Speaking to the Soul

Feeds

SEARCH

We thirst for something far greater than this world can satisfy. So we are always disappointed. Always. But disappointment is itself a gift. Disappointment drives our search for life. We go from one false promise to another, gobbling up things and people in great gulps only to find them go tasteless too soon. And that is the secret of contentment.

It’s when we discover that enough will never be enough that we can finally stop kicking and scratching our way through life, put it all down, and let God be the point of the compass for us. Then we are ready to link arms with the rest of the human race as partners in the great enterprise of life. Then we realize not only the insufficiency of the other on whom we have put the burden of our emotional satisfaction, but of ourselves as well. Because neither we nor they are God, we can finally be gentle with one another.

From Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward, 2004).

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 27, 2007 8:24 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Feast of John Keble

The surest way to uphold or restore our endangered church will be for each of her anxious children, in his own place and station, to resign himself more thoroughly to his God and Savior in those duties, public and private, which are not immediately affected by the emergencies of the moment: the daily and hourly duties, I mean, of piety, purity, charity, justice.

From “National Apostasy” by John Keble, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 27, 2007 8:28 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

My messy house

Children are frequently astonished to discover that the psalmists so freely express the more unacceptable emotions, sadness and even anger, even anger at God, and that all of this is in the Bible that they hear read in church on Sunday morning.

Children who are picked on by their big brothers and sisters can be remarkably adept when it comes to writing cursing psalms, and I believe that the writing process offers them a safe haven in which to work through their desires for vengeance in a healthy way. Once a little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him; his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’” “My messy house” says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boys made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?

From “Repentance” in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 1998).

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 27, 2007 8:30 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou doest overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From pleasure, than from thee, much more must flow,
And sooner our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and souls delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Holy Sonnet No. 10 by John Donne, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 27, 2007 8:31 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

For Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday some years back in Atlanta, I don’t remember which. But we are doing our thing—having our annual dramatic reading of the passion story, and it is going particularly well this year. We practiced hard and it shows. The narrator is great. Jesus knows his lines. And then the part comes when Pilate says what he says every year. What do you want me to do with this man? This is the signal for the whole congregation to get in on the action. And the crowd yells, CRUCIFY HIM! CRUCIFY HIM! Bloodcurdling effect. Very satisfactory.

And while the crowd’s pretended rage is still ringing in our ears, from about two-thirds back in the pews, comes a woman’s voice bellowing. NO. NO. NO. Not my Boy. No. Don’t. Not my Boy. And then sobs throbbing through the air to break your heart.

We are appalled, deeply appalled. What had been an audience is becoming something else. What is happening? Somehow 400 observers are transformed into a body of witnesses. I crane my neck and see that someone sitting near her comforts her. Well, thank God. They look for all the world like Mary and John lost at the foot of the cross, her head collapsed on the shoulder of her pew-mate, whose name, I remember, is actually John.

We sit in silence, all of us, for a timeless time. For what had been a well-done scripted and rehearsed play has become anamnesis, has become Real Presence. And the veil of the temple is torn in two. She is there at the foot of the cross. Perhaps you would have diagnosed her as mentally ill or maybe drunk—but she is there and she is our host and takes us there too.

What if we had ushered her out? What a loss. But we didn’t and she was peculiar and beautiful and rich with gifts to give and plugged into the power like I’ve never seen before. Where else would such a woman belong on Palm Sunday during the Passion of Our Lord but in the Body of Christ?

From “Behold Your Mother” in Alive and Loose in the Ordinary: Stories of the Incarnation by Martha Sterne. © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 27, 2007 8:36 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In the Cross

Augustine says that Christ is present among those who are ‘in severe trial’, and goes on to say that ‘we progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial’. How true that is. The cross is about being broken. Many years ago I worshipped in a ‘storefront church’ in the London docks, and one of our favourite hymns was ‘Jesus, keep me near the Cross’. The chorus is:

In the Cross, in the Cross,
Be my glory ever
Till my raptured soul shall find
Rest beyond the river.

A large West Indian lady, known by all of us as Aunt Matilda, always sang ‘ruptured’ instead of ‘raptured’, and her voice was so powerful that the whole congregation followed her. Yet in a way she was right. The cross does involve a rupture, a break, a cleavage. It is a moment of division and disturbance, a point of crisis, a breaking point.

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 27, 2007 8:54 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Jesus in anger

In praying over the incidents in the New Testament where Jesus is moved to anger, I’ve come to understand that anger, in and of itself, isn’t wrong. Jesus did indeed get angry—very angry—but he never lashed out in manic rage. When Jesus chased the money changers from the temple, he “fashioned a whip out of cords” (John 2:15). In meditating on this scene, I kept asking myself why he would take the time, in a moment of rage, to make a weapon. In some ways, the action makes him seem intent on inflicting severe physical punishment. As I puzzled over the incident, I grew more confused. A friend of mine, a scientist who has a reason for everything, has a theory: “I think he was giving himself time to channel the anger and get it under control. He didn’t want to lash out in a blind rage. He wasn’t seeking hand-to-hand combat. He was slowing himself down.”

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 27, 2007 9:01 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Handing Himself over

If the truth of God is disclosed and the glory of God is manifest in Jesus, then the truth of God must be this, and the glory of God must appear in this—that God so initiates and acts that He destines Himself to enter into passion, to wait and to receive.

Of His own will and freedom God so acts as to enter into passion, to encompass His own passion. This, as John sees it, is the truth of God, and it is in this that the glory of God is manifested at its deepest level. The glory of God is disclosed at its primary level in the work and activity of God; but that glory appears at its deepest level when the activity of God achieves the exposure of God, when by His working God destines Himself to the necessity of waiting. One might say that the ultimate glory of God’s creativity is the creation of His own exposure to that which He has created: that of all that God has done in and for the world the most glorious thing is this—that He has handed Himself over to the world, that He has given to the world not only power of being but also that power to affect Himself which is best described as power of meaning.

Posted by Jim Naughton on March 30, 2007 4:06 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Maundy Thursday

Ordinary life discloses to us, in the experience of loving, this dimension of glory—discloses the transcendence of loving over everything else that a human being can do. The Gospel of John suggests to us that the divine glory, in that ultimate dimension in which it appears in the handing over of Jesus, is of this same shape, though on a vaster scale. There is in it something whose shape we know and can recognize—the shape of the glory of loving. There is in the God Who is disclosed in Jesus first the glory of signs and mighty works—the glory of free and unfettered activity and achievement; but when Jesus destines himself, by His own will and initiative, to wait at the end of exposure and helplessness, there is disclosed, as the ultimate dimension of the divine glory, that same glory which we dimly perceive in our own experience when, because we love, we destine ourselves to wait and to be exposed and to receive. The glory of that waiting figure in Gethsemane is not wholly strange and unfamiliar to us—not so strange that we could mistake it for misfortune and regard the figure with pity or sheer incomprehension. The glory of God which finally appears in the waiting figure in the Garden is the glory of that not wholly unfamiliar activity which always, in the end, destines itself to waiting—the activity of loving.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 5, 2007 3:27 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Good Friday

The real tragedy of Good Friday was the death of Judas. This death was truly tragic, meaningless, violent and desperate. Much of my ministry has been spent with people who have died tragic deaths. Others have lived lives which have been devoid of hope. I think particularly of the experience of many heroin addicts as they moved towards despair. Unless we can identify in some way with this loss of hope, we have not begun to understand the Good Friday experience. In fact only those who know something of the meaning of despair can come to experience victory. Only the dead can appreciate resurrection, and all Christians must confront and experience the darkness as they move along the way to death. One of the worst aspects of the darkness which we face is the painful fear that some of the darkness we encounter may not be redeemable, that it may be the darkness of original sin. Yet this too must be faced in trust and confidence.

This entry into the darkness is the very heart of faith and of hope. To be a Christian at all is to enter this dark night: the night in which we do not know the way but in which God becomes luminously present. This dark night is a paradigm of the paschal transformation by which we are integrated into the life of God.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 6, 2007 5:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Holy Saturday

The third procession is that of the Easter Vigil ceremony which is held on the night before Easter Day and once again it is possible to come into this central moment of the Christian year, the celebration of the completion of salvation, by the simplest of ways, by walking, bowing, standing, breathing, being. On Easter night we are on even more fundamental ground in the simplicities of this procession, which is shaped by the basic elements of earth, of air, of fire, and of water. There is silence at the basis of it: when all lights in the church are extinguished, we stand with Adam in darkness, at the moment of creation, in earth and air only, until new light is struck out of the rock. The Scripture readings of the Vigil will later emphasize this beginning, by using Genesis, with the creation of all things, of which humankind is the crown, the complete image of God. This is the time of new beginning, a new creation, and therefore especially it is the time of the catechumens; this is, those who are preparing for baptism, and for those already baptized who are with them as they go towards baptism, the unifying basis of Christian life. There is in this moment of darkness a sense of alienation, of exile, of not being at home, created in the image of God but still far off, helpless of ourselves to change. From the rock of the tomb a new light is struck from flint and shines into darkness. A candle is lit and from it small candles take their light, so that behind each small candle-flame there is the face of a human person newly made in Christ whose only identity in the darkness is that of this new light. We are taken into a new dimension of life which is pure gift. We are with the reconciled, with the baptized, with the risen Lord, who is the new Adam. It is the first and timeless day of a new creation.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 7, 2007 5:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Wishing you a joyful Easter

Here and now in this new dawn there is someone who weeps, broken-hearted, in a garden and hears her name. The young man is risen, death is taken into victory, but it is still a time of tears, both of sorrow and of longing and of wonder for amazing love. It is overwhelming: as Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) wrote, meditating on the meeting of this new Eve in this new garden with the new Adam:

The Lord called her ‘Mary’,
the name he had so often called her by as if to say,
‘I know who you are, and what you want;
behold me; do not weep, I am he whom you are seeking.’
At once her tears were changed;
I do not believe they stopped at once,
but where once they were wrung from a heart
broken and self-tormenting,
they flow now from a heart exulting.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 8, 2007 5:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A loose thread

April 9

I found a loose thread in the sleeve of my jacket the other day and hesitated to pull it off in case it unraveled the entire seam. I did it anyway and of course the whole lining came apart. This made me think of certain questions we are reluctant to ask ourselves. We think twice about dealing with them in case we make a worse rip in the fabric of the story we tell about ourselves. Just now, as we approach the celebration of Easter, I am not sure that I want to ask: “How real will my Easter joy be this year?” Questions about the authenticity of our feelings scare us. Where might it lead if I start wondering whether my religious experience is fake?

So what is authentic Easter joy? Well, I do know it isn’t relief at the return of spring, however welcome that is. Easter joy has to be something that I would experience just as much in the southern hemisphere, where Easter heralds the onset of winter cold. Easter joy is not a seasonal mood of uplift.
Neither is Easter joy to be confused with a sense that Jesus’ resurrection is a reassuring illustration of the adage “All’s well that ends well.” A penetrating remark made by the fearless Anglican philosopher Donald McKinnon has always haunted me. He claimed that a lot of conventional talk about the resurrection misrepresented it as “a descent from the cross given greater dramatic effect by a thirty-six-hour postponement.” The counterfeit version of Easter joy depends on the make-believe that God pulls a surprise “happy ending” on us after the ghastly setback of Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus is presented as a Houdini figure who, it seems, could not possibly have gotten out of the ultimate trap of crucifixion and burial in a sealed tomb. But no! To our relief—our so-called Easter joy—out he comes! All is well and our hero is victorious, the One they couldn’t keep down! Happy Easter! Let’s congratulate ourselves for being on the winning side!

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 12, 2007 11:47 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The shock of the tomb

April 10

Many of those who are skeptical about the story of the empty tomb and take the stories of Jesus’ appearances as legends opt for an interpretation that is similarly reassuring. They assume the early disciples created the stories to express in a vivid but imaginary way their inner conviction that Jesus’ soul had passed triumphantly and inevitably into heaven. But this is impossible to square with the evidence that the apostles regarded the resurrection as a shocking anomaly. Something utterly unprecedented had happened to transform the dead Jesus, and this transformation involved the passing of his body into an entirely new state. The visible trace of this transformation was an empty grave.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 12, 2007 11:50 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The last word

April 11

Easter joy focuses then on why God would do this unique thing to Jesus, something that by definition only he could do. If someone is raised while history is allowed to go on, this is God’s only way of showing us what he is actually like. The resurrection is God’s way of showing that it is the crucified Jesus who is the ultimate manifestation of his identity and character. In the resurrection, it is Jesus-on-the-cross who is confirmed as the “last word” about the nature of divine love and creativity—and divine vulnerability.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 12, 2007 11:51 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In on the joke

April 12

This is where it gets scary. The resurrection only makes sense as God’s “showing his hand” about the meaning of the cross. So I can’t have Easter joy if I don’t find joy in Jesus-on-the-cross. In fact, I can’t even believe in the resurrection, unless I want to believe in a God who would be so crazy as to identify himself with the crucified Jesus. God identifies with Jesus’ choice to risk being crucified, his refusal to make the compromises that could have saved him from it. Paul speaks of the foolishness and weakness of God shown on the cross. The resurrection, far from supporting the notion of a triumphalistic deity of power, mysteriously confirms how deeply hidden and baffling the Creator truly is, as he reveals that he is at one with the man who so willingly exposed himself with an open heart to the fate devised by political power and religious expediency to crush him.

Authentic Easter joy—the genuine pearl of great price—is unfeigned delight in my heart of hearts that a hidden God turns out to be so different from all the stuff, aggressive or sentimental, that gets fabricated about him. Centuries ago, a custom grew up of beginning Easter sermons with a joke, known as the risus paschalis. The subtlety of Easter joy is like getting a joke. It is impossible to explain the resurrection to someone who doesn’t get the foolishness of the cross. You either get it or you don’t. The real God has authenticated himself in an event only the poor in spirit can appreciate. Easter faith comes with a desire to be in on the secret, to get the joke.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 12, 2007 11:52 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Practicing Resurrection

April 13

Wendell Berry, the great environmentalist poet-theologian, has written a piece about somebody he calls a “mad farmer” who goes around shouting, “Practice resurrection!” “Practice resurrection.” That’s not bad advice. It’s certainly what Thomas does—and maybe, just maybe, the other disciples are rehearsing the story and replaying the experience, too. Most of us don’t “get it” the very first time. Most of us spend our lives learning what the reality of resurrection looks like, feels like, and tastes like—because it keeps on happening in new ways every day of our lives.

How do we practice resurrection?

Maybe the most important skill is learning to live in the now, looking toward the future, rather than living in the past. That doesn’t mean we forget about what’s come before, though we are meant to honor what’s good about it, and grieve what is gone if we need to. It also means that we live in hope for the new thing God is doing.

Resurrection means that creation isn’t over and done with. And if we’re made in the image of God, then we’ve got creation work to do. What’s coming may not look exactly like what we knew before, but God promises that it will be abundant and life-giving.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 13, 2007 1:56 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Living in expectation

April 14

Practicing resurrection means living in openness. It’s a vulnerable attitude. Jesus invites Thomas to examine his wounds—come and see the ugliest thing you can imagine. God has made it a source of beauty and healing. It means that our fears, our inadequacies, the wretched parts of ourselves, can be the vehicle for new and more abundant life—if we’re willing to confront them honestly and openly. In the baptismal covenant, it’s the second promise we make—to repent and return to the Lord. But it’s not just our wrongdoing—the weak and untried parts of ourselves can be the stuff of new life, too. That’s what exercise is all about—stressing, trying the weak parts of our bodies so that they become stronger. Our psyches and souls can find new strength too if we’re willing to journey within and confront some of that darkness or fear or mystery.

Practice resurrection. Live in open expectation of the new thing God is doing at all times and in all places. It means opening ourselves to that new thing, recognizing that the change it brings will cause some distress. But there is always more abundant life on the other side of the pain and grief that comes with change and growth.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 14, 2007 1:57 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

"That Which Waited There"

April 16

I am very sure that so long as we are caught in time, we will never be able to see heaven, which I believe is entirely and absolutely seeable. But having arrived at that statement (which, alas, I have discovered is the only definitive one I can actually make at this juncture), I immediately run up against the very core of the problem for me: namely, that I have had what is now euphemistically referred to as a near-death experience. In 1955 when I was having it, there were no easy terms for such, no almost jocular NDE abbreviations to lessen the outréness of the experience.

The whole thing was fairly straightforward, really. I was threatening to miscarry our first child; and the drug I was given, while hardly experimental, was nonetheless new and, as it turns out, highly toxic to some women. Six or seven of us died, in fact. I didn’t . . . Correction: I did, but I came back.

The second most vivid memory of my life is that of sitting, hunched up like a gargoyle, in the upper corner of my hospital room, watching Sam and the nurse beat on my body, trying to restart my heart. The most vivid memory is when the corner opened up and let me out of the room into a tunnel, pleasantly grassed even on its curved surfaces. Walking through it, I could see the light coming from the other end and I could know myself drawn without effort toward That Which Waited There.

I never left the tunnel, though I stood at the edging place where it ceased and the translucent goldenness began. We talked there, just on the brink of the entering, I saying I needed to go back, that there were children I wanted to have before I came . . . and the What Is saying, “Go,” and my soul breaking within me that I was leaving a greater love for a lesser one, but knowing that I must go . . . and knowing as well that I would return and that the What Is and I were, and would be, when I do return.

So it is—and for over fifty years has been—that I cannot, in any discussion of heaven, get beyond the verge where the end of the tunnel met the That Which Waits There. Neither my mind nor my necessity are ever sufficient to push beyond that place.

From “Sweet Reluctance” by Phyllis Tickle, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 16, 2007 12:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The actuality of the thing

April 17

I do not know—none of us does—what it must have been like to have a dead man materialize through the wall of a meeting room and lay out for public viewing the holes in his hands where his executioners had nailed him to a cross or the rip in his belly where they stabbed him open to hasten his demise. Whatever they felt or experienced, those witnesses to the unspeakable, they knew. They knew what they had seen, and it was enough to persuade them at all costs of the actuality of the thing . . . which is by way of saying that I, too, know what I saw and am persuaded, at all costs, by the actuality of the thing.

I know no more to say or write; but the exercise of having tried has not been entirely wasted. At least I can admit now that I shall never be able to speak of the what-I-don’t-know that lies beyond the what-I-do-know. There is relief in that, as well as comfort and a certain inexpressible pleasure in realizing that someday soon I shall be about the business of greeting again that which I once left with such sweet reluctance.

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 17, 2007 12:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

"Do not cling"

In the garden Christ gently but deliberately says to Mary Magdalene, “Noli me tangere.” “Do not touch” is a misleading translation that deprives us of the significance of what is happening here. “Do not cling” is a more accurate rendering of the Greek, for surely we do need to touch, to touch the hem of the garment, to touch the wounds and feel them. But we must not cling, for that carries the danger of becoming dependent, of clutching or holding on in the wrong way. I love the statue of the Walking Madonna by Elisabeth Frink in the cathedral close at Salisbury. Here is this young woman who strides out boldly into the future, her one hand strong and determined, while the other is vulnerable. She knows that she has seen the Lord, the risen Christ; she has heard the resurrection message and now she is ready to cross the threshold and engage whatever lies before her. What gives her the strength to move forward with today: such assurance, calling out that loving welcome, that Deo Gratias, to a future that is unsure, unknown?

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 18, 2007 1:29 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Abyss of wonders

The cross is the abyss of wonders, the centre of desires, the school of virtues, the house of wisdom, the throne of love, the theatre of joys, and the place of sorrows; it is the root of happiness, and the gate of heaven.

Of all things in heaven and earth it is the most peculiar. It is the most exalted of all objects. It is an ensign lifted up for all nations, to it shall the gentiles seek. His rest shall be glorious: the dispersed of Judah shall be gathered together to it, from the four corners of the earth. If love be the weight of the soul, and its object the centre, all eyes and hearts may convert and turn unto this object, cleave unto this centre, and by it enter into rest. There we may see God’s goodness, wisdom and power: yea his mercy and anger displayed. There we may see man’s sin and infinite value, his hope and fear, his misery and happiness. There we might see the Rock of Ages, and the joys of heaven. There we may see a man loving all the world, and a God dying for mankind.

From Centuries by Thomas Traherne (Faith Press, 1960).

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 19, 2007 12:05 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Nevertheless

I can explain why heaven makes no sense, why the most logical response to the human condition is despair, why the future that lies ahead of us is only chaotic and dark, why we—as individuals, as a species, as a planet—in fact have no future at all. I can explain why belief in heaven as afterlife or belief in heaven on earth is equally impossible, equally absurd. But eventually, and often when I least expect it, something in me rises up and declares: Nevertheless. Is it the Risen Christ? That’s what I would say. For when it comes, so does heaven—a glimpse of it, anyway, a chink in the wall, an echo in the ear. And hope becomes possible again, a hope as lovely and startling as the sight of Earth rising above the barren landscape of the moon.

From “When Heaven Happens” by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 20, 2007 12:06 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Saint Anselm's Day

See, Christian soul, here is the strength of your salvation, here is the cause of your freedom, here is the price of your redemption. You were a bond-slave and by this man you are free. By him you are brought back from exile, lost, you are restored, dead, you are raised. Chew this, bite it, suck it, let your heart swallow it, when your mouth receives the body and blood of your redeemer. Make it in this life your daily bread, your food, your way-bread, for through this and not otherwise than through this will you remain in Christ and Christ in you, and your joy will be full.

Consider, O my soul, and hear, all that is within me, how much my whole being owes to him! Lord, because you have made me, I owe you the whole of my love; because you have redeemed me, I owe you the whole of myself; because you have promised so much, I owe you all my being.

From “Meditation on Human Redemption” by Anselm of Canterbury, in The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm, translated by Benedicta Ward (Penguin, 1973).

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 21, 2007 12:07 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Transfiguring energy

In the common way of looking at things heaven is a place you go after you die (if you’ve been good). And I suppose that overall this shorthand is true: when the physical body has dissolved, there is less to obscure what had really been there all along anyway.

But it is possible to encounter heaven earlier, while still in physical flesh, and to live in it—and from it—here and now. In fact, more than a few people think that’s exactly what Jesus meant by his term the kingdom of heaven: it’s this world seen through the eyes and heart of divine love. Or perhaps better, it’s the flood of transfiguring energy set loose in this world once the eyes of heaven have awakened.

So why not go for it now? For sure, this question stumped Jesus; you could even say it comprised the tragic miscalculation of his life. Why, when this angelically tinged “other” is as simple as opening the eyes of the heart here and now, why wouldn’t people immediately open their eyes and give thanks? Why does the good news tend to receive a rain check?
But the fact is, this other way of seeing requires a high level of spiritual attunement—to use the current buzzword, presence—far more so than is accustomed or perhaps comfortable in this life. “Those who are given liberty by Him to act freely are nailed on the earth; and those who are free to act as they choose on the earth will be nailed in the heavens,” an old Sufi proverb goes. One becomes a fastidious servant of the Now, not of daydreams and future options, and certainly not of one’s personal preferences and agendas. It’s a strange, Himalayan environment of the heart that seems out of tempo with most of what we usually call “getting the most out of life.” And so heaven can wait, as the old saying goes. It’s easier to get caught up in the enchantments and diversions of this existence. Drink it in for all it’s worth, then allow heaven to be “next,” once the veil has melted on its own.

From “Hobbling (Walking, Flapping) North” by Cynthia Bourgeault, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Image (detail) "I Will be What I Will Be" by Margaret McGee

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 23, 2007 12:09 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In the victim's company

What I have said so far suggests a provisional definition of the primary stage in preaching the resurrection as an invitation to recognize one’s victim as one’s hope. The crucified is God’s chosen: it is with the victim, the condemned, that God identifies, and it is in the company of the victim, so to speak, that God is to be found, and nowhere else. And this is not simply to say, in the fashionable phrase, that God makes his own the cause of the poor and despised. We are not talking of ‘the’ poor and despised, ‘the’ victim in the abstract. The preaching of the resurrection is not addressed to an abstract audience: the victim involved is the victim of the hearers. We are, insistently and relentlessly, in Jerusalem, confronted therefore with a victim who is our victim. When we make victims, when we embark on condemnation, exclusion, violence, the diminution or oppression of anyone, when we set ourselves up as judges, we are exposed to judgment, and we turn away from salvation. To hear the good news of salvation, to be converted, is to turn back to the condemned and rejected, acknowledging that there is hope nowhere else.

From Resurrection by Rowan Williams (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1982).

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 24, 2007 12:12 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

St. Mark's Day

Evangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word, and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance and leap for joy. This Evangelion or gospel (that is to say, such joyful tidings) is called the New Testament; because that as a man, when he shall die, appointeth his goods to be dealt and distributed after his death among them which he nameth to be his heirs; even so Christ before his death commanded and appointed that such Evangelion, gospel, or tidings should be declared throughout all the world, and therewith to give unto all that repent, and believe, all his goods: that is to say, his life, wherewith he swallowed and devoured up death; his righteousness, wherewith he banished sin; his salvation, wherewith he overcame eternal damnation. Now can the wretched man hear no more joyous a thing, than such glad and comfortable tidings of Christ; so that he cannot but be glad, and laugh from the low bottom of his heart, if he believe that the tidings are true.

From “A Pathway into Holy Scripture” by William Tyndale, in The Work of William Tyndale, edited by G. E. Duffield (Sutton Courtenay Press, 1964).

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 25, 2007 12:14 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Last hours

We spent the afternoon like that, the three of us. Vincent and I changed places at [my mother’s] bedside. We sponged her mouth. I watched her eyes. I held her hand. Her face was smooth. Her eyes were like the eyes of a child or a delicate bird. A creature. Curious, delighted. She was, we were, there is no other word for it, changed.

How is it that things fall away? The hours of that afternoon were like a wave set off by a stone dropping into a pool of water; the ripples reverberated backward through her life. The past is not what we think it is. It is not written in stone after all, but can be washed over and through by the present’s events.

I felt I understood a part of the resurrection. Jesus rode a wave backward into time and human history and redeemed events, that is, stole them back from chaos and destruction. He walked among the dead and woke them up with the power of the same thing that stood with us that afternoon. In the mind of God, there is no past or present and nothing ever dies.

That afternoon, whatever we had done together in our lives, or failed to do, the fragments of love in all three of us were gathered up so that they coalesced to the point of profound connection. We crossed over, my mother leading the way. It was as if a door had opened into heaven, allowing heaven in. In my Father’s house are many mansions. It matters that it was only a fraction of a long life, a few hours at the end of eighty-eight years, but it was, for then, and for now, enough.

From “Her Last Hours” by Nora Gallagher, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 26, 2007 12:16 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Conserving a vision

Of course the Church is conservative for it has so much to conserve. But let it conserve a vision of the world’s destiny and not the structures of the world’s past. Let the Church in remembering Christ remember that it is conserving the most uprooting, the most revolutionary force in all human history. For it was Christ who crossed every boundary, broke down every barrier. He crossed the boundaries of class by eating with the outcasts. He crossed the boundary of nations by pointing to a Samaritan as the agent of God’s will. He transgressed religious boundaries by claiming that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Everywhere he manifested his freedom and called others to theirs, calling them forth from family, national, and religious loyalty to the world at large. If ever there was a man who trusted his origins and had the courage to emerge from them, it was Christ.

From Credo by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster-John Knox Press, 2004).

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 27, 2007 12:18 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

To love as God loves

Love for God cannot be separated from love of neighbor. Jesus calls us to love God through our neighbor—by visiting prisoners, by hospitality to strangers, by actions that ostensibly give us no reward at the end of a long day’s work. Jesus seems idealistic at best. When we look around and see others prospering through violence or greed, most of us pay little attention to God’s love. How can we? After all, we live in a “real” world in which survival is paramount. Work with prisoners or those on death row may be typical of God’s kind of love, which gravitates toward generosity and gift, but not for our kind of love that is seeking to survive in a violent world. Jesus knows our dilemma, but he does not let us off the hook. He still requires us to channel God’s infinite generosity. Just as we cannot love God without loving our neighbor, we cannot worship in a church building without also ministering in a jail, hospital, or school.

God’s love always points toward the capacity to love outside of self-interest. When it came to heaven, Jesus was no realist—if by realism we mean self-interest. This was his genius. Perhaps the greatest lesson in this for us is to learn that we must prepare to love as God loves—through random acts of kindness. We prepare through our daily prayers. We prepare through the butterflies in our stomach when we make our first volunteer visit in a jail. This kind of preparation hones our skills of navigation as we make our way toward heaven—toward the real heaven, not just our own narcissistic version of heaven. We must practice heaven. In so doing, we catch glimpses of God’s idea of what’s real because we are increasing our attention span to see beyond the ordinary.

From “A Strange Route to Heaven” by Michael Battle, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 28, 2007 12:19 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

More than assent

Daily Reading, April 30

It is essential to remember that for a Christian “the word of the Cross” is nothing theoretical, but a stark and existential union with Christ in his death in order to share in his resurrection. To fully “hear” and “receive” the word of the Cross means much more than simple assent to the dogmatic propositions that Christ died for our sins. It means to be “nailed to the Cross with Christ,” so that the ego-self is no longer the principle of our deepest actions, which now proceed from Christ living in us: “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:19-20). To receive the word of the Cross means the acceptance of a complete self-emptying, a kenosis, in union with the self-emptying of Christ “obedient unto death” (Phil. 2:5-11). It is essential to true Christianity that this experience of the Cross and of self-emptying be central in the life of the Christian so that he may fully receive the Holy Spirit and know (again by experience) all the riches of God in and through Christ.

From Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Jim Naughton on April 30, 2007 12:05 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Freed from formula

Daily Reading, May 1

The Cross is completely baffling both to the Greeks with their philosophy and to the Jews with their well-interpreted Law. But when one has been freed from dependence on verbal formulas and conceptual structures, the Cross becomes a source of “power.” This power emanates from the “foolishness of God” and it also makes of us “foolish instruments.” On the other hand, he who can accept this paradoxical “foolishness” experiences in himself a secret and mysterious power, the power of Christ living in him as the ground of a totally new life.

From Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 1, 2007 12:08 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A re-creation of the world

Daily Reading, May 2

By becoming incarnate in Jesus, the Logos had enabled human beings to transcend themselves and, in a pregnant phrase of the New Testament, “to become partakers in the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). “The Logos of God has become human,” [Athanasius] would say, “so that you might learn from a human being how a human being may become divine.” The original creation in the image of God, in which true human greatness consisted, had been brought about through the Logos; that creation would now achieve not only restoration but consummation and perfection through the same Logos: his incarnation would achieve our deification. And the whole cosmos would have its proper share in that consummation; for “the establishment of the church is a re-creation of the world,” in which “the Logos has created a multitude of starts,” a new heaven and a new earth.

From Jesus Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan (Harper & Row, 1985).

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 2, 2007 12:11 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Wednesday Daily Office

Only One
who knows
the heart
can be kind
to the ungrateful
and wicked.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 2, 2007 9:28 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The place of tears

Daily Reading, May 3

It was Isaac of Nineveh who confirmed what I had supposed all this time: that the biblical phrase “the world to come” refers not to pie-in-the-sky by-and-by but to “the kingdom of heaven within you.”

Once you have reached the place of tears, then know that the mind has left the prison of this world and set its foot on the road towards the new world. Then it begins to breathe the wonderful air which is there; it begins to shed tears. For now the birth pangs of the spiritual infant grow strong, since grace, the common mother of all, makes haste to give birth mystically to the soul, the image of God, into the light of the world to come. . . . Then you will start to become aware of the transformation which the whole nature will receive in the renewal of all things, dimly and as though by hints.

Heaven is without beginning and without end. It’s when I’m not looking for heaven that heaven appears. It is by definition more than I can ask or imagine. It permeates all that I live, have lived, and will live, in weal and in woe. It suffuses the ordinary flow of our lives if only we will stop trying to cut it down to our size, to objectify it, to make it finitely less than it is.

From “Heaven Can’t Wait” by Maggie Ross, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 3, 2007 12:09 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Feast of St. Monica, mother of Augustine

Daily Reading, May 4

Not long before the day on which she was to leave this life—you knew which day it was to be, O Lord, though we did not—my mother and I were alone, leaning from a window which overlooked the garden in the courtyard of the house where we were staying at Ostia. We were talking alone together and our conversation was serene and joyful. In the presence of Truth, which is yourself, we were wondering what the eternal life of the saints would be like, that like which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart conceived. But we laid the lips of our hearts to the heavenly stream that flows from your fountain, the source of all life which is in you, so that as far as it was in our power to do so we might be sprinkled with its waters and in some sense reach an understanding of this great mystery.

As the flame of love burned stronger in us and raised us higher towards the eternal God, our thoughts ranged over the whole compass of material things in their various degrees, up to the heavens themselves, from which the sun and the moon and the stars shine down upon the earth. Higher still we climbed, thinking and speaking all the while in wonder at all that you have made. And while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it.

From the Confessions of Saint Augustine

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 4, 2007 12:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Inflamed

Daily Reading, May 5

I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have had no being at all. You called me; you cried aloud to me; you broke my barrier of deafness. You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me; you put my blindness to flight. You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet odour. I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am inflamed with love of your peace.

From the Confessions of Saint Augustine

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 5, 2007 12:25 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Saturday Daily Office

Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you keep me safe; you stretch forth your hand against the fury of my enemies; you right hand shall save me.
The LORD will make good his purpose for me;
O LORD, your love endures for ever;
do not abandon the works of your hands. Psalm 138:8-9 (BCP)

Songs of hope
fly against
the storms of despair.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 5, 2007 6:18 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

An Eastern heaven

Daily Reading, May 6

Christians inherit two basic views of heaven. The popular Western version tends to be of the static angels-and-harps variety. I prefer the Eastern version. It has more of the flavor of dynamic continuity. We move “from glory to glory” right now, not simply after we’re dead. In the Eastern tradition, human beings long for the infinite. We are not fixed entities, but beings-in-process, defined by an infinite longing which pulls the soul forward in an infinite progression. We live out the questions, and it might take longer than a lifetime. For Christians, the best metaphor for heaven is a banquet. Heaven is not a place you go to when you die. Heaven is present now, all around us, a code word for where God is—in the music, in the feast.

So the question of heaven isn’t an intellectual puzzle which in principle has an answer. If there is life after death it begins now. At the moment, I find myself occupied by the question “Is there life after birth?” So, whatever heaven is, it isn’t about “the hereafter.” The danger of imagining heaven as a destination or a final resting place is that we miss the glory of the present. To quote the wise theologian N. T. Wright, if heaven is going some place it’s “going to be with God in the place where he has been all along.” It’s about presence or, better, Presence right now.

From “’I Tell You a Further Mystery’” by Alan Jones, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 6, 2007 12:24 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Indispensable emptiness

Daily Reading, May 7

My adventure into fullness of life (which I take to be the kingdom of heaven) involves reading, writing, and great conversation—preferably over a good meal. It is nourished by the arts, especially music. But there is a paradox here, one that the mystics might understand. What are virtues for the mystics are torments for many of us: alienation, loneliness, silence, solitude, interior emptiness, stripping bare, poverty, not-knowing, emptiness. The arts have, more often than not, given me an experience of being emptied. What we really need is often to be found in what we dread most—risk, not being in control, in the emptiness of the self. This doesn’t sound much like “heaven,” but how else can we make an inner space for living with ourselves and with each other? Cultivating gratitude helps us draw out the gold that is often hidden in the loneliness, the silence, the interior emptiness, the suffering, the poverty, and “the knowledge-that-knows-nothing.”

Emptiness, then, is indispensable to true enjoyment of the world because true enjoyment has nothing to do with possession. It is the kind of emptiness that encourages me to give myself away to others in love and service. Heaven isn’t a private possession, anymore than music, anymore than food.

Food is a delight. I love cookbooks and miss the times when the whole family would gather together to make bread. There was flour all over the kitchen and we loved to throw the dough around—especially the smooth oily dough of challah. There’s no pleasure quite like preparing and cooking a meal with the bounty of the earth. Where is the food for the soul? It is in the “useless” activities of music and play. We get a taste of heaven in the various ways in which we “waste” our time eating and drinking and delighting in one another.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 7, 2007 12:29 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

St. Julian of Norwich

Daily Reading, May 8

God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for He is nothing but goodness.
Our soul is one-ed to Him, who is unchangeable goodness,
and between God and our soul is neither anger nor forgiveness, as He sees it.
For our soul is so completely one-ed to God by His own goodness,
that there can be absolutely nothing at all separating God and soul.

From A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, edited and translated for devotional use by Father John-Julian, OJN (New York: Walker and Company, 1988).

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 8, 2007 12:32 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Mother bird

Daily Reading, May 9

The cell was a sacred space, a place in which a woman could be with herself and the divine Presence and listen. The cell was a place of divine encounter and of ongoing, daily experience of being immersed in God’s presence. Amma Syncletica’s counsel with regard to this uses a tenderly maternal metaphor—that of the mother bird hatching her young. Each woman in Syncletica’s community would have been formed by this teaching as it was repeated and handed down. The life of faith looks like a mother bird, sitting on her eggs. For all we know, that mother bird has moments when it seems like nothing is happening. There are moments when real boredom sets in and the temptation to leave the eggs and do something more interesting arises.

Amma Syncletica’s metaphor speaks directly to one of the dilemmas of the spiritual life—that of coming to terms with the plain old ordinariness of spiritual practice and the life of prayer, of the whole of life becoming prayer. Instead, we are encouraged not to sit, not to persevere, not to struggle with boredom. We are enticed by a variety of means to leave our “eggs” and simply move continually from one interest to another. The result is that we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to bring forth new life. The “eggs” die because they are not tended. We miss the deeper life of the Spirit because we are constantly moving from one interest to another rather than focusing on one thing.

From The Desert Mothers: Spiritual Practices from the Women of the Wilderness by Mary C. Earle. © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 9, 2007 12:33 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Wednesday Daily Office

One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, 'Let us go across to the other side of the lake.' So they put out, and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A windstorm swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. They went to him and woke him up, shouting, 'Master, Master, we are perishing!' And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. He said to them, 'Where is your faith?' They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, 'Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?' Luke 8:22-25 (nrsv)

Terror:
Fishermen
asking a carpenter
about storms at sea.
Did the storm cease
or did they remember
how to sail?

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 9, 2007 7:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

At home with Christ

Daily Reading, May 10

An African woman perceives and accepts Christ as a woman and as an African. The commitment that flows from this faith is commitment to full womanhood (humanity), to the survival of human communities, to the ‘birthing’, nurturing, and maintenance of life, and to loving relations and life that is motivated by love.

Having accepted Christ as refugee and guest of Africa, the woman seeks to make Christ at home and to order life in such a way as to enable the whole household to feel at home with Christ. The woman sees the whole space of Africa as a realm to be ordered, as a place where Christ is truly ‘tabernacled’. Fears are not swept under the beds and mats but are brought out to be dealt with by the presence of the Christ. Christ becomes truly friend and companion, liberating women from assumptions of patriarchal societies, and honouring, accepting, and sanctifying the single life as well as the married life, parenthood as well as the absence of progeny. The Christ of the women of Africa upholds not only motherhood, but all who, like Jesus of Nazareth, perform ‘mothering’ roles of bringing out the best in all around them. This is the Christ, high priest, advocate, and just judge in whose kingdom we pray to be.

From “The Christ for African Women” by Elizabeth Arnoah and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, in With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology, edited by Virginia Fabella and Mercy Amba Oduyoye (Orbis Books, 1988).

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 10, 2007 12:36 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Thin places

Daily Reading, May 11

Can we say it is God’s home? I prefer to perceive it “through a glass darkly” as what I might call God’s holiest of holies. What is my connection, if any, to heaven? I’ve seen glimpses of it only by eyes of faith. I’ve felt the presence—never in a merely logical way—in thin places or passages that I’ve encountered on occasion between the visible world and—what? Greater reality? God’s love and power? Awareness of the holy?

Ten days before her ninety-ninth birthday, my mother lay dying. I was with her in the convalescent hospital where she’d resided for the past four-plus years. Beatrice appeared to be unconscious. I held her limp hand in mine.

Suddenly, a change occurred. Her hand gripped mine with fierce strength. Now her eyes opened, staring directly into mine with a determination, even a passion, that was startling. I grasped her hand, held her gaze. Then, after a moment, her eyes closed. Shortly her grip wavered and let go.

I knew Beatrice had left and gone to heaven. I could almost follow her journey into what seemed to be light. Her departure was not passive, nor had her life been. In Beatrice there burned an intensity. Born in 1898, she had always lived in what used to be referred to as “a man’s world.” While accepting its Spartan rules, she kept inviolate a part of her life that was a “secret garden.” So, as a single mom who had to work, she did so during her days. But, in her private time, she painted and sketched and gardened. Fame did not touch her; she had no interest in it. Her honesty could be almost shocking in its directness. She remained open to life, clearly honoring the moment at hand.

Being with Mother on the occasion—at the very moment—of her journey’s end here, and the start of her journey to heaven, was a deeply touching revelation of God’s mercy, healing, and treasured gift of this thin place close to heaven.

From “Moments in Thin Places” by Malcolm Boyd, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 11, 2007 12:04 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mother love

Daily Reading, May 12

Some of our mothers taught us what it was like to be loved. Some others of us grew up with mothers who couldn’t really teach us much about love, because they’d never really learned themselves. We tend to idealize mothers as the perfect dispensers of love.

Sometimes mothers do their best work by getting out of the way, or by leaving. After all, children need that to grow up, too. After all, even Jesus gets out of the way so we can try his way for ourselves.

When Jesus is getting ready to leave his disciples, he begins to tell them good-bye. It’s not so different from the speech a mother on her deathbed might give the kids: “Now children, I won’t be with you much longer. You are going to keep looking for me. . . but you can’t come where I’m going. I’m giving you some new instructions: love each other, just the way I’ve loved you. Everybody will know whose family you come from if you love each other.”

The kids get a remarkable challenge—now it’s time to put to work everything they’ve been taught. Love one another, as I have loved you.

What does love look like? Getting out of the way, so another person can try. Blood, sweat, and tears. Feeding one another. Above all, love liberates, love sets us free to be more than we thought possible. Love one another as I have loved you. Befriend the stranger. Engage your enemy in love. Challenge the unlovable. Go hunting for the unloved.

On View: Beggarwoman, Photograph by Diane Walker.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 12, 2007 12:02 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Garden of hope

Daily Reading, May 14

Gardening within a monastery is both a task and an art, and it’s something we only gradually begin to fathom in the early years of our monastic life. The more experienced gardener monks teach us to start slowly. They instruct us how to improve our soil with compost and other amendments, knowing well that this will have a profound effect on the variety of plants we grow. I learned early, as well, to let Mother Nature be our guide. Her signals often indicate the propitious time for many garden chores. For instance, when the crocus is in bloom, we begin cleaning up the winter’s debris. When the forsythia begins to flower, we prune the roses, evergreens, and the plants that have been damaged by the winter. When the soil warms up, we begin to divide and transplant the perennials.

Spring gardening nurtures hope in the monk, then fulfills the promise of new life when all creation is renewed by the power of Christ’s Resurrection.

From A Monastic Year by Brother Victor Antoine, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 14, 2007 12:04 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Heaven in the making

Daily Reading, May 16

“Hell is other people,” according to a character in Sartre’s play No Exit, and it is difficult to imagine a more aggressive contradiction of the Christian vision. The doctrine of the communion of saints affirms that heaven is other people, and the hope of the resurrection of the body affirms that those other people are no wraiths and abstractions but fully alive. When most people talk of heaven, they tend to speak of reunion with certain loved ones and imagine encounters with a chosen few they want to meet. But those great artworks of the resurrection that stir me do not lie—Stanley Spencer’s resurrection paintings contain over seven hundred lovingly delineated figures. The resurrection of the body brings together everyone, including our unloved ones, the strangers. Heaven is the new embodiment of all, and our encounters will be with all, stranger and former enemy, as surely as our neighbor and kin. Our lives, transfigured within the memory of God and remembered by us in a completely new way in all their depths and meaning, will be gifts for sharing with one another. It will take eternity to exchange with one another—all of us—the meaning and fullness of our lives.

Meanwhile, heaven is in the making in this world, and I am one of its makers. My hopes mean little unless they lift the routine of today. So I want to live with the thought that my life is not only a gift now for other people, but that it will be in eternity. In my odd and short life, I take up into myself a certain time, particular relationships, just these parts of creation. They will rise in God with me. So loving what I see, and what I do, and those I meet, helps to get us all ready for surprise.

From “Bodies, Rising” by Martin L. Smith, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 16, 2007 12:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Ecstatic union

Daily Reading, May 18

Most people I know seem to think of heaven as compensatory. Whatever is missing here will be present there. Those who have endured war will know peace. Those who have suffered want will have plenty. Those who have been broken will be made whole. In this sense, heaven is essential both for divine justice and compassion, for heaven is where God’s purpose will be fulfilled, and all people shall see it together. This is more or less what scripture promises, and what my Episcopal tradition teaches as well, yet it does not exhaust my curiosity about what comes next.

That something comes next seems likely to me, although I would gladly admit that I have no certainty about what it is. People I trust speak of seeing through the veil to the life beyond death. I have sat with dying people often enough to watch them become translucent toward the end. Plus, my sense of the communion of the saints is so strong that I have never in my life been lonely. Even when I cannot hear them speaking any language I understand, the very air is thick with their presence. This could be my imagination. What if God’s imagination is where heaven exists?

I suppose my greatest curiosity about the afterlife is whether I will continue to be me. I want to continue being me, of course. I want not only to see all of those creatures that I have rescued through the years; I also want to see the loved ones whom I have lost. I want to lay my head on Grandma Lucy’s lap again. I want to shell field peas with Fannie Belle and listen to Schubert with Earl. The problem with this scenario is that it turns heaven into my perfect version of earth, with a perfect me in the middle of it. As appealing as this is, it strikes me as an underutilization of God’s gifts.

Since ecstatic union with God is my best idea of heaven, I think I have to be ready to let myself go—literally, I mean. I think I have to entertain the possibility that joining God in heaven may mean surrendering everything I hold dear on earth, including my me-ness, in order to be made entirely new. In Christian terms, I think I really do have to die, and be willing to leave the rest to God.

From “Leaving Myself Behind” by Barbara Brown Taylor, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 18, 2007 3:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Transparency

Daily Reading, May 19

One enduring sense I have is that everything will be revealed in the hereafter. In the words of the old Anglican collect for purity, heaven exists in the presence of the God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” I think of this when I say something disloyal about someone who is not present, or when I try to hide the truth about myself from people whose illusions flatter me. If all of this will be perfectly transparent by-and-by, why not prepare for that by practicing transparency now?

Of course I also harbor the hope that if I have managed to do or be any good for God, that will be transparent too. I am embarrassed to admit that, but as someone who has spent my whole life confessing my sins, the prospect of being allowed to discover what I might have done right in this world sounds like heaven to me.

If it is true that most of us give what we want to get, then in the end my highest hope for heaven is simply to be rescued when my time comes—plucked from the roadside where I have fallen, struck dumb by all there is to love and grieve in this world—and gathered into God’s own safety, whatever that turns out to mean. I am willing to forego the details, as long as I know whose lap I am in.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 19, 2007 3:29 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

Threshold moments

Daily Reading, May 21

There is a traditional saying of ancient wisdom: “A threshold is a sacred thing.” When I visited Japan I experienced the role of the threshold in a very simple daily experience. Before entering the house, the Japanese stand on the lintel in order to remove shoes worn outside in the street. Upon entering the house, they put on slippers placed inside the door. This forces a very deliberate and conscious way of standing still, even if for only a moment, in order to show respect for the difference between two spaces, the outer and the inner; the preparation for the encounter with another person, another household.

This is very similar to the traditional monastic practice of statio, which also pays homage to the threshold moment, and shows reverence for the handling of space and time. The monk or nun enters the church for the saying of the daily offices, but always leaves him- or herself time to stand, to wait, to let go of all the demands of whatever the previous activity had been, with all its concurrent anxieties and expectations. That stillness permits each one to enter into that space kept empty in the heart for the Word of God. By rushing, whether through a sense of duty or obligation, or to save a few extra moments for the task at hand, they may gain something in terms of daily work. What is lost, however, is the attention, the awareness of the crossing over into the time and the place for opus Dei, the work of God.

From To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border by Esther de Waal. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

On View: detail from Pentecost Installation at Trinity Episcopal Church, Bloomington, Indiana. Photograph by Susan Kinzer.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 21, 2007 3:29 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Monday Daily Office

As they were going along the road, someone said to [Jesus], "I will follow you wherever you go." 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." To another [Jesus] said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." Luke 9:57-62

Digging holes of excuses
instead of plowing
Making nests of regrets
instead of flying
Will not plant and grow
holiness of life
the kindom of God.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 21, 2007 6:04 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Border country

Daily Reading, May 22

In his book Living on the Border of the Holy, a title that is itself significant, William Countryman writes of that border country that we all carry within us. He describes it as a kind of fault line that runs right down the middle of our lives. We can of course ignore it but it does not go away. We all live with it and we all have our unique experience of it, for it is part of who we are as human beings. It connects the surface or the ordinary reality with its deeper roots; indeed, he would actually claim that the border country is the realm in which human existence finds its meaning:

This border country is a place of intense vitality. It does not so much draw us away from the everyday world as it plunges us deeper into a reality of which the everyday world is like the surface. . . . To live there for a while is like having veils pulled away. In the long run we find that the border country is in fact the place we have always lived, but it is seen in a new and clearer light. Stay at the border, in active conversation with the holy and the everyday.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 22, 2007 3:03 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Tuesday Daily Office

Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you.' But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, 'Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.' I tell you, on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.
Luke 10:8-12 (nrsv)

The sandbox
has room for all
or none.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 22, 2007 7:41 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The owl of wisdom

Daily Reading, May 23

Recently when a nun in her mid-nineties sent me a note on my birthday, she quoted a line of Hegel: “The owl of wisdom flies in twilight,” and then said, “I like to think that as we get older we live in two twilights; the evening twilight of letting-go and the dawn of looking forward. In both, Christ is our Light.” This makes me think of “a kind of double vision in which we see both the light and the dark together and both sustain us,” words actually taken from a book significantly entitled Let Evening Come: Reflections on Aging.

Here is the giving up of the solace of certainty, for it means living with both/and. It is enjoying juxtaposition. It is embracing ambiguity. And if I recognize this poignant mix in my own inner landscape, ought I not let it shape my approach to the world around?

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 23, 2007 3:43 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (3)

The partial truth

Daily Reading, May 24

Whatever name we may choose—the time between, the threshold, the pause—it is by naming it that we honor it and thereby honor change, movement, difference. When a book recently appeared in England written by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, it was significantly given the title The Dignity of Difference. In it Sacks wrote:

Truth on earth is not, nor can it aspire to be, the whole truth. . . . God is greater than religion. . . . Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

The first step in listening, learning, and changing is to see that different is not dangerous; the second is to be happy and willing to live with uncertainty; the third is to rejoice in ambiguity and to embrace it. It all means giving up the comfort of certainty and realizing that uncertainty can actually be good.

