaching, and liturgics; he currently resides in Maryland. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X/Y dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Adam Thomas

Snapping turtles live in the muddy water underneath a dock that extends into Lake Kanuga. I know this because I have been slowly fattening them up with Wonderbread since I was eleven. I’m 26 now, and (while I’ve doubled my body mass in the intervening years) the turtles remain – stubbornly – about the size of my hand. All but one. There is the “Big One” that rises Kraken-like from the depths and that you only ever see out of the corner of your eye.

For years during the last glorious week of July, my friends and I have gone down to the water’s edge to feed the turtles. We used to sprint to the dock. Now we amble. Once there, we untwist our ordnance and pass out the sliced, carbohydrate projectiles. Some employ the patented tear-and-toss approach, which maximizes the number of pieces for the turtles to eat. Others drop whole slices of bread into the water and count the number of bites necessary to consume each piece.

Within seconds of the bread hitting the water, the turtles surface. Plop. Snap. The first breadcrumb disappears, and ripples are the only evidence the turtle was ever there. Plop. Snap. The second piece vanishes. Plop. Snap. We keep a weather eye out for the Kraken. Plop. Snap. There he is, the Big One, the Leviathan that God has made for the sport of it. Plop. Snap. No, it was just the way the light hit the water. Plop. Whoosh. Snap. Missed him again. Maybe next year. Plop. Snap. Plop. Snap. Plop. Snap.

The turtles propel themselves out of the depths, eyes on the dark spots on the surface. They trap the bread in their little, beaky mouths, and they dive again. They stay on the surface just long enough to snap up their sustenance before retreating to the darkness of the brackish shallows underneath the dock. After years of dropping bread to the turtles, I’ve realized that we do the same. We never stay topside in the sun for too long. We prefer the anonymity of the murk. We prefer to focus only on that bit of bread, a floating shadow above us. We prefer to surface only at feeding time, lest the daylight expose us to all the pesky problems of the world.

Now, I’m pretty sure that the above metaphor is thinly veiled enough that my impending addition of the Holy Eucharist to this discussion will seem both appropriate and timely. Here goes. All too often, we approach our worship with a Plop. Snap. mentality. For an hour and fifteen minutes on Sunday morning, we notice the Wonderbread falling from the sky, and we surface to snap up our fill. Then we dive until next week. Same time. Same place.

The trouble is twofold. First, the Wonderbread, heavenly manna, God’s grace – call it what you will – does not descend on us at predetermined times once a week. However, we condition ourselves to notice it only during those times we’ve set aside for God. We kneel at the altar rail. Plop. We lick the bread off our palms. Snap. In seven days time, we’ll commune again. In the six days in between, we are more than a little oblivious to the fact that God wants to commune with us every day. Indeed, we may say “daily,” but too often we mean, “Give us this day our weekly bread.”

Second, the surface is where the action is. The psalmist prays, “Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.” God’s grace pulls us out of these depths, out of the brackish water underneath the dock. We surface in the brightness of day. As our eyes adjust, we notice all the injustice and desperation and fear that the murk makes easy to ignore. And as we share the bread and cup, we remember that the Body we ingest connects us to the greater body of Christ in the world. Jesus says to his disciples, “ If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light." Being children of light means remaining on the surface, knowing we share our lives in a larger community, and addressing those inequities that the light throws into sharp relief. We can accomplish none of these if we dive back to the depths – back to anonymity and ignorance – immediately after receiving our nourishment.

When we begin to notice the abundance of God’s grace around us, which pulls us to the light of the surface, we can break out of the cycle of the Plop. Snap. mentality. Silent ripples should not be the only signs that mark our ascent to the surface. Just as God blesses Abraham, God blesses us so we can be blessings in the world. God nourishes us with the bread of heaven so we can nourish others.

At the end of July this year, I will once again amble to the dock to feed the turtles. I will toss the bread into the water. Plop. Ever vigilant for signs of the Big One, I will watch the little, beaky mouths spear the soggy pieces. Snap. And I will pray to God that we can all remain on the surface, paddle there in the light of the sun, and serve our Lord.

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 Donald Schell

Peter is twenty-eight now. This memory must be almost twenty years old. It was Christmas. I’m guessing we were home between the early Pageant Liturgy and the Midnight Choral Eucharist on Christmas Eve. Peter, just beginning to grow into his manhood, took an elegant nonchalant stance leaning against the mantle over the fireplace when a tea-light on the mantle ignited his t-shirt. He felt heat on his back glanced over his shoulder and did what any of us might do seeing fire - he ran. His mother, the nurse, did what she knew to do – though I don’t remember her telling us that she’d been trained as a tackle in nursing school. She ran after him to the dining room, threw her arms around him, and slammed him against the dining wall, smothering the flames. And when the nurse had dealt with the first stage of the emergency, his mom reappeared to comfort him and calm him enough to get the t-shirt off and survey the damage.

Between Peter’s shoulder blades, he had a blistered area about four inches across, second-degree burns. Some small areas were charred, third degree burns. My dad, the physician was there and Ellen and Dad cleansed the wound and Dad set out the twice-daily protocol for debriding the wound. For the next several days I was her assistant.

A serious burn destroys our body’s most powerful defense against infection, our skin, and to make matters worse, dead skin in a moist wound is particularly hospitable to airborne bacteria. Debriding is tough love. Twice daily with a sterilized pair of tweezers Ellen methodically pulled dead skin from the wound. Dead skin is attached to living skin. It hurt Peter. My job was to help him lie very still on his stomach while she worked. I say ‘help him’ because Peter proved a brave and cooperative patient. Step by step Ellen told him what she was doing, and when she was about to pull. He did his best to steel himself and not to jump or pull away from her. My pinning his shoulders down was his back-up. Because sometimes he had to flinch, and then, without my hands on his shoulders holding him still, he would inadvertently poke himself on the tweezers or break his mother’s grip on the scrap of skin she was pulling away. Sometimes too, Ellen asked me to help by pulling the healthy skin on either side of the wound taut to make a dead skin fragment yield an end she could grab.

My role was mostly silent. For the first couple of days I thought of what an unlikely nurse's assistant I was. Growing up with both father and grandfather physicians, I lost track of how many people had asked me if I wanted to be a doctor. Usually I just said, ‘no.’ Sometimes I might venture a boyish imagining of vocation as ‘a preacher.’ But either way, my unspoken response was a forceful ‘NO,’ imbued with the painful knowledge that not only didn’t I feel called to medicine, but that I couldn't do it. Visible wounds made me queasy. Injuries to my own body frightened me. I was convinced I was too squeamish to be a doctor.

When my firstborn was coming and dad heard that her mother and I were taking birthing classes and that I planned to be in the delivery room, he wondered whether my presence there was a good idea. ‘Birth can be a little startling,’ he said. ‘It’s messy. There’s blood.’ But I was determined, and was glad to be present, and am still very glad for that experience. It was also my first hint that I’d outgrown some of the old un-ease at how raw bodies can be.

Then in my Clinical Pastoral Education at St. Luke’s Hospital, New York, I saw some badly battered bodies, some living, some dead, and I did my job all right, helped families talk to staff, stood by the body, said prayers, touched when it was helpful and appropriate. For my C.P.E. summer I’d been assigned to be the student chaplain on the Intensive Care Unit, which included burn patients.

Eighteen years later, as Ellen and I began our twice-daily routine with Peter, I remembered St. Luke’s burn unit. The memory of a child on the burn unit, most of his body burned, no one knowing whether he’d live or die, helped me with context and focus as we worked on Peter. Where, I wondered, was God in such suffering? I wasn’t satisfied with any answer I could offer to that question, but ‘where is God,’ resonated in this work, the painful and more hopeful treatment of my son. My job was to watch closely to anticipate when Peter's taut muscles would jump or lurch. As the delegated minister of stillness, my task was to watch, to hold a steady gaze as Ellen’s tweezers patiently took us to lower layers of Peter’s burn.

In the second day of this gazing as I watched Ellen’s meticulous work, I saw in Peter’s wound what Symeon the New Theologian called, ‘the impossible beauty of the life in Christ,’ or, to put it in plainer language, the awesome beauty of Life.

So soon after the burn “the wound” that I’d begun to know well from steady scrutiny through twenty minutes of teamwork unexpectedly showed a wholly different face. Just hours before I’d seen only ugly disfigurement, an opening to infection, damage, and grave risk to his health. Now healing was visible. In that same place where old skin was dying, brand new skin was beginning to appear. It felt so much like seeing healing in the moment that I wondered whether we’d actually see new cells or fresh patches of healthy skin move into place as Ellen worked. Peter’s body’s own work healing itself from session to session presented greater changes day by day. I was astonished. Watching the wound was moving me to a kind of joy. I loved gazing at it.

Had I not loved my work as a priest, that gazing spoke deeply enough to prompt a vocational crisis. Why had I imaged I couldn’t bear doing what my dad loved so much? Being a physician, seeing healing happen – ever – was an amazing privilege. Did Dad have to get over his own queasiness? Gazing at the wound, I understood something of my father’s heart and of his joy in his work. My Dad was an often skeptical Christian, but he did insist Life and God did the real work of healing, which he said made his work simpler and humbler: doctors could remove obstacles, sometimes clean things up or put them back together, keep them clean and in their right place, and watch healing overcome disease while trying to prevent complications.

Those days of watching my son’s very ugly wound heal I experienced, saw, and felt beauty where I’d imagined nothing was possible but ugliness. I’m not saying I found the idea of healing beautiful, not even my own thoughts observing the process of healing, but rather seeing Life present as Peter’s body healed, I felt the radiance of the Life that is the Light of humankind.

Culturally, but also religiously, we have a hard time with beauty. Sometimes we explain that difficulty in economic terms. When we’re working for justice or any pragmatic alleviation of human suffering, we mistrust beauty, suspecting it’s a luxury or a distraction. By common cultural consent we reduce beauty to a purely subjective, personal, and even idiosyncratic matter of taste.

But theologians as diverse as Jonathan Edwards (who calls the Spirit “the beautifier, the one in whom the happiness of God overflows … the one who bestows radiance, shape clarity and enticing splendor.” (Paraphrased by David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite, the Aesthetics of Christian Truth). Or Gregory of Nyssa (“Human nature’s perfection is nothing but this endless desire for beauty and more beauty, this hunger for God.” From Gregory’s Life of Moses, quoted in Hart) Or Hans Urs von Balthazar,
Or – liberation theologian Alejandro Garcia Rivera whose work, The Community of The Beautiful, Jesuit James Empereur draws on so heavily in La Vida Sacra, Contemporary Hispanic Sacramental Theology.

Ancient theologians, a famous Puritan in New England, a Roman Catholic teacher beloved by Vatican conservatives, a Jesuit, and new work in the tradition of liberation theology all tell us beauty drives it all.

Gregory of Nyssa describes the engine something like this:

God creates life, Life beholds Beauty, Beauty begets Love, Love of the Life of God.
(Paraphrase from Gregory’s On the Soul and the Resurrection by Scott King who set this text as a four-part canon in Music for Liturgy)

Just as ‘love is stronger than death,’ beauty, the real thing has power enough to include and transform the raw suffering of a healing wound.

Beauty makes our world radiant with the life of God.

Some recent discussions here at the Café focused on verifiable truth claims got me thinking about Peter’s burn and healing and prompted this piece. Watching my son’s wound heal doesn’t prove the existence of God. In fact those who play the game of proofs, sooner or later will admit that none of the proofs give us a loving, forgiving God; it’s simply not possible

Love proves nothing, and watching that wound heal wasn’t an experience of proof or testing but one of simpler knowing: in a community of love facing a hard task, I was seeing the love that sustains our every moment in Life doing its work. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was simply beautiful.

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

By Heidi Shott

Each evening, until my twin sons were ten or so, I gathered with them at bedtime to say our “thank you” prayers, which ended with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. One night after the Amen and the last ten kisses of the day, I began to tiptoe out when a seven year-old head popped over the top of the upper bunk.

“What is it, dude?” I asked, tired and ready for a few, yawny hours in grown-upland.

“Whoever wrote that last prayer was a chump,” said Colin. A barky laugh escaped me. Never before had the words Jesus and chump come together in my mind.

“Jesus made up that prayer. You think Jesus is a chump?”

“Well, Mom, how can things possibly be the same on earth as they are in heaven?” I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recount the answer I gave. In fact I don’t really remember what I said, but I do remember the question. On some level it’s one I ask myself every day.

On a recent Friday, after lying awake for 30 minutes, I turned to my alarm clock to discover it was 4:30 a.m. I’d been thinking about 53 different things I had to do. Rather than do any of them, I put a sweatshirt over my pajamas and set off for a walk around my neighborhood.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, early settlers here saw the value of the setting and set up a mill at the head of a tidal river along the coast of Maine. Our small village of colonials and capes grew up along the millpond at the base of the lake that pours into the salt river below.

As I ventured into the early morning, the alewives had begun the day’s run up the fish ladder on the other side of the millpond. Gulls, osprey and cormorants were fishing for breakfast, making noise and swooping low across the water.

“Pretty nice,” I sniffed to myself as I walked across the bridge that separates the lake from the pond. I was too deeply engaged in thinking about the logistics and politics of Thing-To-Do #14 to be moved by any early morning beauty.

But as I rounded a corner and a vast field of lupine unfolded with the head of the river in the distance, God got me at last. And I thought suddenly that the answer to Colin’s long-ago question lay in a moment like this.

Earth is like heaven when you can recognize God’s grace in the midst of the most stressful week. A line from a song by the Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn buzzed in my head: “One moment you’re waiting for the sky to fall; the next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all.”

My pace slowed. Mist rose from the bay and I gave the geese and their goslings that stake claim to the roadway at the lower end of the Mills wide berth. At the top of the dam, I stopped to see how many alewives had made their way to the last barrier before the lake, their spawning ground. From there I completed the circle back home by trespassing on hydro company land and into my own backyard. My sneakers were wet with dew and spider webs in the tall grass shown in sparkles as the sun began to rise.

As I approached the back of my house, I thought of my sweet menfolk still deeply asleep, my husband, those boys – now teenagers in the prime of their sleeping years. None of my 53 Things-To-Do seemed quite so important, even though about 40 of them involved the Diocese of Maine.

My reclaimed calm wasn’t about church or work or anything remotely Episcopal. It was about God’s loving voice saying, “Here it is. Here it’s always been. Here it will be. All of it, for free.”

By the time I made my way up the hill to the kitchen, the early light revealed a fine day ahead. I turned on my computer and did 12 or 15 things before it was time to make lunches and whisper, “good morning,” in everyone’s ear.

May God’s kingdom come that way more often.

*Title from Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.” http://cockburnproject.net

Heidi Shott is Canon for Communications and Social Justice in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

By Donald Schell

The church where I was baptized and grew up hovered on the edge of mainstream. Officially we were part of the Presbyterian Church, USA, but we were taught that we were Evangelicals, solid on our fundamentals and so confident that our personal decision for Christ made us Christian in a way that liberals (despite what they said) were not. Our youth group activities took us to Baptist and Independent Fundamentalist churches. I sat through a lot of altar calls. A spirituality of ‘knowing Jesus’ was deeply rooted then and still lives for me. But ‘Making a decision for Christ’ and the horror story version of atonement that I heard preached did not fit.

In one dark day in Sunday School, our teacher told us this story of a hanging judge in the Old West:

“There was a judge who was bringing peace to a land ravaged by cattle rustlers and gunslingers. More often than not the judge’s passion for justice in that lawless land moved him to condemn the guilty to death by hanging. One day a man was found guilty of stealing a horse and the judge condemned him to be hanged by the neck until dead. The town was appalled. There were extenuating circumstances. The man was their neighbor, married with children, their sole support. When the condemned was a dangerous stranger, the respectable townspeople were glad for the hanging judge, but this time they were horrified. They begged the judge for mercy. The insisted the condemned man was a good neighbor. It was his first offense. “No,” the judge thundered, “justice must be served; a horse has been stolen, so someone has to die.” A stranger stood near the back of the courtroom spoke with startling calm, “Your honor, hang me, and let the condemned man go free.” The judge seemed caught off guard, paused, frowned, and said, “Son, do you understand what you’re doing?” “Yes, your honor. I have no family. I will die for this man’s freedom.” So the judge ordered the horse thief released and the stranger hanged by the neck until dead. And when they cut the stranger down, the judge stunned the whole town by asking all, including the horse thief to join him at the funeral for his only son.”

The story made me angry. My Sunday School teacher assured us it was a true story, and I did understand it was meant to teach us something about Jesus’ death on the cross, but the father/judge was a monster, and the son was a fool. One pointless death replaced another. The townspeople should have done whatever they needed to do to stop the judge from murdering in the name of ‘Justice.’ I took the story home and told it to my parents, lifelong members of this congregation. My mother said, “The story is not right, and God didn’t kill Jesus.”

I’m thankful today that even as a child, I recoiled from that ugly story, and I’m thankful for my mother’s response. She didn’t offer an alternative atonement theory, but she did model that a story of heartless retribution wasn’t pointing us toward the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The ugliness of the story was an assault on faith, and my aversion to such a monstrous story was a theological response. Why is this adamant ‘NO’ theological? Because, like mathematicians and physicists, beyond mere logic, we test our theology for elegance and economy. Gregory of Nyssa says God’s beauty makes us long for God, moves us to fall in love. If this story were really ‘it’--the Good News-- I could only say ‘NO!’

As a kid, I loved Bible stories and found some big parts of what I was offered for theology off-putting. The community of people in the church obviously cared about each other and gave generously of themselves for the church’s work. I loved them. I also loved music (including ancient and renaissance church music and global music), old church buildings (like California’s adobe mission churches and the Orthodox log church at Fort Ross), so loving the community of people I longed for worship that invited real participation from all of us.

In the turbulent 1960’s after the deaths of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I entered Princeton Seminary. Leaders of our Presbyterian church (like many denominational leaders and activists then) were actively working for peace and racial justice. I was deeply relieved finally to be in a church where people didn’t think Martin Luther King was a communist--some walls had come down. It would be possible to explore and deepen faith. In the openness of my first year at Princeton I first met and fell head-over-heels in love with the writings of the early church fathers like Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa. I heard a new voice determined to describe how human experience and faith-in-community could lead to ongoing formation and growth in Christ. The seminary professor who was offering us these riches from Christian tradition was a Russian Orthodox layman who had been a minister in the United Church of Christ. For most of 1968-69, I thought I was going to follow his lead. I’d found in Russian Orthodoxy a church that could give me a more coherent answer, a church that knew what it stood for. I planned to complete my year at Princeton, become Orthodox, transfer to St. Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Seminary and spend my ministry with a community I understood and that understood me.

I applied to St. Vladimir’s and was admitted pending a face-to-face interview with the seminary’s dean. I drove from Princeton up to Crestwood-Tuckahoe, New York and spent a wonderful hour talking with John Meyendorff. Fr. Meyendorff quizzed me on theology, seemed satisfied at what he was hearing, and then asked where I was going to church. I told him the Episcopal Church at Princeton (the University Chaplaincy). Did I receive communion? Yes. He said, “Then you are an Episcopalian, and you don’t have to become Orthodox. You may be where God wants you to be.”

This was the year I read and re-read The Brothers Karamazov. I felt myself in the presence not just of a scholar, but a staretz, a spiritual elder with a good dose of the wisdom of Dostoyevsky’s Fr. Zossima. This saint was telling me I might already be home. He said I was welcome at the seminary if I chose to come, but he had a request first. ‘Your vision of this church has been formed from reading our ancient teachers and their best modern interpreters. But we’re a church with a lot superstitious immigrants. Go the bookstore and buy what the store manager can sell you of Orthodox Sunday School materials. Don’t come unless you understand who you will be working with if you become an Orthodox priest.’

The bookstore manager greeted me jovially, heard my story and congratulated me. "‘I’ve walked this path too. Welcome to the truth faith. You will come to loathe the Presbyterians and regard the Episcopalians as clowns." I was taken aback at his mean-spirited response. Presbyterians had taught me to love Jesus. In the Episcopal Church I’d begun to understand common prayer. These communities had given me a priceless foundation. After my conversation with an open-hearted saint and that bookstore manager who I feared might be me in a couple of years, I took my Sunday School books and drove home talking to myself, elated, weeping, perplexed, and trying to find where in this conflicted experience God was speaking.

My Italian landlady in Princeton had a good Catholic answer for a good Evangelical. ‘Go to Sacred Heart Church and pray before the Blessed Sacrament. Jesus will tell you what to do.’ I was shocked at it, but Jesus seemed to want me to accept that I’d already found my home in the Episcopal Church. For good measure, I left Sacred Heart to go spend a little more time on my knees at Trinity Episcopal in Princeton. Jesus was saying the same thing there. I phoned John Snow, the Episcopal chaplain, my pastor, and one of the best preachers I’d ever heard (or have heard since). “John, I need to talk to you. I think I’m becoming an Episcopalian.”

John and I had a great conversation. I told him all the theological stuff I was working on and he said, ‘We’ve got plenty of room for you.’ I told him I thought the Episcopal Church was actually a mess theologically, a church without a backbone, incapable of standing for anything. He smiled and said, ‘maybe you’ll come to appreciate that.’ I have.

John helped me make a very late transfer application to General Seminary. I went home to California to work that summer in the Presbyterian Church where I’d grown up. It was a good summer; I was glad not to be making a conversion that stripped away and repudiated the good people who had taught me to love scripture, community, and an abiding, mystical friendship with Jesus. Starting General Seminary in September, almost the first thing I discovered in the theological mess I’d now embraced was that my professor for the Pauline Epistles, a priest who seemed to be an existentialist agnostic, was with us in the chapel daily praying Morning and Evening Prayer, and he came faithfully to the community’s weekly Eucharist. Remembering John Snow’s words I wondered at my new professor’s faith. Could this be how my new church’s theological messiness was a holy gift? Maybe there was some grace in sharing prayer and Eucharist with Christians I didn’t understand. Maybe the gift was praying with this priest I didn’t understand and (still not understanding him) discovering he was my brother in Christ.

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

By Leo Campos

My stepfather was one of those larger than life individuals. It was just the way he was. He would walk into a room and commandeer it. I am not sure he would do it on purpose; I used to think it was a natural outgrowth of being used to having his orders obeyed. He was born in Argentina of English parents. In his late teens or early twenties (sometime after World War II) he jumped on a Triumph bike and drove the 1,000 miles from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo in search of fame and fortune. Argentina at that time had the highest GDP in the world, while Brazil was barely waking up. On paper this seemed like an unwise move and he told me how often his friends in Argentina laughed at his decision, asking if he was going to Brazil to help the “banana bending” industry. Just think of how Brazil was portrayed in Carmen Miranda movies and you will see that such stereotypes were widespread.

The trip itself would probably make a good movie – there were no reliable roads between Brazil and Argentina in those days. He had to rough it for the 1,000 mile trip. He risked it to reach a country with a language he did not speak and very foreign culture. How different were the countries? Well, he tells me that he was shocked the first time he saw a black person – Argentina simply never had the levels of slavery associated with the rest of the New World.

My stepfather by that time had already developed a level of certainty which enabled him to trust his instincts. This is a man who, while working on the railroad as a young teen (no child labor laws back then!), would risk his earnings in dice games - and frequently double his income. Every successful decision, in turn, gave him greater self-confidence to take further chances. The more success he accumulated the more he developed what I call an expectation of certainty. It was a tangible force. This force enabled him to find the strength to work against pretty phenomenal odds to accomplish what he set his mind to. Certainly the success came with much hard work and many sacrifices, but the hard work almost seemed inconsequential - it was simply inferior to his will.

How much of this commanding presence was really presence and how much of it was self-image? Self-image is how we perceive ourselves as objects of others' attention. For me to be aware of how you see me, requires that I create a fantasy, an abstraction - I have to engineer an artificial “me” so I can become an object to myself – taken to its logical extremes you get the frivolities of high fashion. Presence, on the other hand, is indefensible and independent of external factors. It is a purely, or almost purely, subjective state. “I am this.” I am what I am.

These two poles of self-awareness are not mutually exclusive. A strong presence will probably create a strong self-image. A strong self-image will most likely create a strong presence. But the approach to it is different. If you develop a strong sense of presence, then you will not be too concerned with protecting self-image, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

It is instructive here to look at the encounter between Jesus and the centurion (Luke 7). The centurion is used to authority, and he recognizes it in Jesus. On paper this seems like an unwise move, much like my stepfather’s. Why would a centurion come seeking the help of a Jewish peasant, when he could undoubtedly have chosen some more qualified medical doctor? Just say a word and it will be so. The centurion must have been an excellent leader, for he could see the potential beneath the external appearances. He came to Jesus because, using whatever methods of decision he used, he simply expected to be right.
So here’s the catch: what are you seeing in the world today? Where are you looking? What does this say about you? What potential are you seeing? Do you see potential for good or for ill? Are you expecting to be right, or expecting to be wrong? Most importantly are you leaning more on your presence or your image? What 1,000 mile trip are you embarking on? What will you find at the end?

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).

By Jared Cramer

I am not always on time. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I am often running behind. This is a bad enough habit to have as a person, but it’s even worse when you are a clergy person. People generally prefer it when their priest is on time to liturgies. Early is even better. My wife is doing a good job of trying to make me more punctual, but she’s not working with the most malleable of people. Bad habits sink in.

This past Wednesday, I was not going to be late. I set my alarm precisely for the time I needed to get up. I told myself there would be no snooze button. I was set to be the celebrant for our parish’s 7:15 AM service of Holy Communion and I was going to be there early, ready to go.

Except that when I set my alarm I was thinking the service was at 7:30 AM.

So, when I came to the doors at the back of our chapel at 7:22 AM, arms laden with Bible, BCP, and alb, I was briefly confused upon seeing a morning prayer service already in action. Then I realized my mistake. I was mortified. I turned away from the door, briefly considering hiding in my office, thinking saying “I forgot” would be better than “I don’t know what time your service is.” But it was too late, someone saw me.

The lay person officiating finished the creed, saw me, and then invited me to come and continue with the prayers and then to move into Holy Eucharist. I apologized profusely and came to the front of the chapel, continuing the liturgy they had already begun, my face likely as red as my stole.

I worked through the rest of the Rite I liturgy they had begun with a constant stream of self-deprecating thoughts in my head. Then, right before the end of the prayer, I came upon the key paragraph:

And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses, through Jesus Christ our Lord;

It’s tempting, when you are a new clergy person, to begin to believe that the life of the church rises and falls on you. But that morning, as the newly risen sun streamed through the windows of our chapel, persistent grace reminded me once again that, late or not, I am always unworthy to offer any sacrifice. My heart joined to the words, knowing that, even given my momentary shame, this was still my “bounden duty and service.”

Every day our offering to God begins and ends with God’s grace. Some days, our need for grace is painfully evident. On others, we can begin to think that we are the ones making this thing called the church actually work. And even in that prideful failing, our offering remains wrapped in grace upon grace.

And, reminded of this powerful truth, I did not eat humble pie, but received with gratefulness my risen Lord. I tried to accept that grace, as the wafer dissolved on my tongue. Next time, I’ll double check my calendar. But today, I’ll try to believe what Paul heard God say about his persistent weakness, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

The Rev. Jared C. Cramer is a Clergy Resident at Christ Church, in Alexandria, VA and blogs at Scribere Orare Est. He is also the author of the forthcoming book from Lexington, Safeguarded by Glory: The Ecclesiology of Michael Ramsey Applied Today.

By Heidi Shott

My older brother Jimmy, who lives on an island in Southeast Alaska, is a mate and pilot with the state ferry system but he also makes part of his living by hosting fishing charters in the icy, capricious waters west of Ketchikan. The tourists who hire him and his boat hope for the big 200 pound halibut. He tells me that sometimes he has to go farther off-shore than he would like in order to find them. But that’s what his guests pay him to do. And for that reason, since a particularly fateful day, he always packs a couple of peanut butter sandwiches in his cooler.

A few years ago Jimmy took a party of young men in their early twenties on a charter. They were keen to have an Alaskan adventure and with dreams of catching the big fish. After an unsuccessful morning, they finally hauled up some big ones off a point that extends several miles out to sea. The return trip—rounding the point and heading back to the harbor—was rough. The wind came up and the current near the point worked to push them back. As the waves grew so did the uneasiness of his guests. The bravado of the early morning dissolved into seasickness and downright fear.

“I wasn’t so thrilled to be out there myself,” said my brother, one of the most affable, easy-going guys on earth. “I made sure everyone had their life-vests on. I was nervous but, as the skipper, I sure as hell couldn’t show it.”

That’s when he asked one of his guests to reach into his cooler and get him a peanut butter sandwich. Jimmy recalled, “I told him I was hungry, which I wasn’t, but I knew that doing a normal thing like munching a sandwich would calm everyone down. And it did.” After awhile they cleared the point, put the wind behind them and surfed the big swells to the safety of the harbor.

Eating a peanut butter sandwich when you’re not hungry...whistling in the dark when your lips are parched…those are visible things we do for the people who need us to be strong. Jesus, who calmed the seas with a word, was the master, of course – the Chief Whistler of the Faith.

The lives we lead, we Christians, are full of blessings and unexpected moments of grace: illnesses cured, joyful mid-life weddings, children who ride chairlifts down the mountain by mistake and by some miracle don’t fall off. How easy it is to whistle and feast on sandwiches at those times.

But the lives we lead are also fraught with sad news and hard truths - especially in these recent months of recession and uncertainty – lost jobs, troubled marriages, fragile children, tragic diagnoses, and bad choices by people for whom we care and are powerless to change. Those times and the troubled times we live in, can make us justifiably afraid.
But fear need not turn into despair. As that great theologian of children’s literature, Marilla Cuthbert, says to Anne in Anne of Green Gables, “Despair is when you turn your back on God.”

If despair is a choice, then it is one we most often reach for when we are alone. A way to keep fear from slipping into despair lies in choosing to be together as a community centered on hope and faith and by propping open the door to keep watch for others who might find comfort in our company. Our success in battling the despair we see in the world around us will be proved by how well we live together and by how freely we welcome others under the cover of our love.

There will always be some among us who are better and stronger whistlers in the dark, those who lighten our load and make us feel brazen and confident in our life and faith. But I think each of us should be prepared to eat the occasional peanut butter sandwich and hold the wheel steady when the winds of fear and change would drive us back, not only for ourselves but for those who need us to be strong.

Heidi Shott is Canon for Communications and Social Justice in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

By Jane Carol Redmont

I have been thinking recently of all the things I’ve lost.

Eighteen months ago there was the turquoise and fuchsia chiffon scarf, a gift from my mother, which blew off my neck at a professional conference in San Diego as I was on my way to lunch and whose absence I did not notice till a minute or two later. My companion and I retraced our steps near the waterfront, queried the local shops and stands, searched the ground. Nothing. I went to two lost and found booths, at the conference center and in the immediate neighborhood. A day later, I had to leave town. Back home on the East Coast, I kept thinking of tracking down the scarf. I still miss it.

A few years ago there was the Russian shawl, black with bright flowers in tones of pink and red, made of light wool fabric, breezy enough for spring but warm enough for winter and fall, a vast and beautiful square that dressed up slacks, my winter coat, and the proverbial little black dress—the accessory to end all accessories. I wrapped it over my shoulders, safely draped or casually knotted. Only a few times did I wear it slung over one shoulder, and the last time I did, I lost it, walking in a park in Brussels in animated conversation with an old family friend. Suddenly I noticed it was gone, surprised I no longer felt its weight. We retraced our steps, forty minutes’ worth, through the park which was acres wide and full of trees and benches and lawns. We never found the shawl. Someone had taken possession of it, no doubt. I want my shawl back. Not an approximate replacement, not one of the shawls I have seen in slightly different colors and smaller sizes and not quite the same flower pattern, readily available in Russian goods stores on the internet. I want the one I lost, the one my parents gave me, the one they bought 30 years ago, in the Brezhnev era, during their three years in what was then the USSR.

Further back, in college, there were the stolen rings. In my senior year it was the emerald ring, my birthstone –perhaps synthetic, perhaps real, I never quite knew or cared. It was a gift from my paternal grandmother, who emigrated to the U.S. in her teens and was not a woman of means; presents were part of our relationship, but small ones, never lavish. This was an exception. The ring disappeared from my dormitory room along with a few other pieces of jewelry. In the first semester of my freshman year (we still called women freshmen then) the stolen ring was carved obsidian in a silver setting, a hand-me-down from my mother, who had gotten it the year she and my father were married in Mexico. It was a stylized face with a chipped nose, impossible to replicate and easy to identify. After several long visits with a new boyfriend in another dorm, I saw the ring on the hand of a classmate who lived in that building. I asked for it; she lied and said it was a gift from her brother. I was, at seventeen, scared and barely in college for six weeks, afraid to contradict her. I still have fantasies of tracking her down –it would be easy enough, through the alumni association-- and writing in a note: “All is forgiven, but give up the ring. Let my mother see it on me while she is still alive.”

And then there were the books. In their move back to the United States after nearly three decades in France, my parents had to leave some of my childhood books behind. I was an adult already, not living with the books, but secure in knowing I could visit them, like old friends. My parents did ship paperback editions of French and English and American classics — the books of my adolescence— and the hardbound literature anthologies from my French public school curriculum. They also kept the large illustrated books of fairy tales. But the other books of my childhood had to stay behind: my copy of The Three Musketeers, the French-language children’s biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt and Marguerite Plantin, daughter of the Renaissance-era printer Christophe Plantin, and especially, especially, a book that belonged to my brother before it found its way to me, a history of Paris for children, a book I long to read again and whose stories I loved.

It is through this book of history and legends that I learned about the Parisii, the tribe that gave Paris its name. Under the Roman conquest of Gaul, after 52 B.C.E., the city became Lutetia, but the Parisii came first and it is their name that endures. The book was also chock-full of tales of the saints, two of which I still remember: Denis, martyred on what became known as Mons Martyrium (later abridged to Montmartre) and carrying his head in his hands all the way to what is now the town of St. Denis, and Geneviève, the 5th century shepherd girl who prayed away the Huns. I cannot hope to track down my own copy of the book but in these days of the World Wide Web, it is possible to find a book that has long been out of print. Every so often I search for the title on the Web, and last week I found it. Someday I will order a copy for myself, but for now I am just happy the copies exist and moved to have seen the cover again, with its red color and its picture of the boat that is the symbol of the city of my birth.

This spring I lost one of my favorite rings, the only one I have worn with any consistency in the last half dozen years, a plain silver flat coil made by a Navajo artist. A couple of months ago, I put it on in the morning and it slipped off my finger somehow before I left for work. Unless I dropped it down a drain while washing my hands, it is somewhere in the house, but I do not know where. I even tore open a vacuum cleaner bag three weeks ago in hopes of finding it. No ring. Perhaps the cat has used it as a soccer ball and it is beneath the couch in the place I cannot reach. Yes, I am talking to St. Anthony about this one. It should have been easy to locate.

I am embarrassed and irritated at the regret and longing I feel for these things. I ask myself why I hang on to their memory, why their absence hurts. They are, after all, only things.

My first layer of answers has been a combination of two responses. In the first, I chide myself for being a materialist, unable to let go of possessions. In the second, less judgmental, I remember one of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, that desire is the root of suffering: attachment to things is part of that desire.

Only recently have I started to layer onto the first two responses a different set of reflections.

The scarves and rings helped me to feel beautiful. The books told me stories. The silver coil was a consolation, a gift I had bought myself in New Mexico before a week of workshop facilitation, in the summer following a painful break-up. I was attached to these objects for their beauty and for what they added to my life.

But nearly every one of those lost things, besides being beautiful, had been a gift from a person I loved, usually a family member. The thing spoke to me of that person, of our relationship, and of the place from which it came, a place with significance in my family history. As a family, we are emotionally close but geographically spread out. Because of professional occupations and life partnerships across cultures, we are at home in several places, comfortable in more than one country. With this diasporic reality also comes longing: to be at home in more than one place is also to miss the place where one is not and the people who live there. The things I lost felt like extensions of my body or of the bodies of my loved ones, arms around me, protections, talismans.

In the preoccupation with objects, there is also loss and anticipatory loss. My parents are nearing the end of their life. My brother, who is one of my closest friends, lives an ocean and a continent away. My grandmother died three decades ago. Is it easier to focus on the loss of objects than on the loss of relationship that comes with distance and death? Probably so.

There is more. Almost all of these items of clothing or jewelry were lost or stolen or flew off my neck in places and times of instability or transition. At college, four thousand miles from my home, when I was first settling into a strange country, and later, in the “what next?” phase of my senior year. At an academic conference where my colleague and I were interviewing sixteen candidates for the third position in our small religious studies department, vacant after a difficult institutional struggle. In a public garden in Brussels, as an old friend of my parents’ and I walked and talked and argued about the rights of immigrant Muslim women to wear headscarves and what the headscarves signified in modern Belgian society, after passing some women wearing hijab.

Transitions and migrations are everywhere among us. I knew and saw this before my visit to the stunning “Migrations” exhibit by Sebastião Salgado and its related children’s photos a few years ago, but Salgado’s photographs crystallized this for me. As the number of migrants and refugees increases around the world, I look at their pictures and remember my forebears who came to the U.S. as immigrants, some in the 19th century, others in the early 20th like the paternal grandmother who gave me the emerald ring. Most of all I notice the faces, but I note also what people wear and take with them. I wonder what I would take if I had to leave my home in a hurry, not for college or work but in the duress of emigration or the trauma of war.

This preoccupation may come from belonging to a people –most of my ancestors were Jews— who often had to run: inquisitions, exile, pogroms, trains to the camps, emigration to a safer and more promising land. But in the U.S. especially, all of us have displacement in our bones and disruption in our histories: descendants of immigrants from Europe and Asia, internally displaced Native peoples, enslaved Africans stripped, literally, of every object and piece of clothing. For those who were able to migrate and take a few things, there was always the question: What is portable? What do we choose? Most of us, whatever our origins, end up with both the useful and the beautiful, a mix of survival and sentiment. I have seen pictures of immigrants at Ellis Island carrying not just suitcases but large baskets, jars, blankets, spectacular hats. A family of Hungarians, preparing to enter the new land, looks out from a picture, the children dressed in their cleanest and best. More than a century later and on another soil, a refugee family in Burundi stands together in beauty, clothed in shimmering colors.

I probably have thought about objects and transitions more than before during this year because of an attempted break-in at my new residence during Thanksgiving week and a precipitous move just before Labor Day after a tree destroyed part of my house. Mercifully, once the disaster recovery team cleaned the rubble, little of what was inside had been damaged or broken, with the exception of my grandparents’ bed, one of the few heirlooms I owned. Now, at the end of a strenuous academic year, I think of summer travel and begin composing in my head the notes to the house-sitter: how and when to feed the cat; what to guard from intruders and weather; what to grab first and save (after the cat) if there is a fire.

Given the choice, I would grab –after the passport and the cat—the picture in the slightly battered frame on the wall of my study. Given to my mother by her mother’s cousin William, born in the German Rhineland, it is a lithograph by a printer in Alsace, on the other side of the Rhine in France. It was, William wrote on the back, a “prayer director,” an aid to prayer, with words in Hebrew and images of biblical scenes—a rarity in a tradition with a prohibition against graven images—created sometime in the first half of the 19th century. On the back is a translated list of biblical sayings and an identification of the images, numbered and written in neat block letters in Cousin Willie’s hand.

“And I shall dwell in the midst of the people Israel,” the list reads. “The Ten Commandments.” “Know before whom you are standing.” “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, etc.” (Yes, he wrote “etc.”) “From the rising of the sun to the setting thereof, the name of the Lord is praised.” The images, in tones of blue and brown, are the Tablets of the Law, Moses striking the rock, the binding of Isaac, the blessings of Jacob, and the wise judgment of Solomon.

William came to the U.S. in the 1920s, much later than the rest of my mother’s maternal family, who had arrived during the second half of the 19th century. The lithograph left Germany not with him but with his sister Mathilde, who left in the late 1930s, not a moment too soon.

The wall hanging, William wrote on the back, was given to his grandfather, who served as a civilian provisioner to an army post during the Franco-Prussian war, “for his good deeds.” William does not say who gave the lithograph to my great-great-grandfather, but it was probably a gift from his congregation: William’s inscription notes that prior to the gift, the “prayer director” hung on the East wall of the synagogue in the family’s small town in the Baden region.

In the mid-1960s, toward the end of his life, Cousin Willie gave the lithograph to my mother. After the translations and descriptions on the back of the frame, he noted that the “prayer director” had hung on the East wall of its recipient’s home and later on the East wall of the home of his son, William’s father, in the city of Speyer. William then wrote, “Brought to Los Angeles, Calif. in 1938 by my sister Thilde” and added, on the next line, “To perpetuate,” and signed his full legal name.

Judaism and Christianity, the religions of my ancestors and of my choosing, are steeped in memory and materiality as well as in the freedom of hope. Memory teaches. It teaches through things, through the stories we tell about them, and through the stories they tell us. It walks us into the future.

Let not our things own us: ultimately they, and we, belong to God. Still, our things are bound up with our histories and our flesh. This too can be holy: To stop and think about how we live with our things and our memories. To know, when we cling, why we cling. And to tell the stories. To perpetuate.

Jane Carol Redmont grew up in Paris in a family of American journalists and moved to the United States at the age of 17. A former member of the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Refugees and Immigrants, she chairs the Bishop’s Committee for Racial Justice and Reconciliation of the Diocese of North Carolina. Her latest book is the new paperback edition of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life (Sorin Books, 2008). She teaches at Guilford College and blogs at Acts of Hope.

By Howard Anderson

It was a bit like the movie “Father of the Bride,” when Steve Martin’s daughter announced that she was getting married. Rather than seeing the lovely, mature woman in front of him, the Daddy in him sees his little girl, in pigtails, saying a ridiculous thing-“I’m getting married.” Our little Pookie getting ordained? How can it be? As Bishop Alan Scarfe, the Bishop of Iowa laid hands on our little girl, making her a transitional deacon, I was seeing something quite different, and someone quite different.

I was seeing, in my mind’s eye, the new born baby girl, who, when I held her the first time, changed my life forever. I was seeing the little blonde Haole girl running naked across the hot sand at Makapu’u beach, her little bottom covered with sand, accompanied by several of her little friends, and the “herd” of them jumping, laughing into the Pacific. I was seeing the little girl standing in front of her stuffed animals, her faithful old dog propped up in a bean bag chair, with glasses on her snout, with thin slices or radish she had picked from the salad, handing each a thin, white slice and saying “take, eat, this is my body.”

I was shaken out of my reverie by a small voice next to me saying, “Papi, Momma is crying, what did Bishop Alan do to her?” Now there’s a question for you! My grandson, Will, watching his Momma kneeling before the Bishop, tears streaming down her face, was concerned. I leaned toward him and said, “Don’t worry Will, those are tears of joy. Your Momma is very happy to be ordained.”

I was moved to be asked to be a presenter. My wife, Linda, and I, just as when we held her at her baptism, at her various graduations, Will’s baptism, stood this day to support her in her decision to answer the call of The Holy One to give her vocational life to serve God’s people as an ordained person. As I listened to Bishop Scarfe preaching to and about Kesha, I could sense how deeply he knew our little girl, now a woman. She had been on his diocesan staff, and all her foibles, gifts, skills and charisms he knew well. And what a window on her soul his words were…and challenging. More tears. The symbol of unity in the Church, the Bishop, was ordaining a person, our little one, with such tenderness and insight. And then I began to remember. My own ordination as a Deacon came back so clearly.

I remembered, years earlier, a bishop I loved and love still, Bob Anderson, laying hands on me. Like my daughter, I, too, had been a lay professional for many years before I was ordained. And like Bishop Scarfe, Bishop Anderson was ordaining someone he knew well. These two men were ordaining someone whom they had loved, challenged, counseled, someone with whom they had laughed and cried in many unguarded moments. Warts and all, fears and gifts, accomplishments all laid humbly before the Holy One…all made holy through Christ’s love and the power of the Spirit.

Feelings washed over me and time slowed, as the ordination proceeded. Kesha had fought the call to ordination almost as long as I had. Proud lay professionals in the Church for over a decade, she and I were alike in this way. I had feared God could not be trusted. I could not get myself to believe what I preached, that The Holy Spirit guided the Councils of the Church and guided God’s people to call some apart for ordination. Kesha and I had always talked “shop.” And we both believed that the primary vocational sacrament was not ordination, but Baptism. And yet, here she was. Now ordained.

Kesha as a 10 year old, watched another family member, her uncle, announce that he was leaving his position as an athletic trainer and physical therapist for a major Division I university athletic department to follow his older brother to seminary. This was just too much of her. Her mother a parish school principal, and her Daddy, two uncles, a great grandfather and four great uncles all ordained. She placed her little hands on her scrawny hips and crossly said, “Now all we’ll ever talk about at family gatherings is God!”

But The Holy One is a patient and persistent suitor. And here we were. Father and daughter…both reluctant, both now ordained. Her collar felt too tight she said. She was not convinced that there was an ontological change. “Will my friends all stop cussing around me and only want to talk about church?”

And then the pictures. The Mom and Dad and ordinand, their baby, newly ordained and chafing already at the collar. The proud husband and even prouder little boy all smiles. More tears. More laughter.

Future and past all collapsed into a wintry Iowa day when a young woman began a new and perilous journey off to fight the good fight armed with only a bit of bread, a little wine, some olive oil and a couple of books. Paltry things in the world’s eyes. Very ordinary. But with the Spirits gifts empowered, just enough. The Rev. Pookie now thank you. The Rev. Pookie.

The Rev. Dr. Howard Anderson is rector of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, Pacific Palisades, California. He was a long time General Convention deputy and most importantly, is grandfather to a six-year-old theologian, Will.

By Ched Bradley

In high school I had a small part in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, that iconic American play celebrating simplicity. Recently I saw a film of the 2003 stage production starring the late Paul Newman as the Stage manager. I had a dim understanding of Wilder’s point in 1962, but now I understand it more fully.

In the play, the young bride Emily dies in childbirth. In the afterlife, she learns that she can return unseen just once for a day. Her departed relatives and acquaintances counsel against it, because “the living don’t understand.” They don’t understand that they’re too busy to notice the sacred in the ordinary. But in a longing for reconnection, Emily returns to learn that her counselors were right.

In 1970, Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi captured the corollary; “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” I wish I could relive the simple times spent with my maternal grandfather – a bright, gentle man who deeply loved me, God only knows why. We played catch on the beach; he serenaded me with folk songs; and made fun of my doting grandmother’s tireless and mostly failed efforts to teach me manners. I wish I could spend just one day with my mother. We talked about trivia, mostly, because many subjects were perilous. But, like my grandfather, she loved me unconditionally which I felt in my soul. I miss my Kansan grandmother, a creative volcano who taught me to drive in a cemetery, and who led me down a rose trellis (from the second floor) to outflank my crotchety grandfather who forbade us to leave to explore tornado damage.

Why are life’s daily simplicities sacred? Perhaps it is because they are so often about love. I appreciate now the love that we experienced in the ordinary. Must it remain true that “the living don’t understand?” Probably, though I suppose if I adopted a moment-to-moment earnestness, people would wonder (even more) about me. But the longer I live the more important is the unadorned company of family and friends, and the better I understand that simple love is the meaning of life.

In his book, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, Alexander McCall Smith says, “…for that is what redeems us, that is what makes our pain and sorrow bearable – this giving love to others, this sharing of the heart.” Our children can learn from us the sacredness of simplicity appreciated over a lifetime. Jane Sigloh writes, in Like Trees Walking that “…old lovers leave a legacy for the young because what binds them together, even when separated by death, is deeper, broader, and higher than they ever imagined was possible.” In Wendell Berry’s poem, To Tanya at Christmas, the poet speaks to this legacy:

Our lives rise
in speech to our children’s tongues.
They will tell how we once stood
together here, two trees
whose lives in annual sheddings
made their way into this ground,
whose bodies turned to earth
and song. The song will tell
how old love sweetens the fields.
Amen. Amen.

Ched Bradley is senior warden at St. Luke’s, Bethesda.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Every spring we watch and wait for our magnificent Yoshima cherry tree to reach peak bloom, signaling the afternoon for our annual Grove Street Cherry Blossom Popcorn Party beneath the popping buds. The lucky day this year fell on a glorious, warm Palm Sunday afternoon which brought out neighborhood families to revel in the tree’s splendor and each other’s celebration of spring after a long winter indoors. A soft southwest breeze wafted blossoms to the ground creating a pink carpet for our gathering. One friend commented that the sensational old tree helped to keep the spirit of neighborhood and fellowship alive.

When we moved from New York to our house in October 1975, we knew little about Washington cherry tree traditions and had no idea that we’d bought a front yard treasure. So we were awed when the tree popped five months later just in time for our daughter’s 4th birthday party to be celebrated beneath its branches. We began to commemorate all important family events with the tree as backdrop for photographs - more birthdays, graduations, Christmas card snapshots, a wedding, and now grandchildren arriving at Nana’s and Poppy’s. As our cherry has aged to be somewhere around 75-85 years old, far beyond its expected longevity, we have surprised ourselves by becoming the elders on our street, glad that we chose to be deeply rooted here along with our tree which has grown to wrap around our upstairs corner bedroom windows.

Last June, a robin couple built their nest in the tree just high enough so that we couldn’t see into their home but we could observe the parents’ preparations and nurturing when their fledglings’ tiny insatiably open beaks peaked up over the nest’s edge. Mother Robin was extraordinarily diligent in flying out to find food, feeding her young and during one horrific storm, spreading her wings over the nest like a living umbrella to shield her family of four from the cold rain and wind. As they grew larger, Mr. Robin began showing up more often to guard the nest of churning little bodies while his missus was scavenging for their food. His presence appeared to calm his offspring.

Within two weeks, the babies became so large that they almost pushed each other out of the nest, ruffling their wing feathers as if practicing for flight. One amazing day, we watched them begin to fly one by one out of the nest. Finally only one remained, and while his parents hovered around their last baby, I remembered my mixed emotions when our younger child left home (documented by pictures beneath the cherry tree). A story entitled “Soaring” in Friedman’s Fables by Edwin H. Friedman helped me over the rough patch:

Mr. and Mrs. Bird had successfully launched nine fledglings, but as the fable unfolds we experience their desperation over the youngest’s failure to launch or take any advice on how to flap his wings, lift his head, fly! The more perplexed they become, the harder they try, the more Baby-bird resists their mad pokes and chirping which somehow enable him to avoid his destiny instead of facing it.

Finally the parents are fed up enough to leave the nest for their own happy pursuits, but this infuriates Baby-bird which resolves to show them by jumping to a triumphal splat on the ground below. However, his attempt fails when nature takes its course, his wings pull away from his body and soon he is soaring naturally without his parents’ constant interference to foul up his functioning.

Friedman’s moral? “ The children who do best in this world are those we make least important to our own salvation.”

He wrote the fables to celebrate ambiguity, believing that “… questions are more important than answers, in part, because they are eternal while answers resemble fashions that come and go with the age.” In this sense, each fable is best understood as a question and several that flow from “Soaring” are as follows:

• Why do some fledglings have more trouble leaving home?
• How did Baby-bird wind up thinking that learning to fly was for the benefit of his parents?
• Why do children tend to function best in those areas where their parents are least anxious and most incompetent?
• Can you think of any books on raising children that try to get parents to de-focus their child?

As for me, when I see the fat- breasted robins playing in our yard, I imagine they are the now grown children who flew from our cherry tree nest a year ago. They are strong, feisty, and in charge of the garden. And I think to myself, “Babies do grow up and should leave home, and when they do, they return a lot more interesting.”

Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C, has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, during which she served on his faculty, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.

By Luiz Coelho

My grandmother's family emigrated to Brazil on a cargo ship that took six months to arrive! She was raised at a coffee plantation in a region where every single white person was related to each other, and could trace their origins to the same pioneer who got rich in Brazil and brought most of the people from his village in Portugal.

When she was young, she couldn't be friends with people of color. "It was a big transgression" - she said. Only when she went live in Rio (with my grandfather and their three girls), did they get in touch and develop friendships with black and mixed-race people. My mother was still an infant, and at first, she would cry every time a black person approached her. It was the very first time she saw them, in a country where about half of the population is not white! Eventually, she got used to seeing people who had dark skin tones, but just the fact that there are people even today who lived and can recall those events is very sad.

My grandmother had a conversion experience while reciting the Nicene Creed at her Catholic Church. Later, she became a Protestant, because "they also believed in the Creed, plus, they could read the Bible," but she's still fond of the Catholic Church "now that they can do those things as well." She might be a crypto-Vatican II Catholic of sorts.

She had three girls. Only my mom and aunt survived childhood. My grandfather, who also was her cousin, didn't care (or didn't want to care) about birth control. But she knew that they couldn't raise decently any more children, so, she prayed every day she wouldn't get pregnant again - and she didn't. That was her only choice of family planning. I wonder how many women still have to do that.

She worked overnight shifts at a sweatshop. My grandfather eventually got sick, and could not take care of the family by himself. Labor conditions in factories back in those days were deplorable, and my grandmother felt compelled to join a labor union and campaign for labor rights. Eventually, the government passed laws that forced factories to comply to a maximum of eight work hours per day. She still remembers how joyful she felt when that legislation became law.

Her multiple work shifts were not in vain. Thanks to her sacrifice, my mother and my aunt never had to work while at school. They passed the test to go to normal school, and eventually graduated and became elementary school teachers. Both went to college later. My grandmother also adopted an orphan teenager. This girl also went to college, and is now a retired federal judge.

Every time I think about women, and their achievements, I think about my grandmother and her life. Now she is 90, and many of the challenges she faced seem to be so far away from us. However, they are many women still face them. If it were not for my grandmother's witness of life, maybe I would not pay as much attention to this fact as I should. She has been, however, my model and guide, and in her I see the work of all those wonderful women who work and pray next to me.

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

By Leo Campos

I have heard and read much about Jesus' openness to children. In his day and time children were not of much more value than cattle, if that much. So for Jesus to permit children to "bother" him was different enough to merit a mention. It is also one of those small little details which seem to me to be proof of the impact of Jesus in the lives of those who followed him.