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 24, 2007 3:51 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Thursday Daily Office

Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."
Luke 10:30-37 (nrsv)

In the ditch
of my life
I watch.
You move
to the other side
offended by
my blood and tears.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 24, 2007 6:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Bede

Daily Reading, May 25 • The Venerable Bede

Bede’s industry and scholarship are generally acknowledged, but his most significant achievement lies in his inspired ability to select and integrate the vast mass of facts and traditions that he gathered into a single framework. He doubtless rejected much material as unreliable or irrelevant, but all that he retained he welded together into a coherent and eminently readable unity. Even a modern historian, with the advantage of greatly superior facilities and assisted by the researches of many generations of experts, faces a formidable task when compiling a history covering several centuries. And when we consider Bede’s limited facilities and resources, it is clear that his achievement is unique. For although Bede’s monastery at Jarrow possessed a library, it would seem insignificant by modern standards, and while it contained theological works of the Greek and Latin Fathers, there was little material useful for Bede’s purpose. Furthermore, in addition to the slowness and uncertainty of communications, the physical conditions under which the writers of that day had to work were extremely inconvenient and austere during the long northern winters. It is noteworthy that despite the many difficulties under which it was written, Bede’s History contains relatively few errors, and modern research has confirmed the accuracy of most of his statements.

From the Introduction to the Penguin edition of Bede’s A History of the English Church and People (Penguin Classics, 1968).

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 25, 2007 3:44 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Friday Daily Office

Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet. Ezekiel 34:18-19 (nrsv)

Closets fill
with more
than can be
worn in a year
while many
shiver with lack.
Food piles
in storage
until it rots
while bellies
stretch with hunger.
Houses multiply
across the landscape
while people live
on the streets.

On View: Burning Bush by Jan Neal, as seen in Visual Preludes 2006 at Episcopal Church and Visual Arts

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 25, 2007 6:55 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Augustine
of Canterbury

Daily Reading, May 26 • Augustine of Canterbury

Augustine, Bishop of the Church of Canterbury, sought advice on certain problems. The Pope answered his enquiries without delay, and I have thought it proper to record these replies in my history. . . .

The second question of Augustine: Since we hold the same Faith, why do customs vary in different Churches? Why, for instance, does the method of saying Mass differ in the holy Roman Church and in the Churches of Gaul?

Pope Gregory’s reply: My brother, you are familiar with the usage of the Roman Church, in which you were brought up. But if you have found customs, whether in the Church of Rome or of Gaul or any other that may be more acceptable to God, I wish you to make a careful selection of them, and teach the Church of the English, which is still young in the Faith, whatever you have been able to learn with profit from the various Churches. For things should not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Therefore select from each of the Churches whatever things are devout, religious, and right; and when you have bound them, as it were, into a Sheaf, let the minds of the English grow accustomed to it.

From Bede’s A History of the English Church and People (Penguin Classics, 1968).

Posted by Jim Naughton on May 26, 2007 3:44 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Pentecost

Daily Reading for May 27 • Pentecost

Being the living Christ today means being filled with the same Spirit that filled Jesus. Jesus and his Father are breathing the same breath, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the intimate communion that makes Jesus and his Father one. Jesus says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10) and “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). It is this unity that Jesus wants to give us. That is the gift of his Holy Spirit.

Living a spiritual life, therefore, means living in the same communion with the Father as Jesus did, and thus making God present in the world.

From Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith by Henri J. M. Nouwen (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Memorial Day

Daily Reading for May 28

There used to be parades in every town at this time of year in honor of those who died in the defense of our country. Old guys in uniforms they wore as young men marched along Main Street with the high school band and last year’s homecoming queen, and every fire engine the town had crawled through town at the end, blowing its siren. People along the route clapped and cheered. Some of them waved little American flags.

Some towns still have a Memorial Day parade, giving in to the odd human desire for a ceremonial walk to mark important times and feelings. Parades are pretty universal. We have them when people get married and when they die. We have them when people graduate, and years later we still choke up when we hear “Pomp and Circumstance.” We have them in churches, when people bow as the cross passes before them. We have them in synagogues, too, parades in which people dance with the sacred scrolls of the law.

Special walking happens in enough different places, and for enough different reasons, that it seems safe to say that it’s something human beings need to do. People need to have parades. You don’t necessarily need to be in the parade. But you probably need to see one from time to time. It gives you a place to remember. Unless there’s a parade, some kind of special occasion that demands our attention, we’ll just go on being busy. And soon we’ll forget that we owe a lot to those who have gone before.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A Prayer Book for All

Daily Reading for May 29 • The First Book of Common Prayer (1549)

The 1549 Book of Common Prayer was as much the child of worship in the preceding centuries as it was a product of the Reformation. But there is an essential difference. Whereas the 1549 was intended to establish this new, universal relationship between every worshipper and the single, authoritative service book for the whole nation, the preceding era was different altogether. A number of different books were in use for different groups of people and different occasions. Each one started its life long before the invention of printing. In that sense, the Book of Common Prayer, provisional as it came to be, was also the child of the printing press, and its effects and legacy would have been impossible in other circumstances.

What were the original motivations behind the production of such a book? These were partly doctrinal – to embody a liturgy that put Reformation teaching into praying words – and partly social – to signal and spread the use of the vernacular. Above all they were liturgical, bringing together the main services of the (now reformed) Church of England under one cover and placing them in direct relationship not only with the clergy who presided at them, but the laity as well – few could read, but all could listen to and understand the English text. Even though not everyone could afford to pay for a copy (3s.4d. was the price fixed by law), the notion of having the same book in the hands of potentially anyone attending a service was a novel idea, reinforced by the new technology of printing and the new (but also very ancient) conception of the church as the baptized people of God.

From “Worship by the Book” by Kenneth Stevenson, in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, edited by Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (Oxford, 2006).

On View: Transfiguration: Dwellings by Susan Tilt, as seen in Image and Likeness at Episcopal Church and Visual Arts

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 29, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Following the Work of Love

Daily Reading for May 30

The gift of the Paraclete is one of the most remarkable of all the promises in sacred scripture. Through the Holy Spirit God makes it possible for each of us to become one with him through love. This is no mere metaphor, but something quite real and quite palpable. By looking into the deeper parts of ourselves and by seeing love’s work there, each of us may glimpse God’s active, transformative presence. God already dwells within us, and by waking up to this reality we become one with him. Consequently, the chief way of finding a clear path through the desert is to follow the work of love within oneself. Whatever damps down this holy wonder is a cul-de-sac, and whatever fosters it points to our final destination. It is in this way that the Holy Spirit teaches everything.

From From Image to Likeness: The Christian Journey into God by William A. Simpson (Continuum, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 30, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Imagining a
New Creation

Daily Reading for May 31 • The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

From the beginning, Christians have known that they were called upon to do the impossible. But when we look at Scripture and at the history of the Christian community, we can see a pattern in the way former impossibilities became subsequent realizations. The dynamics of the prophetic are in the creative imagination. A fundamental task of Christian spirituality is imagination. It is the task of breaking the process of interpretation wide open to glimpse entirely new and different possibilities of human life and relationships.

Imagination is exercised in influential ways through literature, through the visual and performing arts, through music, but also through human relationships, social structures, technology and science. Christian spirituality is related to all of these in two ways: it should inform them and it should be informed by them. Christians steeped in the Scriptures and deeply influenced by prayer and by the imperatives of charity should pursue the arts as a vocation, should engage in political process and policy, and should devote themselves to technological invention and scientific research. They need only be fully what they are and take the field seriously for what it is, and the redemption of the society through the expanding imagination will happen because the channels for redemptive grace run through us if we all them to be open.

From Christian Women in a Troubled World by Monika K. Hellwig (Paulist Press, 1985).

On View: Mary and Elizabeth by Margaret Adams Parker (Woodcut, 2004, 9" x 7") St. Mary’s Episcopal Church - Arlington, VA, as seen in Visual Preludes 2006 at Episcopal Church and Visual Arts

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 31, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

Thursday Daily Office

Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; *
do not be jealous of those who do wrong.
For they shall soon wither like the grass, *
and like the green grass fade away.
Put your trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and feed on its riches. Psalm 37:1-3

Abide in goodness
Not in what others
are doing
or not doing.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on May 31, 2007 6:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Peace Amid Persecution

Daily Reading for June 1 • Justin, Martyr at Rome, c. 167

It has been said that the lives of the early Christians consisted of “persecution above ground and prayer below ground.” Beneath Rome are the excavations which we call the catacombs, which were at once temples and tombs. Both pagans and Christians buried their dead in these catacombs. When the Christian graves have been opened, the skeletons tell their own terrible tale. But despite the awful story of persecution that we may read here, the inscriptions breathe forth peace and joy and triumph. Here are a few:

“Here lies Marcia, put to rest in a dream of peace.”
“Lawrence to his sweetest son, borne away of angels.”
“Victorious in peace and in Christ.”
“Being called away, he went in peace.”

Remember when reading these inscriptions the story the skeletons tell of persecution, of torture, and of fire. But the full force of these epitaphs is seen when we contrast them with the pagan epitaphs, such as:

“Live for the present hour, since we are sure of nothing else.”
“I lift my hands against the gods who took me away at the age of twenty though I had done no harm.”
“Once I was not. Now I am not. I know nothing about it, and it is no concern of mine.”

The most frequent Christian symbols on the walls of the catacombs are the good shepherd with the lamb on his shoulder, a ship under full sail, harps, anchors, crowns, vines, and above all the fish.

From Fox’s Book of Martyrs (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1926).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 1, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Friday Daily Office

But as for me, I have trusted in you, O LORD. *

I have said, "You are my God.

My times are in your hand; *

rescue me from the hand of my enemies,

and from those who persecute me.

Make your face to shine upon your servant, *

and in your loving-kindness save me." Psalm 31:14-16

The sand
of my life
runs through
my days
each grain
holding
a moment
in time-
holy, eternal.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on June 1, 2007 8:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Witnesses to
the Resurrection

Daily Reading for June 2 • The Martyrs of Lyons, 177

The word “martyr,” derived from the Greek martus or “witness,” was originally applied to the first apostles as witnesses of Jesus Christ’s life and, especially, of his resurrection. Slowly it came to be associated with those Christians who had suffered hardship for their faith and eventually was limited to those who suffered death. Martyrdom became the ultimate symbol of faithful Christian discipleship and thus of Christian holiness. More than this, the tranquil acceptance of martyrdom was an affirmation of the believer’s faith in Christ’s promise of victory over death and of resurrection for all who accepted the good news of God’s salvation.

Martyrdom literature underlined the virtue of sacrifice, imitation of Christ, and the cost of allegiance to Christ, and resistance to an unquestioning acceptance of surrounding cultural norms. The cult of martyrs was also the beginning of a more general devotion to saints in Christianity. Martyrs, because united with God, could now intercede for believers on earth. Festivals were instituted to mark their deaths (or “heavenly birthdays”) and this began a liturgical calendar of saints in the Christian Church.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 2, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Saturday Daily Office

"Weeping may spend the night,*

but joy comes in the morning." Psalm 30

Evening darkens,
grief knocks at my door
and moves in for the night.
With the dawn
I pack his bags
and busy myself in life.

from Streams of Mercy by Ann Fontaine

Posted by Ann Fontaine on June 2, 2007 7:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The Circle Dance

Daily Reading for June 3 • Trinity Sunday

When Nicodemus comes to see Jesus, he comes at night, which is probably the writer’s way of saying that he was in the dark or didn’t get it. Nicodemus is interested in Jesus and what he’s teaching, but he can’t get past his usual way of seeing things. “How can I be born again?” he asks. “I’m already a grown-up.” But as Jesus always seems to be doing, he tells Nicodemus that if he wants to meet God, he’s going to have to let go of those old understandings and see things in a new way. “The wind/spirit blows where it wants to,” he answers Nicodemus, “and you can hear it, but you’ll never know where it came from or where it’s going.” God is always doing more surprising things than we can imagine, right in our midst, if we’re willing and ready to notice.

That’s probably the biggest hint we get about the Trinity—God is always more, and more mysterious and surprising, than we can imagine. The early theologians talked about the three in one as a circle dance—God who creates, the human face of God, and the way God continues to come into our lives, unbidden and unexpected. We experience God in different ways because God is most fundamentally relational.

About fifteen years ago theologian and Roman Catholic nun Sandra M. Schneiders wrote a famous paper entitled, “God Is More Than Two Men and a Bird.” We may use the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Old man, young man, the dove or the bird. But it’s just language—it hints at, or points toward, the ways in which we experience God, but it can never fully describe God.

What Nicodemus learns is that if he thinks he knows who God is and what God is all about, then he’s several cards short of a full deck. He cannot predict what the fullness of God is like from just the few cards he has. He has to be willing to let go of his fixed and unchanging ideas. He has to be willing to engage the Spirit and be surprised. We discover God in wrestling with what the Spirit brings—the very wind blows us off our secure footing.

From “Finding God in the Differences” in A Wing and a Prayer by Katharine Jefferts Schori. © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

On View: The Father's Embrace by Ruth Councell as seen in Art and Faith - A Spiritual Journey at Episcopal Church and Visual Arts

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 3, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (3)

God the Trinity of Love

Daily Reading for June 4

God is Love, Lover, and Beloved.

An ancient Sufi mantra.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 4, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (3)

Our soul is a made trinity

Daily Reading for June 5

Not only are we made in his image and likeness, but the whole workings of our redemption, the way we walk in and towards God, is Trinitarian. Truth sees God, and wisdom beholds God, and of these two comes the third: that is a holy marvelous delight in God, which is love. For where truth and wisdom truly are, there too is love flowing from them both, and all is of God’s making; for he is the endless sovereign truth, endless sovereign wisdom, endless sovereign love—unmade.

And so was my understanding led by God to see in him and understand, to learn and to know of him that our soul is a made trinity, like to the unmade blessed Trinity, known and loved from without any beginning; and in the making it is oned to the Maker.

From the Revelation of Love by Julian of Norwich, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister, compiled by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 5, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Tuesday Daily Office

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, 'Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!' When he saw them, he said to them, 'Go and show yourselves to the priests.' And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, 'Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?' Then he said to him, 'Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.' Luke 17:11-19 (NRSV)

I would have thanked you but:

1.my dinner was burning

2. my kids were crying

3. my business needed me

4. I didn't have any note cards

5. I didn't want to embarrass you

6. I thought you knew

7. I was tired

8. I was so excited

9. I forgot.

From Streams of Mercy

Posted by Ann Fontaine on June 5, 2007 7:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Wednesday Daily Office

Though the cords of the wicked entangle me, *

I do not forget your law.

At midnight I will rise to give you thanks, *

because of your righteous judgments.

I am a companion of all who fear you *

and of those who keep your commandments.

The earth, O LORD, is full of your love; *

instruct me in your statutes. Psalm 119:61-64

Bound yet free
Love unties the knots

from Daily Office

Posted by Ann Fontaine on June 6, 2007 8:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

God the Trinity

Daily Reading for June 7

God made a covenant with us. The word covenant means “coming together.” God wants to come together with us. In many of the stories of the Hebrew Bible, we see that God appears as a God who defends us against our enemies, protects us against dangers, and guides us to freedom. God is God-for-us.

When Jesus comes a new dimension of the covenant is revealed. In Jesus, God is born, grows to maturity, lives, suffers, and dies as we do. God is God-with-us.

Finally, when Jesus leaves he promises the Holy Spirit. In the Holy Spirit, God reveals the full depth of the covenant. God wants to be as close to us as our breath. God wants to breathe in us, so that all we say, think, and do is completely inspired by God. God is God-within-us. Thus, God’s covenant reveals to us how much God loves us.

From Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith by Henri J. M. Nouwen (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 7, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Thursday Daily Office

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” ’ And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ Luke 18:1-8 (nrsv)

is the widow
The Judge
knocking on the door
of my unjust heart

From Streams of Mercy

Posted by Ann Fontaine on June 7, 2007 7:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

God in three persons

Daily Reading for June 8

The Fathers of the church saw an analogy of the image of God in three persons in the original nuclear family: Adam, Eve and Seth. In spite of all the problems and limitations of this analogy it allows some insights which may give us a better understanding of human relations. The human family as image of God shows us that God is the mystery of love—and a fruitful love—and that God’s Trinitarian being is not closed in on itself but is fulfilled by surrendering itself and giving itself freely out of the richness of its immanent being. Moreover, if the woman, man, and child are images of God on earth, then eternal paternity, maternity, and infancy are revealed to us in the Triune God. Femininity and infancy, then, have an assured place in the divine mystery.

From “Reflections on the Trinity” by Maria Clara Bingemer, in Through Her Eyes: Women’s Theology from Latin America, edited by Elsa Tamez (Orbis Books, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 8, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Columba of Iona

Daily Reading for June 9 • Columba, Abbot of Iona

Let me bless almighty God, whose power extends over sea and land, whose angels watch over all.
Let me study sacred books to calm my soul; I pray for peace, kneeling at heaven’s gates.
Let me do my daily work, gathering seaweed, catching fish, giving food to the poor.
Let me say my daily prayers, sometimes chanting, sometimes quiet, always thanking God.
Delightful it is to live on a peaceful isle, in a quiet cell, serving the King of kings.

A prayer of St. Columba, quoted in Holy Companions: Spiritual Practices from the Celtic Saints by Mary C. Earle and Sylvia Maddox. © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 9, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Turning to God

Daily Reading for June 10 • The Second Sunday after Pentecost

What motivates us to begin to follow the Christian path? Here we find that motives cluster around three major features of Christianity that attract many people: God’s power, goodness, and wisdom. Some people are motivated to turn to God because they seek help with various kinds of distress; others are drawn by the hope of nourishment for a hunger that nothing can satisfy; still others are attracted by the understanding of themselves and their world given by the Christian vision. Even in those cases in which one of the three motives is primary, the others may be significantly operative as well.

Throughout the ages, the most familiar motive that has led people to look to God for help is various kinds of distress. Supernatural power is sought in the face of external dangers such as diseases, storms and droughts, military invasions, and death. At a deeper level supernatural power is sought because of a destructive addiction, or as in the case of Augustine, inability to control one’s passions.

By and of itself relief from suffering does not establish that there is a God, but it is a powerful motive for belief in God. Supernatural relief has always been regarded as a reason to be committed and grateful to God. The account of the people of Israel is a witness to us—an invitation—to consider walking the path they have walked because, among other things, they have found guidance for life and relief in their distress.

From Spiritual Theology: The Theology of Yesterday for Spiritual Help Today by Diogenes Allen (Cowley Publications, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 10, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Blessed are the poor

Daily Reading for June 11 • St. Barnabas, Apostle

Is poverty abysmal or blessed? One of the most famous lines in the Gospels is Jesus’ beatitude: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). Through the ages, Christians have been puzzled by what Jesus meant.

Many people act as if death is the worst thing that can happen to one, and pain the most tragic, but they are not. More to be feared are lovelessness, apathy, self-centeredness, or dread. But in our society, so often it seems that what we fear most of all is impoverishment and its companions: exclusion, ridicule, stigma, coercion, or early death. Poverty in spirit may refer to the characteristics in which people—whether they are materially deprived or not—do not rely on material provisions for their security and sense of self. The spiritually poor may be more “totally at the disposition of the Lord.” Dealing with harsh conditions of impoverishment sometimes creates a kind of intimacy with one’s own limits that deepens the soul. It can even create joy. Kahlil Gibran’s phrase is often quoted because it is often found to resonate with people’s experience: “The deeper sorrow has carved into your being, the more joy you can contain.” So the poor in spirit are “blessed” or happy—and this blessedness has a stable core that neither ridicule nor penury can rock.

From What Can One Person Do? Faith to Heal a Broken World by Sabina Alkire and Edmund Newell. © 2005 by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 11, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (4)

Embracing poverty

Daily Reading for June 12

Voluntary and involuntary poverty are interconnected. On the one hand, true “liberation” is found by voluntarily renouncing the things of this world, by accepting real suffering and utter dependence on God. For instance, Christians have often chosen to give up their possessions and to embrace poverty as a path to spiritual intimacy. The voluntary poverty of monks, nuns, and other Christians remains a powerful reminder of the spiritual liberation this state of life can bring.

Yet, on the other hand, liberation is also to be found in the good things of this life, in being freed from poverty, oppression, and disease; in becoming educated and empowered and fulfilled; in working alongside God for the coming of God’s reign.

Wealthy Christians (among others) are obliged to enable others to avoid involuntary extreme poverty. All persons, rich and poor, must also consider whether or not to seek out and embrace poverty voluntarily at a personal level. Finally all persons, including the impoverished, are to seek spiritual blessedness and union with God in any state of life—and in this regard the materially poor may be ahead of others.

From What Can One Person Do? Faith to Heal a Broken World by Sabina Alkire and Edmund Newell. © 2005 by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 12, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Poverty is not sanctity

Daily Reading for June 13

Two final points need to be made to counter a sentimental understanding of poverty to which people sometimes appeal. First, poverty is not sanctity. It goes along with all moods. Depravity and viciousness are found among all; so too gentleness and prayerfulness. Second, extreme poverty is distinct from the elegant simplicity of life that many seek. It is harsh, burdensome, and not generally desirable. Yet those who live in these conditions at times flourish with amazing generosity, hospitality, and faith, and challenge our own overdependence upon material comforts and our own fear of material impoverishment. We have much to learn from them. As the theologian Dorothee Soelle writes, “From the poor of Latin America I learn their hope, their toughness, their anger, and their patience. I learn a better theology in which God is not Lord-over-us but Strength-in-us.”

From What Can One Person Do? Faith to Heal a Broken World by Sabina Alkire and Edmund Newell. © 2005 by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 13, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Basil the Great

Daily Reading for June 14 • Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea, 379

A perfect illustration of Basil’s methodology is the analogy he draws between the life cycle of the caterpillar-butterfly and Paul’s teaching on the resurrection body. For most Greeks, the idea of a resurrected body made little sense philosophically, religiously, or physically. How, many wondered, could a body that had decayed be raised from the dead? How could this type of change actually take place? The mechanics of resurrection seemed an impossibility. Basil responded by encouraging his listeners to observe more closely the many creatures, such as the caterpillar, who demonstrate this kind of metamorphosis in their life cycle. The lesser surely can illustrate the greater.

From Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers by Christopher A. Hall (InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 14, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Plain bread

Daily Reading for June 15 • Evelyn Underhill, 1941

God gives Himself mainly along two channels: through the soul’s daily life and circumstances and through its prayer. In both that soul must always be ready for Him; wide open to receive Him, and willing to accept and absorb without fastidiousness that which is given, however distasteful and unsuitable it may seem. For the Food of Eternal Life is mostly plain bread; and though it has indeed all sweetness and all savour for those who accept it with meekness and love, there is nothing in it to attract a more fanciful religious taste. All life’s vicissitudes, each grief, trial or sacrifice, each painful step in self-knowledge, every opportunity of love or renunciation and every humiliating fall, have their place here. All give, in their various ways and disguises, the heavenly Food. A sturdy realism is the mark of this divine self-imparting, and the enabling grace of those who receive.

From Abba by Evelyn Underhill (Morehouse-Barlow, 1981).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 15, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The love of benevolence

Daily Reading for June 16 • Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, 1752

That which we more strictly call piety, or the love of God, and which is an essential part of a right temper, some may perhaps imagine no way connected with benevolence: yet surely they must be connected, if there be indeed in being an object infinitely good. Human nature is so constituted, that every good affection implies the love of itself; thus, to be righteous, implies in it the love of righteousness; to be benevolent, the love of benevolence; to be good, the love of goodness; whether this righteousness, benevolence, or goodness, be viewed as in our own mind, or in another’s: and the love of God as being perfectly good, is the love of perfect goodness contemplated in a being or person. Thus morality and religion, virtue and piety, will at last necessarily coincide, run up into one and the same point, and love will be in all senses ‘the end of the commandment.’

From “Sermon II: Upon Human Nature” in The Works of Bishop Butler, Volume 1, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 16, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Right practice

Daily Reading for June 17 • The Third Sunday after Pentecost

I am not suggesting that anyone learn more about world religions in order to subvert them. Sacred truth is a very deep well into which human beings have been lowering leaky buckets for millennia. The more we learn about what other traditions have fetched up, the more we learn about our own. It is helpful, for instance, since Jesus was a Jew, to know that Judaism has no doctrine of original sin, and that salvation is conceived of as life lived in obedience to Torah. Heaven and hell have never been very lively concepts for most Jews, who find the Christian focus on the world to come more than a little irrelevant. The point of human life on earth, as any son or daughter of Torah can tell you, is to assist God in the redeeming of this world now.

It is also helpful to know that most eastern religions have very little to say about God at all. The Buddha taught that theological speculation is about as useful as wondering what kind of arrow has struck you in the chest. You may measure it if you want to. You may develop theories about where it came from, who shot it, and what kind of wood it is made from, but all in all your time would be better spent deciding how you are going to remove it from your body. The focus is not on orthodoxy—right belief—but on orthopraxis—right practice—which strikes me as a refreshing alternative to the heresy trials that have plagued my own denomination in recent years. Sin, in Buddhist teaching, is ignorance about the true nature of reality, and salvation is a matter of removing the arrow, or waking up.

From Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Mud season

Daily Reading for June 18 • Bernard Mizeki, Catechist and Martyr in Rhodesia, 1896

The example of Jesus, and the experience of mud season, remind me of a harsher truth: to be reborn, we first must die. The way to Jerusalem lies through mud. Dying, like mud, can take many forms, but every death, in the sense I mean, is a letting go. We let go of ambition, of pride, of ego. We let go of relationships, of perfect health, of loved ones who go before us to their own deaths. We let go of insisting that the world be a certain way. Letting go of any of these things can seem the failure of every design, the loss of every cherished hope. But in letting them go, we may also let go of fear, let go our white-knuckled grip on a life that never seems to meet our expectation, let go our anguished hold on smaller selves our spirits have outgrown. We may feel at times that we have let go of life itself, only to find ourselves in a new one, freer, roomier, more joyful than we could have imagined. All of us, young and old, soon and late, find our way to the mud, the season of our terrible and certain joy. Let us bring to it all the spirit we can muster.

From Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons (Bantam Books, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 18, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

Wildlife preserve

Daily Reading for June 19

Wild animals don’t have to accept themselves. They can simply be. As thinking animals, we must work to create some space for our wild natures, to give them room to roam. Whether keeping our awareness on the breath as we meditate, on our bodies’ rhythm as we run, on our sensations as we sink our hands in bread dough, our practice anchors us in our bodies, takes us further into our wild selves. With time such practice begins to open a space within us. Call it a wildlife preserve, a space where our wild selves can breathe while our judging, criticizing, worrying, doubting minds are kept safely on the other side of the fence. With practice we find ourselves living more and more inside this preserve, a place we come to recognize as our true home.

We practice wildness so that we may live more fully and constantly in the midst of anima, in the midst of soul. Wildness will not save us from misfortune. Fear, doubt, grief all lie in wait to strike and seize us as before. Only now their grip will not be so tight or last so long. In life’s thicket we will have created a clearing for our wild selves. And in that clearing, in the face of confusion and worry, in the face of failure and loss, in the face of death itself, we will lift our noses to the moon and sing.

From Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons (Bantam Books, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 19, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Washing dishes

Daily Reading for June 20

For much of my life I’ve lived contentedly by a few simple rules: don’t track mud in the house, take care of your own, help others, do as little harm as you can, change your oil every three thousand miles. But maybe enlightenment is simpler than we think. I’ve been told that religion boils down to two beliefs: first, that there is something of ultimate significance in the universe; second, that there is a way of being connected to it. Each of the world’s religions offers a distinct way of connecting, and each of us must find his or her own way in to ultimate significance. Prayer, meditation, and selfless service are all honored methods. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has taught me that, if done right, washing dishes can serve as well.

From Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons (Bantam Books, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 20, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Speak out of love

Daily Reading for June 21

I have on my office door these words from an accomplished Indian yogi: “Before speaking, consider whether it is an improvement upon silence.” The man who wrote them once went nineteen years without speaking, setting a standard I can’t hope to meet. Yet his words remind me that when we do speak, we must speak truth. Even more important, because truth so often eludes us, we must speak in kindness. In fact, we might amend the yogi’s saying to read, “Before speaking, consider whether you speak out of love.” If we could learn always to speak out of love, we could change everything.

From Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons (Bantam Books, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 21, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The vessel of character

Daily Reading for June 22 • Alban, First Martyr of Britain, c. 304

What’s needed is a structure for our spiritual life, some container to keep our growing awareness from dribbling away. As John Tarrant writes, in The Light Inside the Dark, “Everything new needs to be held, needs a place into which it can be born.” The name of this container is “character,” he writes. Character, Tarrant says, is the vessel in which to hold “our swirling selves.” We do not have a say in all that befalls us, but we do have a say in the shape of our own character.

In our daily work, in our roles as caregivers and providers, in our manner of receiving gifts and good works of others, we can be disciplined or not, mindful or not, responsible and responsive or not, but always our actions both shape and are shaped by the vessel of character. And traditionally, religious faith and spiritual practice are thought to strengthen this vessel, creating a sound container for our developing relationship to mystery, suffering, and the Divine. Life throws things at us that we cannot predict and cannot control. What we can control is who we are along the way.

From Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons (Bantam Books, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 22, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Living at the edge

Daily Reading for June 23

This experience of living at the edge is not so extraordinary as it may sound. We have all had it. Perhaps you have sat with someone who was near death, and found yourself drawn into her inner radiance, into a place where pain and fear give way before a lucid awareness of the nearness of life’s source. Or perhaps you have listened to a friend who has just lost a loved on, and heard in his voice, through the grief and exhaustion, a wondrous and wondering connection to life’s deepest levels. Perhaps you have had it while giving birth or witnessing a birth, when we seem to rise out of our bodies and become winged things, hovering over all we love. Or you have had it in those ordinary moments, when watching a child butter a slice of bread or a crow settle in a field, and suddenly nothing else matters and you fell like removing your shoes and bowing down.

We all have within us this capacity for wonder, this ability to break the bonds of ordinary awareness and sense that though our lives are fleeting and transitory, we are part of something larger, eternal and unchanging.

From Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons (Bantam Books, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 23, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Genuinely human

Daily Reading for June 24 • The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Once we owned a cat named Nora who seemed to have set up shop at a middling level on the ascent to God. Placid and fat, Nora spent her mornings lying in a pool of sunlight near the back door, and sometimes she gazed into the distance as if she were seeing something of great importance hidden from the rest of us. Then she would pad away from the door to dip water from the toilet or present us with a hair ball. For these reasons I decided that Nora had arrived at the feline equivalent of the illuminative way. The chief characteristic of the illuminative way is a heightened awareness of God’s presence which comes about as the capacities of one’s personality come habitually to be directed toward what is most real and genuinely human.

From From Image to Likeness: The Christian Journey into God by William A. Simpson (Continuum, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 24, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Arriving in the desert

Daily Reading for June 25 • The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

To the biblical mind the wilderness is a holy place in which one may enter into communion with God. It is a place where one can clearly sense God’s sustenance, and, more importantly, it is a place where one learns to turn habitually toward God. We may arrive in the desert by different paths. We may journey there of our own accord, or we may be led there by the hidden work of the Holy Spirit. Once we arrive, however, the geography is the same. The clear and penetrating light of the desert requires that we remove the layers of fear and pretense we thought we needed in the land of unlikeness and recognize these as the unnecessary baggage they are. Now is the time for honesty. The desert demands that we discover who we really are and that we persevere in this knowledge. There is, in short, only one rule for the desert pilgrim: God created you in his image, seek his likeness.

From From Image to Likeness: The Christian Journey into God by William A. Simpson (Continuum, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 25, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Desert solitude

Daily Reading for June 26

Solitude is one of the defining features of the wilderness. When one is alone with God two distinct opportunities emerge. In the first place, one can be more attentive to the work of the Holy Spirit inside when freed a while from competing, outside concerns. Oftentimes, God chooses to be subtle, and his subtle activity can go unnoticed if one’s world is full of jabbering televisions or idle chatter. In solitude one comes to know God as an engaging, and often witty, companion on the day’s journey rather than as an occasionally-glimpsed, stern presence. In this way, solitude often has a unique sweetness and beauty.

As one passes through the wilderness on the way back to God, one discovers a new depth and efficaciousness at prayer. Previously one might have thought that prayer consisted in saying things to God and that it trafficked only in words and mental images. In the desert the words and images fall away, and one is left with a simple awareness of God’s presence. The subtle presence of God is as palpable as that of a friend or lover, and yet one does not see God. Rather, it is as though for a moment in the corner of one’s eye one glimpses God passing. One feels caught up in God’s presence and transformed by it.

From From Image to Likeness: The Christian Journey into God by William A. Simpson (Continuum, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 26, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Keeping vigil

Daily Reading for June 27

Another of the standard tools of the desert is the vigil. Keeping a vigil consists in changing one’s pattern of sleeping and using tiredness or the stillness of the night to foster a quiet attentiveness to God’s presence. The Christian tradition recommends vigils to those who are discouraged or in danger of giving up on the journey back to God. A vigil is an exercise in hope. Simply doing it is an act of faith, and where there is faith love and hope are also present. By waiting one hopes, and in hoping one loves.

Recently, I discovered a new way of keeping a vigil. Sometimes before dawn I drive up Lookout Mountain and sit with my back to a cold rock to watch the sun rise over Denver. At first, I sit in the dark watching a lake of lights shimmer all the way out to the horizon. Then a thin line of blue sky appears in the east. Sometimes I notice a herd of deer grazing below me in the half-light. The sun abruptly breaks over the horizon. The deer pause a moment and look back toward it sensing the first touch of its warmth, and I notice that my hand casts a shadow. I am substantial again and ready to return home for a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee.

From From Image to Likeness: The Christian Journey into God by William A. Simpson (Continuum, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The church's book

Daily Reading for June 28 • Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, c. 202

The awareness of the communal nature of exegesis was particularly highlighted in the early church’s encounter with the Gnostics, hermeneutical lone rangers who claimed to have received in secret both revelation and interpretive insight. Irenaeus, the Gnostics’ great opponent, rejected the possibility of secret revelation and interpretation because the meaning of Jesus and the narrative leading up to his coming can only be discovered and explained in the community he founded, the community whose very existence culminates the biblical narrative’s plot structure. In effect, as Robert Jenson explains, “It is the church that knows the plot and dramatis personae of the scripture narrative, since the church is one continuous community with the story’s actors and narrators, as with its tradents, authors, and assemblers.”

For the fathers, then, hermeneutics is not an objective science that can be practiced by any scholar within any context. Rather hermeneutics in Christ becomes a spiritual, communal, interpretive art. It can be safely, wisely, and fruitfully exercised only by those whose minds and hearts have been soaked in and shaped by the gospel itself—within the Christian community’s reflection, devotion, and worship.

From Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers by Christopher A. Hall (InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Gospel agenda

Daily Reading for June 29 • St. Peter and St. Paul, Apostles

Debate within the church about who is eligible to be “in” and who must be excluded is nothing new. It was a main feature even of the very first years after Christ. That first debate was so long ago, and so decisively settled, that it is hard to realize today just how difficult a question it really was: Can Gentiles be included in the Christian church?

The argument that Gentiles should follow the law, from what seemed to be a clear and unquestionably correct reading of Scripture, could have appeared unassailable, except that it was met by the experience of the working Holy Spirit in the midst of this new community of faith. Jewish Christians spoke up on behalf of the Gentile Christians, speaking about what they had seen in their lives. They had seen evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the Gentile believers, just as they had seen it in their own. After much personal internal struggle, the apostle Peter baptized Gentile believers without requiring them to first be circumcised. When challenged about this, he defended his actions in this way: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

Now it is time for me, as a straight person, to speak up. I can bear witness, like Peter, to seeing the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those whom the church has traditionally said were “unclean” and “unfit” for consideration as members of Christ’s body. I can bear witness to seeing and experiencing in my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters lives of repentance, forgiveness, and transformation through Jesus. It is up to you, and to me, to be like Peter and not hinder God but to welcome God’s grace in the lives of others.

From “The Gospel Agenda” by Susan Buchanan, in Episcopal Life / New Hampshire Episcopal News (October 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 29, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Faiths of the
founding fathers

Daily Reading for July 1 • The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

To discuss the religion of the founding fathers means to discuss religion in the United States of their time. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were born and baptized in what Virginians of the time called “the Church,” “the Church of England,” “the Established Church,” or “the Church of Virginia.” The independence of the thirteen colonies from the mother country prompted the American members of the Church of England to discard the word “England.” In its place they adopted the term “Episcopal” (essentially meaning “we have bishops”) and named their denomination “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.” The name “Episcopal” traced back to the tumultuous Commonwealth period in English history, when clergy and laity who desired continued rule by bishops employed that term for themselves.

This church provided the religious background out of which Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—as well as such founding fathers as Patrick Henry, George Mason, and George Wythe—emerged. The earliest religious memories of these men would have revolved around the wood or brick church their families attended on Sundays. Most of their fathers would have served as vestrymen of their parishes. In due time, the founding fathers would have assumed the same position. The parish priest—or parson—would have been a familiar figure to them, and they would have received much of their early education at academies run by Anglican clergy. The words and cadences of the Book of Common Prayer ran in their blood.

From The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 1, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Deist influences
in the colonies

Daily Reading for July 2

Continuing to belong to the Episcopal Church even when at variance with some of its central doctrines did not seem to discomfort the Deistically inclined founders such as Jefferson, for they liked its liturgy and the historic cadences of its language. The Anglican faith of Virginia differed from the New England Puritanism out of which Adams and Franklin emerged. Both Adams and Franklin changed their religious views and embraced a form of Deism. So, too, did Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. But all of these men, except Franklin, continued to worship at least occasionally in the church of their ancestors—and their wives and daughters were usually devout supporters of it. The Virginia founding fathers married under the church’s auspices, consigned their children to its care, and were buried by its clergy. The impress of their religious background remained strong, even though their questioning of certain of their church’s fundamental doctrines led them to Deism.

During the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, Deism had adherents throughout continental Europe, the British Isles, and the American colonies. Because it was guided by individual reason, the movement was neither organized nor uniform. Thus some Deists renounced Christian belief more thoroughly than others. “The Deists,” an American clergyman wrote, “were never organized into a sect, had no creed or form of worship, recognized no leader, and were constantly shifting their ground. . . so that it is impossible to include them strictly under any definition.” The cleric went on to attempt “as near a definition as possible”: “Deism is what is left of Christianity after casting off everything that is peculiar to it. The Deist is one who denies the Divinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement of Christ, and the work of the Holy Ghost; who denies the God of Israel, and believes in the God of nature.”

From The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 2, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

More on the faiths of the founding fathers

Daily Reading for July 3

Regardless of where they fell on the Deist spectrum, many Deists continued to respect the moral teachings of Jesus without believing in his divine status. But the tendency of Deism was to emphasize ethical endeavors—hence the concern of most Deists for social justice and their profound opposition to all forms of tyranny. In addition, they replaced the Judeo-Christian explanation of existence with a religion far more oriented to reason and nature than to the Hebrew Bible, Christian Testament, and Christian creeds. In the understanding of the typical Deist, a rational “Supreme Architect”—one of a variety of terms Deists used for the deity—created the earth and human life. This omnipotent and unchangeable creator then withdrew to let events take their course on earth without further interference.

Just as a ticking watch presupposes a watchmaker, so Deists thought that the rational, mechanistic harmony of nature revealed a deity. The Deistic view of nature was so high that men such as Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine could write of it as God’s revelation. “There is a word of God,” Paine declared, “there is a revelation. The word of God is the creation we behold.”

From The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 3, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Independence Day

Daily Reading for July 4 • Independence Day

In place of the Hebrew God, Deists postulated a distant deity to whom they referred with terms such as “the First Cause,” “the Creator of the Universe,” “the Divine Artist,” “the Divine Author of All Good,” “the Grand Architect,” “the God of Nature,” “Nature’s God,” “Divine Providence,” and (in a phrase used by Benjamin Franklin) “the Author and Owner of our System.” The Declaration of Independence displays precisely this kind of wording and sense of a distant deity. In its 1,323 words, the Declaration speaks of “Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Supreme Judge,” and “divine Providence.”

Thus Deism inevitably undermined the personal religion of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the worldview of the typical Deist, humans had no need to read the Bible, to pray, to be baptized or circumcised, to receive Holy Communion, to attend church or synagogue, or to heed the words or ministrations of misguided priests, ministers, or rabbis. Many Deists criticized not only the Judeo-Christian tradition but also all organized religion for fostering divisive sectarianism, for encouraging persecution, and for stifling freedom of thought and speech throughout history. Their fundamental belief in reason and equality drove them to embrace liberal political ideals. In the eighteenth century, many Deists advocated universal education, freedom of the press, and separation of church and state. These principles are commonplace in the twenty-first century, but they were radical in the eighteenth.

From The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 4, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The beliefs of Benjamin Franklin

Daily Reading for July 5

Five weeks before his death, when he received an inquiry about his religious beliefs from a Congregationalist minister who was president of Yale College, Benjamin Franklin replied: “Here is my Creed: I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe: That he governs the World by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable Service we can render to him, is doing good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another life, respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion.”

Morality remained primary for Franklin even as he approached death. Jesus had established the best system of morals and religion in the history of the world, Franklin continued, though Christianity itself had undergone some corrupting changes since the time of Jesus. He concluded: “I have . . . some Doubts as to his Divinity, tho’ it is a Question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, & think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.”

Late in the evening of April 17, 1790, Franklin died with a picture of the Day of Judgment by his bedside. Almost twenty thousand citizens observed his solemn funeral procession in Philadelphia. At the front of the cortege marched “the clergymen of the city, all of them, of every faith.” He was buried in the cemetery of Christ Church.

From The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 5, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The beliefs of John Adams

Daily Reading for July 6

“The Christian religion, as I understand it,” John Adams declared to Benjamin Rush in 1810, “is the brightness of the glory and the express portrait of the eternal, self-existent independent, benevolent, all-powerful and all-merciful Creator, Preserver and Father of the Universe. . . . Neither savage nor civilized man without a revelation could ever have discovered or invented it.”

Like other Deists, however, Adams substituted a simpler, less mysterious form of Christianity for the Christianity he had inherited. Reading and reflection caused him to discard such beliefs as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, total depravity, and predestination. God, he declared, “has given us Reason, to find out the Truth, and the real Design and true End of our Existence.” Thus he asserted that humans should study nature and use reason to learn about God and his creation.

Above all, Adams opposed religious oppression and narrow-mindedness. All of this displays the blend of Unitarian Christianity and rational thought that was the religion of John Adams. Like many of his contemporaries, he brought the religion in which he was raised into the court of his reason and common sense and judged it by what he found.

From The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 6, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The beliefs of Thomas Jefferson

Daily Reading for July 7

Thomas Jefferson came to believe that the combined effect of power-hungry monarchs and corrupt “priests” had despoiled the original, pristine teachings of Jesus. But beneath these corruptions—which he labeled with such words as “nonsense,” “dross,” “rags,” “distortions,” and “abracadabra”—Jefferson came to believe there lay a fulcrum of eternal truth. In 1803, he wrote to Benjamin Rush: “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which I believe Jesus wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”

Jefferson disagreed with the Galilean on some matters: “It is not to be understood that I am with him in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sin, I require a counter-poise of good works to redeem it.” Having disagreed with Jesus, Jefferson then indicated what he admired about Jesus: “It is the innocence of his character, the purity and sublimity of his moral precepts, the eloquence of his inculcation, the beauty of his apologues in which he conveys them, that I so much admire. . . . Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence.”

In some famous correspondence with a Unitarian minister, Jefferson predicted that Unitarianism would soon sweep the nation: “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust there is not a young man now living who will not die an Unitarian.”

From The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 7, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Rule of St. Benedict

Daily Reading for July 9

The Rule of St Benedict, written in sixth-century Italy, became the most influential monastic guide in the Western Church. In the period from the sixth to the tenth centuries it gradually replaced other traditions. While the Rule of St Benedict is characterized by relative moderation, urbanity, and balance, it nevertheless presupposes a life of withdrawal from the outside world. The outward-looking ethos of the Augustinian tradition is largely absent although hospitality to strangers (who are to be received as Christ) is a major injunction. Listening and obedience (both to God and to the spiritual master, the abbot) are intertwined. In the many respects the Rule contrasts with the Rule of St Augustine in its hierarchical stance (although fraternal charity is mentioned later in the Rule). The God of the Rule is an awesome figure and the abbot, who stands “in the place of Christ,” is a ruler rather than “first among equals.” The Rule is also detailed and programmatic rather than a collection of spiritual wisdom.

Its popularity is partly explained by a well-organized structure and the priority given to good order. However, its spiritual success also relates to a healthy balance of work, prayer, and rest and the creative tension between the values of the individual spiritual journey and of common life under the authority of an abbot. The central task of the monk is common prayer or the opus Dei supplemented by personal meditation, spiritual reading (lectio), and manual work. Apart from its emphasis on obedience and on humility as the primary image of spiritual progress, the Rule also teaches the complementary spiritual values of stability (faithfulness expressed by staying in the monastery until death) and the virtually untranslatable concept of conversation morum (literally “conversion of manners”). This stands for an overall commitment to a monastic lifestyle including deep conversion and spiritual development throughout life.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 9, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Monday Daily Office

After some time had passed, the religious authorities plotted to
kill him, but their plot became known to Saul. They were watching the
gates day and night so that they might kill him; but his disciples
took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall,
lowering him in a basket. Acts 8:23-25

Basket of reeds
hanging ready
woven strong
to cradle a man
escaping to life
sister to a basket
in Egypt
floating an infant
to safety

From Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible

Posted by Ann Fontaine on July 9, 2007 8:00 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A homely Rule

Daily Reading for July 10

The Rule of St. Benedict has a special way of viewing the patterns and dynamics of Christian life. The whole orientation of the Rule is to the principle that God is everywhere, all the time, and thus every element of our ordinary day is potentially holy. Very few of us believe that and/or act on it. Benedict urges us both so to believe and so to act. It is an enormous challenge, involving life-long response, and yet it is very simple and can be begun at this moment. Because the Rule is so “homely”, so oriented to the opportunities of daily life as grist for the mill of Christian consecration, it has a great deal to say which is directly helpful to a Christian lay person, struggling to live the Christian life even in our contemporary, secular world.

From Preferring Christ: A Devotional Commentary and Workbook on the Rule of St. Benedict by Norvene Vest (Source Books, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 10, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (3)

Benedict of Nursia

Daily Reading for July 11 • Benedict of Nursia

This, then, is the good zeal,
which monks must foster with fervent love:
They should each try to be the first to show respect to the other,
supporting with the greatest patience
one another’s weaknesses of body or behaviour,
and earnestly competing in obedience to one another.
No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself,
but instead, what he judges better for someone else.
To their fellow monks they show the pure love of brothers;
to God, loving fear;
to their abbot, unfeigned and humble love.
Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ,
and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.

From The Rule of St. Benedict, quoted in Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal (Liturgical Press, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 11, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Balance and harmony

Daily Reading for July 12

Balance, proportion, harmony are so central, they so underpin everything else in the Rule, that without them the whole Benedictine approach to the individual and to the community loses its keystone. This is something which speaks to us very immediately in the later twentieth century. The search for personal fulfillment has become something of a fetish in our society today, and yet we complicate our search by at the same time admiring expertise, specialization, professionalization. Total success in one particular area commands great respect. We ask our children early in life to make choices between subjects they intend to master. We acknowledge the superiority of a lifetime devoted to one highly esoteric form of research. It could be valuable to ask ourselves what we are losing, and to set ourselves the task of discovering if we could not, without being impossibly romantic or escapist about it, attempt to become more fully, more totally human, by recognizing that all the elements in our make-up are God-given and are equally worthy of respect. It is the interrelationship of body, mind, and spirit that now eludes us. Yet St Benedict insisted that since body, mind and spirit together make up the whole person the daily pattern of life in the monastery should involve time for prayer, time for study and time for manual work. All three should command respect and all three should equally become a way to God.

From Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal (Liturgical Press, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 12, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A wise latitude

Daily Reading for July 13

The Rule can be appreciated for various aspects, but one that particularly appeals to me is its wise latitude in the way it encourages us monks to walk in the footsteps of the Gospel. The Rule tacitly acknowledges a certain pluralism, making general points instead of specific ones about many observances, allowing for creativity and improvement, where this is possible. The Rule is not limited to its original place and time; like the Gospels, from which it draws its inspiration, it has wisdom as alive and full of meaningful implications today as it was at the time the Rule was composed.

The Rule prescribes an equal distribution of time among prayer, sacred reading and intellectual work, manual work, and rest, thus bringing into balance all the activities of the monastic day. Saint Benedict was a genius in establishing through the Rule a way of life where the seasons of the earth, with their sequences of darkness and light, and the seasons of the Christian liturgy come into harmonious consonance, thus giving a dynamic balance and a healing rhythm to the monk’s daily life.

From A Monastic Year by Brother Victor-Antoine, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Jane R has a fine post on Benedict and Scholastica at Act of Hope today.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 13, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

With empty hands

Daily Reading for July 14

There can be no more role-playing for those who attempt to follow the rule of St Benedict, no more hiding behind a mask. We stand daily before God with empty hands, just like the publican. “Suspice me, accept me O Lord as you have promised and I shall live; do not disappoint me in my hope.” These are the words the novice says on entering the community. They are words that I come back to, time and again, as a prayer for myself. They mean more now that I have learnt that the Latin words comes from the verb sub-capere, to take underneath and so with the idea of supporting, raising, and that in Roman usage it was the word for a father taking up a new-born infant from the ground and thus recognizing it as his own. The implication here then becomes one of acceptance and thus of survival.

So when I say suspice me it conveys the full depth and warmth of that word. Accept me, receive me, support me, raise me up—wonderful singing words that say everything that I want to say as a prayer for myself. They are words that I understand at one level today, as I say them now, and as I present myself today before God. But they are also like some Eastern koan in which the full mystery of what I am saying will only gradually unfold and grow as my own fortune opens up before me.

For the self that I present full face to God is not anything static. If I ask God to accept me as I am now, in the present, I am also able to receive whatever he has in store for me in the future. If I really hand myself over, making an act of personal surrender, asking God to accept me just as I am now, open, vulnerable, powerless, then I shall also be able to receive whatever he has in store for me in the future.

From Living With Contradiction: Reflections on the Rule of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal (Harper and Row, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 14, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Commonplace mysteries

Daily Reading for July 15 • The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

It is a quotidian mystery that dailiness can lead to despair and yet also be at the core of our salvation. We express this every time we utter the Lord’s Prayer. As Simone Weil so eloquently stated it in her essay, “Concerning the Our Father,” the “bread of this world” is all that nourishes and energizes us, not only food but the love of friends and family, “money, ambition, consideration...power...everything that puts into us the capacity for action.” She reminds us that we need to keep praying for this food, acknowledging our needs as daily, because in the act of asking, the prayer awakens in us the trust that God will provide. But, like the manna that God provided to Israel in the desert, this “bread” cannot be stored. Each day brings with it not only the necessity of eating but the renewal of our love of and in God. This may sound like a simple thing, but it is not easy to maintain faith, hope or love in the everyday. I wonder if this is because human pride, and particularly a preoccupation with intellectual, artistic or spiritual matters, can provide a convenient way to ignore our ordinary, daily, bodily needs.

From The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” by Kathleen Norris (Paulist Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 15, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Starting where we are

Daily Reading for July 16

As a human being, Jesus Christ was as subject to the daily as any of us. And I see both the miracle of the manna and incarnation of Jesus Christ as scandals. They suggest that God is intimately concerned with our very bodies and their needs, and I doubt that this is really what we want to hear. Our bodies fail us, they grow old, flabby and feeble, and eventually they lead us to the cross. How tempting it is to disdain what God has created, and to retreat into a comfortable Gnosticism. The Christian perspective views the human body as our God-given means to salvation, for beyond the cross God has effected resurrection.

We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places—out of Galilee, as it were—and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet. The best poetic images, while they resonate with possibilities for transformation, are resolutely concrete, specific, incarnational. Concepts such as wonder, or even holiness, are not talked about so much as presented for the reader’s contemplation.

From The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” by Kathleen Norris (Paulist Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 16, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Guardians of the faith

Daily Reading for July 17 • William White, Bishop of Pennsylvania, 1836

This [1985] Convention has special significance, for this is the month in which we celebrate the bicentenary of the first General Convention. That small gathering in Philadelphia in September 1785 met when the very survival of Anglicanism was in doubt. Amid the turmoil of revolution, the old Church of England in the American colonies had been shattered, and many of its clergy had fled. The Philadelphia Convention was composed of clergy and laity who had supported the revolutionary cause. They set to work to fashion an independent church in an independent nation. Led by the brilliant young William White of Pennsylvania, they sought to re-form the Church with the democratic ideas of their new republic. So, in the ‘Philadelphia plan’ the Episcopal Church was to be independent of any outside authority and responsible for its own doctrine, canons and liturgy. The dioceses were to be federated under the triennial general convention. Bishops were to be elected officers working under a constitution, and the laity were to have equal voice with the clergy.

It was a scheme which accorded well with the aspirations of the independent United States, and its basic wisdom has been shown by the way it has become a model for other independent Anglican churches. But it was right for Samuel Seabury of Connecticut, then the only American bishop, to sound a word of warning. He refused to attend the Convention until the authority of bishops as guardians of the faith of the whole Catholic Church had been safeguarded. He feared that Enlightenment philosophy might separate the Convention from the body of Catholic Christianity.

When the Convention began to revise the wording of the creeds his worst fears were fulfilled, and there was danger of two Episcopal Churches. You will not mind my reminding you that the tension was eased by the counsel of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The changes in the creeds were withdrawn and in 1786 William White and Samuel Prevoost were consecrated bishops in the chapel of Lambeth Palace. A sound Anglican compromise was reached by the creation of a separate House of Bishops in the General Convention of 1789.

From “A New Presiding Bishop” in One Light for One World by Robert Runcie (SPCK, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Harriet Ross Tubman

Daily Reading for July 18

I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven. I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter, with the old folks, and my brothers and sisters. But to this solemn resolution I came: I was free, and they should be free also; I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all there. Oh, how I prayed then, lying all alone of the cold, damp ground; “Oh, dear Lord,” I said, “I ain’t got no friend but you. Come to my help, Lord, for I’m in trouble!”

From a story by Harriet Ross Tubman, the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. Quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 18, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

One human family

Daily Reading for July 19

Among the many important questions which have been brought before the public, there is none that more vitally affects the whole human family than that which is technically called Woman’s Rights....The world waits the coming of some new element, some purifying power, some spirit of mercy and love. The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided. There are deep and tender chords of sympathy and love in the heart of the down-fallen and oppressed that woman can touch more skillfully than man. . . God, in his wisdom has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length, and here, too, is the law of restoration, as in woman all have fallen, so in her elevation shall the race be recreated.

From Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s first public address to the First Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19, 1848. Quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 19, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Speaking for women's rights

Daily Reading for July 20 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Ross Tubman

Unfortunately, her name is forever associated with a type of woman’s undergarment, but Amelia Bloomer was actually a distinguished writer, publisher, and social reformer and a pioneer in the woman’s suffrage movement. She was also devoted to her church. When she moved to Cedar Bluffs, Iowa, she helped organize an Episcopal congregation in the community and entertained visiting missionaries in her home. She took it for granted that God was at work in the causes she espoused, writing, “The same power that brought the slave out of bondage will, in His own good time and way, bring about the emancipation of women, and make her the equal in power and dominion that she was in the beginning.”

Bloomer became an articulate speaker for women’s rights. Using her magazine Lily as a vehicle, she wrote that women ought to be admitted to institutions of higher learning, that they should own property and receive paychecks in their own name, and that the law should do more to protect victims of abuse. She even produced a woman’s Bible to challenge patriarchal views.

And, yes, she did advocate less restrictive clothing. The whalebone, tight-laced corsets, and voluminous skirts then fashionable restricted movement and injured health. Dressing like this made women, in Bloomer’s words, “unpaid street sweepers.” She didn’t invent the garment that was given her name, but Bloomer did popularize it. She gave up wearing bloomers herself after eight years, though, because she felt they detracted attention from issues that mattered more.

From “Amelia Bloomer” in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 20, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Sojourner Truth

Daily Reading for July 21

Born black and female at the end of the 18th century, Isabella Baumfree had two strikes against her—but only two. To balance the account, she stood six feet tall and had a commanding voice and personality. She used these assets to preach the gospel and for other causes as well. She preached “God’s truth and plan for salvation” in Long Island and Connecticut and arrived in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she met and worked with such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Olive Gilbert. Later she went to Washington, met President Lincoln, and spoke before Congress. She spoke about abolition and woman’s suffrage as well as her own experience of slavery. She is best remembered for a speech she gave at a women’s rights conference when she noticed that no one was addressing the rights of black women.

“Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped over carriages, and lifted ober ditches and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober muddpuddles, or bigs me any best place. And ain’t I a woman? Look at me. Looka at me arm. I have ploughes and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman.”

From “Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree),” in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 21, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Become fully human

Daily Reading for July 22 • The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

After saying this, the Blessed One greeted them all, saying: “Peace be with you—may my Peace arise and be fulfilled within you! Be vigilant, and allow no one to mislead you by saying: ‘Here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For it is within you that the Son of Man dwells. Go to him, for those who seek him, find him. Walk forth, and announce the gospel of the Kingdom.” Having said this, he departed.

The disciples were in sorrow, shedding many tears, and saying: “How are we to go among the unbelievers and announce the gospel of the Kingdom of the Son of Man? They did not spare his life, so why should they spare ours?”

Then Mary arose, embraced them all, and began to speak to her brothers: “Do not remain in sorrow and doubt, for his Grace will guide you and comfort you. Instead, let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us for this. He is calling upon us to become fully human [Anthropos].” Thus Mary turned their hearts toward the Good, and they began to discuss the meaning of the Teacher’s words.

From The Gospel of Mary Magdelene. Translation from the Coptic and Commentary by Jean-Yves Leloup (Inner Traditions, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 22, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mary Magdelene

Daily Reading for July 23 • St. Mary Magdalene

Having said all this, Mary became silent, for it was in silence that the Teacher spoke to her. Then Andrew began to speak, and said to his brothers: “Tell me, what do you think of these things she has been telling us? As for me, I do not believe that the Teacher would speak like this. These ideas are too different from those we have known.” And Peter added: “How is it possible that the Teacher talked in this manner with a woman about secrets of which we ourselves are ignorant? Must we change our customs, and listen to this woman? Did he really choose her, and prefer her to us?”

Then Mary wept, and answered him: “My brother Peter, what can you be thinking? Do you believe that this is just my own imagination, that I invented this vision? Or do you believe that I would lie about our Teacher?”

At this, Levi spoke up: “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered, and now we see you repudiating a woman, just as our adversaries do. Yet if the Teacher held her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Teacher knew her very well, for he loved her more than us. Therefore let us atone, and become fully human [Anthropos], so that the Teacher can take root in us. Let us grow as he demanded of us, and walk forth to spread the gospel, without trying to lay down any rules and laws other than those he witnessed.” When Levi had said these words, they all went forth to spread the gospel.

From The Gospel of Mary Magdelene. Translation from the Coptic and Commentary by Jean-Yves Leloup (Inner Traditions, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 23, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A mirror of life

Daily Reading for July 24 • Thomas à Kempis, Priest, 1471

If your heart be right, then every created thing will become for you a mirror of life and a book of holy teaching. For there is nothing created so small and mean that it does not reflect the goodness of God.

Were you inwardly good and pure, you would see and understand all things clearly and without difficulty. A pure heart penetrates both heaven and hell. As each man is in himself, so does he judge outward things. If there is any joy to be had in this world, the pure in heart most surely possess it; and if there is trouble and distress anywhere, the evil conscience most readily experiences it. Just as iron, when plunged into fire, loses its rust and becomes bright and glowing, so the man who trusts himself wholly to God loses his sloth and becomes transformed into a new creature.

From The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, translated by Leo Sherley-Price (Penguin 1952).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 24, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

St. James the Apostle

Daily Reading for July 25 • St. James the Apostle

The next martyr we meet with, according to St. Luke, in the History of the Apostles’ Acts, was James the son of Zebedee, the elder brother of John, and a relative of our Lord; for his mother Salome was cousin-german to the Virgin Mary. It was not until ten years after the death of Stephen that the second martyrdom took place; for no sooner had Herod Agrippa been appointed governor of Judea, than, with a view to ingratiate himself with them, he raised a sharp persecution against the Christians, and determined to make an effectual blow, by striking at their leaders. The account given us by an eminent primitive writer, Clemens Alexandrinus, ought not to be overlooked; that, as James was led to the place of martyrdom, his accuser was brought to repent of his conduct by the apostle’s extraordinary courage and undauntedness, and fell down at this feet to request his pardon, professing himself a Christian, and resolving that James should not receive the crown of martyrdom alone. Hence they were both beheaded at the same time. Thus did the first apostolic martyr cheerfully and resolutely receive that cup, which he had told our Savior he was ready to drink. These events took place A.D. 44.

From Fox’s Book of Martyrs (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1926).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 25, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mary's parents

Daily Reading for July 26 • Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The blessed and glorious ever-virgin Mary, sprung from the royal stock and family of David, born in the city of Nazareth, was brought up at Jerusalem in the temple of the Lord. Her father was named Joachim, and her mother Anna. Her father's house was from Galilee and the city of Nazareth, but her mother's family from Bethlehem. Their life was guileless and right before the Lord, and irreproachable and pious before men. For they divided all their substance into three parts. One part they spent upon the temple and the temple servants; another they distributed to strangers and the poor; the third they reserved, for themselves and the necessities of their family. Thus, dear to God, kind to men, for about twenty years they lived in their own house, a chaste married life, without having any children. Nevertheless they vowed that, should the Lord happen to give them offspring, they would deliver it to the service of the Lord; on which account also they used to visit the temple of the Lord at each of the feasts during the year....

Now, when Joachim had been at the temple for some time, on a certain day when he was alone, an angel of the Lord stood by him in a great light. And when he was disturbed at his appearance, the angel who had appeared to him restrained his fear, saying: Fear not, Joachim, nor be disturbed by my appearance; for I am the angel of the Lord, sent by Him to you to tell you that your prayers have been heard, and that your charitable deeds have gone up into His presence. . . . Conceptions very late in life, and births in the case of women that have been barren, are usually attended with something wonderful. Accordingly your wife Anna will bring forth a daughter to you, and you shall call her name Mary: she shall be, as you have vowed, consecrated to the Lord from her infancy, and she shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from her mother's womb. She shall neither eat nor drink any unclean thing, nor shall she spend her life among the crowds of the people without, but in the temple of the Lord, that it may not be possible either to say, or so much as to suspect, any evil concerning her. Therefore, when she has grown up, just as she herself shall be miraculously born of a barren woman, so in an incomparable manner she, a virgin, shall bring forth the Son of the Most High, who shall be called Jesus, and who, according to the etymology of His name, shall be the Saviour of all nations. And this shall be the sign to you of those things which I announce: When you shall come to the Golden gate in Jerusalem, you shall there meet Anna your wife, who, lately anxious from the delay of your return, will then rejoice at the sight of you. Having thus spoken, the angel departed from him.

From the apocryphal Gospel of the Nativity of Mary.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 26, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A more flexible Prayer Book

Daily Reading for July 27 • William Reed Huntington, Priest, 1909

Three years later at the 1880 Convention, the persistent Dr. Huntington tried again. He proposed a joint committee to consider “whether in view of the fact that this Church is soon to enter upon the second century of its organized existence in this country, the changed conditions of national life do not demand certain alterations in the Book of Common Prayer, in the direction of Liturgical enrichment and increased flexibility of use.” A joint committee, consisting of seven bishops, seven presbyters, and seven laymen, was appointed and ordered to report to the Convention of 1883. . . .

The 1892 Convention was businesslike and determined that nothing would be permitted to set aside or delay the completion of Prayer Book revision. The task was completed by noon, October 11, 1892. The Church had a new Book of Common Prayer. It was a very conservative revision of the Book, especially considering the years of discussion and the number of proposed changes. Unquestionably, the primary force behind the movement for revision was Dr. William Reed Huntington. It was his resolution which had set the process in motion back in 1880. He was secretary of the first joint Committee on Revision which served until 1886 and was the recognized floor leader in the debates on the subject in all five Conventions, 1880-1892. Huntington was respected and admired by his colleagues, not only for his ability but also for his affability and kind consideration of everyone. The Churchman of October 22, 1892, spoke of him as a man of “consummate tact . . . so conciliatory that his very opponents cannot help wishing they could agree with him, even when they are compelled to differ.”

From The Prayer Book Through the Ages by William Sydnor. Copyright © 1978. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Eucharistic fellowship

Daily Reading for July 28

Just as this Eucharistic action is the pattern of all Christian action, the sharing of this Bread the sign of the sharing of all bread, so this Fellowship is the germ of all society renewed in Christ.

From On Being the Church in the World by John A. T. Robinson (SCM, 1974).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Sacred meal

Daily Reading for July 29 • The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

From very early times, human beings have shared meals together, and seen in such an act a symbol of fellowship, common life, common love. The sharing of food and fellowship, the drinking of wine in the atmosphere of warmth and joy, such activities are among the most important in life. It is not surprising therefore that at the heart of the worship and experience of God in Christian tradition is the activity of a meal, the Eucharist. Christian spirituality is of a eucharistic type, that is, it comes to see and know and even digest God within the framework of the liturgy of eating and drinking. It has thus the marks of an active and social experience, not those of a passive and private one. And both the involvement in action, and the social character of the experience, are of the essence, and not simply incidental aspects, of the Christian spiritual path. It is an experience of God which takes place within the context of an action involving movement, responses, manual acts, greetings of our fellow participants, the offering of gifts, the receiving of communion; and this action is the action of a community in which individuals are caught up. It is not therefore on the fringes of the common life, but at its centre, that Christian spirituality, even Christian contemplation, happens. ‘Now is the time for God to act’ as the Eastern liturgy says of the eucharistic action. To come to the sacred meal of the community is to expect a divine encounter, it is both to consume and be consumed.

From Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality by Kenneth Leech (Harper and Row, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 29, 2007 10:12 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

William Wilberforce

Daily Reading for July 30 • William Wilberforce

Compared with the work of the Quakers, the Salvation Army, or Anglo-Catholic “slum priests” later in the nineteenth century, the Evangelical movement has sometimes been accused of lacking a spirituality of social engagement. This is an unfair generalization. It is true that “action” implied an active spreading of the word of God (evangelism) expressed, for example, in the work of the Church Missionary Society throughout the British Empire. However, for many people action also implied social philanthropy. The former slave trader John Newton, later Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London, became a notable supporter of William Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish slavery. William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was the leading champion of the abolition of slavery as a result of his evangelical conversion. Wilberforce witnessed to the direct connection between spirituality and social action by beginning each working day with two hours of prayer and Bible reading. Wilberforce became the political leader of the Evangelical movement and on his death this role was taken on by Anthony Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a leading Conservative parliamentarian and one of the greatest social reformers of the nineteenth century.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 30, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Ignatius of Loyola

Daily Reading for July 31 • Ignatius of Loyola

The Spiritual Exercises is one of the most influential spiritual texts of all times. Despite their Reformation origins they are nowadays used as a medium for spiritual guidance and retreats among an ecumenical spectrum of Christians. The text is not intended to be inspirational but is a series of practical notes for a retreat-guide that suggest how to vary the process according to the needs of each person. The ideal is a month away from normal pressures but a modified form “in the midst of daily life” is allowed. Much of the text consists of advice about the structure and content of prayer periods, guidance about spiritual discernment and making a choice of life, and helpful hints about practical matters such as the physical environment for prayer, moderate use of penance, rules about eating, and about scruples.

The explicit aim of the Spiritual Exercises is to assist a person to grow in spiritual freedom in order to respond to the call of Christ. From the Exercises, it is possible to detect fundamental features of Ignatian spirituality. First, God is encountered above all in the practices of everyday life which themselves become a “spiritual exercise.” Second, the life and death of Jesus Christ is offered as the fundamental pattern for Christian life. Third, the God revealed in Christ offers healing, liberation, and hope. Fourth, spirituality is not so much a matter of asceticism as a matter of a deepening desire for God (“desire” is a frequent word in the text) and experience of God’s acceptance in return. The theme of “finding God in all things” suggests a growing integration of contemplation and action. The notion of following the pattern of Jesus Christ focuses on an active sharing in God’s mission to the world—not least in serving people in need. Finally, at the heart of everything is the gift of spiritual discernment—an increasing ability to judge wisely and to choose well in ways that are congruent with a person’s deepest truth.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 31, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Joseph of Arimathea

Daily Reading for August 1 • Joseph of Arimathea

On the day of the Preparation, about the tenth hour, you shut me in, and I remained there the whole Sabbath in full. And when midnight came, as I was standing and praying, the house where you shut me in was hung up by the four corners, and there was a flashing of light in mine eyes. And I fell to the ground trembling. Then some one lifted me up from the place where I had fallen, and poured over me an abundance of water from the head even to the feet, and put round my nostrils the odor of a wonderful ointment, and rubbed my face with the water itself, as if washing me, and kissed me, and said to me, Joseph, fear not; but open thine eyes, and see who it is that speaks to thee. And looking, I saw Jesus; and being terrified, I thought it was a phantom. And with prayer and the commandments I spoke to him, and he spoke with me. And I said to him: Art thou Rabbi Elias? And he said to me: I am not Elias. And I said: Who art thou, my Lord? And he said to me: I am Jesus, whose body thou didst beg from Pilate, and wrap in clean linen; and thou didst lay a napkin on my face, and didst lay me in thy new tomb, and roll a stone to the door of the tomb. Then I said to him that was speaking to me: Show me, Lord, where I laid thee. And he led me, and showed me the place where I laid him, and the linen which I had put on him, and the napkin which I had wrapped upon his face; and I knew that it was Jesus. And he took hold of me with his hand, and put me in the midst of my house though the gates were shut, and put me in my bed, and said to me: Peace to thee! And he kissed me, and said to me: For forty days go not out of thy house; for, lo, I go to my brethren into Galilee.

From the non-canonical Gospel of Nicodemus, translated by Alexander Walker, in The Lost Books of the Bible (Bell Publishing, 1979).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 1, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The origin of our desiring

Daily Reading for August 2

At the heart of the Spiritual Exercises is learning how to discern the origin of our desiring. Each of us knows the pull and tug of various urges, some for our well-being and some for our downfall. These pulls, tugs, urges, and desires are movements that come from different sources. One of these sources is God and the other is not-God or, as Ignatius calls it, “the enemy of our human nature.” We can tell where a movement is coming from if we can tell where it is leading, says Ignatius. If we can play out in our imagination where a particular desire will lead us—closer to God or farther away from divine love—we can be sure which spirit is behind that urge.

Ignatius calls those movements toward God and toward the deepest truth of ourselves “consolation,” and he calls those movements away from faith, hope, and love and into self-centeredness “desolation.” Harking back to his recuperation time in Loyola, Ignatius recognizes the movements of the spirits in his own life and wants the retreatant to know the same. Thus we can choose to follow the movements of grace and avoid falling into the temptations of the enemy of our human nature. We come to recognize the patterns of temptation in our lives as well as the gentle pull of divine grace. As we come to understand the value system of the Gospel more clearly and in greater detail, through contemplation of Jesus, and as we grow in our understanding of the value system of the world, we are equipped to make better choices in our lives.

From “How Ignatius Would Tend the Holy: Ignatian Spirituality and Spiritual Direction” by Marian Cowan, CSJ, in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions edited by Norvene Vest. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 2, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Finding God in all things

Daily Reading for August 3

Sometimes I need to explain to directees what is meant by the phrase “finding God in all things.” It has nothing to do with reading God into things, blaming God for disasters, saying this or that is God’s will. Rather, it involves opening ourselves to an encounter with God in whatever presents itself to us. God is present in all things, seen and unseen. We are invited to experience this presence in nature, in people, in circumstances, in everything. God is the essence of all that is, and God is within all, in ways that will benefit us. So I ask a directee, “Are you able to feel (or know) God with you in this terrible moment?” “Do you realize that what you are describing as luck is really God’s grace?” Finding God in all things turns life into a love story between God and the directee. It leads one far from self-centeredness into love of all creatures. It puts one at the disposal of God to bring all of creation one step closer to its fulfillment.

From “How Ignatius Would Tend the Holy: Ignatian Spirituality and Spiritual Direction” by Marian Cowan, CSJ, in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions edited by Norvene Vest. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 3, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Sensing scripture

Daily Reading for August 4

Centuries ago, Ignatius of Loyola urged readers of scripture to participate in the life of Christ through a disciplined use of all the senses. When reading a story from the gospels, like the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, Ignatius tells us to enter the scene fully and to become each character in turn:

With the eyes of the imagination we should look . . . at the persons. With our hearing we should perceive how they are speaking or could speak. With the sense of smell and taste we should smell and taste the infinite sweetness and loveliness of the Godhead. With our sense of place we should embrace and kiss the place where these persons have set their foot and where they come to rest.

From Sensing God: Reading Scripture With All Our Senses by Roger Ferlo (Cowley Publications, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 4, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Loving infinitely

Daily Reading for August 5 • The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

We are made to love, both to satisfy the necessity of our active nature and to answer the beauties in every creature. By love our souls are married and soldered to the creatures, and it is our duty like God to be united to them all. We must love them infinitely, but in God, and for God, and God in them, namely, all his excellencies manifest in them. When we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too much, but other things too little. Never was anything in this world loved too much, but many things have been loved in a false way, and all in too short a measure.

From Centuries by Thomas Traherne, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 5, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Treasure in every sand

Daily Reading for August 6 • The Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ

Suppose a river or a drop of water, an apple or a sand, an ear of corn or an herb. God knows infinite excellencies in it more than we. He sees how it relates to angels and to men, how it proceeds from the most perfect lover to the most perfectly beloved, how it represents all his attributes. And for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the author and God the end is to be beloved in it; angels and men are to be beloved in it; and it is highly to be esteemed for all their sakes. O what a treasure is every sand when truly understood! Who can love anything God made too much? His infinite goodness and wisdom and power and glory are in it. What a world would this be, were every thing beloved as it ought to be!

From Centuries by Thomas Traherne, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 6, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Baring all the Godhead

Daily Reading for August 7 • John Mason Neale, 1866

Amongst His Twelve Apostles
Christ spake the Words of Life,
And shew’d a realm of beauty
Beyond a world of strife:
‘When all My Father’s glory
Shall shine express’d in Me,
Then praise Him, then exalt Him,
For magnified is He!’

Upon the Mount of Tabor
The promise was made good;
When, baring all the Godhead,
In light itself He stood:
and they, in awe beholding,
The Apostolic Three,
Sang out to God their Saviour,
For magnified was He!

From “Transfiguration” by John Mason Neale, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Word: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 7, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Dominic

Daily Reading for August 8 • Dominic, Priest and Friar, 1221

It is not unfair to suggest that the character of the two largest mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, reflected the personalities and backgrounds of their founders. St Dominic (1170-1221) was originally a Canon Regular of St Augustine at Osma in Castille. In 1203 he and his bishop were in southern France on diplomatic business when they came across the papal preaching mission confronting the dualist heretics known as Cathars or Albigensians. Bishop Diego and Dominic bolstered the mission by gathering together a band of dedicated preachers who, in line with the spiritual fervor of the time, also espoused a life of gospel poverty. As early as 1206 an associated community of women was founded at Prouille.

On the bishop’s death in 1207, Dominic remained in France and developed his group of preachers into a religious order. Basically Dominic followed his background experience as a Canon Regular. Thus he sought to combine liturgy, contemplation, and pastoral ministry. The Order of Preachers was formally approved in 1216 and from the start embraced women and lay associates, although their full incorporation only happened years after Dominic’s death.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 8, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Dominican spirituality

Daily Reading for August 9

Dominican spirituality does not originate in high theory or in a particular spiritual wisdom embodied in clearly defined techniques. Effectively, Dominic’s vision was to respond to concrete pastoral needs. This, and a reliance on structures that he already knew, suggests a fundamental pragmatism and functionalism in his approach to the spiritual life. The Domincan structures were relatively simple and democratic rather than hierarchical. Clearly preaching as a medium for spreading the gospel lies at the heart of Dominican spirituality. In that sense, Dominican spirituality is evangelical and missionary.

As a foundation for preaching, Dominic placed a strong emphasis on study which really replaced the traditional monastic emphasis on manual labor as a critical spiritual discipline. Veritas (truth) became a kind of motto of the Order expressing its deepest ideals of intellectual integrity at the service of the gospel. Behind the ability to minister effectively also lay a contemplative spirit focused especially on liturgy. This connection between contemplation and action was expressed in a traditional phrase contemplate aliis tradere--it is what is contemplated that leads to everything else.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 9, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Stir up no dust

Daily Reading for August 10

What you hold, may you [always] hold,
What you do, may you [always] do,
and never abandon.
But with swift pace [and] light steps
stir up no dust,
go forward:
securely, joyfully
and swiftly
on the path of prudent happiness.

Letter 2 of Clare of Assisi, quoted in Peaceweavers: Medieval Religious Women, Volume 2, edited by John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (Cistercian Publications, 1987).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 10, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Clare of Assisi

Daily Reading for August 11 • Clare, Abbess of Assisi, 1253

Although Francis’ life and writings are a primary source for Franciscan spirituality, it is now widely recognized that Clare of Assisi (1194-1253) was not merely a dependent figure but a significant personality in her own right in the origins of the Franciscan tradition. Inspired by Francis’ preaching, Clare dedicated herself to a gospel life in 1212 and became the first woman member of the Order. She held to the same vision of poverty and gospel living in the face of considerable opposition from Church officials. Some historians have suggested that Clare originally wished her sisters to have an unenclosed lifestyle of service rather alone the lines of the lay movement of Beguines. Whatever the case, Clare was forced to accept the Rule of St Benedict for her sisters but this was mitigated in 1216 by papal permission to observe the same “privilege” of poverty as the friars—that is, freedom from normal monastic possessions, buildings, estates, and complex finances. However her moderate Rule for the Poor Sisters (the Poor Clares) was only finally approved on her deathbed in 1253.

Although the sisters were dedicated to a life of contemplation, this should not be contrasted with the men’s dedication to preaching in poverty. Enclosure was not the end purpose of Poor Clare life. This was the bond between poverty and contemplation—contemplation in poverty and poverty as itself a form of gospel-centered contemplation. In her famous Letters to Agnes of Prague Clare writes of Christ the Mirror into which the contemplative gazes and there discovers the poverty of Christ and his intense love of the world expressed in the cross. In turn, Clare suggests that the sisters are to be mirrors to those living in the world—mirrors in which people can see the gospel life.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 11, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Venturing into the desert

Daily Reading for August 12 • The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

The desert is the threshold to the meeting ground of God and man. It is the scene of the exodus. You do not settle there, you pass through. One then ventures on to these tracks because one is driven by the Spirit towards the Promised Land. But it is only promised to those who are able to chew sand for forty years without doubting their invitation to the feast in the end.

Alessandro Pronzato, quoted in The Desert: An Anthology for Lent by John Moses. © 1997. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 12, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Right intentions

Daily Reading for August 13 • Jeremy Taylor, 1667

It is probable our hearts are right with God, and our intentions innocent and pious, if we set upon actions of religion or civil life with an affection proportionate to the quality of the work; that we act our temporal affairs with a desire no greater than our necessity; and that in actions of religion, we be zealous, active, and operative, so far as prudence will permit; but in all cases, that we value a religious design before a temporal, when otherwise they are in equal order to the several ends: that is, that whatsoever is necessary in order to our soul’s health be higher esteemed, than what is for bodily; and the indispensable necessities, of the spirit, be served before the needs of nature; or plainer yet, when we choose any temporal inconvenience, rather than commit a sin, and when we choose to do a duty, rather than to get gain.

From Holy Living and Dying With Prayers: Containing the Complete Duty of A Christian by Jeremy Taylor (Thomas Wardle, 1835).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 13, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Jonathan Myric Daniels

Daily Reading for August 14 • Jonathan Myric Daniels, 1965

Like the early Christian witness, Daniels could write, “We are beginning to see as we never saw before that we are truly in the world and yet ultimately not of it.” He was sickened by signs saying “White Only,” but uncomfortable as well with making too “smart” an answer to a segregationist. He wrote: “We are beginning to believe deeply in original sin—theirs and ours.”

In the midst of this ambiguity, the reality of hatred remained, along with the possibility of death. Shortly after writing his report, Daniels was struck down by a supremacist’s bullet. An instinctive reaction led Daniels to throw himself in front of a young black woman when a white man aimed a rifle at her. Yet instincts are the product of prayer and a commitment to justice made long before the event. Daniels seems to have understood that his commitment might require the highest price. He also knew that the way of life can conquer the powers of death. He had written not long before: “A crooked man climbed a crooked tree on a crooked hill. Somewhere, in the mists of the past, a tenor sang of valleys lifted up and hills made low. Death at the heart of life, and life in the midst of death. The tree of life is indeed a Cross.”

From A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 14, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

St. Mary the Virgin

Daily Reading for August 15 • St. Mary the Virgin

It is the moment of the annunciation which makes sense of all other moments. It is a moment which is truly in time, not out of time. It has a whole series of temporal consequences; the embryo begins to stir in the womb. But it is a moment in which eternity has really come, in which God is present and at work. Both the birth and the death of Jesus witness to the depth and immensity of God’s love, and to the infinite openness and potential of human life. And just as, in baptism, the death of each one who is baptized is included in Christ’s death, in order that the whole process of dying may become dying into life, so also the birth of each one is included in Christ’s birth, in order that the whole process of living may be open to the coming of the Spirit, who is Lord and giver of life.

It is in this sense that we may rightly think of Mary as the mother of us all; in this sense that Andrewes speaks of the font as the womb of the Church, of one substance with the Virgin’s womb, with a power given it by the Spirit of bringing forth sons of God. From his participation in our human nature follows our participation in his divine nature. The life of eternity enters into time, so that the life of time may find its fulfillment in eternity.

From The Joy of All Creation by A. M. Allchin (Cowley Publications, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 15, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Flesh and blood

Daily Reading for August 16

There is a closer relationship between faith in the Virgin birth and faith in the bodily resurrection of Christ than might at first sight appear. Both doctrines affirm the depth of God’s love, the extent of his involvement in the human mass, in the very substance of our human history, its reality of flesh and blood. And both doctrines affirm the potential greatness, the infinite openness of that human history. In the reality of flesh and blood, the eternal is made present and made known. It is not surprising that our own society, with its sense of being held in an ‘iron reign’ of necessity and death, with its particular difficulty in believing that human life can open out into something larger than itself, finds these doctrines difficult to accept. In some sense, however, this has always been the case, for at all times these articles of faith have brought a judgement on our fallen ways of thinking. They are bound to come to our minds first as a cross and only afterwards as a fulfillment.

Neither Christ’s conception nor his rising again is an isolated wonder, unrelated to the rest of human history, to the nature of the universe as a whole. ‘The truth, which is revealed in them, is at the same time situated at the heart of history, at the basis of creation and at the goal of history.’ All stories of strange or miraculous births, and there are many in legends and mythology of man, hint at the potential of a birth from above, at the mystery of each human life as a new creation, a possible point of intersection of the timeless with time. The birth and death of Christ, given from on high, are a full and perfect confirmation of these half-lost human longings. They are at one and the same time a revelation of the mysteriousness of the divine love which goes far beyond anything the mind could have thought or the heart desired, and also a revelation of the mysteriousness of the human calling and destiny. Planted at the heart of man’s being there is an openness to what is beyond him.

From The Joy of All Creation by A. M. Allchin (Cowley Publications, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 16, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Joy of all creation

Daily Reading for August 17

Thus in Christ it is revealed both at birth and at death, man’s life can conquer time through time. The moments which in themselves can be and are the perfect symbols of man’s bondage to time and of his imprisonment in a world of endless recurrence, birth, copulation, and death, become the very symbols of man’s liberation from death, and of the liberation of all creation. This is not only a liberation from the cycle of birth and death, it is a liberation through them by the taking up of time into eternity. She who stands at the entrance to this mystery, the place where the Spirit is made manifest, is indeed the gate of heaven, the joy of all creation.

From The Joy of All Creation by A. M. Allchin (Cowley Publications, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

William Porcher DuBose

Daily Reading for August 18 • William Porcher DuBose, 1918

We have our religion through the medium of languages that have been long dead, and that present tendencies in education threaten to render more and more dead to us. Along with the languages, there is a growing disposition to relegate the ideas, the entire symbolic expression and form, of Christianity to the past. The modern world calls for modern modes of thought and modern forms of speech. We have to meet that demand and be able to answer and satisfy whatever of reason or truth there is in it.

There are two tasks before us as students and teachers of Christianity. The first is to know and understand our sources. To begin with, we must know our Old Testament as we have never known it before, if we are to take part in the new interpretation of our New Testament that the times demand. For each time must have its own living interpretation, since the interpretation cannot but be, in half measure at least, relative to the time. If the divine part in it is fixed, the human is progressive and changing just in so far as it is living.

We must cease to treat the phraseology, the forms, definitions, and dogmas of Christianity as sacred relics, too sacred to be handled. We must take them out of their napkins, strip them of their cerements, and turn them into current coin. We must let them do business in the life that is living now, and take part in the thought and feeling and activity of the men of the world of today.

From High Priesthood and Sacrifice by William Porcher DuBose, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 18, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The consecrated life

Daily Reading for August 19 • The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

There is a profound sense in which all of one’s life is lived out in God’s presence, and this recognition becomes a powerful tool for understanding all of one’s life as being consecrated unto God. The Carmelite lay brother Nicholas Herman (1611-91), known as “Brother Lawrence,” cultivated and practiced this sort of life, and its character has been preserved for us under the title Practice of the Presence of God (1692). Without forsaking the mysterium tremendum, Brother Lawrence advocated a style of spirituality that developed a continual sense of being in God’s presence, and the practice of returning to God’s presence through deliberate acts of prayer. He aspired to a habitual sense of God’s presence that penetrated and invigorated all of a Christian’s life. Brother Lawrence wrote: “This presence of God, if practiced faithfully, works secretly in the soul and produces marvelous effects, and leads it insensibly to the simple grace, that long sight of God every where present, which is the most holy, the most solid, the easiest, the most efficacious manner of prayer.”

From Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 19, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Bernard of Clairvaux

Daily Reading for August 20 • Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, 1153

As a theologian Bernard stood in the Augustinian tradition. Like Anselm before him, St. Bernard believed it was necessary to grasp religious truth by faith before one could probe its meaning. His personal mysticism caused Bernard to look from the mind (as in Anselm) to religious experience for certitude. His theology was deeply concerned about the reality of humans being created in the image of God, and the unity that remains between humans and their Creator. Bernard found this most powerfully expressed and experienced in terms of love (Latin caritas). His interior theology was often phrased in the language of romantic love and courtship. Bernard understood the love song of the Hebrew Scriptures, Canticles, as a vivid description of the soul’s relationship with God; his sermons on Song of Songs were among his most influential works.

From “Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)” in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 20, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prompted by God

Daily Reading for August 21

To love one’s neighbor with perfect love it is necessary to be prompted by God. How can you love your neighbor with purity if you do not love him in God? But he who does not love God cannot love in God. You must love God, so that in Him you can love your neighbor too. God therefore brings about your love for Him, just as He causes other goods. This is how He does it: He who made nature also protects it. For it was so created that it needs its Creator as its Protector, so that what could not have come into existence without Him cannot continue in existence without Him.

From “Four Degrees of Love” by Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 21, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

How sweet the Lord is

Daily Reading for August 22

Humanity’s frequent needs make it necessary for us to call upon God often, and to taste by frequent contact, and to discover by tasting how sweet the Lord is. It is in this way that the taste of His own sweetness leads us to love God in purity more than our need alone would prompt us to do.

There is a need of the flesh which speaks out, and the body tells by its actions of the kindness it has experienced. And so it will not be difficult for the person who has had that experience to keep the commandment to love his [or her] neighbor. He truly loves God, and therefore he loves what is God’s. This love is acceptable because it is given freely. It is chaste because it is not made up of words or talk, but of truth and action. It is just because it gives back what it has received. For he who loves in this way loves as he is loved.

From “Four Degrees of Love” by Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 22, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Poured into God

Daily Reading for August 23

Since Scripture says that God made everything for himself, there will be a time when He will cause everything to conform to its Maker and be in harmony with Him. In the meantime, we must make this our desire; that as God Himself willed that everything should be for Himself, so we, too, will that nothing, not even ourselves, may be or have been except for Him, that is according to his will, not ours. The satisfaction of our needs will not bring us happiness, not chance delights, as does the sight of His will being fulfilled in us and in everything which concerns us. That is what we ask every day in prayer when we say, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

To love in this way is to become like God. As a drop of water seems to disappear completely in a quantity of wine, taking the wine’s flavor and color; as red-hot iron becomes indistinguishable from the glow of fire and its own original form disappears; as air suffused with the light of the sun seems transformed into the brightness of the light, as if it were itself light rather than merely lit up; so, in those who are holy, it is necessary for human affection to dissolve in some ineffable way, and be poured into the will of God.

From “Four Degrees of Love” by Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 23, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Preparing something new

Daily Reading for August 24 • St. Bartholomew the Apostle

Prayer and meditation have an important part to play in opening up new ways and new horizons. If our prayer is the expression of a deep and grace-inspired desire for newness of life—and not the mere blind attachment to what has always been familiar and “safe”—God will act in us and through us to renew the Church by preparing, in prayer, what we cannot yet imagine or understand. In this way our prayer and faith today will be oriented toward the future which we ourselves may never see fully realized on earth.

From Contemplation in a World of Action by Thomas Merton (Doubleday, 1971).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 24, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Honest experience

Daily Reading for August 25

Better just to smell a flower in the garden . . . than to have an unauthentic experience of a much higher value. Better to honestly enjoy the sunshine or some light reading than to claim to be in contact with something that one is not in contact with at all.

From Contemplation in a World of Action by Thomas Merton (Doubleday, 1971).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 25, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

God within creation

Daily Reading for August 26 • The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The feature of Celtic spirituality that is probably most widely recognized, both within and outside the Church, is its creation emphasis. Like most children, I had grown up with a sense of awe at creation. Our earliest memories are generally of wonder in relation to the elements. Connected to these moments will be recollections of experiencing at the deepest levels a type of communion with God in nature, but there will usually have been very little in our religious traditions to encourage us to do much more than simply thank God for creation. The preconception behind this is that God is separate from creation. How many of us were taught actually to look for God within creation and to recognize the world as the place of revelation and the whole of life as sacramental? Were we not for the most part led to think that spirituality is about looking away from life, so that the Church is distanced from the world and spirit is almost entirely divorced from the matter of our bodies, our lives and the world?

I had discovered characteristics of the old Celtic Church in the prayers of the Western Isles, but where was the original source of this spiritual tradition? When I explored the earliest manifestations of Celtic Christianity, in the fourth-century writings of Pelagius, for example, I found a similar emphasis on the life of God within creation. This much-maligned early British Christian stressed not only the essential goodness of creation—and our capacity to glimpse what he called ‘the shafts of divine light’ that penetrate the thin veil dividing heaven and earth—but the essential goodness of humanity. It was a spirituality characterized by a listening within all things for the life of God.

From Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality by J. Philip Newell (Paulist Press, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 26, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Thomas Gallaudet

Daily Reading for August 27 • Thomas Gallaudet, 1890, and Henry Winter Syle, 1902

The growth of the spiritual kingdom, as a divinely appointed organization, is a mystery; and the growth of spiritual life in the hearts of each individual member of the spiritual kingdom is a mystery. We behold indications, from time to time, marking the gradual progress of these two kinds of growth; we believe in them, as realities coming to pass, in consequence of Christ’s redemption, and yet we know not how. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

Oh! let those to whom the gospel announcements have come, be not faithless, but believing. Beholding the wonderful work which God, through Christ, has wrought for mankind by the mysterious instrumentalities of his infinitely wise appointment, let all become genuine, devout communicants of the organization which has existed, though they know not how, for upward of eighteen hundred years, as the grand regeneration of the human race; and in due time, they shall be the possessors of the peace of God, which passing understanding, is the earnest of the good things to come in the future life, of which it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive. Oh! let us have entire faith in the Divine arrangements for the growth of spiritual life, although they are to us, in our present condition, unfathomable mysteries.

From the sermon preached at the first service held at St. Ann’s Church for Deaf-Mutes by Thomas Gallaudet, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Augustine of Hippo

Daily Reading for August 28 • Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 430

In his system, [Pelagius] posits and distinguishes three faculties, by which he says God’s commandments are fulfilled, —capacity, volition, and action: meaning by “capacity,” that by which a man is able to be righteous; by “volition” that which he wills to be righteous; by “action,” that by which he actually is righteous. The first of these, the capacity, he allows to have been bestowed on us by the Creator of our nature; it is not in our power, and we possess it even against our will. The first of these, the capacity, he allows to have been bestowed on us by the Creator of our nature; it is not in our power, and we possess it even against our will. The other two, however, the volition and the action, he asserts to be our own; and he assigns them to us so strictly as to contend that they proceed simply from ourselves. In short, according to his view, God’s grace has nothing to do with assisting these two faculties which he will have to be altogether our own, the volition and the action, but that only which is not in our own power and comes to us from God, namely the capacity; as if the faculties which are our own, that is, the volition and the action, have such avail for declining evil and doing good, that they require no divine help, whereas that faculty which we have of God, that is to say, the capacity, is so weak, that it is always assisted by the aid of grace.

The apostle, however, holds the contrary, when he says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” [Phil. 2:12]. And that they might be sure that is was not simply in their being able to work but in their actual working that they were divinely assisted, the apostle does not say to them, “For it is God that worketh in you to be able,” as if they already possessed volition and operation among their own resources, without requiring His assistance in respect to these two; but he says, “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to perform of His own good pleasure” [Phil. 2:13]; or, as the reading runs in other copies, especially the Greek, “both to will and to operate.” God works within us those two very things, even “willing” and “operating,” which [Pelagius] so determined to be our own, as if they were in no wise assisted by the help of divine grace.

From On the Grace of Christ by Augustine of Hippo, quoted in Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 1: From Its Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation, by William C. Placher (Westminster / John Knox, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A contrasting view

Daily Reading for August 29

Augustine’s influence was particularly harmful in relation to sexuality. While he did not actually identify concupiscence with sexual desire, his general orientation—and even more, that of his successors—did lead to a devaluing of sex. Sex was in fact basically bad, but tolerable for the purpose of procreation. For, in Augustine’s view, the essence of the fall was loss of control of mind over body. On this view, all sexual acts have the nature of sin, because they are inherently lustful. The view that original sin was actually transmitted by sexual intercourse was accepted by Thomas Aquinas, and has remained a powerful strain within conventional Western Christianity to this day.

By contrast, incarnational theology involves the acceptance of the goodness and wonder of our physical bodies, and more than acceptance: a joyful, awesome, tender joy in them. Sebastian Moore, in a moving prayer-poem, speaks of the ‘accuracy of the flesh’, the place of knowledge:

Christ! I’m ready now
ready to get lost in the evangel of people’s bodies
accuracy of the flesh
kiss of truth
we cannot say what we are
we can only be to each other
touch each other with truth.

He goes on:

Having known deeply and quietly the goodness of the flesh
I cannot follow the safe self-crucified men who say ‘God alone’.

From Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality by Kenneth Leech (Harper and Row, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 29, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (3)

Pelagius

Daily Reading for August 30

Pelagius, born in the latter half of the fourth century, was a Celtic Briton. Tradition has it that he was the son of a Welsh bard, which would help to explain his breadth of learning. He was a big, enthusiastic man; even his physical appearance became subject to adverse comment. Augustine’s friend Orosius describes him as a huge, proud Goliath, over-confident in his own strength, and even criticizes Pelagius’ hair-style, which may well have been an early example of the Celtic monastic style modeled on the pre-Christian Druidic tonsure (long but shaved around the sides and back), as opposed to the traditional Roman cut (shaved at the crown of the head). This same issue was to draw attention a few centuries later, at the Synod of Whitby, and of course was much more than a mere disagreement about hair-style. It signaled an unease about the Celtic mission’s readiness to incorporate aspects of the thought and symbolism of the nature mysticism and religious practice that preceded Christianity in Celtic Britain.

The early writings of Pelagius contain themes that would develop into some of the main characteristics of the Celtic tradition over the following centuries. Pelagius even makes reference, for example, to the practice of finding an anamchara or ‘soul friend’, a well-known feature of the spiritual discipline within the Celtic Church in later centuries. Typically, he focuses less on looking to the organized Church for spiritual counsel than on finding in life a ‘friend of the soul’, one to whom the inner self can be opened, ‘hiding nothing’, as Pelagius says, ‘revealing everything’ in order to know and further explore what is in one’s own heart.

From Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality by J. Philip Newell (Paulist Press, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 30, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (3)

Early Celtic tradition

Daily Reading for August 31 • Aiden, Bishop of Lindisfarne, 651

The most typical mark of the spirituality of the Celtic tradition apparent in Pelagius’ writings is his strong sense of the goodness of creation, in which the life of God can be glimpsed. Everywhere, he says, ‘narrow shafts of divine light pierce the veil that separates heaven from earth’. Because Pelagius saw God as present within all that has life, he understood Jesus’ command to love our neighbour as ourself to mean loving not only our human neighbour but all the life forms that surround us. ‘So when our love is directed towards an animal or even a tree,’ he wrote, ‘we are participating in the fullness of God’s love.’

Much of Pelagius’ teaching can be seen to stem from the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament. He saw Christ as the fulfillment of that tradition, as the perfect exemplar of wisdom and humility. Again, his Celtic emphasis was not so much on religious belief and the doctrines of the Church as on living a life of wisdom; by that he meant such things as loving all people, friends and enemies alike, and doing good in return for evil.

From Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality by J. Philip Newell (Paulist Press, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 31, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

God's image in every person

Daily Reading for September 1 • David Pendleton Oakerhater, 1931

There are two areas in which explicit criticism of Pelagius does begin to emerge: his practice of teaching women to read Scripture and his conviction that in the newborn child the image of God is to be seen. These issues are clearly related, for the desire to educate women was rooted in Pelagius’ conviction that God’s image is to be found in every person, both male and female, and that the goodness of that image is nurtured and freed largely through the grace of wisdom. The Celtic world was one that gave much greater scope to the role of women and more fully incorporated both the feminine and the masculine into its religious life and imagery.

The second, and much more controversial, feature of Pelagius’ teaching to attract attention was his conviction that every child is conceived and born in the image of God. He believed that the newborn, freshly come forth from God, contains the original, unsullied goodness of creation and humanity’s essential blessedness. This was in stark contrast to Augustine’s thinking and the developing spirituality of the Church in the Roman world, which accentuated the evil in humanity and our essential unrighteousness. Augustine, with his sharp awareness of the pervasiveness of wrong-doing in the world, stated that the human child is born depraved and humanity’s sinful nature has been sexually transmitted from one generation to the next, stretching from Adam to the present. Augustine believed that from conception and birth we lack the image of God until it is restored in the sacrament of baptism, and that conception involves us in the sinfulness of nature. The perspective conveyed by Pelagius, on the other hand, is that to look into the face of a newborn is to look at the image of God; he maintained that creation is essentially good and that the sexual dimension of procreation is God-given. The emphasis that would increasingly be developed in the Celtic tradition was that in the birth of a child God is giving birth to his image on earth.

From Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality by J. Philip Newell (Paulist Press, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 1, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (7)

Work and prayer

Daily Reading for September 2 • The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

If you are at your manual labor in your room and it comes time to pray, do not say: “I will use up my supply of branches or finish weaving the little basket, and then I will rise,” but rise immediately and render to God the prayer that is owed him. Otherwise, little by little you come to neglect your prayer and your duty habitually, and your soul will become a wasteland devoid of every spiritual and bodily work. For right at the beginning your will is apparent.

From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom: Writings on the Contemplative Life by Hugh Feiss (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 2, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

What do you see?

Daily Reading for September 3 • Labor Day

In whatever work that you do, you should say to yourself at every moment: “If God looks at me, what does he see?” Then see how you answer yourself. If you condemn yourself, leave immediately. Stop the work that you were doing and take up something else in order to be sure to reach your destination. For it is necessary that the traveler be always ready to continue his journey. When you are seated at manual labor, when you are walking along the road, when you are eating, tell yourself this: “If God called me now, what would happen?” See how your conscience answers and hurry to do what it tells you.

From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, quoted in Essential Monastic Wisdom: Writings on the Contemplative Life by Hugh Feiss (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 3, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The method of war

Daily Reading for September 4 • Paul Jones, Bishop and Peace Advocate, 1941

In the first place, let me say that I, as a loyal citizen, am whole-heartedly for this country of ours in which all my hopes and ideals and interests are bound up. I believe most sincerely that German brutality and aggression must be stopped, and I am willing, if need be, to give my life and what I possess to bring that about. I want to see the extension of real democracy in the world, and am ready to help that cause to the utmost; and finally, I want to see a sound and lasting peace brought to the world as a close to the terrible convulsion in which the nations are involved.

But the question is that of method. It is not enough to say that the majority have decided on war as the only means of attaining those things and therefore we must all co-operate. I believe that it is not as easy as that, for the problem goes deeper.

If we are to reconcile men to God, to build up the brotherhood of the kingdom, preach love, forbearance and forgiveness, teach the ideals that are worth more than all else, rebuke evil, and stand for the good even unto death, then I do not see how it can be the duty of the church or its representatives to aid or encourage the way of war, which so obviously breaks down brotherhood, replaces love and forbearance by bitterness and wrath, sacrifices ideals to expediency, and takes the way of fear instead of that of faith. I believe that it is always the Church’s duty to hold up before men the way of the cross; the one way our Lord has given us for overcoming the world.

From a statement by Bishop Paul Jones to the House of Bishops, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 4, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The weapon of prayer

Daily Reading for September 5

Prayer is, I believe the best test of the whole matter. If it is right and our honest duty to fight the war [World War I] to a finish, then we should use the Church’s great weapon of prayer to that end; but the most ardent Christian supporter of the war, though he may use general terms, revolts against praying that our every bullet may find its mark, or that our embargoes may bring starvation to every German home. We know that those things would bring the war to a speedy, triumphant close, but the Church cannot pray that way. And a purpose that you cannot pray for is a poor one for Christians to be engaged in.