It is also, in my opinion, proof of Jesus' celibacy - against those inclined toward a gnostic or DaVinci-esque view of Jesus. Only a really cool uncle would say such a thing about children. Of course, Jesus never said such a thing directly to my youngest son.

Case in point: taking my 3-year old to school can turn any morning into drama of epic proportions. Part of the difficulty is that he is one of those kids who absolutely must do everything for himself - no matter that he lacks the finer motor control or the experience or both. He must get it himself, do it himself. He will not tolerate any help...even though without help he cannot (physically) do the task. Even though if I did it we would be out of the house already and I would not be late for work. No matter. A typical conversation will go something like this:

"Daddy I want milk!"

"What do we say?"

Pause. He looks at his father and practices the look he will give me 20 years hence at the early onset of dementia, "I. Want. Milk."

I adjust my glasses, the International Sign of Infinite Patience and explain, "We say 'please'."

"Oh yeah. Please? Milk? Please!! I said please."

"Yes you did. Here's your milk," and I hand him a glass of milk, in his favorite white plastic cup which turns purple with the temperature of the liquid.

"No," he frowns, crosses his arms, and if he knew how, he would probably tap his toes too.

A puzzled look crosses my face, and instinctively I check the cup to make sure it really was milk I poured in there, remembering that one time when it involved my wife's kefir. "Don't you want milk?" I stretch the glass to him.

"No."

I look at this child like someone looks at a small but extremely dangerous animal that is making threatening noises, "You asked for milk!"

After a few seconds of death-staring each other, I say, "Ok. Don't have any milk. See if I care. Do you know how many starving cows in Timbuktu would love some milk?"

I try my best to slam the milk down with dignity and focus my attention back on doing my cereal box lectio. My cereal now is mushy. A few minutes later I hear, "Look Daddy I got milk."

Suffer unto me indeed. But Jesus did not mean this particular pint-sized lovable terror; he meant the approach to certain things in life which all children share. For example, regardless of how the day begins, without or without military interventions, duct tape, and sugar frosted cereals, when we get to the car the request is usually the same: "Daddy can we say prayers?" By this he means he wants to listen to my CD of Morning Offices which I got from GIA Music (highly recommended, by the way). So we put it on and listen and sing along to the psalms and the canticles.

On my wife's side of the family, music is an integral part of their self-identity. Everyone, it seems plays various instruments well, has a range of multiple octaves, and can usually be counted on to start some sort of sing-along around the piano - and that's just the pets. My tone-deafness and general music analphabetism elicits the same sort of look one gives to those brave souls who wear their Phillies hats out in public.

The other day our little one was singing to himself the intro to the Offices ("O God come to my assistance, Lord make haste to help me"). I could tell it was in tune because my beloved wife was frantically calling the DNA research lab, canceling the DNA tests, and just as quickly dialing her family and holding up the phone so they too could hear it.

But the issue with the daily singing of hymns goes deeper than musical appreciation or even family affiliation (and perhaps a larger percentage of inheritance later in life). The point is that my son finds routines comforting. Children, it seems, make natural Benedictines - they thrive on the day-in day-out routines: certain predictable things happen in certain predictable hours, in certain predictable days. My little one quickly memorized what days he could bring a book and what days he could bring a toy to daycare. He must have dinner no later than 5:45 EST. He demands a certain amount of reading every night - usually from a limited collection of "best" books (a collection which his older brother is always trying to expand). And then there is "compline."

"Daddy. My brother has not read me a book."
In the background I hear a "Did too!" from his brother.

"But son, I heard him in there with you for the past half an hour," I reply hoping against hope his mother will be home soon.

Silent pause. He looks at me on the couch with the practiced caring disdain of an overworked nurse, "He has not read me a book," he repeats probably figuring out that all adults are hard of hearing.

"Which book?" I ask putting down my own reading, the international sign of Fantastic Daddyship.

"Don't let the pigeon drive the bus!"

"Ok - let's go read the book."

And after reading, not one but three Mo Willems books plus a few others, there is the bathroom run, and then the prayers. The "friend light" (night light) has to be on and the correct blanket in place. And on and on.

Routines - they bring stability and, strangely, an opportunity to explore and play. Play is much better when carried out within boundaries. There is perhaps a certain feeling of security which routine affords. Those of us who recite the Daily Office find their constancy and their repetition extremely comforting. While novelty is the fastest way to happiness, repetition is the surest road to joy.

Instead of ruing the boredom of our lives, we should spend sometime thanking God for routines - and then setting about doing the work He has given us to do within that routine. To complain of boredom and routine betrays a lack of creativity and of insight - both of which are fundamental tools for a deep spiritual life.

Children, especially my lovable younger one, are masters of creative ways of existing within the boundaries, of playing in and with the boundaries. They are masters of living. Let me suffer unto the little children and learn to live better.

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).

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Did you grow up in a small town you left to pursue careers and adventures as an urban dweller? My hometown is on the banks of the Tennessee River in the northwest corner of Alabama, where back in the day we children could play anywhere fancy free and without worry for our safety. “It takes a village” was an unknown phrase, but our actions seemed always to be known by a plethora of kind, intelligent adults who loved and cared for us as if our families all belonged to each other. Sheffield, Ala., gave me a sense of place and basic trust in a good world.

Named for Sheffield, England, our town was incorporated in 1885. It was created to be an iron and steel center, using locally available iron ore and shipping products to market via river transportation. Boom and bust years followed until 1933, when the newly elected President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act. The TVA’s programs, along with those of the National Recovery Act, helped bring the area out of the severe economic depression during the 30s. Pictures of our town from WWII through the 1980s show a bustling main street filled with a variety of shops to meet every need.

Today, this street is boarded up and closed down, a victim of poor planning by town fathers who refused to merge with the nearby town of Muscle Shoals, where the strip including Wall Mart attracts business unfortunately bypassing Sheffield. Even before the current economic crisis, Sheffield looked dead and decaying. It has become a bedroom community and settling place for senior citizens living in several retirement facilities.

But Sheffield still has a heart if you bother to look beneath sad appearances. The town may be boarded up, but the spirits of good people abound in three abiding institutions: The art association brings the community together with lively theater and museum exhibits; the library provides a center where residents gather and poverty-stricken kids receive warm adult attention with story hours, computer use and help with homework and book selections; the churches continue to draw spiritual seekers who give back to the town.

Grace Episcopal Church is a good example. Five years ago, rector Rick Oberheide was called to help the congregation grow or perish. He focused on a mission of hope for transformation and is overjoyed that young families are flocking to services, joining the parish and committing themselves to the vision. Meanwhile, he is a pastoral presence to his aging parishioners, including my homebound mother (98) who adores the visits that Rick calls “Tuesdays with Flo.”

Rick says he’s an unlikely priest, describing himself as directionally challenged (he gets lost no matter where he’s driving around town), but spiritually directed. His family’s dysfunction left him a spiritual orphan at a very young age, so as a child he began to seek mentors and a church to call home. Finding the right wife and psychoanalysis helped him form an identity and then a love for other people that flows to his parishioners and to others, no matter what their religious beliefs. Remarkably, he has welcomed two retired Grace church rectors back as parishioners as well as several other former priests from other dioceses. He appreciates their assistance at services and with shared leadership. Encouraging his predecessors to participate brings a presence of the past that has helped foster healing and growth.

One of Rick’s greatest gifts is his ability to be vulnerable and to laugh at himself. His stories abound, like the time he rose to leave an important interview, opened the wrong door and walked into a closet. Or the time his microphone was turned on before a service and he went to the men’s room where he says, “I opened my own Niagara Falls amplified throughout the church. The congregation cracked up.” His latest story has become a Sheffield legend:

When a church patriarch named Frank died, Rick drove immediately to his widow Mary’s home, which in his directional confusion, he mistook for the house next door. He knocked, entered and found a group of people he’d never seen. Believing they were out-of-town relatives, he began to converse and minister to them. After a while, he said, “Where is Mary?” Said an elderly woman, “Mary? Why Mary died!” Rick said, “No, it was Frank who died. I spoke to Mary this morning!” A silence filled the room. For a few minutes everyone was speechless. Finally someone said, “Mary is not here because she died. Could you have the wrong house? Frank lived next door but we didn’t know he died.”

Rick sums this one up, “Grace is the space between how you want to react and when you speak.”

As more small towns struggle during these current hard times, we can support the heart of town in people who dream of a positive outcome and continue to give back to the community with love, optimism, humor and commitment to future generations.

Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C, has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, during which she served on his faculty, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.

By Greg Jones

What if some things were meant to be, and some not?

When you look at your life what about it is "meant to be?" And what isn't? What's a mistake? A sin? A...well...a do-over? What in your life are you grateful for - and what would you like to see redeemed? And can those things be brought together?

It's hard to know sometimes, what's meant to be, and what's not. In some cases, of course, it’s easy. I believe that at a minimum, every person was meant to be. All loved by God, all cherished, all made in God’s image. And certainly every person — no matter how long they live, no matter how much or how little they succeed— has the implanted power of God inside already —a soul, an animus, a spark — an inner light. And certainly every good a person does — every truth, every kindness, every patience, every grace — comes from this inner light, planted there by the One who let it be in the first place.

And, so, every person is meant to be, and every grace which passes to and through them is meant to be. So what’s left?

Every vice, every sinful choice, every wasted moment – in a way of looking at things, these are things that are not meant to be. In this same way of looking at things, every harm done to others, either by accident or on purpose, was not meant to be. As well, the many collisions of this universe of cold and chaotic forces which impact upon the beloved of God, maybe those things are not “meant” to be either. After all, in this way of looking at things — which Jesus offers — there is a "ruler of this World" which one day will be cast out of it.

What Jesus chooses to do in going to Jerusalem and dying on the cross, and rising again, and ascending into fullness with God and all, is to begin the reconciliation and redemption of what should and what should never be. God gives everything that is meant to be. And God will redeem everything that isn’t. That’s why God not only creates. God redeems. Thanks be to God.

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

By Richard M. Weinberg

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.
1 John 4:7

“For God is love.” So ends the eighth verse of this same 1 John passage from chapter four. And all of my life I have used these two verses as a mantra in times of serious doubt. My relationship with God has been enduring yet punctuated over the course of my childhood and young adulthood by my relationship with the church, and my identity as a gay man.

Ignorant Bliss

As a devout Roman Catholic raised in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., I was a faithful attendee of Mass, served as an altar boy, never missed a Sunday school lesson, and ensured my parents and brother attended church with me every week. I prayed the rosary often, confessed my sins regularly, and pondered living a full life as an example of an obedient child of Christ.

As adolescence took hold of my life and distracted my mind and body like every teenager, I began to identify with my great aunt who lived with her female partner, as I wondered silently if I were like them. Then, when my aunt, Lynn, posed to me one evening while watching television, “Well, you know your grandfather was gay, right?” it shook my core to realize that, yes!—I am, too. It was all the more reason then, that coupled with my self-inflicted rigid beliefs and my own sexual epiphany, I was utterly wounded the morning in Sunday school when my teacher lectured on the sin of homosexuality.

An Abomination

I sat in the front row with my eyes growing wider as I listened to the lesson. Occasionally making sure my visual discomfort was not noticed by my classmates, my usual engaging questions were silenced by the news I was hearing. During a break in class, I called my teacher to the hallway to speak privately, and asked “out of concern for a family member” about the implications of such a lifestyle.

Of course now I can admit that it was my own sexuality and the reality of the church’s non-acceptance that brought me to question my teacher privately. From that point, my faith slowly deteriorated as I frequently sought excuses to miss Mass and grappled with the seemingly daunting conflict of choosing between being myself or being in God’s grace. I continued throughout high school with the corresponding stereotypical existence of a “different” kid, fearsome of bullies in the hallway who mocked and chided me, and all the while sinking into a deeper depression as a result of a stripped faith and trust in God.

Becoming Spiritual

I could not have asked for a more loving and accepting family. To this day my parents, grandparents, brother, and other family members support me unconditionally, and I know my mother in particular was distraught with worry during those trying years as to how to help me. Perhaps in some way my guilt was augmented by the thought that I could have it so much worse. I could have had a family that threw me out of the house. Yet I fundamentally could not come to terms with the implications of how the church felt about who I was, and that these feelings of helplessness were a direct result of the pain I experienced from a place that once provided me the utmost comfort and solace.

Throughout my undergraduate years my depression gave way to the excitement of life and the experience of maturing. Most significantly, I fell in love for the first time. That relationship with another man made me realize that being gay was completely natural. I experienced first-hand that two committed same-sex adults can be just as happy as their heterosexual counterparts, and that there was no reason to believe that God didn’t love me for who I was. I also discovered the practice of yoga, and bestselling metaphysic titles taught me that a relationship with God could be had outside of the church. I toyed with the label agnostic, and I spoke to my close friends and a rabbi about Judaism. I did not step foot inside a Christian worship service for more than five years. I would shudder at the thought, refuse invitations, and even avoid music performances that took place in any sanctuary.

A Church for All Souls

Thankfully, I found a way to hear God’s calling to come back. Upon moving to downtown Washington, D.C. during my grad school years, I was forced to seek out a paying church choir job and landed at All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church in Woodley Park. I remember my first Sunday in the choir, participating in the order of service with such familiar liturgy, reciting the responses and prayers that brought back years of Roman Catholic Mass. Yet it was different.
The Rev. Joan Beilstein, an open lesbian who was then interim rector, preached from the pulpit. A skilled, openly gay choir director led our ensemble, and at coffee hour I met numerous same-sex couples who were happily engaged in the life of the parish. I learned that All Souls had grown to be a particularly welcoming parish as a result of the former rector, the Rev. John David van Dooren, who drew attention during the Minneapolis General Convention in an August 2003 article in The Washington Post. “Founded in 1911 … All Souls was once known as one of the most conservative Episcopal churches in the District.” Under van Dooren’s leadership, the church—“dwindling in membership, at risk of closure by the diocese”—became one of the most revitalized parishes in D.C. Beilstein estimates that during our time there, some 40 percent of the congregation was gay and lesbian. On the Sunday of the bishop’s visitation, I listened to the Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane preach on the inclusiveness of the Episcopal Church, and his views that gay brothers and sisters are equal in the eyes of God.

A Troubled Communion

But there are those within the Episcopal Church who are seeking to disassociate themselves from what they see as a too liberal acceptance of gays and lesbians, including the ordination of gay clergy. As theologian Walter Wink writes in his well-known essay Homosexuality and the Bible, “Sexual issues are tearing our churches apart today as never before. The issue of homosexuality threatens to fracture whole denominations.” And the issue indeed has. At the same 2003 General Convention, the major issue debated was the confirmation of the church’s first openly gay bishop, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson. Ever since his ordination, it seems too often we read another article about a U.S. Episcopal church voting to break off and align itself with a conservative African diocese, while most recently, news emerged in December 2008 of intentions to create a new church in North America, which portrays itself as the conservative arm to the Anglican Communion.

Through my most influential mentor and friend, I ended up employed at Washington National Cathedral in December 2006. The epitome of a beautiful landmark, constructed for the glory of God, welcome to people of all faiths and none, yet governed by the Episcopal Church, the Cathedral entered my life unlike any other edifice before it. More than a place of work, I was embraced fully by its community, its clergy, and my colleagues. The programs and ministry of the Cathedral were evident examples to me that Christianity does exist within the center—and that rather than discord there is dialogue; rather than slander, respect; and rather than damnation, there is understanding.

The Cathedral makes clear its role of being welcoming to all people, which includes a diverse worshiping congregation with many gay and lesbian members, as well as a growing number of people in their 20s and 30s. The Cathedral’s own openly gay vicar, the Rev. Canon Stephen Huber, who oversees the Cathedral congregation, recently mentioned his own childhood experience in a sermon, which resulted in overwhelmingly unexpected positive feedback on the significance of identifying himself as gay from the pulpit.

A Spiritual Home

I was received into the Episcopal Church by Bishop Chane in May 2008. Kneeling in the Cathedral nave surrounded by the soaring Gothic vaulting, and my family and friends with their hands on my shoulders, I knelt as Chane recited, “Richard Mosson Weinberg, we recognize you as a member of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, and we receive you into the fellowship of this Communion. God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless, preserve, and keep you.” I felt tears pouring down my cheeks and the full divine presence of God so close to me in that moment. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

Earlier that May, I attended a screening at the Cathedral of For the Bible Tells Me So, a feature-length documentary that chronicles the experiences of five “normal,” Christian, American families handling the realization of having a gay child. Enhanced by the in-person discussion among filmmaker Daniel Karslake, Bishop Gene Robinson, and the audience, I sat simply in profound gratitude for my own experience in coming out, growing up, and joining the church out of my own renewed faith. Eight months later, I watched Bishop Robinson participate in the inaugural concert for President Barack Obama. Robinson’s words, “Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance—replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger” resonated deeply.

I view my faith journey as a full circle, and also commensurate with my own self-discovery. Now, as a more mature, religious, Christian gay man, I am proud to call the Episcopal Church my spiritual home. And I am comforted that here at the Cathedral there is a voice for a generous-spirited, welcoming Christianity, firm at its center and soft at its edges, where all people are invited to engage and learn, and cultivate a fuller relationship with God.

Richard M. Weinberg is assistant director for integrated communications and co-editor of Cathedral Age magazine at Washington National Cathedral. He serves on the Advisory Council of Generation O, Washington National Opera’s young professionals and student outreach program.

By Luiz Coelho

A couple days ago, I was overhearing a conversation (yes, I do that) between two women on “churches” and “religion.” Basically, one of them made a comment about being a Reform Jew and finding it very hard to deal with the Conservative Jewish school where she was working as an intern. The other woman, then, told a little bit about her experience as a child of a Southern Baptist father and an Episcopalian mother, and of being raised in the Episcopal Church.

Believe me, I am not the “gossipy” kind of person, but that conversation did attract my attention, after all, it was about the Episcopal Church. And when the Jewish woman mentioned that in Reform Judaism they had the freedom to question while in Conservative Judaism things were much stricter, the other one replied “Yes, I imagine it is just like being Episcopalian as opposed to being Southern Baptist.” I chuckled. I had to!

I have to admit that sometimes I succumb to the dangers of “episcolatry.” Let me explain. Not rarely we are taught, in the Episcopal Church (and, to a certain degree, in other Anglican Provinces), that we have freedom of thought, that we use reason, that we practice inclusion, that we are fighting for a change, and that we are not “fundamentalists” (a word that has been used both by Liberals and Conservatives at times, with no clear boundaries), among many other great things. Nevertheless, the pride that emerges from all of that often consumes me and not rarely I catch myself bearing a silly sense of superiority, almost as if I had find the “True” Church.

Lent has just started and it might be a bit cliché to revisit all the basics about this season, in a sort of Lent 101 course. But I believe, however, that in many cases we grasp much less than we should about this season of fasting and repentance. I tend to focus more on fasts. In fact, I was probably born on a diet, because I recall doing them since I was a child. So, it is not extremely hard for me to give up on edible temptations for a while. It is the repentance part that drives me crazy, and by reflecting upon some of the daily Lenten readings, I realized that I am most likely still far away from the ideal Jesus shows in the Gospels.

This is probably why I chuckled to the conversation I mentioned before. It is not a problem to understand that all of our struggles and achievements as a Church draw us near to the Gospel. The problem lies when we question why the “uncool fundamentalists” (among others) claim to sit at Christ's table. I have to admit that, not rarely, I have acted as the pharisees who criticize Jesus for having a meal with tax collectors. Yes, this passage, which for years was used to justify the inclusion of those seen by the Church as impure (usually liberal-minded Christians), ended up being used by me in a rather curious opposite direction. In the midst of cyber-wars and name-calling, I might say that several times I felt tempted to look down on people who, regardless of opinions or attitudes towards any of the hot topics or people en vogue, are marked as Christ's own and are just like myself: sinners in need of God's grace.

Lent might be, therefore, an appropriate period to repent from a fake sense of superiority that does us no good and in fact diverts our attention from what we are really called to do. Episcopalians or not, there is plenty of Christian ministry to be done around us. There are mouths to be fed, souls to be nurtured, people to be reached, gifts to be used and a life of service waiting for each one of us, whenever we are. Not rarely we will be criticized for claiming to be the sinners who sit at Christ's table, but that is far better than being the ones who feel “superior and clean,” and in no need of repentance. I still believe it is possible to speak with integrity and not succumb to such temptations. And this is what I have taken as my Lenten discipline. I know it is hard, and have no idea if it will work, but I am giving it a try.

So, my prayer is that, during this period of Lent, while we try to discern better what God's call in our life is, we can see every single person that we interact with as God's beloved child, and also as a potential brother or sister in Christ, in need of care, prayer and repentance.

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

By Greg Jones

People who study the universe talk about something called "Dark Matter." Turns out that the majority of the matter in the universe is invisible, not only to the animal eye, but to any kind of eye - whether x-ray, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma ray, or whathaveyou. Dark Matter is something which dominates the mass of the universe, cannot be seen, and is only detectable because of one thing: it has weight. Yes, the dark stuff of the cosmos has weight - and as the cosmologists tell us, it's quite literally pulling on everything. It can't be seen, but it's heavy anyway.

I discovered a bunch of Dark Matter on my trusty five year old laptop today. Well, not exactly, but I discovered that 99% of my hard drive was full, and I had no more room to do the basics any more. Things were running slow. I had to get rid of good programs, just to manage the shortage of disk space. Yet, every time I tried a quick stab at getting rid of junk on my drive, it didn't seem to make much difference - there were literally billions of bits of extra stuff on there that I couldn't seem to see, find or detect in order to remove. The digital Dark Matter was keeping me from the mission I needed to accomplish with that laptop - and it seemed helpless.

Then I went after it with a purpose. I got some good hard drive cleaning software, and with that and about an hour's time, I went through that little rig and found all the stuff I didn't need or want anymore. Mostly, it was stuff that was all hiding in dastardly places allowed for by the arcane operating system born into the rig by its maker. All that stuff that was hiding in there - running either little routines or simply taking up space - well I got rid of it. All of it. And it felt really good. And now, that little computer runs better.

What about you? As Jesus said to Peter, "your mind is too much on human things." Are you weighed down with all sorts of Dark Matter? Old things that are stashed in your mind, heart and soul that have weight, but you've lost sight of them? Is it time for a spring cleaning of issues, concerns, anxieties, agendas that are almost forgotten, but yet still remembered in the attic of your mind?

Maybe, this Lent is a time to look for that dark matter of the soul - and - well - chuck it out. It's called confession. It's called prayer. It's called letting go of dark matters, and allowing the Spirit to cleanse us.

By Donald Schell

Hanging thirty feet above the ground, I was only half way up the rope. My mind and every muscle in my body pulled up, up to the cliff top. From up there my son and five other pilgrim friends cheered me on. We were climbing this braided leather cord to see Debra Damo, the oldest church and monastery in Ethiopia.

I’d done vertical rappel in a ropes course. This was different - harder because climbing this line was all shoulder and arm work, and harder still because the monastery and church are at 8000 feet altitude,. My whole upper body ached for oxygen. Up on top an old monk and his young helpers drew up the safety line’s slack. They were ready to brace themselves and catch my weight if I slipped, but slipping would turn me into a pendulum weight banging against the cliff. Hand over hand, I pulled my way to the top. And I made it up.

If I’d had any breath left, the view across the mesas and gorges to Eritrea would have had been breathtaking, and yes, the thousand-year-old chapel of a fifteen hundred year old monastery was well worth the climb. But that braided leather line lingers in memory as powerfully as anything we saw at the top. Clinging to it, I looked up to the cliff edge and the sky’s intense blue, felt the rope in my hands, swayed with it, and smelled its long-handled age. Muscle memories fix a wild mixture of fear and excitement, elation and exhaustion. So now a month later, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve told myself that something was ‘hanging by a thread.’

- The future of the Anglican Communion hangs by a thread.
- The U.S. economy hangs by a thread.
- With new work of teaching, consulting, and leading workshops, my priestly vocation hangs by a thread.

Just as the three strands of interwoven flesh - animals’ skins - made a lifeline and a way of ascent, the sixth century Syrian monks who built Debra Damo, despite their fierce asceticism, confidently wove Pleasure, Desire, and Gratitude into a line sturdy enough to carry us up into God’s embrace. Most Christians of that time braided this same line.

In our consumerist culture, and especially in the present financial crisis (which we suspect was brought on by greedy desires and the pleasures and power that money can buy) it won’t be easy to renew the crucial strands of our life line. But who is trying? For a single sermon commending pleasure or desire, we’ve probably heard twenty urging us to give or share because we ‘should be grateful.’ We’re in the grip of fearful Christian thinking from those bitter centuries that came to mistrust pleasure and desire.

The 14th century the Black Plague swept across Europe leaving in its wake a crippling mistrust of human flesh, largely focused in misogyny (why would men sin without a temptress?). As the Western church forced parish priests to put away their wives and live in celibacy, priests and patrons had artisan stone carvers carve the seductive temptress Eve and the horrors of a decaying woman’s body in the grave. Even then, though, there were other voices like Dame Julian of Norwich, who heard Jesus the Word saying that if there was any good thing he could have done to increase her pleasure and delight that he’d have gladly done it.

A few centuries later, Protestant reformers and the Catholic Inquisition furthered Christian mistrust of pleasure and desire. There are many such voices of warning, and a brief piece in the Café can’t re-weave the cord of pleasure, desire, and gratitude, but I can ask us to do the work. I’ll offer some accidental reflections on pleasure and desire and on gratitude, the third line, which makes it possible to braid a single, strong line.

1. Pleasure

“Thou Lord didst make all for thy pleasure,
Did give us food for all our days.”

Some readers will recognize this pair of lines from Francis Bland Tucker’s wonderful 1939 hymn, “Father we thank thee who hast planted.” The English text was brand-new in the 1940 Hymnal and people loved it, so it was kept for the 1989 Hymnal. I like to think that singing congregations’ delight in God’s pleasure contributed to the hymn’s success.

Tucker’s hymn paraphrases the Eucharistic Prayer from the Didache, a Jewish-Christian document from the late first or early second century (so, around 100 A.D.). Leonel Mitchell and Michael Merriman, two friends with many good years of liturgical teaching and practice between them, helped distill my question about who the Didache taught was experiencing pleasure. Lee looked back at the Greek to observe that in the original text God’s creation of all is ‘for his Name’s sake’ while God gave US food and drink ‘for our pleasure.’ And Michael recalled ancient Jewish blessings prayers (and some texts from the Psalms) that thank God for wine that ‘makes our hearts glad.’

Tucker’s neat synthesis for the hymn obscures something the Didache prayer emphasizes, that God gives food for OUR pleasure, so that it’s our pleasure that moves us to give thanks for God’s good gifts to us from the vast world of God’s creation.

My old congregation altered Tucker’s text to synthesize these ideas like this -
“Thou, Lord, didst make all for OUR pleasure.”

And then from pleasure in God’s gifts of food and life, we come to receive and enjoy God’s gift of Christ our true bread, and our pleasure at both moves us to offer awestruck thanks.

As an ex-Presbyterian, I’m tickled (maybe ought to be humbled) to hear my Puritan forebears fearlessly affirming their pleasure in God and creation. Eric Liddell, the ‘flying Scotsman’ who ran in the 1924 Olympics before going to China as a Presbyterian missionary famously said, ‘When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.’ And Liddell was simply echoing graceful wisdom from The Westminster Catechism of 1647, that Presbyterian voice from Cromwell’s England bold teaching that ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.’

Our pleasure delights God. Both giving us our daily bread and giving us Christ the bread eternal please God because both ordinary bread and Christ our living bread delight and pleasure us. We’re all of us the prodigal welcomed home to a Great Feast in OUR honor and for our pleasure. Receiving God’s vast blessings with pleasure moves us (makes us want or desire) to offer God our thanks. We’re in bolder and more paradoxical territory than ‘It is right to give God thanks and praise.’

2. Desire

‘Whoever does not dance, does not understand what is coming to pass.’- The Acts of John

Gospel scholar Joachim Jeremias in his Unknown Sayings of Jesus, argues that Jesus spoke this challenge in his lifetime. Naturally enough, early Christian liturgies did include congregational dance. The fourth century Easter Troparion—“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life.”—describes and celebrates Christians’ stomping dance to celebrate Christ’s Resurrection.

But some pastors and theologians feared that the pleasure and desire of dance tipped too easily toward sinful thoughts and whatever else might follow. In fact, like them, we find it hard to receive our bodies and our bodies’ irrational desires gratefully, so after only a few centuries, dance lost its place in Christian worship except in Ethiopia where it remained part of ordinary congregational life. Thank God that Anglican worship in other parts of Africa includes a renewal of drumming and congregational dance.

But speaking my gratitude skips a step. Like many other Episcopalians, I grew up in another church community, one where all dance was reckoned sinful. As it happens, my parents weren’t peddling the line, “we don’t dance.” For them dancing wasn’t a taboo. They admitted they didn’t dance because they’d never learned how and were afraid to begin. They didn’t dance, but they’d rejected their church’s moralism. These two faithful Christians joked about the undifferentiated morass of “don’ts” they’d grown up with in Christian Endeavour – not just no smoking and drinking, and no dancing (because dancing ‘led to other things’), but also no playing cards (not even Old Maid), and no movies or physical labor on Sunday. We didn’t go to movies on Sunday to avoid offending weaker sisters or brothers. My dad was a physician. My parents said they didn’t smoke because of the health risk.

1960. I wince to think of Fridays in junior high school gym class. Friday gym period was a sock hope. Once the girls were in place, their gym teacher would put a 45 record on the turntable, our cue as guys to pad across the polished floor in our socks and ask a girl to dance. ‘I don’t dance’ was not an excuse. ‘You’re here to learn.’ I always crossed the floor as slowly as I could. One day on the other side, I found that fate left the girl who was universally reckoned most desirable of our whole class standing alone against the wall. I approached her cautiously and asked, barely speaking, “May I have this dance.” She grimaced and said, “With you? You’ve got to be kidding.” The gym girls gym teacher insisted she had dance with me. I didn’t die, though I felt like I might.

An intellectual pal who was easy to talk with and only happened to be a girl classmate suggested I put some music on at home and try ‘just wiggling’ in front of a full length mirror. I tried. Even with no one watching, I couldn’t cut loose and wiggle my hips. Sunday School had frozen my hip joints, spine and shoulders. Though I felt stupid, I knew condemning words like ‘profane’ and ‘lewd,’ lay in wait for me if I let the music move my body. I wanted to dance, and I wished my body could hear, but the music drenched my cells in adrenaline for flight.

I first got what I wanted in a high school visit to an Episcopal Church. Hearing the Christian call to prayer, “The Lord be with you,” unlocked my hips and I knelt. My body in that small way was expressing something that mattered to me. The joy at bending knee and hip for prayer was so exhilarating that I refused to hold myself back, so went forward to kneel at the rail to receive communion, even though I wasn’t confirmed and knew I was breaking the rules to receive. This was an altar call I welcomed joyfully.

Finally had desire unlocked what was frozen. Desire hadn’t let me rest, and in the end it moved me to a path I’m still pursuing. Gregory of Nyssa in his Commentary on the Song of Songs says that we are most like God in our infinite desire.

3. Gratitude

‘Give thanks in all things.’
- I Thessalonians 5:18,

In college I discovered folk dancing. Learning each new dance, I still felt like the tin woodman with un-oiled joints, but after several rote repetitions of the stiff-jointed angular movements, music and repetition unlocked my joints, movement flowed. I was dancing. I loved that breakthrough moment when I could feel real dance beginning. Gratitude came with the promise of freedom. For the next dozen years, circle and line dances from around the world offered me a place I could move with music.

When I married Ellen I wanted to live deeper into that freedom and really dance with her. Some shuffling memory from junior high school plus a little bounce from folk dancing at least got us the dance floor. For me, a crowded dance floor felt best. Less visible. One day about eight years after we were married, Ellen and I were at an Episcopal Social Ministries Benefit Tea Dance at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel. A couples’ elegant ease with big stand style dancing captivated us. They weren’t showy, but they moved together as we wanted to, so when the band took a break, I asked where they’d learned to dance. ‘We teach’ they said. I wrote down time and address and the next Sunday we started ballroom dancing lessons. For three years we hardly missed a week. Week by week for three years, we danced our way to deeper understanding and love. Learning to dance together was as deep as any conversation we’d ever had.

There’s the three braid strand - pleasure, desire, and gratitude. I started this reflection with pleasure. Braiding, each is equally essential. I might have told other stories if I’d begun with desire or gratitude, but once braiding has begun, each is line is important in turn, and as Christians of the first centuries knew, together they carry us to Life.

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

By Heidi Shott

After a number of years together, my husband and I determined that we are not meant to be opponents. We can’t play singles tennis; we can barely play ping-pong. We end up feeling bad whether we win or lose. So instead we ski and scuba dive together when we get the chance. There’s no winning or losing, just companionship and wonder. Recently I came to realize that my desire not to whip my husband also applies to my sons and almost everyone else.

I was wasting some time on a game of computer hearts. The game allows you to name the dealer as well as your opponents. For a few weeks I’d been dealing under the name of one of my sons who’d been fiddling around with my computer. But that evening I decided to re-christen myself dealer and name the three other players after my husband and our twin boys. After a few hands, I felt awfully sad. I can’t bear to beat my loved ones, even virtually.

So I thought about people I’d really like to cream. One name, a boss from early in my career, rose to mind immediately, but for the other two – I’m pleased to report – I had to dig down deep. I finally settled on a particularly difficult member of an organization I used to work for and a vindictive college dean about whom I will say nothing because my mother taught me not to say mean things about dead people.

Suddenly, playing computer hearts became exceedingly fun.

While I didn’t mind losing a hand to these three people, I began to take tremendous pleasure in beating them. I thought about what they had in common: one man, two women; two from Maine, one from Virginia; two professional contacts, one academic. What was it that allowed me to hold this antipathy all these years? Then I hit upon it: All three of these people had, at one time, made me feel very small and unworthy.

God has made us so vulnerable, particularly when we are young. An unkind word, a public humiliation, a thoughtless putdown can stay with us over the course of our lives. I have a friend who worked as a newspaper intern during a college summer. One day the paper’s popular columnist carelessly told him, “You can’t write.” It was a throwaway line, but my friend believed it for about 15 years until he took a job that required writing everyday. After awhile he realized he was a very good writer. It had never occurred to him to brush aside what the columnist had said.

On the other hand, those moments when we are singled out, praised and recognized can change the entire course of our lives. We become like spaniels, eager to please, full of good will and belief in all we are capable of.

Here’s a confession: I often think kind things about people, but seldom take the time to tell them. Last week, my sons and I went to a niece’s sixth grade Colonial history play. Though she and her family live nearby, in the busyness of daily life, we seldom connect. After the performance, she approached us to say she was delighted we had come. Will it matter that we attended? Who knows? But I think supporting her interests and cheering her successes over the years will matter a great deal, if we can keep it up.

Practicing the habit of kindness is my discipline this Lent – my plan is to take a moment to write one kind and encouraging note or email to someone who won’t expect it. It’s impossible to know when the stray compliment or the “well done” will indelibly mark someone’s life. As that anonymous 17th Century nun has often been quoted:

“Give me the ability to see good things in unexpected places, and talents in unexpected people. And give me, O Lord, the grace to tell them so.”

The habit of kindness can be practiced in all of our worlds – among our families and friends, in our congregations, in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods. It’s free, it’s Christ-like, and, unlike ping-pong, everybody wins.

Heidi Shott is Canon for Communications and Social Justice in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

By Kathleen Staudt

On the Sunday of the Transfiguration, February 22, I began my day in summer sunshine, sitting on a patio in Sidney, Australia watching the sailboats and ferry boats that were just beginning their day, and reading, for my morning devotion, the story of the Transfiguration. We spent those last 12 days of Epiphany “down under,” -- away from the awful brushfires though they were very much in our awareness all over Australia, a national tragedy—and mostly by the sea. For us it was a sojourn into summertime, a conference by the southern beaches (our reason for going) along the Great Ocean Road, and four days of pure vacation on a tropical island in the Great Barrier Reef, living alongside Creation at its liveliest – with nesting birds and turtles, and a whole colorful and unimagined world right under the surface of the water, off the beach, on a part of the reef that still seems healthy and beautiful. It was a time of reconnecting with my “summer self” – the me who spends time each morning in summer on the patio, writing poems and watching the birds, claiming that season as the time of regrouping and regeneration that the summer is for those of us who live by the academic calendar.

Even sitting there that Sunday morning I knew it might be hard to remember my “summer patio self” by the end of the day. Because the end of the day would be almost a day later. Before February 22 ended for us, we would be back in Washington, in freezing cold weather, and ready or not, called to jump back into the busy life of teaching and formation that is characteristic of my winter-time --- AND it would be Lent 3 days later!

Now, a week later, after a wonderful whirlwind weekend of teaching, barely recovered from jet lag, I look back on that time on the patio as a quiet example of what the Transfiguration story gives us: a lamp shining in the darkness, the letter of Peter calls it; a moment on the summer patio, sipping tea, resting in the quiet of a Sabbath morning on the harbor, reflecting on what it means to be invited into the presence of the living Christ and seeing, just for a moment, that it’s all true. I wonder if those disciples connected, just for a moment, with their own deepest selves, the part of themselves that was called out and loved – as he showed them, just for a moment, that ‘yes – it’s all true”; and they heard “This is my Son, the beloved” – before they headed back down the mountain to discover how much work there was to be done, how much the world needed healing, and dealt again with their own inadequacy to the task of healing and reconciliation that called them back down the mountain.

This Lent, the vastness and smallness of the world, revealed through the time of travel, offers a special gift to me: I am hoping that the memory of my “summer self,” sitting with Jesus on that patio down under, will stay with me this season, as I enter the swirl of activity that this season inevitably brings for someone engaged in retreat and formation work. Perhaps that time as my summer self is the “lamp shining in the darkness” that I’ve been given, this Lenten season.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt (Kathy) keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

When I was around seven-years-old, I began praying every night for a baby sister whom I promised God would be named Hope Ann McDonnell with initials that would give her the nickname of HAM. Although I have no idea where I got that name and she never arrived, I realized as an adult that I stayed stuck in hope with no actualization.

Hope. Friends around the globe contacting me about the inauguration of President Obama constantly use this inspiring word. How brilliantly I experienced it that day on the Mall when our gold embossed invitation with silver gate tickets only served to propel us into a crush of humanity. In trying to escape, we somehow landed in the Museum of the American Indian where, to our amazement, we witnessed the swearing in on a giant screen while sipping hospitably-offered hot chocolate. We and some 500 others crowded up the spiral staircase constituted a Mall microcosm from many nationalities, ethnic groups and states, united for that moment in the personification of hope and the ideal use of that special edifice. We took pictures of those around us happily holding up our official invitations, which never could equal our own celebration. Open to serendipity, our experience was far better than our original hopes for the day.

As the days have unfolded since my peak experience on January 20th, I’ve been wondering what we really mean by hope and how to keep it alive with the worsening world news from the media and our new president who based his campaign on “The Audacity of Hope.” Certainly we seem to be living the cliché “ hoping against hope.”

Webster’s dictionary defines hope as 1) the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. 2) to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence. 3) To believe, desire or trust. 4) A person or thing in which expectations are centered.

These definitions suggest that the focus of hope is outside of us – on events in the future, another person or thing. Much easier to seek there for salvation, yet here is President Obama insisting that our hope lies in all of us forming a community to work with him and each other, a familiar refrain from clergy in dying churches and other leaders in stuck organizations. Even though we know that no leader can be the Messiah, we human beings continue to behave like Jesus’ disciples, who expect Him to fix things while they refuse to look at themselves or draw on their inner resources where real hope for change and a new life lies.

Hope begins at home in our families. Almost everyone who calls my office for the first time hopes to improve a relationship with a loved one. Usually they want to change another person to achieve their desires. One of the first steps in an assessment plan is to examine expectations of others and ourselves. Are expectations realistic or merely distractions from more important questions? Do we want to change in someone else a characteristic or habit we don’t like in ourselves? Often if we work on the very thing we want our spouse, partner, child, parent, friend to change – voila! His or her change occurs while we looked away to work on changing ourselves. A person cannot stay the same if a motivated leader shifts his or her position in the family (or church or any institution.)

I refer to this as the “as if theory,” in which I coach clients to practice living as if hope for another is possible while refocusing on better defining themselves, as if their heart’s desire were attainable. We talk about practicing “futuristic positivity,” a term created by the neuropsychologist Angelo Bolea. He explains that the brain has both positive and negative neurons but the negative outweigh the positive by a two to one ratio. Why? Our great, great ancestors needed to protect themselves by sensing the worst possible outcome in order to survive, a defense mechanism we can now outgrow to our benefit. Just watch your child function more maturely when you practice naming the positive strengths in him or her.

Futuristic positivity is practicing the “as if” vision without being locked in to an expected outcome. Sometimes this focus on hope is best conveyed by how we express our attitudes rather than what we say. Sitting quietly. Standing tall. Looking someone in the eye. Listening. Breathing deeply. Kneeling to pray. Laughing out loud. Walking through the wind and rain with hope in our hearts though our dreams be tossed and blown.

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”
--Barbara Johnson

Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C, has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, during which she served on his faculty, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.

By R. William Carroll

Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

Just think what it would’ve been like to be her. There she lay, sick and at risk. Almost certainly afraid. Back then, fevers were serious business. Even today, they are signs of danger. But Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. And her fever left her.

What a moving story it is. What powerful emotions those around her must have felt. Perhaps it stirs up something primal in us as well. How we long for Christ’s presence in our moments of grief and distress. How we long for him to take our hand and lift us up, whenever we find ourselves brought low.

Throughout the Scriptures, we see God doing the same. In today’s Psalm, we read that God lifts up the lowly but casts the wicked to the ground. Another proclaims that “the LORD sets the prisoners free, the LORD opens the eyes of the blind; the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down.” God is not afraid to take the side of those who have no one else to help them. When we find ourselves at our lowest, we can depend on God.

It was thus with Thomas Dorsey—not the band leader but the African American Gospel musician of the same name. It was a parishioner at the congregation I serve who first shared with me the story of how he came to write Precious Lord. It was shortly after the death of his beloved wife Nettie in childbirth and the subsequent death of their newborn son that Dorsey penned the words to this beloved hymn. Later, it became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. Mahalia Jackson sang it at Dr. King’s funeral. The first verse goes like this:

Precious Lord, take my hand Lead me on, let me stand I am tired, I am weak, I am worn Through the storm, through the night Lead me on to the light Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home

These words are a moving meditation on the Savior’s presence in moments of grief and pain. They exude faith that, no matter how bad things get, Jesus will lead us home. Whatever trouble we face, however beaten down we are by the world or our fellow human beings, Jesus has been there before us. In the words of the great spiritual: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows but Jesus.” If we but call on him, he will come and show us the way. Dorsey’s words come out of the particularities of his own suffering. They are deeply rooted in the tradition and historical experience of the Black Church. But, like any classic text, they have in fact become universal. They apply equally well at a deathbed or in prison. They can soothe a broken heart or console a grieving parent. They provide hope and strength for us in times of loss, danger, and struggle--whenever we are tired, weak, or worn.

Jesus takes us by the hand and lifts us up, but that’s not the end of the story. It continues: “The fever left her, and she began to serve them.” So it is with us. When Jesus heals us and becomes our Savior, we are pressed into service. There are times in our life where it is enough to be near Jesus, when it suffices to bask in his love. But Jesus did not call us, nor did we answer, so that we could stand still. Jesus did not call us, nor did we answer, so that we could stay the same. The call of Jesus is a call to serve. Indeed, he himself once said that he came not to be served but to serve. When Jesus lifts us up from low places, he always also sets us free to serve those around us.

Think about it in terms of a beloved hymn that we often sing during the season after the Epiphany. I want to walk as a child of the light. I want to follow Jesus. To follow him means to go wherever he may lead. He is the star who goes before us as we walk the pilgrim way. And we do so gladly, because he has set us free.

It’s not an easy path Jesus lights up before us. When he walked it, it led him through the valley of the shadow of death. His path is strewn with suffering and death. Even there, his light shines, showing death to be the gateway of eternal life. With Jesus at our side, we can face even this. Listen, once again, to another verse from Dorsey’s hymn:

When the darkness appears And the night draws near And the day is past and gone At the river I stand Guide my feet, hold my hand Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.

The Christian hope is that we can cross safely over Jordan, over the frontier that divides life from death, without fear, resentment, or regret. Our hope as Christians is that nothing—no, not even death itself—can separate us from Christ’s love. We stand at the river bank with him, confident that he will lead us home.

In this hope, we can continue to put one foot in front of the other, day by day, and do the work of love. No matter what the cost. No matter how tired or afraid we may become. No matter what dangers or doubts may stand in our way. The love of Christ urges us onward. Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

The Rev. R. William Carroll serves as rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio (Diocese of Southern Ohio). He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His sermons appear on his parish blog. He is a novice in the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis.

By Ann Fontaine

Making my rounds as Chaplain Ann in the Veterans' Administration nursing home I came to the door of a man whose first words were – “I don’t need a chaplain unless you brought me a gun!” – a startling introduction to my summer of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).

I did not really want to be in the nursing home, I wanted to be in some sexier rotation like Emergency or Liver Transplants. I drew the short straw and ended up with 120 men and 6 women – a somewhat different population mix than your average parish. All were veterans of wars from WWI to Vietnam. Many were estranged from their families due to the life of a career military person or alcohol or drug abuse. I was newly graduated from seminary and fulfilling the requirement in our Diocese that all clergy take CPE before becoming a priest. The real chaplain at the nursing home was an Assemblies of God career military chaplain. So, great, I thought, me—Episcopal, woman, liberal, anti-war, Harvard Divinity School graduate, and him – Assemblies of God, doesn’t believe women can be pastors, career army. He delighted in calling on me to provide ex tempore prayers and putting me on the line to witness my faith.

As I came to the man’s room that day – anger was all around – in me and in him. One thing I had learned a year before when I was very sick and in the hospital, wondering if I would see my next birthday, is the powerlessness of a patient. I was at the mercy of anyone who wanted to come in and poke or prod me. Invasion of space is the norm for a patient, so I decided I would not go into the patient’s space without invitation. I drew an imaginary line beyond which I would not go. Since these were usually double rooms, it meant the area that the so-called privacy curtain surrounded. If the patient showed signs of me being too close, I would back off even more.

Standing at the edge of that space, I am sure my jaw dropped open, but I tried to remain a non-anxious presence and said, “No, I did not bring a gun.” He said that he did not want to see me if I would not bring him what he wanted. I told him okay but I would be around all summer and if he wanted a visit – I would be there. This interchange continued everyday for a couple of weeks. When he discovered that I was not going to push my chaplain shtick on him, he began to talk, I think so I would stay a little longer.

It turned out that he had had surgery and a nerve had been accidentally cut leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He went into surgery physically able to spend hours fishing on his boat and enjoying life. Now he was looking at a future confined to a wheelchair. He talked about how he was estranged from his family and told me other things about his life. He had no hope and wanted to end his life. During every visit he would ask for a gun. Every visit I told him I could not do that. Often we would sit out in the courtyard in the sun for our visits, with him still full of anger about the life ahead.

I thought about his situation a lot and one day as I was driving to work crossing the river, I saw some people loading a boat with a hoist. I thought – maybe this could be a solution for the man. I could not wait to share the idea with him. He was out in the courtyard when I got to his part of my rounds, I told him what I had seen. I explained about the hoist and how one could be rigged up to place him in his boat so he could go fishing again. He was strong enough above the waist to do most anything. I said, “What do you think?” He said, “What if the boat tips over?” And in a moment of idiocy or grace I said, “Well, I guess that would solve your problem about the gun!” There was silence and I thought, yikes, I can’t believe I said that. Then he started laughing – deep laughter, so hard I thought he would fall out of his wheel chair. It was one of those things that worked and changed the whole dynamic but I still can’t believe I said it.

One of the things I learned that summer is men, especially, use anger to express grief. I often forget that when I first encounter the anger but usually the learning comes back to me and I can engage with them in a different way. I can sometimes find a way that will remove the roadblocks to our communication. I recoil from anger and don’t deal well with another’s anger, although I know that grief is often the core of my anger too.

I wonder if this is part of the anger that often emerges in the church. It can be good if the church is seen as safe enough to express actual anger at communal injustice and abuse. But when it is grief masquerading as anger – how can we help one another to mourn instead of striking out at one another?

Anger is not a bad thing but it can eat one up if it lingers on with no resolution. Do we need an internal checklist for ourselves when we react with anger or others react with anger?

Is the anger empowering me to take on injustice and abuse?

Or is it a morass of my own making?

Is this anger becoming a habit?

What is really going on?

Why do I care?

Do I feel powerless in this situation?

Am I angry that things are changing?

Am I afraid that all I trusted in is now worthless to others and by extension I am worthless?

What other questions might we ask next time we react with anger?

How might we approach those with whom we work and live who are angry?

By Greg Jones

What's in a name? In yours? In mine? Sounds. Meaning. Identity. These are in a name.

When we named our children, we considered how the names would sound. We considered the flow - the rhythm - the number of syllables, the way the names fit together. We considered, "What will people shorten it to?"

Sound is in a name. After all, and before all, language trips off the tongue before it is ever written down. Language is sound, and names are meant to be said, cried and whispered. In love, in friendship, in tears and laughter, in prayers. Names are to be spoken in the relationships which make up the fullness of human living. Names recall for us the essence of a person.

Jesus. Joseph. Mary. A single sounded word - a name - conjures to mind the whole person. Does it not?

What's in a name? In yours? In mine?

Meaning's in a name.

In ancient times, among ancient peoples, and among those intentional about understanding their own traditions, people are usually given names that plainly mean something. What's your last name for instance? Jones? It means son of John in Welsh. Cooper? It's English for barrel maker. And so forth.

My middle name 'Gregory' means watchful in Greek. What about yours?

I've always identified with the story of the young boy Samuel hearing his name called in the precincts of the holy place. I've always identified with it not only because my mother named me Samuel Gregory, but because like Samuel, it was my mother who first dedicated me to God. She gave me over to God in baptism, in worship attendance, in Sunday School, in Youth Group, in mission work with the poor and forgotten, in all the things the Episcopal Church does.

She gave me a first name of Samuel - gave me to God in the Church - and so I guess it's no stretch for me to find myself in the story of First Samuel.

It's fascinating to consider Samuel and his mother Hannah. She named him 'Samuel' which means in Hebrew 'His Name is God.' Which is to say that she gave her son a name which points away from him and toward God - toward YHWH. Samuel's very name points to God's name, and how befitting a one called before he was born to be a prophet. A prophet who did what God asked, even the hard parts.

How fitting that Samuel's very name implies an attentive and obedient servant - given that he was that by choice as well. "Here I am, Lord," said the boy Samuel.

What's your name? What's it mean?

Some of Jesus' followers had Hebrew names which point to God - such as Nathaniel which means 'God has given.' Many of his disciples had Greek names, such as Philip which means 'horse lover.' What is clear is that beyond their names given to them by their families, the disciples had to take on identity in Christ by their own choice and obedience - and as such they all got new names and identities added to their birth names.

Beyond your name, and mine, which may or may not plainly speak to your identity in Baptism - how much of your true identity, of who you think you are, of what you call yourself, is bound up in your response to God's calling you by name.

Samuel said, "Here I am Lord, your servant is listening."

Is that true of you and me as well?

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

By Peter M. Carey

In this time of year, it is customary for many of us to make New Year’s resolutions. With the ending of the calendar year, it is natural to look back over the last year and reflect about what has happened, and what we have done, and then to look ahead to see how we might smooth some of our rough edges, take care of our bodies, minds and spirits, and look ahead with hope. The trouble for us, however, is that many New Year’s resolutions only last a few weeks, or perhaps (if we’re really diligent) a month or two. If you frequent a gym, this is the most crowded time, but, no worries, within a few weeks the classes will thin out, and you will be able to get back to the Stairmaster or treadmill or bench press without any waiting.

A trouble with New Year’s resolutions is that they don’t seem to “stick” unless we really have dedicated ourselves to them, unless we have been “scared straight,” or until we have adopted a set of daily practices that lend themselves to a change of behavior, and not merely just a change of intention. As Mark Twain reminds us, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The promise of the Christian Faith is that God is with us, helping us always to turn to our better selves, and to grow into the fullness of who we are meant to be. This may sound like a cliché, but let me illustrate my point with three images: Scrooge, Groundhog Day, and “metanoia.”

First, we have the character Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Like so many stories of the just-passed Christmas season, we have all probably seen multiple adaptation of Dickens’ novel, from Mickey Mouse, to the Muppets, to Patrick Stewart from Star Trek, to older films depicting Scrooge and his visit from 4 night visitors. First he is visited by his recently deceased partner, Marley, wrapped in chains, clearly suffering in death for his chintzy life before he died. Marley tries to warn Scrooge, that he needs to change his ways, that he needs some new resolutions, some new ways of living. But, to enact a change, what follows are three ghosts, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

Scrooge is given the gift of remembering the past – even the hard parts of the past, to see a bit more about why he might have ended up this way. Not immediately, but gradually, his heart begins to be open again, to grow a bit more supple, to grow a bit larger. The ghost of Christmas Past offers Scrooge the gift of a wider perspective, to see himself in earlier times, when his heart was not so hardened. The ghost of Christmas present offers the gift of seeing the love, and also the poverty of the Cratchett family, to see what Joy they have, even while they don’t have much materially, they have an overabundance of love, compassion, and generosity. This vision is in contrast to his material riches, but spiritual poverty. His heart continues to open. Finally, the ghost of Christmas future paints a picture of heartache for the Cratchetts, as Tiny Tim has died for lack of good medical care, and the family is devastated, but not without Joy, and love and compassion, even as they mourn their loss.

As you know, Scrooge emerges from his slumber and immediately changes his behavior, he is Joyful, loving, caring and generous, and he begins immediately to make amends, and to give away what he has. His heart is opened, is supple, and he turns from his old ways.