From a statement by Bishop Paul Jones to the House of Bishops, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 5, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Unlearning not to speak

Daily Reading for September 6

Although I had just finished writing a lengthy doctoral dissertation on the history of the Episcopal Church, my truest self was silent. I do not know how or where I learned it, but I had learned not to say what I really thought or truly believed or most desired. I internalized Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: women who express their deepest passions get run over by trains. The way of safety is to say what others want you to say, to repeat the words of those who hold power. And if you do that well enough you might gain a modicum of control over your own life.

Christianity is a faith of words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God speaks creation into being, the Spirit whispers life into the world. Wisdom is God’s name and holy words impart the way of holiness and the mystery of being. Through scripture, theology, prayers, and hymns, the church proclaims God’s presence in the world.

Throughout church history, however, the words of women and children, of the poor, the sick, and enslaved, have often been silenced by words of the wealthy, learned, and powerful. And if no one listens, you learn not to speak. When such voices are lost, the Word is diminished. I could express few genuine words. I needed to find my voice. Poet Marge Piercy writes in “Unlearning Not to Speak”:

She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with We
starting as an infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure
and rage.

From Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community by Diana Butler Bass (Jossey-Bass, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 6, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

The wood

Daily Reading for September 7

Years after I found my way back to mainstream Protestantism, someone asked what attracted me to the Episcopal Church. With only a moment’s pause I replied, “The wood.”

I am convinced that wood is holy. Cut from living things, it takes on new life when used as beams and columns and pews in traditional church architecture. It is as if the trees continue to grow as they absorb generations of candle smoke, incense, and prayer. The rings no longer measure age. Rather, they measure decades of spirituality and faithfulness. When colored light from stained glass windows falls across this holy patina, the wood itself seems to breathe God’s spirit.

I found God in a building. All Saints shocked my spiritual senses. Wood and windows, icons and organ—it was as if I had stumbled into God’s own house. Here was holiness, robust and physical, passed down through generations. It was the Christian tradition embodied in architecture, music, and liturgy. But it was not a “wooden tradition,” stilted and moribund. Like All Saints’ glowing woodwork, here, tradition was vital, a living thing, crafted in the faithfulness and vision of God’s people, present and past. I felt as if I had stumbled into some great secret world and found the biblical pearl of great price. Although I could scarcely name it myself, I was seeking God, incarnated in dynamic tradition, and God was there at All Saints-by-the-Sea.

From Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community by Diana Butler Bass (Jossey-Bass, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 7, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

God loves everybody

Daily Reading for September 8

Early in his ministry, Bishop Johnson conducted a sort of diocesan listening tour. Christ Church, as one of the largest churches in the diocese, was picked to host one of these events. As Buck and I drove to church, I suspected a hostile audience might ambush the new bishop. The parish hall was full. The bishop told a number of stories about settling in the diocese, expressed some of his hopes for the diocese, and made some vague theological statements about inclusion and openness. Finally, he asked for questions.

A number of parishioners quizzed him on his position regarding controversial issues and theology. They did not like his answers. Part of me appreciated the courage of my fellow parishioners, but another part recoiled as their level of theological indignation grew. Then, to my complete horror, an emboldened Buck raised his hand.

“Bishop Johnson,” he began. “It says in the book of Timothy that the bishop is to guard the gospel. Sir, listening to you, I cannot discern what you are guarding. Can you tell us, please, exactly what you think the gospel is?”

The bishop leaned back against the podium, looked first at Buck, and then, slowly, cast his gaze around the entire room. He unfolded his arms—which he had held across his chest—and stretched them out so widely that he almost looked like Jesus hanging on the cross. “God,” he said deliberately. “God loves everybody.”

“Well, yes,” Buck started to protest, “but . . . .”

“God loves everybody,” he replied. “That’s it.”

“But . . . .”

“God loves everybody.”

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, I knew that that squishy liberal bishop was right and I was wrong. God really did love everybody—including all the people I thought were excluded from the reach of the gospel. I had limited God’s mercy—just like the Calvinists, who insisted that God predestined only some to be saved, and the Catholics, who said that theirs was the only true church. The bishop said no. No limits. God loves everybody. God’s love is as vast as the universe and as difficult to comprehend as eternity itself. God’s only boundary is love.

From Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community by Diana Butler Bass (Jossey-Bass, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 8, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Alexander Crummell

Daily Reading for September 10 • Alexander Crummell, 1898

Although Alexander Crummell and other black Episcopalians could do little to stop white church people in the South from regarding them as inferior, they organized an association (the Conference of Church Workers among Colored People) designed to lobby for recognition and respect in denominational affairs. Crummell believed in a strong racial ministry, and this attitude set the tone for the CCW. Like many white clergy of the time, he lamented the fact that so many African Americans had deserted the Episcopal Church after the Civil War. But rather than blaming African Americans in the South for their exodus from the denomination, Crummell knew (from painful personal experience) that the refusal of whites to encourage and accept the leadership of black men and women was the real cause. If the Episcopal Church adopted an evangelistic plan that allowed African Americans to minister to and uplift their own people, Crummell asserted, it would have a providential opportunity to imbue a significant portion of southern society with its theological and social ideals.

Leading black Episcopalians actually agreed with white paternalists about some of the reasons for bringing African Americans into the church: their denomination had the potential to become a stabilizing and uplifting presence within the black community. They disagreed with whites, however, about who should have the primary responsibility for ministering to the black population in the South. If white Episcopalians were as concerned as they claimed to be about the education and conversion of African Americans, why had they continually ignored the contributions of their fellow church members who were black? Black Episcopalians also opposed white southerners on theological grounds. Skin color, they maintained, could not be used to prevent a priest from exercising the authority, judicial as well as sacerdotal, to which ordination entitled him. No matter what some whites happened to believe, Christian theology taught that race had no bearing on the powers a priest received at his ordination, and black clergy, at least, should be granted seats in the legislative assemblies of their dioceses.

From Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights by Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr. (University of Kentucky Press, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 10, 2007 2:12 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Honest dialogue

Daily Reading for September 11

Of course, Christian-Muslim dialogue must go on. But I am wary of the term ‘inter-faith dialogue’. It often suggests a disconnected, middle class, rather intellectual activity which is cut off from the mass of the people, both inside and outside the faith communities. To be of practical value, dialogue must be localized, honest and courageous. It must explore common ground while recognizing that there are important differences between faith traditions. It must also be very practical. For example, it is often of critical importance that faith communities get together quickly, and the mechanisms that enable this to happen must be put in place. Sadly, the history of inter-faith dialogue suggests that the situation is often the opposite. Often the dialogue is not rooted locally but is vaguely national. It is kind and charitable but tends to blur or avoid areas of controversy. It explores common ground but only at an intellectual level. It avoids differences, and creates no ability to act together when such action becomes really important. Fortunately there are many examples to the contrary.

My main experience has been with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These three faith traditions have a common belief in communion with God. As I have said, I believe that, in the context of inter-faith work, Christians need to develop a new and extended idea of catholicity. This involves the transcendence of birth, ethnicity, race and nationality, and the commitment to the struggle for a common humanity.

From Race by Kenneth Leech. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 11, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

John Henry Hobart

Daily Reading for September 12 • John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, 1830

In uniting us to a visible society, for the purpose of redeeming us from the corruptions of our evil nature and of the world, and for training us for the purity and bliss of a celestial and eternal existence, the Divine Author of our being has not only exercised that sovereign power which makes us in all things dependent on his will, but has mercifully accommodated himself to the social principle which so strongly characterizes us. This, uniform and powerful in its influence, prompts us in spiritual as in temporal matters, to mingle with our fellow men our thoughts, our feelings, our pursuits, our hopes. Most conversant are we, too, with material objects, and most affected by them; what an aid to our conception of spiritual truths, what an excitement to our hopes of spiritual blessings, when they are exhibited as conveyed and pledged by external symbols. Hence the doctrine that the ministrations and ordinances of the church are the means and pledges of salvation to the faithful, to all true believers, is not more enforced by the plainest declarations of sacred writ, than it is conformable to a rational and philosophical view of our nature.

From a sermon by the Rt. Rev. John Henry Hobart, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 12, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Cyprian of Carthage

Daily Reading for September 13 • Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, 258

We ought to hold firmly and maintain our [Christian] unity, especially those of us who are bishops presiding in the Church, thereby revealing the episcopate to be one and undivided. The episcopate is one; it is a unity in which each bishop enjoys full possession. The Church is likewise one, even though it is spread abroad far and wide, and grows as her children increase in number. Just as the sun has many rays, but the light is one; or as a tree with many branches finds its strength in its deep root; or as various streams issue from a spring, their multiplicity fed by the abundance of the water supply, so unity is preserved in the source itself. You cannot separate a ray from the sun any more than you can divide its light. Break a branch from a tree, and once broken it will bud no more. Dam a stream from its source, and the water will dry up. In the same way the Church, flooded with the light of the Lord, puts forth her rays throughout the world, but it is an identical light that is being diffused, and the unity of the body is not infringed. She extends her branches over the whole world. She pours out her generous rivers but there is one source, one Mother, abundant in the fruit of her own creativity. We are born in the womb of the Church; we are nourished by her milk; and we are animated by her Spirit.

The bride of Christ cannot commit adultery; she is pure and chaste. She knows but one home and guards the sanctity of its marriage-bed with chaste modesty. She keeps us for God and she directs the children she has borne into his kingdom. But whoever parts company with the Church and consorts with an adulteress, becomes estranged from the promises of Christ. No one can have God as Father who does not also have the Church as mother.

From On the Unity of the Church by Cyprian of Carthage, quoted in Spiritual Classics from the Early Church by Robert Atwell (National Society/Church House Publishing, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 13, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Holy Cross Day

Daily Reading for September 14 • Holy Cross Day

Christ on the cross cries:
My people, what wrong have I done to you?
What good have I not done for you?
Listen to me. Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see if there is any sorrow like to my sorrow.

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,
because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

From the Good Friday Reproaches, probably from tenth-century French rites. Quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 14, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Sabbath rest

Daily Reading for September 15

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways;
re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence praise.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love!

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still small voice of calm.

From a hymn by John Greenleaf Whittier, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 15, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Become his living body

Daily Reading for September 16 • The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

O eternal God,
Turn us into the arms and hands,
The legs and feet
Of your beloved Son, Jesus.
You gave birth to him in heaven
Before the creation of the earth.
You gave birth to us on earth,
To become his living body.
Make us worthy to be his limbs,
And so worthy to share
In his eternal bliss.

A prayer of Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 16, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Hildegard of Bingen

Daily Reading for September 17 • Hildegard, 1179

Jesus Christ, the love that gives love,
You are higher than the highest star;
You are deeper than the deepest sea;
You cherish us as your own family;
You embrace us as your own spouse;
You rule over us as your own subjects;
You welcome us as your dearest friend.
Let all the world worship you.

Holy Spirit, the life that gives life.
You are the cause of all movement;
You are the breath of all creatures;
You are the salve that purifies our souls;
You are the ointment that heals our wounds;
You are the fire that warms our hearts;
You are the light that guides our feet.
Let all the world praise you.

A prayer of Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

Too late have I loved thee

Daily Reading for September 18 • Edward Bouverie Pusey, Priest, 1882

Good Jesu, too late have I loved thee, nor ever yet have I wholly followed thee; make me now at last wholly to love thee, and out of the fullness of thine infinite love give me all the love I might have had, had I always loved thee. O dearest Lord, too late have I loved thee, too late have I loved thee, too late is it always, not always to have loved thee wholly. Now, too, I cannot love thee as I would. O dearest Lord, who art love, give me of thine own love, that therewith I may wholly love thee. Good Jesu, who gavest thyself for me, give me of the fullness of thy love, that for all thy love, with thy love, I may love thee.

A prayer of Edward Bouverie Pusey, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 18, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Joy in learning

Daily Reading for September 19 • Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, 690

Because both of them [Archbishop Theodore and his assistant Abbot Hadrian] were extremely learned in sacred and secular literature, they attracted a crowd of students into whose hearts they daily poured the streams of wholesome knowledge. They gave their hearers instruction not only in the books of holy Scripture but also in the art of metre, astronomy, and ecclesiastical computation. Never had there been happier times since the English first came to Britain; for having such brave Christian kings they were a terror to all the barbarian nations, and the desires of everyone were set on the joys of the heavenly kingdom of which they had only lately heard; while all who wished for instruction in sacred studies had teachers ready to hand. From that time also the knowledge of sacred music, which had hitherto been known only in Kent, began to be taught in all the English churches.

From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, quoted in The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society by John Blair (Oxford, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 19, 2007 4:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

John Coleridge Patteson

Daily Reading for September 20 • John Coleridge Patteson, Bishop of Melanesia, and his Companions, Martyrs, 1871

This is what they did for the sick. They were not ashamed to carry the bucket of waste matter and take it to the sea; they washed out the bucket and brought it back into the sickroom. Then I thought that they were doing what the Bishop had told us in school, that we should love one another and look after each other with love, without despising anyone; we should help the weak. All this they did to those who were sick. Then I thought that it was true, if anyone taught the Law of God and the things that Jesus did and his way of life, he must follow it himself, and humble himself and be quiet and slow to speak; his conduct must be good in the sight of all men; he must speak without cursing; he must visit the sick; all this work must follow the teaching of him who teaches. But if he merely teaches but does not follow it in his life, it is no good, and his work will remain fruitless, people will not listen to his teaching or believe what he says, nor will they respect him in his work. But whoever teaches must follow his teaching himself, and people will know him by the work he does, and they will like him for his work, and will listen to him and respect him because when he teaches them he does not speak of his own accord, but speaks to them in the name of Jesus, and his teaching has power. And this is what I saw Bishop Patteson doing at Kohimarama.

From They Came to My Island by George Sarawia, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 20, 2007 4:03 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

St. Matthew

Daily Reading for September 21 • St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist

The shape and the content of Matthew’s gospel suggest that the author himself is a scribe like the one that Jesus names. The scribes of the first century were all teachers. The “training” of the scribe that is mentioned is the Greek verb matheteuo—“to teach, to learn.” And this is the same word from which we get Matthew’s name. As the teacher of Judaism and the teacher for Judaism, Matthew’s gospel tells a story that is both new and old. Matthew’s story of Jesus’ fulfillment of God’s promises is written “like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” In this heart of the first gospel, Matthew opens his own heart to his reader. It is a radiant heart and gleams like a fine gem in clear light.

When the dust of the first siege of Jerusalem had settled in A.D. 70, the religious world had to reorganize, reconstruct, and rebuild itself. This was true for the Jews who believed Jesus to be the Messiah. This was also true for the Jews who believed that the Messiah was yet to come. We think that both of these groups of our faithful forebears gathered in southern Syria and northern Judea in order to sort themselves out. We know that around A.D. 90, the remnants of Pharisaic Judaism gathered in Jamnia to decide upon the content and order of their Holy Scriptures and to discuss the future of worship in the synagogues. We think Matthew is their Christian-Jewish colleague and competition, teaching those who are to carry the “good news” of the one who fulfills the Law and the prophets.

Matthew insists that those who confess Jesus as Messiah must honor the tradition and “keep the faith.” His gospel was first in the hearts of our forebears who fashioned the Christian church; his gospel is first in our Holy Scriptures for precisely this truth. When we reach out across ninety-nine generations to hold the hand that Matthew offers, we, too, receive his mandate to honor the tradition and “keep the faith.” It is the right mandate as well as a radiant heart. For if we are to be the ekklesia, those whom God calls out, we must be trained like the scribe who was trained for the kingdom of heaven—the one who is “like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” The hand offered by the “one to teach” is a wise hand to hold, indeed.

From One to Watch, One to Pray: Introducing the Gospels by Minka Shura Sprague. A Seabury Classic, an imprint of Church Publishing. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 21, 2007 4:06 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

From famine to feast

Daily Reading for September 22

Let me define what I mean by famine. Famine is the reigning myth. It is king and queen, emperor and president. As the kids would say, “It rules.” Myth one is that there is not enough. You will barely get through an hour anywhere in the first-world without the subtext of “there is not enough” coming up. “I would love to come but I am so busy.”

Myth two is that more is better. “When I get the promotion or the gig or the partner, then I will have the more I need to be better.”

Myth three is that there is nothing you can do about it. “I won’t get the promotion or the gig or the partner, and if I do it won’t work out, so there is really nothing to do but stay here and whine about it along with the rest of the culture.”

Myth four—and this is really a new one, straight from the Republicans—is that you are personally responsible. No pension? You must have invested your 401K wrong. No health insurance? You probably didn’t take good care of your health. No freedom from work? You probably went to the wrong graduate school.

These four myths are relatives. They all belong to the same family. They dine very well together every night. There is not enough. More is better. There is nothing you can do about it. You are personally responsible.

The story of the wedding at Cana is a striking alternative to the king, queen, prince, and princess myths. It says just the opposite: there is plenty, we have enough, there are lots of things you can do to change things, and we are positively personally responsible. There is not blame here—as in who ordered the wrong amount of wine—but there is hope. As they will say at the World Social Forum, over and over again, another world is possible.

I am a recovering famine freak. I am training myself to be a feast freak. I choose small strategic gifts. I choose a feast mentality (even though there are plenty of days of desperation and despair still left). I also choose a steady principled pace that has plenty of time for setbacks—as well as plenty of time built into it for my money to create lasting change. The better wine is coming. That is the first and central point of view I have on money. From there the rest is simpler.

From Living Well While Doing Good by Donna Schaper. A Seabury Book, an imprint of Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 22, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Pray for the church

Daily Reading for September 23 • The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Crucified and risen Lord, we pray for the Church.
Save us from dawdling by an empty tomb.
Save us from bondage to the past.
Save us from the hypnotic fascination of decay and death
and make your Church to know your resurrection life.
May we follow where you lead and live for you in today’s world.
The Lord is risen.
He is risen indeed.

Savior Christ, we pray for the whole human family.
Hanging on the cross, you gave hope to a rebel at your side
and prayed for those who condemned you to that violent death.
We too live amid violence,
the violence of subversion, of repressive governments,
and all the subtle violence by which the powerful
seek to impose their will on the weak.
You alone can give victory over the violence of the world and of our hearts.
Save us, Lord. Give us the will and the power to share your victory.
The Lord is risen.
He is risen indeed.

Living Lord, we pray for our society,
entombed in material possessions and oppressed with ever-changing fears.
Many know no better hope than that things may get no worse
and that they may enjoy a few years of quiet retirement before the end.
Release us from this living death.
Cause us to live with the life you alone can give.
The Lord is risen.
He is risen indeed.

Lord, you know what it is to suffer pain, degradation, and rejection, and to die an outcast.
We pray for all who suffer....
May they know you as one who shares their agony
and enables them to share your triumph.
The Lord is risen.
He is risen indeed.

With thanksgiving for the life that was given
and joyous hope of the life that is yet to be,
we remember those who have died....
As in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be brought to life.
The Lord is risen.
He is risen indeed. Amen.

From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 23, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Renew us by your Spirit

Daily Reading for September 24

Almighty Father, you give us life
as you give life to all people.
You call us into the Church
that with men and women
of different races, colors, and languages,
different experiences and different traditions,
we may be one body
to the glory of Christ on earth.
Help us to be what you have called us to be.
You are the giver of life.
Father, renew us by your Spirit.

Father of all, you give us
wealth in the earth and in the oceans,
forests and fertile plains,
air to breathe, water to drink,
and all that is needful for human life.
We pray for those who know little of your bounty,
for whom the earth is a cruel desert
and existence a constant struggle
against overwhelming odds.
We acknowledge that their burdens should be our burdens;
we acknowledge that we share a common humanity.
You are the giver of life.
Father, renew us by your Spirit.

Father, you have so made us that we need one another,
but because we do not know how to love everyone,
you tell us to start with the sister or brother at our side.
We pray for any from whom we are estranged.
Bless them,
and bless us in our future relationships with them.
We pray for our families, our friends,
and all whom we meet day by day....
In their particular needs we ask you to bless them.
You are the giver of life.
Father, renew us by your Spirit.

Father, you are present in every part of human experience.
We hold before you
the infant lying in a mother’s arms,
the young lovers planning together their first home,
the sick and infirm battling with weakness and incapacity,
the dying, soon to experience your new creation.
You are the giver of life.
Father, renew us by your Spirit.

Eternal Father, we remember before you
those who have passed from this world....
As we all received from you the gift of life,
so we pray that you will bring us to the life eternal.
You are the giver of life.
Father, renew us by your Spirit. Amen.

From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 24, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Teach us to love

Daily Reading for September 25 • Sergius, Abbot of Holy Trinity, Moscow, 1392

We pray for the Church,
where all too often, like Cain,
we have made the worship offered by our brother a cause for hostility and division.
We pray that our Lord may bind us together,
teaching us to value the richness of our diversity
and to rejoice in every fresh glimpse of God’s glory
seen through traditions other than our own.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.

We pray for those lands where brother and sister fight sister and brother,
divided by arbitrary borders, ideology, or religion.
We pray for those lands where extremes of wealth and poverty are bitterly divisive.
We pray for those lands where power is grossly abused
and the dispossessed bear the heaviest burden.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.

We pray for all who have been nourished on bitterness
and fed with the wrongs suffered by earlier generations.
We pray for all who have grown to hate people
instead of hating that which evil has done to people.
We pray for the young who are impatient for change
and the not-so-young who resist all change.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.

We commend to God any special needs known to us....
As we remember the sick, the sorrowful, and all who are in any distress,
let us also remember that God has supremely made himself known to us as Savior
and calls us to share in God’s rescuing work.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.

Lord, we would heal and not destroy.
Teach us the discipline of obedience to the commandment
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,”
and give us the fortitude to go on obeying to the end.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.

Let us remember before God those who have died....
Lord, we are all sinners and utterly dependent on your grace.
We praise you for the forgiveness of sins
by which men and women are enabled to rise from death to eternal life.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God. Amen.

From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 25, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Save us when we fall

Daily Reading for September 26 • Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, 1626

Lord Jesus, you have faced temptation,
you know how difficult it can be to distinguish
between vision and mirage, between truth and falsehood.
Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

Help us in the Church —
When we confuse absence of conflict with the peace of God.
When we equate the shaping of ecclesiastical structures with serving you in the world.
When we imagine that our task is to preserve rather than to put at risk.
When we behave as though your presence in life were a past event
rather than a contemporary encounter.
Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

Help us in the world —
When we use meaningless chatter to avoid real dialogue.
When we allow the image presented by the media
to blind us to the substance that lies behind it.
When we confuse privilege with responsibility
and claim rights when we should be acknowledging duties.
When we allow high-sounding reasons to cover evil actions.
Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

We pray for our families and our friends
and hold them before you in our thoughts....
We especially pray for any who may be under particular pressures and stress at this time....
Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

Lord Jesus, you have passed through the test of suffering
and are able to help those who are meeting their test now.
We pray for all who suffer....
We especially pray for those who suffer through their own folly
or the folly or malice of others....
Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

Before the throne of God, where we may find mercy and timely help,
we remember those who have departed this life....
Dying, Christ broke the power of sin and death
that we might enter with him into the life eternal.
Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall. Amen.

From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 26, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Rejoice, my spirit

Daily Reading for September 27

Lord, we often fold our hands in prayer,
when we should really jump for joy
because you come to us as rescuer, as Savior,
cleaning up the mess we make of our lives,
putting together what we pull apart.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.
Rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior.

We pray for the Church.
You have called us to have a part in its life
and, despite our failures, you have not cast us off.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.
Rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior.

We know that much of the Church’s life
and witness looks silly and weak in the eyes of the world at large,
but you still use its foolishness to shame worldly wisdom
and its weakness to witness against the abuse of power.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.
Rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior.

We pray for those who cry desperately for salvation,
for tyranny to be overthrown, for the despised to be given dignity,
for the poor to receive a proper share of the earth’s resources.
You are the source of hope and the inspiration to action.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.
Rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior.

We bring you particular needs....
With confidence we share these with you
for you are the God who lives among us.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.
Rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior.

We pray for our families....
Your human life brought both pain and joy to your earthly relatives.
Help us also to know you in both the joys and the pains of family life.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.
Rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior.

We remember those who have died....
Through our sorrow and sense of loss
we are glad for the promise that there shall be an end to death,
and to mourning and crying and pain;
for the old order has passed away.
Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord.
Rejoice, my spirit, in God my Savior. Amen.

From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Help us to live in peace

Daily Reading for September 28

Lord Jesus, in a dark hour you spoke of the gift of peace;
we beg that gift for ourselves,
that we may have the inner serenity that cannot be taken from us.
Then we may be messengers of your peace to a strife-torn world.
Give peace in our time, Lord.
Help us to live in peace.

We pray for those who are fighting—
injury, disfigurement, and death their constant companions,
nerves and bodies strained beyond endurance,
the streams of compassion drying up within them,
their only goal the destruction of the “enemy.”
Whatever the color of their skin—we pray for them.
Whatever the sound of their tongue—we pray for them.
Whatever the insignia they wear—we pray for them.
Give peace in our time, Lord.
Help us to live in peace.

We pray for all who have been broken in battle;
for those who weep and those who can no longer weep;
for those who feel the anguish
and for those who have lost the capacity to feel;
for all prisoners—and all prison guards;
for those who exist in war-torn lands
and for those who no longer have a homeland.
Give peace in our time, Lord.
Help us to live in peace.

We pray for all who stir up strife;
for all who make a profit out of the misery of others;
for all who are led into vice as they seek a momentary forgetfulness;
for all who believe that war is inevitable.
Give peace in our time, Lord.
Help us to live in peace.

The desire to press self-interest is deeply rooted in us.
We defend our attitudes when we should be ashamed of them.
We compare the noblest aspects of our own cause with the basest of that of our opponents.
We are reluctant to admit that our own selfish desires could contribute to the miseries of others.
Give peace in our time, Lord.
Help us to live in peace.

We bring to you particular needs....
and we remember those who have died....
Give peace in our time, Lord.
Help us to live in peace.

From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

One family

Daily Reading for September 29 • St. Michael and All Angels

Spirit of power, we find it hard to come together in the Church,
even within a single congregation.
How shall we learn to be one family, loving and serving the whole of humankind?
Lead us into such unity of purpose that we may receive power:
not the power to threaten or destroy, but the power to restore waste places.
Use us to declare your glory, that blind eyes may see,
deaf ears hear, and the cynical be brought to faith.
Spirit of the Living God,
Hear our prayer.

Spirit of truth, we live in a modern Babel
where words are used to conceal meaning rather than make it plain.
Lead the peoples of the world into such a love of truth
that nation may speak with nation,
not seeking to confuse but to understand and to be understood,
whereby trust is created, out of which a truly international community may be born.
Spirit of the Living God,
Hear our prayer.

Creator Spirit, you give to the old the capacity to dream dreams
and to the young to see visions,
but because we exalt ourselves and our desires to the place that is yours alone,
our visions are visions of horror and our dreams nightmares.
Raise up artists and prophets among us
with the will and the ability to inspire and cleanse our society,
to set our hearts aflame and turn our eyes to the heights.
Spirit of the Living God,
Hear our prayer.

Source of all comfort, we pray for the lonely, the sick, the sad, the bereaved,
and all who suffer or are ill at ease....
We claim for them the gift of your peace,
that their troubled hearts may be set at rest and their fears banished.
Spirit of the Living God,
Hear our prayer.

Giver of life, we remember those who have died....
May they enter into the Kingdom where your presence is all in all.
Spirit of the Living God,
Hear our prayer. Amen.

From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 29, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Service in creating

Daily Reading for September 30 • The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lord, shall we not bring these gifts to Your Service?
Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers
For life, for dignity, grace and order,
And intellectual pleasures of the senses?
The Lord who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service
Which is already His service in creating.

From The Rock by T. S. Eliot, in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Faber and Faber).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 30, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A Prayer for Grace

Daily Reading for October 1 • Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, c. 530

Hedge up my way with thorns,
that I find not the path for following vanity.
Hold thou me in with bit and bridle,
lest I fall from thee.
O Lord, compel me to come in to thee.

Two things have I required of thee, O Lord,
deny thou me not before I die;
remove far from me vanity and lies;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
feed me with food convenient for me;
lest I be full and deny thee and say, who is the Lord?
Or lest I be poor and steal,
and take the name of my God in vain.
Let me learn to abound, let me learn to suffer need,
in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.
For nothing earthly, temporal, mortal, to long nor to wait.
Grant me a happy life, in piety, gravity, purity,
in all things good and fair,
in cheerfulness, in health, in credit,
in competency, in safety, in gentle estate, in quiet;
a happy death,
a deathless happiness.

May thy strong hand, O Lord, be ever my defense;
thy mercy in Christ, my salvation;
thy all-veritable word, my instructor;
the grace of thy life-bringing Spirit, my consolation
all along, and at last.

A Prayer for Grace by Lancelot Andrewes, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 1, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

No Dove, no church

Daily Reading for October 2

The Holy Ghost is a Dove, and he makes Christ’s Spouse, the church, a Dove, a term so oft iterate in the Canticles, and so much stood on by Saint Augustine and the Fathers, as they make no question. No Dove, no church.

And what shall we say then to them that will be Christians, and yet have nothing in them of the church, nothing in them of the dove; what shall we say? You may see what they are, they even seek and do all that in them lies to chase away this Dove, the Holy Ghost. The Dove, they tell us, that was for the baby-Church, for them to be humble and meek, suffer and mourn like a dove. Now, as if with Montanus they had yet “another Holy Ghost” to look for, in another shape, of another fashion quite, with other qualities, they hold these be no qualities for Christians now. Were indeed, they grant, for the baby-Christians, for the “three thousand” first Christians, this day; poor men, they did all in simplicitate cordis. And so too in Pliny’s time: harmless people they were; the Christians, as he writes, did nobody hurt. And so to Tertullian’s, who tells plainly what hurt they could have done, and yet would do none. And so all along the primitive churches, even down to Gregory, who in any wise would have no hand in any man’s blood. But the date of these meek and patient Christians is worn out, long since expired; and now we must have Christians of a new edition, of another, a new-fashioned Holy Ghost’s making.

For do they not begin to tell us in good earnest that they are simple men that think Christians were to continue so still; they were to be so but for a time, till their beaks and talons were grown, till their strength was come to them, and then this dove here might take her wings, fly whither she would; then a new Holy Ghost to come down upon them that would not take it as the other did, but take arms, depose, deprive, blow up; instead of an olive branch, have a match-light in her beak or a bloody knife.

Methinks, if this world go on, it will grow a question problematic, in what shape it was most convenient for the Holy Ghost to have come down? Whether as he did, in the meek shape of a dove? or whether, it had not been much better he had come in some other shape, in the shape of the Roman eagle, or of some other fierce fowl de vulturino genere?

But lying men may change—may, and do; but the Holy Ghost is unus idemque Spiritus, saith the Apostle, changes not, casts not his bill, moults not his feathers. His qualities at the first do last still, and still shall last to the end, and no other notes of a true Christian, but they.

From “Sermon VIII of the Sending of the Holy Ghost” by Lancelot Andrewes, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 2, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Captive of a thousand causes

Daily Reading for October 3

St. Francis, regrettably, has become the captive of a thousand causes, among them the spirituality of escape. The popular domesticated reading of St. Francis, enshrined in backyard statuary and best-selling guides to the spiritual life, reflects the very schizoid spirituality that many North Americans take for granted. Francis is read by Christians and other seekers as the champion of an escapist nature mysticism: someone who can teach us by example how to move beyond the crowded ways of postmodern, computerized existence in order to experience transforming encounters with the beauties and the wonders of the natural world, encounters akin to those that seem to be articulated by Francis’s enormously popular “The Canticle of the Creatures.” Conversely, among devout Christians, Francis is sometimes read as the champion of spiritual interiority: as one who turns away from this world to seek solace within, exemplified, above all, by the mountaintop story of his spiritual and physical experience of being touched by the cross of Jesus, the stigmata.

These popular readings of Francis have had, as a matter of course, the effect of reinforcing today’s schizoid spirituality of escape and consumerism and have, in turn, provided spiritual support to those very forces that are working to destroy the earth and to abandon the poor, both loved so profoundly by Francis himself. To learn from Francis, therefore, we must divest ourselves of our own assumptions about him, such as they may be, and encounter him in his historical otherness.

From “The Spirituality of Nature and the Poor: Revisiting the Historic Vision of St. Francis” by H. Paul Santmire, Ph.D., in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions, edited by Norvene Vest. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 3, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

St. Francis of Assisi

Daily Reading for October 4 • Francis of Assisi, 1226

Francis broke radically with his wealthy class and its lifestyle in 1206, when, standing publicly before his own bishop, with his father looking on unhappily, he threw off his garments, the signs of his wealth and social standing, and revealed himself to be wearing a hair shirt, the sign of a new commitment to poverty on his part. He then threw off that shirt, too. Thus he began his new spiritual vocation—naked, with no possessions whatsoever. For some time he lived as a hermit, supporting himself by begging and reaching out, on occasion, to the poorest of the poor, even to lepers. In 1208 Francis heard Jesus calling him, as the Savior had called the first apostles, to take to the highways and byways to witness to the kingdom of God, all without any possessions of his own.

In his new apostolic ministry, Francis immersed himself in the emergent urban culture of his time, a setting that the spirituality of the then-declining feudal monasteries was generally ill equipped to influence. In this sense, Francis was an urban minister, first and foremost, not a spiritual recluse or a nature mystic. His mission was not to retreat to a solitary life in the wilderness, a still viable spiritual option in his time. Nor was it to retreat to a protected monastery, where he might have imagined himself to be living anew in Paradise, surrounded by a hostile world, awaiting the coming kingdom of God, also a spiritual option that many in the Christian West had been choosing for centuries. No, Francis’s spiritual retreat was in fact an advance into the rising urban culture of his time. His solitary life was in fact a commitment to seek out the lonely and the godforsaken, who were flocking to the cities. Even more comprehensively, the monastery where he awaited the coming of God’s kingdom was in fact the whole world, not just its cities. Francis had become a latter-day apostle who believed that he had been sent by Jesus to preach the Gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15).

From “The Spirituality of Nature and the Poor: Revisiting the Historic Vision of St. Francis” by H. Paul Santmire, Ph.D., in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions, edited by Norvene Vest. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 4, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Preach to every creature

Daily Reading for October 5

Francis led a life of exceedingly great joy and a life of constant praise of God, a life of blessedness in the midst of the fecund goodness of God’s creation, celebrated most forthrightly by his “Canticle of the Creatures.” As a citizen of the peaceable kingdom, transported there by his vision and his prayers, Francis could thereafter call every human, however different or distant, and each of the creatures of nature, however alien to human sensibilities, his brother or his sister. He could be a troubadour of a higher order, constantly rejoicing with friends and foes alike, and with birds and oxen and even wolves and worms. The mandate of Christ had claimed Francis’s soul profoundly: to preach the Gospel to every creature. This he made remarkable efforts to do, in deed most often and in word whenever necessary. And, notwithstanding all the challenges he experienced and all the pains that were thrust upon him, he found joy in the nearness of God to him in every creature, in his encounters with lepers no less than in his songs of praise with the birds of the air.

Francis found peace and joy in his vocation not by getting away from it all, but by getting into it all. His was a vision and a way of life that is open to all of us by the grace of God, even to the most affluent among us who choose to claim his vision and follow his way, to engage ourselves with this world as if it were the world of the kingdom to come.

From “The Spirituality of Nature and the Poor: Revisiting the Historic Vision of St. Francis” by H. Paul Santmire, Ph.D., in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions, edited by Norvene Vest. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 5, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

William Tyndale

Daily Reading for October 6 • William Tyndale, 1536

Prayer is a mourning, a longing, and a desire of the spirit to God-ward, for that which she lacketh; as a sick man mourneth and sorroweth in his heart, longing for health. Faith ever prayeth. For after that by faith we are reconciled to God, and have received mercy and forgiveness of God, the spirit longeth and thirsteth for strength to do the will of God, and that God may be honoured, his name hallowed, and his pleasure and will fulfilled. The spirit waiteth and watcheth on the will of God, and ever hath her own fragility and weakness before her eyes; and when she seeth temptation and peril draw nigh, she turneth to God, and to the testament that God hath made to all that believe and trust in Christ’s blood; and desireth God for his mercy and truth, and for the love he hath to Christ, that he will fulfil his promise, and that he will succour, and help, and give us strength, and that he will sanctify his name in us, and fulfil his godly will in us, and that he will not look on our sin and iniquity, but on his mercy, on his truth, and on the love that he oweth to his Son Christ; and for his sake to keep us from temptation, that we be not overcome; and that he deliver us from evil, and whatsoever moveth us contrary to his godly will.

Moreover, of his own experience he feeleth other men’s need, and no less commendeth to God the infirmities of other than his own, knowing that there is no strength, no help, no succour, but of God only. And as merciful as he feeleth God in his heart to himself-ward, so merciful is he to other; and as greatly as he feeleth his own misery, so great compassion hath he on other. His neighbour is no less care to him than himself: he feeleth his neighbour’s grief no less than his own.

From “The Parable of the Wicked Mammon” by William Tyndale, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 6, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

First you leap

Daily Reading for October 7 • The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

I love
the recklessness of faith.
First you leap,
and then you grow wings.

From Credo by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 7, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Convincing talk

Daily Reading for October 8

When Jesus says, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” I listen. Even during my doubting days in college I listened, and carefully, because Jesus not only knew more about God than I did—that was obvious—he also knew more about the world. He could talk convincingly to me about a father in heaven because he took seriously the earth’s homeless orphans. He could talk to me convincingly about living at peace in the hands of love because he knew that the world lived constantly at war in the grip of hatred. He could talk to me of light, and joy, and exultation, because I knew that he himself knew darkness, sorrow, and death.

From Credo by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 8, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Scientist and theologian

Daily Reading for October 9 • Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1253

Robert Grosseteste was a convinced expositor of the ‘light metaphysic’, regarding light both as the first metaphysical constituent of bodies and as the genetic power of all being. Divine and intellectual light, which to us are no more than analogical applications of the physical term, were to him different manifestations of the same entity. There was for him, therefore, no gulf, no partition between metaphysics and physics such as existed for his thoroughgoing Aristotelian contemporaries, and sciences such as mathematics, geometry, optics and astronomy were an essential part of the philosopher’s equipment. It was only a stage from this, easily traversed under the guidance of Aristotle, to take interest in the subject-matter and methods of science for their own sake, and in order to enlarge and perfect positive knowledge of all kinds. This stage was rapidly attained by Roger Bacon and other pupils and they rightly claimed Grosseteste as their standard-bearer.

He gave them two principles of permanent value: the use of mathematics as a means of description, not (as they were to Plato) as revealing physical or metaphysical cause of things; and the use of observation and experiment controlled by logical methods of analysis and verification. The characteristics of his teaching were: a close attention to the study of the Bible, read textually and critically, as the basis of theology; the study of languages, especially Greek; an interest in securing faithful translations of all ancient works as a necessary part of a scholar’s equipment; and, above all, an attention to mathematics and kindred sciences.

Grosseteste, like the other eminent scholastics of his age, lacked the qualities and tastes of a humanist. His treatises and private letters are wholly without beauty of form and language. Indeed, the element of charm and the impress of personality are almost entirely absent from his correspondence; it is not easy to instance any other man, equally and as justly celebrated for his mental and moral qualities, of whom such a judgement can be made. To us, there is a massive quality about his learning that borders on the ponderous, and an aridity that hides from us the appeal of his holiness. Yet to acute contemporaries, to Adam Marsh, Roger Bacon and Geoffrey of Fontaines, he is the great master, the most learned man of his day.

From The Evolution of Medieval Thought by David Knowles (Vintage Books, 1962).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 9, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Provide a place

Daily Reading for October 10

You bishops, gather the faithful with much patience, and with doctrine and exhortation, as ministers of the kingdom everlasting. Hold your assemblies with all decent order, and appoint the places for the brethren with care and gravity.

And for the presbyters let there be assigned a place in the eastern part of the house; and let the bishop’s throne be set in their midst, and let the presbyters sit with him.

But of the deacons let one stand always by the oblations of the Eucharist; and let another stand without by the door and observe them that come in; and afterwards, when you offer, let them minister together in the church.

And if any one be found sitting out of his place, let the deacon who is within reprove him and make him rise up and sit in a place that is meet for him. And let the deacon also see that no one whispers, or falls asleep, or laughs, or makes signs.

For so it should be, that with decency and decorum they watch in the church, with ears attentive to the word of the Lord. But if, while young men or women sit, an older man or woman should rise and give up their place, do thou, O deacon, scan those who sit, and see which man or woman of them is younger than the rest, and make them stand up, and cause him to sit who had risen and given up his place; and him whom thou hast caused to stand up, lead away and make him to stand behind his neighbours: that others also may be trained and learn to give place to those more honourable than themselves.

But if a poor man or woman should come, especially if they are stricken in years, and there be no place for such, do thou, O bishop, with all thy heart provide a place for them, even if thou have to set upon the ground; that thou be not as one who respects the persons of men, but that thy ministry may be acceptable with God.

From the Didascalia Apostolorum, quoted in Deacons and the Church: Making Connections between Old and New by John N. Collins. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 10, 2007 4:04 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The seven preachers?

Daily Reading for October 11 • Philip, Deacon and Evangelist

Deacons have constantly been inspired by the story of the seven Greek men who were presented to the apostles who, in turn, ‘prayed and laid their hands on them’ (Acts 6:6). Tradition has seen in these men, and in particular the most famous of them, Stephen, the forerunners and prototype of the church’s deacons. Ancient authority and nineteenth-century scholarship give to the idea of an original seven deacons the look and feel of authenticity. And yet Lightfoot himself was aware that the idea of deacons so early in the church’s life—and in this passage in particular—had been ‘much disputed’. A prominent contemporary voice here would be that of James Monroe Barnett, a long-standing champion of the diaconate, who closes his pages on the subject with the plain statement, ‘we must conclude that the Seven were not deacons’. This too has been the view which my own study of Acts 6 has demanded. . . .

Luke does not use a diakon- word again until Acts 6:1, where he refers to ‘the daily ministry/diakonia’ (which we have already met in the phrase of the modern translation, ‘daily distribution [of food]’). Then, in the same part of the story, the Twelve rededicate themselves to their original commission of ‘the ministry/diakonia of the word’ (6:4). Luke then closes the scene of the Seven with the tell-tale phrase, ‘the word of God continued to spread’ (6:7).

With these touches Luke keeps us in mind of his major theme as he moves into the great preaching event in the brief career of Stephen, one of the Seven (7:2-53). With Stephen’s death immediately following, the theme of the progress of the Word re-emerges in the account of another member of the Seven, Philip, engaging in a mission to Samaria; Samaria is the first station outside Jerusalem and Judea according to the stages of the Lord’s programme outlined by Luke (1:8). This mission leaves Philip poised at Caesarea, the port leading to Rome (8:4-14, 26-40), which is Luke’s ultimate objective in the trajectory of the Word. . . .

What does this make of the Seven? It makes of the Seven a new group of preachers, directed at first to the needs of the Hellenists—note how happily the story ends at 6:7: ‘the word of God continued to spread; the number of disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem. . . ’ —and then, after the death of Stephen in Jerusalem, to the wide worlds beyond, as begun in Philip’s mission (8:5). Indeed the only other time we hear of Philip he is called simply ‘the evangelist, one of the seven’ (21:8).

From Deacons and the Church: Making Connections between Old and New by John N. Collins. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 11, 2007 4:03 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Liturgical angels

Daily Reading for October 12

The range and variety of intermediary functions of the deacon have been emphasized in recent studies of diakonia. Ormonde Plater, for example, notes that in the liturgy the deacon “embodies two symbols, servant and angel” and recalls from the New Testament the image of the four living creatures guarding the altar of heavenly liturgy, as seen in Revelation 4. Thus the deacon, Plater tells us, is not only a liturgical table waiter but a liturgical angel—a guard and messenger, one who manages and conducts transactions with the outside.

In one of the earliest patristic references to deacons, Ignatius of Antioch, in his letter to the Philadelphians, indicates that one of the deacon’s functions is to serve as a messenger outside the liturgy, traveling between the churches of distant cities:

News has reached me that the church at Antioch in Syria is at peace. Consequently, it would be a nice thing for you, as a church of God, to elect a deacon to go there on a mission, as God’s representative, and at a formal service to congratulate them and glorify the Name. (Philadelphians 10)

Bishop Richard Grein has recently generalized the go-between status of the deacon in this way:

I like to think of deacons as people on the boundary, that is, on the boundary where the church and the world interface. On this boundary they sometimes face the world to speak the message of the Gospel. Other times they face the church to speak on behalf of the world. In this their task is to keep the boundary open to exchanges between church and world.

The media of those exchanges are matter/energy (for example, bread and wine) and information (money, words, pictures). Whenever the church is in transaction with the world, there is diakonia and there should be its deacons.

From “Serving Intermediary” by Frederick Erickson, in Diaconal Ministry: Past, Present and Future, edited by Peyton Craighill (North American Association for the Diaconate, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 12, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

God hears every whisper

Daily Reading for October 13

You know that God is everywhere, which is a great truth; wherever God dwells there is heaven, and you may feel sure that all which is glorious is near His Majesty.

Remember what St Augustine tells us—I think it comes form his Meditations; how he sought God in many places and at last found the Almighty within himself. Do you consider it of slight importance for a soul given to wandering thoughts to realize this truth and to see that it has no need to go to heaven in order to speak to the eternal Father or to enjoy his company? Nor is it requisite to raise the voice to address him, for he hears every whisper, however low.

Teresa of Avila, quoted in The Joy of the Saints: Spiritual Readings throughout the Year, edited by Robert Llewelyn (Templegate, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 13, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Love what is true

Daily Reading for October 14 • The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

The soul that truly loves God loves all good, seeks all good, protects all good, praises all good, joins itself to good people, helps and defends them, and embraces all the virtues: it only loves what is true and worth loving.

Do you think it possible that one who truly loves God cares, or can care, for vanities, or riches, or worldly things, or pleasures or honours? Neither can such a soul quarrel or feel envy, for it aims at nothing save pleasing the Beloved. It dies with longing for his love and gives its life in striving how to please him better.

Teresa of Avila, quoted in The Joy of the Saints: Spiritual Readings throughout the Year, edited by Robert Llewelyn (Templegate, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 14, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Teresa of Avila

Daily Reading for October 15 • Teresa of Avila

Teresa of Avila taught us to pay attention to the potential of our humanity and to the process of growing into the fulfillment of our baptismal promises. Openness to God’s spirit at work in our lives can lead to the transformation of our desires. Eventually, our desires become less and less fragmented and we desire more and more what God desires. Assuming that God desires the well-being of humanity, a person transformed by him then lives in a way that furthers the actualization of that desire of God. Our desires become consonant with God’s. Yet this intensification of personal encounters with God is not a matter of smooth, always ascending biographies. On the contrary, breaks, leaps, bounds, detours, and crises necessarily form a part of this concept of growth and are often the needed impetus toward the next step in the maturation process. “In spiritual growth nothing can be forced. Periods of growth occur, as well as creative incubation periods—containing regressive arrests and progressive spurts of growth.”

The guide on this way of growth, as in all concepts of Christian spirituality, is God, or rather the Holy Spirit. Thus spiritual growth can be more precisely characterized as growth guided by God’s good Spirit. It is growth toward freedom and maturity, particularly freedom from various kinds of dependency and slavery. And it is growth that is progressive, a process beginning with the purgative way, continuing with the illuminative way, leading towards the fulfillment in the unitive way. It is like a science of psychological health. Holiness is true wholeness of the human incarnate spirit.

From “Freedom to Souls: Spiritual Accompaniment According to the Carmelite Tradition” by Michael Plattig, O. Carm., in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions, edited by Norvene Vest. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 15, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In you will I rest

Daily Reading for October 16 • Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer, 1555, 1556

If you will build a glorious church unto God, see first yourselves to be in charity with your neighbours, and suffer not them to be offended by your works. Then, when ye come into your parish-church, you bring with you the holy temple of God; as Saint Paul saith, ‘You yourselves be the very holy temples of God:’ and Christ saith by his prophet, ‘In you will I rest, and intend to make my mansion and abiding place.’

O heavenly Father, the author and fountain of all truth, the bottomless sea of all understanding, send, we beseech thee, thy Holy Spirit into our hearts, and lighten our understandings with the beams of thy heavenly grace. We ask this, O merciful Father, for thy dear Son our Saviour Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

From The Second Sermon on the Card by Hugh Latimer and a prayer by Nicholas Ridley, both quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 16, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Ignatius of Antioch

Daily Reading for October 17 • Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch and Martyr, c. 115

I am writing letters to all the churches, to assure them that I am dying for God of my own free will--that is, if you don’t interfere. Please, please don’t make a misguided attempt to do me a kindness. Let me be fodder for the wild beasts--that’s how I can come to God. I am God’s wheat, and the teeth of the beasts are grinding me to flour, to be made into a pure loaf for Christ. Please encourage the animals to become my tomb; don’t let them leave any scraps of my body behind. That way, when I have fallen asleep I shall be a nuisance to nobody. Then I shall be a real disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world can no longer see my body. Pray to Christ for me, that in this way I may become a sacrifice to God.

From the Letter to the Romans of Ignatius of Antioch, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Saint Luke the Evangelist

Daily Reading for October 18 • Saint Luke the Evangelist

Our tradition has always been that the author of the third gospel and Acts is “Luke, the beloved physician.” This title comes, however, from a letter written by one of Paul’s disciples to the Colossians (Col. 4:14). The tradition is appropriate and—though we can never prove it—it may even be true. As we do, our forebears could see that the third gospel has more emphasis upon Jesus’ ministry of healing than Matthew, Mark, or John. Luke’s healing stories stand out, then and now. In our time, however, we can see even more evidence for the tradition. Luke uniquely distinguishes among “caring,” “curing,” and “healing” with his Greek vocabulary. Much of this language occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, but does have parallels in the medical journals and records of the first century.

For Luke, the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth is healing for the world. For Luke, the power of God’s Holy Spirit and the incarnation of God in Jesus is healing for the world. For Luke, the power of evil in the world is overcome by the power of God’s Spirit in the person of Jesus and in the life and work of the faithful. This is true, he says, before and after the resurrection. This is true, Luke claims, from the moment of Gabriel’s good news for Zechariah until this very day. The healing embrace the writer of Luke–Acts offers describes a creation that is healed when God and creation love each other in return.

From One to Watch, One to Pray: Introducing the Gospels by Minka Shura Sprague. A Seabury Classic from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 18, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Already in heaven

Daily Reading for October 19 • Henry Martyn, Priest, and Missionary to India and Persia, 1812

O send thy light and thy truth, that we may live always near to thee, our God. Let us feel thy love, that we may be as it were already in heaven, that we may do all our work as the angels do theirs. Let us be ready for every work, be ready to go out or come in, to stay or to depart, just as thou shalt appoint. Lord, let us have no will of our own, or consider our true happiness as depending in the slightest degree on anything that can befall us outwardly, but as consisting altogether in conformity to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A prayer of Henry Martyn (1781-1812), quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 19, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The prayer of power

Daily Reading for October 20

We have never run or knowingly patronized sweat shops, or underpaid workers; the struggle between organized labor and company unions is wholly out of our picture. Indeed, we have really no direct contact with these great abuses and injustices which wise men are denouncing. We live within the capitalistic order, to be sure; and we are being taught not to approve of it; yet we can not run away. We could not escape the profit system for that matter, even if we wove cloth for our own garments on Gandhi’s spinning wheels. There are always a few interesting idealists who are trying to run away but they are very partially successful. We can not escape; we do not feel responsible for the system; we agree with our spiritual guides that it is a very bad system. Then they tell us that “we” must change it, and we inevitably ask them, “how?” No answer comes. . . .