The second character is Phil Connors from Groundhog Day. If you’ve seen the film, you will remember that Bill Murray’s character is a rather grumpy weather reporter who has been assigned to cover “Pauxutawney Phll” the groundhog who comes out on February 2nd and looks for his shadow. Anyway, Connors becomes “stuck” in the same day over and over again. At first, he does all he can to learn the background and interests of a romantic interest he has – so that the next day, he can go on a date with her. Along the way, he decides to learn the piano, because the skill at the piano remains with him each day, until he is a virtuoso. However, gradually, his interest in repeating the day moves beyond selfish aims. He becomes focused on an older man who is wandering the streets, homeless and hungry. At first Connors avoids him, but one day Connors learns that this man has died, and Connors is shocked, and devastated. So, the following day Connors does all he can to give the man food, to care for him. Gradually, living this day over and over again (somewhere like 100 times – it is hard to count the days while watching it), Connors’ character is transformed from a focus on self, to a focus on others. His focus becomes on helping others, and doing good for goodness sake. Finally, when his transformation is complete – and he falls in love, he awakes and it is February 3rd.

The third strand is the New Testament term “metanoia” which means “repentance” or “change of heart,” or “to turn.” Also, it can mean “to be converted.” It is used from time to time by preachers or people who think they can force us to change from the outside. But, more accurately, this “change of heart,” or metanoia is caused by the work of the Spirit. This transformation is a gift from God, a gift of perspective upon our past – the ghosts of our past, a gift of wider perspective about our present, and a gift of greater vision about the future that waits for us if we continue doing things the same old way. Some have said that insanity is “Doing the same things the same way but expecting change to happen.”

For the story of the wise men who visited Jesus, the change might have been so subtle that we didn’t hear it in those readings from Matthew at the start of Epiphany. However, though subtle in the text, this change of heart for the wise men was profound. King Herod’s chief emotional response is fear. This king is in fear of the possibility of a new king who will take over the land, and threaten his earthly rule. He sends these scholars, astronomers, these wise men, to go and “pay homage” to the child – but really, they are on a spy mission, they are there to gain information and report back to Herod – so that he might wipe out this child.

However, something amazing happened to the wise men; they were transformed. The gospel doesn’t say much, but what it does say is that they “went home by another way.” They encountered the Holy in Jesus in such a way that they could not go back to their old ways, their hearts were opened, and they turned, somehow, to a new way – literally “another way” back home.

Isn’t this the gift that we also have been given in the Spirit? Whether the image is of these wise men going home by another way, or it is the idea of metanoia, a “change of heart,” or the image of Phil Connors seizing the everyday opportunity for transformation, or the sense that the ghosts of our past, present, and future might offer us the gift of accepting Scrooge’s transformation?

So, sure, go ahead and make New Year’s Resolutions, but also accept the true gift that has been given to us, the gift of transformation in the Spirit – the gift of a supple heart, an open Spirit, and a richer and truer life that God desires us to have.

See you at the gym!

The Rev. Peter M. Carey is the school chaplain at St. Catherine's School for girls in Richmond, Virginia and is also on the clergy staff at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Richmond. He blogs at Santos Woodcarving Popsicles.

By R. William Carroll

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.

2 Corinthians 4:7-12

I’ve always loved Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians and especially this passage from the fourth chapter. The letter is from a missionary to a young church, and it speaks of Paul’s sufferings as an apostle. One of its great themes is the consolation that comes from knowing Christ, even (and especially) in suffering. I commend it to you in its entirety.

The letter has taken on new meaning for me in the past couple of weeks. It has always spoken to me in terms of spiritual suffering. Blessed few of us reach adulthood without our share of that. I’ve certainly had mine. But I think that since a recent hospitalization and diagnosis with the early stages of diabetes, the physicality of Paul’s sufferings have taken on a new meaning for me. In particular, I am struck by his statement that we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus.” Apparently, my diabetes is easily treatable, perhaps without medication and certainly (for now at least) without insulin. But it is still a serious health condition, the first I’ve had, and when I finally pass from this life, it may be what kills me.

Truth be told, we are always already carrying the seeds of death in our bodies. This side of Eden, mortality is the human condition. But illness of any kind or other milestones of aging make this fact, which we’d prefer to deny, present for us in a whole new way. The other day I had a conversation with one of the members of our parish, who told me that she and her friends spoke about this often.

The thought of our own death creates a choice. We can choose to withdraw further into denial or rage against perceived injustice. Or we can choose face the truth with eyes wide open and accept the gift of life for what it is. I am convinced that the Gospel always calls us to the latter path. For on it, we discover the secret of joy, as we draw closer and closer to the crucified and risen Jesus. On it, we find that his life has become our life, breaking the power of death over us. Perhaps it is only here that we truly begin to live.

“For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.”

The Rev. R. William Carroll serves as rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio (Diocese of Southern Ohio). He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He co-edits The Covenant Journal with Lane Denson, and his sermons appear on his parish blog.

By Donald Schell

In the six weeks since my dad died, my mind has been wandering a lot. I read the newspaper or an email and think about emptiness and wonder about death. I hear a disturbing piece of national or global news and by some crazy logic of faith or hope, I remember my dad’s death, and feel sorrow for others’ suffering and the uncertainties we face, and then I’m moved to gratitude that we’re all alive and in it together. I try to write something (like this) and sooner or later the act of reflection and listening reminds me of something about him.

When I quit being irritated with myself for being so unfocused, I notice that raw edge of my consciousness feels oddly open to contemplation these days. Driving home to San Francisco after my first visit with mother after dad’s death, dazzling sunlight on the trees and the glistening waters of Crystal Springs Reservoir shone with life like I felt when I was newly and deeply in love thirty-four years before. Each sweet inhalation of breath surged with the contradiction of being alive with my father newly dead.

My mind seems awake, but it goes where it will. This attention that isn’t mine feels full of contradiction. If I try to direct attention, it stays bound to something else, something that continues the grieving.

I’ve been thinking again how much grieving shaped my life even from my birth. I was born in 1947, about three years after my parent’s marriage. In those years of their beginning my mother’s father died of a heart attack and her brother, a B-24 pilot was lost in action over Taiwan, the remains of her brother and his crew finally found months later. My parents faced all that as they lived through not knowing whether my dad, also a bomber pilot would return from daylight bombing raids on German munitions factories. And when I was born my dad was twenty-five and my mother all of twenty-two.

It took my mother a quarter century to discover how completely her devastating losses had closed her down. My dad’s steady love for us (for mother, for me and my sisters and brother) carried her and all of us through until her suicidal crisis finally got her started with a good therapist. Until then she’d walked a bitter road cherishing the unpredictable breaks in her deep depression and fending off Christian friends from our church who told her she was just suffering a crisis of faith. With the therapist’s help she found her buried grief and learned to trust grief’s logic and let it take its course. Grieving gave her back her life.

Mother led the way and was our teacher in grieving, and we’re reminding her of it now. I have to remind myself that it’s all right that I’m moved by the radiant beauty of a stand of trees on a hillside, and tell myself not to be surprised when next morning I’m barely muster the strength and resolve to get out of bed. I’m trusting that the Spirit, Life, and the Lord Jesus are in both the radiance and the weariness.

Three books have made a difference to me, and each, in its way, was a gift. Some months before dad’s death my wife Ellen was reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Mother had given it to Ellen because Didion’s account of the year following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, touched her so deeply. Sometimes as Ellen read herself to sleep she wept and sometimes wanted to be held because Joan Didion spoke so plainly and uncompromisingly of loss.

As soon as Ellen had finished the book I read it. Joan Didion is an agnostic Episcopalian, someone who counts on a Prayer Book funeral at New York’s Cathedral St. John the Divine and Sunday liturgy to order her chaos and darkness, but who also firmly insists that there’s no eye on the sparrow. What she called ‘magical thinking’ in her title was another kind of ritual, her carefully avoiding markers of loss – not reading the obituary, not giving away her husband’s clothes and shoes as though he could come back to wear them. She watched herself hoping (against her own reason) that avoiding these markers would stop her loss.

Re-reading one of Dunne’s novels after his death, she wondered whether in his sudden massive heart attack, he himself felt what he’d written for a character - ‘a moment of terror’ and ‘eternal dark.’ Oddly I found these stark words another gift. And I was grateful she also told of the unseasonal fear as their daughter Quintana moved in and out of coma for months after her Dunne’s death. I thought of Didion’s book when I got the phone call that my dad had died.

On my flight home to California, my physician seat companion told me about his cousin’s new book about faith. His cousin the rabbi had debated Christopher Hitchins and the book took on the new atheists, but there was more to it. My seatmate would be seeing his cousin this trip, so he’d gotten himself a copy of the book. When he learned I was a priest, he asked if I’d read the author’s preface and tell him what I thought of it.

The book was Rabbi David Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters. I read the preface and three more chapters as we flew west, and I felt grateful to read the rabbi’s words the day my father had died. I wanted to remember why faith matters and he could tell me. My seatmate asked me to write his cousin a note about it, and then he gave me the book. I finished it the next day.

David Wolpe nearly lost his wife to cancer after their child was born, and then he suffered a brain tumor (benign) and a bout of melanoma (in remission after chemotherapy). Rabbi Wolpe tells his congregation, ‘Actually, we’re all in remission. Some of us just know it more clearly than others.’

David Wolpe writes reasonably and intelligently about faith – not specifically Christian faith (though he writes of our faith appreciatively) but a more generic monotheism that continues to trust some larger good than ourselves even when it refuses to prove it’s there. My busy pastor’s mind thought, ‘This would be a really good book for an inquirer’s group,’ but my heart was moved by it and touched unexpectedly. I took courage from David Wolpe’s courage in continuing to love and serve a God of compassion. Sometimes ‘my faith’ isn’t good enough to carry me through, but our faith is.

Each weekday morning Ellen and I read Morning Prayer together. I bring her tea in bed and we read (and talk about) the appointed readings. For our Psalter we’ve using Robert Alter’s stark, meticulous The Book of Psalms, a Translation with Commentary. Often we read Alter’s notes. He observes repeatedly that when a psalm says, ‘the dead do not praise you,’ that the writer means that is an abyss, a darkness. Writers of the psalms asserted that there was nothing or barely anything left of the person after death. Just silence and darkness without any lively intention to praise God.

One morning after my dad’s death, Ellen said that she was grateful that psalms said so plainly that death was death. It matched her experience of seeing my dad laid out on the floor after the paramedics had stopped CPR. He was gone. There was his body, but the life we’d known in that body, the man we’d loved was gone.

Now we’ve got his ashes in a closet in our house waiting the building of a memorial garden in my parents’ church. And dad’s not in our closet. It’s his ashes.

I was trying to understand (for whatever understanding is worth) why Didion, Alter, and Wolpe’s stark courage touched me, why ‘he suffered death and was buried’ is the part of the Nicene Creed that’s touching me most deeply righty now, and why, missing my dad as I do and appreciating in a thousand new ways how much he gave me through my lifetime, I’m determined to say that he’s gone. When people say, ‘Harold’s gone to a better place,’ I welcome their intended kindness, but also feel myself shut down at this vague ‘better place.’

Just last week talking to an old friend about my hunger to spend time with family, to be in the room with living, breathing with flesh descended from dad, to hear our stories and eat together. She said, ‘One dancer’s gone and you all are having to make a new choreography.’ Her words rang true. That image fit what we were doing and feeling.

How do we this ‘faith’ thing? That question is part of what keeps distracting me.

My wife is the real theologian in our family. I read and think about this stuff; she just gets it and tells it to me when I need to hear. Ellen was telling a much-loved priest friend of ours her satisfaction at the finality of death in the psalms, and he said, “Frederick Buechner says, ‘…dead as a doornail,’ and he’s right. Harold’s as dead as a doornail. That’s why we believe in the resurrection of the dead, not the immortality of the soul.”

My beloved theologian was on our friend’s argument like a hound after a rabbit. “’Dead as a doornail’ is just what he was,” she said adamantly. “so tell me about immortality and resurrection.” I needed to hear it too.

Our friend said he’d learned it from Charles Price, his old mentor from Virginia Seminary, and recently it had come up again in a book by John Garvey, Death and the Rest of our Life. As I listened, I wrote down the book title and within two days had gotten Garvey’s book and read it through. Charley Price and John Garvey agree, our hope that we’ve got an ‘immortal soul’ is a power move, claiming something about ourselves, something within us, that we desperately hope the abyss and darkness can’t destroy. A long shot, but a power within us. But Resurrection – Jesus’ and ours – is faith, our trust in God’s unfailing love.

It’s not some irreducible, barely glimpsed idealized essence of my dad that escaped and flew free from the fires of the crematorium. He’s gone, what remains is ash, is dead as a doornail. And the whole of him, the hands I marveled at as a kid when he played Rachmaninoff’s B minor prelude, the face that looked so much like mine and which, in the pictures I’ve got still teaches me to smile, the courageous heart that managed to squeeze almost eighty-seven years of living from a terrifying beginning as a preemie in 1921 and scarlet fever a few years later, the whole of that good man was, is, and will be held in God’s love. I don’t know what it means or looks like but I trust it - God’s initiative, God’s creative embrace that won’t let one vibration of one atom that was him out of the old/new whole of God’s making.

The Gospel writers are so determined that it’s God’s initiative that their preferred language for Jesus’ resurrection is that the Father “raised him up.”

The darkness, the abandonment, the devastation and decay and knowledge that we’re all just in remission and each of us alone faces a ‘moment of terror’ and ‘eternal dark’ must sink in, take hold, and be bitterly true. We’re none of us going to make out of this alive. None of us and nothing in us is any match for death. Nothing except the love of God.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago, and contributed to Music By Heart, (a collaboration of Church Publishing with All Saints Company's New Music Project), "What Would Jesus Sing", and "Searching for Sacred Space."

By Lauren R. Stanley

SPRINGFIELD, Va. – Grocery stores in this country are incredibly amazing places; really, they are. They’re light and airy and spacious and have literally tens of thousands of items for sale.

But they’re also incredibly scary places. They’re light and airy and spacious and have literally tens of thousands of items for sale. Which makes them very scary indeed for those of us who don’t have regular access to them.

So I have this love-fear relationship with grocery stores. I love to go to them and see all the wondrous items they have: fresh meat, fruit, vegetables, cereal, teas, coffees (oh, the smell of the coffee aisle!). But I fear going there, too, because they overwhelm me: Why do we need all those varieties of cereal? Where, pray tell, is the tea? And how can I possibly choose from all the varieties of apples?

I’ve just come back from three months in Sudan, living in a small town called Renk. It’s growing rapidly, with the return of thousands of Internally Displaced Persons, but it has very little in the way of food, especially fresh vegetables and fruits. There’s running water on a sporadic basis only, and it’s not clean. Electricity generally comes from generators for a few hours at a time. The roads are dirt, most homes are mud huts, most roofs are thatch. Life there is very, very basic.

So whenever I return to the United States, I find American grocery stores pretty overwhelming. There are simply too many choices and it takes time for me to adjust. I waited five days after my return before going to the store. I used up the last of my travel toiletries: toothpaste, shampoo, soap, baby oil, ear swabs. Much as I wanted to resupply, I couldn’t bring myself to face the complete overload that I knew awaited me there.

But then my little tube of toothpaste, which was turning a tad bit … um … yucky from all the heat in Sudan … began to flatten ominously. So I finally had to give in and face the great boogieman, the American grocery store.

The store I went to recently underwent a renovation, making it even bigger, even brighter, even more spacious. And it had even more items to sell than before. Just looking at all the fresh produce made my head swim. Apples! Oh, my, nice crisp apples, such a difference from the mushy ones in Renk. Bananas! Look how big they are! Five, six, seven kinds of lettuce … what a change from jejeer, the bitter greens we eat. Only the tomatoes didn’t faze me; we have a tomato farm on an island in the White Nile, so fresh, beautiful tomatoes, up to six per day, are a norm in my life.

Then I saw the cereal aisle … how in God’s name can we have so many varieties? Why? (Note: All those choices didn’t stop me from buying a box …)

And on and on, up some aisles, skipping others. Buying only those things I thought I needed, trying not looking at all the options. Every once in a while, I’d forget to keep my eyes averted and would see rows upon rows of pastas, or canned soups, or soaps, and I’d feel a moment of almost panic. Then I’d remember my list, pick one item, go find it, and move on.

Whenever I try to explain American grocery stores to my friends in Sudan, they don’t understand. They think I’m making it up. I’ve shown them pictures, even, but still, they can’t believe that Americans would have so much food in just one place, with so many choices to make. I have this dream of bringing a bunch of my friends to America just so I can take them on a tour of our grocery stores. It would be great fun to see their reactions, but then again, I’m worried that even one quick trip to the store might overwhelm them completely.

We are blessed in this country with an abundance, an overabundance, of goods. We have more choices than we can possibly need, more than we even can handle. In reality, we have too much. I know that by the end of my three months here, I’ll be fully adapted to all this abundance. Then I’ll go back to Sudan for another three months, and when I return next summer, I’ll have to work out this whole love-fear relationship all over again.

My prayer is that one day, I won’t have to do through this anymore, not because we have any less here, but because one day, there will be at least a modicum of abundance in Sudan as well.

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is a lecturer at the Renk Theological College, teaching Theology, Greek, Old Testament and English, and serves as chaplain for the students.

By Donald Schell

Wednesday, Day 1: hearing and telling, “My dad died”

5:30 a.m. New York time, my phone wakened me. It was my wife, Ellen, calling from San Francisco. 2:30 a.m. there. She said it simply, ‘Donald, your dad has died.’ I heard it but had no idea what to do next. Ellen spoke to my stammering silence, ‘Come home now, your mother needs you.’ Clarity.

Downstairs in the lobby, I told the night clerk I was leaving - “I have two more nights, but I’m leaving now. My dad died.” More than check-out: I needed to tell someone.

When I caught a cab, I told the cabbie, “JFK,” and as he pulled out added that I was grateful for his service because my dad had died. At the terminal I thanked him again and tipped extra, a thank you? Or penance for beginning his day with a death? Maybe both.

At the airport time dragged (or seemed to stop) until we got called for boarding. Soon we’d be airborne and I could sleep and maybe wake up closer to knowing dad had died. My quick silent prayer on the jetway surprised me – “Dad’s death is enough for the family to deal with just now,” I explained to God. Then stumbling over which of the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews would be flying to California on other flights, simply added, “Keep us all safe.”

I leaned my seat back, closed my eyes and welcomed merciful sleep, but an hour and half later, much too soon, I woke up thinking, “I’m flying home because my dad died this morning,” and wondering whether any of the other passengers were flying home for a funeral.

The man next to me began light chat that eventually went to his work, and when I learned he was a physician like my dad, I wanted to tell him. I must have been looking for the opening. “My Dad was a doctor too. I’m flying home because he died this morning.” My voice didn’t break.

He asked how my dad had died and invited me to talk about him.

For some months Dad had been worrying about a cluster of small physical ailments and mental lapses. Ever the physician, he was putting pieces together and wondering if he’d begun a decline (and what it would mean for him and for my mother).

My new friend wanted more diagnosis. I told him about Dad’s heart history, his childhood rheumatic fever, the damaged heart valve that had to be replaced twice, and his bypass. Combining his history and his dying in his sleep, my companion said it sounded like a heart attack. We agreed it seemed like a quick, easy end to a long good life.

I told him how dad’s flying a B-17 in World War II made him want to become a doctor and spend the rest of his life saving lives if he could. Then we landed.

I drove the hour south to San Jose repeating aloud, “My dad died.” I stopped the dark mantra when I left the freeway, then started it again when I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house, now “Mother’s house.”

Mother welcomed me with a hug and tears. Ellen too. Dad’s absence was a silence in the house. Ellen told again how she and our daughter had driven down at 3 a.m. and what a good job my brother had done. He’d been down visiting mom and dad for dinner and had stayed overnight in their guestroom, so he was there for mother when she woke to find dad not breathing.

When Ellen arrived Dad’s body was still on the floor where my brother had done CPR until the paramedics took over and then stopped it. Ellen had pulled back the sheet to see Dad’s face. She told me he’d looked like himself, surprisingly peaceful after the CPR, very still, but with a little color left in his cheeks and not yet cold. Now his body was downtown at the funeral home. It would be cold. He’d been dead for just over twelve hours.

I wanted to see Dad’s body. The funeral home insisted they needed two days to ‘arrange the features’ and ‘prepare for a viewing.’ I was frustrated. It had seemed simpler with Ellen’s dad.

Ellen and I stayed over at mother’s house. We slept in the guest room under the Monet prints Dad had found so fascinating. “I think the impressionists understood how the optic nerve and the brain work together to see,” he’d said. At dinner that night we’d been seven. We’d set the funeral for the following Friday. Drifting toward sleep, I thought, “It was our first dinner here without Dad.”

Thursday, Day 2: remembering

I spent the morning writing an obituary. Harold Newton Schell, October 30, 1921-October 15, 2008. Remembering felt good. After lunch Ellen and I drove back to San Francisco.

Friday, Day 3: tears

I woke in the dark – Ellen wasn’t in bed. I listened. She was writing on the computer in the next room – keyboard sound…then sobs. She caught her breath and was back. She’d wakened and decided to write something about dad –

‘Harold was my father-in-law for 33 years. My own father died when I was 29…my father-in-law’s heart had dodged a lot of bullets, as a premature infant taken by Caesarean section from his mother who was dying of brain tumor, from rheumatic fever that damaged his heart valve as a child, from two heart surgeries to replace the damaged valve and then replace the worn-out replacement fifteen years later. That good, faithful, wise heart loved so much and endured…that good heart. Shakespeare came to mind, Horatio’s words at Hamlet’s death: ‘now cracks a noble heart.’ I cannot think of a human being of whom the word ‘noble’ is more appropriate than Harold Schell. ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’

Horatio’s ‘noble heart,’ she told me, loosed her tears, imagining what courage had kept dad going and living well for so long, before ‘it cracked.’ Heartbreak. She’d lost her second father.

My older daughter and her partner arrived from England. Driving down to San Jose again, we each told our stories of the last two days, how we each heard of Dad’s death, our travels now converging, and more tentatively stories of him.

At the viewing an attendant showed us into a hushed, windowless room. Dad’s body lay in a draped cremation casket covered with a colored satin sheet up to his neck. When we scheduled this, they’d offered to dress him, but mother said, ‘No, please don’t. He’s dead.’ Dad would have enjoyed the Monet print they’d hung on the wall above him, but his “arranged” features look like someone else pretending to be him. This face they’d made from his flesh had lips pursed in a tight thin line. Even in sorrow or deep thought, his living face seemed ready to smile.

I wanted to speak to a body I knew. What here was familiar? I studied his chin. It looked right, despite the face above it. Then I lay my hand on his forehead and knew this is what I was looking for. I must have done this when I sat on his lap as a child. I knew every contour of the skull beneath the cold skin. I closed my eyes and spoke it silently to myself, “It’s him. No – his body, not him. He’d dead.”

Another crowd at mother’s house for dinner. Fortunately the church kept delivering food.

Saturday, Day 4: space

The flood of sympathy notes amazed me with vivid descriptions of his character, some from people who had only met him a time or two. More friends than I’d realized knew the man I loved.

Sunday, Day 5: Church and Mother’s birthday

Too soon after Dad’s death, it was Mother’s birthday.

My mother still works half-time as a Presbyterian minister, but this first Sunday after Dad’s death she wanted to go to a church where no one would know her. We went to a colleague’s church. Tears.

After church fourteen family members gathered in a hotel downtown to eat and celebrate mother’s birthday. We did actually celebrate with plenty of food and more talk. She welcomed the feasting, though with some tears.

My dad died and we can’t get enough of one another’s company. He would have enjoyed these gatherings, though at recent dinner gatherings he’d spoken less and watched more. But we felt his steady affection and, if he missed a joke, he’d ask to hear it again.

Day 6, Monday: the orphans’ club

Home again in San Francisco. I’d asked my oldest friend from college, K. to spend the day with us. Forty years ago, my first year of seminary, he was visiting when his father died five thousand miles away – I remember the distance. Mine died when I was three thousand miles away.

We gathered in our kitchen, my old friend, my daughter and her partner, Ellen, and me. One by one I ask for the stories of lost parents, stories I already know. K. talked about his father’s death and why his father hadn’t told him he was dying, and about his mother’s death, and about the feelings that linger. Ellen told of hearing about her father’s heart attack, how he collapsed on the dance floor at a wedding rehearsal party, when she was also three thousand miles distant. My daughter’s partner talked of the slow disease that had wasted his father’s mind and body in a death that gathered family and began the grieving before the dying that made the death sadder because it was such a relief. Ellen told the story of my dad’s death again. Phone call from my brother. Drive down.

Paramedics. My daughter said she was not part of this orphans’ club and didn’t want to be soon. I promised to do my best to keep her ineligible for membership. Ellen’s dinner is a little feast, chicken and a Mediterranean rice with nuts and dried fruit bits.

For the last few days of his life Dad hardly ate anything, but he’d been losing his appetite for a year. My rock of strength who’d taught me tenderness grew thin and frail. Until I was thirty, this man whose love I knew so well never said the words, ‘I love you,’ or hugged a greeting or a good-bye. The love was evident in every way, and when I began greeting him with a hug, he seemed to welcome it, and with good-bye hugs, even began to reply in kind to my, ‘I love you, dad.’

So it was thirty years ago, that I began drawing strength from holding his muscular back in a hug. Then for the last few years, I’d felt the bony ridge of his spine and the plane of his shoulder blades beneath his sweater and wished I could pour strength back into him.

Day 7, Tuesday: weary

No energy. It was early as usual when the alarm went off, but up? Slowly. Wearily. That afternoon, like several others, I took a nap because I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Day 8 and 9, Wednesday and Thursday: the banquet

Each day we drove to San Jose, the dinner gathering was larger. My father’s sister and her husband had arrived. More nieces and nephews too. More grandchildren – our next generation’s two priests, my son and his wife from D.C. We crowded ourselves in tight to eat. Food just kept coming.

“On this mountain, I will make a feast for all peoples, and take away the mourning veil that covers the nations.”

My dad died and we talked, told stories, and laughed. Sometimes someone cried. We talked of dad’s medical practice, family vacations, old history a generation or two back, and we pieced together our few tiny glimpses of his B-17 bomber missions in World War II. Questions we’d like to ask him sneaked up on us, and his stillness, the answers he couldn’t offer silenced us for a moment.

Day 10, Friday: the funeral

Our youngest son, my brother-in-law, and my sister-in-law made our gathering complete. Mother had asked Judy, her Presbyterian pastor colleague, to preach. I was on the platform to lead family rememberings, one of three Episcopal clergy (my son and his wife, also vested, sat by me to lead prayers). I looked out on the church where I’d grown up, where my parents and grandparents had grown up, and surveyed the faces. My Jewish son-in-law and his parents, friends from our Episcopal church in San Francisco, second cousins I hadn’t seen for thirty or forty years. Faces I didn’t know - people who would tell us afterwards that they’d been dad’s patients, ministry colleagues of mother’s.

It really was the promised mountaintop gathering in Isaiah, all peoples. This healing work was holy and deeply human.

We gathered a lot of people to remember and give thanks for Dad’s life, worked to say what we believe and see how true it rang, we cried and took the time to feel our loss. Then after a long and noisy reception (in which we just avoided reciting ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee,” which would have delighted my dad) family adjourned to mother’s house…for half a dozen large pizzas, another feast.

Day 11 Saturday: good-byes

Saturday began the good-byes. Our two sons and a daughter-in-law, two cousins, my aunt and uncle soon to follow. No one wanted to break the group, but beyond that, good-byes felt plain risky. We knew more clearly than we’d like to that every one of us was mortal.

Day 12, Sunday: my friend’s church again, more Gospel, more tears

The Gospel reading – Jesus choosing two commandments to summarize the whole of God’s law – to love God heart and soul and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That’s what church is for. My dad joked that no one ever truly became a doctor, and that he was just “practicing” medicine. We’re glad to be back here just practicing Christian life with our little bits and pieces of loving our neighbors and accepting their love. We drove back to Mother’s for another big family dinner.

Day 13, Monday: more good-byes

Driving my older daughter and her partner to the airport, I told them about the end of Mom’s, Dad’s and my visit with them in the U.K. eighteen months before. I told them how we’d gotten lost driving from their place down to London. The M-1 was closed and detours sent us off the main road without further directions. I was driving and Dad was navigating. We had good maps, but the old pilot for all his pride in reading them kept losing his place. At a rest stop I quietly asked mother to take over. “I can’t do that to him,” she’d said.

Our last afternoon in England, I took them to see Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare’s Globe. At lunch before the play, mother wasn’t at the table when Dad said, “I was afraid one of us might die on this trip.” He was already thinking about it, watching his health, knowing he needed to make his peace. After the play he said, “Shylock was right. The Christians weren’t acting much like Christians.” It concerned him.

Day 18, Saturday: All Saints Day

A week and a day after the funeral Ellen and I drove down for an intimate All Saints Day celebration at mother’s church. Judy, mother’s clergy friend presided and Mother preached. We sang “For All the Saints” with a young M.D. colleague of Dad’s accompanying us on piano.

After the service he gave me a flu shot from the store of vaccine that the Medical Society had asked Dad to dispense, and then he told a story he said would have made my Dad smile and laugh. Only an hour before Dad’s funeral, this friend was seeing patients in clinic, and one had a cardiac arrest. The young doctor had gotten the man’s heart going again, turned him over to the paramedics, and made it to the funeral just as it began, and yes, the patient had made it.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company. He contributed "What Would Jesus Sing", and "Searching for Sacred Space" to Music By Heart, (a collaboration of Church Publishing with All Saints Company's New Music Project).

By Heidi Shott

A few days ago my 14 year-old son Colin and I were walking down Main Street past Reny’s Department Store when a woman I’ve known for years flagged us down. I’ll call her Jenny. I’ll call her Jenny because Jenny is – well -- her name. That’s the kind of town Damariscotta, Maine, is. It’s a town where you call people by their real names because sooner or later everyone’s real name will end up in the police blotter of The Lincoln County News. As in “Heidi Shott, 45, of Newcastle, dog-at-large, $100 fine.” I don’t have a dog, but I was once busted for having improper life vests in my dingy and, boy, did I hear about it.

But back to Jenny.

“I have a funny story to tell you,” she said, walking up to us on the sidewalk. “Last year at the hospital league rummage sale, I bought a little roller L.L. Bean suitcase for Sarah for 50 cents to take to Camp Bishopswood. As I was packing, I realized I didn’t have the ‘what to bring’ checklist. Where could I find the ‘what to bring’ checklist at the last minute?”

Perhaps at www.bishopswood.org? the diocesan communicator in me wanted to suggest, but I realized it would impede the flow of her funny story which she was telling me solely because of our Episcopal Church connection.

“So,” she continued, “I was cleaning out the suitcase and found a Bishopswood ‘what to bring’ checklist inside one of the pockets with ‘Colin’ written on it.”

That got my attention. “Was the suitcase green and maroon?” I asked.

“Yeah!”

“That was Colin’s suitcase we donated to the rummage sale,” I said, letting a loud Hillary-laugh escape me to the stares of passers-by.

“And it had the ‘what to bring” checklist at the very moment I needed it!” Jenny repeated, still in wonder.

“That’s crazy!”

“It’s great!” Jenny said as she waved and ducked into Reny’s.

“That is crazy, Mom,” said Colin, my loving little Deist, walking along to the coffee place. “But don’t get any ideas, it’s not a God thing. It’s just a coincidence.”

Frankly, I’m with Colin on that. While I don’t want to put God in a box, surely the God of the Universe has better things to attend to than orchestrating the whereabouts of camp packing lists. But something is at work in my encounter with Jenny, and I think it has something to with Facebook.

I’ve been wondering for a few months about why the people I’ve become friends with on the social networking site Facebook are the types of people who faithfully post status updates. For non-Facebook people, status updates are one sentence descriptions of what you’re doing, thinking, feeling at the moment you post them. When you sign-on to Facebook and click “Friends,” you instantly see what your friends have posted.
Here are the five latest postings by my friends.

V is wondering where the photos I uploaded have disappeared to....radda radda radda.

W immediately needs a sharp stick.

X is writing on his back porch under a perfect blue Maine fall sky.

Y says "buy, baby, buy!"

Z is, arrrghhh....anxiously awaitin' for Talk Like a Pirate Day, ye scurvy dog!

Thirty-five of my 100 or so friends have posted a status update in the past 24 hours. They hail from 20 states and represent a broad definition of the word friend. There’s Nora, a Silicon Valley mega-executive who sat next to me in seventh grade homeroom and math class. She was paying attention in math while I daydreamed. There’s a very interesting grad student from Chicago, Agnieszka, introduced to me by an acquaintance who thought we’d like each other because we both have pet rabbits and a sense of humor. And he was right, at least that we’d like each other.

While there’s a disproportionate number of Episcopalians, there’s also my niece Mary, a special ed. teacher in California whom I hardly ever get to see. The beauty of the Facebook status updates is when I fire up my laptop and check, I suddenly know that “Mary is sitting on her deck in the sunshine eating cold pizza.” How else would I know that? What a lovely mental picture of my delightful niece and how I wish I were with her at that moment!

A few weeks ago I posted this status update: “Heidi finds it curious that when she visits other people's profiles not as many of their friends post status updates. Is she a SU magnet? Theories welcome.” Here’s another interesting component to status updates: You can comment on your friends’ updates.

Peter, a high school chaplain from Richmond whom I’ve never met, replied that high school kids think status updating is uncool.

Susie, an editor friend from New York, added, “I think we update our statuses (statii?) more often because we have the kind of friendships that -- even though our work lives make it hard to physically get together often enough, or even have time to pick up the phone or write a mid-length e-mail (much less a LETTER!) -- we want to be able to keep in touch and up-to-date in microbursts.”

Scott, an association executive and college friend, wrote from Columbus, “high school kids don't need to update their status. Their worlds are small enough that they see each other all the time!”

Jim, an interesting diocesan communicator from Florida who doesn’t do status updates commented, “I’m just not that interesting.”

To which Phil, a photographer from Georgia who was my much beloved partner at a newspaper 20 years ago, responded, “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

Jim and Phil would really get along, but they’ll probably never meet. And with Facebook that’s okay.

Seven or eight years ago I wrote a column titled, “The Kingdom of Heaven is where the Fed-Ex lady tracks you down.” It was about how when our local Fed-Ex lady, Sue, couldn’t find my husband at his office, she would look for his car downtown then stop in where he was eating lunch to deliver the package. That’s the kind of town Damariscotta, Maine, is. That’s the kind of connection people thirst for in the world. What I’m observing as a member of Facebook is that with people from all points of my life’s compass there is an intersection of knowing and being known that is delicious, addictive and immediate.

For all the anonymity of the big box stores and sprawling suburbs, we yearn for connection, to be recognized, to delight and be delighted in. Just yesterday afternoon, Susan, a friend and colleague from Washington, D.C., called to say she and her husband Lance were in Maine staying with a couple who, just last spring, moved from D.C. to our little town. I invited the four of them over for drinks, and we had a short but lovely visit. This morning, I stopped for coffee downtown and was heading back to my car when I bumped into Susan’s friend who’s new to the community. We stopped in the parking lot and chatted for a few minutes. We wouldn’t have recognized one another had she not been to my house the previous evening, but now, suddenly, instead of passing one another by in our busyness, there’s a new connection, a new friend.

I wonder about the role of the Church in this. What Facebookian structures could we create in our institutions to give us permission to befriend one another in our daily real lives? On the road from Emmaus, Jesus struck up a conversation with his fellow travelers that was life-transforming. Of course, Jesus was kind of exceptional, but doesn’t Paul remind us of the “Christ in you, the hope of glory?” Isn’t the ability to reach out hardwired into us by the Spirit, available to us through Him, our friend, who loves us? Isn’t knowing and being known rather glorious?

One last story: A year ago, on our way to pick up our sons from Camp Bishopswood, my husband Scott and I stopped for breakfast at Moody’s Diner, a Maine institution. It was crowded and the only two seats were at the counter. I struck up a conversation with an older gentleman to my left whose wife, it turned out, was sitting four places down from us. Over the course of the conversation we discovered two astounding things from this couple visiting Maine from Tampa: first that their daughter-in-law went to high school with Scott in Bluefield, West Virginia, and her father played golf with Scott’s father for 30 years, and second that their daughter and I had gone to college together and were in the same German class for two years.

“That’s crazy!” Scott and I said to each other, walking out of Moody’s on our way to gather our sons from Bishopswood – where at that very moment a crumpled “what to bring” list was getting stuffed deep into a suitcase pocket.

Heidi Shott is Canon for Communications and Social Justice in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

By Marshall Scott

Well, the summer is over, and with it another summer unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), as well as another year-long CPE residency. One set of students has left, and another is arriving, beginning, in this case, another year-long commitment. (Students with shorter commitments will come in their appropriate times.)

I know my colleagues, the Supervisors (teaching chaplains) of the program, are hopeful that the new students will do well. That means in part providing good care for patients, as well as interacting well with one another. It means being attentive to their learning opportunities, whether through clinical experiences or more academic activities. It also means the Supervisors hope they will have the expected work ethic.

Any of us who has had even the basic experience of chaplaincy provided by that one CPE unit required in seminary will know that chaplaincy isn't a 40-hour job. And any of us with experience in any other professional ministry will know the same thing. The work of ministry doesn't really settle down into five eight-hour days, whether in the parish or in clinical settings. We know that longer days, longer weeks, are just part of the profession; it goes with the territory.

So, I hear periodically from my colleagues, "What are we going to do with these students? They just disappear at 4:30." Granted, in some ways it's easier for our students than, say, for me. The students get most of their experience in a large hospital as part of a large staff. With lots of people around, it's easier to get the work done and to get home. Too, students don't have administrative responsibilities that many staff chaplains have. Some of the things that bring me in early and keep me late just aren't part of their job description. And I've always thought myself we need to keep in mind that they are students, here for their learning and growth, and not just cheap labor.

Still, I hear the question about work ethic, and I hear it from colleagues in both clinical and parochial ministries. "What are we going to do with these young clergy, these interns, these new folks?"

Long ago, in a church far, far away, when I was a seminarian, our faculty spoke to us of balance and managing stress. They spoke to us of setting appropriate limits, both on our time and our energy. They spoke of protecting our family life. They spoke of protecting our emotional and spiritual resources, with good support and a healthy spiritual life. They encouraged us not to work ourselves to burnout, much less to death. And they encouraged us to model such good emotional and spiritual balance for our parishioners.

Not that we took them all that seriously. We knew the score. We knew that it wasn't that simple. We knew, if only we'd been paying attention to our own clergy before we entered seminary, that this, like any other profession, called for long hours and long days. I remember asking my own rector what day of the week he found best to take off. He said, "Well, I don't have one regular day off. Enough happens in the parish that it's hard to take the same day each week. But, I do try to take one whole day each week." I knew then that he didn't get a day off each week, and that if I could manage only that I'd be making progress.

Still, we did hear what our faculty told us, and I think many of us did try to convey that to parishioners. Some of them even heard it, at least for themselves. On the other hand, many of us found that, whatever they might hear from us about their lives, their expectations for our lives were still the same: long hours and constant availability. Getting them to change their expectations of themselves, to allow for more grace in their own lives, was hard enough. Getting them to change their expectations of us--well, some days, some places, that seemed beyond us.

So what, then, can we do with these new residents, these new clergy? They seem to be setting appropriate limits, both on their time and their energy. They seem to be protecting family life, to be protecting emotional and spiritual resources, with good support and a healthy spiritual life. They seem committed to not working themselves to burnout, much less to death. And they seem to be modeling good emotional and spiritual balance.

Maybe we ought to learn from them. Perhaps I'm a bit more conscious of this these days. I'm getting ready to experience Episcopal CREDO, a retreat/renewal/vocational experience for Episcopal clergy offered by the clergy wellness folks at the Church Pension Group. Suddenly, the level of stress that seems normal to me seems a matter of concern to someone else. There are questions about stress in the health screening that's part of the process. I identified my stress level as "Moderate," thinking I was doing pretty well. Thinking I was doing pretty well, when asked whether I had any plans to address my stress, I said, "No." Lo and behold, when the results came back, stress was for me a risk factor!

And I hardly think I'm all that unique. I'm certain I'm not unique among clergy, but in fact I'm not unique among Christians. We have been encouraged to seek "the peace which passes all understanding." We have been called by Christ to "Come, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." And yet, we seem more driven by one old adage or another like, "Jesus is coming. Look busy;" or, "Pray like it all depended on God, but work like it all depended on you." In our desire to control our environment, including to "work out our own salvation," we fall again and again into works righteousness, implicitly denying God's grace and our own limitations.

So, what will we do with these new residents, these new clergy, these new people, when they set good limits, and care for themselves, and trust God to take care of those things they can't? Perhaps we should pay attention. Perhaps, as both Paul and Benedict suggested, they have something to teach, and we have something to learn. If we can learn, even at long last, that balance we in our own time were called to, we will be better persons; and those of us in orders will be better clergy. We will model for our own people and for the world healthier lives. We will lead those we serve toward a healthier community. Most important, we will demonstrate what we have long proclaimed: that all of life is God's, and that in all of life--even in those most pedestrian activities of life--we are saved, not by our own efforts, but by God's grace.

The Rev. Marshall Scott is a chaplain in the Saint Luke’s Health System, a ministry of the Diocese of West Missouri. A past president of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains, and an associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, he keeps the blog Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside.

(Through Labor Day, the Daily Episcopalian will be the every-other-daily Episcopalian.)

By Deirdre Good

When we want to identify something, we look at it closely.

When we see someone we think we know in a crowded place, we concentrate on seeing particularities--that distinctive walk or hair or face.

To identify birds, people look at their markings. How big is the bird? Is it as big as a sparrow, a robin, a pigeon, a chicken or an ostrich? Is the bird fat or skinny, long or short? We look at each part of the bird. Is its bill short or long, thick or thin, curved or straight? How about the tail? What shape is it? Is it long or forked? Are the bird's wings pointed or curved, long or short? You have to train your brain to focus on distinctive traits. Expert birders can identify birds by a single glance that takes in all these details at once. This is called the "giss" or general impression of size and shape of the bird. Similarly, experts recognize a bird just by hearing a few notes of a birdcall. If you start by recognizing the giss of birds that you see regularly, you can take in differences of more unusual birds at a glance. All of this takes time and persistence.

For several weeks one Spring I joined a group that went birding in Central Park with an expert from the American Museum of Natural History. At the end of the time, I could tell a white-throated sparrow from a chipping sparrow. And when I saw the difference between a female pine warbler and a female ruby-crowned kinglet (the female isn't ruby-crowned), I thought I might be getting somewhere. The next year I joined a group looking at migrating warblers. This summer, I've seen a common yellowthroat warbler residing in a nearby field down the road from where we live in Maine. However, I'm still not very good at identifying warblers in general.

Enthusiastic birdwatchers (birders) in the UK and Europe are known as twitchers because they will drop everything and travel long distances to make an unusual bird sighting. Twitchers often compile lists of birds they have seen. I belong to a list that announces unusual bird sightings in New York City. Postings identify sightings and location of rare species. It's often very exciting to see an unusual bird and to be in the company of other enthusiasts.

But in my heart of hearts I must confess that I've become skeptical about this approach to bird watching, which is just about universal, for the reason that someone once pointed out to me--it fails to take into account the individuality of each bird.

To be sure, observing distinctions within the same species is going to take me much more time. I won't be able to put away my binoculars (as everyone else does) after saying emphatically, "that was a palm warbler!" and move on to the next bird. I'll need to be settled in one place for longer. I'll need to pay much more attention to the particular curve of a beak or feather markings or some detail I have yet to learn.

This summer, an injured female purple finch has been showing up at our bird feeders. Her left wing and leg is damaged so her balance on the feeders is precarious but she still flies. I've no idea how she was injured but she survived the injury although it is visible. She comes to the feeders by herself and with a male purple finch, presumably her mate. I suppose its not often that we see injured birds probably because they don't survive long. I find myself thinking often about this female purple finch and her well-being. I'm thrilled to see her when she shows up and am concerned when she doesn't. But because bird watching is a passive activity, I can only observe her when she does visit and try to compare one visit with another by memories or photographs to assess whether her health improves at all.

The funny thing is that because of her injuries she has become a distinctive bird to me. Until she arrived, I'd been working at singling out one male-rose breasted grosbeak from another. But observing her is effortless. So what's the payoff for seeing individual birds rather than bird species? Isn't this the way God sees birds? Isn't it the way God sees us?

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. While she is an American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and loves marmite which may explain certain features of her blog, On Not Being a Sausage.

(Through Labor Day, the Daily Episcopalian will be the every-other-daily Episcopalian.)

By Richard Helmer

Several weeks ago, with a group of youth pilgrims from my parish, I visited The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City for their Nightwatch program. The time there became for me a spiritual journey through the heart of what it means to be a musician, a priest, an Anglican, and a Christian -- all writ large in the great hand-hewn stones of the partially completed Cathedral.

The nave was still blocked off, the organ pipe framework still empty as the clean-up continued from the fire that devastated the Cathedral in 2001 shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center. The state of things seemed to me a metaphor for the great fires in the world and the Communion since that time: the blow-ups between bishops and archbishops, the painful breaks and terrible rhetoric. And all the while the globe saw another war, genocide in new places, and fear rose again to prominence in the hearts and rhetoric of many. But somehow, life at St. John the Divine had continued like it had for so many of us in the Church, despite the mess around them, they reached out locally with the Gospel and plumbed the depths of the Spirit in an age of almost frenetic uncertainty.

The unfinished nature of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine to me was breathtaking. The great central tower is missing, never undertaken. The pseudo-Byzantine dome is unadorned, linking a recovering transept to its invisible counterpart; connecting one of the longest Gothic naves in the world to a great choir with empty alcoves for un-hewn saints. The limestone finishing stones stop abruptly in the crossing like the edges of an abandoned jigsaw. The bell tower is unfinished; its twin hasn't even been started. Meanwhile, the water flows in occasionally through leaky rooflines, staining chapel walls and reminding all who look that the elements work tirelessly to drive the whole edifice back to earth.

At a number of points during the evening of Nightwatch, I was nearly overcome with the irrepressible urge to quit my "day job," and set off on the quest of high finance to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to complete the grand scheme of the Cathedral. As if I could. But the irrational desire was akin to the desire to finish all unfinished projects, to attain perfection, to complete the incomplete.

I also found in myself a strange sense of loss to history. Time was continuing forward inexorably. It was uncanny during the vertical tour to climb up the winding stone staircase into the triforium where artists like Madeline L'Engle had escaped for the solitude necessary to forge their craft. We gazed down a tunnel of carved rosettes to the stained glass at the far end of the nave. The rosettes are virtually invisible from the floor below, but offered to the glory of God, just the same. Stone masons, many now long gone, had left their unique impressions on each ornamental flower adorning a column in the triforium, knowing that few people would ever see the work up close or gaze for long at the details of a carving unique in all of cosmic history. And to know that even the stones themselves would not last forever, but would ultimately crumble into something other. Madeline L'Engle, a favorite childhood author of mine, had now passed away. All remains in motion. Anglicanism, and even The Episcopal Church as I once knew it was no more but was becoming something else again.

As we explored the Great Choir, we were asked what the Greek said in the Anglican Compass rose in the tile work on the floor. I was taken aback by the realization that I had never looked at the Greek in the Anglican Compass Rose before, lifelong Anglican that I am. "The Truth will set you free," it reads in that inviting quote from John's Gospel. The Compass Rose seems to suggest that the Truth sends us off in all directions, and not just for mission, but for discovering God in Christ already at work in our midst, in our world, in our torn hearts. For the rest of the night, the Compass Rose kept appearing in my meditations and prayers.

GAFCON was concluding their statement from Jerusalem as we were in the Cathedral that Saturday evening – a new condemnation for The Episcopal Church and other parts of the Communion was in circulation. Lambeth was shortly set to meet, the media were gathering a storm already, and the boycotts were being announced. There was something significant in the Compass Rose in St. John the Divine needing to be taped down in one spot, where it had sprung up from the floor. The Communion was in need of some repair, the tensions had finally reached a breaking point.

It began to dawn on me that my overwhelming desire to finish or at least "fix" the Cathedral was akin to the quest of some to fix the present crisis in the Anglican Communion through any number of means, as though the Anglican Communion can be fixed or cleansed by sand-blasting, the empty porticoes filled in with saints hewn from stone who will guard us from all that is heretical and undesirable.

Around Midnight, an old college friend of mine, David, called us with his mandolin to the high altar, beyond the Compass Rose, for Eucharist. A deeper truth began to emerge before my eyes as our youth gathered, and my associate led us and another youth group from Florida in the hallowed words of sursum corda under the watchful gaze of the Christus Rex. We were dwarfed by the great polished pillars of the apse, reminded of our insignificance by the sheer scale of tireless human labor. And yet we were offering glory to God, whose work in the ordinary bread and wine that we shared was infinitely greater.

There's a name for the old heresy of the Church and Christians in our collective quest to be perfect before God, to be "fixed," to be complete: Pelagianism. But there were greater reasons than that for my feeling ashamed for being overcome with such desires to complete the great Cathedral, to fix it for all eternity. To think of raising millions for a great Gothic tower when tens of thousands struggle for basics like food and shelter and medical attention in one of the world's wealthiest cities. . . To conclude the never-concluded architecture of a Cathedral and to try to erase the awesome question mark that is at the heart of the Revelation to John while countless multitudes around the world who suffer from skyrocketing food prices: now these were heretical thoughts.

The heart of Anglicanism, and indeed the heart of Christianity, along with the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-reformation, and the Settlements and Creeds and theological arts. . .these are all manifestations, like The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, of the unfinished business that Christ began. They are manifestations of the unfinished work of God's Reign, the in-breaking Kingdom that lives on like the uncut diamonds of hope planted in our hearts, the fragile seedlings nurtured by a Maker who is not finished creating us yet.

The Anglican Compass Rose, I realized, is not the destination in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. It is only a waypoint, a mark of where we are in the journey towards the great altar of God. It is at the great altar where all that is holy and all that is mixed up like the world comes together to worship the Lamb in simple gifts and the love of Christ working in the human community there gathered. There we are clothed not by our own achievements or monuments, but by the glowing white garments of grace given us beyond time.

My visit to St. John the Divine and the meditation I found there in the Anglican Compass Rose have now become a parable to carry with me at this time, when the future direction of the Communion, The Episcopal Church, and the world still remains messy and uncertain. Questions remain unresolved. The tensions are left in place for another season.

Perhaps that is precisely as it ought to be. After all, God is still at work, and we are not in charge.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer, a priest, pianist, and writer, serves as rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. His sermons have been published at Sermons that Work, and he blogs regularly about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, and church politics at Caught by the Light.

(Through Labor Day, the Daily Episcopalian will be the every-other-daily Episcopalian.)

By Jean Fitzpatrick

What can we learn from the Olympics? Like their predecessors on Mount Olympus, the athletes offer us a larger-than-life narrative that reflects our own struggles. There's are the inspiring stories: Michael Phelps winning his 14th Olympic gold medal, breaking one world record after another. Not bad for a young man with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The women basketball players from Mali, marching in flowing white robes in the opening ceremonies. Yes, they lost to New Zealand hours later, but -- coming as they do from a country where women are subject to genital cutting, poor access to education, and domestic violence -- their presence alone is amazing.

And then there are those who try too hard: the supposedly teenage tiny Chinese gymnasts who, as the famed former coach Bela Karolyi put it, "look like they are seven and may be still in diapers." Gary Russel Jr., the 20-year-old bantamweight boxer from Maryland, who collapsed in an effort to weigh in at 119 pounds. And all those cyclists on steroids.

So much focus on striving to win always leaves me uneasy. If the last shall be first, I find myself wondering, how do you defend years of training to go for the gold? Most of us know what it means to want to be the best at school or in the office, or to get our way in relationships. These yearnings don't generally bring out our most loving or generous selves. And yet there's something in us that wants to grow, to discover the limits of our talents and sensibilities. How do we tell whether our desires are greedy or life-giving?

In the church we aren't always as helpful as we might be. Often I wonder why the most "spiritual" people -- especially women -- who come seeking my help have the worst lives. I don't mean that they are the poorest in material terms. Instead, often they seem to believe that being a good Christian means losing in life, especially in relationships. They don't voice their needs and wants. They don't speak their truth.

If I suggest that it's time to focus on themselves, I see them wince. "That sounds...proud," they say. Or "That's not very Christian."

"'Jesus said, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' I often tell them. 'You're forgetting about the self part."

When we try to manipulate or muscle others out of our way in order to have power over them, then we're like Olympic athletes on steroids. But reaching out to others in love isn't for anyone who's afraid to dive right in and try their best. It demands the strength and courage and passion to struggle, to stick with a situation and seek understanding, and to speak up for justice and truth. As Ram Dass famously put it, "We must first be a somebody before we are ready to be a nobody." I'm thinking of that as getting in touch with your inner Olympian.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., is a psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By Kit Carlson

On August 12, the Perseid meteor shower will reach its peak. For those who can find a dark enough spot, who are willing to sit up throughout the long night, the reward is awesome. Up to 60 shooting stars an hour fly through the sky, blazing with a sudden and glorious streak of light.

But most Americans, even if they are willing to stay up to see the show, will not be able to see it in its glory. Creeping light pollution is taking the night sky away from us. Where in a purely dark sky, almost 2,500 stars are visible to the naked eye, in most inhabited areas that number shrinks quickly, to 200 in outlying suburbs, 75 or so on the edges of a city and in downtown Manhattan, one might be lucky to count 15 stars in total. And a couple of those are likely to be the brighter planets, not stars at all.

Humanity is shutting out the stars. More and more people, more and more badly shielded and energy-wasteful lights, more and more lumens, and slowly but surely, the stars are fading away. Astronomers in some of the world’s most noted observatories are having difficulty seeing stars, even with their high-powered telescopes, because of light pollution. Amateur star-gazers are learning not even to bother.