The responsibility for social intercession is not satisfied by vague aspiration, “Thy Kingdom Come.” That petition, to be sure, covers all our desires; but if we pray specifically for the recovery to health of a beloved friend, for example, we should be equally specific in our prayers for the health of the body politic. Now we can not be specific unless we have some conviction and some intelligence. There is a type of purely formal prayer; not wholly, useless, we hope. But most Christian people have some little experience at least of another kind of prayer, the prayer of power. That kind of a prayer must be enlightened; it must be lit at the torch of knowledge. The chief reason why all Christian people should be making themselves intelligent about the great issues of the day, is that they may learn to pray with fervor and to use the prayer of power.

To cultivate social imagination; to study; to pray; here even if no practical activity is possible to us, are outlets for that need of action native to men, here is sure release from bewildered and unworthy private-mindedness. . . . But let us not suppose that what lies before us will be easy. To evolve that “new economic order” which the Churches desire, will mean heavy cost to every single man. Let us rejoice; for tests of heroism and of readiness for sacrifice await us. The fate of our whole Western civilization hangs today in the balance; and on the Church, that is, on the body of her children, this fate may well depend.

From “Social Problems Facing the Church” by Vida Dutton Scudder, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 20, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Ripening faith

Daily Reading for October 21 • The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Again, we pray and pray, and no answer comes. The boon does not arrive. Why? Perhaps we are not spiritually ready for it. It would not be a real blessing. But the persistence, the importunity of faith, is having a great effect on our spiritual nature. It ripens. A time comes when we are ready for an answer. We then present ourselves to God in a spiritual condition which reasonably causes him to yield. The new spiritual state is not the answer to our prayer, but it is its effect; and it is the condition which makes the answer possible. It makes the prayer effectual. The gift can be a blessing now. So God resists us no more. Importunity prevails, not as mere importunity (for God is not bored into answer), but as the importunity of God’s own elect, that is, as obedience, as a force of the kingdom, as increased spiritual power, as real moral action, bringing corresponding strength and fitness to receive. I have often found that what I sought most I did not get at the right time, not till it was too late, not till I had learned to do without it, till I had renounced it in principle (though not in desire). Perhaps it had lost some of its zest by the time it came, but it meant more as a gift and a trust. That was God’s right time—when I could have it as though I had it not. If it came, it came not to gratify me, but to glorify him and be a means of serving him.

From The Soul of Prayer by P. T. Forsyth, quoted in The Westminster Collection of Christian Meditations, compiled by Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild (Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 21, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Perseverance

Daily Reading for October 22

Perseverance is not merely the crown and stamp of perfection, it must accompany every step in the growth of every grace; just as the texture of the tree must be woven firm in every stage of its growth, so perseverance has to watch over the growth of each virtue day by day; every day in which it fails, the graces which are under its care begin to droop and lose their bloom.

Thus perseverance is not only a virtue in itself, but it is one without whose constant presence and assistance no other virtue can develop on step in its growth. If charity, then, be the soil into which all must spread their roots, perseverance is the cohesive force that gives form and consistency to all over whose development it presides. And thus temptation will often leave all the graces that the soul is trying to form unassailed, and attack the one grace of perseverance; for it knows well that if it can destroy this, all else must fail with it. We often meet with people with very high aspirations and the beginnings of many graces and with great possibilities, but nothing in them matures, nothing attains its full bloom, for they are lacking in the one grace which is the guardian and protector of all—they have no perseverance.

From Some Principles and Practices of the Spiritual Life (1899) by B. W. Maturin, quoted in The Westminster Collection of Christian Meditations, compiled by Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild (Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 22, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

True community

Daily Reading for October 23 • St. James of Jerusalem, Brother of our Lord Jesus Christ and Martyr, c. 62

It is quite easy to found a community. There are always plenty of courageous people who want to be heroes, are ready to sleep on the ground, to work hard hours each day, to live in dilapidated houses. It’s not hard to camp—anyone can rough it for a time. So the problem is not in getting the community started—there’s always enough energy for take-off. The problem comes when we are in orbit and going round and round the same circuit. The problem is in living with brothers and sisters whom we have not chosen but who have been given to us, and in working ever more truthfully towards the goals of the community.

A community which is just an explosion of heroism is not a true community. True community implies a way of living and seeing reality; it implies above all fidelity in the daily round. And this is made up of simple things—getting meals, using and washing the dishes and using them again, going to meetings—as well as gifts, joy and celebration.

A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that human greatness is to accept our insignificance, our human condition and our earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of humanity is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.

From Community and Growth by Jean Vanier (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 23, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Enclose us in your threefold wings

Daily Reading for October 24

Holy Wisdom in your power
Hold us fast in every hour.

Enclose us in your threefold wings
Spreading to embrace all things.

One pierces heaven’s heights above,
Another touches earth with love.

The other moves with tender care
In mystery through the cosmic air.

Holy Wisdom in your power
Enlighten us in every hour.

A prayer of Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in Invincible Spirits: A Thousand Years of Women’s Spiritual Writings, compiled by Felicity Leng (Eerdmans, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 24, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Come home

Daily Reading for October 25

May the Lord be my friend,
Who once on earth endured on the gallows-tree
Suffered here for the sins of men.
He has redeemed us, he has given us life
And a home in Heaven. Hope was renewed
With bliss and blessing for those who had been through burning.
The Son was successful in that expedition,
Mighty in victory, when with a mass,
A great crowd of souls came to God’s kingdom.
The Almighty Ruler, to joy among the angels
And all the saints, who in heaven already
Lived in glory. Then the Lord,
Almighty God, came home to his own land.

From “The Dream of the Rood” (c. 780), attributed to Cynewulf, a poet in Northumbria. Quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 25, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Alfred the Great

Daily Reading for October 26 • Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, 899

We pray to you, O Lord, who are the supreme Truth, and all truth is from you. We beseech you, O Lord, who are the highest Wisdom, and all the wise depend on you for their wisdom. You are the supreme Joy, and all who are happy owe it to you. You are the highest Good, and all goodness comes from you. You are the Light of minds, and all receive their understanding from you. We love you—indeed we love you above all things. We seek you, follow you, and are prepared to serve you. We desire to dwell under your power, for you are the King of all. Amen.

A prayer of Alfred the Great, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 26, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Guide me to my soul's need

Daily Reading for October 27

Lord God almighty,
I pray you for your great mercy,
and by the token of the holy rood,
guide me to your will, to my soul’s need,
better than I can myself;
and shield me against my foes,
seen and unseen;
and teach me to do your will,
that I may love you inwardly before all things
with a clean mind and a clean body.
For you are my maker and redeemer,
my help, my comfort, my trust and my hope.
Praise and glory be to you now,
ever and ever, world without end. Amen.

A prayer of Alfred the Great, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The church exists by mission

Daily Reading for October 28 • The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Identity, vocation, and mission for Christians are not three separate realities, but are mutually dependent. Christian identity is realized through Christian mission. Mission defines and fulfills identity. Vocation, a word derived form the Latin verb vocare, “to call,” is the calling every Christian has both to be with God and to carry out God’s mission. We can see all this as a theological expression of the relationship between being and doing, living and working. One’s being is only partly separable from one’s doing, for just as our doing is grounded in our being, our being is realized through our doing. Our doing expresses who we are, but we also discover who we are through our doing. Just that intimate is the relationship between Christian identity and Christian mission. As the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner is reputed to have said, “The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.”

From Horizons of Mission by Titus Presler, Volume 11 of the New Church’s Teaching Series (Cowley Publications, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Bishop James Hannington

Daily Reading for October 29 • James Hannington and his Companions, Martyrs, 1885

The Church Missionary Society had had for some years a station at Mombasa, on the coast, but when the discoverer Stanley, who had visited Uganda, told the story at home of his intercourse with King Mtesa and with his people there, they at once resolved to send a mission to Lake Victoria Nyanza and its neighbourhood. In 1876 the first band went forth, but in the course of a year and a half four out of the eight had fallen in Africa, and two men were obliged to return home. . . . The news reached England—it reached the Sussex village, and it stirred the heart of the young minister there. Why should not he go forth and fill the place of those who had fallen? He had had thoughts of missionary work before, but there were home claims—he was a husband and father—and the way was not clear.

Now, however, he deemed the call from God had come, and he offered himself to the Society to go out for a time without finally giving up his church at Hurst. He was accepted, and leaving his quiet parsonage and peaceful home, the brave soldier of Jesus Christ went forth to hardship and exile for His dear sake. He sailed with five other missionaries for the east coast of Africa, in May, 1882, and in the following month they left Zanzibar for the interior, whither they were bound. . . . It was not such an easy life as he had known before, as regards outward comfort, but when the love of Christ is in the heart we can do without being easy and comfortable. . . .

What were the Bishop's thoughts on this, his last journey? He has told us himself. After speaking of his difficulties and trials, he adds, “Yet I feel in capital spirits, and feel sure of results, though perhaps they may not come in the way that we expect. In the midst of the storm I can say—

‘Peace, perfect peace, the future all unknown?
Jesus we know, and He is on the throne.’

"You must uphold my hands in prayer lest they fall. If this is the last chapter of earthly history, then the next will be the first page of the heavenly; no blots and smudges, no incoherence, but sweet converse in the presence of the Lamb.” This was his last letter to the Church Missionary House. He was “almost home,” though he knew it not.

The party arrived safely at the north-east corner of the lake, and a few days from here would have taken them to Uganda, where welcome would have awaited them. For the work had been prospering, other helpers had joined Mr. Wilson, and more than a hundred natives had been baptized into the Christian faith. But there was a new danger of which the Bishop was unaware. Mtesa had died some time before. He had been very uncertain in his behaviour to the Christians, though he had professed himself one; his son Muangu was much the same, and just now he had been alarmed about German invasion and annexation in this part of Africa. So when he heard of a party of Europeans entering his dominions by the north side, a thing never done before, he put the two things together, and sent to forbid them.

The Bishop meanwhile had gone forward with about fifty men, leaving Mr. Jones with the rest. The messengers of King Muangu met them, and arrested them, saying it was the “back door” into their country, and they must not proceed. They were kept in confinement eight days, and then, alas! were killed, the men being speared and the Bishop shot with his own rifle. Four men only escaped, and fled back to Mr. Jones with the terrible news; then the sad remains of the party retraced their steps back to the coast.

It was a sad ending (as it seems to us) to a brave and noble Christian life. But God's ways are not as our ways. He makes no mistake, and there is no such thing as failure in His purposes. Already the death of the good Bishop has fired anew the missionary spirit, so that even in the few weeks after the news came fifty-three young men offered themselves to the Church Missionary Society for the mission field. Let us pray that many more may do the same.

From the introduction to Peril and Adventure in Central Africa: Being Illustrated Letters to the Youngsters at Home by the late Bishop James Hannington (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1886).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 29, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The missionary legacy

Daily Reading for October 30

Mistakes that Christian missionaries from the Global North made in their work in the Global South have become so well known that caution and suspicion are the first reactions many people have to the mention of world mission. Many missionaries have dismissed the primal religions of Africa and Polynesia and have demonized such world religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Some have presented the gospel through their own ethnic and cultural identity, depicting Jesus, for instance, as a blonde European. Missionaries have sometimes not bothered to learn the language of the people to whom they were sent, insisting that their hosts should learn English or French or German. Some missionaries have disparaged and dismissed indigenous cultures as lacking worthwhile values and have sought to substitute western norms. In their evangelistic zeal, they have ignored human needs, and some have lived a lifestyle far removed from that of the people they seek to serve. The style and content of development projects have sometimes been misconceived and poorly implemented.

It is very important that Christians in the Global North absorb this history and avoid naïve optimism about mission, both historically and for the future. It is equally important that we not be paralyzed by this history. Not only is Christianity now a global religion, but Christians in many recently evangelized societies have vital and growing autonomous churches, and they have their own affirmations and critiques of the western missionary enterprise. These indigenous Christians describe the mistakes that western missionaries made much more acutely and eloquently than we can, for they experience them from the inside. Often they also celebrate how missionaries preached the gospel, established churches, and founded institutions of education and healthcare that continue to be crucial in the indigenous churches’ witness in newly independent nations. Assessments of those on the receiving end, in other words, tend to be more balanced between shortcomings and gifts, while our own soul-searching is often more uniformly negative about the past and pessimistic about the future. If we are serious about learning from our partners, we need to listen to their perspective on the missionary legacy.

From Horizons of Mission by Titus Presler, Volume 11 of the New Church’s Teaching Series (Cowley Publications, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 30, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Toward practical resurrection

Daily Reading for October 31

Three weeks after Celusim’ne’s death her mother turned up at our nutrition office. She placed before me two bulging baskets of large, ripe Haitian grapefruits. She had walked six hours from Bouly in the hot sun just to offer me this gift. I was overwhelmed, speechless under the generous donation of such wealth out of such dire poverty. “But . . . we failed,” I wanted to say. “We didn’t save her.”

But then I saw the gift for what it was: her act of resurrection in the face of death. This was her work of hopeful solidarity. More pointedly, for me her gift was a sacrament of understanding and perception; through it I began to learn how it is that Christian solidarity can and should move from failure to serious hope, from hiddenness to revelation, and through death toward life.

Herein lies a central principle of Christian solidarity often neglected in certain ecclesiastical circles that issue amorphous calls to “social justice.” Far too often we see but do not perceive. We must learn that it is not we, Christians of the developed world, who bear the right to define the contours of our companionship with the poor and the suffering. Rather, it is the poor and the suffering themselves who bear that right. It is they whose knowledge of death and marginalization is terribly intimate, and thus it is often they who can point us the way forward through destitution and toward practical resurrection. Our task, then, is as much one of listening to and understanding suffering as it is a responsible and determined work toward its alleviation.

From “Solidarity with the Suffering” by Justin Mutter, in The Scripture of Their Lives: Stories of Mission Companions Today, edited by Jane Butterfield. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 31, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Feast of All Saints

Daily Reading for November 1 • All Saints Day

This hymn was written by the Reverend Robert Lowry, D.D., a Baptist minister in New York and the editor of a number of popular Sunday school songbooks. He wrote the words to this well-known hymn when he was a pastor in Brooklyn, on a hot July day in 1864 during a severe epidemic. Dr. Lowry was thinking of the sad scenes all around him when the question arose in his mind, “Shall we meet again? We are parting at the river of death; shall we meet at the river of life?” With his heart full of these thoughts, he seated himself at his parlor organ, and both the words and the music of the famous hymn came to him as if by inspiration.

Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel-feet have trod,
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God?

Chorus:
Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.

On the margin of the river,
Washing up its silver spray,
We will walk and worship ever
All the happy, golden day.

Ere we reach the shining river,
Lay we every burden down;
Grace our spirits will deliver,
And provide a robe and crown.

At the smiling of the river,
Mirror of the Saviour’s face,
Saints, whom death will never sever,
Lift their songs of saving grace.

Soon we'll reach the silver river;
Soon our pilgrimage will cease;
Soon our happy hearts will quiver
With the melody of peace.

From A Treasure of Hymns by Amos R. Wells (Boston: United Society of Christian Endeavor, c1914).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 1, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The communion of saints

Daily Reading for November 3

The “communion of saints” is an important resource for the cultivation of Christian spirituality. A portion of the current consensus is based in a willingness to think of the “saints” in a fashion that includes and yet goes beyond the formal process of canonization. Lawrence Cunningham, for example, suggests that “the saint is a person whose life is so centered on a profound religious vision that it is radically different; that difference is so apparent to others for its quality and depth that the sympathetic observer can see the value of the religious vision that has grasped the saint.” Karl Rahner and William Thompson pointed in this same direction as they linked the classical saints and mystics to the spirituality of “Every Day Mystics.” Viewed in this fashion, Cunningham was correct to point out that consultation of the saints “serves both a paradigmatic and prophetic function” for Christian spirituality. It is paradigmatic because the saints offer us models for pursuing and practicing Christian spirituality that are road-tested and reliable; it is prophetic insofar as the luminous sanctity of the saints’ lives carries with it—either implicitly or explicitly—a judgment upon our own lives and values.

The role of the communion sanctorum in Christian spirituality is based in the fellowship with Christ and fellowship among Christians that is epitomized in the Eucharistic celebration of Christ’s body. It emphasizes the transcendent unity of Christians, “the saints” past and present, that shapes Christian spirituality through the quality of life engendered by Christian koinonia and that takes expression in congregational life, community life, and various forms of devotion. “Such devotions,” Edward Yarnold reminds us, “can express a joy and confidence in the way in which God works through human intermediaries; they depend upon the doctrine of the communion of saints, which asserts the interdependence of all Christians, living and dead.”

From the introduction to Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 3, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

One choir

Daily Reading for November 4 • The Sunday after All Saints

This is the depth of the liturgy. It is the presence of angels, archangels, the kingdom of heaven, earth and its people, the whole of creation, and the Creator, too. It is an all-embracing drama, a meeting-place of the earthly and the heavenly. This truth is made plain during the Small Entrance, when the following prayer is recited: ‘Make with our entry an entry of your holy angels, celebrating the liturgy with us.’ ‘In this mystery,’ the liturgy continues in the Great Entrance, ‘we are icons of the cherubim.’ Indeed, as John Chrysostom elsewhere affirms: ‘Those in heaven and those on earth form a single festival, a shared thanksgiving, one choir.’

Everything is always sung in the liturgy of the Orthodox. It might be said that Orthodox Christians do not come to church simply to pray. Nor do they go to church to be in silence. Something is happening there, in liturgy, and Orthodox Christians are invited to participate. Before each liturgy, Sunday by Sunday, Orthodox Christians pray: ‘God, our God, who sent your heavenly bread, the food of the whole world, to bless us, bless also the offering.’ Orthodox Christians assemble in liturgy to eat and to enjoy together; and not just to see and hear and feel the Word of God.

Together, heaven and earth offer one hymn, one prayer, one feast and one doxology. Everything sings and exclaims, ‘crying aloud and saying: holy, holy, holy.’ Everything aspires to divine holiness and symbolizes an overture to paradise. The created world does not escape to heaven; indeed, the whole world becomes an organic part of the mystery of heaven. Within that context, one diminishes in humility and offers thanksgiving and glorification for all.

From Light Through Darkness: The Orthodox Tradition by John Chryssavgis (Orbis, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 4, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Religion and politics

Daily Reading for November 5

An old saying holds that religion and politics don’t mix. Probably it was first said to Pharaoh when he turned down Moses’ plea to “let my people go.” Generally what it means is, “Your religion doesn’t mix with my politics.” If religion is where it all comes together—the microcosm and the macrocosm, intimate relationships and public policy—if Christians are called so to live “that in everything God may be glorified” (1 Peter 4:11), then religion and politics do mix and to claim otherwise is really to understand neither.

But to claim they mix is not to say they are identical. It is one thing to say with the prophet, “Let justice roll down like mighty waters” (Amos 5:24), and quite another to work out the irrigation system. The former is a religious concern, the latter a political task.

While Christians certainly don’t have to take positions on every issue, on matters of justice they have no choice. Said South African bishop Desmond Tutu, “When the elephant has his foot on the tail of the mouse, and you say you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

And neither will God. When you stop to think about it, how can God be neutral? How can God do otherwise than side with the oppressed? If God sided with tyrants, God would be malevolent. If God sided with no one, God would be indifferent, which is to say again “malevolent,” because God would be supporting tyranny by not protesting it.

The story of God and Moses and Pharaoh reminds us that compassion, for its implementation, demands confrontation. It also puts churches on notice to identify not with the structures of power but with the victims of power.

From “Beyond Charity” in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 5, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

William Temple

Daily Reading for November 6 • William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1944

Christianity and Social Order, published in 1942, was Temple's last and perhaps his most provocative book, in which he articulated the principles which had guided his political activity and challenged many popular assumptions. The church is not a department of life concerned only with personal beliefs and devotional practices, he wrote. From earliest times, the church has spoken out on public matters, and it is only in recent years that this right has been questioned. When the economic order fails to build Christian character, the church must seek to change it. "The church may tell the politician what ends the social order should promote; but it must leave to the politician the devising of the precise means to those ends," Temple wrote. Society should be structured to give each person the widest opportunity to become what God has placed it in that person to become, Temple said. He saw personal freedom (maximum individual choice), social fellowship (strengthening family, national, and international ties), and service (wider loyalties taking priority over narrow ones) as the key principles leading to such a society."The art of government," Temple wrote, "in fact is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands."

From the introduction to William Temple in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 6, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

St. Willibrord

Daily Reading for November 7 • Willibrord, Archbishop of Utrecht, Missionary to Frisia, 739

Many miracles were also wrought by divine power through His servant Willibrord. Whilst the ministry of preaching the Gospel is to be preferred to the working of miracles and the showing of signs, yet, because such miracles are recorded as having been performed, I think mention of them ought not to be suppressed; and so that glory may be given to God who vouchsafed them, I will insert them into this narrative, and in this way what we know to have been achieved in former times may not be lost to future ages.

Thus, when the venerable man, according to his custom, was on one of his missionary journeys he came to a village called Walichrum, where an idol of the ancient superstition remained. When the man of God, moved by zeal, smashed it to pieces before the eyes of the custodian, the latter, seething with anger, in a sudden fit of passion struck the priest of Christ on the head with a sword, as if to avenge the insult paid to his god. But, as God was protecting His servant, the murderous blow did him no harm. On seeing this, Willibrord's companions rushed forward to kill the wicked man for his audacity. The man of God good-naturedly delivered the culprit from their hands and allowed him to go free. The same day, however, he was seized and possessed by the devil and three days later he ended his wretched life in misery. And thus, because the man of God followed the Lord's command and was unwilling to avenge the wrongs done to him, he was vindicated all the more by the Lord Himself, just as He had said regarding the wrongs which the wicked inflicted upon His saints: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

On another occasion, when the blessed man was on his way to a cell belonging to him called Susteren, from the name of the stream that flows past it, he took a narrow path running through the cornfields of a certain wealthy landowner. When the keeper of the fields saw this he was furious and began to revile the man of God. Those who accompanied Willibrord wanted to punish the man for insulting him, but the saint of God mildly restrained them, not wishing that anyone should perish on his account, since his whole happiness lay in bringing salvation to all. When he found it impossible to calm the fury of the foolish man, Willibrord did not persist but returned by the way he had come. Next day, however, the wretch who had not feared to heap insults upon the servant of God was struck down on that very spot with sudden death before a crowd of onlookers.

From The Life of St. Willibrord by Alcuin (c. 796).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 7, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Christ loves childhood

Daily Reading for November 9

One day when the disciples were asking among themselves as to who was of greatest importance in the kingdom of heaven, the evangelist recounts that Jesus “called a little child over and stood the child in their midst and said: ‘I assure you, unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God. Whoever strives to be lowly, becoming like this child, is of greatest importance in that heavenly reign.’”

Christ loves the childhood which he first assumed in his soul and body. Christ loves childhood: toward it he steers the conduct of adults and toward it he leads the aged; after its example he fashions those whom he raises to the eternal kingdom.

From a sermon for Epiphany by Leo the Great, in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 9, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Leo the Great

Daily Reading for November 10 • Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome, 461

The whole body of the faithful profess that they “believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary.” By which three clauses the engines of almost all heretics are shattered. For when God is believed to be both “Almighty” and “Father,” it is proved that the Son is everlasting together with himself, differing in nothing from the Father, because he was born as “God from God,” Almighty from Almighty, Coeternal from Eternal; not later in time, not inferior in power, not unlike him in glory, not divided from him in essence, but the same Only-begotten and Everlasting Son of an Everlasting Parent who was “born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary.” This birth in time in no way detracted form, in no way added to, that divine and everlasting birth; but expended itself wholly in the work of restoring man, who had been deceived; so that it might both overcome death, and by its power “destroy the devil who had the power of death.” For we could not have overcome the author of sin and of death, unless he who could neither be contaminated by sin, nor detained by death, had taken upon himself our nature, and made it his own.

From The Tome of Leo, quoted in Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Volume 1: From Its Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation, by William C. Placher (Westminster / John Knox, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 10, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Patriotism

Daily Reading for November 11 • The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

I have urged the need to chip away at national sovereignty and expand global loyalty. But I believe that global loyalty will be reached through patriotism, not by rejecting it. Christians simply cannot allow political leaders to hijack patriotism in the service of fervent jingoism. As I see it, there are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad patriots are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics of their country. The good patriots are those who carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s eternal lover’s quarrel with the entire world.

Nationalism at the expense of another nation is as evil as racism at the expense of another race. Nevertheless, just as husbands can love their wives without denigrating other women, so patriots ought to be able to love their country without disparaging others. I love America, and it is precisely because I love my country and want to promote her best interests that I want her citizens to recognize their interdependence with all nations, their need for common rather than national security, the worldwide need for disarmament, environmental protection, and greater economic justice.

Genuine love expands, it doesn’t contract. True patriotism can only extend minds and hearts, extend them to the point where all citizens in every land will one day vote for a vision of human unity once so eloquently described by a candidate for no less a post than that of the U.S. presidency: “We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say, the love we give our fragile craft” (Adlai Stevenson).

To eyes that are open, this vision is still accessible, not yet beyond hand’s reach.

From “A Vision of the Future” in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 11, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Charles Simeon

Daily Reading for November 12 • Charles Simeon, priest, 1836

Merely speculative knowledge is of little avail: it is only like the light of the moon, which dissipates obscurity indeed, but communicates neither heat nor strength. The knowledge which alone will augment our love, is that which produces suitable impression on the mind; it is that which, like the sun-beam, enlivens and invigorates our whole frame. Now there is a great difference, even amongst good men, with respect to their perception of divine truths. There is, if we may use the expression, a spiritual taste, which is acquired and heightened by exercise. As, in reference to the objects of sense, there is an exquisite ‘judgment’ attained by some, so that their eye, their ear, and their palate can discern excellencies or defects, where others, with less discriminating organs, perceive nothing particular; so is there, in reference to spiritual things, an exquisite sensibility in some persons, whereby their enjoyment of divine truth is wonderfully enhanced. Now this is the knowledge which we should aspire after, and in which our love should progressively abound. We should not be satisfied with that speculative knowledge which may be gained from men and books; but should seek that spiritual discernment, which nothing but the operation of the Spirit of God upon the soul can produce. Whatever be the particular objects of our regard, we should get a realizing sense of their excellency, and be duly impressed with their importance.

From “Discourses Digested into one continued Series” by Charles Simeon, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 12, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Holiness is our only option

Daily Reading for November 13

No nation is well served by illusions of its righteousness. All nations make decisions based on self-interest and then defend them in the name of morality. Saint Augustine gave excellent advice not only to individuals but to nations as well when he said, “Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside of yourself.” He was reflecting Saint Paul’s “all have sinned and fallen short.” It is tempting, of course, to believe that some have sinned—for example, “that evil empire”—or that “most have sinned, but not us.” Paul’s insistence, however, that all have sinned makes an important point: if we are not one with our enemies in love, at least we are one with them in sin, which is no mean bond, for it precludes the possibility of separation through judgment. That is the meaning of the injunction “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Innocence may be beguiling in children, but it is spiritually disastrous in adults, who ought to know that in the sullied stream of human life it is not innocence but holiness that is our only option. As with individuals, so with nations, their salvation lies not in being sinless but in believing that there is more mercy in God than sin in us.

From “Beyond War” in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 13, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Samuel Seabury

Daily Reading for November 14 • Consecration of Samuel Seabury, First American Bishop, 1784

The general practice in this country is to have monthly Communions, and I bless God the Holy Ordinance is so often administered. Yet when I consider its importance, both on account of the positive command of Christ and of the many and great benefits we receive from it, I cannot but regret that it does not make a part of every Sunday’s solemnity. That it was the principal part of the daily worship of the primitive Christians all the early accounts inform us. And it seems probable from the Acts of the Apostles that the Christians came together in their religious meetings chiefly for its celebration. And the ancient writers generally interpret the petition in our Lord’s prayer, ‘Give us this day,’ or day by day, ‘our daily bread,’ of the spiritual food in the Holy Eucharist. Why daily nourishment should not be as necessary to our souls as to our bodies no good reason can be given.

If the Holy Communion was steadily administered whenever there is an Epistle and Gospel appointed, which seems to have been the original intention, I cannot help thinking that it would revive the esteem and reverence Christians once had for it, and would show its good effects in their lives and conversations. I hope the time will come when this pious and Christian practice may be renewed. In the meantime, let me beseech you to make good use of the opportunities you have; and let nothing but real necessity keep you from the heavenly banquet when you have it in your power to partake of it.

May the consideration of this subject have its proper effect upon every one of you! And the God of peace be with you, keep you in the unity of His Church, and in the bond of peace and in all righteousness of life, guide you by His Spirit through this world, and receive you to glory through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

From “An Earnest Persuasive to Frequent Communion” by Samuel Seabury, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 14, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Life in the slow lane

Daily Reading for November 15

My move from New York City to western South Dakota changed my sense of time and space so radically I might as well have gone to sea. In journeying on the inland ocean of the Plains, the great void at the heart of North America, I've discovered that time and distance, those inconveniences that modern life with its increasingly sophisticated computer technologies seeks to erase, have a reality and a terrifying beauty all their own.

Like all who choose life in the slow lane—sailors, monks, farmers—I partake of a contemplative reality. Living close to such an expanse of land I find I have little incentive to move fast, little need of instant information. I have learned to trust the processes that take time, to value change that is not sudden or ill-considered but grows out of the ground of experience. Such change is properly defined as conversion, a word that at its root connotes not a change of essence but of perspective, as turning around; turning back to or returning; turning one’s attention to.

Both monasteries and the rural communities on the Plains are places where nothing much happens. Paradoxically, they are also places where being open to conversion is most necessary if community is to survive. The inner impulse toward conversion, a change of heart, may be muted in a city, where outward change is fast, noisy, ever-present. But in the small town, in the quiet arena, a refusal to grow (which is one way Gregory of Nyssa defined sin) makes any constructive change impossible. Both monasteries and small towns lose their ability to be truly hospitable to the stranger when people use them as a place to hide out, a place to escape from the demands of life.

Because of the monotony of the monastic life, the bad thought of boredom (or acedia, the noonday demon) has traditionally been thought to apply particularly to monks, but I think most people have endured a day or two along the lines of this fourth-century description by the monk Evagrius:

I makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and the day is fifty hours long. Then it constrains the monk to look constantly out the window, to walk outside the cell to gaze carefully at the sun and determine how far it stands from the dinner hour, to look now this way and that to see if perhaps one of the brethren appears from his cell.

Anyone living in isolated or deprived circumstances, whether in a monastery or a quiet little town on the Great Plains, is susceptible to the noonday demon. It may appear as an innocuous question; “Isn’t the mail here yet?” But as monks have always known, such restlessness can lead to profound despair that makes a person despise his or her neighbors, work, and even life itself.

From Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris (Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 15, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Queen Margaret of Scotland

Daily Reading for November 16 • Margaret, Queen of Scotland, 1093

The Norman Conquest of England could not fail to exercise a deep and lasting effect also on the northern kingdom, and it was the immediate cause of the introduction of English ideas and English civilization into Scotland. The flight to Scotland, after the battle of Hastings, of Edgar Atheling, heir of the Saxon Royal house, with his mother and his sisters Margaret and Christina, was followed at no great distant date by the marriage of Margaret to King Malcolm, as his second wife. A greatniece of St. Edward the Confessor, Margaret, whose personality stands out clearly before us in the pages of her biography by her confessor Turgot, was a woman not only of saintly life but of strong character who exercised the strongest influence on the Scottish Church and kingdom, as well as on the members of her own family. The character of Malcolm III has been depicted in very different colours by the English and Scottish chroniclers, the former painting him as the severe and merciless invader of England, while to the latter he is a noble and heroic prince, called Canmore (Ceann-mor great head) from his high kingly qualities. All however agree that the influence of his holy queen was the best and strongest element in his stormy life.

Whilst he was engaged in strengthening his frontiers and fighting the enemies of his country, Margaret found time, amid family duties and pious exercises, to take in hand the reform of certain outstanding abuses in the Scottish Church. In such matters as the fast of Lent, the Easter communion, the observance of Sunday, and compliance with the Church’s marriage laws she succeeded, with the king's support, in bringing the Church of Scotland into line with the rest of Catholic Christendom. Malcolm and Margaret rebuilt the venerable monastery of Iona, and founded churches in various parts of the kingdom; and during their reign the Christian faith was established in the islands lying off the northern and western coasts of Scotland, inhabited by Norsemen. Malcolm was killed in Northumberland in 1093, whilst leading an army against William Rufus; and his saintly queen, already dangerously ill, followed him to the grave a few days later.

From The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIII; http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13613a.htm

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 16, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Hugh of Avalon

Daily Reading for November 17 • Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, 1200

Richard I took only a passing interest in the affairs of his kingdom, for his life was so totally absorbed by the Crusades that, out of his whole reign of ten years, he spent only four or five months in England. Meanwhile the government of the country was carried on by his ministers, most of whom were bishops and many of them far more interested in the details of political organization than in the routine of pastoral duties. Hubert Walter, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1193 to 1205 held, in addition to the primacy, the offices of legate, chief justiciar, chancellor and vicegerent. But he was a good and conscientious man, a great civil servant anxious to make a success of his labours and to guide the country through an exceedingly difficult time. William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely (1189-97), who was also chancellor, was a less attractive character who made himself much disliked by his domineering and extravagant ways. Geoffrey Plantagenet, an illegitimate son of Henry II, had far less claim to ecclesiastical preferment; yet he became Bishop of Lincoln at the age of fourteen and Archbishop of York seven years later, though his interest in the affairs of the Church was of the very slightest and he spent most of his time abroad. One bishop alone stands out as a shining example of pastoral devotion, and that was S.Hugh of Lincoln.

. . . .

Among the minor orders which found their way into England in the twelfth century was the order of Carthusians, founded by S. Bruno at the Grande-Chartreuse in 1086. Unlike most of the other monastic orders the Carthusians were hermit-monks, who renounced the corporate life and lived each in his own cell, where he did his work, cooked his own food and said his prayers. The community met only for the night-office, Mass and vespers. For the rest of the day each monk lived the life of a solitary. The order never made much progress in England, for the life was very hard and the standards remained very high. It produced, however, one of the most saintly characters of the medieval English Church—S. Hugh of Avalon, who came over to found the charterhouse at Witham in 1178 and in 1186 was elected Bishop of Lincoln, where he lived for fourteen years, setting an example of what a really pastoral bishop might be.

From A History of the Church in England by J. R. H. Moorman. Copyright © 1963. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Blessed poverty

Daily Reading for November 19 • Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary, 1231

O blessed poverty,
who bestows eternal riches
on those who love and embrace her!

O holy poverty,
to those who possess and desire you
God promises the Kingdom of Heaven
and offers, indeed, eternal glory and blessed life!

O God-centered poverty,
whom the Lord Jesus Christ
Who ruled and now rules heaven and earth,
Who spoke and things were made,
condescended to embrace before all else!

From the letter of St. Clare of Assisi to Agnes of Prague, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 19, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Edmund the blessed

Daily Reading for November 20 • Edmund, King of East Anglia, 870

Edmund the Blessed, King of East Anglia, was wise and worthy, and exalted among the noble servants of the almighty God. He was humble and virtuous and remained so resolute that he would not turn to shameful vices, nor would he bend his morality in any way, but was ever-mindful of the true teaching: “If you are installed as a ruler, don't puff yourself up, but be among men just like one of them.” He was charitable to poor folks and widows, just like a father, and with benevolence he guided his people always towards righteousness, and restrained the cruel, and lived happily in the true faith.

Eventually it happened that the Danes came with a ship-army, harrying and slaying widely throughout the land, as is their custom. In the fleet were the foremost chieftans Ivar and Ubbi, united through the devil. They landed warships in Northumbria, and wasted that country and slew the people. Then Ivar went [south-]east with his ships and Halfdan remained in Northumbria gaining victory with slaughter. Ivar came rowing to East Anglia in the year in which prince Alfred—he who afterwards became the famous West Saxon king—was 21. The aforementioned Ivar suddenly invaded the country, just like a wolf, and slew the people, men and women and innocent children, and ignominiously harrassed innocent Christians. Soon afterward he sent to king Edmund a threatening message, that Edmund should submit to his alliegence, if he cared for his life. The messenger came to king Edmund and boldly announced Ivar's message: “Ivar, our king, bold and victorious on sea and on land, has dominion over many peoples, and has now come to this country with his army to take up winter-quarters with his men. He commands that you share your hidden gold-hordes and your ancestral possessions with him straightaway, and that you become his vassal-king, if you want to stay alive, since you now don't have the forces that you can resist him.”

Then king Edmund summoned a certain bishop with whom he was most intimate, and deliberated with him how he should answer the fierce Ivar. The bishop was afraid because of this emergency, and he feared for the king's life, and counselled him that he thought that Edmund should submit to what Ivar asked of him. Then the king became silent, and looked at the ground, and then said to him at last: “Alas bishop, the poor people of this country are already shamefully afflicted. I would rather die fighting so that my people might continue to possess their native land.” The bishop said: “Alas beloved king, thy people lie slain. You do not have the troops that you may fight, and the pirates come and kidnap the living. Save your life by flight, or save yourself by submitting to him.” Then said king Edmund, since he was completely brave: “This I heartily wish and desire, that I not be the only survivor after my beloved thegns are slain in their beds with their children and wives by these pirates. It was never my way to flee. I would rather die for my country if I need to. Almighty God knows that I will not ever turn from worship of Him, nor from love of His truth. If I die, I live.”

After these words he turned to the messenger who Ivar had sent him, and, undaunted, said to him: “In truth you deserve to be slain now, but I will not defile my clean hands with your vile blood, because I follow Christ who so instructed us by his example; and I happily will be slain by you if God so ordain it. Go now quickly and tell your fierce lord: ‘Never in this life will Edmund submit to Ivar the heathen war-leader, unless he submit first to the belief in the Saviour Christ which exists in this country.’” Then the messenger went quickly on his way, and met along the road the cruel Ivar with all his army hastening toward Edmund, and told the impious one how he had been answered. Ivar then arrogantly ordered that the pirates should all look at once for the king who scorned his command, and seize him immediately.

King Edmund, against whom Ivar advanced, stood inside his hall, and mindful of the Saviour, threw out his weapons. Lo! the impious one then bound Edmund and insulted him ignominiously, and beat him with rods, and afterwards led the devout king to a firm living tree, and tied him there with strong bonds, and beat him with whips. In between the whip lashes, Edmund called out with true belief in the Saviour Christ. Because of his belief, because he called to Christ to aid him, the heathens became furiously angry. They then shot spears at him, as if it was a game, until he was entirely covered with their missiles, like the bristles of a hedgehog (just like St. Sebastian was). When Ivar the impious pirate saw that the noble king would not forsake Christ, but with resolute faith called after Him, he ordered Edmund beheaded, and the heathens did so. While Edmund still called out to Christ, the heathen dragged the holy man to his death, and with one stroke struck off his head, and his soul journeyed happily to Christ. There was a man near at hand, kept hidden by God, who heard all this, and told of it afterward, just as we have told it here.

From Abbo of Fleury’s Life of St. Edmund, from the Anglo-Saxon version as it appears in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, ninth edition, translated by K. Cutler (Oxford University Press, 1961).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 20, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Gratefulness

Daily Reading for November 21

Why is it so difficult to acknowledge a gift as a gift? Here is the reason. When I admit that something is a gift, I admit my dependence on the giver. This may not sound that difficult, but there is something within us that bristles at the idea of dependence. We want to get along by ourselves. Yet a gift is something we simply cannot give to ourselves—not as a gift, at any rate. I can buy the same thing or even something better. But it will not be a gift if I procure it for myself. I can go out and treat myself to a magnificent treat. I can even be grateful later for the good time I had. But can I be grateful to myself for having treated myself so well? That would be neck-breaking mental acrobatics. Gratefulness always goes beyond myself. For what makes something a gift is precisely that it is given. And the receiver depends on the giver.

This dependence is always there when a gift is given and received. Even a mother depends on her child for the smallest gift. Suppose a little boy buys his mother a bunch of daffodils. He is giving nothing that he has not already received. His mother gave him not only the money he spent, but his very life and the upbringing that made him generous. Yet his gift is something that she depends on his giving. There is no other way she could receive it as a gift. Gift giving is a celebration of the bond that unites giver and receiver. That bond is gratefulness.

From Gratefulness, Heart of Prayer by David Steindl-Rast (Paulist Press, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 21, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Thanks for small things

Daily Reading for November 22 • Thanksgiving Day

Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts he has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith and difficulty; if on the contrary we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

From Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (SCM Press, 1963).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 22, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Breach of unity

Daily Reading for November 23 • Clement, Bishop of Rome, c. 100

Because of our recent series of unexpected misfortunes and set-backs, my dear friends, we feel there has been some delay in turning our attention to the causes of dispute in your community. We refer particularly to the odious and unholy breach of unity among you, which is quite incompatible with God’s chosen people, and which a few hot-headed and unruly individuals have inflamed to such a pitch that your venerable and illustrious name, so richly deserving of everyone’s affection, has been brought into serious disrepute.

There was a time when nobody could spend even a short while among you without noticing the excellence and constancy of your faith. Who ever failed to be impressed by your sober and selfless Christian piety, to tell of your generous spirit of hospitality, or to pay tribute to the wide range and soundness of your knowledge? It was your habit at all times to act without fear or favour, living by the laws of God and deferring with correctness to those who were set over you.

Humility, too, and a complete absence of self-assertion were common to you all; you preferred to offer submission rather than extort it, and giving was dearer to your hearts than receiving. Asking no more than what Christ had provided for your journey through life, you paid careful heed to His words, treasured them in your hearts, and kept His sufferings constantly before your eyes. The reward was a deep and shining peace, a quenchless ardour for well-doing, and a rich outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon you all.

From the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, translated by Maxwell Staniforth (Penguin Books, 1968).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 23, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The open gate to life

Daily Reading for November 24

There must be no time lost in putting an end to this state of affairs. We must fall on our knees before the Master and implore Him with tears graciously to pardon us, and bring us back again into the honourable and virtuous way of brothers who love one another. For that is the gateway of righteousness, the open gate to life. There are many gates standing open, but the gate of righteousness is the gate of Christ, where blessings are in store for every incomer who pursues the path of godliness and uprightness, and goes about his duties without seeking to create trouble. By all means let a man be a true believer, let him be capable of expounding the secrets of revelation, and a judicious assessor of what he hears, and a pattern of virtue in all this doings. But the higher his reputation stands, so much the more humble-minded he ought to be; and furthermore, his eyes should be fixed on the good of the whole community rather than on his own personal advantage.

If there is true Christian love in a man, let him carry out the precepts of Christ. Who can describe the constraining power of a love for God? Its majesty and its beauty who can adequately express? No tongue can tell the heights to which love can uplift us. Love binds us fast to God. Love casts a veil over sins innumerable. There are no limits to love’s endurance, no end to its patience. Love is without servility, as it is without arrogance. Love knows of no divisions, promotes no discord; all the works of love are done in perfect fellowship. It was in love that all God’s chosen saints were made perfect; for without love nothing is pleasing to Him. It was in love that the Lord drew us to Himself; because of the love He bore us, our Lord Jesus Christ, at the will of God, gave His blood for us—His flesh for our flesh, His life for our lives.

From the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, translated by Maxwell Staniforth (Penguin Books, 1968).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 24, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Christ the King

Daily Reading for November 25 • The Last Sunday after Pentecost

O Lord; O King, resplendent on the citadel of heaven,
all hail continually;
and of your clemency
upon your people still have mercy.

Lord, whom the hosts of cherubim in songs and hymns
with praise continually proclaim,
upon us eternally have mercy.

The armies aloft, O Lord, sing high praise to you:
those to whom the seraphim reply, “have mercy.”

O Christ, enthroned as king above,
whom the nine orders of angels in their beauty
praise without ceasing,
upon us, your servants, ever have mercy.

O Christ, hymned by your one and only church
throughout the world,
to whom the sun, and moon, and stars, the land and sea
ever do service, have mercy.

O Christ, those holy ones, the heirs of the eternal country,
one and all with utter joy proclaim you in a most worthy strain:
have mercy upon us.

O Lord, O gentle son of Mary free;
O King of kings, blessed redeemer;
upon those who have been ransomed from the power of death,
by your own blood, ever have mercy.

O noblest unbegotten, yet begotten son, having no beginning,
yet without effort (in the weakness of God) excelling all things,
upon this your people in your pity, Lord have mercy.

O sun of righteousness, in all unclouded glory,
supreme dispenser of justice,
in that great day when you strictly judge all nations,
we earnestly beseech you, upon this your people,
who here stand before your presence,
in your pity, Lord, then have mercy on us.

A prayer of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury in the tenth century. Quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 25, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prayer in changing seasons

Daily Reading for November 26

Mindfulness and awareness, though the essential foundation of a life of prayer, are not in themselves sufficient. There must be some structure and framework, regular times for prayer, particularly shared prayer, and it is these that Benedict is establishing here [in Chapter 8 of the Rule]. Prayer is never taken out of the natural flow of life itself. It is firmly inserted within the rhythm of the changing seasons, of winter and summer, of day and night, and not least of the rhythm of my own body. In a world in which the techniques of prayer are widely discussed and so many varying techniques seem to be offered, it is rather startling to have the subjects of sleep, digestion, and making time to go to the lavatory introduced into this short chapter. This, however, at once makes it clear that the daily office is tailored to suit the needs of the monks, rather than according to some idealized blueprint or an abstract principle. Benedict respects our total humanity—body, mind, and spirit—and recognizes that balance here: praying is disassociated neither from a gentle handling of bodily needs, nor from intellectual demand. The gap between the first two offices of the day is to be used for reading and for study, for memorizing the psalms in order to make them one’s own, “to possess the psalms and be possessed by them.”

From A Life-Giving Way: A Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal (Liturgical Press, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 26, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

From dark to light

Daily Reading for November 27

In the world of his day, Benedict’s monks would go to bed at 6:00 p.m., so that after eight full hours of sleep they would awaken at 2:00 a.m. They would thus start the day in the dark, and the slow coming of the dawn would be a symbolic daily reminder of the movement from dark to light, from sleep and death to new life. Anyone who has read what Thomas Merton has told us of his life in his hermitage at Gethsemani will know, even if they have not experienced it for themselves, that those hours before dawn are perhaps the best time of all for prayer. Merton himself would rise at 2:15 a.m., when the night was at its darkest and most silent.

It is necessary for me to see the first point of light which begins to dawn. It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of Day, in blank silence when the sun appears. In this completely neutral instant I receive from the eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word “Day” which is never the same. It is never spoken in any known language.

From A Life-Giving Way: A Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal (Liturgical Press, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The church in Hawai'i

Daily Reading for November 28 • Kamehameha and Emma, King and Queen of Hawai’i, 1864, 1885

If we are Christians according to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, we cannot withhold our belief in the Holy Catholic Church established on earth by Jesus Christ our Lord. There are branches of this church in every land. How the church has come down from the times of the apostles to these days in which we live is not a matter about which the generality of men are ignorant. It were useless perhaps to set forth how she has taken root sooner or later all over the world. She is planted in America, in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in the islands which stud the ocean, and now, behold! She is here with us in these islands of our own.

Let us see how she felt her way and reached us at last. Our ancient idols had been dethroned, the sexes ate together, and the prohibition upon certain articles of food was held in derision by the females to whom it had been a law, the temples were demolished, the kapu had become no more than a memory of something that was hateful before, and the priests had no longer any rites to perform—indeed, there were no priests, for their office had died out. These changes came no doubt by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, acting through blind, unsuspecting agents. These revolutions were greatly furthered and helped along by those devout and devoted men who first brought here and translated into our mother-tongue God’s Holy Word, and we, while these lines are being written, see the complete fulfillment of what the Bible enjoins in the establishment here of Christ’s church complete in all her functions.

The church is established here in Hawaii through the breathings of the Holy Spirit and by the agency of the chiefs. It is true that the representatives of the various forms of worship had come here, and there had been many controversies, one side generally denying what some other sect had laid most stress on. Now we have grounds to rejoice, and now we may hold fast to the hope that the true Church of God has verily taken root here.

A reading from Kamehameha IV in the Hawaiian Book of Common Prayer, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Discipleship

Daily Reading for November 29

Next to the calling of the disciples, I expect that Matthew’s story about their sending forth is one of the most confrontational stories in all the Bible. Can you imagine? There you are, perfectly content to be a follower, when Jesus comes home all worn out one day with his hair hanging in his face and his clothes ringed with sweat and dirt. He looks around at those of you who have been with him all along and says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. I need some help, and I’m nominating you.”

Since we have been hearing this story about the sending of the disciples for so long now, we may take their job description for granted. In short, they were given exactly the same things to do that Jesus himself had been given to do, but it did not have to be that way. He could have pointed out that none of them was the son of God, after all. None of them had been born under a blinding star, or had angels sing hosannas over their cribs, or received exotic gifts from foreign dignitaries before they so much as cut a tooth.

He could have reminded them of all that and insisted that they remain his assistants—for their own safety, you understand, to avoid malpractice suits. He could have let them mix the mud when he healed blind people, or spray the Lysol when he cleansed lepers, or unwrap the bandages from those he had raised form the dead. He could have done that, but he did not. Instead, he transferred his ministry to them while he was still alive. He entrusted it to them. With no training and very little advice, he sent them out to heal wounds and restore outcasts and bring the dead back to life.

What keeps nagging at me, though, is the way he sent them out—no money, no shoes, not even a walking stick. Why send them out with so much power and so few accessories? The way Jesus set it up, they could not provide for others out of their own abundance; they could only provide for them out of their need. What must it be like to own nothing, to have nothing but your own need, and to understand that the only thing you have to offer anyone else is what you yourself have been given?

When it comes down to being a provider of God’s love, there is really only one provider, who sends us out with nothing at all and with everything we need: healing, forgiveness, restoration, resurrection. Those are the only things we really have to share with the world, which is just as well, since they are the only things the world really needs.

From “Heaven at Hand” in Bread of Angels by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 29, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Call to friendship

Daily Reading for November 30 • St. Andrew the Apostle

One common element in the gospel narratives is the story of Jesus’ call of the disciples. By the sea of Galilee he meets and calls brothers Simon Peter and Andrew, fishermen who are invited to ply their skills in new ways and new "waters." On one level it might seem to us that Jesus is organizing a campaign or setting up shop. Perhaps this is because we view the stories through what is familiar in our day; we read backward through the lens of institutional and church history and see in these early associations the pattern of our own administrative structures. But is it not curious that when Jesus calls these early companions, he is terribly hazy about job descriptions and mission statements?

Clearly, the pattern here is somewhat different. The relationship between Jesus and his disciples emerges as more that of friends than of professional staff. There is no evidence of how he comes to choose the particular individuals he chooses. No rationale is offered and no apparent design for their deployment emerges. He is not hiring workers or associates, but calling friends.

Jesus’ selection of his own circle of companions may well have been something more than a conscious organizational plan for the implementation of a well-planned ministry. It may have been his first opportunity to choose friends freely. Like Jesus, when we are free from the familial and the familiar and offered the opportunity of new circumstances, we find and embrace those friends who are of our own choosing. They are uniquely ours, and in that uniqueness lies much of their preciousness. In these relationships we often share everything. Most importantly, through them we build sufficient confidence in others to express our ideas openly. . . .

What we observe in Jesus’ pilgrimage of vocational fulfillment is that he experienced a series of radical changes and reorientations. Each one was essential to his formation as a person, and each was a response to vocational urging. That he found himself knee-deep in the Jordan being baptized by John, or living in Galilee on the opposing bank of the Jordan from Nazareth, or in the midst of strange but chosen companions, or broadening his notion of family to include those who were not tied to him by blood or nationality, was not by whimsy or will. He was where he was and what he was in response to his discernment of God’s will for him, God’s call to him.

From Crossing the Jordan: Meditations on Vocation by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 30, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Born again

Daily Reading for December 1

Advent offers all of us a chance to be born again. We might well ask with Nicodemus, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus tells us that if we want to be part of the people of God we must be born “from above”: “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (John 3:4–7). In truth, all of life is an ongoing opportunity for us to find new life and to get in touch with God’s ongoing work of co-creating the world with us.

In the beginning God created everything. Created by God, we are called to be stewards of all that we have and receive from God. The mystery of the incarnation, Christmas, and Christ’s coming invites us to enter fully into God’s ongoing acts of creation and to participate joyfully in the reign of God.

Advent calls us to remember that God is our Creator. Remembering God’s acts of creation, as well as God’s acts of redemption, liberation, salvation, and grace, we grow in anticipation of the Child’s coming at Christmas and on the last day. The first step in Advent is to remember that we are created by God and loved by God.

From The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozutti-Jones. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 1, 2007 1:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Beginning to shake

Daily Reading for December 2 • The First Sunday of Advent

There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, no foundation, we need to know this too and endure it.

We may ask why God has sent us into this time, why he has sent this whirlwind over the earth, why he keeps us in this chaos where all appears hopeless and dark and why there seems to be no end to this in sight. The answer to this question is perhaps that we were living on earth in an utterly false and counterfeit security. And now God strikes the earth till it resounds, now he shakes and shatters; not to pound us with fear, but to teach us one thing—the spirit’s innermost moving and being moved.

Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see this Last One and get to the bottom of things. Only then will we be able to guard our life from the frights and terrors into which God the Lord has let the world sink to teach us, so that we may awaken from sleep, as Paul says, and see that it is time to repent, time to change things. It is time to say, “All right, it was night; but let that be over now and let us be ready for the day.” We must do this with a decision that comes out of these very horrors we have experienced and all that is connected with them; and because of this our decision will be unshakable even in uncertainty.

Condemned as a traitor for his opposition to Hitler, Father Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest, wrote this piece in a Nazi prison shortly before he was hanged in 1945. Quoted in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Plough Publishing House, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 2, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Flesh of God

Daily Reading for December 4 • John of Damascus, Priest, c. 760

So then, after the assent of the Holy Virgin, the Holy Spirit descended on her . . . purifying her, and granting her power to receive the divinity of the Word, and likewise power to bring forth. And then was she overshadowed by enhypostatic Wisdom and the Power of the most high God, the Son of God Who is of like essence with the Father as of Divine seed, and from her holy and most pure blood He formed flesh animated with the spirit of reason and thought, the first-fruits of our compound nature; not by procreation but by creation through the Holy Spirit; not developing the fashion of the body by gradual additions but by perfecting it at once, He Himself, the very Word of God, standing to the flesh in the relation of subsistence. For the divine Word was not made one with flesh that had an independent preexistence, but taking up His abode in the womb of the holy Virgin. . . . So that He is at once flesh, and at the same time flesh of God and the Word, likewise flesh animated, possessing both reason and thought. Wherefore we speak not of man as having become God, but of God as having become man.

From Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by John of Damascus, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 4, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Celebrate the mighty Child

Daily Reading for December 5 • Clement of Alexandria, Priest, c. 210

Bridle of colts untamed,
Over our will presiding;
Wing of unwandering birds,
Our flight securely guiding.

Rudder of youth unbending,
Firm against adverse shock;
Shepherd, with wisdom tending
Lambs of the royal flock;

Thy simple children bring
In one, that they may sing
In solemn lays
Their hymns of praise
With guileless lips to Christ the King.

King of saints, almighty Word
Of the Father’s highest Lord;
Wisdom’s head and chief;
Assuagement of all grief;
Lord of all time and space,
Jesus, Savior of our race;

Shepherd, who dost us keep;
Husbandman, who tillest,
Bit to restrain us, Rudder
To guide us as Thou willest;
Of the all-holy flock celestial wing;

Fisher of men, whom Thou to life dost bring;
From evil sea of sin,
And billowy strife,
Gathering pure fishes in,
Caught with sweet bait of life:

Lead us, Shepherd of the sheep,
Reason-gifted, holy One;
King of youths, whom Thou dost keep,
So that they pollution shun:

Steps of Christ, celestial Way;
Word eternal, Age unending;
Life that never can decay;
Fount of mercy, virtue-sending;
Life august of those who raise
Unto God their hymn of praise,
Jesus Christ!

Nourished by the milk of heaven,
To our tender palates given;
Milk of wisdom from the breast
Of that bride of grace expressed;
By a dewy spirit filled
From fair Reason’s breast distilled;
Let us sucklings join to raise
With pure lips our hymns of praise
As our grateful offering,
Clean and pure, to Christ our King.
Let us, with hearts undefiled,
Celebrate the mighty Child.

A hymn of Clement of Alexandria, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 5, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Act like children

Daily Reading for December 6 • Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, c. 342

We can choose the light. Choosing the good and the light is not always an easy process. Many give up on growth in the Christian life because they find it difficult to shake their destructive patterns of behavior. We have learned we should choose the good, but we do not always understand the role of desire. If we do not understand desire, we will never understand choice. Desire is what saves us in the Christian life.

Desire is an innate gift of the Holy Spirit that needs to be intentionally cultivated. Desiring to do good, even when we do not choose to, is a step in the right direction. Let us be patient with ourselves when we fail to pray, fail to be courageous, or fail to practice what we preach. Let us tap into our gift of desire and cultivate it though prayer.

Advent invites us to stand up as children of God. Being children, of course, requires having birth parents, and this is the rub. Some of us do not treasure the time spent with our parents or do not have parents at all. Because of this, we find it hard to understand what it means to have God as our parent and to be children of God. On the other hand, some of us have had wonderful relationships with our parents, and it is easy for us to understand God as loving parent. In Christian community, we can share our experiences of childhood and explore our understandings of God as parent. When was the last time we shared our experiences as parents and children in a faith setting? When was the last time we shared the joys and pains of our childhood in the context of a prayer gathering or Eucharist? Doing this could be a tremendous source of healing and life this Advent.

Being children of God requires that we act like children. Cry when you need milk. Act silly to make God laugh. Listen to what God says. Throw things off the table and experience God’s patience. Curl up in the arms of God. Ask God to read you a story. Allow God to throw you up in the air. Play hide and seek with God. Allow God to play hide and seek with you. Cry when God goes away. Squeal with delight when God comes back. Listen to God say how much you are loved. Tell God of your love. This, without a doubt, is what Advent is all about.

From The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozutti-Jones. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 6, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Fountain of water

Daily Reading for December 7 • Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, c. 397

To Thee, O Fountain of mercy, my mother poured out still more frequent prayers and tears that thou wouldst hasten thy aid and enlighten my darkness, and she hurried all the more zealously to the church and hung upon the words of Ambrose [of Milan], praying for “the fountain of water that springs up into everlasting life” [Jn 4:14]. For she loved that man as an angel of God, since she knew that it was by him that I had been brought thus far to that wavering state of agitation I was now in, through which she was fully persuaded I should pass from sickness to health, even though it would be after a still sharper convulsion which physicians call “the crisis.”

Ambrose himself I esteemed a happy man, as the world counted happiness, because great personages held him in honor. Only his celibacy appeared to me a painful burden. But what hope he cherished, what struggles he had against the temptations that beset his high station, what solace in adversity, and what savory joys thy bread possessed for the hidden mouth of his heart when feeding on it, I could neither conjecture nor experience. I heard him, indeed, every Lord’s Day, “rightly dividing the word of truth” [2 Tim 2:15] among the people. And I became all the more convinced that all those knots of crafty calumnies which those deceivers of ours had knit together against the divine books could be unraveled.

From the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 7, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The double Advent

Daily Reading for December 8

When we call God ‘Father’, we are called to step out, as apprentice children, into a world of pain and darkness. We will find that darkness all around us; it will terrify us, precisely because it will remind us of the darkness inside our own selves. The temptation then is to switch off the news, to shut out the pain of the world, to create a painless world for ourselves. A good deal of our contemporary culture is designed to do exactly that. No wonder people find it hard to pray. But if, as the people of the living creator God, we respond to the call to be his sons and daughters; if we take the risk of calling him Father; then we are called to be the people through whom the pain of the world is held in the healing light of the love of God. And we then discover that we want to pray, and need to pray, this prayer. Father; Our Father in heaven; Our Father in heaven, may your name be honoured. That is, may you be worshipped by your whole creation; may the whole cosmos resound with your praise; may the whole world be freed from injustice, disfigurement, sin, and death, and may your name be hallowed. And as we stand in the presence of the living God, with the darkness and pain of the world on our hearts, praying that he will fulfill his ancient promises, and implement the victory of Calvary and Easter for the whole cosmos—then we may discover that our own pain, our own darkness, is somehow being dealt with as well.

This, then, I dare say, is the pattern of Christian spirituality. It is not the selfish pursuit of private spiritual advancement. It is not the flight of the alone to the alone. It is neither simply shouting into a void, nor simply getting in touch with our own deepest feelings, though sometimes it may feel like one or other of these. It is the rhythm of standing in the presence of the pain of the world, and kneeling in the presence of the creator of the world; of bringing those two things together in the name of Jesus and by the victory of the cross; of living in the tension of the double Advent, and of calling God ‘Father’.

From The Lord and His Prayer by N. T. Wright (Eerdmans, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 8, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Heard by God

Daily Reading for December 10

Do we feel seen, heard, remembered, and blessed by God? In our busy lives, we easily forget that we are precious in the sight of God. “If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:30). Indeed, it is our faith in God that reminds us we are forever in the sight of God. Our search for meaning as Christians is to come to this realization of knowing that we are always in God’s view. To live in the sight of God calls us to trust the providence and the workings of God.

The more we attune our lives to this reality, the more we take on the eyes of God. Numerous times throughout the Scriptures we hear God described as seeing the suffering of individuals and entire peoples. God does see the suffering of our hearts, which we try so hard to conceal from one another. God sees the suffering of millions of poor and homeless people, whom our society tries to hide from our view. God sees us when we are Leah, needing to give birth. God sees us when we are Jacob, struggling to make sense of God’s promises. God sees us when we are Rachel, desperate to have things work out.

Advent is also a time to be heard by God. To approach Christmas without prayer is to go to the airport without a ticket. God wants to hear our prayers, our hopes, our conflict, our pain, and our joys. In an ever more talkative society, we have distanced ourselves from talking to our Creator. As Christmas approaches, we spend a lot of time talking to friends, but few of us spend sufficient time giving God a chance to hear us. God knows that we are happy, but God wants us to sing thanks. God knows that we hurt, but God wants us to proclaim a ballad. God knows that we can speak, but God wants to hear our voices. How often do we cry out to God? How often do we sing God’s praises? When was the last time we said “I love you” to God?

Do we remember that we are beginning again, starting over and growing? It is a joyful season and also a difficult one. By the end of the year, the last thing most of us want is to be asked to improve and to grow. The weather and the light contribute to a desire to give up, to lie down and not do much. For us as Christians the call goes out to wake up and be watchful. Pay attention, the Scriptures remind us over and over again. In the quiet and in the cold, we listen attentively to God, and we warm our hearts by drawing close to God. Who knows the birth places deep within us that God will open?

How do we grow in the areas where we feel forgotten by God? How do we grow when we feel barren like Leah and Rachel? How do we grow in the quiet and the dark? Spend some time today reflecting on your spiritual journey in the dark night of the soul. Let us be still, let us be contemplative in our actions, not for our own sake, but because God needs us to be light, even as the night approaches.

From The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozutti-Jones. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 10, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Come!

Daily Reading for December 11

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise. Every year we roll up all our needs and yearnings and faithful expectation into one word: “Come!”

And yet, what a strange prayer this is! After all, you have already come and pitched your tent among us. You have already shared our life with its little joys, its long days of tedious routine, its bitter end. Could we invite you to anything more than this with our “Come”? Could you approach any nearer to us than you did when you became the “Son of Man,” when you adopted our ordinary little ways so thoroughly that it’s almost hard for us to distinguish you from the rest of our fellow men?

In spite of all this we still pray: “Come.” Is it true, then, that we only “celebrate” this season, or is it still really Advent? Are you the eternal Advent? Are you he who is always still to come, but never arrives in such a way as to fulfill our expectations? Are you the infinitely distant One, who can never be reached?

You promised that you would come, and actually made good your promise. But how, O Lord, how did you come? You did it by taking a human life as your own. You became like us in everything: born of a woman, you suffered under Pontius Pilate, were crucified, died, and were buried. And thus you took up again the very thing we wanted to discard. You began what we thought would end with your coming: our poor human kind of life, which is sheer frailty, finiteness, and death.

From “The God Who Is to Come” by Karl Rahner, in Encounters with Silence, translated by James M. Demske (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 11, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Behold, you come

Daily Reading for December 12

Contrary to all our fond hopes, you seized upon precisely this kind of human life and made it your own. And you did this not in order to change or abolish it, not so that you could visibly and tangibly transform it, not to divinize it. You didn’t even fill it to overflowing with the kind of goods that men are able to wrest from the small, rocky acre of their temporal life, and which they laboriously store away as their meager provision for eternity.

No, you took upon yourself our kind of life, just as it is. You let it slip away from you, just as ours vanishes from us. You held on to it carefully, so that not a single drop of its torments would be spilled. You hoarded its every fleeting moment, so you could suffer through it all, right to the bitter end.

Is that your real coming? Is that what humanity has been waiting for? Is that why men have made the whole of human history a single great Advent-choir, in which even the blasphemers take part—a single chant crying out for you and your coming? Is your humble human existence from Bethlehem to Calvary really the coming that was to redeem wretched humanity from its misery?

It is said that you will come again, and this is true. But the word again is misleading. It won’t really be “another” coming, because you have never really gone away. In the human existence that you made your own for all eternity, you have never left us.

But still you will come again, because the fact that you have already come must continue to be revealed ever more clearly. It will become progressively more manifest to the world that the heart of all things is already transformed, because you have taken them all to your heart.

Behold, you come. And your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfillment. Now it is still the one single hour of your Advent, at the end of which we too shall have found out that you have really come.

O God who is to come, grant me the grace to live now, in the hour of your Advent, in such a way that I may merit to live in you forever, in the blissful hour of your eternity.

From “The God Who Is to Come” by Karl Rahner, in Encounters with Silence, translated by James M. Demske (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 12, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Santa Lucia

Daily Reading for December 13

The feast of St. Lucy (304) occurs during the Geminid meteor showers, sometimes called “St. Lucy’s Lights.” The northern sky filled with shooting stars prompts us to put on the “armor of light” in anticipation of the day of the Lord. Before the Gregorian calendar reform in 1582, the feast of Santa Lucia fell on the shortest day of the year. Lucy (“light”) marked the close of the long, dark nights and heralded the new light to come. Thus her feast is identified with a wreath of candles to drive away the darkness and welcome the returning sunlight.

Born to nobility in Syracuse, Sicily, young Lucy accompanied her mother on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Agatha. Her mother was miraculously healed, convincing Lucy to serve God. She gave all her riches to the poor and lived a life of service. She was beheaded after surviving extreme torture during the Diocletian persecutions. Her relics remain in Venice, Italy, at Santa Lucia Church.

Tales of a miraculous appearance of Lucy to a desperately hungry Sweden, her head haloed with light and her arms filled with enough food for everyone, generate the traditional “Lucia bride.” In Swedish homes, at cockcrow, the eldest girl in the house dresses in a white gown sashed in red and crowns her head with an evergreen wreath of seven to nine candles to impersonate Lucy. The Lussibrud wakes all the sleepers with coffee, sweet drink, and cakes called “Lucy cats.” The cakes are circular swirls, like cinnamon buns, that represent the eternal Sun. All gather for breakfast and tales of Lucy, who announces that darkness is broken and the Son is coming.

To honor Lucy and the Advent of the Light of the world, choose a family member to rise early and awaken the household with beverage and donuts or round sweet rolls. Just before dawn, you may want to go outside and try to spot the Geminid lights.

From Teach Us to Number Our Days: A Liturgical Advent Calendar by Barbara Dee Baumgarten. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 13, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

O Come, Emmanuel

Daily Reading for December 14

Advent. A time of waiting and watching and preparation. A time, if we are not careful, of rampant materialism and tension that looks forward only to a too-secularized and too-commercialized Christmas holiday. On the other hand, Advent can be a time like no other—a time in which we pause and ask Christ into our hearts, invite God into our world.

But who is this God who comes to us and enters into our life? How do we invite God into our lives? How do we know Christ Jesus? One way to discover Christ and to pray for God’s coming is to use the ancient prayers of the early church together with a present-day understanding of what Christ’s coming will mean for us.

The well-known carol, “O come, O come, Emmanuel,” provides just such a passageway linking the old and the new. The carol’s familiar names for Christ are based on the Advent Antiphons—the “Great O’s”—which date back possibly to the sixth century. These antiphons—short devotional texts chanted before and after a psalm or canticle—were sung before and after the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, at Vespers from December 16 through December 23. Each of the antiphons greets the Messiah and ends with a petition of hope. The simple refrain of the carol, “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!” sets the tone for this Advent time of waiting and expectation.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 14, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Great "O's"

Daily Reading for December 15

The Advent antiphons are known as ‘the great “O’s’, from the initial ‘O’ of each one, which conveys our longing for the coming of the Lord. The longings of the human heart are part of the glory of humanity. Why do people climb Everest, explore potholes, cross the Antarctic on foot or the Atlantic in a rowing boat, build cathedrals like Chartres or tombs like the Taj Mahal, write and read poetry, compose and listen to symphonies? We discover in ourselves ‘high instincts before which our mortal nature did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.’ There is a yearning for the transcendent, even among moderns who have done so much to make the world a comfortable place to live in.

It is the conviction, not only of Christians but of all who believe in a personal God, that this longing is implanted in us by God and can only be satisfied by him. All our desires are, in one form or another, a desire for God. Sometimes desires conflict with one another and with our desire for God, but when purified and graded according to their true value, they will be seen as a longing for God in his manifold being and activity. Love for things and for other human beings reaches fulfillment in subordination to love of God.

We speak disparagingly of ‘cupboard love’ in pets and children, but their frank enjoyment of the good things they receive from parents and owners shows a genuine, uncomplicated love without any attempt to analyse its constituent elements. A child-like love which looks for presents may be more pleasing to God than one which is wholly disinterested and high-minded. Other desires can be rivals to our desires for God, but they can also be included in that desire. Given a subordinate place, they can receive full satisfaction in God’s infinite bounty. The deepest longings of our hearts find their satisfaction in the coming of Christ.

The longing for God expressed in the antiphons is the pale, human shadow of God’s longing for us. God longs for us, longs for our love and devotion, longs to give us the cup of joy which is communion with him, longs to share with us the vision of eternal beauty, truth and goodness. God’s longing creates in us a human, creaturely longing for his gifts and above all for himself. The Advent antiphons articulate that longing under different figures—Wisdom, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Emmanuel—and gives us the words in which to pour out, though we may not recognize it, the deepest desire of our hearts.

From O Come Emmanuel: Scripture Verses for Advent Worship by William Marshall. Copyright © 1993. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 15, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

O Sapientia

Daily Reading for December 16 • The Third Sunday of Advent

O Wisdom, you came forth from the mouth of the Most High and reach from one end of the earth to the other, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence. (Listen)

In his book, The Far-Spent Night, Edward West pointed out that the first thing needed in preparing to meet the Lord is prudence or “good sense.” “It is good sense,” he said, “which makes the disobedient listen to the wisdom of the just. It is good sense which makes [us] cope with the whole of life as a unit. It is good sense applied to every area of living which is the outward and visible sign of an inner integrity. In short, it means to have understanding, but it is an understanding of wisdom.”

In the context of the Old Testament, wisdom is always a gift from God, rather than some skill or knowledge that we can gain for ourselves. In the context of the New Testament, wisdom is a person. Wisdom is who Christ is and what Christ does. Wisdom is often thought of as feminine—as the Greek “Sophia”—through which we access a deeper knowledge and understanding of God not only as creator, but also as nurturer and sustainer.

It is when wisdom truly comes to us that we will have the prudence—the good sense—to listen and to follow where Christ leads. In asking Christ to come as Wisdom, we are praying for a unity in our life that will draw us into purpose and vision, and away from fragmentation and unproductivity. The Wisdom that is Christ may well lead us in the ways of the just: into compassion, concern, peace, justice, and love.

O Wisdom,
gift on the breath of creation,
measurer of the earth and seas,
singer of paths for stars and planets in the heavens,
holder of all things together
since before time and forever.

My sister, my friend,
as the Spirit of the Lord fills the whole world,
and as you know every word that is said,
come as mentor and guide:
so I’ll delight in knowledge,
claim intuition and understanding for my own,
discern, learn
what his advent holds for me.

O Wisdom, my sister,
let us lean close, laugh and weep together,
be one with each other as we shout our whispered greeting
to the Lord of life.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 16, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

O Adonai

Daily Reading for December 17

O Adonai and Leader of the house of Israel, you appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm. (Listen)

‘Adonai’ is the Hebrew word for ‘Lord.’ God has a person name in the Bible but it was considered too holy for normal use, so when the reader at public worship in the synagogue found the holy name in the text, he read the word ‘Adonai’, ‘Lord’, instead. The original text of the Hebrew Bible was written in consonants only and the name of God occurs as YHWH so that its pronunciation can only be guessed.

The name of God which is rendered ‘Lord’ is associated with the description of Moses as ‘I am who I am’ in the account of God’s appearance to Moses in the burning bush. The designations ‘Lord’ and ‘I am’ indicate that God is both known to us and beyond our knowledge. He gives us his name, yet this name directs our attention to God as he is in himself, rather than any ideas we may have of him. He is I am, not anything we can define or capture in human concepts. So we cry in the antiphon, ‘O Adonai, . . . come,’ not with any power to manipulate God or compel him by knowing his name, but adoring his transcendent majesty and asking him with childlike trust to come and help us.

This antiphon presents the God revealed in Jesus Christ as the ultimate answer to the world’s need for leadership. The wisdom which ‘mightily and sweetly ordereth all things’ does not override our freedom or force us into a particular line of conduct. God leads us but does not drive us. We follow his leading, not because we have to, but because it appeals to those urges in our nature which we judge to be deepest and best. Our Christian faith is that God is sovereign Lord over all creation, yet his leadership is not like the heavy hand of a totalitarian state. His supreme rule is known only by faith, not with the coercive evidence of logical demonstration. We have the choice to accept or reject his rule, but if we accept it then we commit ourselves to him as Lord and make all other concerns subordinate to God’s kingdom.

May the cross of the Son of God, who is mightier
than all the hosts of Satan, and more glorious
than all the angels of heaven, abide with you in
your going out and your coming in! By day and by
night, at morning and at evening, at all times and
in all places, may it protect and defend you!
From the wrath of evil men, from the assaults of
evil spirits, from foes visible and invisible,
from the snares of the devil, from all low passions
that beguile the soul and body, may it guard,
protect, and deliver you. Amen. (–an Indian blessing, the Christaraksha)

From O Come Emmanuel: Scripture Verses for Advent Worship by William Marshall. Copyright © 1993. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 17, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

O Radix Jesse

Daily Reading for December 18

O Root of Jesse, you stand as an ensign to the peoples; before you kings will shut their mouths and nations will bow in worship: Come and deliver us, and do not tarry.

As Adonai is our lord and leader, it is the Root of Jesse that delivers us into love for each other—not a love that molds another into our own image, but a love that sees each one through the eyes of God. It is because Christ comes as a sign for all creation that king and servant are equal, Jew and gentile are alike in their search; everyone is holy.

Queen, prince, street person, priest—everyone is holy. And it is Christ himself who not only leads us into mutual concern and compassion, but also reminds us just how holy each one is. Charles deFoucauld summarized this truth, “I do not think there is a gospel phrase which has made a deeper impression on me and transformed my life more than this one: ‘Insofar as you did this to one of the least of these. . . you did it to me.’ One has only to think that these words were spoken by the uncreated Truth, who also said, ‘This is my body . . . This is my blood.’”

It is with the coming of Christ that the groundwork for our union with God is begun, but we will only be able to grow in this union when we are in communion and in community with others. Christ comes as the sign that all are welcome.

O Root of Jesse
The nations—all the nations—seek you.
And kings—even kings and rulers, prophets and seers—
even kings and queens,
who usually understand and make pronouncements—
even kings stand speechless,
dumbfounded,
witness to something
they cannot begin to imagine: God!

God, himself, a sign of the people—
the average, ordinary, everyday, all people.
God himself a sign
that the people are holy . . .
wholly wrapped in the Spirit
of wisdom and insight,
of counsel and power,
of knowledge and awe,
of godliness, itself—
all the people are holy.
O Root of Jesse
stand as a signal,
as a sign to the people
of the holiness of God,
of the holiness of us all.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 18, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

O Clavis David

Daily Reading for December 19

O Key of David and Scepter of the house of Israel, you open and no one can close; you close and no one can open: Come and bring captives out of the prison house, those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

Only those who have been incarcerated can know fully the isolation and dehumanization of being physically locked in prison—the humiliation of strip searches, the desolation of loneliness, the fear of physical and sexual abuse from officers and other inmates, the terror of nightmares, the often unabated guilt and anger over past mistakes. It is no wonder that the scriptural texts for today’s antiphon refer to prisons as an analogy for darkness and captivity, and then also echo a hope of future release and freedom.

It is only because Christ comes as the Key of David that prison can also be a place of transformation. In his book, Summons to Serve, Richard Atherton shared his vision of one redeeming influence of prison life. Atherton, for many years a prison chaplain in England, knew first hand of the harshness of prison life. “Using the imagery of Scripture, I like to think of prison as a desert; a place where the human spirit may be purified and ennobled but, alas, more easily twisted and damaged; a place that is often threatening and almost always unpredictable; a place where faith is put to the test—the faith of the inmates, but that of their pastor too; a place of loneliness and powerlessness and frustration, where [one] begins to feel . . . the truth of our Lord’s words: ‘Without me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5); and so ultimately a place of encounter with God.”

For those who have not experienced life in an actual prison, there are, nevertheless, other “prison” experiences—prisons that can be rigorously isolating and dehumanizing in their own way. There is a prison of fear and hate, a prison of anger, and a prison of resistance to openness and change; there is a prison of physical limitation and disability, of painful relationships, of difficult employment, and of unemployment. Most often we lock ourselves into these prisons; with Christ, however, even here we can encounter God. And it is this encounter that will begin the unlocking, opening process to freedom.

O Key of David,
come,
unlock my prison of self-distrust and fear,
of secrecy and doubt,
of injustice and unkindness.
Unlock my blindness
to the splendor and glory of your light.
Unlock my deafness
to the melody of the world
and the harmony of the universe.
Unlock my stumbling lameness
to the dance of your life.
Unlock my depression and gloom
to the majesty and gentleness of your love.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 18, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

O Oriens

Daily Reading for December 20

O Day-Spring, Brightness of Light everlasting, and Sun of Righteousness: Come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

There can be few words of such universal significance as ‘light’. It is both a common metaphor and a potent religious symbol. One of the most beautiful prayers in the Hindu scriptures is ‘Lead me from the unreal to the real, lead me from darkness to light, lead me from death to immortality’, words which have been incorporated into the baptismal liturgy of the Church of South India. The Hindu festival of lights, Diwali, which, incidentally, usually falls quite close to Advent, celebrates the hope of returning light when the days are getting shorter. Muslims affirm ‘God is the light of the heavens and earth’ (Qur’an 24:35). The religion of ancient Persia, Zoroastrianism, calls God ‘Ahura Mazda’, Wise Lord and Lord of Light, and the sacred, ever burning fire symbolizes the eternal divine light. The first specific thing which God created, according to the Genesis account, was light (Genesis 1:3).

The universal idea of light as closely related to God finds its fulfillment in the Jewish and Christian scriptures and preeminently in Christ, the light of the world. The Antiphon O Oriens brings out a special aspect of the light of Christ by its use of the word Oriens, rising sun, day-spring, dawn. It is new light, light after darkness, light which has conquered darkness. In some ways the most welcome light of all is the dawn which brings the long, weary night to an end. Jesus is the dawn which we long for above all things. He is the new light that fills us with hope, putting to flight the darkness of despair. The new light also guides us when we have been floundering in the darkness of ignorance, uncertainty and indecision by leading us into the way of peace, the wholeness of communion with God.

From O Come Emmanuel: Scripture Verses for Advent Worship by William Marshall. Copyright © 1993. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

O Day-Spring,
dawn of day,
bright clearness of the light:
Sometimes, in the very early morning,
I watch for your coming
to unravel the darkness,
to unhide the unknown,
to unmask the shapes and shadows of the night;
And in your sun-brilliant shining
to discover the secrets of righteousness and justice,
to discern and learn that where you are,
there is no shadow,
no darkness,
no death.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 19, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

O Rex Gentium

Daily Reading for December 21 • St. Thomas the Apostle

O King of the nations and the Desire of them all, you are the Cornerstone who makes both one: Come and save the creatures whom you fashioned out of clay.

The figure of ‘the cornerstone’ is particularly apt to describe Christ’s role of reconciliation. The cornerstone is the place where two walls of a building at right angles to each other meet, and as such as a key function in holding the building together. Both St. Paul and St. Peter describe Christians as forming a building of living stones held together by Christ and growing up to maturity in him so that they may be a fit dwelling place for God through his Spirit. A world torn apart by conflicts based on colour, race, religion, inequality of wealth, and many other causes desperately needs the unifying power of Christ. In Christ differences need not be abolished, though injustice must be removed, but they can be combined into a rich and living unity. In that spirit, we pray to Christ, the cornerstone who binds us together, to come and deliver us form sin which separates us from God and each other.

The final words of the antiphon, ‘whom you fashioned out of clay’, have profound and subtle links with those which go before and beautifully round off this prayer to God. The ‘clay’ of our common humanity takes up and reinforces the thought of the universal reconciliation achieved by Christ the King. We are fully part of the material universe and Christ’s redeeming work does not cut us off from our earthly roots but is part of his gathering up of all things into one. Today, when human mastery over nature has advanced so far that we are in danger of destroying our planet, we can see more clearly the connection between human sin and the pollution of the environment.

The antiphon is the cry of humanity, in its earthly state yet longing for union with the divine, to be remade in God’s image and reunited through Christ, the king of the universe, with its source in God.

From O Come Emmanuel: Scripture Verses for Advent Worship by William Marshall. Copyright © 1993. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

O King—
King and Desire of the Nations,
made one by the cornerstone
of your coming,
of your being.
How can it be?
The cornerstone rejected,
misused as rubble for rocks and stones
to hurl and smash.
They didn’t understand then
(and often we don’t now)
that cornerstones are
for fastening onto,
for building up,
for foundations and transformation.
Come, O King,
Desire of the nations,
Cornerstone.
Save for us, formed of clay,
the opportunity of being transformed by your peace.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 20, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

O Emmanuel

Daily Reading for December 22

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Expected of the nations and the Savior of them all: Come and save us, O Lord our God.

When we pray, O come, O come Emmanuel, we are asking that God will indeed come to us in human flesh, that Christ’s incarnation will be made real for us. This is a petition of hope and for deliverance. It is a prayer that, had God not made the first move toward us, we would not be able to utter. God does not remain distant from us, but actually enters into our joys and sufferings. In the words of a popular Christmas carol, “And he feeleth for our sadness, And he shareth in our gladness. . . .”

Rather than ask why the innocent suffer or where God is when there is suffering, we need to ask ourselves how it is that we cause the innocent to suffer and what we can do to alleviate suffering. How much can we share of our own brokenness so that someone else can endure the otherwise unendurable? The way people know God is through us—we are here to make God’s kingdom known to other people.

And it is only because Christ is Emmanuel—God with us—that Israel, and in fact all of us, are able to rejoice! It is when Christ comes as Emmanuel that the importance, vocation and dignity of every person will be restored.

O God with us,
Emmanuel,
whose law and life and rule are love;
You are, in fact, our only hope.
Greed and injustice
in the justice of the nations
discover us deep into poverty,
starvation, corruption and war.
And into our homes sneak silent abuse
and assault,
incest and injury—
a polite and private life of poverty,
starvation, corruption and war.
Make no mistake—we
don’t know the slightest
what we’re asking you: to be saved
will be a costly bargain—
and one we hadn’t rully reasoned on or planned.
Nevertheless,
you are our only hope,
O God with us,
Emmanuel.

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 21, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

O Virgin of virgins

Daily Reading for December 23 • The Fourth Sunday of Advent

O Virgin of virgins, tell us how shall this be? For neither before you was any like you nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why do you marvel at me? The thing which you behold is a divine mystery.

Although this antiphon, unlike the others, is not addressed to Christ, it is nevertheless an attempt on our part to know and understand that which we worship. It is as though we are asking for a sharing into Mary's human insight and intuition in order to help us understand. But when all is said and done, God's incarnation must remain for us a mystery beyond human comprehension. We can imagine such love, but only imagine, for the depth and breadth of God's love for us is immeasurable—inestimable—by any standards that we have.

Perhaps, by drawing close to Mary, the God-bearer—Theotokos in Greek: she who gave birth to God—we will understand. But no, even then our "knowing" and "understanding" will always remain and require a leap of faith. God with us remains a divine mystery!

From Hasten the Kingdom: Praying the O Antiphons of Advent by Mary Winifred, C.A. (Liturgical Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 22, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Make haste

Daily Reading for December 24 • Christmas Eve

The shepherds who hear of the birth of the Child make haste to see what the angel told them. Notice how the shepherds decide to go together, and quickly.

Advent is a time to make spiritual haste. “Let us go now,” the shepherds say. It is never too late to set out to see Christ. The announcement of the birth to the shepherds came after the Child was born. In the same way, the invitation comes to us today. The Child is born, the promise is fulfilled: we need to go and take part in the ongoing story.

As Christians, we need to bring a certain urgency to how we live out our Christian values. Our urgency comes from a place of love: we are called to go see the helpless, newborn child. The Child, who resembles the weak among us, invites all of us to come and see him—and to see ourselves in him. Where do we encounter weakness in our own hearts? How do we become a neighbor to those who are weak in our society? How well do we represent the visiting and caring presence of God in the world?

When we live lives characterized by love and caring, we model who God is in the world today. Church communities that take seriously their call to model God’s reign offer what secular institutions cannot: devotion to the ideal of unmerited love and care, conscious effort to avoid evil, and an ideal of fruitfulness in which gain is understood through sharing. Following Jesus’ way of life, Christians have a school in which to live differently and better.

Strangely enough, we cannot model a better way of living without first encountering God. Many hear and see the angels, but choose to stay out in the fields. Advent calls us to respond differently. Advent calls us to be outstanding in our field, as opposed to be out standing in the field. To be outstanding in the field is to detach from the things and ways that are not of God and to stand with God.

Today is the day when we need to leave the things that keep us busy to go and see. God has come to us. The time has come. Let us go in haste. Let us go today.

From The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozutti-Jones. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 23, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Christmas Day

Daily Reading for December 25 • The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.
(Hamlet, I, ii, 157)

So hallowed and so gracious is the time—these lines from the first scene of Hamlet in a sense say it all. We tend to think of time as progression, as moment following moment, day following day, in relentless flow, the kind of time a clock or calendar can measure. But we experience time also as depth, as having quality as well as quantity—a good time, a dangerous time, an auspicious time, a time we mark not by its duration but by its content.

On the dark battlements of Elsinore, Marcellus speaks to his companions of the time of Jesus’ birth. It is a hallowed time he says, a holy time, a time in which life grows still like the surface of a river so that we can look down into it and see glimmering there in its depths something timeless, precious, other. And a gracious time, Marcellus says—a time that we cannot bring about as we can bring about a happy time or a sad time but a time that comes upon us as grace, as a free and unbidden gift. Marcellus explains that Christmas is a time of such holiness that the cock crows the whole night through as though it is perpetually dawn, and thus for once, even the powers of darkness are powerless.

Horatio’s answer is equally instructive. “So have I heard and do in part believe,” he says to Marcellus, thus speaking, one feels, not just for himself but for Shakespeare and for us. In part believe it. At Christmas time it is hard even for the unbeliever not to believe in something if not in everything. Peace on earth, good will to men; a dream of innocence that is good to hold on to even if it is only a dream; the mystery of being a child; the possibility of hope—not even the canned carols piped out over the shopping center parking plaza from Thanksgiving on can drown it out completely.

For a moment or two, the darkness of disenchantment, cynicism, doubt, draw back at least a little, and all the usual worldly witcheries lose something of their power to charm. Maybe we cannot manage to believe with all our hearts. But as long as the moments last, we can believe that this is of all things the thing most worth believing. And that may not be as far as it sounds from what belief is. For as long as the moment lasts, that hallowed, gracious time.

From The Faces of Jesus by Frederick Buechner (Harper and Row, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 24, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

John's icon of Jesus

Daily Reading for December 27 • St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

The icon of Jesus painted by John is his gospel is not a naturalistic rendering. The other gospel writers also created distinctive impressions of Jesus with an artistry wholly unlike modern biography or journalism. But John has taken the boldest steps away from reportage into the creative realm, using distortion and selectivity and elaboration with shocking freedom. What we recognize as some of the most emphatic features of John’s portrait of Jesus are, I believe, the very features that we ourselves will acquire through conversion. John has Jesus continually return to certain themes so that we can see as in a mirror the new features of our own converted lives.

Three very prominent characteristics of John’s portrait of Jesus are as instantly recognizable as the elongations and storminess of an El Greco painting. The first is an intense awareness of being sent by God. The theme of phrases such as “this is the will of the One who sent me” resound again and again. But the intensity and saturation of this coloring of all Jesus’ words and actions with the sense of “sentness” is not meant to separate us from him, and thus degrade our discipleship by comparison. The opposite is true. The believer in Jesus gains in conversion exactly the same conviction of having been given life and of being brought into the world to fulfill a mission from God. The new vision that comes with conversion brings with it the gift of a sense that one’s life is purposeful, that one has been given a mission, a life-task for God.

The second and intimately related feature of John’s icon of Jesus is agency. Jesus knows what he is doing and when it is time to do it, and he knows that he is doing it. We can be pretty sure that this is based on actual memories of Jesus. All the way through, Jesus’ words emphasize his own authority and responsibility for his actions. Now it is just this sense of agency and responsibility that comes as a gift from God in the converted life. In profane life, human beings suffer from a sense that not only are their lives accidental, but the fate to which they must resign themselves is that of being forever pushed around, manipulated, and dictated to. In the converted life, we are endowed with responsibility and with power.

The third feature of John’s gospel, which blends into the other two, is that of centeredness. The Jesus of John’s gospel can say “I am” so powerfully because he is totally understood and known by God. He is so known by God that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. And this is the authority that comes to us as converted believers. If I know myself to be utterly known, utterly known and completely loved, then I am. I really am. I really exist. I mean everything to God and therefore my life has meaning.

From “The Converted Life” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 27, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Disruption at work

Daily Reading for December 28 • The Holy Innocents

Sorting through the stack of cards that arrived at our house last Christmas, I note that all kinds of symbols have edged their way into the celebration. Overwhelmingly, the landscape scenes render New England towns buried in snow, usually with the added touch of a horse-drawn sleigh. On other cards, animals frolic: one card shows an African lion reclining with a foreleg draped affectionately around a lamb. Inside, the cards stress sunny words like love, good-will, cheer, happiness, and warmth. It is a fine thing, I suppose, that we honor a sacred holiday with such homey sentiments. And yet when I turn to the gospel accounts of the first Christmas, I hear a very different tone, and sense mainly disruption at work. . . .

The earliest events in Jesus’ life give a menacing preview of the unlikely struggle now under way. Herod, King of the Jews, enforced Roman rule at the local level, and in an irony of history we know Herod’s name mainly because of the massacre of the innocents. I have never seen a Christmas card depicting that state-sponsored act of terror, but it too was a part of Christ’s coming. Although secular history does not refer to the atrocity, no one acquainted with the life of Herod doubts him capable. Five days before his death he ordered the arrest of many citizens and decreed that they be executed on the day of his death, in order to guarantee a proper atmosphere of mourning in the country. For such a despot, a minor extermination procedure in Bethlehem posed no problem. . . .

As I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog. Growing up, Jesus’ sensibilities were affected most deeply by the poor, the powerless, the oppressed—in short, the underdogs. Today theologians debate the aptness of the phrase “God’s preferential option for the poor” as a way of describing God’s concern for the underdog. Since God arranged the circumstances in which to be born on planet earth—without power or wealth, without rights, without justice—his preferential options speak for themselves.

From The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey (Zondervan, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 28, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

On love alone

Daily Reading for December 29 • Thomas Becket, 1170

The Child we seek
doesn’t need our gold.
On love, on love alone
he will build his kingdom.
His piercéd hand will hold no scepter,
his haloed head will wear no crown;
his might will not be built
on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
he will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death,
and the keys to his city
belong to the poor.

Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti (G. Schirmer, 1950).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 29, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

God of good news

Daily Reading for December 30 • The First Sunday after Christmas Day

God of good news,
today you begin again to reshape our lives and communities.
You do not start from the outside, but from within.
You begin in the hidden place.
Behind the inn. Before the marriage. At the wrong time.
You invite a handful of guests into your company.
Shepherds. Local children perhaps. Maybe some animals.
You join the community of the invisible ones.
The homeless and hopeless. Refugees, fleeing a tyrant king.
Later, you find fisherfolk. And a tax collector. More children.
The small. The unimportant. The forgotten. The frightened.
These are the people you choose,
as little by little you start sharing
the secrets of a kingdom that will change the whole world.
From within. From the hidden place.

God of good news:
as we celebrate worldwide the tidings of your birth,
as we set the heavens echoing with angel songs,
as we contemplate a new year and pray for peace on earth. . .
remind us of the hidden places, of the forgotten people,
of the starting-points and the time it takes,
of the pace of the slowest and the dreams of the children
and the human scale and the soul of our towns
and the freedom to create secret dens.
Remind us that the great joy promised to the whole people
starts with those who need it most, in places where they hide.
Remind us, with all our seasonal cheer and tinsel,
that some people are left out in the cold;
that it is there, with them, that you are being born into the world again;
that it is there, through them, that you will change the world.

God of good news,
help us to find you again
in the hidden place.
Amen.

From Advent Readings from Iona by Brian Woodcock and Jan Sutch Pickard (Wild Goose Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 30, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Not much time left

Daily Reading for December 31 • The Eve of the Holy Name

Something about this time of year makes us resolve to do all manner of things better. Almost all our good intentions will be history in a week or two. But there is also that other aspect of this time of year, the part that taps us on the shoulder and whispers that our lives are speeding away, faster and faster, evaporating as we speak. That there is not much time left. That soon we will be gone.

At the end of the year we remember the other years. Look at photos of people who are gone. See our young selves—they, too, are gone. We marvel at them. Was that party really sixty years ago? Was I ever that young?

Yes, comes the answer from the pictures. You were. You still are. I’m still here, inside you, your eighteen-year-old self. But remember, we are leaving soon. Good-bye, good-bye.

The only remedy for that sorrow is a life well lived now. “Love well that which thou must leave ere long,” Shakespeare wrote, and he was right.

Don’t let a day of the new year pass without marking it, because it will be gone when it is over. Put into your days the things you want there—no one else will fill them for you. Anything we have can be taken from us at a moment’s notice. Some of the people in our old photographs are dead already, and one day we will be, as well, and no one knows when.

But today is ours.

From Let Us Bless the Lord, Year One: Meditations on the Daily Office, Advent through Holy Week by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 31, 2007 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Becoming persons

Daily Reading for January 1 • The Feast of the Holy Name

Back in the 1950s you opened up the newspaper on the first January certain to find the cartoonists trotting out the images of the little baby in diapers imprinted with the new year’s numbers, and old Father Time with his hourglass and scythe. These secular symbols are already so threadbare that in comparison the scriptural image of today’s liturgy, the Feast of the Holy Name, seems quite dramatic and still replete with meaning. Here the child held up before us is a real infant, and the figure with the sharp blade a real elder who cuts the flesh of the boy as the sign of the covenant with Abraham, while his parents give him his name. We are present at a fateful event: the newborn is becoming a person. And we are also persons, are becoming persons. This feast has to do with us. This becoming a person is what we would know the meaning of.

Seven full days have passed since the birth of Jesus. A week of namelessness, a symbolic hiatus. The infant is only a newborn. Only on the eighth day does the trajectory of the child’s human identity begin; he is acknowledged as a member of the community. He is inserted into its history, claimed by its tradition, and given a destiny within its future by naming. This name that bears his future is one that gathers up into a single sound the whole past experience and hope of his forebears and parents. Yahweh Saves. It is the name of the leader who took the desert wanderers into the promised land.

The feast is no longer called by its old name, the Feast of the Circumcision. Perhaps we are appalled to think about the radical givenness of identity that the irrevocable surgery on a helpless infant expresses so sharply—literally as a matter of flesh and blood. Before there is an I to choose, others choose and must mold and make me and do what calls me into life as a person in a particular community. Each of us is marked for life by the scandal of initial absolute dependence and vulnerability to the cutting edge of our situation. The persons we become can never dissolve or undo this givenness, though some of the wounds may heal and some of the blessings be lost.

From “Seek My Face” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Reciprocal joy

Daily Reading for January 2

No one can say that the classic pattern of the liturgy of Christmas is light on the tragic side of human existence. It has its themes of the census, the exclusion from the inn, the martyrdom of Stephen, the massacre of the innocents, the flight into Egypt, and now this serious evocation of the wound of historical existence, of submission to the narrow way of becoming a unique person through utter dependence on others. But there is throughout the Christmas season an ambience of hope, a yes radiating from the face of Mary that prevails over the shadow. Mother and child smile in mutual recognition, in reciprocal joy. Many of us are captivated and allured by the mystery of Jesus’ emerging self, summoned out of latency by his mother’s gaze and care.

As we contemplate in liturgy, icon, and prayer the face of Mary, we know we are in a mystery. This face launched the movement of the Savior into both personhood and faith. This is the face in which Jesus felt the presence of a loving other, a presence and a sign of wholeness which orders the universe as safe enough for life.

We could do worse than begin the new year by paying loving attention to this crucible of personality, the face-to-face interaction of mother and child, Mary and Jesus, and the arms and face of Mary as primal originating sacrament of the faith and trust of Jesus.

From “Seek My Face” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The saving name

Daily Reading for January 3

Loving God,
whose angels proclaimed
the saving name of Mary’s child,
grant that we might live each day
in the light of your incarnate love
and guided by your Holy Spirit
find our salvation in and through
the redeeming and most precious name
of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

A prayer for the Feast of the Holy Name by Frank Topping (2001), in Daily Prayer, edited by Frank Topping and based on the classic collection compiled by Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs (Oxford, 2003).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Uncontrollable mystery

Daily Reading for January 5

E. M. Forster said that the most deep and terrible line written on the nativity is the last line of Yeats’s poem, “The Magi”:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. The magi mysteriously shimmer as faces in the sky, forever peering back behind Calvary to their encounter with the baby lying on the stable floor among oxen and asses, a revelation so mysterious that its depths still baffle them, ever preventing them from being satisfied.

The key to their dissatisfaction is the terrible word “uncontrollable.” Magi were spiritual technicians. Their role was to assist people in getting control of their destinies through divinizing, augury, and horoscope. They offered means of controlling divine presences and forces through spells, charms, and rites. Human religiosity is about control. If the divine is close at hand, right here, then we can manipulate it. It is within our grasp, susceptible to our control. If, on the other hand, the divine is far away in a remote heaven, then we are on our own, and our religious practices serve just as well to calm our fears and put a spiritual gloss on our attempts to keep order.

What met the magi at Bethlehem was the mystery of divine creativity itself, which cannot be usurped or deflected; the uncontrollable mystery of God’s sheer initiative, which cannot be bent or blocked. What met them was the mystery of suffering love, which cannot be bought or seduced, there, right there, lying on its back on the bestial floor. Here is the uncontrollable mystery of Love present in all its fullness as a vulnerable baby.

All at once their potions, their horoscopes, their charts and crystals, their incantations and secret lore collapse into nothing. So they unload onto the floor where the baby lies gazing at them their obsolete bag of tricks—the talismans of gold, the incense with which they fogged and scented their rituals, the myrrh they used for magic ointments. They let all these go in the presence of the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

From “The Uncontrollable Mystery” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

Home by another way

Daily Reading for January 6 • The Feast of the Epiphany

A colleague of mine noticed several years ago one of those marvelous phrases of multiple meaning strewn throughout our scriptures, the familiar reference to the magi who, “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, . . . left for their own country by another road.” We both had noticed that the political acumen of the magi surely certified their wisdom. But it was my friend who noticed something else: that nearly everyone who encounters Jesus ends up going home by another way. The encounter with Jesus changes people, makes them different. After they have met this Jesus, they seem incapable—or certainly unwilling—to go back the same way they had come.

The Feast of the Epiphany and the season that follows is, for the church, a traditional season of mission and evangelism. Of course, for the modern church in America, there are very few mission fields left to us, few places where the basic outlines of the gospel has not penetrated geographical, political, and cultural barriers in one fashion or another. And evangelism demands some good news to proclaim, but too many days there seems precious little good to report. But there is still a ripe mission field remaining for each of us, if only we turn our sights inward.

I was reminded of this at a national conference for Episcopal students where we used varied liturgies from prayers books across the Anglican Communion. I was reminded of how very different we all are, and how much more so we grow daily. In this modern-day church, as in that ancient stable, those gathered really have nothing much in common. If we look around that manger, if we look at those who surrounded Jesus throughout his life, and even those who stood around at his death, we find that they were as diverse a lot as one might find. Like us. For truth be told, when you get right down to it, we probably really do not have much in common, you and I; the only thing we have in common is this person, Jesus. And that was certainly true for those of us who gathered at that conference. Even when we could not agree on what this Jesus looked like, or what he thought, or the meaning of what he said and did, we could still acknowledge that he was our common connection.

That was his singular gift, a genuine gift, something inherent in his person, and not some skill he crafted or stratagem he employed. For on the first Epiphany he was but an infant. Yet the force of his person was such that the different gathered around him.

From Daysprings: Meditations for the Weekdays of Advent, Lent, and Easter by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Listen to the story

Daily Reading for January 7

The story of the magi ranks right up there with the Christmas and Easter stories in terms of snaring the human imagination. Poets as distinct as William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams have wrapped words around the visit of the wise men. Longfellow even gave them names: Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. Hundreds of artists have painted the scene, including Botticelli and Fra Angelico.