This is not simply an ecological or even a scientific issue. It is also a theological issue. Without the immensity of heaven overhead, we lose some of the greatest images of God’s creativity and glory. We lose some of the most wonderful images in the Bible.

For instance, the prophet Amos writes: Seek him who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night; who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth: The Lord is his name. But who can see the Pleiades anymore (much less count all seven of the stars in that cluster)? And Orion has been erased until only the three stars of his belt remain.

And when God promises Abraham that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, what does that mean to those of us who live in semi-darkness, who can count the stars overhead and find them few in number? Maybe the promise to Abraham isn’t as bountiful as one might think, when one can only see a dozen stars.

Most of all we lose the sense of our place in the universe, camped out as we are on a tiny blue rock here on the outer fringes of one middling galaxy in all the infinity of space. How can we sing along with the psalmist, When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

We forget ourselves. We forget our place. We forget the immensity of the creation we inhabit and the commensurate immensity of the One who created it all. Yet that is how, for millennia, human beings became aware of the transcendence of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the presence of God. By looking at the stars.

Madeline L’Engle liked to tell the story of her first awareness of God. She was only two, and her family was staying at a beach cottage in what was then a remote corner of Florida. And someone said, “Let’s wake the baby up and show her the stars.” Wrapped in a blanket, held in her mother’s arms, young Madeline looked up into the black and star-spangled sky and recognized her Maker.

Will any of us ever be able to share that experience?

(For more information on how to protect the night sky, visit the International Dark Sky Association website at www.darksky.org)

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich., where she blogs at Saints Alive!

By Ann Fontaine

Walking to practice baseball early in the day to avoid the soon to be 95 degree day, our grandson and I cross the bridge over the Popo Agie and into the City Park. It is only a short walk from our house down the pathway, across the river and to the ball field but each step is filled with wonders as only a 9 year old can find.

Here is a shiny split ring washer that must be pocketed for addition to the treasure box, there is an old nail from a long past fencing project. As we walk, with a grandpa-purchased regulation equipment bag, carried by grandma, we examine cracks in the sidewalk. Small green shoots are relentlessly breaking up whatever pavement humans try to keep in place. Life cannot be stopped by a layer of cement or asphalt. It finds the smallest opening and sends up a leaf of weed, a blade of grass.

There is something about spending days with children that slows one down and opens the eyes. Many have remarked on the wonder of seeing things only noticed by the under 10 set or those who see the world through the openness of a child or an artist.

Last week a group of adults were examining two photos. We examined the first one without seeing the second one.

The question was asked – What do you see? What is it like in the world of this photo? The small bits of shell embedded in the stone or is it concrete? The green bits in the open spaces, the leaves on the surface. As I look at the lines between the blocks - what could be negative or separating in this world? What disturbs you? It is such a close up shot – does it make you want to see more? Or are you content to examine what is put before you? As we looked at the photograph and reflected on it we drew parallels to how we see things in our lives. One person said – oh I am used to seeing partially as I am very short and usually cannot see over or around the people nearby. Others felt constrained by being so close to the subject that they could not tell what is was. We realized that because it was a close up and we were all looking at it on a computer screen where we had to scroll to see the parts – we did not even know if everyone was looking at the same part of the whole. The points of view were so different even though we were looking at the same photo and we are a fairly compatible group on most issues.

The differences in our perceptions were all due to our life experiences not due to the object in our vision. It was a simple lesson in the truth that without listening to and sharing with one another we never know how the other perceives our words, our actions, even concrete objects. It is a wonder we can understand each other at all in the simplest of exchanges and how much less we can know about abstract concepts in our minds and hearts.

When we saw the next photo that was the full picture on our screens – we were surprised by what it showed.

Backing off from the close-up it was clearly a piece of sidewalk made of blocks of concrete. The little shells and stones were part of the aggregate. The cracks were partially intentional and partially from weathering. Most immediately saw a crucifix in the spaces. The group is a Christian study group and the icon of cross is embedded in most of us. Still the points of view on the meaning of cross varied wildly- from an image of death to an image of life. In this photo the green new life and marks of water and wind turned a dead piece of concrete into a sign of new life. One saw the cross as only bringing death to those of other faiths; it was impossible for her to see any life in it until seeing it in the photo. Another saw all the people who had died by those who carried the cross as a symbol of exclusion. While others saw the cross as the death of many who were followers of Christ.

Seeing the cross in the divisions in a sidewalk caused by human hands and natural forces brought out the way the cross can bring forth life and join seemingly divided things and people together.

And what does this have to do with walking to the park with a 9 year old? Somehow when I slow down and really look, take time to listen and really hear – I find the moments of God breaking into my concrete mind and heart of stone. The world rushes by, I think I understand with a quick scan of life – with a nine year old I can taste and see the holiness of each moment.

Photographs Lynn Ronkainen ©2008

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blog what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

by Richard Helmer

On Friday, July 11th, I rose early with designs on the AT&T store in San Rafael. It was the day the new improved iPhone was hitting the stores, and Apple had done what it always does best – generated fanatical demand for their newest, latest, coolest product. Sure enough, I got to the cellular store at 6:45, credit card and drivers license in my pocket, to find a line of nearly forty people already waiting there. They were stretched out around the block, Starbucks cups in hand, waiting outside the door to be among the first to have the new iPhone launching at 8:00 sharp. There was laughter, a bit of embarrassment, a few quarters for the parking meter, and then I was in line, too, feeling smug that I had beaten the clock as more and more people filed behind me.

Apple had created in me and a million other people a rather expensive iPhone-shaped hole. We were bound and determined to get one to fill that little void. What made it truly silly was that I already have one, and it’s only a year old. It’s just not as fast as the new one, just not as snazzy. So I’d been pining away for the new model for weeks, fed by a steady stream of advertising and commentary online, the happy sales pitch of a guy with glasses in a plain black sweater telling me how convenient, compact, productive, efficient, and cool my life would be with the shiny new piece of plastic with a glass screen and a computer chip inside my pocket.

For about an hour, I enjoyed talking with the people around me in line. There was the lady behind me with two dogs. I wondered if they needed iPhones, too. She was having a lively chat with her son about whether or not they could upgrade based on their current cellular plan, and whether the new data plan was worth the cost. The father and his son in front of me talked about all the new programs that could now be downloaded to the gadget. The lady in front of them was sitting on the sidewalk, furiously scribbling down all the phone numbers from her old iPhone’s contacts application. She’d dropped hers in water a few weeks earlier. It didn’t turn off any more, and she couldn’t synchronize it with her computer, so she had to turn to the archaic mode of pen and paper or she’d lose all her important data when she upgraded.

I was starting to feel a little sorry for her when sales people from the store came out to chat with us in line: to make sure we understood all that was required of us to get our hands on the new gadget; to make sure we understood our choices; to make change for the parking meters. They counted heads and assured us there was enough stock to sell us all an iPhone that morning. Their aim was good business: to make us as comfortable as possible as we desperately waited for their generous hospitality in the shiny, clean store – generous hospitality offered so that they could take our money and help us sign our lives away through a new two-year contract for the shiny, black (or white, if you want it) beastie.

I assuaged any feelings of guilt by working on my sermon while standing in line, but I couldn’t quite get the question out of my mind: Why was I really there? At 8:00 the doors opened, and AT&T began processing the new iPhone customers five at a time, promising an average of ten minutes per customer. I timed things out in my head but remained in denial about the conclusion I was forced to draw. At 8:15 the line, already slow, slowed further. At 8:30, it had ground almost to a halt.

The rolling launch of the new iPhone around the world was clogging up Apple’s systems, the computers had stopped talking to one another, and people were looking down the gauntlet of waiting for countless hours in line to get the device. Everybody else was calling work or home to cancel appointments and moving the day’s schedule around so they could stay in line. Thing was, I couldn’t. At 8:45 I had to return to the church. Morning Prayer was on the agenda as well as a memorial service. I had to print my sermon for the memorial, and there was much to be done in the office.

Suddenly I was heartsick. I would not be getting the new iPhone that day. And didn’t I deserve one? My love for gadgets is almost legendary in the community where I serve. It gets so bad at times that my wife has resorted to declaring computing-free (and that means iPhone-free) zones in our apartment.

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit,” Paul writes the Church in Rome in this past Sunday’s Epistle. For Paul, “flesh” is a technical theological term, one that appears to encompass all in our nature that opposes or ignores the life that God offers us. “Flesh” means our addiction to all that is not God, to our quixotic pursuit of more with the insistence of scarcity biting at our heels, chasing us into selfish ambitions.

Living in America too frequently cannot be defined as a state of being. It might better be defined as a “state of consuming.” And with the economy, the housing market, the stock market, the consumer market all down for a time, we’re all suffering some symptoms of consumption withdrawal, withdrawal from living “according to the flesh.” Yet our sufferings are nothing compared with much of the world’s population as food prices soar and resources become scarcer.

As I left the line last Friday, I said goodbye to the people I had gotten to know a little in that hour-and-a-half. “Sorry,” said one man to me, with a look of true pity that I had to go to work, and I wouldn’t be getting my hands on the new gadget that morning. “Yeah,” I said, “me too.” But on the way home, glancing at my older iPhone model on the dash, I realized the little empty iPhone-shaped hole in me was an entry point for God, and through that grace I began to wake up.

I could see more clearly now that I was headed home to lead a memorial service for parishioner who, as a pediatrician, had given her lifetime so that countless children could have healthy lives in our community. How could I forget the blessings that I had received, that the fields all around are rich with the grain planted by our God, nourished by a creation that doesn’t toil in assembly lines or work out market strategies or weigh the cost of every action or every individual?

Ours is a God who explodes our human notions of value, and our theories of supply and demand with the simple formula of grace: the supply of God’s love for us and for all Creation is infinite and unbounded. Perhaps the silver lining of this economic downturn is that it can become for many of us a reality check, a graceful opportunity to get back in touch with what is truly important. This time is an opportunity to really help those who are truly in need, and to stop pursuing illusion and vanities. To learn again how to tend our wayward hearts and our deepest longings for a God who loves us.

Christian economics works this way:

We call a small portion of bread and a sip of wine God – Christ’s flesh and blood – spiritual things to which we are called. And we consume them. Because we know deep down we become what we consume. We consume them so we may return to being made in God’s image, become more Christ-like, more imbued with grace for a world in true need. And around this tiny sacrifice, worth not even pennies to the great economic and governmental powers of our day, is built the compassion and love that truly nourishes our lives.

That satisfies me in a way that no shiny new iPhone ever could. That calls me to give it up for greater things. And that is what God and I at last agreed on the way back from San Rafael, Highway 101 the path, the draw of true human life and real needs back at home guiding the turns of the wheel.

It took God a while to break through all the hype, but God finally did. God always does.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer serves as rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. He has served in interfaith, ecumenical, diocesan, and national church organizations, including Episcopal Asiamerica Ministries , stewardship, and ethnic and multicultural church settings. He blogs regularly about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, and church politics at Caught by the Light.

By Jane Carol Redmont

My brother’s grandchildren look at me from the photos I have just received, fresh from the internet. They are at the beach, smiling under their cloth hats, cheeks round and dark eyes sparkling, the five-year-old boy and seven-month-old girl.

I wish I were there with them and their parents, my elder nephew and his wife. But the beach is in Portugal, where they live, thousands of miles away.

I have not yet met the baby. My plans to visit this summer have been scuttled by a combination of work and financial constraints. Family togetherness is expensive. Our immediate kin – my parents, their two children, and two more generations – are spread out over four countries.

We remain close. My brother and I exchange e-mails when he has just awakened in Italy and I am closing down the computer for the night in the U.S. My mother calls from Boston to ask about plans for a visit later in the summer and speaks of an old friend whose health is failing, of the presidential campaign, of her small garden plot, a raised bed which she tends at nearly ninety years of age.

A few days ago I spent the day at a small retreat center here in North Carolina, writing, resting, praying. After the afternoon thunderstorm, I walked the outdoor labyrinth on a path of pine needles bounded by large round stones. The air was full of birdsong. It was still humid, less thick than in the heat of the day but with a muggy texture that makes me miss the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for a decade before moving East three years ago.

At the entrance to the labyrinth is a stone birdbath. Or perhaps it is a holy water font – or both. It holds both soil at the bottom and fresh fallen rain. I am a Christian; I touch the water, make the sign of the cross. Walking the labyrinth, step by step, slowly, with no agenda or question in my mind, I follow the path. Images come to me of my family’s children, of the land where they live. I move back to the present, returning my attention to my steps, watching my feet, noticing thick tarpaulin where the bed of pine needles has thinned, walking. In my steps are the steps of my ancestors who came here as immigrants, mostly poor, some more privileged, all leaving their homes, never seeing their parents again. I walk, feeling this land, carrying other lands inside me.

I walk and remember the migrants and immigrants I met in Oregon eight summers ago, during a week-long walk for justice with labor and religious activists. For some, Spanish is a second language; they speak Mixteca and Zapoteca. In their bodies are layers of exile. I think of today’s migrants in Sudan, displaced by war and stalked by violence and hunger. My life is a palace compared to theirs.

Still, we share displacement and rebuilding, the tug toward and separation from family, the experience of communal bonds, accidental or intentional, that go beyond the kinship of blood. We take steps on foreign land.

On the same July 4 weekend as the children’s photos arrive, I hear from a high school friend from Paris. We have renewed contact after three decades, picking up where we left off, writing short, affectionate notes, celebrating a reunion with two other friends last fall. He writes a few lines from southeast France, where his parents have retired. The mere name of the town fills me with memories: stone houses, cobblestones, the smell of lavender and herbs in the surrounding countryside.

Later in the day, I attend a potluck party at the home of a couple of men who are friends from church and professional colleagues. We often spend holidays together: Easter dinner, Thanksgiving, sometimes our birthdays. We see each other more often than we see our families. We sing together at church, roll our eyes at stories from work, share news of our parents’ health. Today, on the Fourth of July, the house is full. Some of the guests have lived most of their lives here in the southern U.S. Others, like me, are recent transplants.

This land is not my land nor the land my body loves. It is not the place of my birth. In other ways it is becoming home, not least because of the church. These simultaneous truths speak to me as I walk, step by step, on a quiet summer evening in a labyrinth bounded with stone.

In the city of my birth, which will always be home, I am now also a stranger: I always return to visit, but have not lived there, by the Seine, since the year I turned twenty-one. In the city I miss, by the Pacific, where the air is soft and where I spent ten years, I could not live today. There is no work for me there.

Where is my land? Who are my people?

As a citizen of one nation raised in another, these questions used to haunt me, especially during my adolescent and young adult years. Later they mattered less, or mattered differently.

In some ways those of us who have lived astride cultures are a nation of our own. My family has and is its own culture. I have come to accept this.

In other ways my life has schooled me for the church, for broad belonging, for holding many people – and peoples – in my heart at once. It is no accident that theologies of the communion of saints and of the body of Christ are among those I treasure most and find most sustaining.

I still think a great deal about place, and belonging, and what it means to be a people or belong to a land. I think about home and exile.

With formative communities and loved ones in more than one culture, I am at home in several places. I also always miss someone or someplace – even when, adapting to a new location or tending to my present life, I may suppress for weeks on end the feelings of longing.

Paradoxically, it is in the taking of slow, mindful steps on the land where I now live that I can return fully to the memory of the other lands I love and of the people who live there.

My path may not be as unusual as it seems. Even those who have less migration and fewer cultures in their recent past carry the footsteps of their ancestors with them, learn and relearn a sense of place, discover the shape and meaning of kinship and friendship as they walk through life.

Jane Carol Redmont is theologian for the deacon formation program of the Diocese of North Carolina and chairs the diocesan Anti-Racism Committee. She teaches religious studies and women’s studies at Guilford College. Her book When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life will be published in a new edition by Ave Maria Press in October.

By Kit Carlson

I stopped in a touristy gift shop on my way home from the lake, and spotted a little bumper sticker that warned other drivers “I’m in my Happy Place.” It was meant as an alert … that the driver of the car was blissed out on some internal image of a beach or a mountain, somewhere deep inside where the person had learned to retreat in times of trouble.

Many of us have learned to find an internal “happy place,” as a way to cope with stress and anxiety. But how many of us have learned to find a real-life “happy place” -- a three-dimensional, reality-based, imperfect-but-still-nourishing PLACE in which to find rest and refreshment?

Unlike the imaginary “happy place,” a real Place has heft and substance. It becomes a holy ground upon which one can stand, without shoes, if necessary. It has sounds, odors, colors, sensations. It incarnates “happy place,” and like any incarnation, it can exalt us or it can disappoint us.

My Place is the family cottage on the lake, a small cabin my parents built 20 years ago, and which my sister and I inherited after their death. It looks out over an inland lake in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is a view of exquisite beauty – early in the morning as the sun is rising along with the mist off the water, at noon under a crisp, blue sunburnt sky that snaps everything into sharp focus, at midnight when a million stars unfold overhead like a lost memory of how the world used to be. To stand at the shoreline in the morning with a hot cup of coffee in hand -- watching a bald eagle circling overhead, hearing the loons shrieking back in the swamp, feeling the cold water washing my toes – is, for me, sheer heaven.

But the lake is a real place, and as such, it brings real-life challenges and imperfections into my idealized sense of Place. The mosquitoes were particularly abundant this year, swarming in thick clouds of malice and banging their bodies futilely against the window screens of the house. Sometimes it rains for days on end and everything is grey and sopping wet. Even the house gets moist and clammy so that no fire in the fireplace can dry it out. The cottage is a place for family vacations, with their ever-changing kaleidoscopes of personalities and issues and anxieties. Stuff breaks, needs fixing, needs replacing. There are always more dishes to do. The neighbors have different tastes in music from me, and well, water has a way of carrying the sound.

But it has become over these 18 years or so that we have gone there, my one Place, the place I can go to put myself back together, the place where I feel closest to my late parents, the place that offers me a vista which is familiar, yet ever-new, just as God is familiar, yet ever-new.

I think everyone needs a Place, not just a “happy place,” but a real Place to go and get centered or get disrupted or get closer to God. A coffee shop. A prayer corner in the bedroom. A local park. A bench in the back yard. A library carrel. A monastery. A path through the woods. A window with a view. A real Place, with peace and power and potential and imperfections.

Jesus never withdrew into a “happy place.” He was forever seeking out a real Place – the wilderness or a mountaintop. The last night of his life he found that Place in a garden outside Jerusalem, a place where he could pray, where his friends could sleep, where his enemies could find him.

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich., where she blogs at Saints Alive!

By Melody Wilson Shobe

When I was a child, I went to a Baptist summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina every year. I tell my current Episcopal congregation that the reason I know my Bible so well is because of all those summers at Baptist camp, and I’m only partly joking. Because in addition to all of the other usual camp activities like archery, swimming, horseback riding, and arts and crafts, we had group Bible studies and worship. We also had challenges where we were asked to memorize Bible verses. It might seem silly to some, but it was a foundational experience for me. Now, 20 years later, I can still recite the books of the Bible in order and remember the challenge verse from each year of summer camp.

One of the verses that I memorized all those years ago was Psalm 27:14 “Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he will strengthen your heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord.” It was actually a pretty easy verse to memorize; it is short and simple and even has some repetition. And yet, while the words are simple, the call that those words issue is anything but easy.

Because, you see, I’m not very good at waiting. I get impatient if the person scheduled to meet me is running a little bit late, or if my husband takes longer than I do to get ready to leave. I try to find new and different routes from my home to the church, so that I don’t have to spend as much time waiting at stop lights. In the grocery store, I make a mad dash to find the shortest checkout line, so that I don’t have to wait an extra minute or two to purchase my groceries.

If I am not good at waiting in the world, then I am not any better at waiting on the Lord. I get panicked when the things in my life do not work out on my schedule, and I have a hard time remembering that God might have a different timeline than I do. The process of placement out of seminary and the process of job searching for myself and my husband this time around has, more often than not, involved a great deal of waiting. And I have to confess, I have not been good at waiting on the Lord. I find myself wide awake in my bed, staring at the ceiling, making lists in my head, trying to figure out what I can do to make things move more quickly. Waiting, for me, is much easier said than done, much easier memorized than lived.

At the heart of it, my problem with waiting is really an issue of control. I want to be in control of my life. I don’t want to let stoplights, or grocery store cashiers, my husband, or even God, control the timing in my life. I want to have power over what happens and when it happens. It is, perhaps, a natural inclination, but it is also a spiritual issue. My unwillingness to wait is, fundamentally, an unwillingness to trust God, and to give over my life, from the small details to the big picture, to God’s care and control.

If I am honest with myself, I know that waiting is an important spiritual practice. It forces me to let go of the death grip that my hands have on the details of my life and acknowledge that God’s desires are more important than my wishes. It reminds me that trusting God and waiting on the Lord, as difficult as they might be, are essential to the Christian life. And if I take a moment, and look back over the times in the past that I have been called to sit and wait, with baited breath and badly bitten nails, I can see that God has always, always, come through in the end.

As the psalmist says, waiting takes courage and strength: the courage and strength to let go of the tight grip I have on the steering wheel of my life, and let God take the driver’s seat for a while. I have to have the courage and strength to take the words that I recited so glibly as a child and make them the reality of the life that I live as an adult. So today, as I face a season of my life that has a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety, I will try to pray and to live the words of Psalm 27:14. Perhaps they will bring you, too, some comfort, as you face times of indecision, transition, and waiting in your life. “Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he will strengthen your heart. Wait, I say, on the Lord.”

The Rev. Melody Wilson Shobe is Assistant Rector at a church in the Diocese of Texas. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and is married to fellow priest The Rev. Casey Shobe.

By Greg Jones

Last Sunday's story from Genesis may be the most vital story in the entire Old Testament. Commentators have long thought so, seeing in this strange, foreign, upside-down-from-what's-to-be-expected-story-of-faith every nuance of salvation history.

This tale of God's strange testing of Abraham, with its horrible potential, and Abraham's choice to trust God through it (his choice to sacrifice even his son, his heir, his legacy) trusting that if God calls for it then somehow God will make it all well, this is a big story.

We cannot even begin to know what Jesus, the Cross and the Good News are about if we haven't struggled a bit with this story. I've struggled with it for many years, joining twenty-five centuries of rabbis and twenty centuries of the Church, all looking at it, trying to make heads or tails of what seems an absolutely absurd request on the part of God.

Pretty much, the essential interpretation is that this story is about trusting God, against all the things that would conspire to make you lose that trust – even filial love, even reason, even common sense, even every bit of human knowledge about what's what.

It's about welcoming into your heart a God who is indeed very strange, very foreign, very other. It's about taking the biggest chance of all – and giving up all control – and saying, "God, I trust that you will make alright something that to me looks very, very bad."

Despite all evidence to the contrary in this story, Abraham chooses to trust that God's way is the good way. He says, "God will provide." Kierkegaard suggests Abraham's faith in divine absurdity is – oddly enough – the saving faith God requires.

Yes, the Salvation history of Scripture is dotted with folks who said, "Yes, Lord, I trust that you will make alright something which looks rather bad to me."

Consider those who said:
• "Yes, Lord, I will challenge the Pharaoh."
• "Yes, Lord, I will fight a giant with a slingshot."
• "Yes, Lord, I will bear this child named Jesus."
• "Yes, Father, I will suffer and die."

Actually, doing what God asks, being an instrument of salvation for others, isn't hard. No doing what God asks isn't hard, choosing to do it is. For, by Grace, God lifts up those who have chosen to be his instruments. God will provide those who serve Him.

Similarly, entering the Kingdom isn't hard, choosing to enter is. For by Grace, Jesus Christ has opened the door to the kingdom, and is holding it open with the hard wood of the cross. What's hard about choosing to serve God, to enter the Kingdom, is that you can't bring your stuff with you.

Everything we possess from proud desire, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, whether financial, social or mechanical, whether emotional, intellectual or otherwise, all the stuff we possess from proud desire cannot come with us into the kingdom.

Maybe it's a grudge, a sweet and sour grudge. Maybe it's an ideology, that has proven successful in this world. Maybe it's tribal or national or political convictions. No matter what, all of this stuff can become idolatrous, even one's own household can be, and idolatrous stuff cannot come with us into the kingdom.

As Jesus said, "God must come first." For, as Abraham said, "God will provide."

Yes, God will provide all that we need to follow him and do his will. This is the witness of the faithful. This trust in the providence of God is what inspires disciples to take chances, risks and challenges for the sake of what's right. It's what allows us to welcome God and other strangers into our very midst – and it's is how the Kingdom of God is grown.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ("Greg") is rector of St. Michael's Raleigh, and author of Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004). He blogs at fatherjones.com.

By Heidi Shott

Twice in the past two weeks, our friend Joanne, who is an accomplished belly dancer and one of my twin sons’ godmothers, has driven 100 miles to attend each boy’s eighth grade graduation.

In upstate New York, where I grew up, we didn’t stop and pass go for eighth grade. We just moved along to high school without fanfare or cash envelopes. But in Maine, where not so long ago, down these remote peninsulas where one could find ready work on a lobster boat or at your uncle’s boatyard, finishing eighth grade was something to be celebrated and cooed at. And it still is. The Kindergarten through Grade 8 school remains the norm around here and the eighth grade graduation is a community event. Though twins, our sons are very different people and for various reasons, one attended public school and one attended private. Joanne, who for some reason delights in these children of ours, made a point to attend both ceremonies.

“Can you join us for dinner after?” we asked as we sat down in the folding chairs in the gym before Colin’s graduation on Wednesday night.

“No, no,” she said. “Tomorrow night’s my belly dancing performance and I need to get to bed early.”

In the busyness of life, I had forgotten this.

“Tickets are five dollars with a non-perishable food item.”

“Okay,” I said warily. “I’ll be there.” I looked over her shoulder at my wide-eyed son, Martin, who looked exceedingly glad that I’d used the first person singular. “I’ve never seen anyone really belly dance before.”

The things we do for love.

Someday I will write an essay called, “The Long Con.” It will be about how my husband, Scott, whom I met when I was a 17 year-old college freshmen, told me on our first date that he yearned for a motorcycle. I’ve been firmly poo-pooing this idea for the past 27 years with such brilliant rejoinders as, “You’ll kill yourself! Or worse, you’ll maim yourself and I’ll have to care for you!”

I should have seen it coming several years ago when he talked me into letting him buy a scooter. “It only goes 35 miles an hour. It’s good for the environment.”

Then a few years later, “It’s not safe to drive on Route 1. When someone passes by, it’s dangerous. I might get blown off the road into a ditch.” Bigger scooter that required a motorcycle license ensued.

Then last year, “If I’m going to drive on the highway, I need a heavier bike,” he cajoled. “It’s a safety issue. There’s a Honda dealer in Chanute, Kansas that sells discounted never-ridden 2004s. It’s a great deal, but I have to pick it up in Kansas”.

That was the dumbest, middle-aged guy thing I’d ever heard, but it didn’t stop him from picking up two college buddies enroute and making a road trip to buy a mammoth scooter…which looks remarkably like a motorcycle … in Chanute. Kansas.

Early last Saturday morning our sons, who have recently entered their prime sleeping years, were in deep slumber. It was warm and sunny and I was drinking a peaceful cup of tea on the deck when Scott – or the Scooterian as he’s known among the on-line scooter community – stomped onto the deck in florescent yellow scooter garb and said, “We could go to Moody’s Diner for breakfast and the boys would never know.”

“You want me to ride on the back of the scooter all the way to Moody’s? That’s ten miles.”

“Sure. It’d be fun!”

I looked at this man on my deck with whom I’ve spent my entire adult life and with whom, God willing, I’ll still be eating dinner long after our sleepers have cleared out. And I said, “Okay, but no splaying of my body on the roadway.”

The things we do for love.

This morning, Bishop Chilton Knudsen and I had a conversation in her living room over apfelstrudel and coffee. After two years away working for a community development loan fund, I am returning to full-time diocesan employ in August. We had a lot to talk about.

We talked about the mixed signals we lay employees of the Church often feel in a work environment dominated by clerical types. Many of us have discerned that we are called by God to serve as lay people…that ordination isn’t necessary to do, as Rite One says so prettily, “all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” But despite that calling, sometimes our ministries are made to feel less important, less like real ministry, than those of our ordained colleagues.

The work I did as a communications director in community development and affordable housing was good work. It, too, was ministry. Low income Mainers and underserved communities benefit greatly from the efforts of organizations like the Genesis Community Loan Fund . And I never once had a phone call from a member of the press asking about human sexuality or financial misconduct or imminent schism or even “What is your organization’s opinion of the boycott of The Da Vinci Code movie by the Christian Civic League?”

My goodness, why go back to work in communications for the Episcopal Church? When I broke the news that I was returning to work for the Diocese to my boss - a wild and deeply caring man who is also cradle Episcopalian and a former senior warden, he smiled and said quietly, “That’s good for you. You should do that, but we will miss you terribly.” It almost broke my heart to part from these wonderful people, but my love for the mission of the Church is so compelling that it’s hard to explain.

We do all these crazy things for love. We attend tedious graduation ceremonies and enter dark theaters for mysterious belly dancing recitals. We ride on the back of dangerous two-wheeled vehicles because we know it will please our beloved.

We work for a Church that sometimes can’t find its way …when the way and the truth and the life is spelled out for us so simply: Hello, people! Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God, fear nothing, love your neighbor, tell the truth, teach your children kindness and respect, honor all people by seeing Christ in them.

God expects such hard and crazy things from us.

This afternoon I stopped with my sons at our local hardware store to buy rabbit food.

I’ve known the owners, Louis and Judy, for 20 years and charge everything I buy there without looking at the price. Their son, Mark, the manager, will glance at the sticker on whatever’s in my hand – a paint brush or a box of nightcrawlers - and say, “You’re all set,” and wave. Their store is as far from a big box as you can get and I will pay anything for it to be here 20 years hence. Today Judy weighed my bag of bunny pellets and wrote it down on a charge slip. Behind me in line my sons waited to buy a candy bar with their own money. They didn’t bother to waste their breath to ask if I’d buy them candy.

“Last day of eighth grade!” I said as I stepped aside, smiling because Judy’s known them since they were babies.

“Eighth grade!” she exclaimed, handing Colin back his dollar. “My goodness, that’s a big day! This one’s on me.”

Perhaps not everything we do for love is hard, but it’s almost always a little crazy.

Next month, Heidi Shott will begin work as canon for communications for the Episcopal Diocese of Maine . Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Barbi Click

While the Anglican/Episcopal world sits all atremble, watching as the Anglican bishops speak out in Jerusalem of their own disenfranchisement and waiting with excitement or trepidation the upcoming Lambeth Conference, life as a lesbian Episcopalian goes on. Funny how that happens in so many aspects of our lives. That which seems earth-stopping for one is just another moment in time for another.

Were I still in the Diocese of Fort Worth, I am sure that the gathering of those at GAFCON and at Lambeth would matter a great deal more. Yet I am not in Fort Worth any longer. I am in St. Louis and in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri. That does not mean that I care less, only that the world is different here.

One year ago, monumental things were happening in my life. As a member of the Board of Integrity USA and as a lesbian resident of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, I was invited to share my story with Phil Groves who was to be in New York as part of the Archbishop of Canterbury's "Listening Process". Mr. Groves headed up this endeavor. I was watching the Anglican-Episcopal world with a much greater degree of interest.

Yet at the same time, my partner, Debbie, and I were preparing to move out of our home of 13 years. As a result of our impending move, I was unable to meet with the invited group in New York. For the year past, Debbie and I had actively sought discernment for God's will in our lives. We wanted to live a life according to that will. It was no longer enough to exist within the confines of security. To wit, Debbie quit her job, we sold our home and small acreage, sold or donated a great deal of our material goods, stored that which we deemed irreplaceable, loaded up our eleven-year-old son and two dogs into an old motor home, said goodbye to family and friends and set off to see the Episcopal Church outside of The somewhat-less-than-Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.

Between July 2007 and February 2008, we traveled by car, by motor home and by airplane from Texas to Wyoming to Ohio to California to Missouri with many stops in between. We visited Episcopal parishes, Integrity and Canterbury groups and a couple of college campuses at their invitation. We heard the same question repeatedly: how did we take the steps that we took to walk in the faith that we walk? They wanted to hear how God called two moms and their child into this Church and this journey.

There can be a great discussion between the ideas of sacrifice and suffering. Some see what we have done as a great sacrifice. We see it, not as a sacrifice; rather, we would have suffered had we not done what we did. We had no choice but to step out and follow, for to have not done so would have resulted in great spiritual angst. We had no idea what God was calling us to do; we knew only that we had to move forward willingly to be able to know more. So, move we did.
Underlying all of this was the acknowledgement that I was being called into the ordination process. It took a great amount of time to understand and accept this. It is no small thing and far from simple to be a woman called into the priesthood in the Diocese of Fort Worth. Many know that hardship. Being a lesbian woman in a long term relationship made it an even more difficult thing. Being in relationship excluded me from the process within all the dioceses in Texas and many dioceses in this Church.

We know more now that we did before. We know that part of this pilgrimage in seeking God's will in our lives is truly about listening. We also know that it is not over. We are in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri at this time, awaiting further discernment. We are practicing our "listening" skills. We know that what happens in both Jerusalem and at Lambeth are important but that, regardless, life goes on.

As the Anglican world turns, we hope that it will step out in faith to listen – not to those who are talking for gays and lesbians in this Church; rather, that it will listen to the Holy Spirit which lies within the voices of the gays and lesbians themselves. Let us tell our every day stories. Let us share our stories of faith and just what these mean to not only us but to the Church at large. Just as we can learn from the journey of straight Anglicans and Episcopalians, so also can these learn from us. We have a story of love to share; we have a story of Good News. There is no sacrifice…only faith.

Barbi Click of Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis is vice president of the South Central region for Integrity.

By Heidi Shott

One recent, magnificent Saturday, the temperature hit 85 degrees here in midcoast Maine. I spent some time fiddling in the garden, admiring the green pea shoots popping up through the dirt. My son Marty and I walked to the neighborhood fish ladder and watched thousands of struggling alewives ascending, in little fits and starts, the tortuous 42 vertical feet from the tidal Damariscotta River to the concrete dam that marks the southernmost shore of Damariscotta Lake, their birthplace. Once over the dam and into the mill pond, these mackerel-like fish spawn and then late in the summer they slip and slide back down the ladder and out to the open sea. Next spring they’re compelled to do it all over again.

At one point I pulled out the hammock, set it up for the season, and just lay there enjoying the welcome warmth and the view of the mill pond and the repeated whoosh of my son Colin whacking the heads off the dandelions with a badminton racquet. The ecstasy lasted about ten seconds before the black flies found me.

The black fly. The bane of what passes for spring in Maine hovered around my hairline and behind my ears with the intention of extracting little droplets of A Positive. I hauled myself out of the hammock with a sigh and walked down to the dock where there was a wisp of breeze. Every few seconds the skin of the mill pond flickered as a newly-arrived alewife struck a black fly on the surface. Down below the dam, where the fish are the thickest, the gulls and cormorants feed from the sidelines on the fish that get waylaid on the rocks. If you’re lucky, once or twice during the alewife season, which runs the month of May, you might look skyward at just the right moment to see one of the neighborhood eagles flying by with a fish clutched in its talon en route to its nest over the far line of pine trees.

Black flies, alewives, and eagles. I stood on my dock looking at the chill, black water thinking how superfluous we humans are to this particular chain of connections. But then a black fly started to suck a bit of blood from the tender flesh at the corner of my right eye. Instinctively I squished it with my index finger and flicked it away to the pond. At that moment it occurred to me that my blood and my family’s blood and the blood of my-until-recently-cooped-up neighbors is what feeds this remarkable system. In May we come out of our homes en masse, feed the black flies who, heavy with our donation, skim the water to be eaten by alewives who are in turn eaten by eagles and osprey eager to feed their young. One sad spring several years ago, the eaglets died of hunger in their nearby nest because the alewives were delayed in making their journey up the river. It’s true. I have neighbors who monitor these things with high-powered binoculars.

Back on the dock, I felt a twinge of guilt for squishing my tiny fly friend. What’s a bit of pain and an unsightly red welt when I could help to feed the eaglets? It’s a small price to pay to live amid this natural wonder and beauty in a setting that would resemble a photo in the L.L. Bean catalogue if only we had nice lawn furniture and professional landscaping. By letting myself be chomped, I can be a living sacrifice – a little of my life given freely will support a little of theirs. Of course the sacrificial life, particularly when it involves blood sacrifice, has fallen a bit out of fashion over the past couple of thousand years. But in this natural setting, it represents a yielding, deferential way of life that does not much diminish me as a giver but rather offers my small oblation up to the world.

Last Tuesday night, after the local school budget passed, my seven years as a school board member ended. Over the years my sons resented my absence on the second Wednesday of each month. I didn't help them with their homework or read to them or put them to bed on many weeknights. But it gave them a little guy time with their dad. They get to break the rules, stay up late, play pinball after 9 p.m. All in all my community service has equaled a very small sacrifice. I can think of dozens of people who give much, much more out of the substance of their lives for the benefit of others, not to mention a lot of black flies and the alewives who, wittingly or not, give up the whole thing.

Still I worry that my modern children won’t learn about sacrifice, blood or otherwise. Come summer I know that Colin will walk around the house with a flyswatter and recite Ogden Nash’s couplet, “God in his wisdom made the fly/but then forgot to tell us why.” Maybe in time he’ll take a larger view, but until then, all I can say is I’m glad Colin isn’t in charge of the universe.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. Communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development, her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Ann Fontaine

Sundays, I often drive 125 miles or more to church crossing the trails of the great migrations of peoples searching for a better life. In Wyoming towns are distant from one another and mostly small. Churches with over 100 members are considered large. Many counties are larger in area than the state of Massachusetts.

I grew up in a city and love cities but now I live in a town of 6,000 people. This is considered a medium-sized community. One church I serve has 4-7 average attendance. The town is called Eden and the church is Oregon Trail Memorial Church. It is located in an irrigated area of the high plateau of the continental divide. The economy was mainly ranching and hay crops but now it is on the edge of the development of vast gas and oil fields. Newcomers are arriving to work on the rigs and in construction. Long time residents know that this is the usual boom and bust cycle of Wyoming so there is hesitation to involve oneself in the life of the newcomers who will soon move on to new jobs.

There is a sense that what others do is their business. Although watching and discussing “neighbor TV” is the favorite sport, there is quite a bit of space for living as one wishes as long as you don’t tell others how to live their lives. However, when a great need arises all this independence and isolation vanishes.

Recently in Basin, Wyoming, tragedy struck. First there was a terrible car wreck. The mother was killed and the daughter gravely injured. A few months later, their uninsured family home burned to the ground. There were no injuries but everything was lost. St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and other members of the community responded to help this family. The Diocese of Wyoming sent out a plea for assistance for the family to all the churches in the state.

The first letter was sent to the members of St. Andrew’s and then forwarded on to the Diocesan listserv:

Please send the prayer chain forward, The Durneys' house burned down today, I don't know how much is left, everyone is okay. Please keep them in you prayers and wishes. Everything is probably gone, anyone willing to help out please do. Clothes are going to be needed for everyone and more importantly just give them your love and prayers. They need it. Thank you and God Bless you.
We know people are wanting to know how they can help the Durney Family:
Their home was completely destroyed as was the motor home beside it. The garage is ok.
No one was hurt, but those at home were checked out and were in shock. There were 4 at home -- Carrie and her little 4-yr. old, Stephen and Matt. Shannon and Alethia were in Powell.
Richard and Beka are in Virginia.
The only clothes and shoes are what they had on
Someone had found them a place to stay for now.
This is the family who lost their mother, Anne, in a car wreck recently - daughter Beka was injured. Now this.

In the letter were ways people could help and where to contribute to a fund for monetary gifts.

As reported in the Casper Star Tribune:

POWELL -- Every family faces trials, but the Durney family seems to have gotten more than its share this year. On Jan. 19, the mother, Anne, was killed in an automobile accident that left one of the daughters, Rebekah, 18, suffering from severe injuries.
With Rebekah still trying to recover, the family home -- on rural property about seven to 10 miles west of Basin -- was destroyed in a fire on Friday. … Anne and her husband, Richard, had several children ranging in age from the late teens to just under 30 -- and at least four of them were living or staying in the home at the time of the fire. Nobody was hurt in the blaze. And two of the Durneys' sons also escaped serious injury in a recent rollover auto accident they were involved in, Alberts said. "You want to talk about bad luck, they've had so much of it this year," he said.

One positive side to the story is the response of the community to the Durneys' needs.

This is the story of one family and tragedy and community response but it is repeated over and over in Wyoming. It is still a place where people will stop and help change your flat tire as well as respond to major events in the lives of friends and strangers.

There are disadvantages to small town life and small churches. Sushi is rarely available and often our organist is a small box called a digital hymnal. People can be mean and terrible just like everywhere. Shopping is not something that can be done on a whim – malls are few and far between. Winter can happen any month of the year. But then something will happen that calls out the best in us, and I know I have a home on the range.

Driving to Rock Springs on a Sunday morning

morning sun
rising above the rim
of hills
catching the red
of a sweater worn by a woman
walking out to feed her horse.
Dry Lake sparkling with water
and bright white of pelicans
antelope racing through the sagebrush
and deer risking death
leaping across the road
bald eagle
surrounded by ravens
feasting on the night's road kill.
briefly rising from their meal
disturbed by my passing car.
the new road
passing the old iron mine
leaping up to the horizon
leading to South Pass and the Continental Divide.
crossing paths with my twelve year old great grandmother and her family
on the Oregon trail
on their way to better days.
driving on to Farson
where travelers could buy huge ice cream cones
but no longer
the old stone building stands desolate

turning towards Eden I pass the church
where soon 2 or 3 will gather
around dry wafers
and make it bread of life
but for now I race past on my way to Rock Springs
where we sing out bravely
a cappella
our organists
traveling on a different journey this morning

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Lauren R. Stanley

RENK, Sudan – A quick lesson in cultural differences:

In Sudan, a bride price is paid when two people want to get married. No bride price, no marriage.

In the United States, no bride price is paid. People get married for love.

In Sudan, if the families and the community don’t agree to the marriage, it doesn’t take place.

In the United States, if the families don’t agree, too bad. And who asks the entire community for permission to wed?

In Sudan, paying a bride price – in cattle, pigs, beads or money, depending on the tribe – is a given. It is considered by many to be payback for all the investment that went into raising and educating the girl. The more educated she is, the more cows (or pigs or beads or money) is paid to the girl’s family, to recompense them for their investment and for “losing” the girl, who goes over to the man’s family. (And yes, it is normal for a “girl” to marry a man – the men often are much older than the women.)

In the United States, paying back the woman’s family for educating her is not even a consideration.

Why is bride price – or the lack thereof – so important to figuring out how culture affects our understanding of God?

Well, it’s a major portion of our discussions in theology classes at the Renk Theological College, because it’s such a good example of understanding the “tradition” leg of the three-legged stool of Anglicanism.

The first thing the students learn is that “tradition” comes with both a capital “T” and a small “t.” The capital-T Traditions of the Church include the Sacraments, the Creeds and the Lord’s Prayer. Small-t traditions include the cultural ethos of the people in the Church.

To help the students understand these differences, we frequently talk about bride price. About one-third of our students are married; all of them paid the traditional bride price for their tribe and clan. None of them can understand why we in the United States do not do this. When I tell them that paying for a bride in America is not only not part of our tradition, but also could be considered illegal – “We don’t pay for people in America; we outlawed that in the 1860s.” – the students here are appalled.

“How can such a thing happen?” they ask.

I assure them I understand the differences in our small-t traditions, and that since I live in both Sudan and the United States, I pay attention to both. If I were to marry here in Sudan, to a Sudanese man, a bride price would be paid. That’s all there is to it; the local culture has to be honored.

But, I say, if I were to get married in the United States, no such thing would even be considered. We don’t do that; it’s not our tradition, capital “T” or small.

Who would set the bride price, they want to know, if I were to get married here. Oh, I explain, that bride price was set more than two decades ago, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. An elderly tribal chief decided he had to have me as his fourth wife. In a desperate attempt to help both him and me save face, I wrote to my Pops and asked him to set a ridiculously high bride price – 2,000 cattle, 1,000 goats and 500 chickens. My Pops wrote back a beautiful letter, setting forth the price and explaining that I was his beloved daughter, and that it would break his heart to lose me to Kenya forever.

When the chief received the letter, he was devastated. “Ah,” he said, “I cannot pay that price. But I am glad to know that your father values you so highly. You must be special indeed. But the marriage cannot take place.” (I never did tell the chief that I was not devastated in the least by his decision; that would not have been appropriate.)

Since the going bride price here is 20-30 cows among the Dinka tribe, my bride price is considered ridiculously high and helps keep the conversation light, which is necessary, because then we move to the nitty-gritty of the theological discussion.

Whose tradition is correct? I ask. The adamant reply, from both sides: Ours. How can you be sure? I ask. It’s our tradition, we each say. Who decides? I ask. We do. But what if we can’t agree? And that’s where the conversation stops for a while, every single time.

For what are we do to when two cultures clash? How are we to reconcile ourselves to each other’s traditions? Do we fight over them? Do we simply agree to disagree? Do we disparage each other?

Or, I always ask, can we agree that what is appropriate in one culture – paying bride prices – is not appropriate in another – no bride prices even considered – and still manage to maintain our unity in the body of Christ?

Always, always, the discussion ends the same: Cultural differences must be respected – as long as we remember that we all are members of the same body, and as long as we remember not to make another culture do what we want.

When we’re discussing bride prices, it’s easy to come to this conclusion. This is a cultural difference that in the end is not all that important in the greater scheme of God’s plans for us.

But when we move the discussion to the next level – to other cultural disagreements between one part of the Anglican Communion and another – it becomes a little harder to come to a quick conclusion. Cultural differences over sexuality are huge, particularly between the Sudanese and American churches. It takes a lot of discussion, a lot of prayer, a lot of arguing, before we, a tiny slice of that Anglican Communion, finally can come to an agreement:

As long as you don’t force your culture on us, or make us change our culture to fit yours, we can live with each other.

Every one is a little uncomfortable with this idea of different cultures co-existing in the same body, but in the end, when we keep our focus on Jesus and the love of God for all us, it works out. We rely on Gregory the Great’s instructions to Augustine of Canterbury: If the local tradition is not impeding the faith, let it stand.

We have great disagreements over sexuality in the Communion today. Perhaps if we all stood back a bit, if we all looked at this the way we look at bride price, perhaps, then, we could all remember: We are all members of the same body, even when our local small-t traditions aren’t the same.

Will this discussion, small as it is, solve all the problems the Communion is facing today? No. But it’s a start.

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is a lecturer at the Renk Theological College, teaching Theology, Liturgy and English, and serves as chaplain for the students.

By Heidi Shott

Last Sunday evening my family and three others gathered for a picnic supper at the old farmstead that serves as the headquarters of the Damariscotta River Association, a conservation land trust here on Maine’s midcoast.

The main reason for our gathering, besides sharing a meal and one another’s company, was to search for spring peepers (pseudacris crucifer) and wood frogs (rana sylvatica) in the DRA’s fresh water marsh just below the farmhouse. Our friend Tom, a biologist, had led a walk in search of frogs and salamanders just two nights before that drew 40 people. His friends, we losers, had missed it, so he and his children, Andrew and Jenny, agreed to host a private peeper hunt.

Among our party was Mamiko, a woman in her late fifties who came from Japan to spend this school year teaching Japanese and learning English at our local high school. She lives with our friends Ned and Denise and their sons Abe and Lucas.

By the time we finished our potluck meal, the sun was setting over the tidal river beyond the treeline. As we donned hats and zipped jackets, Tom and Andrew stopped to put on waders. I looked down at my Converse All Stars (white) and my sons’ sneakers and experienced a moment of maternal inadequacy. I looked over at my husband Scott and knew, after almost 23 years of practice, that he was just along for the company… if he didn’t get his feet wet and see the diminutive peeper up close, that was just fine with him.

Mamiko was wrapped in her full length winter jacket but hatless. On my way out of the house, I had grabbed several wool beanies and still had one in the car. It had been a beautiful spring day but now the air chilled to remind us that spring is a fickle friend to Mainers.

“I will get a hat for you, Mamiko,” I gestured the universal sign for hat and ran off. A moment later, with peepers in full voice as dusk dropped quickly upon us, I returned to her. Everyone else had started down the hill to the marsh: Andrew, who is 12, swinging his long-handled net marched ahead and Audrey, who is two, tried to keep up with the big kids despite the uneven grass.

“Not many Americans get to do this kind of thing,” I told Mamiko. “This is special. This is rare.” She turned to me as we walked along.

“I know,” she said, smiling in her shy way. “I am very happy.” And forgetting to be reserved with her, I put my hand on her shoulder.

Earlier Tom had explained that the call of the spring peeper is pitched so high that it makes it almost impossible to identify where the sound is coming from. “They’re only an inch long and you can practically look right at one without seeing it.” Now, down at the marsh’s edge, everyone fanned out with flashlights. After five minutes we’d found a lot of big spiders but no frogs whatsoever. In the dark I’d lost my husband, sons, and Mamiko, but found myself beside my five year-old godson, Lucas, whose responsible and loving mother had supplied him with a headlamp and rubber boots.

“Okay, Lukie, I’m depending on you to find a peeper.”

“I can hear them but I can’t see them,” he said, earnest but exasperated.

“We’re going to have to go closer to the water. Tom said they’d be in the water or on the grass at the edge.” As I stepped closer, a surge of frigid marsh water seeped into my All Stars and socks. I trained my flashlight on the tufts of grass that made cozy little inlets for frogs and searched. After another few minutes in the deafening roar of lovesick frogs, I heard Lucas’s brother call out to him and off he stomped in hope of allying himself with someone with better luck and eyesight.

Alone, I realized that the only way I was going to get close enough was if I knelt down in the water. Another plunge and my left leg, knee to ankle, was soaked. Argh. My flashlight probed every little nook of the brown marsh grass for the evidence of just one of the gajillion tiny amphibians making all this racket. It’s obvious that they’re here, so why do I feel compelled to see one? How uncomfortable must I become before I’m rewarded with the proof.

After another few moments, I decided to try something. I switched off my light and in a few seconds, I heard a call that was just inches away. I hit the button with a “haHA!” but nothing. I tried it again and the little voice returned from a tuft near my left hand. On with the flashlight, a quick grab, a plop. My light picked up a tiny frog doing a froggy kick in the water. Splash as my hand went in and came up with nothing. Well, I saw the critter at least. That would have to do.

Standing up, dripping, cold and happy, I heard a commotion 20 feet away. Andrew had succeeded in catching one in the water. He sloshed over to the edge of the marsh in his waders and we gathered around. “Bring it inland so I can see,” I heard my husband call from higher ground.

There it was, a tiny frog, just as we’d been told.

How powerful is this need to see with our own eyes, to feel, to taste, to hear, to smell. Though the aural evidence of the presence of peepers was overwhelming, a sound I’ve welcomed every spring of my life, the urge to actually see one and – better still – to hold one for a few seconds was strong. It was strong enough to compel me to get my shoes and jeans soaking wet in the chill of a spring evening, to turn off my flashlight and kneel alone in the dark. It’s not a far leap to liken this human requirement for evidence to how we demand such proof from God.

Though when it comes to delivering sensory input, it’s hard to beat the Episcopal Church. The feel of an oil-slickened thumb making the sign of the cross on your forehead; the smell of smoke emanating from the thurible; the sweet taste of the wine; the swell of a well-played organ or a practiced choir; and the sight of the backs and shoulders of your loved-ones – or, better yet, strangers – as they kneel at the rail and wait for their turn or intimate gaze of people’s eyes as you offer the chalice to their lips.

These physical points of confirmation give us license to believe the unbelievable. They embolden us to make choices that the world deems foolish. They feed us enough in the way of faith to last until we become faint and doubting again and then provide the space to return to be replenished, week after week, year after year.

ee cummings had it right:

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any--lifted from the no of all nothing--human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

Even if Andrew hadn’t caught a peeper to show around, seeing the quick flash of the little frog in the mucky water would have been enough.

I think of my young friend Lucas for whom I couldn’t deliver the goods. Despite my willingness to soak my shoes and pant legs for our efforts, he went over to the big boys who could. But still he’s my friend. In fact, as we climbed back up the hill, he told me and Mamiko all about it. And the warmth of his mittened hand resting securely in mine is proof enough to last awhile.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Luiz Coelho

A few months ago, after Evensong, I decided to do one of my “favorite” Sunday night activities – grocery shopping. There I was in one of Midtown Atlanta’s supermarkets strolling my buggy, drinking my latte and trying to get everything I needed as fast as I could. Until, at a certain moment, my eyes were attracted to a cute little girl, with a big smile and curly hair, who was fascinated with a basket full of multicolored tie-dye balls in front of her.

As I contemplated in awe the beauty of innocence, a horrifying thought suddenly came to my mind: “where are this girl's parents?” I was not the only one to wonder where they were; within seconds the little child also realized that she was alone in the midst of strangers. Immediately her smile was erased from her face, and my heart started aching as I heard her begin to yell desperately, “Mommy, Mommy!”

Thankfully, within seconds a young woman came from behind a pile of products and hugged the frightened girl. Everything was alright; Mommy was there. My heart settled in peace as that same wide smile that had first caught my attention came back to the child's face as she was embraced by the one who has loved her for her whole life. Since that Sunday night, I have not been able to erase that scene from my mind; and, the reason, I believe, is because through it God has been speaking to me.

That scene speaks a prophetic message to me and to all of us ‘adults’ that even when we pretend to believe we are strong and self-sufficient, we know deep down that we are as lonely, frighened, and vulnerable as that little lost girl. There are moments when we walk away from God and think we can live our lives apart from God; yet, even in those moments when we think we are capable of controling our own lives, our hearts are crying and we too are yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, where are you?”

It happened to me; I can still remember it vividly. I was serving in the Brazilain Army and was on a flight from Manaus, in the Amazon, to Brasília, in order to take part in a “War Games” symposium. I boarded the plane, confident in the power of humankind, knowing that it would arrive to its destination safely, since it was a safe aircraft and the weather was wonderful. That's not what happened, though. As the plane flew through the Amazon forest, it found itself being sucked by an unpredictable low-pressure zone, and went deeply into freefall. Passengers screamed; dishes, bags and even a baby were flying around us. A woman on my right side held my arm so tightly that it hurt. I knew that there was no way of surviving. Even if we landed in the forest, it would still be in the middle of nowhere and our chances of surviving in the wild were nearly impossible. At that moment, I knew that nothing that human beings had ever developed or created would be able to save me. All of the things in which I had placed my trust were powerless to help me. I was defenseless and scared.

And then I decided to pray. It was nothing more than a simple sentence: “God, into your hands I commend my life.” It was my first prayer in years, as I had given up on “church” and walked away from God. But, I can say those words were probably the deepest and truest ones my mouth had ever said. Only God knows why, but the plane shook hard, and found its track back on course. Everybody was safe again. Even the baby who was flying over our heads was rescued and restored to his mother. My life (and probably the other passengers' lives too) would never be the same, though.
I think most of us have been through similar situations. An accident, a disease, the death of a loved one – each of these moments, and other tragic moments like them, remind us that we are nothing but children running around carelessly, until we find ourselves apparently lost, and begin to scream for our parents. The pain of human impotence and the realization that we human beings are powerless towards such situations bring us the scariest, deepest fears. Even our Lord Jesus in the fulness of his human nature, felt the fear and pain of his abandonment and loneliness on the cross and he too screamed to God in agony.

The good news, however, is that it does not end there. We are not left in our despair, and neither was Our Lord Jesus. As we go through Eastertide, let us not forget that the greatest rescue took place in Jesus Christ's Resurrection. God did not forsake the forsaken One on the cross; God heard the cries of agony, and raised Jesus Christ on the third day. Christ is risen indeed, and the power of sin and death is no longer upon us. We, who were lost, are now found; as the mother was at there in the supermarket to rescue her child, so God is always present to rescue us to new life.

After that moment in the airplane, I knew there was someone who really cared about me. Soon, I began to view all of those Christian beliefs and Biblical stories that I had been taught in my youth and had cast aside as a set of irrational children's tales in a new light. I began to relaize that they meant something; and I rediscovered truths that I will never forget.
Throughout my life, I have seen the Risen Christ with his message of hope even in the midst of despair. He has been there through the prayers of friends, through the tears in the eyes of my family, through the intercession of his Blessed Mother, though hymns, icons and scripture verses... and in my heart, always giving me a reason to live and have hope that in the end, all will be well. I can not say my life is perfect, but I know, now, that I have a “mother in Heaven” who will always come to me with a healing embrace when I cry out in moments of despair.

Our highest Father, God Almighty, who is ‘Being’, has always known us and loved us: because of this knowledge, through his marvellous and deep charity and with the unanimous consent of the Blessed Trinity, He wanted the Second Person to become our Mother, our Brother, our Saviour.

It is thus logical that God, being our Father, be also our Mother. Our Father desires, our Mother operates and our good Lord the Holy Ghost confirms; we are thus well advised to love our God through whom we have our being, to thank him reverently and to praise him for having created us and to pray fervently to our Mother, so as to obtain mercy and compassion, and to pray to our Lord, the Holy Ghost, to obtain help and grace.

I then saw with complete certainty that God, before creating us, loved us, and His love never lessened and never will. In this love he accomplished all his works, and in this love he oriented all things to our good and in this love our life is eternal.

With creation we started but the love with which he created us was in Him from the very beginning and in this love is our beginning.

And all this we shall see it in God eternally.

Blessed Julian of Norwich

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

By Melody Wilson Shobe

One of the highlights of my job as assistant rector is the work that I am privileged to do with our church day school. Each week I work together with the lay chaplain to conduct two chapel services, one for the Pre-K and Kindergarten students, and another for the 1st through 5th grade students. Chapel is always an adventure and a joy. With the older students, we follow the service of Morning Prayer from the Prayer Book. With the younger students, we follow the outline of Morning Prayer, but the words are greatly simplified so that small children can memorize them. In lieu of the entire Apostle’s Creed, we recite a children’s creed:

“I believe in God above.
I believe in Jesus’ love.
I believe the Spirit, too,
comes to teach me what to do.
I believe that I can be kind and loving,
Lord like Thee.”

We dance to funny songs, and we pray very heartfelt prayers. When I ask a question in my sermon, no matter what the question is, at least one child shouts out: “Jesus!” “What was the bread that God gave the Israelites in the desert called?” I ask. The answer comes back quickly and forcefully “Jesus!” Not quite what I was looking for, but a great answer all the same. I tell them about manna, but make a point to connect it to Jesus and the Eucharist as well. I find myself leaving school chapel each week with a smile on my face and a lighter heart; it is a truly uplifting experience.

Last week, I had a particularly meaningful “chapel moment.” At the end of the service I stood and turned to the children to offer the blessing. As I said the words and moved my hand in the familiar shape of the cross, something caught my eye. One of the first grade boys seated in the second row was moving his arm with mine. His face was scrunched in concentration, his little fingers shaped just as mine were, his arm also tracing the shape of the cross through the air. He was mimicking me. I’m not sure if he thought he was supposed to mimic my motions, like we do when we sing together, or if he was just being playful. Regardless of why he did so, as I was blessing him, he was blessing me.

In the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, Jacob tricks his father into giving him his brother’s blessing, the blessing that is traditionally reserved for the first-born son. Now, the authors of the Bible want you to prefer Jacob to Esau. After all, Jacob is Israel, the one on whom the rest of the Hebrew Bible will be built. So Esau is described as unrefined, both in appearance and manners. And yet, when I read the story, it is Esau who I identify with, Esau who I am pulling for. Because his response when he hears of what Jacob has done is heartbreaking. “When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst into wild and bitter sobbing, and said to his father, ‘Bless me too, Father!’… ‘Have you not reserved a blessing for me?’(Genesis 27.34, 36b) Isaac tries to explain, but again Esau cries out, ‘Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!’ And Esau wept aloud.” (Genesis 27.38) When I read it, the exchange almost brings me to tears. You can hear the pain and confusion in Esau’s voice. He wants a blessing more than anything else in the world, and somehow there is not enough blessing to go around.

As a priest, I am more used to doing the blessing than I am to being blessed. I haven’t been doing this that long, but already I have all but forgotten what it feels like to have the beautiful words of blessing spoken over me rather than by me. I think that sometimes, without meaning to, I feel like Esau felt in Genesis. I want a blessing more than anything else in the world; I yearn for it. But somehow I just miss the blessing. I don’t feel it. So when that little boy in chapel raised his hand and, without even fully knowing what he was doing, made the sign of the cross, I felt blessed perhaps more powerfully than ever before. What I had forgotten was that the act of blessing is not something I do, with my rehearsed motions and scripted words. It is something that God does to and through me.

Blessing doesn’t come in limited quantities, as Jacob and Esau thought. Nor is there just one blessing to be given and one person who blesses. What I learned from that little boy in chapel is that blessing is a two-way street. I can bless someone in God’s name, and I can receive a blessing at the very same time. When I, like Esau, cry out, “Have you but one blessing, Father?” God’s answer is clear: “No.” When I ask, with all my heart, “Bless me too, Father!” The blessing will come. Maybe in an unexpected way from an unexpected person. But it will be a blessing all the same.

The Rev. Melody Wilson Shobe is Assistant Rector at a church in the Diocese of Texas. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and is married to fellow priest The Rev. Casey Shobe.

By Kit Carlson

I saw it again yesterday. Side by side in the Lansing State Journal's obituary section, three separate obituaries announced that no services were planned for the departed. One said this was in accordance with the deceased's wishes. The others were silent on the reason.

Since I am in the "service industry," as it were, I began to wonder about this. Is this a trend? Why would someone who left behind a long list of survivors -- wife, children, grandchildren, cousins, neighbors, friends -- request that those people not mark the passing in any formal way?

So I asked my friend Clark, the funeral director, what this might portend. He said that at his funeral home, they see this fairly often. Generally, he observed, it is someone from the university community, someone intellectual and secular and rational. But not always. Some families do it to save money, others simply to avoid the hassle. Clark said that he and his colleagues feel bad when people see the funeral directors as "pushing" the option of a memorial service, since there are so many less-expensive ways to honor someone: in a church, a fraternal lodge, even in someone's home or in a park. But some people, he said, just want it all to be over with as quickly as possible. They think it will be less difficult for the survivors.

I understand that not everyone is religious. I understand that not everyone believes in some kind of life after death. But everyone is human, and this latest turn of events puzzles me, as a human being. Throughout human history, death has always been marked with ceremonies. Funeral pyres, mummification, burial mounds, pyramids, graveyards, even the practice of launching someone's ashes into space -- all of them recognize that death is a passage of sorts, even if one believes it is only from this life into a kind of nothingness. Death has always been seen as a sacred time to honor the person for who they were on this earth, and to send them on their way to whatever happens next.

I have experienced and celebrated at any number of memorial services in my almost half a century on this earth. I have been at services for a teen killed in an auto accident, for a Liberian woman dead of cancer at an early age, for a beloved matriarch of the church, for fellow clergy, for atheist cousins, for a homeless man, for a friend with AIDS, for both my parents. Each of those people held a different idea about life and about life after death. But all of them were honored and remembered in some public way. All of them were held up and cherished in the presence of their communities. The reality of their lives and the inevitability of their deaths were solemnized by their friends and family members.

I did not know any of the three people in the paper who were not going to be remembered at a public service. But even so, I felt cheated in a way, as I read that they would not be publicly honored. Their lives mattered enough to list in the newspaper. Their stories mattered enough to fill up several column inches. But apparently, they did not matter enough to gather the community to say farewell.

As a pastor, I understand the challenge and difficulty of saying farewell when someone has died. But as a pastor, I have also found that the process of planning that farewell service, of walking through it, of public remembrance, of public declaration of whatever hope we might hold for the future, of prayer and mourning in the presence of our loved ones and the presence of God, actually makes it easier for the survivors. It pours balm on the wounds. It offers a chance to bear witness to that person's life, loves and works. They were here, and now they are gone. But the fact that they were here matters, matters enough that we all get together to observe the passing.

There was an awkward memorial service I conducted once. The woman who died had been an Episcopalian, but had not attended church for years. Her adult children were a mix of the completely secular and the evangelical. No one knew quite what to do with the Prayer Book liturgy. No one quite knew what to say when I offered them a chance to speak about their mother and grandmother. Finally, one of the daughters asked if a granddaughter could play the piano. "Begin the Beguine" was her grandmother's favorite song, and the girl had learned it years ago to play for her now-dead grandmother.

There in that nearly-empty church, the young woman got up and went to the piano. We sat in silence as Cole Porter's tune soared up into the rafters, played with perfection, played with all the love that girl could muster.

We knew the moment she ended that it had been the most necessary thing. A service rendered in the service of the dead, and in service of the living.

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich., where she blogs at Saints Alive!

By Heidi Shott

Yesterday the ironing crisis in our house reached a critical point. The piles of shirts, skirts, and slacks balanced on a maple rocking chair in my bedroom attained such historic proportions that I could no longer ignore them. At least three dozen articles of clothing – most of them mine because long ago my husband Scott learned to send out his shirts – required the attention of a hot, steamy iron. That doesn’t count the 30 or so linen napkins that graced our table at various dinners from Thanksgiving to New Years, which were washed and then relegated to the realm of forgotten textiles.

This is embarrassing and I am loath to reveal it in such a public, Oprah-esque way except that I can’t think of a better way to tell this story.

Scott gave the rocking chair to me 20 years ago on my birthday. I’m fond of it but haven’t sat in it for years because, well, because it’s always covered in wrinkled clothing. But in the late fall of 1993, in a different house six miles inland, I moved the rocker from my bedroom to the room across the hall that, with its new dormer and fresh carpet and built-in cupboards, would serve as a nursery for our imminent twins. I bought some lovely watercolory fabric for the curtains with enough left over for a seat and back cushion for the rocker. I figured I’d be spending a lot of time rocking over the next year and I was right. The seamstress I hired did a beautiful job fashioning both the cushions and the curtains, immeasurably better than I could have dreamed of doing myself.

Over the next few months the cushions stayed perfect. Then the babies arrived and before long the cushions weren’t so pristine anymore: baby spit-up, stray squirts of breast milk, later juice and gummy cheerios, still later crayon marks and smears of play dough. Though the cushions turned dingy, I never thought of more than spot cleaning them because I assumed that the cushions had been permanently sewn into the covers.

Ten years ago, when our sons turned four, we sold that house and moved closer to town. I left the curtains for the new owners, but the cushions and the rocker made their way to our new home. The smart thing to do would have been to chuck the cushions, but I felt the need to keep some remnant of that fabric close at hand. It spoke to me of hundreds of dimly-lighted midnights with a baby or two in my arms, the sweetness of rocking and singing or the desperate whisperings of please please please, darling boy, go back to sleep. In a corner of our new bedroom, the chair began to take on clothes faster than a leaky boat takes on water. Until yesterday, I hadn’t had a visual on those cushions in years.

When I removed the ironing for triage, out of the corner of my eye I noticed something I had never seen before: an overlap of fabric indicating a zipper. Fourteen and a half years since I tied them onto the rocker, I realized the covers were removable.

“No way.” I said, shaking my head, and in a moment both the back and seat covers were in the machine for a long-delayed bath. The mechanism to keep them clean and fresh had been there all along but my lack of curiosity and the fuss and busyness of daily life had not given me eyes to see.

Why is it so easy to get used to the familiar, grimy things in our lives that they become virtually invisible? How many hidden zippers are lurking under our piles of ironing or among our daily comings and goings? What else waits 14 years to be discovered, ripped off and scrubbed clean? Eastertide isn’t a bad time to look for the zippers in our lives – for that quiet moment or that seemingly random encounter that causes you to see something clearly.

For many years now I’ve been writing personal essays that start with simple moments of daily modern life and then eventually wend their way to matters of faith. And what a hypocrite I’ve felt each time I’ve written about reconciliation or doing hard things or choosing to act in a Christ-like way. And here’s why: Since 2000, with the exception of one phone conversation when she had by-pass surgery, I haven’t seen or spoken to my sister nor have I made an effort to do so.

However, the events of recent months have served as a Gordian knot to reverse this estrangement. I’ll call my sister “Peg” because her story is complicated and not mine to tell. Peg has lived in the Midwest for years, but agreed to come to upstate New York to care 24/7 for our mother in December when Mom was essentially kicked out of a nursing home for refusing to do physical and occupation therapy.

In advance of Peg’s arrival, we spoke on the phone several times. The conversations were focused on train fares and arrival times and our mother’s condition. While initially strained because of our long lack of communication, they became remarkably natural and cordial as long as we stayed within the confines of the current situation. Arriving at my mother’s apartment the night before we were to spring her from the nursing home, I felt anxious about seeing Peg after so long. She is 16 years older than I am, and, as the oldest of the four children, she often took care of me, the youngest by many years. Her older son and I grew up more like siblings. Still we never had the close sisterly relationship that I often envy my friends for sharing with their sisters and a sad set of family circumstances led to our years of mutual silence.

But there I was at the front door with my bag and my laptop. The gap of eight years, since she last came to New York to make peace with our father who was dying of lung cancer, had pushed her into her sixties and me into my forties and we both stood at the doorway gulping back the shock.

Because it was snowing hard, I had called her when I turned off the Utica exit on the Thruway. She had put the tea kettle on. After I dropped my things, we sat at our mother’s kitchen table and drank tea and talked. And talked and talked and talked.

Gently and instinctively, we didn’t talk about the past or any hurtful, sorrowful, regretful things. We talked about our families, and our brothers, and what the heck to do about our mother. We talked about today and tomorrow.

Here’s the hard truth: On my best day as a Christian, I could not have picked up the phone to call her in the Midwest to start that conversation. My mother’s health crisis became an opportunity, a suddenly revealed zipper that allowed us to whip off the veil that separated us…not completely perhaps...but enough for healing to start.

Last week my sister returned to the Midwest. My mother is on her own in a new apartment with meals on wheels and Lifeline. We don’t know how long this equilibrium of our extended and far-flung family life will last but for today, this day, all is well.

In the midst of my ironing marathon, my sister called and I happily picked up the phone. We talked about her trip home, her grandchildren, my sons, our mother and how the hard it will be to get through the next four weeks without the TV show Lost.

Despite how well this has turned out, I’m frightened to think what other sorrows and difficulties in my life could be redeemed if I choose. What possibilities are there for forging new relationships and challenging old fears and casting aside old stumbling blocks. As one who knows I am lavishly beloved of God, I should be able to open my eyes to see how easy it is to do such things. But without the miraculous grace of the previously unseen zipper and the knowledge of how to work it, I’m not so sure how to start.

As I walked back into my bedroom and the pile of clothing on the floor, my eye caught the empty rocking chair. Instead of returning to the ironing, I sat in the chair and turned my face to the familiar cushion: stained, faded but so so so sweet.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. She is communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Heidi's essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Melody Wilson Shobe

A few months ago, I began going to spin classes at the local YMCA as part of my exercise routine. Spinning is a group exercise class in which an instructor leads a group of people on stationary bikes through a cycling routine designed to simulate an actual bike ride. The students increase or decrease the resistance on their bikes to imitate climbing hills, sprinting, or intervals. It is a great workout, and usually a lot of fun. My husband and I make a habit of going to a particular class on Thursday nights, because it’s the one night of the week that neither one of us has a standing church commitment.

On Maundy Thursday, however, we had a service in the evening. So I decided to try the Thursday morning spin class instead. Little did I know, the Thursday morning class is “Devotion in Motion:” an hour-long spin class during which the instructor plays praise and worship music and talks about God. The instructor, a layperson who attends a local non-denominational church, uses the idea of a bike ride as a metaphor for the spiritual life to direct his devotional comments throughout the class.

The class was problematic for a number of reasons. The first problem was merely a matter of my personal taste. The instructor, who seemed like he was a very nice guy, had the unfortunate habit of singing along to snatches of the praise music pulsing through the room. This in itself would not be so bad, except for the fact that the instructor in spin classes wears a headset microphone in order to give directions to the class. So, throughout the class, interspersed with the instructions, we got a miniature concert. It was all a little too Brittany Spears for me.

The second problem was purely practical. As I mentioned earlier, spinning is a class in which “the students increase or decrease the resistance on their bikes to imitate climbing hills, sprinting, or intervals.” This instructor, however, starting telling us to increase the resistance on our bikes from the minute we began riding. Then he kept yelling, “Increase!” every two minutes for the rest of the class. By fifteen minutes in, I was at the maximum amount of resistance on my bike, waiting for him to tell us to decrease so that we could build back up. By twenty-five minutes, I was physically incapable of riding at maximum speed any longer. As a spiritual metaphor, it didn’t work very well for me; if, in fact, my faith journey is like a bike ride, it has both hills and valleys, steep climbs and long smooth descents. My relationship with God, at least, has not been all uphill. But regardless of the spiritual implications, it certainly didn’t work as an exercise regime. Asking a room full of people, some of whom have never been on a spin bike before, to “increase” every two minutes is neither feasible nor safe.

But my biggest problem with the class that I attended was theological. It was obvious from the beginning that the instructor and I differed on a number of theological points. He spent a good bit of time talking about the lies that the Enemy (you could actually hear the capitol E) whispers in our ears, which revealed a different understanding of evil than mine. He made a remark about God conquering your depression that revealed a different understanding than I have about mental health. But our theological differences weren’t an obstacle until, in between repeatedly saying, “Increase,” he yelled, “There is no ‘I can’t’ in the spiritual vocabulary!”

I almost fell off of my bike. In the midst of Holy Week, those words struck a deeply dissonant chord inside of me. Because “I can’t” is what Good Friday is all about. When we look at the cross, we are forced to acknowledge that Jesus did something there on that day that I cannot do for myself. And the same is true of Easter and the empty tomb; resurrection is something I can’t do. The transformation of places of death into places of life, the victory over death and the grave, life after death: these are all things that I cannot reach or accomplish. Through his life, death, and resurrection, God does for me something that I can’t do for myself.

In fact, I think the words “I can’t” aren’t just Holy Week words, or Easter words. They are the foundational words of the life of faith. They are integral, not inimical, to the spiritual journey. I grew up going to Baptist summer camp, and each summer counselors would give their testimonials, telling us how they had been saved. As an Episcopalian, I had a great discomfort with that language. But I was also uncomfortable because I felt out of place. My counselors always seemed to have dramatic stories: they had been saved from a life enslaved to drugs or alcohol, they had been saved from illness or injury or anorexia, they had been saved from dangerous or depressing home situations. My own life seemed, by contrast, inadequate and boring. Just what, exactly, was there for God to save me from?

It took me a long time to figure it out. But now, when I’m asked to talk in “salvationspeak,” I tell people that God saved me from thinking I could ever save myself. As an oldest child, I’ve always worked extra hard to be good and do the right thing; I’m the classic over-achiever. But through the years I’ve come to know there’s nothing I can do to earn God’s love, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. God saved me by teaching me to say: “I can’t.”

Holy Week is over, and my Thursday evening is open again. I’m back to my usual spin class this week, and I think from here on out, I’ll try to keep my spinning and my salvation separate.

The Rev. Melody Wilson Shobe is Assistant Rector at a church in the Diocese of Texas. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and is married to fellow priest The Rev. Casey Shobe.

By Roger Ferlo

It was about 20 years ago, soon after I turned 35, that I decided it was time to learn to play the cello.

It turned out to be a religious decision. I had just become the rector of a small parish that had, so to speak, been through the wars. Nothing to do with the organist, thank God. The conflict centered on the rector who preceded me, a priest whom I have never met but whose parish I am sure I would have joined had I come to town as a lay person. He was one of those brilliant, charismatic sixties priests who had spent his early career in college chaplaincy, and happily never recovered. He brought his edgy, transgressive theological style to a parish that thought it was ready for it but really was not. The impact he had made as a writer, teacher and preacher had been extraordinary. Clearly, people’s lives had changed because of his ministry. But like most of us, he was also very good at excusing his several personal failings by theologizing them, and some parishioners loved him for this—that is, the ones who stayed.

It all fell apart in the end. The evangelical bishop refused to officiate at this third marriage, and basically forced his resignation, which made the parishioners feel that they were being besieged for their liberal views by the know-nothing fundamentalist right-wingers in the diocese, although it was clear to more level-headed people that even the present bishop’s more liberal predecessor would have been hard-put to accept the third marriage.

Anyway, by the time I showed up, many people were licking their wounds and loaded for bear, and the bear was me. So I took up the cello, figuring that would be cheaper than therapy and more rewarding in the long run.

In all the turmoil of the parish in those first years I was there, the music didn’t come easily. But I discovered that though I wasn’t great at this, I wasn’t all that bad, and as the weeks and months went on, the music began to center me. In a chaotic life, it became my one means of self-discipline. In the more difficult moments in that parish it became my only means of prayer.

But it was not just the music I loved when I played the cello in those days. I loved the sheer feel of the instrument in my hands. The shape of it, the sheen, the exquisite purfling, the absurdity of that scrollwork at the top, the flaming wood grain on the back, the miraculous way that inert slice of board could burst into the sound of a living voice. I didn’t play it so much as cling to it.

That clinging almost undid me. I was in my office one day, chatting with a parishioner, when the parish secretary called up the stairs to me that the cleaning lady was at the door. She had just come from the rectory, and was pretty distraught, something about my guitar falling over when she was vacuuming, and how it had broken in half, and could I come down and help her pick it up.

The news hit me like a sucker punch. I tried to put a good face on it, and act professional with my parishioner, but she saw right through me. I rushed out of the office, ran up the hill to the rectory, slammed into the living room, and there it was—the cello was on the floor, its neck broken off and splayed to one side. A large splinter remained attached to the body, with a piece of purfling jutting out like a broken finger bone. The poor cleaning lady was standing there crying, because she thought that it could stand up by itself on its pin, and she had only left it that way for a second, and was it worth a lot of money, and she didn’t mean to do it—

As you might imagine, I wasn’t feeling very pastoral at the moment, and I’m amazed I didn’t just fire her on the spot. All I wanted was for her to go home, and to leave me alone with—well, with the body. I realize now with some embarrassment that that’s how I thought of it. I found myself crying wretched tears of grief and loss, anger and frustration, because the one thing that had empowered me to endure what seemed to me in those early days the unremitting pressures and betrayals of parish life now lay in pieces on the floor in front of me.

Of course, I had lost all sense of proportion, both about the parish, which was full of good people, and about myself. As my cello teacher told me on the phone when I called him in panic, that in spite of appearances I lived in a pretty musical town, and he knew an excellent luthier, and in his long experience what was broken could often be fixed—

Wisdom. I love music teachers. I visited the cello in the shop a few days later. It had been completely disassembled, and its cracked face was now being painstakingly patched from within—the long, narrow cracks disappearing as if by miracle, the damaged inlay matched and restored so skillfully that only an expert could detect the difference. It took months and months, but when the work was done, it really could be made to sing again, cracked and patched and scarred, but whole.

Now you might expect that I want you to see in this story a parable of death and resurrection, But that’s not exactly why I’m writing this, although whenever I pick up my cello I see in its cracks and patches the history of my ministry in that place, which went on to be enormously productive and satisfying.

No, I tell this story because I know God works through us in our music and art. What musicians do with their various contraptions of wood and strings and pipes and wind brings us so close to things divine that it can steal our breath away. But I also know that no matter who you are, and whatever name you bear—Monteverdi or Mozart, Hampton or Hindemith—however good you are at what whatever you do—your finest achievements are but fragile things, as fragile as the wood of my long-suffering student cello.

It is so tempting to carve for ourselves idols out of such fragile wood, to make of our art another god, to pursue our music just for the music’s sake. In the hyper-competitive hurly-burly of our professional lives, all of us succumb to the temptation of thinking that in the end it is only the music that really matters, or the sermon, or whatever bottom line our jobs force us to toe. But there is no other God besides me, says the Lord. Everything we do and say—any music we have the grace to make—we make in the shadow of the cross.

Now there is wood that endures—that rough and jagged piece of executioner’s wood lifted high like Moses’ serpent in the desert, standing up by itself on its own pin, drawing all the world to itself like a sure-footed compass. All our talents, all our losses, all our triumphs, all our failings—the cross draws everything we are and everything we do into the searing truth of the wounded and resurrected Savior—the Holy One patched and scarred as we are, yet living, breathing, triumphant and loving.

Life can be hard. What is broken can truly be fixed, my teacher told me. It’s not true for everything, perhaps, but it is true for this. In the end, it is the cross that matters—that living sign of redemption about which we can do no other than lift our breaking voices in song, and tune our broken instruments in sounds of endless praise.

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. He was trained as a Shakespeare scholar, and frequently leads audience discussions on religion and drama for the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC.

By Greg Jones

With the birth of our third girl this month, surprisingly early, we were able to experience the miracle of life at close hand again. We believe that the birth of a child is testimony to the Glory of God and a sign of God's marvelous handiwork in creation.

Seeing the hand of God in nature is hardly some new-fangled thing of course. John Calvin said that there is "by natural instinct, a sense of divinity." Indeed, Scripture itself proclaims that God may be perceived in nature. As the Psalmist says, "the heavens are telling the glory of God." Paul writes: "Since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made."

Life itself is a wondrous thing of course, and you don't even need to believe in God to agree. Popular author Richard Dawkins – a convinced atheist – upholds biology as the most complex and fascinating of all sciences. Before Dawkins, George Gaylord Simpson, the famous paleontologist and evolutionary scientist, argued that biology alone "stands at the center of all science, and it is here, in the field where all principles of all the sciences are embodied, that science can truly become unified." Simpson recognized, studied and reveled in the majesty of life in all its diversity – yet he didn't believe in God.

For Christians who believe in a particular story (that God is creator of all things visible and invisible who loves His Creation and especially His children – and who has become one with Creation through the incarnation – and who has faced all we face as mortal beings – and who has defeated death in resurrection) we must careful. For seeing God in nature is fine – but seeing nature as God is not.

Consider the Easter 'holiday' as it now exists in the English speaking world. Like Christmas, Easter has taken on a number of symbols which have a lot to do with fertility and nature – but not necessarily anything to do with God in Christ. The word Easter – first of all – derives from the name of a pagan goddess associated with the rising of the sun. In ancient Britain, the pre-Christian folks of Northumbria venerated this goddess ('Eastre') at the vernal equinox.

Yes, life is important – supremely so – whether one believes in Jesus Christ or not. For those of us who do, it is even more important that we make sure not to see life as the same as God or in the place of God. For those of us who believe, life is not God, but rather the gift of God. Life is not in the place of God, but is rather the place where God pours out his love most fully and completely. Life is not to be worshipped, but rather God who gives life is to be worshipped and adored.

In the Fourth Gospel 'life' is central to the Johannine vocabulary. More than any other book in the New Testament, John talks about 'life'. And it takes on a double meaning. The word 'life' means not only life as you and I normally speak of it. It refers to the indwelling presence of God in the universe – it refers to the presence of the living God in our midst – it refers to the fact that God is not the same as us, but God is with us, and in us, and around us. It refers not only to biological life – as amazing as that is – but also to eternal, spiritual, divine life. Quite plainly, it refers to Resurrection life – the life which includes but goes beyond fleshly life – and extends eternally in full communion with the God of all. Interestingly enough, the Greek word for resurrection does not appear in John's gospel very much. But, in its place, the Greek word for 'life' appears many times as a synonym for resurrection.

What I'm saying – what I've learned from John – is that Easter is not just about the miracle of natural life. It is not really about Spring, and fertility, and eggs, and hatchlings, and sweet little babies. No, it is about those things, and infinitely more. Easter – or Christian Passover – or the Feast of the Resurrection – is about the kind of new life that only Jesus Christ can offer. It is about resurrection life – eternal life – life beyond biology and its undeniable but limited majesty.

This Easter season – remember – that Christ died for you, and rose from the dead, and took on the fullest possible kind of life in his resurrection. It is that kind of life that you and I are called to share, and have begun to share, for when we died with Him in our baptism, we have been given that kind of life to put on – from now on and forever.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ("Greg") became a member of Christ's Body at St. Columba's in Washington, D.C.. He was educated at the University of North Carolina and the General Theological Seminary, where he is on the Board. Rector of St. Michael's Raleigh, and author of Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004), he blogs at fatherjones.com.

By Ann Fontaine

Today the word is Silence. All the chaos and noise of Holy Week is stilled. Palm Sunday with its hosanna-ing where even the rocks cry out in praise is past. Tenebrae is over with--an earthquake of sounds in its last crashing cymbal. Maundy Thursday’s slopping of water on bare feet of resistant Peter, and its sharing a meal ended with the betraying Judas leaving in a flurry of shame. Good Friday has come and gone with its whipping and wailing and pounding of nails and last words. The sounds of the week resound through our souls. And now – silence.

Holy Saturday brings a Sabbath from noise. We sit in the stillness of grief wondering. Where has he gone? What has happened? How can this be?

Is it a time of rest as the Holy Saturday collect from the Book of Common Prayer proclaims?

O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Or is the Holy One working in Hell as the Apostle’s Creed states:

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell.

Is Jesus harrowing hell as it is sometimes called? Was he freeing those who died in slavery of mind, body, or spirit?

Holy Saturday is my favorite day in Holy Week. It is like a walk on the Oregon coastal beaches in early Spring or late Winter, a time of solitude. All the people are gone. The tides and waves are fierce and dangerous. The detritus of storms is scattered on the sand as high as the floods can rise. I walk in the rain and wind. Mostly it is gray and more gray – gray sand, gray clouds. The beach tells its own story of love and loss. The ocean called the Pacific is rarely safe. Sudden sneaker waves can sweep the unwary off their feet or worse. Once in a rare moment a flash of blue green glass proclaims a glass fishing float. It has traveled for years across the ocean from Japan. A glass ball blown by its maker years and miles ago reveals life beyond my little bit of beach.

This is Holy Saturday – a silent yet wild and fierce day of unknowing with hints of what has been and what is yet to come.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Sara Miles

Every Sunday, at my church, I carry a plate full of fresh bread, the body of Christ, to feed the crowd around the altar. Every Friday, around the same altar, I run a food pantry that offers free groceries––bread, spinach, potatoes, oranges, Cheerios, beans and rice––to about 500 hungry families. Both gatherings are matter-of-factly open to everyone: on both days, we feed people without asking them what they believe, how much money they make, or if they’re “good.”

The food pantry, especially, can feel almost trippily Biblical. Every week there are hundreds of people milling about; women working and arguing and feeding each other; men embracing; someone singing, someone crying, someone washing dishes. It isn't hushed and pious; it's loud and holy.

But on Good Friday––a day in Christian churches that’s traditionally been devoted to private penitence and collective binges of anti-Semitism––everything falls quiet. The church is stripped of ornament, and hung with black; at night the congregation gathers to chant a funeral liturgy, laying flowers on an icon of Jesus’ tomb and leaving in silence, taking hot cross buns to break their fasts.

As evening fell, Paul Fromberg, our priest, was setting up for services. A long-haired homeless guy, kind of sweaty and intense, strolled in looking for groceries, and Paul explained to him that the food pantry was closed for Good Friday.

“But don’t you have anything to eat?” the stranger asked.

Paul turned and saw the trays of hot cross buns on the stove, and handed him a couple. The man paused and lifted them up.

“Baruch attah Adonai...” he said. “Baruch attah Adonai eloheinu.... oh, man, it's been a long time since my bar mitzvah.” He was saying the Hebrew blessing for bread: 'Blessed are thou, Lord God, king of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.'

Paul stood there in his black cassock trying to recite the prayer, as the homeless guy smiled and took a big bite of the first bun. "Baruch attah Adonai eloheinu melek ha-alom....” Paul began. He couldn't remember it all either.

"Well, bless this bread," Paul said.

The stranger nodded, took another bun, and walked out. "OK," he said. "Thanks. Good Shabbas."

Or, as we say in church, Amen.

Sara Miles is the author of Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion. She is the founder of the food pantry at St. Gregory's of Nyssa in San Francisco.

By Roger Ferlo

I once produced a student performance of an old play of the crucifixion. It was part of the great York Mystery Cycle, a play that used to be performed every year on the feast of Corpus Christi in the streets surrounding York Minster in the late middle ages. Each play in the mystery cycle, ranging from Creation to Revelation, was assigned by tradition to a particular trade guild. The Crucifixion play was assigned, as I recall, appropriately enough, to the Pinners, stout Yorkshiremen whose trade was nail-making. It is a brilliant script, with the four pinners, dressed as Roman soldiers, carrying on a spirited, even comical dialogue in thick and racy Yorkshire dialect all the while they are nailing Jesus to the cross. The actor playing Jesus remains silent through almost the whole proceeding. The script sounds scandalous, characters cracking jokes as they go about their sordid business. (There is an odd, uncomfortable resonance with the way some of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib used their silent and abused prisoners as the butt of their obscene jokes.) The contrast between the profanity of the torturers and the solemn silence of Jesus was not as disgusting as the scene at Abu Ghraib, but nonetheless disturbing enough.

My students performed the play with no sets, under a naked light-bulb in a college basement. The walls were painted black, the only prop a broomstick that the student playing Jesus carried across his shoulders, his arms stretched out to each end. There were no seats for the audience; we gathered around the action in an uneasy circle, our silence matching the silence of the central figure. No one wanted to appear complicit in the action, but standing there watching it and not intervening seemed to imply we were somehow involved. We knew it was just a play after all, but it left us profoundly troubled. When the action ended, the Jesus figure was left standing there, his arms outstretched on the broomstick, bare feet on the floor, still maintaining silence. You have to understand that there was no attempt at realism here, no stage blood, no simulated groaning. Just the dignity of silence underscoring the enormity of the act. When the student actor finally broke his pose and walked out of the circle we had formed, we all saw the imprint of his sweaty feet on the floor, and for the longest time, not one of us moved or spoke a word. And when we finally did move, no one dared to enter the circle, or to step on the place where the sweat stains had by then disappeared.

I have another story about Jesus’ silence to share with you, this one far removed from a student workshop production performed in the safety of an Ivy League college.

Over ten years ago now a news article appeared in The New York Times that became for me a Good Friday Parable of the Unspeakable. It’s also a parable that forces us to explore—as this gospel does—what you might call the geography of evil. For years now the story has occupied a silent place in my skull, like a dispatch from Golgotha.

In spring of 1996 a reporter named Mike O’Connor gained access to a field outside the Bosnian town of Srbrenica. A lot has happened since 1996, but memory runs long in that part of the world. You still might remember the disastrous story of that sad town. During the ugly, bloody wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the UN had tried to protect Srbrenica as a “safe town,” a place where people could escape from the so-called ethnic cleansing by which Christian Serbs were trying to wipe out Muslim Bosnians from the area. The UN policy was a disaster. UN forces did almost nothing to stop the slaughter—they more or less looked on in horror, like bystanders at Golgotha. An international war crimes tribunal had determined that anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 Muslim men had been driven from their homes and executed in this field by Christian Serb militia. The Times ran a photograph of the site. It looked terribly ordinary, nothing like a Golgotha. The land was flat, plain, with a small copse of trees visible in the background. But reports that had trickled in from survivors said that the landscape had recently been altered. You could see in the photograph that the ground was broken and rutted in spots, as if it had been dug up, moved and replaced by heavy equipment. O’Connor describes the scene with an eye for detail that is almost as vivid as Dante’s, who knew something about killing grounds:

Clinging to chunks of dirt, some piled in mounds three feet high, are pieces of sod and delicate yellow flowers growing at unnatural angles, suggesting that the dirt was broken and piled up after it was covered by new spring plants….Near the larger field was a pile of what first appeared to be rubbish, but tangled among the bits of garbage were strips of multicolored cloth, about three feet long. These matched the published descriptions of blindfolds that survivors say were put on the victims by the killing squads. Also in the pile were berets like those frequently used by older Muslim men. On one beret was a set of Muslim prayer beads, and near them was a cane nicely carved from a tree branch.

Clearly, there had been bodies buried there, and someone had ordered them moved—covering the evidence of this deepest crime by digging it up. The whole story has a Dantesque ring to it. Even the names of the commanders involved have an allegorical resonance. Here in the killing field, where hate-filled Christians betrayed and murdered terrorized Muslims, the spokesman for the war crimes investigation bore the name of Christian Chartier, a name that translates into English as Christian the Mapmaker, as if he had been assigned to map the geography of evil. And the colonel in command of the American forces who were patrolling the area was named, of all things, John Baptiste. As they say, you can’t make this kind of thing up. It would all be high comedy if it weren’t so horrific. The headline to the Times' story said it all: Disturbed Dirt in Bosnia Refuels Talk of Graves.

Why resurrect a story like this? Why refuel talk of graves, this close to Easter?

Recall the words of Jesus’ companion on the cross. Remember me. In a world with a minimum attention span, where one atrocity replaces the next in public memory with alarming regularity, it’s important to remember the anonymous and silent dead of Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, or Darfur. It seems to me that if we are going to make sense out of Jesus’ silence, if we claim any right to play at the empty tomb on Easter morning, we need to remember his companions in suffering. We cannot in good faith re-encounter the silence of Jesus in these latter days without encountering the silence of the victims who came after him. You can hear in Jesus’ silence the silence of victims everywhere, victims of war and oppression and ethnic cleansing who are mostly nameless to us, silent skulls lined up in rows in a warehouse in Cambodia, silent bones in a mass grave in Bosnia or Rwanda or Darfur. Only their bones are at liberty to speak, and not just through DNA and other forensic tests. They bear mute testimony to the unspeakable. Their silence is Jesus’ silence, His silence theirs. Confronted with such pain, for us to keep silence would condemn us. Remember me. Remember me.

By George Clifford

Last year in a bar at the Hale Koa hotel in Honolulu, I met Ed (name changed to protect his privacy). He was standing just inside the bar’s entrance, looking lonely. The U.S. Army operates the appropriately named Hale Koa, which in Hawaiian means warrior’s house, as a recreational facility for military personnel and military retirees. So I felt confident that Ed was a veteran and, with my wife’s consent, invited him to join us for a drink.

Ed was in fact lonely and appreciated the invitation. Each year he vacationed in Hawaii. A widower, rather than go by himself he had invited one of his grandsons, aged twenty-something, to accompany. That day the grandson had met some other twenty-somethings on the beach and, at Ed’s urging, had gone out for the evening with them.

As it turned out, Ed and I had more in common than both being veterans. We both had served in the Aleutian Islands, he during World War II and I during the Cold War. And, in the course of talking about what we had done in the military, we learned that we are also both Episcopalians.

Unprompted, Ed told me about his relationship with the Episcopal Church. I guess he thought that as a priest this would be my primary interest. How little most people know about the clergy! Faith journeys interest me, but I must confess that listening to someone talk about his or her faith journey over drinks on Waikiki does not top my list of prospective topics for a scintillating conversation.

Although Ed was not reared in the Episcopal Church, his mother who died at age 34 and was not Episcopalian had sung in the choir of their town’s Episcopal church. During WWII, that Episcopal church had a plaque listing the names of those serving in the armed forces. The parish included Ed’s name on their list and prayed for him every week along with the others listed on the plaque. The parish had also sent him and, he presumed, all of those listed on the plaque a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. Ed drew much comfort from reading it during the war.

Following the war, Ed married a woman who belonged to the Methodist Church. Neither particularly liked the Methodist services and he did not want to return to his childhood Church, so they decided to join the local Episcopal church. Even when they twice moved to new towns, they continued to be Episcopalian.

Only once had he met an Episcopal priest he did not like. Ed had met that priest, who ironically was a distant cousin, during WWII when the priest had served as a military chaplain. The priest was arrogant, obnoxious, self-centered, and only interested in Episcopalians – a sharp contrast, Ed said, with the other Episcopal priests he had met.

Ed remarked that he did not understand the controversies currently roiling the Episcopal Church. He implied that he did not approve of homosexual relationships yet had clearly never considered leaving the Episcopalian fold. He also thought that the Church had more important business than focusing so much time and energy on sexual ethics.

Listening to Ed, I heard how three themes important to our Anglican heritage had shaped his faith journey. These themes – the pastoral, liturgical, and incarnational – led him to the Episcopal Church and kept him there.

After a couple of drinks, Ed said goodnight and left. In retrospect, I have wondered if I was the real beneficiary of our conversation that evening. Ed reminded me of why I am a priest and of what is important in our Anglican identity: reaching out in love to others (the pastoral), offering worship that helps people acknowledge or experience their humanity and the transcendent (the liturgical), and being the inclusive, loving people of God (the incarnational).

The Rev. George Clifford served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years, with tours at sea, with the Marine Corps, on the staff of the Chief of Chaplains, on exchange with the Royal Navy in London, as the senior Protestant chaplain at the Naval Academy, and as the senior chaplain at the Naval Postgraduate School. He taught philosophy at the Academy and ethics at the Postgraduate School.

By Lauren R. Stanley

RENK, Sudan – We gathered in church this week to talk about forgiveness, a good topic to tackle on the last Sunday of Lent.

Far too often, when we talk about forgiveness, that’s all we do: talk. It’s usually nothing more an intellectual exercise for us, because heaven forefend that we should seek forgiveness for the wrongs we have done, heaven forefend that we should forgive those who have wronged us.

But in Sudan, a land that has been at war for most of the past five decades, forgiveness is a much more immediate issue. This is a place where religious, tribal, ethnic, language and gender differences have resulted in the deaths of millions of people. This is a place where land has been taken, families have been split, livelihoods have been destroyed.

Talking about forgiveness here is all the more poignant because everywhere you turn, there are reminders of the wars, reminders of the deaths, reminders of the devastation that has sundered this land.

On this past Sunday, our preacher at the Cathedral of St. Matthew was The Very Rev. Martha Deng Nhial, possibly one of the first African women to become a cathedral dean in the Anglican Communion.

Using texts from Luke on forgiveness and Matthew on temptation (“lectionary” frequently is a loosely followed word here), Mother Martha got right to the point:

We have to forgive, she said, because Jesus said so. If we don’t forgive those who have wronged us, she stressed, why should God bother to forgive us?

And then she brought in the devil.

The devil, she said, doesn’t want us to forgive. So the devil instead comes into our lives and tells us that we don’t have to forgive, because the other person isn’t forgiving us.

“The devil is not far from us,” she said. “He will be with you, eat with you, sit with you all the time. And because the devil is right there in our lives, we don’t forgive.”

Forgiveness – with all its attendant difficulties – is a very personal, absolutely urgent issue here. Every single Sudanese sitting in the Cathedral on Sunday has lost family members in one or more of the wars that have plagued this land. A culture of hatred has grown up over the last several generations, hatred between North and South, East and West, between the tribes, between the different religions. It almost seems ingrained some days.

Asking people to forgive those who have killed their families and friends, or who have denied them jobs or education, or who have striven to keep them from simply enjoying a life of peace and prosperity is hard, very hard.

Forgiveness in this place is not some intellectual exercise; it’s reality. It’s a daily need. Mother Martha wasn’t discussing some esoteric theological point; she was directly telling the people in her care to work at something some of them don’t want to even consider.

But in this place, a place of war and death and destruction, forgiveness is the only thing that will save this land. True forgiveness – the kind that hurts, the kind that stretches you beyond anything you’ve ever conceived – is the only thing that will heal this land.

So on the last Sunday of Lent, preparing ourselves to go into Holy Week – where forgiveness was modeled for us in the most memorable way possible – talking about forgiveness was real, poignant and necessary.

If the people take to heart that which Mother Martha preached, there is a chance that one day, Sudan will be healed. But only if the people start by forgiving.

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is a lecturer at the Renk Theological College, teaching Theology, Liturgy and English, and serves as chaplain for the students.

By Derek Olsen

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

I wasn’t focusing on the words of the Ash Wednesday liturgy as closely as I could have. Rather, I was trying to keep an energetic toddler from bouncing up and down the aisles of the cathedral, shrieking joyfully, at one of the more somber moments of the Christian year. We returned to the narthex after the imposition of ashes to color and have snacks. Then, after her sister and I joined in the Eucharistic prayer from there, we once again braved the central aisle, the sisters walking hand-in-hand. The smaller one was awed by the approach to the high altar where we communed, but the moment passed and we beat a hasty retreat to the parking lot before more gleeful yelps sounded, trailing collects as we went. With that, my Lent was off to a distracted start.

The whole family rose early on the morning of the First Sunday in Lent for we were all trekking out to the western edge of the diocese to hear my wife chant the Great Litany at her parish, one of our favorite Lenten traditions. My right foot hurt; I figured I’d kicked something in a nocturnal ramble. By Sunday evening, my foot was swollen a bit and there was a short dark mark on one edge I thought might be a bruise or a blood blister. Rising in the night for a drink, I found my foot would no longer support my weight. The next morning, my wife noticed that my foot had swollen to an angry red and was marked by a rash that headed up my leg. By the time we were seen at the urgent care clinic, the rash was up both legs. By the time I left the clinic by ambulance, the rash had spread to my chest and back, and my body was in sepsis—toxic shock—giving me a roughly 50-50 chance of survival.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The season of Lent calls us to do something that none of us likes to do willingly—to consider the fact of our mortality. Humans have never liked considering it, and I believe that modern American culture has taken this avoidance to a whole new level, insulating us whenever possible from the realities of life and death. St. Benedict’s monastic culture took the opposite approach and, as one of the ramifications of the monastic life as a perpetual Lent, Benedict exhorted his monastics to keep death daily before their eyes.

Me, I’m not so good at that. I find I prefer to focus on the acknowledgment and amendment of my sins in Lent and let the mortality issue slide. But this year, that was not an option: what I had mistaken for a minor foot trauma had been the bite of a poisonous brown recluse spider that had injected an aggressive bacterial infection into my bloodstream. I had not yet taken up the Lenten call to contemplate my death when I found myself staring into its very face.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Two and a half days in the intensive care unit of the local hospital as they struggled to stabilize my vitals and hold down my soaring fever followed by another five days on a medical floor as I received course after course of antibiotics gave me some hard time to think about what I had been through and what it all meant. Of course, I have no pat answers—and would be concerned if I did—but do have a couple of initial thoughts and reflections.

Every time I think about what has happened, my initial response is gratitude: I’m grateful that I was the one in the house that the spider found. Had it been either of my daughters, the story would have been shorter, more tragic, ending with a too-small coffin and that archetypical affront to the natural order: parents burying their child. Too, had the creature found my petite wife with the proclivity to ignore injuries and ailments to the last possible moment, I fear the story might have ended with another grave. So I am grateful. For though still sick, I live—and so too does the rest of my family.

I think the most important thing my brush with death granted me was a rediscovery of love—in an entirely practical sense. Thanks to flexible daycare arrangements, an understanding rector willing to give my wife time to be with me, and a few local friends who could take the girls overnight, my wife and I were able to spend much of my time in the hospital together—and I found that a treasure beyond compare. Instead of the insidious cycles of sniping and second-guessing, competing demands of work, housework, child care, and personal time that inevitably build up over eight and a half years of marriage, we simply rejoiced in each other’s presence. In the death-shadowed room the scales fell from my eyes and I encountered again the woman I love. And I marvel at how easy it is for the daily grind to efface the important—the truth of that love—by means of the merely urgent. Is that not death-in-life? To be surrounded with the promise and potential of love yet to get so trapped in our own games that we refuse to see and experience it?

Death has taught me of life, and reminded me of the love that lies at the heart of life. Now, I find myself wondering, having once lost this simple insight, how not to lose it again. Perhaps keeping death daily before my eyes is not an exercise in morbidity but a reminder that everyday I have the opportunity to choose love over pettiness, strife, and selfishness. I resolve to heed the words of the Preacher: “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which God has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.” (Eccl 9:9).

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

When I step outside of myself and examine my thoughts in connection with this brush with death, I find myself bemused. My encounter didn’t focus me on my sinfulness—although I’m certainly aware of that truth—nor on my immeasurable need for God’s grace—also entirely beyond dispute. Rather, I find that my experience with death has caused me to contemplate the importance of life and the simple joys that lie so close at hand—my wife, my daughters, and our wider family of friends. I am dust and I shall return to the dust. But for now, I am dust at dance within a shimmering, sunlit, cloud of dust, interacting with hundreds and thousands of other frail beings on the same trajectory as mine. St Augustine once reminded us that we are called to love all people but, since sheer volume makes the practical acts of love for all impossible, to care for those most closely bound to us by place, time, or opportunity. I have been reminded not to overlook those who dwell in the same house with me.

This Lent I continue to contemplate death and the facts of my own mortality. The spread of the infection into my bones reminds me that my apparent improvement may prove illusory and that I may again stare into death’s face sooner than I think. I continue to work on contemplating and getting in touch with my feelings surrounding these issues. But a primary task is to hold onto the gift that death has given me, the secret of her weakness, a weakness we shall celebrate come Easter: Love is stronger than death (Song 8:6) and the promise of the resurrection is that love, not death, will have the final word.

Derek Olsen is completing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. His full-time calling of keeping up with two adorable preschool girls and his wife, a priest in the Diocese of Atlanta, is complicated by his day-jobs as a database programmer and an adjunct professor at Emory’s Candler School of Theology. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc. Haligweorc.

By Peter Pearson

Over the last few days I have been one busy priest. The deanery in which I serve has held meetings for its delegates, for its priests and yesterday we had a liturgical workshop. I attended each of these along with leading the Sunday worship and vestry meeting at my parish, visiting some folks who can’t get out, doing some necessary paperwork, attending our mid-week evening prayer and discussion, connecting with the folks who were responsible for some of the parts of our Lenten observances, answering phone calls, meeting with my spiritual director, walking the dog, chatting with friends on the phone, attending my own 12-Step meeting schedule, talking to my sponsor, and hitting the gym when possible. (Please feel free to add the hyperventilating sound effects for added punch.)

Like you, I’m a busy Christian. For some reason, this morning I thought of Linus Mundy’s statement in his book A Retreat with Desert Mystics: Thirsting for the Reign of God about how the Desert Fathers and Mothers recognized that the greatest enemies of leading a spiritual life are: speed and noise. Perhaps I thought about it because this is the first day in a week that I haven’t over-booked, over-extended, over-done, and, as a result, I am completely over myself. I have no one to blame here; I ‘m nobody’s victim. It’s me. The problem is me.

Maybe this momentary slowing down began when I got home last evening and got a message about the lunar eclipse that was happening through the evening. I grabbed my binoculars, ones given to me by someone I love and admire who died last year, and went out to watch. Did you ever notice how s-l-o-w lunar eclipses are? It was especially apparent because it was pretty cold last night up here in Pennsylvania. Maybe it began when I built a fire in the wood stove and lay on the couch with my dog to warm up and found myself delighting in the dance of the flames. Maybe I helped it along when I turned the phone off before heading to bed so I would get a good night’s sleep. And maybe I am missing Lent along with lots of other wonderful moments in my life due to the rapid fire speed at which I live. Maybe I should slow down.

Along with all my business, I have loads of noise in my life too. First, there’s the cell phone and you already know how that goes. I can be reached anytime, anywhere, by anyone and it all seems urgent. When I am not on the phone, I am at the computer (like I am now) getting all the news and weather and commentary about all sorts of vital things. When I am in the car, I like to listen to public radio or books on tape so I can keep up with the whole Hillary vs. Obama thing and The New York Times’ picks of good books to read or listen to. Oddly, I don’t have a television and wear that fact as a badge of honor around my poor, unenlightened friends who watch mindless things like “Project Runway” and “Survivor” and talk about these programs like they’re important. Funny but I seldom realize how mindless my noise can be at times. Still, have you ever really listened to a deep, thick silence? I have and I loved it but somehow I forget that fact every time I reach for the phone, the radio, the ear phones, or the computer. I guess you could say there’s a great deal of noise in my life.