In more recent years, Garrison Keillor has told the story on National Public Radio’s “Prairie Home Companion,” and James Taylor has written a lilting song from which the title of this sermon comes. So much has been made of this story about which we know so little. They were not kings, of course, and there were not three of them, at least not according to Matthew. We do not know who they were, where they came from, or how many of them there were. We do not know how long it took them to get to Bethlehem or how old Jesus was by the time they got there. We are not even sure about that famous star.

It is not that the facts don’t matter. It is just that they don’t matter as much as the stories do, and stories can be true whether they happen or not. You do not have to do archaeology to find out if they are genuine, or spend years in the library combing ancient texts. There is another way home. You just listen to the story. You let it come to life inside of you, and then you decide on the basis of your own tears or laughter whether the story is true. If you are in any doubt, it is always a good idea to watch other people who have listened to the story—just pay attention to how the story affects them over time. Does it make them more or less human? Does it open them up or shut them down? Does it increase their capacity for joy?

From “Home By Another Way,” in Home By Another Way by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Harriet Bedell

Daily Reading for January 8 • Harriet Bedell, Deaconess and Missionary, 1969

St. Andrew's Mission at Stephen's Village on the Yukon River between Fort Yukon and Rampart, deserves a special word because its actual starting was the result of a really clamorous importunity on the part of the Indians themselves. So long as the white man's town of Rampart was large enough to warrant a resident missionary, Stephen's Village, with its native catechist, was visited from that post, eighty miles away. It was on a Christmas journey thither that the Rev. John Huhn, our last resident clergyman at Rampart, contracted the illness from which he died, in 1906. He is buried on the hill above the old native village near Rampart, in the burying ground of the Indians whom he loved.

As Rampart decayed many of the natives who had flocked thither when it was prosperous (to their demoralization and general detriment) returned to the more eligible Indian residence at Stephen's Village, situate just on the edge of the Yukon Flats, ten or twelve miles above the abrupt beginning of the Lower Ramparts of the Yukon. The village thus grew by accretions until it numbered nearly an hundred souls. There had been a Government school there for a few years, but it burned down and was not rebuilt (for lack of funds) and the teacher was withdrawn. Every time that the Bishop stopped there on his visitations there were eager demands for a mission of their own. At length the Bishop told them that if they would build a church themselves (so far as the log structure was concerned) he would send a missionary, and the next summer the church was built and the missionary demanded.

So Miss Effie Jackson was sent and for two years taught school and held service in the church, and a convenient cabin was built for her. She was followed by Miss Harriet Bedell, of long experience in Indian work, who for three years past has lived all alone in the village, exercising all the functions of a woman missionary and swaying almost undisputed influence over the native mind. Off the steamboat track in summer--for the steamboats do not like to cross the river amidst sandbars and make the turn necessary to reach the place unless they have freight to discharge--entirely cut off from communication in the winter, for there is now no mail route down the Yukon and the nearest post office is eighty miles away, this is one of the most isolated spots in interior Alaska, although it is situated on the main Yukon. And again this very isolation makes for more intensive educational and religious work. Such a post requires a missionary entirely absorbed and happy in the work, and such a one is Miss Bedell.

From The Alaskan Missions of the Episcopal Church: A brief sketch, historical and descriptive by Hudson Stuck, D.D., Archdeacon of the Yukon (New York: Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, 1920).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Julia Chester Emery

Daily Reading for January 9 • Julia Chester Emery, 1922

Julia Chester Emery is not the kind of person one expects to meet in a calendar of religious commemorations, in part because of the nature of her accomplishments. Her story does not involve extraordinary feats of courage, neither was she tortured or executed for reason of her faith. She was only twenty-four years old when she assumed the only ecclesiastical post she would ever hold, secretary of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the Episcopal Church. In that office Julia Emery served for forty years, a faithful lay woman.

By the time Julia Emery left her post in 1916, she had helped organize branches of the Woman’s Auxiliary in nearly two-thirds of the eighty-five hundred parishes of the Episcopal Church. Moreover, the Auxiliary itself dispensed many dollars in financial aid to missions and raised the awareness of the larger church to the important work of outreach.

Julia Emery reminds us that the most difficult and demanding work of mission is the most mundane, the work of administration and education. Increasingly, missionary work involves not exotic travel or rare courage; far less does it involve a zeal for conversion to one’s own ideals or methods. Instead, modern mission demands just those qualities Julia Emery devoted to service—gifts for educating, organizing, and administering.

We remember Julia Emery for raising funds, organizing volunteers, administering institutions, and educating lay members of the church. Apparently, her only training for this ministry was a willingness to try it, for she possessed no special education or preparation. Her only authority was collegial, for being a lay woman, she had neither the office nor the perquisites of ordained status to buttress her leadership. Julia Emery reminds us that we all possess the resources we need to be effective missionaries, except perhaps the two most important qualities exemplified in her—a willingness to try and the commitment to stick with it, even for a lifetime.

From Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

William Laud

Daily Reading for January 10 • William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

The ‘unity,’ then, ‘of the Spirit,’ to which the apostle exhorts, includes both; both concord in mind and affections, and love of charitable unity, which comes from the Spirit of God, and returns to it. And, indeed, the grace of God’s Spirit is that alone which makes men truly at peace and unity one with another. To Him it is to be attributed, not to us, saith Saint Augustine. It is ‘He that makes men to be of one mind in an house.’ Now one mind in the Church, and one mind in the State, come from the same fountain with ‘one mind in an house;’ all from ‘the Spirit.’ And so the Apostle clearly, ‘one body, and one Spirit,’ that is, ‘one body,’ by ‘one Spirit.’ For it is ‘the Spirit’ that joins all the members of the Church into ‘one body.’ And it is the Church that blesses the State, not simply with ‘unity,’ but with that unity with which itself is blessed of God. A State not Christian may have ‘unity’ in it. Yes; and so may a State that hath lost all Christianity, save the name. But ‘unity of the Spirit’ nor Church nor State can longer hold, than they do in some measure obey the ‘Spirit,’ and love the ‘unity.’

This ‘unity of the Spirit’ is closer than any corporal union can be; for spirits meet where bodies cannot, and nearer than bodies can. The reason is given by Saint Chrysostom: because the soul or spirit of man is more simple, and of one form. And the soul apter in itself to union is made more apt by the Spirit of God which is ‘one,’ and loves nothing but as it tends to one. Nay, as the Spirit of God is one, and cannot dissent from itself, no more ought they whom the Spirit hath joined in one; and the Spirit hath joined the Church in one; therefore he that divides the unity of the Church, practices against the ‘unity of the Spirit.’

And now I cannot but wonder what words Saint Paul, were he now alive, would use, to call back ‘unity’ into dismembered Christendom. For my part, death were easier to me, than it is to see and consider the face of the Church of Christ scratched and torn, till it bleeds in every part, as it doth this day.

From Sermons Before King Charles’s Third Parliament by William Laud, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Be not afraid

Daily Reading for January 11

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak—even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. “Be not afraid,” says another, “for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen for the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.

From The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Aelred of Rievaulx

Daily Reading for January 12 • Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, 1167

When God created man, in order to commend more highly the good of society, he said: “it is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a helper like unto himself.” It was from no similar, nor even from the same, material that divine Might formed this help mate, but as a clearer inspiration to charity and friendship he produced the woman from the very substance of the man. How beautiful it is that the second human being was taken from the side of the first, so that nature might teach that human beings are equal and, as it were, collateral, and that there is in human affairs neither a superior nor an inferior, a characteristic of true friendship.

Hence, nature from the very beginning implanted the desire for friendship and charity in the heart of man, a desire which an inner sense of affection soon increased with a taste of sweetness. But after the fall of the first man, when with the cooling of charity concupiscence made secret inroads and caused private good to take precedence over the common weal, it corrupted the splendor of friendship and charity through avarice and envy, introducing contentions, emulations, hates and suspicions because the morals of men had been corrupted. From that time the good distinguished between charity and friendship, observing that love ought to be extended even to the hostile and perverse, while no union of will and ideas can exist between the good and wicked. And so friendship which, like charity, was first preserved among the all by all, remained according to the natural law among the few good. They saw the sacred laws of faith and society violated by many and bound themselves together by a closer bond of love and friendship. In the midst of the evils which they saw and felt, they rested in the joy of mutual charity.

From Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx (Cistercian Publications, 1977).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Christ is baptized

Daily Reading for January 13 • The Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord

Christ is bathed in light; let us also be bathed in light. Christ is baptized; let us also go down with him, and rise with him.

John is baptizing when Jesus draws near. Perhaps he comes to sanctify his baptizer; certainly he comes to bury sinful humanity in the waters. He comes to sanctify the Jordan for our sake and in readiness for us; he who is spirit and flesh comes to begin a new creation through the Spirit and water.

The Baptist protests; Jesus insists. Then John says: “I ought to be baptized by you.” He is the lamp in the presence of the sun, the voice in the presence of the Word, the friend in the presence of the Bridegroom, the greatest of all born of woman in the presence of the firstborn of all creation, the one who leapt in his mother’s womb in the presence of him who was adored in the womb, the forerunner and future forerunner in the presence of him who has already come and is to come again. “I ought to be baptized by you;” we should also add: “and for you,” for John is to be baptized in blood, washed clean like Peter, not only by the washing of his feet.

Jesus rises from the waters; the world rises with him.

From Oration 39 by Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople (389), quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Beloved one

Daily Reading for January 14

A voice from heaven tells Jesus he is a beloved son who is well pleasing. Close your eyes. Silently or aloud say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Then in your mind’s eye, see Jesus and imagine his unspoken response.

Now visualize what it would be like for you to have God descend upon you. Ask yourself:
—If that were to happen in my life, what might I have to give up or take on?
—The word beloved—what does it mean to be a beloved one?

Look around your office or school or dining room table and wonder:
—Who has ever called me a beloved son, daughter, friend, spouse, lover, or colleague?
—From whom do I yearn to hear those words?
—To whom have I given that blessing?
—Who has waited and still waits to hear me say: “You are my beloved in whom I am well pleased”?

From Finding Jesus, Discovering Self: Passages to Healing and Wholeness by Caren Goldman and William Dols. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Daily Reading for January 15

It was not until I became part of the leadership of the Montgomery bus protest that I was actually confronted with the trials of life. Almost immediately after the protest had been undertaken, we began to receive threatening telephone calls and letters in our home. . . . After a particularly strenuous day, I had reached the saturation point. I was ready to give up. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage seemed almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers, I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced Him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared.

Three nights later, our home was bombed. Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My experience with God had given me new strength and trust. I knew now that God is able to give us the interior resources to face the storms and problems of life. Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future.

From Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The way to God

Daily Reading for January 16

The desert fathers withdrew from ordinary society and sought the solitude of the desert. This was the first step in their ‘spirituality’. Then they placed themselves under spiritual fathers. After that, the daily life was their prayer, and it was a radically simple life: a stone hut with a roof of branches, a reed mat for a bed, a sheep-skin, a lamp, a vessel for water or oil. It was enough.

The aim of the monks’ lives was not asceticism, but God, and the way to God was charity. The gentle charity of the desert was the pivot of all their work and the test of their way of life. Charity was to be total and complete. Antony the Great said, ‘My life is with my brother’, and he himself returned to the city twice, once to relieve those dying of plague, and once to defend the faith against heresy. The old men of the desert received guests as Christ would receive them. They might live austerely themselves, but when visitors came they hid their austerity and welcomed them. A brother said, ‘Forgive me, father, for I have made you break your rule’, but the old man said, ‘My rule is to receive you with hospitality and send you on your way in peace.’

From The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers by Sister Benedicta Ward SLG (SLG Press, 1975).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Integrity before God

Daily Reading for January 17 • Antony, Abbot in Egypt, 356

Abba Antony said, ‘Whatever you find in your heart to do in following God, that do, and remain within yourself in Him.’ This personal integrity before God, without any disguises or pretensions, is the essence of the spirituality of the desert. All ascetic effort, all personal relationships, life in all its aspects, was to be brought slowly into the central relationship with God in Christ. All the means to this end were just that, means and no more; they could be changed or discarded as necessary. The Sayings of the desert fathers must be used in the spirit in which they were spoken, otherwise they will have less than their true value. They are not just for interest but for use. Radical simplicity and integrity is their aim and purpose.

From The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers by Sister Benedicta Ward SLG (SLG Press, 1975).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

You are the Christ

Daily Reading for January 18 • The Confession of St. Peter the Apostle

From apostolic times, Jesus has been spoken of, and proclaimed, as the Christ, the anointed One. While such usage is common in the earliest Christian preaching, it is not common in the Gospel accounts, although Peter proclaims Jesus as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8.29; Matt. 16.16; Luke 9.20). However, Mark tells us that Jesus forbade his disciples to speak of this (Mark 8.30), and he himself does not speak of himself as the Christ (apart from the two references in Matt. 23.10 and Mark 9.41 which are from secondary sources). Christ, Messiah, was not at this time a divine or even supernatural title, but was associated with an act of earthly liberation, with the restoration of Israel. Whether Jesus ever specifically accepted the title is not clear. When asked by the High Priest about the claim to messianic status, he seems to have accepted it (Mark 14.61; Matt. 26.63) though this may simply reflect the early Church’s view. Yet within a generation of the crucifixion the name ‘Christian’ was being used in Antioch (Acts 11.26), and King Agrippa II knows and understands this usage (26.28).

In view of the clear centrality of the identification of Jesus with the Christ/Messiah in the early Church’s preaching, it is significant that there is so little evidence in the Synoptics, or even in John, for an explicit claim from the lips of Jesus himself. Had there been more evidence to produce, the early Church would surely have produced it in support of their belief. . . . It was out of the experience of what Jesus had achieved, in his ministry, death, and resurrection, and out of reflection on this achievement in the light of the Jewish hope, that the early Christians came quickly to see Jesus as the Messiah.

From Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality by Kenneth Leech (Harper and Row, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The sevenfold gift of God

Daily Reading for January 19 • Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, 1095

Isaiah the prophet wrote about the sevenfold gift of God in his prophesy about the Holy Spirit and about his sevenfold gifts. The sevenfold gifts are named thus: sapientia in Latin, that is wisdom in English; intellectus in Latin, that is understanding in English; consilium in Latin, that is counsel in English; fortitude in Latin, strength of spirit in English; scientia in Latin, good sense in English; pietas in Latin, piety in English; timor Domini in Latin, the fear of God in English. These sevenfold gifts truly were in our Lord in perfection, and the Holy Spirit still daily distributes them to Christians, each according to his desire and his spirit’s eagerness, just as bishops in confirmation eagerly long for God himself.

And indeed that person has wisdom through the gift of God who lives wisely and always considers how he might please God. And he has good sense through God’s gift who always turns it toward his Lord’s will with good works. And he has good counsel through God’s gift who ever guides himself about what is to be done and what to be left undone. And he has strength of spirit through God’s gift who can forebear and endure much and ever be patient in every humility and again in good occurrences not forsake his diligence but be always discreet in every way so that he be not too glad in joy or too despondent in woe. And he has good sense through God’s gift who loves goodness and innocence and is better within than he is thought without and knows for himself the difference between truth and untruth. And he has piety through God’s gift who is devout and shows respect to other people, to his peers and also to his subordinates and does not want to despise or shame the other with words or deeds. And then the fear of God is the seventh gift of these spiritual gifts, and this gift is the beginning of all wisdom. And he who has the fear of God fully by no means forsakes many of the things that are necessary for his soul to have and to hold.

From “On the Sevenfold Gifts of the Spirit” by Wulfstan, quoted in Anglo-Saxon Spirituality: Selected Writings, translated and introduced by Robert Boenig, in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Warming my spirit

Daily Reading for January 20 • The Second Sunday After the Epiphany

In the mystery of our Lord’s incarnation there were clear indications of his eternal Godhead. Yet the great events we celebrate today disclose and reveal in different ways the fact that God himself took a human body. Mortals, enshrouded always in darkness, must not be left in ignorance, and so be deprived of what they can understand and retain only by grace.

In choosing to be born for us, God chose to be known by us. He therefore reveals himself in this way, in order that this great sacrament of his love may not be an occasion for us of great misunderstanding.

Today the Magi find, crying in a manger, the one they have followed as he shone in the sky. Today the Magi see clearly, in swaddling clothes, the one they have long awaited as he lay hidden among the stars.

Today Christ enters the Jordan to wash away the sin of the world. John himself testifies that this is why he has come: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.” Today a servant lays his hand on the Lord, a man lays his hand on God, John lays his hand on Christ, not to forgive but to receive forgiveness.

Today Christ works the first of his signs from heaven by turning water into wine. But water [mixed with wine] has still to be changed into the sacrament of his blood, so that Christ may offer spiritual drink from the chalice of his body, to fulfill the psalmist’s prophecy: “How excellent is my chalice, warming my spirit.”

From a sermon of Peter Chrysologus, Bishop of Ravenna [450], quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Genuine festival

Daily Reading for January 21 • Agnes, Martyr at Rome, 304

The Word who becomes all things for us is close to us, our Lord Jesus Christ who promises to remain with us always. He cries out, saying: “See, I am with you all the days of this age.” He himself is the shepherd, the high priest, the way and the door, and has become all things at once for us. It was Christ who shed his light on the psalmist as he prayed: “You are my joy, deliver me from those surrounding me.” True joy, genuine festival, means the casting out of wickedness. To achieve this one must live a life of perfect goodness and, in the serenity of the fear of God, practice contemplation in one’s heart.

This was the way of the saints, who in their lifetime and at every stage of life rejoiced as at a feast. Because of their holy lives they gained freedom, and now keep festival in heaven. They rejoice after their pilgrimage in shadows, and now distinguish the reality from the promise.

From an Easter Letter by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria [373], quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Defending the faith

Daily Reading for January 22 • Vincent, Deacon of Saragossa and Martyr, 304

Another early deacon with close ties to his bishop was Vincent of Saragossa, martyred on 22 January 304. Vincent was not only the eyes and ears of his bishop, but literally his mouth. Because Valerius stuttered badly, Vincent often preached for him. According to legend, they were arrested by the governor of Spain, threatened with torture and death, and pressured to renounce their faith. Vincent said, “Father, if you order me, I will speak.” Valerius replied, “Son, as I have committed you to dispense the word of God, so I now charge you to answer in vindication of the faith which we defend.” Vincent defied the governor and was tortured to death. . . .

Scholars may question the historical accuracy of these legends about Laurence and Vincent, Apollonia and Thekla, and other early martyrs, but they tell us a good deal about deacons in the early church. They stood close to their bishop, they brought help to the poor and brought the word to the people, and they held the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience, even to death.

From Many Servants: An Introduction to Deacons by Ormonde Plater (Cowley Publications, 1991).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In the way of love

Daily Reading for January 23 • Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, 1893

I find myself pitying the friends of my youth, who died when we were twenty-five years old, because whatever may be the richness of the life to which they have gone, and in which they have been living ever since, they never can know that particular manifestation of Christ which He makes to us here on earth, at each successive period of our human life. All experience comes to be but more and more of pressure of His life on ours. It cannot come by one flash of light, or one great convulsive event. It comes without haste and without rest in this perpetual living of our life with Him. And all the history, of outer or inner life, of the changes of circumstances, or the changes of thought, gets its meaning and value from this constantly growing relation to Christ.

I cannot tell you how personal this grows to me. He is here. He knows me and I know Him. It is no figure of speech. It is the realest thing in the world. And every day makes it realer. And one wonders with delight what it will grow to as the years go on.

Less and less, I think, grows the consciousness of seeking God. Greater and greater grows the certainty that He is seeking us and giving Himself to us to the complete measure of our present capacity. That is Love,--not that we loved Him, but that He loved us. I am sure that we ought to dwell far more upon God’s love for us than on our love for Him. There is such a thing as putting ourselves in the way of God’s overflowing love and letting it break upon us till the response of love to Him comes, not by struggle, not even by deliberation, but by necessity, as the echo comes when the sound strikes the rock.

From Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Ministry transformed

Daily Reading for January 24 • Ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi, First Woman Priest in the Anglican Communion, 1944

The first woman priest in the Anglican Communion was not an American. In a curious parallel to the seating of Elizabeth Dyer in the House of Deputies in 1946, the upheaval of wartime had also made possible the 1944 ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi by Ronald O. Hall, the bishop of Hong Kong, to provide priestly ministrations to Chinese Americans under the Japanese occupation. When word of the ordination reached England, Bishop Hall was roundly denounced and Li Tim-Oi agreed to suspend her sacramental ministry to protect Hall from punitive action. Her subsequent disappearance throughout the years China was closed to the West made it easy for the Anglican Communion to resist dealing with the implications of her ordination, but Li Tim-Oi’s ordination reminds us that the issue was by no means an American invention of the 1960s. In fact, women’s ordination to the priesthood had been urged by women’s rights activists on both sides of the Atlantic since the turn of the century, and was first alluded to in a Lambeth Conference report of 1920. . . .

On February 11, 1989, before a jubilant crowd of eight thousand people in the Hynes Auditorium in Boston, Barbara Clementine Harris was consecrated suffragan bishop of the most populous diocese in the American church. . . . Everything about the service testified to the fact that the old order was changing. The preacher was Harris’s mentor, Paul Washington, rector of the Church of the Advocate which had hosted the Philadelphia ordinations fifteen years earlier. Joining Bishop Harris around the altar to concelebrate the Eucharist were Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first Anglican woman ordained to the priesthood in 1944, and Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven. . . . A woman had become a bishop, and the episcopacy had been transformed: no longer a male preserve, it had become an image of human leadership within a community of diverse men and women united in Christ’s service.

From New Wine: The Story of Women Transforming Leadership and Power in the Episcopal Church by Pamela W. Darling (Cowley Publications, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prayer for unity

Daily Reading for January 25 • The Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle

We have come together in the presence of Almighty God to pray for the recovery of the unity of Christ’s Church, and for the renewal of our common life in Jesus Christ in whom we are all made one.

Silence

Let us give heed to the words of Holy Scripture which set forth God’s will and purpose for the unity of his Church.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will.

“There is one body, and one Spirit, as there is also one hope held out in God’s call to you; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will.

“For Christ is like a single body with its many limbs and organs which, many as they are, together make up one body. For indeed we were all brought into one body by baptism, in the one Spirit, whether we are Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and that one Holy Spirit was poured out for all of us to drink.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will.

“But it is not for these alone that I pray, but for those also who through their words put their faith in me; may they all be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
Lord, write your word in our hearts:
That we may know and do your will. Amen.

A litany for The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity from Prayers for Today’s Church, quoted in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised and updated edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery Rowthorn with W. Alfred Tisdale. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Companions in the faith

Daily Reading for January 26 • Timothy and Titus, Companions of St. Paul

Heavenly Father
you sent your apostle Paul to preach the gospel
and gave him Timothy and Titus
to be his companions in the faith:
grant that our fellowship in the Spirit
may bear witness to the name of Jesus;
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit
one God, now and for ever.

Collect for the Feast of Timothy and Titus from An Anglican Prayer Book 1989 of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (HarperCollins, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Following Jesus

Daily Reading for January 27 • The Third Sunday After the Epiphany

If persons and communities follow Jesus and proclaim the kingdom of God to the poor; if they strive for liberation from every kind of slavery; if they seek, for all human beings, especially for the immense majority of men and women who are crucified persons, a life in conformity with the dignity of daughters and sons of God; if they have the courage and forthrightness to speak the truth, however this may translate into the denunciation and unmasking of sin, and steadfastness in the conflicts and persecution occasioned by this forthrightness; if, in this discipleship of Jesus, they effectuate their own conversion from being oppressors to being men and women of service; if they have the spirit of Jesus, with the bowels of mercy and the pure heart to see the truth of things, and refuse to darken their hearts by imprisoning the truth of things in injustice; if in doing justice they seek peace and in making peace they seek to base it on justice; and if they do all this in the following and discipleship of Jesus because he did all this himself—then they believe in Jesus Christ.

From Jesus in Latin America by Jon Sobrino (Orbis Books, 1987).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Thomistic synthesis

Daily Reading for January 28 • Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Friar, 1274

Though involved in numerous ecclesiastical and civil affairs, Thomas Aquinas was primarily a theological thinker and writer. The only comparable figure in previous church history is Augustine, and Aquinas quotes his distinguished predecessor more frequently than any other of the Fathers. But unlike Augustine, Aquinas was a systematizer with a neat, orderly mind that delighted in logical and dialectical coherence. Aiding him in this architectonic ideal was the newly rediscovered Aristotle, whose precision of definition and syllogistic distinctions provided Aquinas with the philosophical instrument he needed for his theological construction. Thus in Aquinas both Augustine and Aristotle meet, and the synthesis added an astonishing brilliance to such perennial problems as the relation of revelation and reason.

There are two distinct lines of development in Christian theology. One comes out of the Hebrew-Christian tradition and the other from the Greco-Roman philosophy and culture. The so-called Thomistic synthesis brought the two into functional coexistence.

From Readings in Christian Thought, edited by Hugh T. Kerr (Abingdon, 1983).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Taking on our littleness

Daily Reading for January 29

To restore man, who had been laid low by sin, to the heights of divine glory, the Word of the eternal Father, though containing all things within His immensity, willed to become small. This He did, not by putting aside His greatness, but by taking to Himself our littleness.

The reparation of human nature could not be effected by Adam or by any other purely human being. For no individual man ever occupied a position of preeminence over the whole of nature; nor can any mere man be the cause of grace. Nothing remains, therefore, but that such restoration could be effected by God alone.

There are also other reasons for the divine Incarnation. Man had withdrawn from spiritual things and had delivered himself up wholly to material things, from which he was unable by his own efforts to make his way back to God. Therefore divine Wisdom, who had made man, took to Himself a bodily nature and visited man immersed in things of the body, so that by the mysteries of His bodily life He might recall man to spiritual life.

At the same time, by willing to become man, God clearly displayed the immensity of His love for men, so that henceforth men might serve God, no longer out of fear of death, which the first man had scorned, but out of the love of charity.

From Compendium of Theology by Thomas Aquinas, translated by Cyril Vollert (B. Herder, 1948).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Humbly I adore thee

Daily Reading for January 30

Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen,
Who thy glory hidest ’neath these shadows mean;
Lo, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed,
Tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.

Taste, and touch, and vision, to discern thee fail;
Faith, that comes by hearing, pierces through the veil.
I believe whate’er the Son of God hath told;
What the Truth hath spoken, that for truth I hold.

O memorial wondrous of the Lord’s own death;
Living Bread, that givest all thy creatures breath,
Grant my spirit ever by thy life may live,
To my taste thy sweetness never-failing give.

Jesus, whom now veiled, I by faith descry,
What my soul doth thirst for, do not, Lord, deny,
That thy face unveiled, I at last may see,
With the blissful vision blest, my God, of thee.

Thomas Aquinas, c. 1260; hymnal version, 1939. Hymn 204 in The Hymnal 1940 (Church Pension Fund, 1940).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The monastery at Kildare

Daily Reading for January 31

“And who can describe in words the supreme beauty of this church, and the countless wonders of that minster—of that city as we may say, if it can rightly be called a city when it is surrounded by no circuit of walls? But because countless people come together in it, it earns the name ‘city’ from the gathering of crowds there. This city is supreme and metropolitan, in whose suburbs, which holy Brigit marked out with a precise boundary, is feared no mortal adversary nor onslaught of enemies. But it is the safest city of refuge, with all its external suburbs, in the whole land of the Irish for all fugitives. . . . And who can count the varied crowds and countless peoples flocking together from all provinces? Some come because of the abundance of feasts, others to obtain healing of their ailments, others to stare at the crowds; others bring great gifts and offerings to the celebration of holy Brigit’s birth.”

Thus the seventh-century Irishman Cogitosus praised Kildare. He was writing in a tradition, suffused with biblical conceptions of cities of refuge and the heavenly city, which presented the minsters of Ireland as places of safety, centrality, and popular resort as well as places of cult. The main centres of early Christian Ireland were indeed its monastic sites, and several of them have now yielded archaeological evidence for complex zoning of activities, including specialized craft production and industry, during the seventh to ninth centuries.

From The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society by John Blair (Oxford, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 31, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Abbess of Kildare

Daily Reading for February 1 • Brigid (Bride), 523

Father,
by the leadership of your blessed servant Brigid
you strengthened the Church in this land:
As we give you thanks for her life of devoted service,
inspire us with new life and light,
and give us perseverance to serve you all our days;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Collect Two for Saint Brigid, in The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of Ireland (Dublin: The Columba Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Faith to believe

Daily Reading for February 2 • The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple

Hope and fear, laughter and tears have been part of our journey.
Joy and pain, longing and doubt meet on the pathway.
Often we do not believe, O God,
and sometimes we doubt that your promises can be true.
Grant us and our world the freedom to laugh,
the courage to cry,
the heart to be open,
and the faith to believe.

From Celtic Treasure: Daily Scriptures and Prayer by J. Philip Newell (Eerdmans, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 2, 2008 2:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Exodus and transfiguration

Daily Reading for February 3 • The Last Sunday After the Epiphany

Consider one of the central symbols of the Bible: the exodus from Egypt. It recurs again and again in both the Old and New Testaments. At first the symbol may work on us by inviting us to explore in prayer the implications of the historic event itself. The event reveals God as the One who takes up the cause of the defenseless, the exiled and oppressed. God does not soothe the oppressed with promises of heaven, but wants their freedom in this life. In our meditation on the Exodus event we find ourselves challenged: do we really look to God as liberator? Do we hear God saying today to those who hold their fellow human beings in various kinds of political, social and economic bondage, “Let my people go”? Where do we stand with regard to the oppression perpetrated by the powerful of our own day?

The symbol may then have another effect on us. It is used in the New Testament to interpret redemption, the liberation which Christ achieved through the cross. Luke represents Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration speaking of “the exodus which [Jesus] was to accomplish at Jerusalem.” In meditation on the theme of redemption we find our hearts searched and tested. What do we believe Christ has done for us? What was the slavery we were powerless to escape from? What did Christ do to set us free? Do we in reality look to him as our liberator and rescuer? As we explore for ourselves what it is we have been emancipated from, what kind of promised land is now ours to enter, our meditation begins to turn into praise of Christ.

From The Word is Very Near You: A Guide to Praying with Scripture by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Moving the boundaries

Daily Reading for February 4 • Cornelius the Centurion

If a boundary defines, then moving or removing that boundary means redefinition. Something new is being identified and named. The work of changing a boundary—or moving ourselves across a threshold—demands attention and a willingness to listen to the voices around us. . . .

Any decision to include or exclude either creates a different system altogether or modifies the existing one. Indeed, revolution itself might be defined as the setting of a new boundary. Responsible shifting of boundaries requires our asking a number of questions: Where is the boundary? Who or what determined it in the first place? Is this line of God, or was it set by powers acting contrary to God’s will? Does there need to be a line drawn where there was none before? How do we know? The answers we make to these questions can help us discover when and where boundaries need to be maintained, shifted, or abolished altogether, especially concerning those areas of human life in which there is considerable disagreement. Answers do not come easily. They will emerge only after intense work in personal and communal discernment—prayer, wrestling with God’s word in scripture, honest exchange.

From Good Fences: The Boundaries of Hospitality by Caroline Westerhoff (Cowley Publications, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Shrove Tuesday

Daily Reading for February 5 • The Martyrs of Japan, 1597

Shrove Tuesday calls us to think about sin in preparation for the season of repentance, yet the tradition of revelry associated with Mardi Gras militates against deadly seriousness. Can we let ourselves into the subject of sin a little lightly?

Ogden Nash has a delightful poem called “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” that explores comically the classic distinction between sins of commission and sins of omission. He warns us not to bother our heads about the first kind, “because however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn’t be committing them.” It is through the sins of omission that we get bitten. These are the things that “lay eggs under our skin.” What we do wrong is often less harmful than our failure to do good. Our wrongdoing is so often powered by an energy that can be converted to good. The secret of sin does not lie in our energetic but misdirected action; it lies in our inertia and forgetfulness, in our inner deadness, denial, and boredom. The secret of hell lies in our not loving, in our not risking, in our withholding. Evil is our paralysis in the face of love’s invitation, our great refusal.

From “What Shall We Do For Lent?” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Entering the wilderness

Daily Reading for February 6 • Ash Wednesday

Lent is not a temporary affectation of gloom or a brisk interlude for self-improvement. It is for being in the wilderness, which means stopping long enough to recognize the truth of our inertia and faithlessness. This deadness inside is a fact. On Ash Wednesday we are called first to face this fact—but then what? What shall we do?

This may seem strange, but this year every time I have asked myself the question “What shall I do for Lent?” I have immediately thought of a brief exchange that occurs in a droll Russian novel by Goncharov. The hero, Oblomov, is asked what he does. The question astonishes and offends him. “What? What do I do? why, I am in love with Olga!” To him, the question about what he does is a question about his identity. He is a man in love, and that is who he understands himself to be.

The question that should be put to us all at the beginning of Lent is not “What shall we do?” The right question is the one to which the answer is, “Why, I am in love with God!” What begins to enliven our inertia is remembering and realizing that we are in love with God. True repentance, true change of heart, consists in grasping the fact that we are called to be in love with God, and that the love with which we love God is something already given to us. Repentance is coming alive to our given identity as lovers of God.

So, what shall we do for Lent? We shall act on our identity as women and men who are in love with God. We shall do whatever helps us remember and realize that identity and do what arises from it.

From “What Shall We Do For Lent?” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Clearing a space for prayer

Daily Reading for February 7

If prayer is something important to us, then much more of our time will be directed to trying to bring about possible conditions for prayer than to actually doing it. I have several times compared the act of prayer with the act of writing, and here once again the comparison holds true. As a writer I seem to devote an awful lot of effort and time to clearing a space in which to write. I means turning down invitations to things like coffee mornings and conferences. It means trying to persuade my friends not to telephone me in the mornings. It means finding someone to do the housework that I can’t get done.

It means, on a more seductive level, refusing jobs, and friendships, and good works, and hobbies, that simply would not leave enough time and energy over.

Prayer seems to me to work in much the same way. We want the space in which to deepen our awareness of ourselves and of God by one method or another; but, much as we want it, we can still be tempted into activities which exhaust us and leave us as unsatisfied as ever. These may not necessarily be what people used to call ‘frivolous’ activities—frivolity can often feed us in unexpected ways. In fact for many Christians now it often seems to be the sheer weight of earnest and worthy duties which makes self-discovery no more than a wistful hope.

Perhaps if, collectively, we had a bit more spiritual insight, we should know that there are occasions in people’s lives when a kind of moratorium on works, even good works, is what is needed most, and that this is as much a proof of their love for mankind as feeding the hungry.

From Christian Uncertainties by Monica Furlong (Cowley Publications, 1982).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

What is the spiritual life?

Daily Reading for February 8

The perennial question, centuries old and ever new, harries us: What is the spiritual life? How do we develop it? Is it real? Is it possible? Is it even desirable? Isn’t earth about earth and heaven time enough for heaven? The questions plague us in the deepest parts of ourselves, to the blackest recesses of our souls. “We live most of our life,” Wendy Miller wrote, “oblivious to our true identity as persons created and provided for by God.” The starkness of the statement catapults us into another dimension of religion entirely. To know our true identity—to really know down deep where we came from, to whom we belong, out of whose life we live—is to know that the God who made us is with us still. God is the eternal memory, the inseparable presence, the unending energy that beats within us yet, inchoate but clear. . . .

Once we empty ourselves of our certainties, we open ourselves to the mystery. We expose ourselves to the God in whom “we live and move and have our being.” We bare ourselves to the possibility that God is seeking us in places and people and things we thought were outside the pale of the God of our spiritual childhood. Then life changes color, changes tone, changes purpose. We begin to live more fully, not just in touch with earth, but with the eternal sound of the universe as well.

From Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir by Joan D. Chittister, OSB (Sheed & Ward, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Lent in Jerusalem

Daily Reading for February 9

When the season of Lent is at hand, it is observed in the following manner. Now whereas with us the forty days preceding Easter are observed, here they observe the eight weeks before Easter. This is the reason why they observe eight weeks: On Sundays and Saturdays they do not fast, except on the one Saturday which is the vigil of Easter, when it is necessary to fast. Except on that day, there is absolutely no fasting here on Saturdays at any time during the year. And so, when eight Sundays and seven Saturdays have been deducted from the eight weeks—for it is necessary, as I have just said, to fast on one Saturday—there remain forty-one days which are spent in fasting, which are called here “eortae,” that is to say, Lent.

This is a summary of the fasting practices here during Lent. There are some who, having eaten on Sunday after the dismissal, that is, at the fifth or sixth hour, do not eat again for the whole week until Saturday, following the dismissal from the Anastasis. These are the ones who observe the full week’s fast. Having eaten once in the morning on Saturday, they do not eat again in the evening, but only on the following day, on Sunday, that is, do they eat after the dismissal from the church at the fifth hour or later. Afterwards, they do not eat again until the following Saturday, as I have already said. Such is their fate during the Lenten season that they take no leavened bread (for this cannot be eaten at all), no olive oil, nothing which comes from trees, but only water and a little flour soup. And this is what is done throughout Lent.

From the Travels of Egeria, Abbess, and Pilgrim to Jerusalem [late fourth century]. From Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Temptation

Daily Reading for February 10 • The First Sunday in Lent

There are so many difficulties in life that we seem to be engaged in a daily battle just to keep from going under. We struggle to keep on top of our job, maintain our household, take care of our children, cope with bad health, homework, and money problems. None of us is without difficulties, sometimes overwhelming ones. We are often advised to turn to religion for help, and in fact the phrase “Christ is the Answer” has even appeared on a bumper-sticker.

But genuine religion begins by revealing to us that Christ is the answer, not in the sense of lifting all our troubles from us, but in directing us to the place where the right battles are to be fought. He reveals to us where we should be struggling. He does not magically remove us from all strife, but shows us which specific struggles will lead us into a haven.

The situation then is not that there are those with troubles and those without them, but that there are those caught in a whirlpool, going around and around, and those making for shore. Christ is the answer in showing us the direction to take, the place where we are to struggle, if we are to find a way that leads to the kingdom of his Father.

We discover what we ought to struggle with by looking at what he struggled with. He did not calmly inform us of the gateway, but he himself labored and pioneered his way through the place we are to follow. All three synoptic gospels tell us that Jesus was tempted; and all three portray the temptation scene as a gateway through which he passed. Before he began his life’s work of healing and teaching, he had to pass through temptation. Mark only records the fact; Luke and Matthew give the details so as to reveal which specific conflicts or temptations form the gateway. They tell us that there were three specific temptations, concerned with how he should direct his life in order to create a path to lead people into the kingdom.

From Temptation by Diogenes Allen. A Seabury Classic from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Bread or obedience

Daily Reading for February 11

Temptation does not usually come when we are ready for it. It does not come when we are strongest, when we are at our best. It comes when we are weak. It came to Jesus when he was hungry, very hungry. . . . When he had grown weak, when he was not physically strong, when it became hard to see straight and clearly in the dazzling sun of that sun-drenched land, it was then that temptation came.

Jesus was exposed to terrible hunger, his body giving him no rest. Perhaps he was looking at the smooth round stones that lay at his feet. They looked something like the smooth loaves just out of a baker’s oven, and then it struck him, “Turn these stones into bread.”

It was a temptation to use his powers to bring comfort to his body, to use his unique relationship to God as a magic wand to care for his earthly needs. That was a personal temptation he faced: to avoid the pains of a bodily life. More broadly, it was to avoid being subject to one of the common human conditions we face. It was a temptation to reject a condition set by God, namely, that we are to seek him as beings who must eat, who are vulnerable to starvation, as beings who are made to desire material goods and who can therefore become greedy, covetous, envious. To use his powers to provide food in a miraculous way when he was in trouble would have been to reject a condition his Father sets for us. He could hardly have pioneered a new way for us to the Father if he rejected one of the conditions to which we are subject in our pilgrimage.

But it was also for him a temptation that concerned the welfare of others. He could have made his mission to the world an attempt to satisfy people’s bodily needs. He could have tried to see to it that everyone had food, clothing, and shelter; to see that everyone’s sensuous needs and desires were fully satisfied.

His Father faced that decision when he made the universe; he could have protected us from all shortages, from being vulnerable to starvation. But clearly we are vulnerable and we are not fully protected. Whatever the reason for this situation, it is where we are. The decision the Father made at creation, to allow this, was now faced by Jesus. He had to ratify or to reject his Father’s decision by deciding what his mission was to be—bread or obedience to his Father’s will.

That was for him a temptation, a terrible temptation. For are not we all, as he was, frequently moved by compassion at the suffering of people, their terrible suffering? All people are not being fed. At the same time do not we all know that people do not live by bread alone? None of us is hungry. . . . We consume and consume and consume, and we learn the hard way—if we learn at all—that we cannot be satisfied this way. We need it; it is good; yet it does not fill us. We find here that we are tempted into evil, not by something that is evil, but by something that is good.

From Temptation by Diogenes Allen. A Seabury Classic from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Our restless heart

Daily Reading for February 12

So we are faced each day with the terrible temptation, the powerful pull of two forces: our need and enjoyment of goods that are of this world, and our need for the good that is not. We need both. For we cannot live by bread alone; we do not live without it either. How can we face that temptation?

Jesus faced it by quoting the Old Testament: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” We shall live by listening to all that God tells us. So attend to that craving in yourself that only God’s words can fill. The danger is that we shall not notice or we shall forget that the world cannot satisfy us. We overlook that craving that goods do not satisfy. That emptiness is only one desire among a multitude of desires, and so it may easily be thought to be insignificant.

But do you remember the experience of thinking that if only I had—a what? Whatever it was, you fill it in. And remember when you got it? How wonderful it was? Remember how after a while it didn’t matter so much and you wanted other things? Such experiences are of vital importance. They tell us about our restless heart, our craving. For we are tempted to forget the one thing that points us to God: our restlessness with all that the world has to offer. Only he can fill that void.

We must, in other words, forsake the world. This is what we must renounce before we can enter the gateway of a new reality and receive. To forsake is not to hate the world, or to reject it. It is not to turn from material goods—food, drink, clothing—and become an ascetic; for as Jesus said, “your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.” It is instead to recognize that all this world’s goods are not able to satisfy us.

From Temptation by Diogenes Allen. A Seabury Classic from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

You must not kneel here

Daily Reading for February 13 • Absalom Jones, Priest, 1818

I thought I would stop in Philadelphia a week or two. I preached at different places in the city. My labour was much blessed. I soon saw a large field open in seeking and instructing my African brethren, who had been a long forgotten people and few of them attended public worship. I preached in the commons, in Southwark, Northern Liberties, and wherever I could find an opening. I frequently preached twice a day, at 5 o’clock in the morning and in the evening, and it was not uncommon for me to preach from four to five times a day. I established prayer meetings; I raised a society in 1786 of forty-two members. I saw the necessity of erecting a place of worship for the coloured people. I proposed it to the most respectable people of colour in this city; but here I met with opposition. I had but three coloured brethren that united with me in erecting a place of worship--the Rev. Absalom Jones, William White, and Dorus Ginnings. These united with me as soon as it became public and known by the elder who was stationed in the city. . . .

We felt ourselves much cramped; but my dear Lord was with us, and we believed, if it was his will, the work would go on, and that we would be able to succeed in building the house of the Lord. We established prayer meetings and meetings of exhortation, and the Lord blessed our endeavours, and many souls were awakened; but the elder soon forbid us holding any such meetings; but we viewed the forlorn state of our coloured brethren, and that they were destitute of a place of worship. They were considered as a nuisance.

A number of us usually attended St. George’s Church in Fourth Street; and when the coloured people began to get numerous in attending the church, they moved us from the seats we usually sat on, and placed us around the wall, and on Sabbath morning we went to church and the sexton stood at the door, and told us to go in the gallery. He told us to go, and we would see where to sit. We expected to take the seats over the ones we formerly occupied below, not knowing any better. We took those seats. Meeting had begun, and they were nearly done singing, and just as we got to the seats, the elder said, “let us pray.” We had not been long upon our knees before I heard considerable scuffling and low talking. I raised my head up and saw one of the trustees, H-- M--, having hold of the Rev. Absalom Jones, pulling him up off of his knees, and saying, “You must get up--you must not kneel here.” Mr. Jones replied, “wait until prayer is over.” Mr. H-- M-- said “no, you must get up now, or I will call for aid and I force you away.” Mr. Jones said, “wait until prayer is over, and I will get up and trouble you no more.” With that he beckoned to one of the other trustees, Mr. L-- S-- to come to his assistance. He came, and went to William White to pull him up. By this time prayer was over, and we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church. This raised a great excitement and inquiry among the citizens, in so much that I believe they were ashamed of their conduct. But my dear Lord was with us, and we were filled with fresh vigour to get a house erected to worship God in. . . .

We then hired a store room, and held worship by ourselves. Here we were pursued with threats of being disowned, and read publicly out of meeting if we did continue worship in the place we had hired; but we believed the Lord would be our friend. We got subscription papers out to raise money to build the house of the Lord. By this time we had waited on Dr. Rush and Mr. Robert Ralston, and told them of our distressing situation. We considered it a blessing that the Lord had put it into our hearts to wait upon those gentlemen. They pitied our situation, and subscribed largely towards the church, and were very friendly towards us, and advised us how to go on. We appointed Mr. Ralston our treasurer. Dr. Rush did much for us in public by his influence. I hope the name of Dr. Benjamin Rush and Mr. Robert Ralston will never be forgotten among us. They were the two first gentlemen who espoused the cause of the oppressed, and aided us in building the house of the Lord for the poor Africans to worship in. Here was the beginning and rise of the first African church in America.

From The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (Martin & Boden, Printers, 1833). http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/allen/allen.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Known for unity

Daily Reading for February 14 • Cyril and Methodius, Missionaries to the Slavs, 869, 885

When the time came for him to set out from this world to the peace of his heavenly homeland, [Cyril] prayed to God with his hands outstretched and his eyes filled with tears: “O Lord, my God, you have created the choirs of angels and spiritual powers; you have stretched forth the heavens and established the earth, creating all that exists from nothing. You hear those who obey your will and keep your commands in holy fear. Hear my prayer and protect your faithful people, for you have established me as their unsuitable and unworthy servant.

“Keep them free from harm and the worldly cunning of those who blaspheme you. Build up your church and gather all into unity. Make your people known for the unity and profession of their faith. Inspire the hearts of your people with your word and your teaching. You called us to preach the Gospel of your Christ and to encourage them to lives and works pleasing to you.

“I now return to you, your people, your gift to me. Direct them with your powerful right hand, and protect them under the shadow of your wings. May all praise and glorify your name, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Once he had exchanged the gift of peace with everyone, he said: “Blessed be God, who did not hand us over to our invisible enemy, but freed us from his snare and delivered us from perdition.” He then fell asleep in the Lord at the age of forty-two.

From an Old Slavonic Life of Cyril, Monk, and missionary to the Slavs in the ninth century, quoted in They Still Speak: Readings for the Lesser Feasts, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1993. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Qualities of a missionary

Daily Reading for February 15 • Thomas Bray, Priest and Missionary, 1730

But since, I am not over sanguine to hope for any publick Funds for the PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, either in this, or the other Colonies: And my great hopes are from the pious Clergy themselves, and such particular Persons amongst the devout Laity, whose Hearts are inflamed with a Love of God, and of those Souls which he has purchased with his own Blood: I shall rather turn my self to you, my most Reverend Fathers, and other Noble Patrons of Religion, giving you a general Estimate of the number of Missionaries, which we hope to be supplied withal from your Paternal Care, and Pious Assistance: . . . .And the necessity that there should be both so many, and those singularly well qualify’d for the purpose, I am next to shew you. . . . The Persons which alone can do good there, as I conceive, must,

In the First place, be of such nice Morals, as to abstain from all Appearance of Evil;. . . It is the worst Fault of the Plantations, that they give their Tongues too much liberty that way, especially if they can find the least Flaw.

Secondly, They must be Men of good Prudence, and an exact Conduct, or otherwise, they will unavoidably fall into Contempt, with a People so well vers’d in Business, as every the meanest Planter seems to be.

Thirdly, They ought to be well experienced in the Pastoral Care, having a greater Variety, both of Sects and Humours, to deal with in those Parts, than are at home; and therefore it would be well, if we could be provided with such as have been Curates here for some time.

Fourthly, More especially they ought to be of a true Missionary Spirit, having an ardent Zeal for God’s Glory, and the Salvation of Mens Souls.

Fifthly, Of a very active Spirit, and consequently, not so grown into Years, as to be uncapable of Labour and Fatigue, no more than very Young, upon which account they will be more liable to be despised.

And, lastly, They ought to be good, substantial, well-studied Divines, very ready in the Holy Scriptures, able with sound Judgment to explicate and prove the great Doctrines of Christianity, to state the Nature and Extent of the Christian Duties, and with the most moving Considerations to enforce their Practice, and to defend the Truth against all its Adversaries: To which purpose, it will be therefore absolutely requisite to prove each of them with a Library of necessary Books, to be fix’d in those places to which they shall be sent, for the Use of them, and their Successors for ever: This to be a perpetual Encouragement to good and able Divines, always to go over, and to render them useful when they are there.

From A Memorial Representing the Present State of Religion, on the Continent of North-America by Thomas Bray, D. D. http://anglicanhistory.org/england/tbray/memorial1701.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Openness

Daily Reading for February 16

Openness is not gentility in the social arena. It is not polite listening to people with whom we inherently disagree. It is not political or civil or “nice.” It is not even simple hospitality. It is the munificent abandonment of the mind to new ideas, to new possibilities. Without an essential posture of openness, contemplation is not possible. God comes in every voice, behind every face, in every memory, deep in every struggle. To close off any of them is to close off the possibility of becoming new again ourselves.

From Illuminated Life: Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of Light by Joan Chittister (Orbis Books, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Born again

Daily Reading for February 17 • The Second Sunday in Lent

How was it possible, I thought, that a change could be great enough to strip away in a single moment the innate hardness of our nature? How could the habits acquired over the course of many years disappear, since these are so deeply rooted within us? If someone is used to fine feasts and lavish banquets, how can they learn restraint? If someone is used to dressing conspicuously in gold and purple, how can they cast them aside for ordinary simple clothes? Someone who loves the trappings of public office cannot become an anonymous private person. While temptation still holds us fast, we are seduced by wine, inflated with pride, inflamed by anger, troubled by greed, goaded by cruelty, enticed by ambition and cast headlong by lust. . .

But after the life-giving water of baptism came to my rescue and washed away the stain of my former years and poured into my cleansed and purified heart the light which comes from above, and after I had drunk in the Heavenly Spirit and was made a new man by a second birth, then amazingly what I had previously doubted became clear to me. What had been hidden was revealed. What had been dark became light. What previously had seemed impossible now seemed possible. What was in me of the guilty flesh now confessed it was earthly. What was made alive in me by the Holy Spirit was now quickened by God.

From the treatise To Donatus by Cyprian of Carthage, quoted in Spiritual Classics from the Early Church by Robert Atwell (National Society/Church House Publishing, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

One thing necessary

Daily Reading for February 18 • Martin Luther, 1546

One thing, and only one thing, is necessary for Christian life, righteousness, and freedom. That one thing is the most holy Word of God, the gospel of Christ, as Christ says, John 11, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.”. . . Let us then consider it certain and firmly established that the soul can do without anything except the Word of God and that where the Word of God is missing there is no help at all for the soul. If it has the Word of God it is rich and lacks nothing, since it is the Word of life, truth, light, peace, righteousness, salvation, joy, liberty, wisdom, power, grace, glory, and of every incalculable blessing. . . .