Reflecting on the amount of speed and noise in my life makes it apparent that I am not as attentive to my spiritual life as I sometimes think I am. Heck, I’m not even good at just being still and silent whether it’s a spiritual thing or not. I suppose I could go to town beating myself up for what I am NOT doing here but it just occurred to me that even the simple fact that I am attending to and reflecting on my need to slow down and be quiet is itself a beginning. Years ago my therapist said that, “Problems are seen leaving.” Let’s hope she’s right.

So, if you find that you can relate to my life, my insane addiction to speed and noise, perhaps you can just spend some time honestly looking at the truth of your life and see the insanity of it all. Breathe it in and sit quietly for a few moments. That’s a beginning.

Just breathe.

The Rev. Peter Pearson is priest in charge at Saint Philip’s Church in New Hope, Pa. He is a former Benedictine monk and icon painter.

By Peter M. Carey

“It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
and I feel fine….(time I had some time alone).”

REM, It’s the End of the World as We Know It

As I enter this Lent, the pounding beat and the prophetic words of the REM song “It’s the end of the world as we know it” run through my mind. I yearn to cultivate a Holy Lent, but there is much to do, and many to-do lists seem to stand in the way. However, listening carefully to the song, one hears the reply, “and I feel fine” and then, very quietly, toward the end of the song, “time I had some time alone.” There is a hope in the song that even in the midst of a busy life that feels like the end of the world, one can find solace; perhaps finding a bit of time alone is a key to unlock the door to a Holy Lent.

And then I say, “If only I could get through all this “stuff,” then I could have a Holy Lent! I could pray more, read more, take a class, go to church more, be more holy, give up caffeine and sweets, and meditate more. If only I could get through my to-do list, if only I had not so many commitments, maybe I could lead a Holy Lent!”

I wonder, if we are already feeling overwhelmed with projects, could Lent be a time when we just try to do one thing?

I have used this concept of “one thing” in my life as a teacher and coach and found it to work pretty well when people are feeling overwhelmed. In the midst of coaching a junior varsity soccer team after a terrible first half, when we were already down 3-0, I asked my team to agree to one thing that we would do better in the second half. I asked them to think of only one thing to concentrate on, such as communication, or movement off the ball, or pushing hard forward on the counter-attack. One thing—we had something to find unity around, and we had a goal on which to concentrate as we crawled out of a deep hole. In that case, we found a way to struggle back into the game, which ended in a tie that felt like a Super Bowl victory.

For this Lent, for those of us who are in the midst of multi-tasking, email flooding, blackberry buzzing, children running, bosses calling, grocery shopping, doctor visiting, there may be just one thing that we can do.

For that one thing, I would suggest “attention”.

That one thing is to strive to be attentive to the now and the here of our lives. If we have the courage to be where we are, we can cultivate awareness, we can cultivate attention. Attention to what, one might ask. Well I would make the claim that when we cultivate attention, when we turn aside from our to-do lists, from our cell phones, from our multitasking, even for a moment or two, several times a day, we are offered the gift of knowing God’s presence. God does not “come to us” only in times of calm reflection, but is ever present, what theologians call “prevenient grace.” God is with us always, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

I take wisdom from the words of the deranged prophet figure in the 1984 film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai across the 8th Dimension: “Wherever you go, there you are.” And, so, here we are. It is here and now that God breaks into our lives, not in some other place or time. It is here that God is, not only in mountaintop experiences, not only when we go away on retreat, not only in the midst of nature, not only in the midst of a concert hall, not only in the exhilarating rush of endorphins when we exercise. One of the Desert Fathers said: “Your cell will teach you all you need to know.” This does not mean that we all have to become monks. For the monk, the cell was his everyday place; it was his place of work. This going to one’s cell was not a retreat from the work of the monk, but was encouragement for the monk to go to his place, to seek God in the everyday place.

Rowan Williams claims in his book, The Trial of Christ, that “hardest place to be is where we are,” for if we want to turn our selves toward God, we must first work to be fully present, which can be hard when our minds leap forward and back, and we multitask ourselves away from where we sit. Cultivating attention may offer us a deeper sense of beauty, if we have eyes to see. As Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hahn claims, “The present moment is a beautiful moment.” And if we truly embraced the present moment, we might, indeed see the beauty of this place, and even see God.

So in the midst of the messiness of raising three children under 5, God is there. In the balancing of the checkbook, God is there. In the waiting room of the hospital, God is there. In the boring meeting, God is there. In the frustrating traffic jam, God is there. Lent might be a time when even in the rush of our appointments and commuting and to do lists we can be attentive to the place where we are, and attentive to God.

As we cultivate a greater sense of attention, we might experience frustration, we might have to acknowledge our fears and our anxieties, we might be confronted with thoughts of the past, and our worries for the future. However, taking the time to turn and cultivate attention may give us eyes to see the beauty of nature, the wondrous diversity of people, and God’s presence even in those interruptions.

To be where we are, in the present moment, means that we cannot deny the cries of the outcast, that we cannot ignore economic injustices, that we cannot ignore the sin of racism that not only surrounds us but is also within us. And it is our practices of being where we are, and in the present moment, that move us to take on the challenge of the brokenness and sinfulness of the world, as it is, in this place, in our own time. We are empowered by Jesus Christ to be agents of reconciliation, to forgive and to ask for forgiveness. We are given the strength to be reconciled with each other, to seek peace.

However, before we take on all of these projects, we can claim the gift of attention to the here and the now of our lives. God is with us always, so we do not need to recover some past glory, or hope for some future rest. God is with us where we are, so enormous journeys are not needed to know God in our lives. In the messiness of the stuff of our lives, in the feeling of “the end of the world as we know it,” we can find “some time alone,” and cultivate attention to this moment, to this place, for this is a beautiful time and place. Do we have eyes to see it?

The Rev. Peter M. Carey is the school chaplain at St. Catherine's School for girls in Richmond, Virginia and is also on the clergy staff at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Richmond. He blogs at Santos Woodcarving Popsicles.

By Heidi Shott

In 1979 a small island in the Southern Caribbean made a bold move by designating the real estate between the high tide mark and 200 feet below the surface a national marine park. Rules require dive boats to use moorings instead of reef-damaging anchors and make illegal spearfishing and the use of diving gloves, lest divers be tempted to touch vulnerable coralheads.

Nearly 30 years later Bonaire, one of six islands that comprise the Netherlands Antilles, has done more to preserve the complex ecosystem of the coral reef and the variety and abundance of fish life than anywhere else in the Caribbean. Not only have the Bonairians preserved their natural resource, but they have also ensured steady economic growth by drawing divers to their pristine underwater park year after year. My family has returned to dive off the island ten times over the last 15 years. We’re in a rut, but it’s an awfully nice rut and very affordable once you get there.

Diving is something my husband Scott and I have shared throughout our life together. The thrill of seeing a sea turtle or a eagle ray or to swim in the midst of a huge, flock-like school of silversides or to have dolphins frolic along side our boat, binds us in a way that is hard to explain. Scott learned to dive at 14 in the mid-seventies in the murky lakes and frigid quarries of West Virginia. I learned in 1985 in the tropical waters off the Micronesian island of Saipan when we were first married and teachers at the island parochial school.

During our most recent trip in January, our twin 14 year-old sons learned to dive. Finally we could dive together as a family. We spent two weeks diving, reading, playing scrabble and gin rummy, and watching the sun set from our porch with boat drinks and snacks – no phone, no email, no computer games, no TV, no diocesan or hospital emergencies that required our response. When we awoke in the morning, the drill was not the mad morning rush to school and work but to drink some tea with a slice of toast, gather our gear bags, squeeze into the bottom half of our wetsuits, and make our way down the dock to the happy camaraderie of the dive boat. “So where we goin’ this morning?” the day’s dive leader would ask.

“Salt Pier!”

“La Dania’s Leap!”

“Carl’s Hill!”

“Anywhere, it’s all good!”

Under the Caribbean sun we would arrive at the dive site and hoist our air tanks onto our backs, the acrid smell of hot neoprene in our noses. How delicious to let the weight of the gear flip us backwards off the side of the boat into the cool ocean.

As a diver, one skill I’ve paid close attention to over the years is controlling my buoyancy. I’ve learned to rise and fall in the water by gauging the amount of air in my lungs and to control my pitch and yawl by the flick of a fin or the twitch of a hand in the water. I’m not an expert – I don’t dive enough for that – but after a dive or two the fluency comes back. By maintaining neutral buoyancy a diver can get close to things…really close. This is important because so much of what goes on in your average coral reef neighborhood is tiny and complicated and if you want to get a sense of the intricacies of life on the reef, you need to be as close and as still as possible.

What an honor to be a visitor to this little corner of creation. It takes hundreds of years for the coral reef to grow: one generation of a hundred of species of coral dies to form a minute layer over the great exoskeleton of the reef, a millimeter at a time. One of my favorite things to do, and I taught my sons to do it as well, is to kick back from the reef into the deep water and pause to take in the whole wide expanse of the scene. We’re looking at part of creation that was in this very place doing its silent, magnificent thing at the same time Henry VIII was beginning to grow a teensy bit dissatisfied with Catherine of Aragon, when our boys were shooting themselves to bits at Second Bull Run, and when my grandfather was in the trenches faraway in France. For millennia tiny blue-lipped blennies have bravely defended their two inches of territory, orange frogfish have extended their deceptive lures, the spectacular and shy spotted drum has swum in and out of the hollows of brain coral…over and over and over again. For the past 60 years, since M. Cousteau and his friends figured out how to breath underwater, we humans have been privileged to observe this world for up to 75 minutes at a time.

Last month, on the day before we were to fly home and resume our life in Maine, I jumped off the dock with my fins, mask and snorkel. We’d made our last dive earlier in the day and were now allowing all the dissolved nitrogen built up in our blood to dissipate before we flew." (Getting the bends in an airplane is a seriously dumb, seriously dangerous rookiesque thing to do.) Before long, I was swimming 30 feet above the terrain I’d dived inches from a half dozen times in the past two weeks. From the surface I recognized certain distinctive coral heads, a large prickly West Indian Sea Egg, brilliant purple stovepipe sponges and delicate, translucent vase sponges, five different species each of parrotfish, angelfish, damselfish, and butterflyfish, and little groupers called Rock Hinds. I recognized them from 30 feet above only because I already knew them intimately from close at hand. Fish we don’t recognize at depth, we study in our fish books when we surface so we will know them the next time. Divers sport the geeky enthusiasm of birders, we just don’t often talk about it in public.

As I paddled around in the gorgeous turquoise, warmer than our mill pond ever gets at mid-summer, I started to finger this essay in my mind. Out of habit and propensity, I often contrast whatever situation I’m find myself in to the state of the Episcopal Church or the nuttiness of trying to live like a Christian in this complicated world. It’s an annoying habit and I’ve tried unsuccessfully to break it. I’ve compromised by only writing about one in five ideas that wash over me. Still, what I was thinking was something like this: If one part of God’s glorious creation - such as the ecosystem of the tropical coral reef – is so amazingly complex and fragile, doesn’t it follow that other parts of creation – the family, the congregation, the diocese, the Church, the Communion – each would be just as complex. Think of how nuanced and complicated the life of any congregation or diocese is. Yet, if we’re on the outside, how easy it is, with a little bit of distant observation, to feel we have captured the nut of a place in the palm of our hands.

As a diver at depth, so careful with my breathing to remain close but not intrusive amid the life and death action of the reef, I can observe a world that I don’t belong to. I can learn a lot, but I’ll never be a fish. I’ll never know what causes the Pederson’s Cleaning Shrimp to climb onto that particular anemone. As a snorkler 30 feet above, I can see the bigger coral heads and the bigger fish, but I’ll never see the two-inch blenny defending his little home in the crack before darting back to safety or the baby spotted moray eel poking its head and mouth full of teeth from a burrow.

But my inability to really, really know doesn’t stop me from pretending I know the undersea world. In his song, “Laughter,” Bruce Cockburn sang, “A laugh for the dogs barking at our heels, they don’t know where we’ve been. A laugh for the dirty window panes, hiding the love within.” I’ve always loved that line because he calls us on how willing we are to be dismissive of people with whom we don’t agree or with whom we have little in common. We’re especially good at that in the Church.

I don’t know how to change that, but scuba diving provides some good lessons: control your breathing, be still, watch carefully, and, for God’s sweet sake, don’t open your mouth.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. She is also communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Heidi's essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

For the next 6 weeks or so I’ll be teaching a seminary course I call “Contemplative Writing.” This year’s run coincides almost exactly with the season of Lent. It teaches a discipline that can help us “word-people” – teachers, preachers, bloggers -- to let our words take us beyond words, and center our lives more fully in God.

My working definition of contemplative writing is “writing that is for no audience but yourself and God.” That is the hardest part for word-people, since so much of what we think about is how to make our ideas available to a particular audience of readers or listeners. But how do we write when no one else will read what we’re writing? What happens when we say to God: “these words are for me and You only.” They may be “me talking to myself in the presence of God” or they may be words to God. But there is no other audience. The title poem of Mary Oliver’s wonderful recent volume Thirst gives us a glimpse of the contemplative writing experience as we overhear the poet speaking to God: “Love for you and love for the earth are having such a long conversation in my heart,” she writes. Contemplative writing uses words to ground those “long conversations” that go on in our hearts, in the listening presence of God.

I like to distinguish contemplative writing from other kinds of writing that we do in “not for publication” mode especially journaling, creative writing, and now, blogging.

Most of us writers probably practice journaling/freewriting/prewriting in some form. Journaling is “reflective" writing: the audience for it is myself -- I write so as to see myself more clearly, reflected back. This can be an important tool in the spiritual life, but ultimately, self-understanding is not the goal of contemplation, however important it may be as a step toward honesty with God (what the spiritual tradition calls “purgation"). Contemplation in the spiritual life is ultimately contemplation of God, not of oneself. Journaling melds into contemplative writing when we move away from talking to ourselves and find ourselves saying “You” to our God.

Contemplative writing is also not “creative writing.” Again, it’s about audience. Creative writing encourages people to release and explore their intuitive, imaginative side, to see things in a new way, to approach life creatively -- and to shape these experiences into literary form, for a particular audience. The best creative writing shows real respect for the disciplines of poetic form, the properties of language itself as a material, and the best creative writers submit themselves to the disciplines and challenges posed by their materials, uncovering new richness in words that embody and show imaginative insights. Contemplative writing can become “creative writing”—occasionally something will emerge that calls out to be shared. But the disciplines are different.

Some people now use blogging as another way of engaging the spiritual life with words: An online blog, of course, has an implicit audience, but I’ve known of people who blog on a website offline just to have a place to put their private thoughts, and the fluidity of the keyboard-to-screen medium can be freeing. I find, however, that there is a kind of “body prayer” involved in the exercise of putting pen to paper – a groundedness that we lose at the computer keyboard. The very clunkiness and messiness of pen and paper slows us down and forces pause, as the speed of electronic media does not.

The discipline I commend to my students is one that I also intend to take on, this Lenten season: Spend some time every day writing in a journal. Begin by placing yourself intentionally in the presence of God, and attending to what you see, hear, perceive around you – or to whatever conversation is going on in your heart. Let whatever comes, come: fill 3 pages, or spend 20 minutes – whichever frame fits your life better –but write in the presence of God, where whatever you write is acceptable, and spelling doesn’t count. Most important, leave some time after your writing time simply to rest in that loving Presence. On good days you may find that this practice of writing has become a preparatio for prayer: a doorway into the presence of the One who loves us, and always calls us deeper into that loving presence, in every moment of our lives.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt (Kathy) keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area, and teaches courses in literature, theology and writing at Virginia Theological Seminary and the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By Jean Fitzpatrick

We were supposed to get a storm of Antarctic proportions, and the radio announced a long list of school closings, but it's only a light snowfall. For an instant, I stop to look: as the wind rises through the trees, showers of huge lollipop flakes, like the ones in a child's drawing, fall to the ground, and the pure winter light reflected off the snow pours in our windows and bathes the whole house. But then it's business as usual: I return a few phone calls, exchange emails with colleagues about an upcoming meeting. My neighbor calls and we congratulate ourselves on the fact that with the snow on our driveways already melted, we won't need to call the plow.

As I put down the kitchen phone, I remember with a pang how, when my kids were small, they would greet a day like this with great whoops of joy, running outside to sled down the lawn and make snow angels. Once they were back indoors -- noses runny, mittens caked with snow, hair electrified from their knit hats -- we'd spread their wet clothes over the radiators and it would be time for hot chocolate. They'd spend the long afternoon rummaging through old clothes for costumes, getting lost in a storybook, watching Gilligan's Island reruns.

I don't let myself do that very often. Don't look back, I tell myself. Banish the self-pity. You have two healthy, grown kids. They're moving forward, they're happy and caring, they stay in touch. You have a full life, people and work you love. You're safe in a warm house. To be anything but thankful would be a disgrace.

Right. I turn away from the window. Back in my office, sinking into the swivel chair at my desk, I click on the online reservation that will, in a few weeks, whisk me away from winter. Tropical sunsets, blue water and pineapple daiquiris: just the ticket.

Now, hold on a minute, something inside me says. What are you running away from?

I take a deep breath and check in with myself. Actually, I'm surprised to notice, I feel no sadness, no pain, nothing. Zero. How did it happen so quickly that the most frozen place of all is inside my own heart?

I go back to the kitchen, fix a cup of orange tea, and gaze out the window. This time I let myself picture my children trudging across the meadow beyond the trees, calling out to each other, putting out their tongues to catch falling flakes. Ice glistens along the birch branches. A cardinal lights on the feeder and flies off. This time, instead of flinging off the sadness, I'm letting it rest with me, but lightly. Before long, as I slow down to take in the beauty of the silent, snowy woods, I'm deep in the present moment, with all its fullness.

There's no substitute for letting ourselves be human. At certain times in our lives, other people -- those we love, those we reach out to help, those with a gift for prayer or preaching -- help us see the world in an intense, new way. In doing so, they open our eyes to a larger reality, mediate the divine for us. When those times pass, no two ways about it: we're bound to grieve. It's true there's no point in looking back, like Lot's wife. But if we insulate ourselves completely against those inner waves of loss, we end up walling off the grace that is always offered to us. We lose touch with joy.

The sky is a milky white. I'm pretty sure it's going to snow again.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth. She has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By Joel Merchant

This story will become serious soon enough, so first, a lighter note. Picture this. Years ago, in growing dusk, I am walking a New York City sidewalk, my tall person’s legs taking long strides. Turned slightly toward friends, more involved in animated college student conversation than wary of my path, I walked full tilt into a metal lamp post. It was a shattering hit. My forward momentum stopped only after an arm and leg was draped around either side of the post. I crumpled straight down, losing consciousness. An unfamiliar, disconnected, observant part of me thought, “Oh. A ringing sound. The pole is hollow. That’s how a stringed instrument’s sound chamber works.”

Most of us are untrained for emergencies. Lacking experience, we’re unfamiliar and uncomfortable with tragedy – not others, not our own. It’s awkward when tragedy strikes a friend. We’re not sure how to be present. We keep our distance. We look on from a safe place. We read the paper: “Whew. What a relief this happened to someone else” (thinking, this time). We approach, confused by mixed feelings, perhaps guilt. “I cannot imagine….”…our voice trails off. It’s difficult to hide our hesitation that the person in pain could be us.

The journey through another person’s suffering is intimate. We look on, thinking that perhaps sympathy is appropriate, but helpless to express it. We imagine how we might feel in similar circumstances. Some fall into the trap of telling the person having the experience how she must feel. This doing so is less emotionally painful than asking “How are you doing?” That question crosses the psychological safety line, brings us closer to seeing, perhaps too clearly.

Having nothing to say provides little relief from the confusion and awkward silence that accompanies pain. A friend shares her experience. “Others consider that tragedy is private, that they are outsiders, not qualified to respond, especially since what you write or say is intimate. They listen to you, but fear their response would be (what?) judgmental? critical? Pain and sadness envelope a person who suffers a loss. Its protective function is to help us survive the experience. But it also isolates us because it is difficult for others to see us as we are. People are busily absorbed in their own lives, and don’t feel the pain. Once, we were the same. Now, we’re changed.”

In his book If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!, therapist Sheldon Kopp writes: “Love is being open to experience the anguish of another person’s suffering… the willingness to live with the helpless knowing that we can do nothing to save the other from the pain.”

Time is important, not because “time heals” or “with time, you’ll get over it.” It is only as time passes that we can know if the tragedy will do us in, or if we survive. A friend reminded me, “If this doesn’t kill me, it’ll make me stronger.” We understand ourselves in new ways. We cannot be the same. The experience becomes part of the story we tell that defines our life.

Why do we hesitate to tell our stories? Do we fear projecting our suffering on to the listener? “Why would anyone be interested?” “Who’d want to talk about that?” “My story doesn’t compare with the trouble she’s had.” Tragedy’s traveling companion is a sense of isolation. Everyone has a story to tell, but they’re difficult to share. Tragedy yawns open before us, a chasm, with no apparent way around or over. Crossing requires the leap of faith. If we share our story, others will listen. Someone else cares. We feel isolated, but are not.

Eli Wiesel began his 1966 The Gates of the Forest with a tale later quoted by Kopp in his book about the pilgrimage of psychotherapy patients: “When Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening…it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and misfortune averted. When his disciple, Magid of Mezritch, had occasion to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say, Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer.” Again, the miracle would be accomplished. Later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save the people, would go into the forest and say, “I do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.” Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, head in his hands, he spoke to God: “I am unable to light the fire. I do not know the prayer. I cannot find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient. God made man because He loves stories.

It was two years after my daughter’s death before my breathing returned to normal. Exhausted, in shock, psychologically confused, vision obscured, normal interaction impaired, I went about activity by rote. Friends, awkward, kept their distance. At times, I’d kept a busier than usual schedule, perhaps for the sense that there was something which continued to give life a sense of purpose. Some days I could barely function. The earlier story about walking along the New York sidewalk? The loss of my daughter is the experience of colliding with an immovable object.

Sharing my story is an idea that came only in its own good time, and still seems impossibly difficult. Time passed. I could talk about Ali without weeping. But I didn’t know where to start the story. I remember admitting to a high school teacher I was having trouble writing a paper. She said, “Just start at the beginning and write until you come to the end.” That was little help then or now. The ending is stark and abrupt. The beginning remains elusive.

Not long before her death, my daughter made me a dream catcher. People says its purpose is to allow pleasant dreams through and stop unpleasant ones. I remember an early afternoon, a breeze through the windows, sunlight through leaves of the tree spread about in speckled soft arrangements on the floor and walls. I sat, eyes unfocused, watching the dream catcher, as if I expected to see her fingers tying knots around the last feathers and beads. The experience is like hearing a plane on its landing path descent into Honolulu, and saying aloud to my daughter (who has been away long enough), “I’ll bet you’re not on that one, either.”

Her dream catcher hangs in front of an louvered closet door. Top and bottom shelves look like I’m determined to see how much they’ll hold before collapsing. The accumulation of papers, letters, pictures, books, file folders, old slides, boxes are a mix of a white elephant sale, a flea market, a not-quite-antiques auction. Of course, as each item joined the collection, it was indispensably meaningful.

That afternoon, I remembered. Wedged among these memories were treasures – copies of letters, through the years, my daughter and I exchanged. I thought: perhaps I can use these letters to tell my story. So it began. I took my letters from the shelves, read them, alternately laughing, weeping, wondering, remarking at the events and emotions in each letter. Randomly, I chose one, then another, and the next. I began to read and make slight edits in the letters. The process was manageable, satisfying, and spared me the pressure of a deadline. There’s a happy-sad quality to sharing the correspondence with others. The letters elicit responses without difficulty. Emotions and experiences behind each exchange, laughter about an event remembered, are still “like yesterday.” But inescapably, the letters are a solemn reminder. These events, this life, is unrepeatable. My daughter is no longer living. The laughter I hear is in my head, not from her in the next room or over the telephone.

After rewriting each letter, I’d wonder the story’s beginnings. Every few letters resulted in changes in the introduction. It doesn’t seem possible, no matter how easy my high school teacher suggested it was, “just to begin at the beginning.” I suppose one reason was because the end of her life brought an emotional collapse. I don’t expect that to change soon. Time has passed. It’s possible to survive. But the collision with the immovable object occurred, and the hollow metal pole still vibrates.

Joel Merchant is an educator, business consultant, and essayist. He is currently working on www.a-reminiscence.com, from which it is possible to write to him.

By Heidi Shott

Last August my sons and I made our way downeast to Mount Desert Island for our annual camping trip to Acadia National Park. Our stated goal – my stated goal – is to hike every named peak by the time the boys graduate from high school in 2012. Each year we update a master map of the park by circling the peaks we’ve knocked off. Last year we hiked Sargent and Dorr Mountains and were joined by my non-camping husband on the final morning for a hike up Pemetic.

By real mountain standards the peaks of Acadia are only biggish hills, but on clear days the views of the glacial lakes and the outline of the piney islands off the Atlantic coast still take my breath away. This annual trip at the end of summer is a touchstone for our family, a final time together before the new school year to pick the last wild blueberries along the trail, to walk around Bar Harbor with ice cream, and to savor the hot popovers with butter and strawberry jam at the park’s venerable Jordan Pond House.

Another touchstone has been reading aloud. From the time they were four or five until last summer when we finished the last Harry Potter book after a six hour marathon ending at 2:30 a.m., we’ve always had a read-aloud going. However, last summer the boys announced that after Harry Potter, we should call it quits. “It’s been fun, Mom, but we prefer to read alone from now on. No offence, okay?”

With a hard swallow, I accepted this rare example of twin solidarity. Their tastes are, after all, diverging: Colin reads history and historical novels; Martin prefers contemporary fiction and poetry. And already, at 13, they are commending many hard and wonderful books that I’ve never gotten around to reading.

So in August, shoehorned into our tent at the remotest, raccoon-infested corner of Southwest Harbor’s Smugglers Den Campground, the three of us were each to our own book. Martin was sailing around the tent alone with the poetry of Billy Collins, I was halfway through Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex, and Colin was reading an anthology of P.G. Wodehouse. (He dressed up as Bertie Wooster for Halloween and was disappointed when our neighbors mistook him for a croquet player). For me, it was sweet – each boy kept interrupting to read lines thereby annoying his brother – but not the same as reading together, immersed in the same book. I missed the plaintive cries of “One more chapter, please, or at least read to an asterisk!” After much phony reluctance, I always gave in.

In late November when it came time for Martin’s eighth grade conference, he shared with us the following poem he wrote early in the school year.

“Daily Gift”
“Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your walking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.”
- Billy Collins, “Days”

--
The first thing I hear
are the birds.

I am lying in a snug sleeping bag,
eyes closed,
absorbing the whistles
and tweets.

The second sound is the tap
of raindrops on a nylon tent
as they trickle from soggy trees.

The final noise
in my semi-asleep state
is the kettle reaching its boiling point.

Now I am awake.

I rise,
a zombie of the campground,
hair untamed,
and glare through trash-bag eyes:

a nocturnal adolescent
sore from hiking.

I clamber out of my cave
and utter the first word
of a fresh day:

“Coffee.”

Who knows what this day,
this gift,
will bring.

I only know one way
to find out.

- Martin Shott

How I wish I had Martin’s trash-bag eyes to see each new day as it is delivered to my bedside. In this new year, how I wish that we Episcopalians could focus on the gifts so freely and lavishly given to each of us by God: our capacity to love and our freedom to commit ourselves to whomever we choose; the thousands of opportunities available to serve those without a voice in our society and in the wider world. These gifts are already ours, no matter where General Convention stands on the matter at any given time or whether some among us have chosen to leave the Church altogether.

Years ago, my college’s chapter of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship invited a Presbyterian minister from Charlottesville to preside at an evening called, “Hard Questions.” It was meant to be a particularly intriguing and evangelical night, drawing students who wouldn’t ordinarily attend one of our weekly meetings. We were hopeful this Presbyterian dude would be good on the stump. (Our local Episcopal priest who faithfully attended our meetings was a genial, laid back guy and glad to escape the hot seat.) While I recall we drew a good crowd including a couple of lively agnostics, I can only remember two sure things about the evening: one is that the Presbyterian guy had a beard and the other is his response to question, “How can you explain terrible things that happen in the world?”

I had just read the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamozov and was interested to see where he would go with the answer. I was also interested because my comfort level with my friends’ confidence in a fairly rigid Evangelical view of faith was beginning to shift. At the same time I was terrified of being left as a castaway to grapple alone with an increasing number of questions and an emerging vision of what it could mean to be a Christian. So I listened to the Presbyterian intently.

He said something close to this: A countless number of horrible things happen to people that we can’t explain, no one disputes that. But the Bible gives us a clue by fully explaining that God the Creator loved humankind deeply enough to redeem us by the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. All the details are there, all the explanation is there. It’s the most complex and most horrifying deal in all of history, but God has seen fit to reveal it to us fully. A god who will explain an event of such magnitude…one that demonstrates such abounding love for creation… is a god who can be trusted with millions of things – the tragedies and the mysteries – we can’t explain in the world.

While I was disappointed with the answer at the time, I’ve found that I’ve remembered it for almost 25 years. The gifts are there. The child is born, and we know the how and why. While I miss the gift of reading to my sons, the closeness and the sweetness of it, their sharing of the books they read alone takes us new places and bestows its own gifts. I need to learn to let old gifts go and new gifts emerge, but it’s not easy.

Hark, friends, and listen closely in this New Year. Each day as you wake remember what you know is true; remember you are well-loved. Remember it is worth the struggle to climb out of your cozy tent and into the new day to accept whatever’s out there.

Just ask Martin, he’ll tell you.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Margaret Treadwell

The last thing I remember clearly is the shrill siren of the ambulance racing me through the streets of Manila to the Makati Medical Center, while my rock of a husband held my hand. Several of us attending a conference on the island of Boracay had experienced food poisoning, which concealed my true diagnosis: a ruptured appendix. When I finally learned what was really wrong, my new friend Annabella sprang into action, phoning her doctors and arranging the flight out to the hospital.

Hours later when I awoke, two doctors were standing beside my bed.

“What happened?” I asked. As they described the extent of the damage, the toxic fluids from the rupture, the peritonitis, the gangrenous appendix, the unlikely good fortune that they had decided to stay in the city and thus were available on All Saint’s Sunday to perform the urgent operation, I burst into tears, sobbing, “You saved my life!”

“I didn’t save your life, God did,” responded Dr. Pastores. “Well, Annabella did have her cell phone to reach the two of us, who happened to have the expertise you needed, but the minute we opened you up, I began praying for you and I haven’t stopped. Even one hour later and you might not be here now.”

I knew in that moment that I would work with these doctors, forming a triangle with God that would heal me.

During my 10-day hospital stay, with an array of lifelines hanging above me containing all my sustenance and medicine, I learned lessons at a deep emotional level.

First, when the doctors happily told me I was the first person they’d seen smiling the day after surgery, I realized that they and the superb nurses responded to cheerfulness. No matter how terrible I felt, a smile helped all of us feel lighter, better able to function and think.

On the third hellish day, as I struggled unsuccessfully to hold down liquids, I decided to envision each person who walked through my door as God the Father or God the Son bringing the Holy Spirit. After this resolve, the second person to arrive was a nurse named Jesus!

Second, when the threat of another operation loomed large due to adhesions that weren’t healing naturally, I became like our 3-year-old grandchildren, who have no shame about their bodies when they discuss vomiting, pooping, and the like. I was open and honest with the doctors as I lived one moment at a time: “Will my vein tolerate this new needle? Can I sit up? How will I get my feet on the floor?”

On the last day of X-rays before the scheduled second operation, I suddenly knew with extraordinary clarity that I did have the strength and stamina to undergo the ordeal, because God would be with me no matter what happened. How freeing to know this! Shortly thereafter I was able to report success in the bathroom, and Dr. Pastores did an enthusiastic jig and let out a cheer – the operation was no longer necessary.

Third, the new friends we had made were wonderfully supportive, bringing me cards, flowers and good humor. Ed, a diabetic chef we’d met earlier in our trip, ended up in the hospital room across the hall. When reintroduced by a mutual friend, we immediately bonded. Ed was released before I was, and decided that food, along with medicine, is the best healer. He asked the doctors what I was able to eat, and on the first day I was allowed solid food prepared a “flan broth” that was the best soup I’ve ever tasted. The next day it was cream of broccoli. The next, he decided on mushroom risotto prepared in large quantity for friends to enjoy.

“Ed, this is too good to be true! But when is it going to stop?” I asked.

“When you leave the Philippines,” he replied with a chuckle.

On the day before our journey home, he invited his favorite chefs and all my new friends to a thanksgiving for healing feast of paella stirred over an outdoor fire.

My toast to all present highlighted three characteristics that I experienced in each one: Deep faith in God and the goodness of life; a profound generosity of spirit – sharing gifts of healing and joy; and an everlasting sense of humor to pull through the toughest times.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and eternally grateful to be alive.

Margaret M. (Peggy) Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice. She writes a monthly column for Washington Window
and teaches a course, "Congregational Leadership: Family Systems Theory for Clergy" at Virginia Theological Seminary's Center for Lifetime Theological Education.

By Ann Fontaine

Christmas has officially arrived at our house with the ritual of the breaking of the ornament. Bearcat, one of our 2 cats, performed the rite this year. We have had many cats, all strays left by people who think that it is a good thing to leave their unwanted kittens a half mile from town. I think our gate must have a sign that says "good food, warm beds, nice man" - like those codes left by hobos in The Depression. My husband is a softy when it comes to these orphans - we currently have 2 indoor cats. But that is a different story - back to Christmas.

Every year while our kids were still home we would try to provide the imagined perfect Christmas and desire-of-the-heart presents (of course that desire seemed to change up to the moment of unwrapping). This drama would find its peak when one of the children would drop a glass ornament, yet another piece of family history would shatter on the floor and I would break down into the screaming mother.

I remember the years of my childhood Christmases as dinners at a rich relative's home with more silverware (and it was sterling!) than we knew what to do with and terror at using the wrong fork. Every Christmas morning I awoke hoping for that pair of cowboy boots, but received another doll or doll accessory. Now, as an adult, I know that the relatives were just trying to give us a lovely party and my parents were trying to figure out what to give the alien who had been left on their doorstep.

Ordination freed me from the Christmas nightmare. Now I am excused from all the family duties so that I can be attentive to my work! Sinking into the preparations and rituals of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, I began to look forward to Christmas. All our kids have now moved into their own homes and hopefully into their own less dysfunctional Christmas celebrations.

Last week Jim and I hiked up the nearby canyon and cut a tree, I decorated it with the lights that flash in 8 different patterns. The ornaments consist of everything from a Santa that was given to my husband in 1940 to gifts through the years to ones made by the kids in school and church. I put the old glass ones up high, but obviously not high enough. As I heard the smash of glass scattering into the mix of fir needles and dust bunnies, I thought, “Ahhh - now it is Christmas.” Sweeping up the fuchsia colored shards and needles so we don't have to give the vacuum cleaner hose one more tracheotomy (duct tape is your friend), I found that I had come to a new place about Christmas.

The Holy comes to birth in the midst of the chaos of life, telling us that life is worth living. Much like finding the Holy Family in the middle of those wildly overdone yard displays with Rudolph, the Grinch, Disney-fied classics and the latest cartoon favorites, the Christ child comes into our lives once again.

Recently, I presided at funeral for a man who carried this anonymous quote in his wallet - "It starts at a time called birth and continues until a time called death. It is called life. It comes with no guarantees of 60 years or 60,000 miles whichever comes first, and somehow they've even left out instructions. All we get is life itself and it's up to us to do the living.”

So DO the living - it's about love and presence (not presents). Give thanks for gifts as signs you are loved not as judgment on the givers or on your essential being. Don’t worry about using the wrong fork. Enjoy the food.

Merry Christmas!

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Jean Fitzpatrick

Leafing through this week's classifieds in New York magazine, I came across the following ad in the real estate section:

WE NEED HELP BUYING AN APT on the UWS (editor's note: that's Upper West Side), 3bd2bath. YOU are a philanthropic, wealthy person who would not miss a million bucks and would be interested in donating (or even investing) in a highly targeted manner: to my family. WE are a wonderful, hard working middle class family who contributes to our UWS community, is entrenched, happy and desperately wants to remain on the UWS (lest the city lose yet another wonderful family to the burbs). We can afford 600-700k, so you see the predicament. Can you help us??

Well, I thought, here are some grown-ups who believe in Santa Claus. So this is what Manhattan real estate prices have come to, that people who can afford to pay more than half a million for an apartment are looking for handouts. There's an absurd Little Match Girl tone to the whole ad: urban Mom, Dad, and kids standing on the sidewalk outside the Upper West Side's elegant prewar buildings, filled with longing, fingers numb in the cold. In a borough where many pay exorbitant sums to live in apartments not much bigger than a sectional sofa, the ad's Manhattan real estate envy is familiar to most of us, writ large. Now, there's something to be said for the idea that not every condo and coop in the city should end up owned by Wall Street people or international real estate investors. And with the richest two percent of people on earth owning more than half of the household wealth, maybe it's inevitable these days that middle-class people will feel poor. Maybe soon we'll be seeing similar requests from people asking for a Sub Zero kitchen ("WE are fabulous cooks!") or a Bose stereo ("WE only listen to classical music played on authentic period instruments!") or a $4,000 Capresso cappuccino maker ("WE only brew coffee with whole, fair-trade beans!").

I couldn't help noticing the theology here. In explaining their "predicament," the ad's writers appeal to the good old Protestant work ethic: they are a "wonderful, hard working middle class family who contributes to our UWS community." It's the word "wonderful" that got to me. Here's a chance, during this Advent season, to consider the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus. We are brought up to believe that if we're good boys and girls, we'll get everything on our Christmas list. Most of us recognize, by the time we reach adulthood, that life just doesn't add up that way. "Wonderful" people, we discover, experience suffering, disappointment, and loss. There are "wonderful" people living in cities and suburbs -- in New York and all over the world -- who who go to bed hungry, lack basic health care, and have no roof at all over their heads, let alone a home with two bathrooms. Talk about predicaments.

No wonder the story of a holy child born in a filthy manger touches us so deeply. We are invited to imagine, in the midst of so much hardship, the presence of joy. We're reminded that we can avoid experiencing a kind of envy that is not only unappealing, but painful, if we turn our gaze to people who have less than we do and focus on reaching out with prayers and help. And in doing so we feel blessed -- no matter where we live.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst, is a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By John B. Chilton

Paper or plastic? Booth or table? Pew or chair?

Two historic Episcopal Churches have done something that caught my eye. They each made the decision to switch from pews to chairs. In one case it was to improve the quality of worship. In another case, it was to make the nave a multipurpose space for mission. At least one of them faced resistance and conflict with the change. For reasons that will become be obvious below, I emailed these news items to my friend at St. Swithen’s by the Exit Ramp.

My earliest memories of church are of the family sitting in the pew. The pew is a bit like a booth at a restaurant. Few of us have booths at home, but when we go out to eat we favor snuggling up in a booth. It’s different. It’s more private. It better defines your space. It’s your home away from home. But a booth at home isn’t necessary for those purposes.

It’s the same with a church pew. Your family can sit together. A child can squirm or lay his head on dad’s lap. As you get older you and your friends can scrunch up together on a pew. There’s an intimacy. I didn’t meet my first girlfriend on a church pew, but it was kind of similar. The church youth group went on a field trip and we were crowded together in the backseat of the youth leader’s car. I doubt that I would have had the courage to ask her, or anyone, to the Senior Prom if it hadn’t been for that incident.

But, getting back to pews. Our church burned down when I was a teenager. Mom and I saw the violent lightening strike and heard the siren of the fire trucks. From a distance of half a mile we could see the flames of the wood structure shooting up in the sky. The only thing that was left was the speakers from the electric organ. They’d been stolen the week before and were later recovered. The old building had pews and a choir loft. When the church rebuilt there were choices to make. They decided to stay with a choir loft but to switch to chairs. Both seemed like a good idea to save space.

The loft might have been used initially – I don’t know, I was off to college by then. But it turned out the spiral staircase was impractical so the choir now sits on ground level with the congregation. The idea of the chairs, I presume, was to make the worship space more flexible and multipurpose. But on my return visits the chairs have always been in the same place. Except to accommodate the relocation of the choir. I heard recently the congregation decided to turn the entire orientation of the church around by moving the altar to the other end. Now you don’t face the empty choir loft and the latecomers as they enter. Having chairs made the reorientation easier.

Not so long ago, I was a member at St. Swithen’s by the Exit Ramp. The church has a square nave. The orientation is on the diagonal with the narthex (such as it was – that’s a long story) in one corner and the altar towards the opposite corner. The main aisle follows this diagonal. If you are still with me in imagining this configuration, you might be able to imagine that arranging the seating is tricky. As you move along the aisle from altar to narthex your pews have to get shorter. In the longest rows a single pew would be impractically long.

On top of all this St. Swithen’s did not have a parish hall. We were often moving the pews aside in order to hold parish dinners. (We liked to eat.) Restoring the pews to their proper location for Sunday service was not easy.

There’s more. The pews were donated by another church. I still remember us driving up to the warehouse with a 13 foot U-Haul. And then scrambling to rent an additional 30 foot U-Haul when we found the 13 footer was laughably small for the task. A sainted Junior Warden with some carpentry skill had made them work in the worship space.

When the time came that the parish budget allowed us to replace those pews we faced the choice. Pews or chairs? Did I once write that apparently any kind of conflict causes some people to leave the church? I’m not sure anyone did on this occasion, but the choice did create conflict. People had strong preferences. Some people are just attached to pews. I admit, I’m one of them. But I also see the advantages of chairs. In fact, I wanted to split the difference and have a mix of both. In the end, those who wanted chairs only were the stronger willed and won the day.

But we decided not to call them chairs. They’re not chairs, they’re just personal pews. Who knew we were pioneering a personal pew movement?

Dr. John B. Chilton is an economist specializing in applied game theory. In January he will conclude six years of service at the American University of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) and return home to Orkney Springs, the location of Shrine Mont Episcopal Conference Center of the Diocese of Virginia.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Annabella Santos-Wisniewski stood on her favorite Boracay Island beach in her native Philippines and had a vision. Looking behind her into a forest of palm trees, she said, “I see something white like a jewel sparkling at night. It connects inside and out to the environment such that nature is inseparable from the whole.”

Four years later we are standing in the same spot, surrounded by Annabella’s recently completed dream. Discovery Shores, where we’ll be spending a few days with the Cornell Hotel Society, Asia–Pacific conference, is extraordinary for its natural beauty, superb taste and an easygoing spirit first manifest as school children welcomed us with delightful Filipino songs and dances.

When I asked Annabella to describe herself as a visionary leader of her industry, she
told me three things: “First, I was born with vision and accept it as a great gift not to be taken lightly. I have to share it for others to multiply the enjoyment; second, I was blessed with parents who encouraged me to develop the left part of my brain – education and other tools for grounding my right brain and building teams to implement my ideas; and last, my lucky star gave me the optimism that all would work out, and this helps me risk adventure.”

Annabella’s journey began after she graduated from a Catholic girls’ school in Manila where she decided she wanted to be an architect. Her mother, a successful restaurateur who had turned a three-table coffee shop into 28 cafeterias, three restaurants, a catering service and 750 employees said, “Make that your hobby, and go study business so you can support it! By reputation the Cornell Hotel School is the best place for you and they’ll accept foreign students.” In 1965, Annabella was the first Filipino to graduate from the Cornell Hotel School, where she later completed academic requirements for a master’s degree and met and married her husband, Thomas Wisniewski.

“Education is not purely academic,” she says. “Experiences make you stronger, especially if you fail once in a while.” Even while raising their three sons, she and Tom were willing to move to where the best opportunities arose – Manila, both coasts of the United States, Hawaii and Singapore. In 1990, at the peak of their productivity in California, their lives changed dramatically when Annabella suffered an abscess in her cerebellum and doctors said she would either die or become a vegetable unless she had an immediate operation. Drawing on her considerable strengths and a deepening spirituality, she healed within three months.

“I learned that God has a design if I’ll just let go and let God,” she said. “Having lived, I decided that I must have a mission in life and that my job was to listen and feel out what that might be over time.” After several years she knew that her life’s work was to return to the Philippines to make a difference in her own community.

Businesses had begun to move from an autocratic toward a more democratic model, and Annabella decided to create a standard that promoted the dignity of her staff despite the rigid class structure. Her focus became growing her organization and the people in it through their niche – developing luxury hotels and food parks. Her son explains how the latter works: “We conceptualize and build food courts inside office buildings, and then we sublease the space. We also operate our own stalls to keep us grounded in operations.”

Raintree Partners is changing the food and hotel business in the Philippines, and in 2003 won a highly prestigious “Best Employer in Asia” award from Hewitt Associates with the Asian Wall Street Journal. “You give them roots and you give them wings and it’s wonderful to see them fly,” Annabella says of her employees.

Observing Annabella during our time in the Philippines, I see that she functions in absolutely the same way in business and with her family. She is a leader who is respected for her tough love because she has such a big heart. What you see is what you get and it’s spelled “authenticity.” When I ask this visionary woman so at home in the world how she would like to be described, she says: “By being there she helped a life. She made a difference. She opened doors and lived for others, not herself.”

Margaret M. (Peggy) Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice. She writes a monthly column for Washington Window
and teaches a course, "Congregational Leadership: Family Systems Theory for Clergy" at Virginia Theological Seminary's Center for Lifetime Theological Education.

By Derek Olsen

Every few years, I take my “epic tour.” Never leaving my armchair, I travel miles and centuries and states of mind by re-immersing myself in the great epics of former days, the Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, and even that recent vernacular upstart, Beowulf. I find this tour grounds my spirit and placates the shade of my departed grandmother, the Latin teacher who never understood why I chose a major in Japanese rather than Classics.

When last I read the Aeneid, I was struck—hard—by the presence of a theme I’d never noted before. After the frenetic escape from burning Troy, the homeless prince Aeneas and his ships of salvaged companions make landfall on the holy island of Delos—birthplace in classical mythology of Apollo, god of music and divination. The ancient shrine of Apollo was tended by the priest-king Anius, a friend of Aeneas’s father. When the hero consults the oracle of the shrine, asking where he and his band should turn and make their new life, they receive this reply:

Tough sons of Dardanus, the self-same land That bore you from your primal parent stock Will take you to her fertile breast again. Look for your mother of old. Aeneas’ house In her will rule the world’s shores down the years, Through generations of his children’s children. (3.130-135)*

The Aeneid and its quest for a new home is—at root—a quest for origins. The new land is the primal land. Look for your mother of old. This is one of the deep stories of humanity—an archetype coded deep in our understanding that resonates at a subconscious, an unconscious, level. Look for your mother of old. And, lifting my eyes from my armchair Aeneid, I find it again in books dotting my shelves—from Asimov’s Foundation series to the Holy Scriptures themselves.

The oracle’s message to Aeneas becomes the prophet’s cry to Israel as Isaiah’s second portion (Isa 40-55) exhorts the people from their place of exile, beguiling them from their slothful security to a vision of the beckoning arms of Mother Zion; no longer the shamed and shattered woman of Lamentations but clothed in clean and costly garments Zion awaits her children (Isa 54): Look for your mother of old. Creation itself will be sundered in the Almighty’s eagerness to guide the wayward children home (Isa 42:15–16) and the elements themselves shall lose their nature least they hinder the people’s return (Isa 43:2).

Psalm 107 borrowing and condensing the theme of Isaiah begins and ends with a glorious city rising where once was waste, a home for exiles, a refuge for the weary. The first vignette (Ps 107:3–9)—the wanderers in the waste, lost in alien lands—finds consummation in the bounty of the last (Ps 107:33–43) where the new city rises above the fruited plains. But no name is given. Look for your mother of old. But the city is never identified and transcending name and physical place points to something beyond the earthly dwelling. Further, the path from first vignette to last traverses curious ground, with images oddly resonate. A people sitting in darkness—upon them a light is shone, bounteous food given to the hungry, a tempest tamed by divine word at sea…and I am reminded of the old tradition linking the shattered doors of bronze and iron bars to the now-sundered gates of hell itself. A path of liberation, a path of redemption, presented as if pioneered by a God who has felt hunger, pain, and darkness in his own flesh…

And finally Hebrews, an enigmatic book of eloquently literary Greek, sees Isaiah and the Psalter as signposts pointing into the fullness of the truth. It speaks of Abraham, father of the faithful, leaving his home by strength of faith and “sojourning in the land of promise as in a strange country…For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb 11:9, 10). And the litany of “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb 11:13) wends its way through patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs, all making their way to the heavenly country, for God “hath prepared for them a city” (Heb 11:16). But the one who leads the way, the one who goes before—in truth if not in time—is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, he who shatters the gates of bronze and throws open the doors of paradise: even Christ Jesus our Lord. He is the way, the gate, the door of our heavenly home.

Look for your mother of old. Look—press on—for the land that gave you birth. No, not in your flesh but in the root of your being.

But the metaphor twists and bends on the point of a paradox for the place is not a place and the wandering people wander towards the place where they already dwell. For the city, our ancient home, is near to us. It hangs—just a moment’s breath away from us, closer indeed than our hands and our feet. The carpet—the tile—the hardwood—under my feet is shaded and shadowed by its glistening pavers. For the place is not a place but a people. And the people is not a people but a Body. And the city is not a city but a bride. Look for your mother of old. Washed in clearest water, fed on finest wheat, our Scriptures, songs, and stories urge us to realize what has already been attained for us. The heavenly country lies not only in heaven; the heavenly country lies where its citizens may be found, where they proclaim its light and its truth, yes, even in the midst of hurried and exhausted lives that feel decidedly less than spiritual.

We are citizens of a different homeland, of another place. The land of promise. Our ancient home and source. Though we forget ourselves in our exile here, its call recalls us to who and what we are—to whose business we are to be about. While we obey the laws of this land there is a higher law, another legislation, a yet more excellent way that commands our words, our deeds, our actions. For the law of our homeland is the law of love—love of God, love of neighbor. Isaiah recalls and reminds; the Psalter recalls and reminds, Hebrews recalls and reminds: Live into the land of promise; look for your mother of old.

* The quotation is from Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (Vintage, 1990) which I cannot recommend highly enough.

Derek Olsen is completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University where he teaches in homiletics, liturgics, and New Testament. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Martin L. Smith

I was walking along P Street in Washington, D. C., the other day pondering a phrase our Presiding Bishop used in a recent webcast, when she spoke of the need for the church to move on from the controversies surrounding sexuality to “refocus on matters of life and death like starvation, education, medical care.” I know she was using “life and death” to mean “of the highest priority.” But for gay people it’s hard to hear straight folks using language that, even inadvertently, seems to imply that the struggles we must undergo are not matters of life and death. In fact they are—sometimes in the most literal way. Ironically, I found myself halting outside the paint store on the corner of 15th Street NW. It was here that my partner and I experienced the second of two attempted gay-bashing assaults.

It happens so quickly, as any victim of a street crime will tell you. Thugs suddenly came pouring out of a huge SUV. They screamed for our blood using anti-gay curses that left their motive in no doubt. As we ran for our lives, with the pounding of their boots on the sidewalk drumming in our ears, we never thought we could outrun them. But we eventually shook them off when we reached an area perhaps too brightly lit for them. This nightmare repeated a similar incident several months earlier that began outside the fire station on 13th Street, as we were walking home after supper. We also managed to escape that time, ending up in an alley retching from the effort, just glad to be alive.

Perhaps you’re thinking murder is an exaggeration. Well, no. A priest friend of mine was the victim of a gay-bashing in Logan Circle so violent that he would almost certainly have died had not a horrified passerby made a 911 call that brought a police car quickly to the scene. I also think of a seminarian friend, who was so brutally smashed up by a homophobic assailant wielding a tire iron that five operations on his head and brain were required. He was too disabled to be ordained and died two years later in an accident caused by the side effects of his medications.

Life and death. I hope we will find other language that can unite us around a cause that our Presiding Bishop is perfectly right to emphasize—global claims of mission and justice. However, I hope we’ll never imply that the claims of gay and lesbian folk to equality, respect and security lie outside the realm of life and death matters. We must be careful what we say.

What will we say when we are trying to comfort two parents, friends, whose teenage son, an acolyte, has committed suicide, leaving a note about his despair in the face of bullying and his lack of faith in the possibility of happiness? They know that issues of sexual orientation are matters of life and death, not merely an irritating distraction from nobler causes. What do we say when a priest friend who has moved into a neighboring parish finds herself being trailed for by a stalker, whom she discovers to be an agent of an anti-gay organization notorious for its tactics of defamation? Not an issue of life and death?

As I paused outside the paint store, I realized I had never told the story of the two attempted assaults from which I had narrowly escaped to more than a few friends. I didn’t want to worry my family, and these are grotesque stories for a middle-aged clergyman to recount. Yet the real reason is that most gay folk are trained to take their vulnerability for granted. We suck it in. But maybe we must change that. Straight people enjoy innumerable unearned privileges denied to gays, just as white folk have unearned privileges denied to people of color. We shouldn’t add another one to the list, the privilege of being spared the pain of hearing about our wearying and incessant experiences of being attacked, condescended to, marginalized, insulted and patronized.

No one looks forward more eagerly than gay folk to the day when issues like the eligibility of partnered gay and lesbian priests for the office of bishop will sink to a lower place in our order of priorities. But in the painful meantime, while the progress of equality in the ministry is temporarily halted, the task of making sure that the life and death stories of gay and lesbian people are heard grows in urgency. And gay and lesbian Christians will have to become more outspoken, not less, even in the face of pressure from those who seem to be signaling that it is high time we fell silent again.

Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s in Washington, D.C.

I wrote this column a few years ago for Beliefnet, and it is reprinted here with permission.

By Jim Naughton

A few years ago, while I was on an academic fellowship, my family and I spent Thanksgiving with other fellows and their families. In religious terms, we were a mixed bunch: Christians, Unitarians, Jews, agnostics, and atheists.

A multi-religious dinner table always presents a bit of a problem when it is time to say the grace before meals. But Thanksgiving presents a particularly sticky situation, because it is the one occasion on which even the irreligious feel that some sort of invocation should be made. But who, or what, should we invoke?

After several minutes of communal hemming and hawing, one of the braver of our number delivered a prayer to the earth, thanking it for its bounty and seeking its forgiveness for our environmental sins. In all, it sounded more Green Party than pagan. Having crossed that hastily improvised bridge, we tucked into our feast.

But the moment stayed with me, for it illustrated what a peculiar, not to mention sneaky, holiday we were celebrating.

Thanksgiving is not a purely civic holiday like Memorial Day or Independence Day, although we are, in part, celebrating the fortitude of our Pilgrim forebears. Nor, like Christmas or Passover, does it come freighted with the content of a particular faith. Rather, Thanksgiving straddles these two categories; it is civic and religious. To paraphrase Jesus, Thanksgiving gives both to Caesar and to God.

In doing so, it discomfits believer and unbeliever equally. For giving thanks assumes the existence of one (One?) who deserves our gratitude--anathema to atheists. But giving thanks as a nation assumes that we stand before God as citizens of a country, as well as members of a faith. And that should offend anyone who believes that salvation flows from the church and not from the state.

Thanksgiving, in other words, assumes the existence of something that doesn't exist: an American faith.

On these grounds, I suppose one could argue that this holiday violates the establishment clause of the Constitution. I leave that task for some particularly dogmatic member of Americans for the Separation of Church and State. What interests me is the ubiquity of gratitude, the understanding, even among witnessing atheists, that it is important to be grateful for our good fortune.

For me, the desire to give thanks is evidence, at a minimum, that human beings are innately religious. The theologian Karl Rahner wrote that there is a "God-shaped hole" in every one of us. With Rahner, I believe that it is God who put it there.

You can take that argument or leave it. But if you leave it, help me to understand why we experience this particular species of gratitude. I'm not talking about the kind of gratitude we feel toward someone who has done us a favor. I mean the sort of global gratitude inspired by gifts we could not have known enough to ask for, or the kind we feel when matters beyond our control end well for us.

Who do you thank for your sweetheart's brown eyes; for growing up where it snows (or doesn't); for being alive at the same time as Bruce Springsteen; or for seeing your children born into a country that is prosperous and at peace?

You might argue that there is no one to be thanked. Maybe all our purported blessings are a matter of random chance. Perhaps the desire to extend gratitude beyond the human is an evolutionary glitch--a useful social trait that got too big for its britches.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps we awaken one day and realize that we are not now, nor have never been, masters of our own destinies; that our successes were not entirely of our own making; that our souls magnify the Lord, whether we like it or not.

Again, you can take this argument or leave it. It is easier to believe in chance than in grace. Chance requires nothing from us. In fact, if life is a succession of random events, than any response to good fortune is superfluous.

Grace is different. In receiving grace, we are challenged to become channels of grace. This is more than a matter of a few good deeds (although those help); it is an invitation to place one's self in God's hands, and devote one's self toward what we perceive as God's ends.

Thanksgiving, then, is a call to action: a gentle poke to awaken our collective conscience from its postprandial slumber. To whom much is given, etc. etc.

In a county as religiously diverse as ours, we may never be able to express our gratitude in words that are acceptable to everyone. Fortunately, deeds work even better.

By Sam Candler

It’s that time of year. It’s time to wear everybody down by asking incessantly what we are thankful for. From kindergartens to garden clubs, everyone will be pressing themselves to consider all the things we are – or should be—thankful for.

Isn’t giving thanks supposed to be a lovely activity? Well, not always. During this upcoming season of Thanksgiving and Christmas, I remind myself that what we give thanks for can also affect our spiritual lives negatively. For example, there may be a problem with giving thanks for over-abundance and over-supply. Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector reminds us that merely thanking God indiscriminately may not be the best prayer after all.

Therefore, I have decided this year to thank God in another way. I propose to thank God not for all the things I have. I want to thank God, instead, for all the things I do not have. I want to thank God for all the things I do not need!

I do not know about you, but I have received about a hundred pounds of retail catalogs in the last few weeks. The same catalogs are in the doctor’s offices. They are in the seat pocket of the airplane I flew a few weeks ago.

I thank God that I do not need all the products that those catalogs are offering. Have you noticed how much stuff is in those catalogs that you absolutely do not need?

Here’s a few of the items I thank God that I do not need: I do not need an all-in-one breakfast machine. This machine has slots for toast and eggs and sausages. Apparently, you put everything in, wash your hands, and then out pops your own ready-to-eat breakfast. I do not need that. In fact, I enjoy a breakfast that requires a little time to prepare. It’s usually just enough time for me to wake up. Machines that claim to save me time usually cost me a great deal more anxiety.

I am also thankful that I do not need a fifteen-thousand dollar exercise machine that promises to make me lose weight if I use it only ten minutes a day. Have you seen the advertisement for this machine? It looks like something the absent-minded professor has invented, full of arms and cables and strange hooks.

I must admit that I am actually a bit overweight myself. I should exercise some more. But I think good exercise should not cost fifteen thousand dollars. It really costs only time. I am thankful I do not need that contraption.

I am also thankful I do not need the fanciest GPS –global positioning system—in my car. Have you seen how complicated and fancy they have become? For one thing, I like to know where I am going before I start driving the car.

For a second thing, I really don’t want a strange voice telling me about every turn and every local attraction we pass. A friend of mine has one of these devices, and he took me for a ride in his fancy car. I could hardly have a conversation with him, due to that strange voice mildly droning out directions. Actually, we were up in north Georgia, and –I swear—we ended up on some God-forsaken dirt road that led us through a roller-coaster. I am thankful that I do not need a GPS voice in my car.

Here’s one. Mini-helmets. A six-inch football helmet signed by my favorite football player. I am thankful I do not need that. If I had one, it would probably be signed by Michael Vick.

Here’s another item I am thankful I do not need. It’s a new kind of shoe with industrial grade absorption springs in the heel. The ad says it defies gravity. Yeah, that’s just what I need. I hop over a crack in the street, and I end up bouncing into a plate-glass window. I am so thankful I do not need to wear gravity-defying shoes.

How about the world’s largest write-on map of the world? Do I need that? Actually, I thought I did need one of these, about ten years ago. We had children at home, and –how great!—we could have a huge map on the playroom wall, so they could actually learn something while they were staring into space! So I bought one. “World’s Largest” has to be correct. It was thirteen feet long and nine feet high. We didn’t have a wall it would fit on. We ended up trying to install it by curving around the corner and up into the ceiling. We did not need that thing. I am thankful I don’t need another one. By the way, I do not need a television screen that big either.

I am thankful that I do not need a runaway alarm clock. Have you seen it? Its cousin is an alarm clock that starts flying around the room when it goes off. The idea is that you have to get out of the bed and search for it in order to turn off the sound. That way, you are definitely awake. I am so thankful that I do not need that.

I am thankful that I do not need a “garage elevator.” Apparently this device is a steel platform that you install in your garage. After you put all your garage clutter into it, you hoist it up to the ceiling, so it’s out of your way. That way, I suppose, I can put more clutter on the floor and fill every cubic foot of the garage with other things I do not use. I don’t need a garage elevator, and I cannot imagine how to install it anyway.

I am thankful I do not need a nose-hair trimmer. Well, I take that back. My wife would probably say I do need a nose-hair trimmer. Would I pay more attention to that area of my personal hygiene if I had paid forty dollars for a special machine? Let’s give it another year before I put it on the Christmas list.

I am thankful I do not need a backpack bicycle. This little bicycle apparently folds up so you can put it in your backpack …and add twelve pounds to what you are already carrying. I guess if it got too heavy you could unfold it and try to bicycle out on the trails, but I am not sure the six inch tires would let you do that. I am thankful that I like to backpack and I like to bicycle, but I do not have to do both of them at the same time!

I am thankful that I do not need that new language teaching series that will have me speaking Portuguese in ten easy weeks. What a great headline: Learn Portuguese today! Today? I would have to spend a year in Portugal or Brazil before I could get by. I am thankful that I do not need a language teaching tape to prove to me how un-disciplined I am!

What else is being touted this year as “Gotta have it”? I actually do not need a pick up truck that has ten horsepower more than the one my neighbor has. It doesn’t need to be six inches wider either. I am so thankful that I do not need a cell phone with two hundred different ring tones.

Think of all the things we do not need this year! I do not need to paint the kitchen another color. I do not need another sweater. I do not need another channel on my cable television menu. I do not need to spend more money.

I simply do not need all this stuff that the world tells me constantly I do need. I am thankful, so thankful, that I really don’t need it! What a liberating experience it is to realize what I simply do not need. It makes me feel free!

Maybe this is what it is like to be close to the kingdom of God, where all is made new. When I realize how much I do not need, I am that much more free to acknowledge the simple wonders God has for me right now – the simple gifts like love and family, friends and community.

Maybe this is what real thanksgiving feels like. Thanksgiving is freedom from the unnecessary clutter of our lives, freedom from what we do not need, so that we can see anew the simple gifts God has for each of us.

The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He helped start that city’s interfaith group, and leads regular community bible studies. He is also inspired by playing jazz piano, hunting, astronomy, and poetry. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral web site.

By Heidi Shott

It all started when Jerry Hames decided to retire as the editor of Episcopal Life at the end of June. My friend Tracy Sukraw, editor of the Diocese of Massachusetts’ paper The Episcopal Times, and I wormed an invitation to his goodbye party in New York as the surprise guests. We figured a surprised and delighted Jerry Hames would be a marvelous sight to behold. And, you know, it was.

On the morning of, Tracy flew from Boston and I flew from Portland, Maine. We found each other and took the AirTrain (seven bucks from JFK to Manhattan!) to midtown. Because this was just a quick trip and we’d be walking around all day, we limited ourselves to one shoulder bag. Mine was stuffed, and I kept needing to take things out of it to get to what I wanted at the bottom. I sensed this was not a good way to live, but without a convenient place to drop our bags (we were spending the night way uptown), I had no choice. Perhaps that I would lose something was inevitable. But, as I discovered when I tried to start my car back at the Portland airport several days later, losing my key ring was truly unfortunate.

If Jerry Hames was less wonderful and if Tracy was less game, I would never have gone to New York last June and lost my all my keys…keys to both of our cars, keys to the Diocesan House, keys to the Genesis Fund and its post office box and the key to my mother-in-law’s house that I’m still afraid to tell her I lost. The only reason I didn’t lose the key to our house is because we never lock our doors. That small mercy compensates for hardly anything at all.

Three weeks ago when I arose at 4 a.m. to drive to Stittville, New York, (same state – different universe) to take my mother to the hospital for surgery, I jiggled my coat pocket to listen for my keys. Clang, clang they sounded and I figured I was good to go. At 5:30 a.m. when I inserted my car key into the ignition after a coffee run at the Kennebunkport rest stop, I thought, “Gee, this feels funny.” I turned on the light and discovered I was holding my husband’s key ring.

Rut-roe.

Because I had lost my key to his car in June, one of the keys splayed out on my palm was the only key to his car in existence. That his keys were in my coat pocket is an uninteresting story that involves impatience, laundry, and designated driving and I won’t bore you with it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was on a trip of undetermined length with the only key to my beloved’s car in my possession. Actually, when I woke Scott up at 6:30, he took it well. He knows Jerry Hames and likes him very much, “It’s Jerry Hames’ fault,” I said into my cell phone somewhere on I-495.

“I don’t think so,” my car-less husband said.

Scott borrowed a friend’s car to take our son to school and I fed-exed the keys from the road.

So yesterday afternoon, when I couldn’t find my wallet in my mother’s hospital room in Utica, New York, I thought back to the moment earlier that day as I sat in my car in the parking garage. “Should I take my wallet into the hospital or lock it in the car?” I pondered a moment, consulting my wiser self. “Take it, because you need someplace to put the money you get back from the cafeteria.”

Ah, the wisdom of moi.

The previous evening my brother Brad, his girlfriend Lisa, and I were in the hospital dining room while they were working on our mom in the Intensive Care Unit. It had been quite a bad day with a worrisome close shave with the dreaded and invasive ventilator. Three weeks after surgery and we were back to the ICU. Brad hadn’t eaten and the cafeteria was closed for business, but you could buy sandwiches from a sort of automat machine. “Here, Sweetie,” I said, “I’ll buy you a sandwich. The turkey doesn’t look too bad.”

I put a ten in, retrieved the $2.25 sandwich, and waited for my $7.75…which didn’t come. The maintenance man patrolling the dining room told me to return the next day and the cafeteria people would refund my change. So that’s why I took my wallet into the hospital - because of the turkey sandwich situation. My wallet, it turns out, probably never made it past the parking garage. Later, I retraced my steps, talked with Security, poked through the garbage cans and finally left my name and number at the main desk. My mother had 20 bucks stashed away that I could use for tolls and I had a gas card in my glove compartment. I would make it back to Maine and I did.

Before I left the hospital, I called Scott at home. That morning we’d had a little tiff on the phone about some wet laundry I thought he should have noticed and put in the dryer without being prompted. “How do you walk past a basket of wet laundry a dozen times and not notice it?” I asked, befuddled.

“How was I supposed to know it was wet?” he cried.

From the parking garage I called to ask him to cancel our credit cards, I said, “Hi, it’s me. Please don’t be mad.” And when I told him what had happened, you know, he wasn’t.

Blame is a funny thing. As someone who has worked for the Church for a long time, I’ve seen a lot of blame passed back and forth. Anyone who follows the episcoblogs can’t escape the winding gyres of blame that circle each new development. I’ve always been pleased that I wrote an essay about which both Gene Robinson and Kendall Harmon seemed to agree.

The need to place blame is so human, so natural we’re hardly aware when we’re doing it.

Over the weekend I started reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s “Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.” Though I still work for the diocese as a consultant, my family and I, once so involved in parish life, have kept our distance for the past few years. Scott was senior warden and chair of the last Search Committee. He played guitar at the family Eucharist every Sunday for years. Then suddenly something broke for us, and we’ve never quite been able to figure out what it was. We’ve visited other nearby churches, warm and welcoming all, but ultimately we believe in being involved in the community where we live. This is our church, but we feel removed from it and we’re stuck in a hard, sad place.

Taylor’s book is certainly told from a clergy point-of-view but, having lived the oxymoronic life as a “lay professional,” I understand her journey. The need to blame others for my lapse as a churchgoer is palpable. If only, if only. But ultimately I’m responsible for my own stuff. That’s what we’re trying so hard and so rigorously to impress upon our young teenage sons. You don’t like that grade in math? Oh…maybe you should try harder. You want an I-tunes gift card? Oh…maybe you should mow a neighbor’s yard.

But here’s the thing: I hate being responsible when it’s so comforting to blame others for bad things happening or good things not being done. On Saturday night if Brad hadn’t said, “Let’s go down to the dining room,” I never would have lost my wallet. In June, if Jerry Hames hadn’t retired, I never would have lost my keys in New York.

But here’s one more thing: Once you start owning up, it gets a lot easier. On Saturday morning, I stepped into my mother’s hospital room with a chocolate frosted donut as a peace offering. The word on the sibling street was that she blamed me for all the complications that had caused her to be back in the hospital instead of living independently in her own home. I had pushed her into a dangerous surgery and look what had happened.

But when I stepped to the threshold of her door, she held up her index finger to me, as though she were on an important phone call…but she wasn’t. She was in the midst of a very, very serious bout of congestive heart failure and had called for help. Nurses and respiratory therapists streamed into the room on either side of me.

Her struggle for breath was frightening. It reminded me of the brief days seven years before when my father was poised between this life and the next: the feeling that together we – he on one side and I on the other – were on the verge of something else, something unknown and slightly reckless. On Saturday my mother struggled for breath under the oxygen mask while we waited for a room in the ICU and for the three diuretics they had given her to kick in to relieve the fluid buildup in her lungs. I sat on her bed and sang all the old hymns I still knew by heart. She pulled off her mask and whispered, “Sing ‘How Great Thou Art’”, and I obliged the best I could.

If, as my siblings had warned me, she blamed me for pushing her into this awful, vulnerable place, she didn’t say it then. My mother held my hand and whispered, “I knew you’d come.”

Maybe I am to blame for the complications of my mother’s medical condition. Maybe we’re to blame for our restlessness with our congregation. Maybe we are all to blame for the current fracture of our church. But maybe blame doesn’t matter. Maybe blame is irrelevant to God. Maybe what’s important is simply showing up to church every Sunday and to every goodbye party we can manage whether we’re invited or not.

Maybe Jerry Hames isn’t to blame for my lost keys after all and maybe ten dollars isn’t too much to pay for my brother’s turkey sandwich.

Heidi Shott is press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine and communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Andrew Gerns

The classic TV series “The Naked City” used to end with this line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” I was way too young to see the show when it was on, but that line sums up city ministry just the same. In a city church there are a million stories.

Here is one more.

One Advent‐tide, our parish was getting ready for the Christmas celebration that we host for the guests of our Saturday soup kitchen. The Ark Soup Kitchen serves an average of 75 meals a week and the hosts are volunteers from Trinity and from other churches and community groups in our area. But everyone who eats at the Ark comes to Christmas. They await the visit from St. Nicholas who gives out presents we have received from donors in the parish and matched to guests who signed up before Thanksgiving.

But this particular year, strange things were happening. The wrapped presents under the tree in the rear of the church had become “peekages.” Someone not‐so‐carefully pulled aside the wrapping to peek at what was inside. Little things in the church did not go missing but were just in a slightly wrong place as if someone had picked it up and put it down again but not quite sure as to where it belonged.

We stepped up our lock‐up procedures but as the strange events moved into the second week, we found our answer when a person came into pay the nominal rent we charge to community groups who use our space. She gave our secretary glowing reviews for the new sexton we hired.

“Oh?” said our puzzled secretary. “How nice.”

Then another rave review came in. And we began to wonder just who this angel was.

It seems that the outside group was met by a polite middle‐aged man dressed in a jeans and a flannel shirt. He would accompany them as they unlocked the door, help them set up their tables and chairs, make the coffee, and then at the end of the meeting re‐appear, clean up the coffee, put away furniture and take out the trash. He would wish the group good night and promise to take care of the lights and the doors.

And he did because he was spending the night.

We decided to find out who this fellow was. And so after choir practice—the one time he did not appear—we combed our darkened building. We found him asleep on one of the relocated pews that lined our parish hall. As soon as he saw us, he bolted out the door leaving his belongings behind.

Besides a few clothes, there wasn’t much. And most of that he got from us.

He had soap, shampoo and a shaving kit from what we collected for the homeless shelter, ironically enough. He had picked food from our food basket and pantry. He had cooked on our stove using our utensils and ate using our plates and flatware. When we found him, he had not cleaned up for the night, but clean up he did because everyday our real sexton checked the space and there was never any sign of him. We found that he stashed his stuff way back under the stage behind the table carts. He used an alarm clock that he found with the other Christmas gifts.

And he left his identification.

Our secret live‐in sexton was a Viet‐Nam era veteran. Another homeless vet had made our church his home for a little over two weeks.

We called the police. We did not want him arrested, but we wanted him to get his stuff back. Besides, he had done such a good job, maybe he’d like to get paid for it? But it was not to be. That very night he got into a scuffle with another homeless person and landed in jail for the night. The officer who came, himself a vet, said that this was not a surprise. Together, we –-the officer and a few of us at church—tried to reach out to the man, but he took back his stuff with a nod and went away.

Oh, how I wish we could have turned this into a heart‐warming Christmas story! Alas, there was no redemption here. He just took off into the night.

One can only guess at his story. Was he homeless because of addiction, or stress‐related mental illness? There was no alcohol or drug anywhere in his stuff and he never tried, as far as we could tell, to break into the places where we kept our valuables. Did he have a family? Was he able to hold down a job but just not have enough to afford his own place to live? Clearly he was inventive and able to deal with people on some level, but here he was, living on the street –and for a time in our parish hall.

As so he left, becoming another story in another city church. His story, though, is not unique.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, who studied patterns of homelessness among veterans, veterans make up a disproportionate share of the nations homeless population. They tell us that in 2006, approximately 195,827 veterans were homeless on a given night—an increase of 0.8 percent from 194,254 in 2005. More veterans experience homeless over the course of the year. We estimate that 495,400 were homeless in 2006.

While vets make up only 11 percent of the civilian population, one quarter of all homeless people (26%) are veterans. An estimated 44,000 to 64,000 veterans are chronically homeless in this country.

The popular picture of the psychologically scarred, dysfunctional vet does not account for the high incidence of homelessness. Nearly half a million vets are paying more than 50% of their income for rent, and half of these live below the poverty level, and 43% were receiving food stamps.

“Female veterans, those with a disability, and unmarried or separated veterans were more likely to experience severe housing cost burden,” the Alliance reports. “There are also differences by period of service, with those serving during the Korean War and WWII more likely to have severe housing cost burden.”

The reasons for homelessness among veterans are the same reasons that homelessness is widespread in this country. But like those who go before us to protect our nation and our freedoms, these vets go before us as a living sign that in the most affluent nation in the world there are far too many of us who have no place to live.

I have no doubt that among the routines of ministry among caring churches there is some kind of outreach to a homeless vet hidden among the faces of those seeking food, shelter, a handout or a little work.

On Veterans Day, we will mark the graves of the honored dead; we will have parades to honor those who have served our country in the armed forces at home and abroad. We will remember the sacrifices who served with flags, ribbons, and car magnets. But it may be that the most effective way we can honor veterans is to work for accessible, quality healthcare for these women and men; and, most of all, work to end the scourge of homelessness that falls disproportionately on this group and others.

The Rev. Andrew Gerns is the rector of Trinity Church, Easton, Pa., and chair of the Evangelism Commission of the Diocese of Bethlehem. He keeps the blog Andrew Plus.

By Heidi Shott

My mom, Audrey, is 84 years old and lives alone in my tiny hometown in upstate New York. For about five years, she’s used a walker because she needs a hip replacement. She can’t have a hip replacement because she refuses to have a heart valve replaced and no orthopedist will touch her unless she does. Last Wednesday morning she was scheduled for surgery to stop intestinal bleeding. But then suddenly she wasn’t.

In the midst of getting ready to go to work and rustling my sons off to school, I called my brother, Brad, to remind him that I’d placed her living will in her purse before I returned home to Maine a few days before. “Well, it doesn’t matter, Heid,” he said with a huff. “She’s refusing to have the operation. She’s afraid she’ll die.”

“You’re kidding me,” I hissed. This is the woman who 18 hours before said over the phone that she had the peace that passeth all understanding.

It had been a long few weeks for both of us – for Brad because he lives next door and is the “first responder” – her go-to guy – and me because I’d come out to New York – a seven hour drive – to take care of her when she arrived home after eight inconclusive days in the hospital. We had a nice couple of hours sitting and talking, my mother reminiscing fondly (now that he’s dead) about her long and bumpy life with my dad and telling me tidbits about neighbors and family members that she forgets to mention when we talk on the phone. Then suddenly, things went wrong. You’ll have to trust me on this, because anything more gets into the realm of too-much-information.

After an initial, highly alarming crisis and a call to her doctor, we tried to settle down to sleep. She called to me in the night and I thought it was my son, Colin, calling. I thought I was at home in Maine…not in the spare room in what we call the “front apartment.”

After shaking off the confusion, I tended to her in the night, twice, three times, and in the morning we tried to leave for the hospital but she was too weak and dizzy to make it the last 25 feet to my car. “Do you want me to call for an ambulance?” I asked. It was a dumb question. She leaned deeply over her walker and I thought, “Shit, this is it.” I called 911 and returned to her, rubbing circles on her back while we waited.

“That feels good,” she said. “It feels good when you rub my back like that.”

I remember my mother rubbing my back when I was small and afraid to go to sleep or when I was sick. “I’ll pull out my old nursing tactics,” she’d say brightly. My mother, an army nurse during World War II, nursed many of the men who survived the Bataan death march when they returned to the states at the end of the war. She told stories of how they would rally for their families and girlfriends who came across the country to see them and then die shortly after the jubilant visitors departed. She told of how she painted all of their toenails bright red while they slept to cheer them up and then had to fess up when a general visited the ward the next morning. “Who did this?” the general bellowed, the story goes. “I timidly said, ‘I did,’ and the General roared with laughter.” And my mother always laughs at that sweet memory. But here she was at 84, dizzy and weak and waiting for the ambulance in the dingy garage of the front apartment. I rubbed her back.

My mother is a Southern Baptist, and we don’t talk much about religion anymore. She thinks I’m nuts and I think she’s nuts and we generally get along fine.

The previous evening, having been away from the piano for more than a week while she was in the hospital, she sat down to play. Between the ages of 11 and 14, when I started hitching rides to a more liturgical church and several years before I found myself at the door of an Episcopal church as a college freshman, I learned a whole lot of Baptist hymns and Gospel songs. Downstairs my mother started to play a song from the 1970s, Because He Lives by Bill Gaither. I know the chorus by heart; it goes like this:

Because He lives I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone. Because I know-oh-oh, He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives.

Frankly, I’ve spent the last 27 years trying to forget that song and others like it. It’s not that I don’t believe that Jesus lives or that knowing Jesus doesn’t make life worth living, but because…

And that’s the problem, I thought as I stood in the upstairs hall listening to her play, suddenly I don’t know why I hate that simplistic, unnuanced, goofy music, because, whatever else it is, it is a balm to her in this frightening time of illness and worry. It’s her centering prayer, her compline, her Taize, her Eucharist.

Before long, we were stationed in an acute bay in the emergency room at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Utica. Nurses milled about asking questions. “She was just discharged yesterday,” I said from a chair in the corner. “Shouldn’t you have all that information?” They glared at me. I’m not used to this in a hospital. My husband is an administrator at a small, community hospital on the Maine coast where we know everybody. We’re used to big-hearted people but here my mom was just an 84 year-old female patient who presented with thus and so.

The nurses shifted her in her bed. “My mom’s a nurse,” I gambled. They perked up and looked at her. “You are!” Suddenly Mrs. Stukey was a person.

In the afternoon with my mother finally settled after hours in the ER, I drove back to her place and embarked on some industrial strength cleaning. Old ladies with walkers and bad eyesight who are too proud to pay someone to clean for them are prone to harboring crumbs in their toasters and all manner of splorches on their kitchen linoleum. I also had promised to find her living will, health care proxy, and power of attorney. After cleaning the kitchen, I was rummaging around in the curious mix of junk in her desk…ancient family photos, a TV Guide from last winter, never sent Christmas cards from 1964, and this month’s phone bill…when Brad walked in.

Here’s the truth: my brother Brad and I have spoken more in the last three weeks than we have in the entire time since he left home to learn to fly helicopters in 1973. We never felt we had much in common. We were busy with our own lives and work and families. He lived in Alaska for many years near our older brother. I’ve lived in Maine for most of my adult life. Like most families, ours is complicated in its own Tolstoyian way – the inner workings of which are of little interest to anyone outside the circle. But here’s another truth: I really like him. He sat on the sofa while I went through the desk. I chucked papers and photos at him to look at. We found controversial documents about our dead aunt’s estate and rehashed the drama.

“Come on, let’s go down to the VFW for a beer,” he said when I’d found the papers I was looking for and stashed the rest back in the drawers.

“No,” I said, smiling. “I promised Mom I’d come back over to St. E’s tonight.”

“Come on, Heid,” he cajoled.

“Really, no, there’s a certain type of bar I won’t go to,” I said. “When I was little, Dad dragged me to bars all over the place.” I named a number of them.

“Dad took you into LBJ’s?” he said, eyes wide. “What a dive, I wouldn’t go in that place.”

“Didn’t he take you to bars, too?” I asked. I always assumed my older siblings were dragged to bars as well.

“No,” he shook his head, still stunned at the differences in our childhoods. “No, he never did.”

“C’mon, I’ll walk you back to your house,” I said, and swung my arm through his, so deeply tanned and strong.

A week later Brad and I were on the phone after Mom’s refusal to have surgery. “I’ll come right out,” I said. “I’ll talk some sense into her.” So after making arrangements for kids’ activities and work, with a Michael Chabon novel to listen to on CD, back to New York I went.

With surgery declined, St. Elizabeth’s discharged my mother to one of three fates: eat food and bleed; drink fluids and grow weak; have surgery and return to health. When I arrived at the front apartment, she was obviously happy to be home. Her choice was to drink fluids until she got her nerve up to have the surgery. She had a permanent IV line dangling from her black and blue arm.

Still mad at her for refusing to have surgery, I couldn’t refrain from a snide remark, “What happened to the peace that passeth all understanding, Mom?” I was standing over her. She had lost about 15 pounds in three weeks. She was small and wrinkled in her easy chair, and I instantly felt like a supercreep for jabbing at her faith.

“I was so scared. An anesthesiologist came in last night and said, ‘Wow, you’re a serious heart risk,’ and walked out. It scared the pants off me. I couldn’t sleep and when Brad got there this morning, I told him I couldn’t go through with it.”

Sighing, I sat down on the arm of the sofa. Even if Jesus lives, even if life is worth the living, it can still be scary. And the fact is that right now, life is scary for my mother. Maybe what she needs to be brave is to see the face of Jesus in her children, no matter how imperfect they are. Being cynical about her simple, abiding faith shouldn’t be a part of how I live out my faith…so exquisite at times with its shades of gray and intriguing dappled colors.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” and bent down to kiss her hair before taking my bag upstairs to the spare room where as a little girl I had often slept when my sister – married so young – lived here in the late sixties. Downstairs I heard Mom move her walker over to the piano. She was playing “At Calvary,” and the fourth verse popped into my head:

O, the love that drew salvation’s plan O, the grace that brought it down to man O, the mighty gulf that God did span, At Calvary.

Mercy there was great and grace was free.
Pardon there was multiplied to me.
There my burdened soul found liberty
At Calvary.

“Preach it, Mom,” I whispered.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. She is also communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Heidi's essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

Do not revel in great luxury, or you may become impoverished by its expense. Do not become a beggar by feasting with borrowed money, when you have nothing in your purse. Ecclesiasticus 18:32-33

By George Clifford

The Christmas shopping season started weeks ago even though Christmas is still almost two months away. Shopping is a passion for many Americans, as slogans like Shop til you drop, Born to shop, and Retail therapy remind us. No holiday, no matter how minor, is now complete without multiple retail sales. Retail purchases comprise almost half of all consumer spending. Credit card debt, home equity lines of credit, and other forms of borrowing finance much of that spending.

With the approach of Advent, Christian rants about self-indulgent spending are as tiresome as predictable. At the risk of falling into that tedious trap, a couple of recent experiences have prompted some reflections.

First, a daily feature in my local newspaper and a seemingly weekly fixture in my mailbox are advertisements for products and services to help me organize my clutter. TV shows intended to help people to sell their house invariably emphasize decluttering. When strolling around my neighborhood in the evening, most garages with open doors reveal piles of stuff, often so much stuff there is no longer room to park vehicles in the garage. Long after the Depression era, many cling tenaciously to every item they own.

How much stuff does one really need? I want, unlike what Jesus had, a place to lay my head at night. I also like clean clothes, comfortable furniture, books, music, and a laptop. But I do not need family business records from the previous century, old photographs in which the people are unidentifiable, a collapsible boat that sinks rather than floats, miscellaneous kitchen and household items that might help in the emergency that never comes, etc. That is not a random list of items. My family of origin inherited all of that and much, much more, enough to fill a large fourteen room colonial with large attached barn. We had so much stuff that one could not enter some of the rooms or use some of the stairways. As a young boy, I watched my parents sort through the legacy and detritus left by the four prior generations who had lived in that house and I decided that I did not want to live that way. My ancestors had so much stuff that it got in the way of living.

I want my stuff to enrich rather than to impoverish my life. Pragmatism is good for the wallet and the soul. Moving every couple of years during my Naval service, I cultivated the habit of getting rid of anything that is no longer serviceable, no longer used, and unlikely to be used in the next year. This not only simplified moving, unpacking, and getting settled but also made for a more spacious, freer lifestyle. An incredible number of military families have boxes they move from one home to the next, boxes that remain unopened and take valuable space in an often too small house. People usually have no idea what these boxes might contain. I have wondered what ties bind people so strongly to these unopened boxes; surely, it is more than simple greed. Whatever the ties, many civilian families also have similar issues given the quantities of stuff and clutter that seem so much a part of contemporary life.

Second, Fortune magazine identified their September 17, 2007 issue as their luxury issue. Some of the articles focused on businesses, like Guicci and Polo, that cater to the luxury market. Thankfully, I have sufficiently strong ego that I do not take my identity from brand names. I was feeling pretty smug until I read what Columnist Stanley Bing wrote:

Now, this topic, while of intense interest to virtually everyone in any economic stratum whatsoever, leaves those of us without even a plan to acquire a yacht or a polo pony in a discursive state of mind. On the one hand, it is great fun to fantasize about owning your own island, driving an automobile whose hood ornament costs more than your brother-in-law’s house, or flying in a plane with your name on its tailbone. On the other hand, the fact that each of these things seem out of reach may leave many feeling covetous, angry, or just plain sad.

Do I find luxury a subject of intense interest? Do I want luxury? Unsure about the meaning of the word luxury (like others, including my former Commander-in-Chief, I sought some maneuvering room!), I consulted the Concise Oxford Dictionary (maneuvering room, not an ocean of choices). The Dictionary provided two definitions:

1. the state of great comfort and extravagant living. 2. an inessential but desirable item.

The first felt vaguely unchristian when I am daily reminded of people desperately in need of life’s basic necessities. I, with complete honesty, can disavow any desire to own my own island or polo pony. However, I do want nonessentials. Indeed, I think that God wants us to enjoy nonessentials because they enrich life, e.g., a good wine, aesthetically pleasing homes, and art. Poverty, thanks be to God, is not the life to which I was born nor is voluntary poverty a lifestyle to which I feel called.

Yet, an issue with which I continually struggle is how to balance my desire for a good life with my neighbors’ rights for the same. To the extent that I can only spend my money once, this is a zero sum game. I either spend my money on myself or on others (whether directly or as a bequest at my death). The Christian wisdom literature captured this moral dilemma with a good measure of irony (Ecclesiasticus 14:15-16):

Will you not leave the fruit of your labors to another, and what you acquired by toil to be divided by lot? Give, and take, and indulge yourself, because in Hades one cannot look for luxury.

Maybe one day, in the remembrance of a birth both simple and beautiful, I will find my answers.

The Rev. George Clifford, Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years, with tours at sea, with the Marine Corps, on the staff of the Chief of Chaplains. He taught philosophy at the Naval Academy and ethics at the Postgraduate School.

By Missy Morain

October is here and I am glad. I hate the month of September. It hasn't always been this way. I use to love the arrival of September for the promise of cooler and less humid weather and the beginning that it always brings. For the fact that when I was five I got my greatest wish, a baby sister instead of another brother, and for the celebration of my baptismal anniversary. Last year though, I begin to dislike September.

In September of 2006 my sister lost a close friend to a car accident. It was one of those accidents that no one expects and two lives were lost, while so many other lives were changed forever. This September, I was sitting in an airport waiting to go to an Episcopal young adult gathering when my mother called. She told me that one of my other sister's friends, Meggie, was killed in a car accident the night before. Meggie was beautiful, intelligent, and so very talented, one of the most talented soccer players to ever come out of the state of Iowa. In May she had graduated from the University of Missouri summa cum laude with a degree in industrial engineering. She was so full of promise and now she is gone.

I hadn't seen Meggie in years. I admit that she could drive me nuts when she was little. She and my baby sister were always so goofy together when they were little and the level that they could raise their collective voices to could rival a rock concert. Yet, her death still hit me like a knife to the heart, although not until about 14 hours later during the opening worship service for the gathering, right as I was in the middle of the Nicene Creed. I realized that I couldn't force the words of the Creed out of my mouth. Before I began to cry in public I ducked out to sit on the front steps of Grace Cathedral to have a chat with God. I was angry. I was so mad that my jaw hurt from clenching and my eyes burned with tears. I don't understand why these amazing young people die. My grandfather died earlier this year but he was in his 90s. We could say, "He had a good life." Meggie had a good life, but it was too short, and feels as though it is left unfinished. Not because of anything that she hadn't specifically done but because I know there are so many things that she still could have done.

I knew that God was big enough to deal with my anger and I didn't have any reason to hold back so I tried not to. I know that the first heart that broke when Meggie died was God's heart. I know that Meggie is with God, and yet it doesn't really change the way that I feel. I know that it is not supposed to yet, I am still thinking about the holes her death leave in this world, not entirely caring at this moment about the delight in her arrival at the next one.

My anger for the most part has dissipated. In some ways it has been replaced by fear. Fear and frustration. I am afraid of next September. I am afraid of more loss and I know that there will be more. I am frustrated by the ways in which my sisters, who I love so much, are hurting. There is this piece of me that wants to pull back from the world, to disconnect, in the hopes of not getting hurt. Yet, that is not who Jesus calls me to be. I have not been called as a Christian to pull back or to hide, but to step out and face this continual cycle of birth, death and resurrection. That does make me feel better, to know that there really isn't an end. Of course this doesn't mean that I am going to refrain from asking everyone I know to not drive in Iowa during the month of September. It is not going to work, but I am going to ask anyway, perhaps it will save God's heart, and mine, a little extra pain.

Missy Morain, Program Manager for the Cathedral College's Center for Christian Formation at Washington National Cathedral, is keeper of the blog Episcopal Princess. She is on the board of directors of the National Association for Episcopal Christian Education Directors and works with the Colloquium of Episcopal Professional and Vocational Associations.

By Ann Fontaine

Last week the paternal side of my family gathered for an impromptu reunion. Brothers, sisters, cousins, kids and grandkids shared a potluck meal. We lined up the grandkids for the traditional photo. I noticed a change in the line from the generation of my children. The next generation of children chose to stand beside their first cousins rather than by height. At first my brothers and I said, “Oh, no, that is wrong,” but then realized that the second cousins were strangers to one another and a bit fearful.

Today as I look at the dozens of photos of the event I can see small gatherings of relatives sharing stories and edging closer to one another. The children are racing around the yard and playing with the toys getting to know each other in their way. A digital family album is emerging to go with the various print albums that are stored on our families’ bookshelves.

As part of this gathering our daughter added to her compendium of genealogical information. She along with one of my brothers and a cousin in Norway are trying to obtain stories as well as birth, marriage, and death dates. Family stories give us our identity.

My brothers and I are first generation children of immigrants. Our stories tell of leaving home to try new things. They tell of people starting out with no idea of what they will encounter but believing they will find a place to work and dream. The stories tell of trying things before having full information of the consequences. They also reveal that we were concerned with what others thought and how they acted as we tried to fit in and become part of the dominant culture. We lost our sense of being part of the “old country” as new generations were born here. We try to reconnect with those who stayed behind. These are just a few of the messages from our album.

It occurred to me that the Bible is like a family album. Images, stories, clippings, and mementos of encounters with a common story are gathered into its books. The Bible tells of encounters with the Holy and tries to make sense of Divine-Human relationships. The stories are saved to show future generations the way to live as a people of faith. They explore the questions of immortality, community, and the meaning of life. Like the family album we may have stories about the pictures and know the names of the people we are viewing but there is always a level that cannot be seen or understood because we were not there when the photo was taken or the event occurred.

When I read the Bible with this sort of lens - I stop arguing with it or trying using it as a template for life in God. When it contradicts itself, I can see that this is because there were different points of view about events, like when people are interviewed after a wreck and remember totally different versions of the same event.

For instance, Etienne Charpentier, in How to Read the New Testament, says, that the book of Revelation is like modern art, trying to convey ideas through metaphors, feelings, and images. It is not representational or photographic. When we try to apply scientific, rational principles to works of art we miss the point and end up analyzing the paint. We can easily fall into a paint by numbers version of a painting rather than the rich glowing depth of the artist’s offering.

So it is with the Bible. If we study it as our family album we can gain a sense of where we have come from and who we are being called to be as a people of God. We learn how people made choices, what they used as a basis for those choices. While their conclusions may differ from ours we can learn from the process that is revealed. We travel the same path of faith with very different landscapes but our beginnings and our endings come from the same source. Leaf through the pages, savor the stories, learn about your spiritual family.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Marshall Scott

When I was young, my father's profession took him at times overseas. He would attend meetings and discuss problems and solutions with folks from far away - such exotic places as England and Belgium and Germany (well, to a young boy they seemed distant and exotic enough). It gave him an interesting perspective on cultural differences.

Once, after a trip to the UK, he spoke of a meeting he had been to, and how it seemed different than those he commonly attended. The resolution of the discussion was a compromise; but my father found it interesting. He told me that in England, unlike America, a compromise was basically a good thing. True, no one got all he wanted; but everyone got something. In America his experience was that, no one having gotten all he wanted, everyone saw the compromise as loss. No one got everything, and so there was nothing one could celebrate.

The Oxford English Dictionary has several different denotations for "compromise." Two (in the Compact Edition of 1971) sound similar, but have some subtle differences.

4. Coming to terms, or arrangement of a dispute, by concession on both sides; partial surrender of one's position for the sake of coming to terms; the concession or terms offered by either side. 5. Adjustment for practical purposes of rival courses of action, systems or theories, conflicting opinions or principles, by the sacrifice or surrender of a part of each.

These sound a lot alike, don't they? And yet they are different.

They are different specifically in intent. The first definition is about coming to terms, with some concession from both sides. The second is about making pragmatic sacrifices to a rival. The first is about meeting of minds and mutual efforts. The second is about suspending conflict and grudging truce. The first is about comprehensiveness, and even communion. The second is about that other connotation of compromise: polluted, infected, stained, and shamed.

Now, I can't say now that the difference my father saw still obtains. Perhaps it was the setting or the topic or the times that made the difference. My own observation is that there seem to be quite enough competitive, convicted folks in the UK as to make "compromise" as distasteful to folks there as to folks here in the U. S. In any case, it seems to have been the first sense of compromise that moved the Episcopal House of Bishops; and the latter that moved the loudest voices on either side of the issues involved.

It is a hard time that way. I have heard again and again Revelation 3:15-16: "15 I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. 16 Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth." It is from the challenge to the Church in Laodicea, a church apparently comfortable in the pews. But the call to be either hot or cold is apparently about the faith as a whole, and not a single issue. And while those who quote it most frequently want to portray their interest as "19 I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. 20 Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me," the tone and context seems more indicative of "21 To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne." Separated, verses 19-20 are about, I think, the first sense of "compromise;" while verse 21 is about the second sense. (Indeed, I have come to feel that for some the secret favorite passage is no longer from Revelation 3:14-22, but from Psalm 83.)

And that is the problem with this quotation, and with the second sense of "compromise:" it begins with separation and seeks to institutionalize it, to reify it. It is much like our current cultural and political context, parodied well by Stephen Colbert in his character for The Colbert Report. It’s all about rage and passion, and thought and reflection only undermine strength of purpose.

But "being neither hot nor cold" need not be so stark. Readers may have noticed by now that I love to cook. One of the things I have to work at, still, is noting that some things do better with long, steady cooking at low heat. What comes to mind are onions. Many recipes start with onions that need to be "sweated" - cooked slowly over low heat to bring out the sugar in them, so long hidden by the sharpness of sulfur. Rush to cook them quickly and you either undercook them or burn them; and everything you add to them will take on the flavor of the sulfur that remains or the charred sugar that has been added. It's worth noting that this is also known as "clarifying" the onions; for as the sulfur fades away the onions go from opaque white to translucency, almost transparency. It's not that the onions aren't hot. It's that the slower, more patient process has brought out in them beauty and flavor that you wouldn't know from the raw form, and that no other, faster process would have produced.

We know this well in human experience and in the Christian faith, even if it sometimes gets short shrift. It is, after all, how we come as persons to wisdom, and how we distinguish wisdom from knowledge. It is as William James described in writing of those "once born": a gradual growth in the knowledge and love of the Lord not dependent on one or a few moments of conversion (even though those moments do come). It is what we mean in the Catholic west by "sanctification," what our Orthodox Christian siblings mean by "theosis:" the gradual growth in grace and in awareness of God's presence and God's action that is the result of the Spirit's continuing work in us.

It is, I think, an aspect of Paul's statement that "God is working in all things for good for those who love him:" in all things, and not just in those that move us in passion. It was lived out in the life of Peter, whose passions drove him while Jesus lived. His anger rejected Jesus' prediction of the crucifixion. His rage cut off the ear of the High Priest's servant. His fear denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed. It was in quiet and reflection that he understood his mission to tend and feed Christ's sheep, and that he realized that God could proclaim acceptable what his children had long rejected. And yet we would not suggest that either Paul or Peter was 'lukewarm' about faith in Christ.

So, perhaps all of us who are determined, committed, "hot" in our faith in Christ need to reflect again on what we mean by "compromise." Shall we see one another as colleagues to whom we might in good faith concede; or as rivals to whom any concession constitutes surrender? It's an important question for the Episcopal Church and for the Anglican Communion, and for each of us as individuals. Will we be moved by hasty passion, or trust in the slower, arguably harder and less comfortable process by which the Spirit seeks to bring us into all truth? How will we answer the question? The direction of the Church, and perhaps of our souls, depends on the answer.

The Rev. Marshall Scott is a chaplain in the Saint Luke’s Health System, a ministry of the Diocese of West Missouri. A past president of the Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains, and an associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, he keeps the blog Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside.

Second of two parts. (Part one is here.)

By Helen Thompson

Regular readers of this column may recall that earlier this year, I turned down a job offer. What I wasn't able to talk about in that essay was that part of the reason I turned it down was that there were still unknown doors waiting to open, and in late July I accepted a different job offer that allows me to continue to build my understanding of social media and how it can help organizations grow. It's a lovely parallel to the thing I was writing about in my last essay, that social media may be the door to reaching the hundreds of thousands of people who are unchurched yet spiritual. If that point wasn't clear in the last part of the essay, I'm underscoring it now, but that's not what I want to talk about this time around. Rather, I want to talk about how the Café's Ethic of Transparency opened the door to this new world.

I think I was invited to participate in the Café because my RevGalBlogPals "Ask the Matriarch" column (which I edited for the first year of its existence and recently resumed doing) had caught the attention of several Episcopalian priests. Truth be told, I have no formal training in theology, ecclesiology, homiletics, or any other of those ten-dollar Latin cognates that compose the Divinity curriculum. I'm barely even a good layperson--I'm not in the choir, not a lay reader, not a Daughter of the King, not on the Altar Guild, not working in the shelter, not.. not.. not.. I'm not even a good tither. Shame on me!

Part of the reason for this, despite the nifty blogroll I have over at Gallycat's Lounge about the churches I attend and have attended, is that I haven't been a regular churchgoer. I've moved a lot. I travel a lot on weekends. I have joint custody of my son, whom I didn't raise as a Christian, and so we find other ways of exploring the sacred on Sunday mornings. Sometimes it involves church, but not always, and not even often.

Yet. I am in my second year of Education for Ministry, and I'm very active in several online communities that are based around faith, spirituality and/or the Episcopal Church. But for a long time, people didn't know that I was me. I'm gun-shy about openly tying my name, Helen Thompson, to my various online handles. I have several. I compartmentalize myself in some ways, packaging the faithy bits at Gallycat, the irreverent bits at Deviathan, the work-related stuff to Exurbanista, the deeply personal journal to Zen Pooky, the reproductive clock angst to Kersplunkity, the Second Life persona to Vahnia, the knitster knots at Knitster, the life-in-the-valley explorations at NorthShenandoah.com and so on. One person recently told me that my collection of Web 2.0 presences might be a manifestation of Multiple Personality Disorder, to which I strenuously (but guiltily) objected, knowing, as I do, some people with truly dissociative issues. But when a friend of mine today made an allusion to forming a 12-step group to help those with a compulsive urge to register domain names, it hit really close to home.

Mine is one more akin to the author trying her hand to many different genres and hoping that one will take off. Nora Roberts is J.D. Robb, for instance. In my case, working as a professional journalist and still very midlevel in my career, I had a byline that was a brand, that of Helen H. Thompson. I was worried that if I started writing prolifically about faith as Helen Thompson, it might compromise my ability to find a job. Now, ideally, someday my vocation will merge with my profession and I'll become a communications officer for the church in some capacity that will still allow me to pay my exorbitant mortgage payment. (I live modestly; honest. Housing prices are so bad in the DC area, even in a cooling real estate market, that I had to move 75 miles west of the Capitol just to get a foot in the door, if you'll pardon the pun.) But in the meantime, being a Good Christian Person (progessive, conservative, whatever the stripe) can be a liability in my world. When I first confessed to my friends that I had come back to the faith, I was challenged on many levels to defend how a reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent young postmodern woman could buy into the hokey nonsense that was religion. And as such, I was shy. I became Gallycat (first here, then here). Gally, the "fallen angel" of a Japanese manga series, and "cat."

Enter Jim Naughton and the Episcopal Café and their Ethic of Transparency. OMG, was I going to have to SIGN MY NAME to a post? Scary. Sticking my neck out and admitting that I'm brazen enough to talk about my faith life when I'm oh so very.... me? Scary. Covering anything above and beyond my diocese or interesting news items about faith in the postmodern world? Scary.

Do you remember the first time you ever addressed a group of people, whether it was your first sermon or your first public speaking class or your first time lay reading? It's sort of like that, at least as I experienced it. Signing my name to a post about faith created anxious tension. Even though I wasn't hiding my identity per se--just not coming out and saying so or undertaking the daunting task of writing a bio about myself in third person (which I can't do without making some kind of smartass comment about myself)--it scared me.

But I signed my name. And once I owned that work, I did something else, too. I updated my resume to reflect the fact that I do volunteer work for the church, by helping blog users get acquainted with the technology, by helping the good folks in Second Life get their Anglican Cathedral up and running, by editing stuff for the RevGals and by coordinating posts for the Lead here at Episcopal Café. Just two months later, I was having a phone conversation with the director of a publication who wants to take advantage of these technologies--blogs, podcasts, wikis, virtual worlds, streaming media, RSS, distributed bookmarking, tags, and so on; this world of new toys we collectively call "social media"--and by September I was one step closer to merging my vocation and profession. They hired me because I had demonstrated familiarity with these tools.

I was, perhaps, the Café's most ardent voice in favor of allowing people to post under pen names. And I was soundly outvoted. But I have come to see the wisdom of the policy. All of us who participate in these forums are part of the future of the church, for better, for worse. I can take responsibility for what I do. But God rewarded me for being brave enough to do so, for being brave enough to open my mind to a new way of thinking—God also let me get credit for what I do.

Helen Thompson directs social media initiatives for an international association in Northern Virginia and is a freelance writer and editor. She lives in the northern Shenandoah Valley, where she is in her second year of studies in Education for Ministry and plugging away at her first novel. Catch her on the web at Gallycat's Lounge, among others.

By Ann Fontaine

How do you know when God calls? There is no caller i.d. from AT&T – Angelic Telephone and Telegraph? How do you know if it is God or Ego. For the first part of my life I did not think about becoming a priest, as it was not a possibility for women. To me it was like wanting to become a professional football player – something I actually considered until it became clear that I was only going to be 100 pounds and 5’5” – among other disqualifying attributes.

After I returned to the church from my non-believer phase, I became more and more active as a layperson. I was happy teaching Sunday School, organizing programs, directing church camp, and serving on various local and national church committees and councils. I was sent to Tanzania and Mexico and Guatemala and all over the U.S. by the church. I felt that I was making a contribution to the life of the church and was I enjoying myself. I had a lay preaching license and served on the worship planning team.

In 1974, women began to be ordained. It was not on my radar as something for me but people would occasionally ask me if I was going to become a “minister” – meaning ordained. I said – not me – I am a minister and contented with my life. The idea began to pop up in my mind. I would say to the idea – “no thanks – I’m happy being a member of the laity.” This idea became more insistent, however, we had three school age children and my husband had a busy medical practice – it would be too inconvenient for all of us.

This recurring thought about ordination appeared off and on for years. Finally, I said, “Fine, if you (whoever “you” are) want me to do this, I want to hear if from Jim (my husband) and I am not telling him.”

I was certain that would never happen so I completely forgot about it.

Two weeks later, Jim was making spaghetti sauce. This a production number at our house, involving his homegrown tomatoes, onions, herbs, etc. He puts on an Italian opera with a tenor, preferably Bjorling or Gigli. Suddenly he looks up from stirring the aromatic sauce and says, “We have to talk.” Startled I say, “Okay.” Putting the sauce on to simmer, we go for a walk in the Wyoming afternoon. He says, “It just came to me – you better go to seminary and you better go soon or you will be dead before you get ordained.” I was stunned.

So the next year I left him at home with our teenage son – the other kids had gone off to college by now – and went to seminary. I still don’t know if it was God or Ego but here I am ordained and loving it.

People ask – how do you know if it is God? I really don’t know, even with this experience. I think the truth is God does not really care about our choices in ministry but about our faithfulness and the outcome of our choices. Regardless of the path one chooses the results show whether the choice is of God or not.

But I do believe God loves opera and the incense of food made for family and friends.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Roger Ferlo

About 50 new seminarians showed up here at Virginia Theological Seminary last week, three weeks before the start of the regular term. They’re here to get a head start on their required courses in Hebrew and Greek, and to undergo the time-honored training in the oral interpretation of Scripture that the seminary underground still refers to as “Read and Bleed.” Half of the newcomers seem to be in their twenties and early thirties, continuing the youthful swing we have experienced here in the past several years. (You have to admire these young people, committing themselves to a lifetime working in a church that too many people in my generation seem intent on tearing apart.) As to the other half of the class, a large number seem to be newly retired, in the way we baby boomers retire in our mid-fifties. There aren’t too many people in their 40s. My seat-of-the-pants demographic theory about this is that if you are going to go to seminary in these parlous times, you are more likely to try it either in your twenties (when you are still relatively free of commitments, except, of course, for that sizable college debt), or in your late fifties, after you’ve sort of completed the trajectory of your first career, maybe seen your kids through college, and sense that you now have permission to do with your life what you’ve always known you wanted to do.

I changed careers pretty dramatically in my early thirties, so maybe I’m projecting. To be fair, the best part of working in an Episcopal seminary is that you never really can predict where people might be coming from, or what brought them here. In their first session together last week, one guy introduced himself to the group by looking at his watch, and then declaring that it was now almost exactly 72 hours since he retired from the military. A woman of a certain age marveled that the student sitting next to her was young enough to be her daughter. Several people identified themselves as recovering lawyers. One of the youngest men wore a T-shirt that revealed an amazingly elaborate network of tattoos on his right arm—perhaps setting a new trend in clerical dress.

Whatever the case, here they are, part of our lives for the next three years, God bless them all. Their nametags dutifully hanging from their necks, they gathered yesterday with the rest of us for a Eucharist in the chapel at 8:10 in the morning. I suspect that they were too distracted by a looming pop quiz on Hebrew verbs to listen closely to the sermon, which might have been just as well, as I was the preacher, and it was St. Bartholomew’s Day, and St. Bartholomew does not provide you with the most inspiring of sermon texts even in the best of circumstances.

It was those nametags that set me going. I hate wearing nametags. Maybe that’s why I’m always attracted to the unnamed people in Scripture, like the anonymous woman who washes Jesus’ feet in Mark’s version of the story, or the unnamed young man who runs away naked to avoid being captured by the police who are arresting Jesus in the garden (did he too wear tattoos on his arm?). I think of St. Bartholomew as part of their company. He didn’t really have a name, at least any name the gospel writer cared to record. Roughly translated, Bartholomew just means “son of Tolmai.” No real claim to fame there, nothing really to put on a nametag. Matthew, Mark and Luke mention him only once or twice. John, on the other hand, seems never to have heard of him. As usual with mysterious figures like this, legends have accrued, the most persistent one being that he was flayed alive somewhere in Armenia (“read and bleed” with a vengeance), and that his body washed ashore on the Italian island of Lipari (a long way from landlocked Armenia), where a cathedral still stands in his honor. Colorful rumors, but not much to hang a sermon on.

This being the case, I decided to keep to that ancient principle of Episcopal homiletics--when in doubt, start with the collect. Whoever wrote it knew the score. The collect repeats all we know of Bartholomew—that he had the grace to believe and the courage to preach (and even the latter is only an inference from the scarcest of scriptural data). This being the case, we are made to ask not that we would love and venerate Bartholomew (it’s hard to love and venerate a relative cipher), but that we would “love what he believed and preach what he taught.” The feast of St. Bartholomew thus becomes a feast of holy anonymity.

I more or less said all this, and then looked out on that crowd of newly washed seminarians. I thought about my own ministry through the years, and realized that if what was said of Bartholomew could one day be said of us—that because of what we said or how we acted or who we were, others could be brought to love what we believed and to preach what we taught—well, then, maybe this priesthood thing would mean something in the end, long after our names were forgotten. The priestly life can be such an ego-trip—witness the clash of prelatial egos now bedeviling our common life. “I came among you as one who serves.” Bartholomew knew this about Jesus, and about himself, and acted accordingly. In spite of the occasional need for nametags, a little dose of this holy anonymity in love’s service might do all of us a world of good.

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. His books include Opening the Bible (Cowley 1997), Sensing God (Cowley 2001) and Heaven (Seabury 2007).

By Helen Thompson

The details of my engagement are half funny, half touching, but mostly chaotic. I have a feeling the wedding itself will be very similar. Here I am, devout Episcopalian heavily influenced by Buddhist readings I did during my atheist phase, marrying a man who won't set foot in a church unless I drag him there for some occasion other than worship: a musical performance, a summer cookout, a labyrinth walk, a drum circle, a Cathedral program. When I was toying with formal discernment, he got very excited that I might become a priest for reasons that weren't exactly the sort of thing I should be sharing with you, gentle readers, but imagine my horror when I found that he had posted exactly that to HIS blog. In the vernacular of the netspeak generation, Oh noes! zomg! Do. Not. Want!

With all the high drama over sexuality in the church (and, for that matter, all the high drama over problems with inappropriate behavior from unexpected corners), it was, however, hilarious. He graciously removed the post when he saw my apoplexy, even though it was, at worst, just PG-13. And probably did more to convince me that even if I was called, my significant other wasn't really interested so much in my turning my life over to God as how I'd look in a collar. (It bears noting that this happened around the same time I stumbled across Collar This, which was all about clerical dress and needs to be resumed (hint, hint VTS grads who started it.)

But at any rate, now that we're heading down the aisle, we can't stop laughing. There's the idea of having a new wedding each year so that I can ask more of my friends to be bridesmaids, since I'm having trouble cutting myself off and already have six lined up with two more I wish I could include. And none of them are my priest girlfriends, who are so abundant I've been joking about letting potential celebrants bid on officiating our wedding on eBay. There's the fact that my fiancé has insisted on May 4 for our wedding date in celebration of the new moon, which happens to be a Sunday, which may make the celebrant status moot, and for that matter, happens to be Derby Sunday, which inconveniences the numerous horse racing fans that I didn't know were horse racing fans among my friends.

And I haven't even figured out where it's happening, except for the fact that it's not happening in a church. That's OK; I mean, my first wedding was in a church and I was pretty much Godless at the time, and that worked out splendidly (hi, ironic tone) despite the pastoral counseling that went in one 21-year-old ear and out the other. Now I'm older and wiser, if a bit heavier, and understand the nifty phrase "functional relationship." And my fiancé actually wrote about that in his blog, recently, when he became aware that female friends were all giddy over running into him again until they realized that he was off the market, and that my friends were a little curious as to what brought him and I together in spite of our differences. Functional relationship, hands down.

So we'll get through that marriage thing ok. It will be funny, touching and chaotic. We'll likely argue over how much church I'm allowed to bring into the service, but a lot of it is overcoming his distaste for his Southern Baptist upbringing. And it's working, even without the collar; last week, after a wry exchange as I left for church on Sunday in which he said in his best Southern preacher bombastodrawl: "Say hi to Jaysus for me!" I shook my head and laughed, and he added, quite seriously, "One of these days I'm going to have to come with you."

It trickles down, it does. In lovely ways. The wedding itself isn't what matters; it's the marriage that comes after that does. But we've got practice, now. We're comfortable, we influence each other. Invisibly. We finish each other's sentences, and we have a reasonable shot at having 50 years together. (Church secretary, after asking my date of birth: "Oh my GOSH you're young!" I guess. This is why I can speak to my teenage son in netspeak. Teh lolz!!!) And I suppose, if I do go through a formal discernment at some point, it won't matter what I look like in a collar, because I know that I (and I'm lucky to be) loved for who I am.

Thank you, God, for bringing us together.

Helen Thompson, known on the faithblogging circuit as Gallycat, is a writer living in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. A summa cum laude graduate of Temple University, she has written for the Philadelphia City Paper, RevGalBlogPals, Geez magazine and others. Visit her on the web at Gallycat's Lounge.

by Deryl Davis

“Time is time and runs away,” a young T.S. Eliot wrote near the turn of the last century. Like many poets intent on detailing the passages of life, Eliot was obsessed with time. His spiritual masterpiece Four Quartets is in many ways a meditation on the subject, the poet coming round again and again to the question of what time is and what it means for human life:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
(“Burnt Norton,” I)

As Christians, we have inherited from Greek philosophy the dual concepts of chronos, clock time, and kairos, the opportune, although unbidden, moment. Ancient statues of kairos depicted a young man racing on tiptoe, a shock of hair hanging over his brow and a bald patch behind. If prepared, one could catch him by the hair as he sped by; for the unprepared, there was only the bald pate of lost opportunity. If one were “present” (i.e. attentive), the moment of opportunity did not go unnoticed.

Kairos is something of a two-way street in Christianity. Not only do we look for the opportune moment, we expect it. Not only do we act in that moment, but God acts with us; in fact, kairos is the moment when we are called to respond to God’s revelation. Jesus proclaimed this at the beginning of his ministry, announcing that “the time [had] come” for the kingdom of God (Mark 1:15). Kairos moments seem to abound in the New Testament, nowhere more obvious than in Paul’s encounter with the Athenians on Mars Hill regarding the “unknown God” they worshiped. The time was ripe for proclamation, and Paul was ready. Something similar occurs in the story of Esther in the Old Testament, when Mordecai suggests that God has placed Esther at the side of the king for a specific moment - when the Jewish people are threatened with annihilation.

In Western culture, we have become attuned to thinking of kairos as a series of fleeting moments, largely in the past - Wordsworth’s “spots of time” or the mystical “moments of illumination.” But a more complete understanding of Christian teaching suggests that kairos is always the present moment, and that this is the opportune time for God’s action in the world. Rather than something to be won or lost, according to Greek interpretation, the New Testament makes clear that kairos is the fulfillment of time according to God’s purposes. The most important action, God’s redemption of the world, has already happened in historical time and continues to happen in the present moment of our lives. We think of the sacraments of the church – baptism and the Eucharist – as recurrent instances of this ongoing divine intervention.

Is time really “unredeemable,” as Eliot appears to suggest? Is the past – our lives, relationships, decisions – lost to us forever? Only in the sense that these things have a fixed and unchanging identity, or only if we allow ourselves to be trapped in them. A Christian understanding of kairos suggests that time, in its many forms, is being redeemed by Time in the person of Christ, “who is and was from the beginning.” In Christ, we have the union of chronos and kairos – human time and divine time, the one constantly transforming the other. Past events may not change, but their meaning does; it expands, evolves, and becomes part of a larger, unfolding purpose. In Christian, as in Hebrew thought, time is predominantly a linear concept – everything moving toward the eschatological goal of judgment, resurrection, or the fullness of the kingdom of heaven – at which point time ceases to exist altogether. Kairos replaces chronos for good.

If, then, we redesign the ancient Greek representation of kairos, what does he look like? In the Christian understanding, he is not racing past with his eye on some distant prize, a lock of hair taunting us with the possibility of lost opportunity. Rather, his compassionate, unhurried gaze is directed outward, looking for us. He leaves the main path, if necessary, for stragglers on the road toward fulfilled time. When he engages us, we utterly forget the movement of chronos, that alluring baby who quickly grows into a withered old man. Kairos waits for us to see him, however long it takes, until we realize that he is eternally present. Then we understand that every moment is the right, exact, opportune time for our response to the divine; that, as Eliot says, “all is always now.”

Deryl Davis is producer of the Sunday Forum at Washington National Cathedral and an associate faculty member in religion and drama at Wesley Theological Seminary. His work on religion and culture has appeared in a number of newspapers and magazines and on public radio and television.

by Missy Morain

Hi my name is Missy and I am an Episcopal Nerd. There I said it. They say that admitting that you have a problem is the first step, and although I am admitting it, I am not entirely sure that it is a problem at all. I probably cannot be taken to dinner parties where the rules are "don't talk about religion or politics" as one of my favorite topics is religion and I love a good religious political debate. While my parents taught me lovely manners I sometimes wonder whether my Episcopal nerd aspect will slip out in polite company, thus making me inappropriate, which is something, a good Episcopalian should never be.

I work at the Cathedral College of Washington National Cathedral, a little building on the grounds of the National Cathedral that looks strangely like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It is sometimes a bit of a surreal experience. In the past year I have been a part of both the Investiture and Installation of Katharine Jefferts Schori as the new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the funeral of Gerald Ford, a gathering called Church for the 21st Century which Phyllis Tickle called "a council of the church" and participated in discussions with a group trying to determine how to have healthy inter-religious dialogue. I was a nerd before I started working at the Cathedral College but I think my nerdyness has increased since I arrived. I even got to be there when my boss told nearly one thousand people what a nerd I was when I first saw Marcus Borg and couldn't even manage to find words to say "hello", I just shuffled my feet and stared.

Lately though I have been witnessing one of the most remarkable things I have experienced since I got to DC and it is not happening at the Cathedral at all, a smaller parish with just a few children, taking another step on their journey towards living out baptismal ministry. This parish has been putting together its first Godly Play room. Godly Play is a process of Christian Formation. While it is a wonderful program for any age it is most frequently used with children. This past weekend a group of us began setting up the Godly Play room after the Sunday morning Eucharist.

While we were setting up various members of the congregation wandered into the room, asking questions and helping organize. A small group began talking about how to make the room even more welcoming. Initially the conversation revolved around painting, then the graphic artists got involved. For the next hour they discussed possibilities and designs eventually settling on a method to further create the room as a holy learning place. Then they began to discuss fabric and banners that could be created. None of the people left in the room were parents of children at the church, but this didn't change their passion for the ministry being discussed. Several times in several different ways I heard a desire on the part of these ministers of the congregation, to have a place where children were welcomed, formed and ministered with and to. They talked about the young people of the congregation, and the young people that they would like to welcome. These weren't people who wanted to create for their children but for the children who didn't even exist in their lives yet. It was amazing to watch.

When I saw Marcus Borg most recently, I managed to be somewhat coherent and didn't drool, I consider that a measure of my growth. I am not sure that I am equally capable of being coherent at this new Godly Play congregation. Each time I am there or interact with the ministers of the congregation I am heartened by their desire to share the Good News and to really welcome young people into their mix. It is also providing a much-needed lesson for me. My inclination is always to work behind the scenes. If I had done that, people with gifts to offer would not have explored or been able to share their gifts. Part of not hiding my light under a basket means that it leaves space for others to shine too.

Missy Morain, Program Manager for the Cathedral College's Center for Christian Formation at Washington National Cathedral, is keeper of the blog Episcopal Princess. She is on the board of directors of the National Association for Episcopal Christian Education Directors.

By Kit Carlson

The hawks have been screaming all week in the trees behind my house. The red-tailed fledglings are due to take off and they don't like it at all. They sound like tortured cats, mewing and wailing and shrieking. Their parents have gone off somewhere, leaving the two younguns alone on the nest to make the next and necessary step in their lives ... the step off the side of the nest into the unforgiving air.

The young hawks don't realize that they have all they need to take the leap. They are quite large now, really almost mature. Their wings are broad and beautiful, and they stretch them as they scream, wave them up and down, as if realizing that their wings are there for something ... even if they haven't quite figured out what.

It's not a pretty business, learning to fly. When the hawks get hungry enough and lonely enough and irritated enough, they finally do take a plunge into the air. They don't go far, usually just to a nearby branch, where they bounce and flail with their wings and scream some more. They dig in the bark of the branches for bugs, which might take the edge off their hunger, but really ... it's not enough. They're going to have to get serious pretty soon. They're going to have to start hunting for themselves.

It's not easy to learn to fly, to step off the nest, to risk falling or failing. The project seems to require a lot of screaming. The fledglings make a lot of noise, but it doesn't bring back their parents. The days of mom and dad feeding and tending and guarding are over. The birds are on their own, for good or for ill.

So they hop around some more, from tree to tree, from branch to branch, complaining all the while. After a few days, the two fledglings find themselves separated, their abortive flights taking them farther and farther apart. I can hear the shrieking and mewing, but it's fainter now and farther away. In a few more days, the deed will be done. They'll take off for good, to soar and swirl, to hunt and to feed.

When something new is about to happen, it is natural to want to cling to what was. It is easy to grip the secure sides of the nest and hang on for dear life, screaming your head off how it's not fair, it's not right, things should be the way they used to be, why don't the ones in charge here do something, why are we left alone to figure this out for ourselves, why aren't we being fed like we used to, and what are we supposed to do with ourselves now, now that everything is different, anyway?

Jesus and Paul describe these shifts as birth pangs, as labor, as the struggle for something new to happen. God brings new things into being and we balk. We struggle. We defy the future, as though we could stop its arrival simply by saying "no." We want to be cared for, mothered, fathered, nurtured, protected.

But God has other ideas in mind. God never lets us rest. Something new is about to happen, and even as we scream, we stretch and wave in wonder the broad, beautiful wings that God has given us to carry us forward, out of the nest, into the open sky.

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. In 2003, she played the apostle Paul on the world's first internet reality series, The Ark, a project of the Christian humor website Ship of Fools.

Continuing our "Episcopalians go to camp" theme begun yesterday...

By Roger Ferlo

Orkney Springs, Virginia is not an easy place to find. The trip south from the District seems designed to test your nerves. You start off on the DC Beltway—trial enough—and then you lurch onto the notoriously congested I-66, which you have to follow all the way to the end (a prospect that must haunt the nightmares of daily commuters), where it turns south on I-81 toward Woodstock. You then find yourself deep in Shenandoah country, passing road signs directing you to the Luray Caverns or the Skyline Drive. But you resist temptation. You make a right turn and then another right and then another right (or was it a left?) through gorgeous rolling hills until you finally stumble your way onto a steep incline of a road called the Orkney Grade, which will funnel you and your motorcar straight into the nineteenth-century—to the old mineral spa known as the Orkney Springs Hotel, owned lock, stock and water barrel by the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia.

It was not always thus. For years Virginia Episcopalians owned the acreage to the west, where they long ago built a retreat center and an outdoor chapel—Shrine Mont, they call it, as close to building a cathedral that this die-hard low-church diocese will ever come. But folks must have had their eye on the hotel down the road for a long time, if only for fear that it would fall in on itself. It wasn’t until 1979 that the Diocese managed to purchase the ramshackle place. And now, completely refurbished in the simple style to which it has always been accustomed, it can sleep as many as 600 church people at a time. It’s a vast white-painted wooden pile five storeys high, each level completely ringed by its own complicated stretches of porch and outdoor stairs—an Escher print in 3-D, Shenandoah style. Virginia parishes vie fiercely for preferred weekend slots, when parishioners recover from the long drive on the interstates by gathering for fellowship in the Ladies Parlour on the second floor, or sharing potpie and cornbread dinners in the vast refectory hall, or submitting themselves to some serious lecturing or other sorts of pious carryings-on in the elegant third-storey ballroom with its floor to ceiling windows and its wide and gracious balconied porch.

Since moving to Virginia from New York City three years ago to teach at the seminary in Alexandria, I’ve been invited to Shrine Mont several times. I’ve preached from the curious stone pulpit in the outdoor chapel (which looks a little like a congealed lava flow), and I’ve lectured on art and the spiritual life to generously attentive crowds in that lovely ballroom. I’ve hiked up North Mountain to the fire tower surmounted by a cross, and eaten my share of canned fruit salad and pulled pork in the dining hall. It’s good to find a church spot where people remember to keep relatively quiet and to behave themselves and to say their prayers and to be nice to one another—behaviors that might seem pretty trite and obvious if they weren’t at such a premium in a church otherwise sorely bedeviled by lawsuits and name-calling and furious divisions. There’s a kind of country ordinariness at Orkney Springs that gives you a sense that church might go on being church even in spite of church.

I am prompted to thoughts like this because I just got back from spending a week in residence at the Orkney Springs Hotel doing something that had absolutely nothing churchy about it. For the past seven years, a remarkable cellist named Dorothy Amarandos, now in her 83rd year, has all but single-handedly organized a week-long music camp at the Orkney Springs Hotel—a summer camp for geeky adults. There were 48 of us this year, most of us middle-aged and older, many of us still relative beginners wrestling with this most recalcitrant and noble of instruments. When you look at the roster, you see that all of us were pretty successful type A personalities in high-powered jobs (there were five MD’s in the room, for starters). And yet there was nothing more humbling than what we had agreed to do last week, as we made ourselves vulnerable to each other and to our teachers in that most exposed of venues—a public recital. Learning to play the cello as an adult can be an isolating and lonely business. It’s seldom about success as we usually have experienced success. Few if any of us will ever get to a place where we would call ourselves cellists rather than cello players. The noise we make can be excruciating—no wonder we tend to keep our doors closed. And yet coming together like this for a week, guided by Dorothy and her immensely gifted colleagues, we all gave ourselves permission to break out of our lonely practice rooms, to play in consort with others—performing in trios, duets, and even in a full-voiced choir of 48 instruments, strains of Beethoven and Vivaldi echoing off the walls of that elegant third-floor ballroom. We were all engaged in kind of a secular ubuntu at Shrine Mont this past week.

As I say, there was nothing churchy about any of this, except, of course, that everything we did with and for each other in that quaint and gracious hotel was, at least for me, anyway, sacramental. In such a setting, prayer takes care of itself. On the last day of the workshop, there was a solemn little ceremony where Dorothy presented each of us with a certificate of congratulations. It was a sweet gesture, and touching to watch each of these highly accomplished people sheepishly come forward to accept our teacher’s simple tribute. The certificate included an epigraph from T.S. Eliot—“you are the music while the music lasts.” That line evokes for me the experience of that week in Orkney Springs, and the gift of quiet and hospitality that the diocese offered us in allowing us to use this gentle space. Sometimes the church does get it right.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in time and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. There are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” from Four Quartets

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. He was trained as a Shakespeare scholar, and frequently leads audience discussions on religion and drama for the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, DC.

By John B. Chilton

In the summers I live in a rural community where there is an Episcopal conference center. If you care to dig deeply enough, you can figure out which one. But what I want to share is my gratitude to the young adults – and not so young adults – who work as cabin counselors on Episcopal camp staffs across the country. What I have the pleasure of witnessing locally happens in many places.

Part of the conference center operation is a collection of camps for children and young people. From mid-June through mid-August there are always four to five camps running with over 200 campers at any point in time. Some camps are for kids with challenges such as the camp for teens and young adults with Down syndrome. Some camps are outdoor-oriented, another is focused on the arts, and another does organized sports. Camp enrollment this year remained at capacity despite the widely publicized (or shall I say, megaphoned) departure of a few churches in my diocese back in December.

All of the camps are coeducational. Limited access to a mirror, a shower, and a laundry for a week or more conveys a lesson in mutuality that, I suspect, is a beneficial life-skill to develop early on. It doesn’t hurt that each camp staff works together and effectively models healthy working relationships between adults.

One camp may focus on outdoor activities and another on music and drama, but every camp is Christ-centered. It’s not just camp with an Episcopal name attached. There is daily worship. There is weekly worship where all the camps gather together (and a bishop is likely to be present). An environment is created where it is safe to express doubt and ask questions. The purpose of the camps is to build up the body of Christ. This is what the campers take away with them when they leave the mountain.

No camp operates without staff such as directors and nurses. But as I have observed these camps over many years, I have developed a special appreciation for the cabin counselors. Living with a cabin of kids 24/7 for several months is not something everyone is called to do. To take one example of many foregone comforts of home, how many of us would be willing to go two months with no more than a suitcase of clothes? I simply cannot comprehend how they maintain their energy, enthusiasm and patience. Counselors are the heart of camps. In virtuous cycle, the camps attract counselors who are committed to working with kids and staying on message – building up the body of Christ.

Over the years many campers have become counselors. Several campers and counselors have entered the priesthood, and the camps have produced a bishop or two. But what I believe is the finest dividend of camps is that so many campers and counselors have become nothing more or less than active members of the ministry of the laity. Praise God.

Camps are risky. You might fall and twist your knee. Your life might be changed. One counselor this year, a bruiser of a football player, said at end of his camp’s session “My life has been changed. I now know my vocation is to work with kids.”

I’d be interested in reading your comments about your experience in church camp as a camper or counselor.

Dr. John B. Chilton is an economist at the American University of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) specializing in applied game theory. He maintains two personal blogs, The Emirates Economist and New Virginia Church Man.

By Susan Fawcett

Sometimes I take the dog to church.

This is a big treat for him, obviously, since otherwise he'd be at home staring out the window, waiting for us to come home. But at church, where I work full time, there are constant distractions: phones ringing, folding machines clacking away, people chatting. It's a decent gig for a dog. He gets leashed to a knob on my desk chair so that he can't bowl over any Church Ladies. He observes the comings and goings in the hallway with a great deal of interest. And he gets attention. A lot of it.

Becket (the dog, not the martyred Archbishop. We chose his name partly because we could say, "Will no one rid us of this turbulent dog?," which, I admit, reveals a great deal about how much of a church dork I am) is a seventy-five pound black Labrador retriever. He wears a collar with the Episcopal shield on it. My hope is that this might win him some brownie points with skeptical office volunteers who find him scary.

Part of my argument for bringing him is that the dog himself is an entrée into people's lives. Folks who would otherwise just nod at me through the door on their way elsewhere will stop, do a double take, and come in and chat for a few minutes so that they can pet him. I get to hear about their favorite animals. Because of Becket, I've been invited to parishioners' homes to help commit the ashes of their beloved dogs to the earth.

More importantly, though, a friendly dog brings people's guard down. For example, he comes to youth group events and makes the rounds, meeting all the kids, soaking up the attention. And it's fairly miraculous to watch that very quiet, reserved young person play with a dog-all of a sudden we see another side of that young man. You can't be cool with a Labrador; there's a
little too much slobber and tail involved.

With adults, having a dog in the office breaks down the idea that church is like a corporate office. It is entirely unprofessional, at least in the Washington, D. C. area, to bring a pet to work. And because they spend so much time in a work environment with all those unspoken rules about professionalism, many folks come into our church office expecting, I suppose, a certain amount of decorum and propriety. They expect the priests here to be wearing suits and
clergy collars. They expect this to be a Well-Run Office. And, my friends, that is fairly contrary to what I understand the Church to be. We are not a corporation; I, as a priest, am not a CEO. And the parishioner who visits and gets an unexpected hello from a waggy dog may have to dispense with the pretense of being professional herself. Having Becket around means that I
get to see who people are in the midst of delight, rather than in the midst of Doing Business. It's a gift.

All of this is a long way of saying that I'm deeply uncomfortable with this paradigm the church has inherited of trying to operate like a Corporation. Yes, there are all kinds of professional standards we need to meet. Priests need to conform to a certain amount of vocational and professional principles. Our parishes need to be adequately administrated and our ministries need to be effective. This takes people who are willing to work hard, it takes an organized group of office staff and volunteers, and it takes a great deal of teamwork.

All of that is lost effort, though, if we aren't becoming a community that has some of the best characteristics of healthy families: people who laugh together, take care of each other, challenge each other to grow, and pray for and with each other. Unless I am mistaken, churches are called to be groups of people who are journeying together toward and through the call of Jesus Christ, to be God's hands and feet and heart in the world. None of those things have anything to do with 'being professional.' They have to do with love.

And if a dog in the office helps remind people of that, well, be prepared to be welcomed by a happy, slobbery Labrador when you come in.

The Rev. Susan Fawcett keeps the blog This Passage. She serves a parish the Diocese of Virginia, and supports the work of the General Convention publication The Center Aisle.

By Missy Morain

I sold my house in Iowa last week. It was my dream house, a 1917 arts and crafts bungalow, with hard wood floors and lots of natural light. I loved the house. I could even hug it by wrapping my arms around a pillar in the living room and found myself doing that more than I will ever admit. It was a space in which I felt perfectly safe and sane. In selling it I let go of the largest physical tie to the state that was home to me for the first thirty years of my life.

It had to be done. I have lived in Washington, DC for eighteen months and there is no sign that I am moving back to Iowa in the near future. That didn’t in any way make it easier for me. So many parts of me want to go back to the place that makes sense to me and yet at this point in my life I know that is not my path. It is not where God is calling me to be.

Call is a funny thing. I still haven’t figured out how you are sure that the Holy Spirit is calling and when she is not. It makes me wonder about the disciples and their call to follow Jesus. How did they know that it was the right thing to do? Did they weigh the pros and the cons? Did they follow their gut? Was it a combination of the two? Did they think about it at all? The Gospel of Mark says that Simon, Andrew, James and John just left their nets and followed. When I got the call of a job offer at the Cathedral College I did not just drop my nets and follow. I tied up loose ends, bought a condo to live in, packed most of my worldly belongings, got in my car with my pets and drove 1000 miles. Yet I left huge chunks of me behind, physically, mentally and emotionally.

Maybe there is a lesson for me in those Gospel stories (shocking I know), a lesson in how to leave a place taking what I need with me but leaving the other odds and ends behind. The Gospels don’t provide a specific list of what the disciples took with them or what they left behind (other than the nets), but I can take some educated guesses. I imagine that they disciples brought the clothes on their backs and the sandals on their feet while leaving most other tangible items behind. They brought with them their hearts, souls and minds; their questions and their searching for understanding. They took the knowledge of the love of their friends and family and their love of God.

I brought lots of things with me to DC but feel as though I left behind the feeling of safety and certainty in my world. Safety and certainty wasn’t what Jesus assured the disciples they would have while traveling. What the disciples did have to develop was a sense of trust in Jesus and their ministry. What I am working on developing is a trust in my ability to listen to and hear the call from the Holy Spirit. I cannot be sure of what she is saying to the larger world but I have to work on shutting up my inner critic long enough to listen to where the Holy Spirit is telling me to go. I am still going to search for my safe places in the world but those spaces cannot be my center, instead they will be the lucky places that I discover to refresh my soul and to remind me of what the world can be, if only I can listen quietly enough.

Missy Morain, Program Manager for the Cathedral College's Center for Christian Formation at Washington National Cathedral, is keeper of the blog Episcopal Princess. She is on the board of directors of the National Association for Episcopal Christian Education Directors.

By Heidi Shott

My Uncle Walt died last Tuesday, just a few weeks shy of his 92nd birthday. An extremely pious Roman Catholic, he considered my father’s older sister, Alene, his wife until the day he passed on – 32 years after she left a short note and skipped out of the house like a school girl.

He was a goofy kind of guy, but I always liked him. He played the guitar and sang; he wore moccasins; he liked to play catch. He was a terrible driver. He liked to swim in the lakes in our part of central New York and appreciated my mother’s willingness to swim with him when no one else would. He used Grecian Formula on his gray hair and everybody knew it.

But his outstanding characteristic was his profound devotion to the Church. He made his daughters say the rosary every night. As a small child I remember staying overnight at their house and reading comic books while they fingered their beads and murmured the prayers over and over. It was both extremely exotic (they were the only Catholics in our extended clan) and extremely boring. It seemed to last for hours and hours as I lay flopped on their living room davenport, as Aunt Alene always called the sofa, listening to the cadence of their voices and watching my two older cousins glance at their watches and one another.

Uncle Walt was exceedingly frail when I saw him last at my father’s funeral in 2000. As we sat with our baked ham and potato salad after Dad’s informal service on the side lawn of the family farm, Uncle Walt told me how he drove each Sunday to Syracuse (at least an hour’s drive) to hear the Latin mass. The thought of an 85 year-old Uncle Walt driving on the New York State Thruway was truly terrifying.

He died on Tuesday, the day Pope Benedict XVI released his statement which contends, in part, that Protestant denominations are no more than “Christian communities.” This reiteration of the “Dominus Iesus” declaration of 2000 and the news last week about the lifting of restrictions for the Latin mass may very well have been too much of a good thing for the old guy. He must have died a happy man. Things were finally swinging his way!

No one else in our family was religious, including another uncle who was an American Baptist minister. The rest of us were Protestants merely because we weren’t Catholic or Jewish or Zen Buddhist. So it’s funny that my most enduring childhood memory of spending time with Uncle Walt and Aunt Alene is of those Sundays when they dragged me to Mass and I had to sit alone while they went up for Communion. It was my first experience of exclusion.

“You’re part of our family for everything else. You can wear hand-me-downs from your cousins. You can drink milk from the special Mary Poppins cup. You can fall asleep on our laps after you’ve run around in the backyard and we’ll stoke the damp hair off your hot forehead. But at Mass on Sundays you can’t approach, much less partake of the body of Jesus. Nope, sorry. Not allowed. Stay in your seat and be a good girl. We’ll be right back.”

It seems we Christians…of virtually every stripe…are very good at being gatekeepers of Jesus. When we humans attempt, through sophisticated theological debate or literal scriptural interpretation or the occasional lively claim of divine revelation, to have the corner on the Jesus market, it scares me. I’ve been there and can’t forget the sucky way it made me feel. Implicit in the act of keeping the gate is the notion that the keeper has access to information and power and knowledge and secret handshakes that the rest of us don’t.

I’ve always been tickled by the practice – started in Mormon youth groups, I recall – of determining one’s actions by asking the question, “What would Jesus do?”

Here’s my answer: “I don’t know! I’m not Jesus!”

As a parent of two young teenagers, I’m beginning to realize there’s a day in the not-so-distant future when they are going to shake our hands and say (I hope), “thank you, lovely parents.” Then they will walk out that door. When confronted with the inevitable choices life will bring their way, I hope to God they don’t ask, “What would my Mom do?” I want them to do the right thing because it’s what they know they should do. I want them to remember how we’ve taught them to live and to how we’ve taught them to treat the people they encounter. If they have to pause to ask the question, then I fear for the answer.

Jesus, that savvy teacher, left us such good, simple instructions. If we heed them well and faithfully, we shouldn’t have to stop and think.

There has been a lot of interesting talk about open communion in these parts and I understand (most of) the conversation and appreciate the arguments on both sides. The recent posts reminded me of my college roommate reading aloud a letter from an old boyfriend who was an agnostic and fairly cynical about Christian faith. He wrote that he was attending an Episcopal Church and that he liked the ritual. He “relished” walking up the aisle and taking Communion.

“Eeeuuuwww,” we both said when she read that part. “That’s creepy.”

But now I’m not so sure. Maybe the mysterious act of taking communion was the start of something for that young man. Maybe, as the songwriter Bruce Cockburn sang a few years later, “spirits open to the thrust of grace.” Who am I to say?

But then again, maybe being shut off from something mysterious and holy, something I didn’t understand when I was seven or eight, maybe that fed my yearning for the things of God. Maybe I’m still pondering these things decades later because they weren’t just handed to me. Does it matter how the gift is given? Does it matter how it is received?

But not everyone is an asker of questions. God gifts some people with the different propensities. Some people are like my Uncle Walt whose passion for the Blessed Mother and the Roman Catholic Church was all consuming. His need to keep that gate in place was as clear to him as breathing.

What does the question-asker do with an Uncle Walt?

Seven years ago, at my father’s funeral, I balanced a chinet plate on my lap and listened to him tell me about the Nocturnal Adoration Society. The next day I prayed he wouldn’t kill anyone while driving to the Latin mass in Syracuse.

Then today, I sent some flowers.

By Sara McGinley

One Sunday not long after my husband, Aron Kramer, started his first job as a priest a woman in her late 70s pulled me aside after church. She looked up at me from her 4’10” height in a way that made me feel small and very, very young and said, “Dear, I want you to know, Miriam has been answering the phones in the afternoons at church. You know how busy it gets. Well, I just thought you should know she told me, a Sara McGinley has been calling Aron an awful lot. You keep an eye out dear.” She gave me a lovely squeeze on the arm, smiled, looked me up and down as if to size up my fortitude and walked away.

Thus began my husband’s affair.

A few months later spring arrived after a very, hard, long winter, the first we’d spent back in the mid-west after leaving San Francisco.

He talked that morning in his sermon about how the world was pregnant in spring. In an 8 minute sermon he used the word pregnant 3 times.

That morning at coffee hour three women seemed determined to coax me into admitting that I was pregnant, seemingly hungry to be the first with confirmation.

One woman even pulled me aside to tell me there was no shame in being pregnant perhaps a bit sooner than one expected. She, after all had been pregnant at each of her three weddings.

Thus began my first pregnancy.

All told I think I was pregnant according to the rumor mill at least 3 times before I actually conceived a child.

Our impending divorce was predicted the day I was caught on the local news getting my head shaved bald.

A friend’s friend was in treatment for breast cancer and when her hair fell out all of her close friends shaved their heads. I ended up in the mix (truth be told, I’d always wanted to see how air feels on a bald head and so I fell in line easily when asked).

The first Sunday after that very public shaving I was pulled aside and reminded that the last woman to shave her head at the church was divorced within the year. “You should be more careful,” I was told.

I’ve had plenty of days as a priest’s wife that I felt imposed upon, days when it seemed that my life was laying wide open for everyone to interpret as they pleased.

Some days it has been exhausting, others just hilarious.

And there have been days when I’m blown away by the seemingly unending energy people in the church have when it comes to caring for me and Aron and our children.

Six months ago when our son was diagnosed with leukemia a stream of warm, hearty, meals and their accompanying desserts found their way to our front door night after night.

Eleven months before that, when my daughter was born and my son was just 18 months old, meals arrived, ready to eat and just in time for dinner.

When my son was born I joked that I had a new part-time job writing thank you notes for the mountain of gifts given to us.

Never did I anticipate asking for and receiving the generosity of spirit and prayer from such a widely diverse group of people.

When my husband and I were married I had every intention of having a high-powered job that took up a fairly huge chunk of my time. I intended to be one of those Christmas and Easter kinds of Christians.

I intended to fake it a lot at church and pretend that I actually knew my way through the church service.

I intended to do just enough not to sink Aron’s career—and absolutely nothing more.

Naively, I thought it would be my propensity to swear and my lack of interest in hymns and cleaning brass that would get people talking.

Instead it was my husband’s affair, mystery pregnancies that produced no offspring, and my exceptionally shiny head that got people stirred up.

The fact that I use the ‘s word’ has caused at least 2 people to start coming to church.

When a friend caught me lip syncing hymns in church and another caught me making up words like “I like Aron, he looks so cute in his funny priest dress thing” to hymns they both started coming to church more often.

If anything, the church has taken me as I am, held me up, shaped and changed me for the better and whenever I start to seem boring they’ve just added a few more exciting details to the mix.

Sara McGinley, irreverent priest's wife and mother of two, writes the blog subtly named, Sara McGinley. She is a lay person from Minnesota who thinks the term 'lay person' is unnecessarily suggestive.

By Sam Candler

I happened to be at an island wilderness area during the summer solstice this year. I could not discern, from my tiny vantage point, that the earth’s orbit had angled it so far toward the sun again (though I could feel the heat!). I had no television or internet access to feature the several scientists who surely explained patiently again just how the earth orbits our large star.

I did notice that much of the natural world knows this season rather intuitively. At the beach, I saw the tide extraordinarily high. Somehow the eggs of the shorebirds laid up in the white dunes hatched just days before those summer solstice high tides reached their nests. At the marsh, the opposite low tides exposed black mud to a rare treat of the sun’s fertile energy.

We hear much about polarities these days. We say that two persons are “poles apart,” in their relationship, or in their opinions. We say the same thing about political parties and church factions; we mean that they could not be more at odds with one another. I heard one good writer several weeks ago talk about “antithetical polarities.” We use the phrase “polar tension” to describe tendencies in ourselves. Palmer Parker claimed in his book, The Active Life, that the active and the contemplative parts of ourselves sometimes represent a “polar tension” that is difficult to reconcile.

But the phrase “polar opposite” began to mean something different to me when I pondered the poles of the earth’s orbit. The earth does not orbit around the sun in a perfect circle, but, rather, in an ellipse. Our elliptical orbit around the sun might teach us something about polarities. Our orbit, being elliptical, has two poles: the two outer reaches of the ellipse. In an ellipse, the two poles represent the more extreme points of our journey.

Consider that the two poles of the earth’s orbit represent extreme points along the ellipse, but they do not represent points outside the orbit itself. In fact, those points are just as much a part of the orbit as any other points are. In the best of our political differences, and church differences, and relationship differences, the same can be true. We may be at extremes, but we are in the same orbit. Furthermore, the orbit would not be the same without those points; it would not be complete.

Orbits, of course, depend upon the mass of the object around which the planets hurdle. Our relationships, too, depend upon a power greater than ourselves. Our church depends upon the mass of a God whose power is great enough to keep us in the orbit. It is God who keeps us in the orbit, not we ourselves.

I know there are times when my wife and I are poles apart; friends have observed that we are polar opposites. Nevertheless, we stay married. We stay married, by the grace of God (and it takes more grace for her to stay married to me!). For me, however, “polar opposites” does not mean that two folks never can relate to one another. The phrase just means that we are not in the same place right now. In a couple of seasons, one of us might just be in the exact place where the other is now.

The church, at our best, orbits gracefully and beautifully around the might star of life, Jesus Christ our Lord. We seek his light daily, so that we might reflect that glory. But every day of the earth’s revolution provides us a slightly different angle from which to reflect that glory. Some of us reflect the light at a different angle. Some of us are at extremes in the orbit, and some of us are right in the middle. No matter where our place in the ellipse, God keeps us in the grip of a power much greater than our own devices. We are part of a vast solar system of grace.

The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He helped start that city’s interfaith group, and leads regular community bible studies. He is also inspired by playing jazz piano, hunting, astronomy, and poetry. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral Web site.

By Helen Thompson

I just turned down a job offer. I didn't have to turn this one down, and part of me will always wonder what would have happened if I hadn't. It's sort of like that old saying about "When God closes a door..." except this time God opened one, and I sat there feeling dumb and not knowing what to do. Why? I want to see what other doors there might be beyond the horizon. I felt like I was playing Let's Make a Deal, short of wearing a silly costume, and having to choose between one door with a known and many other doors with unknowns. I chose the unknown.

"Lead us not into temptation," however, didn't work. I was tempted by more money, a shorter commute—and a blinding vision of something else, yet to come, that was more in line with my vocation. After all; I didn't "need" to take this job. I'm employed, and very good at what I do, if my evaluations and occasional awards are any indication. And I make a respectable living—although in this part of the country, it doesn't go as far as I'd like it to. But I've been singing that sad song for years now, and honestly, it's nothing compared to what I've been through.

You see, sometimes I know I'm lucky to be employed at all. When you look at the first ten years of my Social Security Statement, your first thought might be how on earth I managed to feed myself (and, by 1992, a family of three) on less than $10,000 a year. In 1996, I managed to break $6 per hour for the first time. Later that year, I got my first white-collar job, right before my 26th birthday, making $18,000 a year managing charter transportation projects for the University of Virginia.

So now you know how old I am. Another ten and change years later, I'm turning down positions that pay more than my Dad was making at retirement. He's so proud of me, but then my mortgage payment is six times what his was. I'm a successful, award-winning writer, an accomplished editor, a Web 2.0 jockey and a DJ. On my way to a second, loving marriage. But sometimes, I still feel poor.

Poor. Even though the money I make could feed a village in many parts of the world.

You see, I have lived through the American incarnation of poverty. Sometimes it's weird, seeing my present middle-class world through that lens. And I didn't start there, having been raised in a middle-class family in an entirely average American neighborhood. But in 1991, I dropped out of college to marry a guy I'd had a crush on when I was 14 and didn't know much more about him than I'd had a crush on him when I was 14.

And because he now works for a government agency and has a security clearance, I sometimes wonder if his biggest fear might be that I might write an honest memoir of that time period. Suffice it to say, that for the four years he and I were married, we lived off food stamps and WIC checks, my pregnancy was covered by the taxpayers of the Commonwealth of Virginia (thank you), and I tried very, very hard to find a path to productivity rather than get trapped in the system. I worked overnight shifts at a local nursing home while trying to get back to school, taking evening classes at the local community college while paying all the bills for our little family.

If you'd told me then that someday I'd be turning down jobs like the one I just turned down, I'd likely have laughed. But I've realized now that jobs aren't about work, and aren't even about career. They're about calling. Even when I was at my poorest, I followed a call out of poverty, one that would later help me connect with people from a wide range of socioeconomic circumstances. Now I'm a homeowner with car payments and any struggle I ever have, I'm thankful for.

But to this day, when I look into the face of American poverty, I see myself staring into a dark mirror. I made it out because I had the cultural language to navigate my way out. On the one hand, I see people with privilege who never know want, dispensing charity with a pat on the head and a tut, tut of pity. On the other hand, I see the faces of a million other moms like the me of a decade ago, too proud to snatch that coin from the fingertips of the condescending.

For it is more blessed to give than to receive, true, but… what do you package with that "give?" To this day, I still wonder if people are looking at me like I have "Medicaid" stamped across my medical file. Heaven knows that most people with kids my son's age are at least ten years older than I am. My peers are having kids now that they're established in their careers, and they already know how they're paying for junior's college. I don't, because, in spite of every blasted thing, I'm still poor. But that's OK.

I know wealth and abundance in how it comes from the love of friends. I'll wear my thrift-shop threads to the country club with pride. And I don't worry about what next great opportunity will cross my threshold. And most importantly, I know there are other doors waiting for me—ones that when they open, I'll know I'm supposed to walk through them. And I'll be able to say, "Here I am. Send me."

That's faith, and it's priceless.

Helen Thompson, known on the faithblogging circuit as Gallycat, is a writer living in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. She has written for the Philadelphia City Paper, RevGalBlogPals, Geez magazine and others. Visit her on the web at Gallycat's Lounge.

By Heidi Shott

Fifteen years ago this week five friends enjoyed a picnic on the west coast of Ireland just north of Galway. We had ham and cheese, good bread and a tube of spicy mustard perfect for a cutlery-free, wayside lunch. I suspect there were cookies and cherries and probably pickles. We ate perched on a jumble of rocks – not unlike the coast of Maine – high above that side of the Atlantic. It was a wonderful lunch, full of happy banter. It was the kind of lunch I would have remembered years later even if what happened next hadn’t happened.

After lunch, my friend Denise and I decided to pick our way along the rocks. We hadn’t gone far before we heard the insistent, unmistakable bleat of goats. We walked toward the sound and looked over a precipitous edge. Twenty feet below three goats – two grownups and a kid – balanced on a narrow ledge. Bleating, panting and standing amid clumps of goat poop, these were not happy goats. The drop facing the sea was much greater than the 20 feet above.

Oh dear. A goat crisis.

Denise, a physician, is used to fixing things and immediately started to make suggestions about how to effect a rescue. We tossed a few implausible ideas around but after a moment we yelled, “Scott!” My husband, the best kind of troubleshooter, ambled over with our other companions, Chris and Mo, whose turn it was to pack up the lunch things.

“They’re goats. They’ll figure it out. That’s what goats do,” he said dismissively. “They leap up and down rocks and ledges.”

“But they look hot and panicky,” I moaned.

“There’s a lot of goat shit down there and they appear to be dehydrated,” said Denise. “They’ve been stuck down there a long time.” She looked around to a couple of cottages a quarter-mile in either direction along the coast. “Maybe we should tell a farmer.”

Scott howled and his native West Virginian accent suddenly shifted to Irish: “Now, Jimmy, do you remember the time when we were kids and the daft Americans stopped by to inquire as to the welfare of the goats?” He looked at Denise and me. “They’ll be telling that story 50 years from now.”

After another ten minutes of heated goat debate, we conceded defeat and piled into our rental car. We stopped for the night in Galway where, at the modern Cathedral, I looked around for my friends before dropping an Irish punt into a tin and lighting three candles for the you-know-whats.

The goat affair wasn’t the first time I’d been tempted to intervene in matters outside my sphere of responsibility. About four years earlier, just a few weeks before we moved to Maine from West Virginia, I sat down in a colleague’s office at the newspaper and told him that there was something I thought he should know. I thought he should know that there were rumors floating around town that he was having an affair with a church secretary. I said I knew the rumors would be hurtful to his wife and daughter. I admired this man.

“I don’t know how these things get started,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I appreciate you telling me, but there’s nothing to it.” He deftly shifted the conversation to some loose ends with a story I was working on. He walked me back to the stairs.

“You did what?” Scott asked me when I told him I’d talked to Keith. “It’s not your place to intervene.” Months later we learned that Keith and the church lady had run off to North Carolina. It hadn’t lasted. After a month he slouched back to his wife.

Despite my acute embarrassment, I wondered if I still hadn’t done the right and caring thing by talking to him. I had intervened with a good heart and loving intentions. But feeling burned, I also decided to never put myself in that position again. I’d mind my own business in the future. Later, when it came to the goats, I didn’t insist on intervening and it’s haunted me ever since. My good friend Denise knows this and every few years, after we’ve had a few glasses of wine, she’ll lean back in her chair, look to the ceiling, and muse, “I wonder what happened to those goats?”

I was pondering this fine line between saint and busybody one morning last week while driving Colin, one of my 13 year-old twin sons, to school. For someone who considers himself an agnostic with deistic leanings, Colin has an awful lot of questions about religion. We’d been cruising along in pleasurable silence when Colin asked me to buy him a copy of the Koran. “I need to know more about Islam,” he said.

“You need to know more about Christianity,” I countered. By the time we crossed the bridge over Great Salt Bay, we’d moved onto the central theme of Christianity. As in, “So, Mom, what is it?”

Easily nailed! “Matthew chapter 20-something: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” (I realized, however, such imprecision would not impress my high school Bible quiz team coach.)

“So if you do those two you’ll automatically keep the ten commandments?” Colin asked as we turned into his school’s driveway. “They sort of take care of all the wrong things you might otherwise do?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, the ever-deficient carpool theologian.

But as he leaned his head in the rear passenger door to grab his backpack, he delivered the zinger: “Well, I don’t need to be a Christian to love my neighbor.” And then with a cluck of his tongue – our schoolyard signal that means ‘I love you but I don’t want to say it in front of the whole world’ – he turned and was gone.

He’s right, of course. Some of the most wonderful, selfless, appropriate interveners I know would not characterize themselves as Christian.

The problem is that I’m not one of them. I’m not at all selfless but I am a Christian. After all these years of trying to live this stuff, I am yet to figure out where the line should be drawn between loving involvement and benign indifference to the people I walk this world among.

Amid the ridiculous busyness of two jobs, two kids, two school boards, many friends, one house, one garden and one husband who is lobbying to host a lobster feed for 60 people on the fourth of July – amid all this – I can’t quite figure out whom to love first or in whose life I should intervene.

Jesus commands me to love my neighbor, which, according to the www.one.org wristband I’m wearing, means everybody in the whole wide world. It also means enforcing a consistent computer policy with Colin. It also means visiting my 84 year-old mom more than once a year and supporting my brother in his care of her. It also means checking in more regularly with my friend who’s going through a hard divorce. It also means making time to go to town with my sons to choose goodies to send to the four children of our friend Alex who are living on their own in Ghana while he works to support them in England. It means everything in between.

In this world where it’s possible to know so much about so many, how can we possibly manage to do what Jesus asks?

In the Galway Cathedral, I lighted three candles and prayed for the goats. If we’d jumped down onto the ledge to try to hoist them up, we would have failed and irredeemably soiled our shoes. If we’d gone to the nearest cottage to report the goat situation, we would have been the worst sort of tourists. So I prayed, dropped a coin in the box – such good work as had been prepared for me to walk in. That was June 1992. Four years before I’d sat trembling in a chair just before I told a good and kind man something I thought he needed to know, something I thought no one else would tell him.

Last Christmas morning, I opened a package from Denise. In recent years we’ve tried to scale back on the gift-giving and have taken to donating to good causes in our families’ names. Inside the box was a card with the Heifer Project logo. “In honor of the Shott Family: Three Goats.” Below, in her hand, I read, “They’re not Irish goats, but I did the best I could.”

Heifer International www.heifer.org

Heidi Shott is communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Sara McGinley

“I’m just buying socks.” she said.

“I’m going to a wedding today. And it’s so cold I need a pair of socks.”

She is a parishioner at the church.

My husband, Aron, is her priest.

She has just paid for her new black socks she’ll wear to a wedding later today.

She not only bought the new socks and showed them to me but she showed me her old socks and the shoes she’ll wear with the new ones.

Our conversation would be of no consequence, except that for the first time in my life I have just purchased underwear that doesn’t come packaged together. Pairs of underwear that aren’t white or cotton. Underwear that might get someone’s attention. I’m a bit shy about these fancy little panties, and so I have put them at the bottom of my cart and piled the cart with several things that I know I’ll return. I don’t want to flaunt these fun little invitations by purchasing them as if they have a purpose.

And now, one of Aron’s parishioners is talking to me while the woman at the check out is removing the panties from their tiny, tiny clothes hangers. Clothes hangers so small I’m not sure infant’s clothing would fit on them. Hangers so tiny that I think a man would have a hard time returning the panties in the proper fashion. Yes these are panties. Panties I tried to purchase discreetly.

And Aron’s parishioner is telling me about her wedding socks, I feel her notice the tiny, bright, sexy things on the counter.

I feel her notice them and I decide that I’ll pretend she doesn’t see. We go into an insane time warp where I’m noticing her notice. I’m deciding not to comment, but then her arm stretches to the little well-folded pile of underwear in front of me. Horror of horrors she picks up one pair of underwear – the brightest, most stringy pair. Her fingers rub the material almost as if to test out its strength and then she comments. Yes she not only notices my new underwear, she touches my new underwear and then she comments on my new underwear.

“Oh I see you’ve made much more exciting purchases here. Oh my how fun.”

I smile. And try to look calm. I mean honestly, it’s not like buying exciting underwear is a sin. I try to look calm, as if I don’t have some bizarre issue with spending extra money on something that I’m the only one likely to see. Well me and my husband. Yes me and her priest.

I smile and try to mask what I’m thinking in my head. I feel grateful those thought bubbles they have in cartoons don’t exist in real life because mine would be screaming: “Woman you’re touching my underwear!”

I decide while time is moving along as if each second is an entire minute to make a joke.

I don’t have one.

I just keep smiling.

While Aron’s parishioner just stands there with my underwear in her hand as if I’m going to tell her where I’ll be wearing my purchase tonight.

Then time comes back to normal. And she wishes me a good day and walks away. I watch as she leaves and think I can see my red underwear stuck to her shoe like a rogue piece of toilet paper trailing after her. I imagine the woman coming in the door telling her there is porn-star colored underwear on her shoe and her laughing and saying: “Oh this. This little thing. That’s not mine. That belongs to my priest’s wife. That’s her over there.”

I have to look twice to realize that the underwear are not on her shoe. Of course they aren’t. My red underwear are here on the counter safely out of her grasp.

I take my large bag to the car. I go grocery shopping and on the way home I stop and return the pair she held in her hand. I keep the rest.

The next Sunday, sitting in my usual pew, in my usual, boring underwear I think I detect knowing looks from a few women who are well connected to the church grapevine. I'm pretty sure my new purchases have become public knowledge. Suddenly, they see me as something more than the priest’s boring, comfortable wife. Maybe they aren’t comfortable with that.

I am.

Sara McGinley, irreverent priest's wife and mother of two, writes the blog subtly named, Sara McGinley. She is a lay person from Minnesota who thinks the term 'lay person' is unnecessarily suggestive.