You may ask, “What then is the Word of God, and how shall it be used, since there are so many words of God?” I answer: The Apostle explains this in Romans 1. The Word is the gospel of God concerning his Son, who was made flesh, suffered, rose from the dead, and was glorified through the Spirit who sanctifies. To preach Christ means to feed the soul, make it righteous, set it free, and save it, provided it believes the preaching. Faith alone is the saving and efficacious use of the Word of God.

From “The Freedom of a Christian” by Martin Luther, in Martin Luther, Three Treatises, second revised edition (Fortress Press, 1970).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

He is Christ the Savior

Daily Reading for February 19

When Jesus came to Jordan’s stream his Father’s will obeying,
and was baptized by John, there came a voice from heaven saying,
“This is my dear beloved Son upon whom rests my favor,”
And till God’s will is fully done he will not bend or waver,
for he is Christ the Savior.

The Holy Spirit then was shown, a dove on him descending;
the Triune God is thus made known in Christ as love unending.
He taught, he healed, he raised the dead, yet in his great endeavor
to save us, his own blood was shed; but death could hold him never.
He rose, and lives for ever.

He came by water and by blood to heal our lost condition;
he cleanses, reconciles to God, and gives the Great Commission.
Then let us not heed worldly lies nor rest upon our merit,
but trust in Christ who will baptize with water and the Spirit
that we may life inherit.

Hymn text by Martin Luther (1483-1546), paraphrased by F. Bland Tucker. Hymn 139 in The Hymnal 1982. Copyright © 1985. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

God's longing

Daily Reading for February 20

What are we assuming when we ask to know God’s will? Are we imagining a God who, like a master planner, has a five-year, ten-year, or lifetime plan mapped out for us and leaves it up to us to figure out what it is? Are our discernments basically concerned with “getting it right,” with making the choice that down the road we will be able clearly to see was “correct” because everything came out in the end in a neatly wrapped, manageable package?

I prefer to rephrase the question and thus to reframe the reference somewhat. I ask instead, “What is God’s longing for our lives?” Such reframing will situate us in the arms of a God who desires the fulfillment of creation, who longs for justice, mercy, and love to dwell among the creatures and the created world fashioned in the divine image and likeness. We are unique, unrepeatable, loving responses to the divine desire. There is a particularity to our reciprocal desiring. But the path of love that I walk is neither predetermined nor clear-cut. It is forged in the process of walking day by day, listening deeply to the silence brooding beneath the noisy instructions issuing from without and within our own hearts. God’s will is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be lived into. It is a mystery whose contours emerge as we journey on.

One of the pieces of our Lenten journey is cultivating the art of discernment, listening for the voice of God in the wilderness of our hearts, trying to sense the divine will. Discernment is part of our ongoing conversion, our ongoing struggle with the holy mystery and creative chaos that we encounter as we turn toward the rising beacon of the light of Christ.

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Untangling the threads

Daily Reading for February 21

The patient process of untangling the threads of voices, of settling down to the center was the lifelong work of the desert. It is our work as well. Like the desert ascetics, we must learn the art of inner listening. . . . Lent is a time for tuning our ears, for listening carefully, for discerning the texture and quality of our own demons, for attending to God's unceasing, creative plea amidst the noise of cultural pressures, the busyness of life, and our own self-limiting habits. Some of our Lenten discernments may be fairly straightforward. We may have become inattentive in our eating or drinking and need to give our oversatiated bodies a holiday. We may need to cultivate a more rhythmic pattern of prayer or bring the scriptures into clearer focus in our everyday life. We may need to mend the pieces of a broken relationship. We may need to take some of the time we hoard so tightly for work and lavish it on our children or friends. We may be called to respond to the cry of the poor, to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, or to visit the prisoner. All these can rightly be discerned as God's prompting to a freer life.

But the ongoing process of discernment, which I think is the more subtle invitation of the Lenten season, is not always so straightforward. It involves a radical and risky self-evaluation and a commitment to rethink and rework everything you know and are. God is always calling us out of ourselves, into a more generous freedom, so that we can love and serve ourselves and one another more authentically.

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Fully born

Daily Reading for February 22

A door opens in the centre of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. God touches us with a touch that is emptiness and empties us. He moves us with a simplicity that simplifies us. All variety, all complexity, all paradox, all multiplicity cease. Our mind swims in the air of an understanding, a reality that is dark and serene and includes in itself everything. Nothing more is desired . . . you feel as if you were at last fully born.

From Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton (Dell, 1949).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Consider unity

Daily Reading for February 23 • Polycarp, Bishop and Marytr of Smyrna, 156

Ignatius, who is also called God-bearer, to Polycarp, bishop of the church of the Smyrnaeans—rather, the one who has God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ as his bishop. Warmest greetings.

I welcome your godly way of thinking, which is fixed firmly as upon an unmoveable rock; and I exult all the more, having been found worthy of your blameless face. I hope to enjoy it in God! But I urge you by the gracious gift with which you are clothed, to forge ahead in your race and urge all to be saved. Vindicate your position with all fleshly and spiritual diligence. Consider unity, for nothing is better. Bear with all people, just as the Lord bears with you. Tolerate everyone in love, just as you are already doing. Be assiduous in constant prayers; ask for greater understanding than you have. Be alert, as one who has obtained a spirit that never slumbers. Speak to each one according to God’s own character. Bear the illnesses of all as a perfect athlete. Where there is more toil, there is great gain.

From “The Letter of Ignatius to Polycarp,” quoted in The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader by Bart D. Ehrman (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Coming to faith

Daily Reading for February 24 • The Third Sunday in Lent

That Jesus’ revelation and the woman’s realization of him come through dialogue is an important feature to notice about the Gospel of John. Jesus does no sign here. There is no “miracle.” Rather he makes a claim and offers living water to this stranger. To understand it requires back and forth question and answer, partial understanding, correction, and deeper knowledge. Martha’s conversation with Jesus after the death of Lazarus is like this too. So are the Easter conversations of Mary and of Thomas. These dialogues in John’s gospel reflect a way individuals and peoples come to faith—through a process of effort and discussion. Those who converse with Jesus put Jesus’ claims into relationships with their own traditions and beliefs: I know he will be raised on the last day. I know that the Messiah will come. I am the resurrection and the life. I am he, the one who is speaking to you.

From Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John by Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, in the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars Study Series. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The hidden ones

Daily Reading for February 25 • St. Matthias the Apostle

All we know is that his name was Matthias and that for some reason he was chosen to replace the traitor Judas in the circle of Jesus’ apostles. . . . I have a feeling that Matthias turns up many times in our lives. He is the person who just failed to get into the photograph; either he was not there when it was taken or he stood behind someone taller or bigger. Matthias is the new neighbor we have glimpsed only once; is he worth getting to know? Or is he the person we have met only briefly, and yet when he walks out of our lives forever we are intrigued and haunted?

Matthias turns up many times in the lives of parish churches, especially in the very large ones, the kind we call corporate parishes these days. These are the people that you never really get to know beyond the shake of the hand at coffee hour, the exchange of smiles. At first she may volunteer her name, but somehow it never settles in your mind and she remains anonymous in her quiet, faithful way. Months, even years, go by until something happens or something is said that makes you realize that there is within this person a very great soul. Perhaps it turns out that the whole congregation comes to realize that hidden within its life is someone whose courage or faithfulness or generosity puts others to shame. I call someone like that my Matthias.

From For All the Saints: Homilies for Saints’ and Holy Days by Herbert O’Driscoll (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

Let's fight

Daily Reading for February 26

Two old men had lived together for many years and they had never fought with one another. The first said to the other, “Let us also have a fight like other men.” The other replied, “I do not know how to fight.” The first said to him, “Look, I will put a brick between us and I will say: it is mine; and you will reply: no, it is mine; and so the fight will begin.” So they put a brick between them and the first said, “This brick is mine,” and the other said, “No, it is mine.” And the first replied, “If it is yours, take it and go.” So they gave it up without being able to find a cause for an argument.

From The Desert of the Heart: Daily Readings with the Desert Fathers, edited by Benedicta Ward (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

As fair as ever

Daily Reading for February 27 • George Herbert, Priest, 1633

Herbert had a particular fondness for the imagery of bees and herbs. Bees represent productive lives not least when Herbert expresses his deep desire to serve God usefully (‘Employment I’) or when he laments his spiritual weakness (‘Praise I’). Bees also become an image of the natural wisdom that all creatures have that enables God’s providence to express itself effectively in the world’s workings.

Bees work for man; and yet they never bruise
Their master’s flower, but leave it, having done,
As fair as ever, and as fit to use;
So both the flower doth stay, and honey run.
(‘Providence’)

Heaven may be compared to a hive to which our lives are drawn like laden bees.

Surely thou wilt joy, by gaining me
To fly home like a laden bee
Unto that hive of beams
And garland-streams.
(‘The Star’)

For all that Herbert relishes natural imagery and offers a positive view of the created order, his vision is not merely romantic or a form of nature mysticism. Creation is the second book of revelation precisely because it draws us to the deeper truth of God’s reality, loving presence and powerful action.

From Love Took My Hand: The Spirituality of George Herbert by Philip Sheldrake (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Anna J. Cooper

Daily Reading for February 28 • Anna Julia Heyward Cooper, Educator, 1964

Anna Julia Cooper, the widow of an Episcopal priest and a teacher at St. Augustine’s College in North Carolina, was an important supporter of [Alexander] Crummell’s efforts to foster racial uplift. Cooper, who was born in slavery, emphasized the value of education, religion, and proper conduct in assisting the rise of black women and men in the South. One of six delegates from the United States to the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, Cooper was an active public speaker and writer. In an address to a convocation of black priests in 1886, she summoned the clergy to the task of saving their people from “the peculiar faults of worship” into which they fell when left on their own. She praised the Episcopal Church for the positive influence it had offered African Americans before the Civil War, but she was concerned that, following emancipation, white Episcopalians had been pathetically slow in recruiting and ordaining black priests. Although white southerners complained that African Americans were no longer interested in the Episcopal Church, they had created the problem themselves. Since most southern bishops advised black ministerial candidates to aspire only to deacon’s orders, they not only relegated black men to “a perpetual colored diaconate” but also tacitly encouraged them to seek full ordination in other denominations. African Americans in the Episcopal Church needed priests of their own race, Cooper said, for only black men could be fully trusted to “come in touch with our life and have a fellow feeling for our woes.”

From Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights by Gardiner H. Shattuck (The University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

True progress

Daily Reading for February 29

True progress is never made by spasms. Real progress is growth. It must begin in the seed. Then, “first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.” There is something to encourage and inspire us in the advancement of individuals since their emancipation from slavery. It at least proves that there is nothing irretrievably wrong in the shape of the black man’s skull, and that under given circumstances his development, downward or upward, will be similar to that of other average human beings.

But there is no time to be wasted in mere felicitation. That the Negro has his niche in the infinite purposes of the Eternal, no one who has studied the history of the last fifty years in America will deny. That much depends on his own right comprehension of his responsibility and rising to the demands of the hour, it will be good for him to see; and how best to use his present so that the structure of the future shall be stronger and higher and brighter and nobler and holier than that of the past, is a question to be decided each day by every one of us.

The race is just twenty-one years removed from the conception and experience of a chattel, just at the age of ruddy manhood. It is well enough to pause a moment for retrospection, introspection, and prospection. We look back, not to become inflated with conceit because of the depths from which we have arisen, but that we may learn wisdom from experience. We look within that we may gather together once more our forces, and, by improved and more practical methods, address ourselves to the tasks before us. We look forward with hope and trust that the same God whose guiding hand led our fathers through and out of the gall and bitterness of oppression, will still lead and direct their children, to the honor of His name, and for their ultimate salvation. . . .

Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman. With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of to-day stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving around her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She must be loosed from her bands and set to work. . . .

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” Is it not evident then that as individual workers for this race we must address ourselves with no half-hearted zeal to this feature of our mission. The need is felt and must be recognized by all. There is a call for workers, for missionaries, for men and women with the double consecration of a fundamental love of humanity and a desire for its melioration through the Gospel; but superadded to this we demand an intelligent and sympathetic comprehension of the interests and special needs of the Negro.

From “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” by Anna Julia Cooper; read before the convocation of colored clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Washington, D. C., 1886 and published in A Voice from the South by Anna J. Cooper. http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/cooper/cooper.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

David of Wales

Daily Reading for March 1 • David, Bishop of Menevia, Wales, c. 544

Christ hear us, sovereign Lord,
lest I should suffer some oppression;
lamb-lion, alpha and omega,
god-man eternally true,
redeeming king you must dispense
true council to us against death. . . .

True king of heaven for your peace,
for your suffering, for your passion, . . .
for your tribulation on Friday,
and your true light and your wounds,
for your praise, heavenly king,
valiant teacher, and your surpassing qualities
give me understanding to withstand evil,
pure wise lord, for your true blood:
this I wish, this I will get,
this I seek, fine objectives,
the protection of the true cross and protection of Idloes,
and giving me life, me and mine,
the protection of Maria and the protection of Anna,
and the saints of Asaph and the saintesses,
the protection of the saints of Bardsey and of Cybi,
and of David, Nudd of the South,
and of Ieuan and of Cadfan,
and of Sanan, Nudd of the saints,
the protection of Michael and Gabriel,
and of Uriel, the best protection,
the protection of the saints of the world be with me
to safeguard me against the snares.

A Prayer of Iolo Goch (Welsh, fourteenth century), quoted in A Celtic Primer: The Complete Celtic Worship Resource and Collection, edited and compiled by Brendan O’Malley. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

I do believe

Daily Reading for March 2 • The Fourth Sunday in Lent

For many centuries, dating back to the ancient Jerusalem liturgy, the Church has singled out stories from John’s Gospel to be read at Mass during Lent. In our era, three of these stories—the most sacred narratives in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ public ministry—appear on the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent. They are the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), the healing of the man born blind (John 9) and the raising of Lazarus (John 11). . . . Why are these stories given such prominence during Lent? Because during this season, from the earliest days, people were being prepared for Baptism, and John’s stories fitted beautifully into the process of Christian initiation. In time, the three narratives were read at specific stages in the Lenten preparation of catechumens for Baptism on Holy Saturday. . . .

If the story of the Samaritan woman has illustrated an initial coming to faith, this [story of the man born blind] shows that often first enlightenment does not result in adequate faith. Sometimes faith comes only through difficult testing and even suffering. Saint Augustine recognized that this man born blind stands for the human race. And the initial dialogue where Jesus proclaims, “I am the light of the world,” alerts us to the fact that more than physical sight is involved. . . .

Besides recognizing a baptism theme in this story, readers of John would also be taught that a series of testings may be necessary before sight really comes. Only gradually and through suffering does the man born blind come to full faith and enlightenment. . . . How many of us who have a traditional faith stemming from our Baptism come to believe in our hearts only when difficult decisions test our faith in God and Christ? It is then we understand what it means to say, “I do believe.”

From Reading the Gospels with the Church: From Christmas through Easter by Raymond E. Brown (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Reconciled to God

Daily Reading for March 3 • John and Charles Wesley, Priests, 1791, 1788

I observed many years ago, “It is hard to find words in the language of men, to explain the deep things of God.” Indeed, there are none that will adequately express what the Spirit of God works in His children. But perhaps one might say, (desiring any who are taught of God, to correct, soften, or strengthen the expression), by the testimony of the Spirit, I mean, an inward impression on the soul, whereby the Spirit of God immediately and directly witnesses to my spirit, that I am a child of God; that Jesus Christ hath loved me, and given Himself for me; that all my sins are blotted out, and I, even I, am reconciled to God. . . .

I do not mean hereby, that the Spirit of God testifies this by any outward voice; no, nor always by an inward voice, although he may do this sometimes. Neither do I suppose, that He always applies to the heart (though He often may) one or more texts of Scripture. But He so works upon the soul by His immediate influence, and by a strong, though inexplicable operation, that the stormy wind and troubled waves subside, and there is a sweet calm; the heart resting as in the arms of Jesus, and the sinner being clearly satisfied that God is reconciled, that all his “iniquities are forgiven, and his sins covered” [Ps 85:2].

From “The Witness of the Spirit, Discourse II” by John Wesley, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A skeptical world

Daily Reading for March 4

We hear much of modern skepticism. There is, perhaps, no more in the world now than there has always been, only its forms have changed. Its answer lies not in argument, but in the lives of Christ’s followers. It was Christians who lived like Christ that won the first battle for Christianity, and it must be Christians who live like Christ that shall win the last. The life of faith in the Son of God, when fully lived out, always has been and always will be a victorious argument.

But to live this out faith must be firm. We cannot meet a skeptical world with weak faith. If we would draw our friend out of a swift-rushing current, our own feet must not stand on slippery places. We must seek faith in looking to him who has the giving of it. We must keep him before our minds and come so near him in daily prayer that we can say, “That which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled of the Word of Life, declare we unto you.”

From Footsteps of the Master by Harriet Beecher Stowe, quoted in A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week by Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Perpetually unfinished

Daily Reading for March 5

The main reason that the Church is unfinished, of course, is that we humans are ourselves perpetually unfinished. We’ve all experienced the sense that there is always something more to learn, to accomplish, to become. It is this “incurable unfinishedness,” as one philosopher calls it, that sets us apart from other living things, because in trying to “finish” ourselves, we become creators. Our incurable unfinishedness keeps us childlike, capable of learning and growing. We may be trying to head toward perfection, but none of us will ever arrive there.

Benedict understands this, and is constantly making allowances for human weakness and frailty. For example, although he would prefer that the monks abstain from wine altogether, he admits that “monks of our day cannot be convinced of this” and so he allows for a certain amount of wine to be allotted each day. Similarly, after saying “a monk’s life ought to be a continual Lent” he concedes that “few have the virtue for this, so let us at least keep the forty days of Lent in a special way.”

Imperfections, setbacks, and sins, then, are all part of the striving; they’re all grist for the mill. They’re the place where we are destined to meet God—in the gap. Wherever there is that unfinishedness, there is the call to holiness: in the kitchen, the office, the hospital room, or the supermarket. Wherever there is that sense of striving, there is a saint in the making. From this point of view, then, there is no such thing as an “obstacle” to sainthood. Saints may be preoccupied with raising a family and balancing a checkbook; we may be struggling with our too-crowded daily schedule, our short temper, or our jealousy; we may have to live with a painful experience in the past or a physical disability. No matter what, it is through and in the experience of our imperfections that God wants to meet us.

From Pilgrim Road: A Benedictine Journey Through Lent by Albert Holtz, O.S.B. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Opportunities for redemption

Daily Reading for March 6

I don’t believe in spiritual formulae anymore. I believe God presents each of us with opportunities for redemption, and we either name them or not, embrace them or not. We can’t anticipate those moments—we can only become ready as best we can and pray for the grace that we will experience God. We ready our lamps with the enlightening oil of inner work. We feed the soul in the inner world—in meditation, prayer, study, reading, psychoanalysis or therapy, creative arts, woolgathering, dream work, thinking, dialoguing. Each one’s way in unique and belongs to her alone. We commit to know, to love, to become ourselves, and to stay with it. All moments are God’s moments, and through grace we come to recognize some of them. Our lives gradually begin to reflect more accurately who we really are, and we find our own meaning. We truly do experience God. These promises are not empty. They are full to overflowing.

The process is frightening, difficult, dangerous, painful, and consuming of both time and energy. It is also comforting, transforming, clarifying, deeply satisfying, and is the source of inner peace.

From an essay by Lois Ann Peckham, quoted in Gifts from Within: Women’s Meditations for Lent by the Women of Brigid’s Place. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A second baptism

Daily Reading for March 7 • Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs at Carthage, 202

The day of their victory dawned, with joyful countenances they marched from the prison to the arena as though on their way to heaven. If there was any trembling it was from joy, not fear. Perpetua followed with quick step as a true spouse of Christ, the darling of God; her brightly flashing eyes quelling the gaze of the crowd. Felicitas too, joyful because she had safely survived child-birth and was now able to participate in the contest with the wild animals, passed from one shedding of blood to another; from midwife to gladiator, about to be purified after child-birth by a second baptism. As they were led through the gate . . . Perpetua was singing victory psalms as if already crushing the head of the Eyptian. Revocatus, Saturnius and Saturus were warning the spectators, as they came within sight of Hilarion they informed him by nods and gestures: “You condemn us; God condemns you.” This so infuriated the crowds that they demanded the scourging of these men in front of the line of gladiators. But the ones punished rejoiced in that they had obtained yet another share in the Lord’s suffering.

From “The Martyrdom of Perpetua,” in Patricia Wilson-Kastner, G. Ronald Kastner, Ann Millin, Rosemary Rader, and Jeremiah Reedy, trans., A Lost Tradition: women Writers of the Early Church (University Press of America, 1981). This conclusion to the Vibia Perpetua is thought to have been written by Tertullian..

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Through a blinding sandstorm

Daily Reading for March 8

It is true that the solitary life must also be a life of prayer and meditation, if it is to be authentically Christian . . . But what prayer! What meditation! . . . Utter poverty. Often an incapacity to pray, to see, to hope . . . a bitter, arid struggle to press forward through a blinding sandstorm.

Do not mistake my meaning. It is not a question of intellectual doubt. . . . It is something else, a kind of doubt that questions the very roots of a person’s own existence, a doubt which undermines their very reasons for existing and for doing what they do. It is this doubt which reduces a person finally to silence, and in the silence which ceases to ask questions, they receive the only certitude they know: The presence of God in the midst of uncertainty and nothingness, as the only reality but a reality which cannot be placed or identified.

From The Power and Meaning of Love by Thomas Merton (Sheldon Press, 1976).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Matrix of love

Daily Reading for March 9 • The Fifth Sunday in Lent

The account of the raising of Lazarus is a wonder marveled at by generations of Christians. It speaks of God’s redemptive action in the midst of human life, of divine fulfillment of the ancient covenant in the person of Jesus. It proclaims Jesus as the Christ, the fount of eternal life.

Beyond this, the Johannine passage is an incredibly rich mine of images and ideas that can enliven its hearers. It contains the poignant account of Jesus’ friendship with this family, the encounter with the weeping Mary with her distraught accusation—“If you had been here”—and the episode of Jesus’ tearful response to her grief. Even more strikingly, it contains Martha’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Except for the confession of Peter found in Matthew 16:16 (and the confession of Andrew to Peter in John 1:41), there is no other comparable statement of faith discovered in the gospels. For the early church, to confess Christ in this way was the mark of an apostle. Thus we have here a somewhat lost tradition, apparently current in the community from which the Gospel of John comes, of Martha as the first witness to Jesus as the resurrection, the one who brings new life.

The Lazarus passage speaks eloquently to me of hope and healing, especially as it is discovered in the communities of friendship in which we find ourselves. It is a Gospel that speaks of tears and compassion and the empathetic suffering we share with one another, a suffering which raises us beyond our own small sorrows and limited vision. It is a Gospel that proclaims the miracle of renewal that is discovered as we allow ourselves to know our interdependence. Our personal lifelessness, our private wounds are made whole as we tenderly touch and are touched by one another.

This late Lenten Sunday is one in which we enter into the mystery of pain and brokenness, both our own and the world’s, to discover that we are not alone, that what seems hopeless is in fact hope-filled, that what appears dead can spring forth into life. It happens because we are embedded in a wider, more sustaining matrix of love than we can possibly imagine.

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Power of interconnection

Daily Reading for March 10

This truth of the power of our interconnectedness was brought home to me in an unexpected way not long ago. One recent spring I was referred by my family physician to an endocrinologist because of a growth on the right lobe of my thyroid. The specialist informed me that he needed to perform a biopsy on the growth to gain the necessary information he needed to make an accurate diagnosis. This procedure involved placing several small needles into the lump in my neck and drawing out tissue which would then be analyzed in the laboratory.

To get clear access to the growth, I was asked to lie on the examination table and prop a pillow under my shoulder blades and upper back so that me head fell backwards off the pillow and left my throat prominently exposed. I felt like Isaac, docilely submitting to the one in whom I had placed trust.

Just before the physician inserted the first needle, one of the two nurse assistants who were standing by his side toward the end of the exam table took my hands in hers. I could not see which nurse it was but I knew immediately what she expected me to do—hold on to her. That is in fact what I did. As each of the needles was inserted deep into my throat, I found myself communicating my response to the pain to her hands. As the pain rose I held tighter, as it subsided I let go. I remember thinking that she had remarkable hands, healer’s hands, that they “said” much more than simply, “Hang on here if you have to.” . . .

About four o’clock, driving to pick up my children after school, suddenly the experience came rushing back to me. In the recalling, I became aware of the inner shift that had occurred when I took the unknown nurse’s hands. I had been making the kind of inner preparation that I might usually make, a sort of burrowing down into myself to find the resource, strength, or attitude that could get me through, when suddenly I found myself connected to a source of strength outside myself, a self-transcending energy that was greater than my bounded efforts and capacities. It was a graced moment, a grateful recognition of the holy, if you will, and, flooded with gratitude for it, I broke into tears.

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Somebody there

Daily Reading for March 11

Most of all, we don’t want to be alone. We may long for some peace and quiet, assaulted as we are by the needs of other people all day. But we don’t want there to be no one for whom we matter. We want somebody to be there.

People who are dying want that. They are embarked upon a fearsome journey, and it looks, at first glance, like a journey into oblivion. “I’m afraid to go see him—what do I say?” someone says about a friend who is terminally ill, and she stays away. But the dying one doesn’t expect pearls of wisdom from his visitors. Just your presence is enough—your brief presence, usually since people who are dying don’t feel well and need to rest. Tell him you love him, if you’re built that way. Or don’t—talk about baseball instead, if that’s what your friendship has been about. But you don’t need to talk much on his account. He knows who you are.

As death comes nearer, something extraordinary happens. The dying one becomes more resident in the next world than in this one. Less tied to the existence he has known. This can be seen in a certain detachment from the people around him, a quietness with regard to interacting with them. Sometimes the family is hurt by this—doesn’t he care that we’re being separated? But his detachment is a blessing for the dying, a natural anesthetic against the pain of separation. It enables him to focus on the difficult task at hand: leaving this existence for another. It is like the quieting in the womb mothers usually note as childbirth becomes imminent. Both the baby and the dying person are gathering strength for the journey.

In life, in death, it is the same: Whenever we appear to be completely alone, Jesus is there. We began life with God, and we return to God when we die. When we can no longer reach out for the hand of the one we love, he grasps our hands firmly and helps us across.

From Living Lent: Meditations for These Forty Days by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 1998. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A bishop's love

Daily Reading for March 12 • Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, 604

Summer is hard for me physically, and has brought about a long interruption in my explanations of the gospel. But because I’ve been silent my love has not ceased. I’m only saying what you all know within yourselves. Our expression of love is often hindered by other concerns; it remains undiminished in our hearts even though our actions do not show it. When the sun is covered with clouds we on earth can’t see it, but it is still there in the sky. It is the same with love: it produces energy within us even if it does not reveal itself outwardly in our activities. But it is time now for me to speak again. Your enthusiasm is stirring me as I see you eagerly awaiting my words.

From Be Friends of God: Spiritual Reading from Gregory the Great in an English version by John Leinenweber (Cowley Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The church in Haiti

Daily Reading for March 13 • James Theodore Holly, Bishop of Haiti, 1911

During the middle years of the 19th century, the position of African Americans in the United States remained unresolved. While white abolitionists battled the institution of slavery, black Americans were divided between the movement advocating a return to Africa and those who demanded freedom on the grounds that so much of this country’s development resulted from their own tears and toil. Though James Theodore Holly was born free in the north, it seemed to him that there should be a place where black people could control their own destinies. Since its revolution, Haiti had been an independent black republic, so Holly felt it would be an ideal place for him to work.

Ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, Holly served briefly in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then, after visiting Haiti, took a group of 100 people with him to establish a church there and a center for settlement by American blacks. He established churches, schools, and medical facilities, and in 1874 Holly was consecrated the first black bishop in the Episcopal Church and the second in any major white denomination. . . . By the time of his retirement, the church he had established had twice as many priests as when he was made bishop and twice as many church members. Abandoning its independence, the Haitian church ultimately became an Episcopal diocese, but the strong foundations Holly had laid served well and it continues to grow so that today it is one of the largest dioceses of the Episcopal Church.

From A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Can these bones live?

Daily Reading for March 14

“Mortal, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3)

Some setbacks in life are so profound that they feel like death. I called him as soon as I heard. He was in disgrace, incredibly so: stripped of his position, perhaps even of his orders. Everyone was talking about it. The misdeed that brought about his humiliation was a grave one, too grave to overlook. He was finished.

The day of our date arrived, and there was an unsurprising message on my answering machine. He wouldn’t be able to make it today. I called him back. Let’s wait a while, he said. Okay. I knew we would never have lunch. And we never did.

His life and career were dry bones. A gifted ministry dead, dry as dust. I hope there was some other friend, one whose overtures he could accept. But I think there may not have been. I think he may have chosen to be alone. I think the isolation of death may have been what he craved. Life was such a mess. Don’t bother me. I’m dead now.

But he is the same gifted man he was before his sin was revealed. Every good thing he ever did is still good, no matter what bad things he may also have done. This is true of every one of us. None of us can be understood solely in terms of the worst things we’ve ever done. Death may end our lives, but it doesn’t cancel them.

And he yet may rise again. He isn’t really dead yet. In the rubble of his repentance may lie his resurrection, waiting to reveal itself.

From Let Us Bless the Lord, Year One: Meditations on the Daily Office, Easter through Pentecost by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Accepting resurrection

Daily Reading for March 15

“They came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.” (John 12:9-11)

In the midst of joy and miracle, resurrection and love, we have Lazarus fresh from the dead and under the death threat of the chief priests! This part stops me—“What? This man has just been resurrected and now you want to kill him because people’s beliefs are changed?” For me, this is where the story becomes real. I know people are resurrected, and what a glorious experience that is; yet, I know that the world does not take kindly to resurrection, to fundamental changes in who a person is and can be.

Think of experiences where change threatens us: watch churches separate rather than accept new modes of being; watch society as we struggle to redefine families in the wake of divorce, single parenting, and same-sex unions; watch our nation as we try to understand what it is to be an American in the midst of a global village. Change, coping with resurrection, is scary, hard, and assaults the core beliefs about the way things are or should be.

As Christians, we are called to be a part of resurrection and accepting of the change that it brings—to move beyond our comfort level to see new possibilities. My resurrection experience of being made whole may threaten people just as Lazarus stumbling out of the tomb did. Yet it also may lead me into a new relationship, a new way of imagining the world. So, when fear and discomfort become apparent, I need to remind myself to look for resurrection and ways to welcome this miracle into my life.

From Aimee Estep’s essay in Gifts from Within: Women’s Meditations for Lent by the Women of Brigid’s Place. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Acquainted with grief

Daily Reading for March 16 • The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

The cross is the exhibition of Life being precisely that; more—as knowing itself to be precisely that, as experiencing itself as being precisely that. We are relieved—may one say?—from the burden of being naturally optimistic. “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together.” If we are to rejoice always then it must be a joy consonant with that; we need not—infinite relief!—force ourselves to deny the mere burden of breathing. Life (experience suggests) is a good thing, and somehow unendurable; at least the Christian faith has denied neither side of the paradox. Life found itself unendurable. Life itself consents to shrink from its own terrors; it concedes to us its utterance of our own prayer: “O not this! If it be possible, not this!” I am not for a moment equating our sorrows with that; the point is that the sorrow is centrally there. Life itself is acquainted with grief.

And not grief alone. Crucifixion was an obscene thing. It was revolting not merely because of the torture and the degredation, but also because of the disgust; or rather it is revolting to us—I do not know that it was revolting to those who saw it. They were as accustomed to it as our fathers were to burning and castration or we to many years’ imprisonment or to the gallows. It was, however, definitely more spectacularly obscene than the gallows; we can hardly, in the nature of things, realize it so, and even our best efforts tend to make it a little respectable. But then again life, as we know it, is obscene; or, to be accurate, it has in it a strong element of obscenity. Again and again we become aware of a sense of outrage in our physical natures. Sometimes this is aroused by the events of which we read in the papers, but as often by the events which happen to us. The family, for example, is a sacred and noble thing, but the things that happen in the family are the result of blood antagonistic to itself. “Love,” it is said, “is very near to hate.” Without discussing the general truth of that, it may be allowed that were it is so, the hate is often of a particularly virulent and vehement kind.

I take these two qualities—the sorrow and the obscenity—as examples of that dreadful contradiction in our experience of life which is flatly exhibited in the living of life by Life.

From “The Cross” by Charles Williams, in Charles Williams: Essential Writings in Spirituality and Theology, edited by Charles Hefling (Cowley Publications, 1993).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Bold responses

Daily Reading for March 17 • Monday in Holy Week

The story of the woman anointing the head of Jesus with precious ointment is yet another story of conflict. The woman is immediately despised for her action. The indignant critics condemn her for senseless waste: that stuff of hers should have been donated for the relief of the poor instead of being emptied over Jesus’ head. The voices are pragmatic, moralistic, high-toned. Jesus, with the oil trickling down all over him, springs to her defense. “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me” (Mark 14:6, RSV).

The critics see only a frivolous and meaningless gesture. Jesus experiences it as rich with meaning, gracious, grave, and truthful. She is saluting him magnificently as the one getting ready to die for all. . . .

This woman breaking open her costly flask appears again and again in stories of faith. She has inspired artists in their creation of works that glorify God in wood, stone, paint, gesture, movement, melody, and thread, while the pious sneered that these things were unnecessary, wasteful, impractical, and unspiritual. She has inspired men and women following the Spirit’s call to monastic life, to make adoration their reason for being, when their friends and family complained that they were wasting their lives. She has smiled upon thousands who tend the flame of prayer and love of Jesus in the midst of busy lives, when those around them view their devotion as wasted effort diverting them from achievement and doing good. Her memory has been present like a fragrance in thousands of bold responses to Jesus in the face of condescension and disapproval.

From Martin Smith’s A Season for the Spirit: Readings for the Days of Lent. © 1991, 2004. A Seabury Classic published by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Having nothing

Daily Reading for March 18 • Tuesday in Holy Week

Reflect, my son, Do you walk too quickly for God?
Hear that song which the Lord sings with your life. Recall that:
There is one time for the lattices of heaven to give dew,
And another for the sun to fire the sands.
There is one time for children to play with coloured toys,
And another when they rest upon their pallets.
There is a time when life blooms and youth is all,
And another when white hairs close life’s door.

Reflect again my son, Do you climb too high for God?
Recall that a solitary:
Seeks not the voice of God, but hears it in cracking ice, blowing reeds and brethren’s laughter.
Seeks not the gifts of God, but finds them in new bread,
the darkness of dawn and brethren’s love.
Seeks not the vision of God, but spies His Print on bee’s wing,
fishes’ fin and brother’s heart.

Reflect again my son. Do you ask too much of God?
Know that:
When His prize is downfalling, you may find a rising.
When His favour is silence, you may catch a melody.
When His blessing is suffering, you may sense deep peace.

So:
The heart of darkness is new light.
The heart of despair is fresh hope.
The heart of death is eternal life.

Only those who have nothing
can accept everything.

“Having Nothing” by Abbot Nicholas and John the Dwarf, in the Abbot and the Dwarf by Derek Webster (St. Paul’s Publications, 1992). Quoted in The Desert: An Anthology for Lent by John Moses. © 1997. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

We are his body

Daily Reading for March 19 • Wednesday in Holy Week

Sin, sorrow, and suffering, and death itself, were indeed taken away at the Cross, but we mortals must enter into the depths of this mystery in actual experience. The fact that the Savior bore all this for us does not mean that we bear nothing of it; rather, it means that we are invited in to that place (the Cross) where suffering is transfigured. We (the Church) are his Body, says St. Paul. As such, we share in his suffering for the life of the world.

Jesus tells his followers that they will drink the cup of which he drank and be baptized with the baptism with which he was to be baptized (he was speaking specifically of his imminent suffering in Jerusalem). Where, suddenly, is the theology that teaches that because the Savior did it all, we thereby are reduced to the status of inert bystanders? Whether the sorrow of the moment is a lost glove or a lost spouse or a bombed city, I am invited by the Divine Mercy to unite this terrible loss (for the child, the loss of the glove may threaten the end of the world) with the suffering of the Savior at Calvary and thus to discover that my suffering is his suffering, and that—paradox of paradoxes—his is ours (again—we are his Body).

From “The Crucifix” by Thomas Howard, quoted in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Plough Publishing House, 2003).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Blood covenant

Daily Reading for March 20 • Maundy Thursday

“Take, eat, this is my body,” Jesus said. Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Have we done it so often that we have forgotten how to be shocked by it? Of course it is not real blood in the cup. It is probably Taylor’s Tawny Port, but clearly, this is a blood covenant we are being asked to enter into, with staggering implications. . . .

The death cannot be overlooked, nor should it be, but it is the life that is being offered, the life that rushes out of that cup like a spring of living water. It is God’s promise from before time and forever, spelled out this time in flesh and blood. It is the new covenant and the last one—new because it is offered to us fresh each day and last because there is nothing more that God can say or do. This is as close as God can get: blood kin, indissoluble union, friend bound to friend for life, forever. When we lift the cup to our lips and drink, we accept the gift, renewing the covenant and reminding ourselves that we do not live for ourselves alone. We are possessors of a double life, having taken our friend’s life and nature into ourselves. Inside of us God rides in our bloodstreams straight to our hearts where the covenant is written: I shall be your God and you shall be my people.

From “Blood Covenant” in Gospel Medicine by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

They know not what they do

Daily Reading for March 21 • Good Friday

In Jesus’ time, crucifixion was not against the law. It was carried out by the law. It was an exceptionally gruesome method of torturing a person to death, carried out by the government not in secret dungeons but in public. Everyone knew what it looked like, smelled like, sounded like—the horrific sight of completely naked men in agony, the smell and sight of their bodily functions taking place in full view of all, the sounds of their groans and labored breathing going on for hours and, in some cases, for days. Perhaps worst of all is the fact that no one cared. All of this took place in public, and no one cared. That is why, from the early Christian era, a verse from the book of Lamentations was attached to the Good Friday scene: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?” (1:12). . . .

The crosses were placed by the roadside as a form of public announcement: these miserable beings that you see before you are not of the same species as the rest of us. The purpose of pinning the victims up like insects was to invite the gratuitous abuse of the passersby. Those crowds understood that their role was to increase, by jeering and mocking, the degredation of those who had been thus designated unfit to live. The theological meaning of this is that crucifixion is an enactment of the worst that we are, an embodiment of the most sadistic and inhuman impulses that lie within us. The Son of God absorbed all that, drew it into himself. All the cruelty of the human race came to focus in him.

In his first word from the Cross, Jesus does not pray for the good and the innocent. He prays for people doing terrible things. He prays for men who are committing sadistic acts, offering them to his Father’s mercy. It is for his enemies that he prays, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

There is a suggestion here that human beings are in the grip of something they do not fully comprehend. The evil that lodges in the human heart is greater than we know. This means at least two things. It means that there is nothing that you or I could ever do, or say, or be, that would put us beyond the reach of Jesus’ prayers. Nothing at all. And it also means that no one else, no one at all, is beyond that reach. His prayer for the worst of the worst comes from a place beyond human understanding. From that sphere of divine power we hear these words today as though they were spoken for the first time, as though they were being spoken at this very moment by the living Spirit, spoken of each one of us: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

From The Seven Last Words from the Cross by Fleming Rutledge (Eerdmans, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Creation freed

Daily Reading for March 22 • Holy Saturday

Clearly for these Greek-speaking Christians [Clement of Alexandria and Athanasius] our human reconciliation with God was effected by the entire dynamic of the Christ-coming. The salvific emphasis was placed upon the incarnation as much as upon the crucifixion. And the sense of redemption was universal and creation-centered rather than individual and focused solely upon humankind. This is a precious insight to take forward with us into the twenty-first century as we grow increasingly aware of the symbiotic and endangered relationship between our own species and all the species in the ecosystems of the earth. God is not simply above the earth, raising us up from our God-lessness by bypassing the created order. Rather, God in Christ breaks the chains that enslave us and our earth-home, and radically frees creation to realize its own intrinsic God-likeness. . . .

This descent to the dead, while not deeply explored in any other quarter of Christendom than Eastern Orthodoxy, is wonderfully rich in its implications. The descent to the dead as it is elucidated in that tradition speaks symbolically to the length and breadth of divine compassion, to the extent of the redemptive promise and to the utter intimacy of a God whose love penetrates to the furthest reaches of creation’s fallen depths. There is no place God is not.

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In the midst of death we are in life

Daily Reading for March 23 • The Feast of the Resurrection: Easter Day

The last certainty is the certainty of death. It is the one thing of which we can be sure. We may try to forget it, but it will not forget us. Nor can we ever really forget it until we have faced it and come to a decision about it. In the midst of life we are in death, unless we know that in the midst of death we are in life.

Faith in eternal life is and must be the logical conclusion—using logic in its fullest human sense—of the instinct of self-preservation. As we grow, so grows that divine discontent that severs us completely from the rest of the animal creation and bids us reach out to fuller and fuller life. We can find endless reasons to justify the instinctive craving, but it is the instinct that sets us reasoning, and unless the world is a fraud, that instinct points to something real by which it can be satisfied.

Unless then life mocks us and has no meaning, the instinct for self-preservation must have its perfect work and must lead to truth, not falsehood. The Christian hypothesis is that life is as good as God revealed in Christ and that behind the Cross there is ever and always the resurrection. And it is only by taking that hypothesis and living life as though it were true, flinging ourselves upon it recklessly in the faith that God keeps the good wine until the last, that we can come to that triumphant certainty which destroys death and makes us sure that in the midst of death we are in life everlasting.

From The Wicket Gate by G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, quoted in A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week by Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The empty tomb

Daily Reading for March 24 • Monday in Easter Week

Of all the mysteries our faith invites us to contemplate, the Resurrection is by far the most astonishing. Not simply in the sense of being difficult to believe in a logical fashion. That, in a way, is the very point of it. The very idea of resurrection shatters all the categories of comprehension with which we make sense of our world. It draws us instead into a reality that transcends present possibility. For myself, the wonder of the Resurrection is not so much discovered in my shoulder-shrugging acknowledgement of the power of God to effect the impossible. It is discovered instead in our own capability, pried open by the sight of the empty tomb, to live into our most poignant longings, to dream our farthest dreams, and to hope with the full expansion of our hearts. We are met, at the far limits of our resources, with limitlessness. We are met at the gates of death with a freshness and fullness of life barely grasped by the wildest stretches of our imaginings.

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The power of God

Daily Reading for March 25 • Tuesday in Easter Week

For Paul the Resurrection was no metaphor; it was the power of God. And when he spoke of Jesus as raised from the dead, he meant Jesus alive and at large in the world not as some shimmering ideal of human goodness or the achieving power of hopeful thought but as the very power of life itself. If the life that was in Jesus died on the cross; if the love that was in him came to an end when his heart stopped beating; if the truth that he spoke was no more if no less timeless than the great truths of any time; if all that he had in him to give to the world was a little glimmer of light to make bearable the inexorable approach of endless night—then all was despair. . . .

The earliest reference to the Resurrection is Saint Paul’s, and he makes no mention of an empty tomb at all. But the fact of the matter is that in a way it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.

From The Faces of Jesus by Frederick Buechner, quoted in Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner, compiled by George Conner (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Each day is Easter

Daily Reading for March 26 • Wednesday in Easter Week

Easter is not merely an event of long ago. It is not only the celebration of divine desire to be at one with humankind. It is not only the renewal of the cosmos. Nor is it simply our kindled hope for what is promised us. Easter is also realized when we are most fully alive and aware of all that is. A former bishop of Romania has been quoted as saying, “If we only knew the truth of it we would know that each day is Easter.”

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

We are with God

Daily Reading for March 27 • Thursday in Easter Week

The Bible tells us one thing—only one—about the dead who have passed out of our sight. They are with God. How simple that is! How sufficient it becomes! How cheap and tawdry as we dwell on it, it makes the guesses and conceits with which people try to make real to themselves what the dead are doing! They are with God. Their occupations are ineffable. No tongue can tell their new, untasted joy. The scenery in the midst of which they live speaks to the spirit with voices which no words born of the senses can describe. But the companionship and care—those are the precious, those are the intelligible things. The dead are with God. O you who miss even today the sound of the familiar voices, the sight of the dear, familiar faces, believe and be more than satisfied with that.

From a sermon on the resurrection by Phillips Brooks, quoted in A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week by Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Two springs

Daily Reading for March 28 • Friday in Easter Week

Holy Week is the world’s sacred Winter;
The earth is a widow, the skies are sere,
There’s a sound of scourging and nailing in the vinegary wind;
And the darkness chokes the Son of Man.

But spring, two springs, are coming to the world
From the depths on the third morning:
The lily, the primrose and the daffodil
Will follow the Saviour from the Egypt of soil.

The rejoicing is green and white, the praise is yellow
Because the new Adam has risen alive from the grave;
And the ivy, tying itself round the tree like the old serpent,
Is for us eternal life with God.

Gwenallt, Gwreiddiau, 1959 translated by Patrick Thomas, quoted in A Celtic Primer: The Complete Celtic Worship Resource and Collection, edited and compiled by Brendan O’Malley. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

New life of spring

Daily Reading for March 29 • Saturday in Easter Week

No season of the Christian year speaks to the soul as does the Easter Tide. It is the beautiful season of the year, when the winter is ended and all things bud forth; the graves and sleeping-places of the dust are broken up and the beauty of the floral kingdom comes back to us in the fresh glory of living green and painted leaves and with the perfume of the incense-breathing gardens of spring. Now best may the gospel of immortality be preached, when ten thousand times ten thousand witnesses confirm the word; when bud and leaf and flower, when every little branch that swells with new life of the spring, and every brook that frees itself of ice and resumes the song of the past, and every gentle bird and beast, and tiny creatures of the dust, and all that have life and health, seem to rejoice in the morning of their returning day; now comes to us the gospel of immortality, attested by a great cloud of witnesses in earth, sea, and sky, and vouched for by the deeper tones of years that are past; by the testimony of all ages since Christ was here; by the voice of those who have lived and died believing that, to God, there are no dead, that “for to him all are alive.” This is the thing which has been most surely believed among us; the event from which all else is reckoned backwards and forwards; the stay of those on their journey, the inspiration of genius, the melody of music, the strength of manners and morals, the support and consolation of the mourning heart. From the natural and the moral world, the world of history and art, the worlds of mind, of matter, and of religion, come voices announcing that Christ is risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that sleep.

From the sermon “The Morning of Eternity” by Morgan Dix, , quoted in A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week by Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Practicing resurrection

Daily Reading for March 30 • The Second Sunday of Easter

Wendell Berry, the great environmentalist poet-theologian, has written a piece about somebody he calls a “mad farmer” who goes around shouting, “Practice resurrection!” “Practice resurrection.” That’s not bad advice. It’s certainly what Thomas does—and maybe, just maybe, the other disciples are rehearsing the story and replaying the experience, too. Most of us don’t “get it” the very first time. Most of us spend our lives learning what the reality of resurrection looks like, feels like, sounds like, and tastes like—because it keeps on happening in new ways every day of our lives. . . .

Practicing resurrection means living in openness. It’s a vulnerable attitude. Jesus invites Thomas to examine his wounds—come and see the ugliest thing you can imagine. God has made it a source of beauty and healing. It means that our fears, our inadequacies, the wretched parts of ourselves, can be the vehicle for new and more abundant life—if we’re willing to confront them honestly and openly. . . . But it’s not just our wrongdoing—the weak and untried parts of ourselves can be the stuff of new life, too. That’s what exercise is all about—stressing, trying the weak parts of our bodies so that they become stronger. Our psyches and souls can find new strength too if we’re willing to journey within and confront some of that darkness or fear or mystery. . . .

Practice resurrection. Live in open expectation of the new thing God is doing at all times and in all places. It means opening ourselves to that new thing, recognizing that the change it brings will cause some distress. But there is always more abundant life on the other side of the pain and grief that comes with change and growth. Like Thomas, all of us get opportunities to learn something that we can’t believe without firsthand experience. True joy and abundant life come out of those experiences of resurrection.

From “Practicing Resurrection” by Katharine Jefferts Schori, in A Wing and a Prayer: A Message of Faith and Hope by Katharine Jefferts Schori. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The difficult way

Daily Reading for March 31 • St. Joseph (transferred)

We know that Joseph was concerned about his future with Mary because they were not yet married when she conceived. We know that he considered divorcing her, as the Jewish law allowed. So Jesus’ life began in a difficult and even dangerous situation in that small town in Israel.

This difficulty provides us with what is perhaps the most important ethical lesson we can learn from the Nativity of Our Lord. Not only in his teaching but even in his birth, Jesus showed us that the way of life is a difficult way, and may even collide with the rules of polite society. We can never say that we have fulfilled righteousness because we have followed the rules; Jesus went beyond the rules to the mercy that often lies on the other side of them.

We might object to this idea, saying that the case of the Holy Family was a special case, a case involving a miracle, not like our cases. And so it was. But the purpose of miracles in God’s plan is always to show us something about the way God works in the world, to show us the fullness of what God intends for us. None of us is the Blessed Mother or St. Joseph. But by showing us these people in the context of their world, a difficult one as ours is, the Scriptures challenge us to live up to the miracles we see in their pages.

From A Year of Days with the Book of Common Prayer by Bishop Edmond Lee Browning (Ballantine Publishing Group, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 31, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The gutsy one

Daily Reading for April 1 • The Annunciation (transferred)

I once heard an old piece of folklore about Mary. Imagine, this story goes, that the angel of God had been wandering the earth sine the beginning of time, asking people if they would be willing to bring God’s child into the world. Mary was not the most pure, most holy, most beautiful; she was simply the only one gutsy enough to say “yes.”

I love that little addition to the Gospel narrative because it makes us look at the story from a different angle. The Church has traditionally taught us that Mary was selected by God for the most important task of all time, the birth of Christ. Mary is seen as the most pure, the most devout woman in the world. She was selected, out of all the women of all time, to be the mother of God. It’s almost as if Mary is the valedictorian of devotion, she was the best, and she was awarded the greatest honor. But what if her role was awarded to her because she alone was willing, because she agreed? What if it was Mary’s willingness that set her apart?

In the Gospel of Luke, Mary says to the angel Gabriel, “Here am I.” These are words repeated by some of the most devout lovers of God in Scripture. Abraham says, “Here I am.” Isaiah says, “Here I am.” These are the words of those who volunteer to submit themselves to the will of God. These are the words of true devotion. After uttering these words, no one ever stands still.

From Between Two Worlds: Daily Readings for Advent by Kate Moorehead (Cowley Publications, 2003).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The praying people

Daily Reading for April 2 • James Lloyd Breck, Priest, 1876

From what I have now written you, you will learn, Christian brethren, that plants are ripening here for the harvest that comes on apace, before the reapers can be prepared to enter in. But you will like to know something further, viz., in what have the two years promised fruit, where we have been laboring? Seeds of glorious light have been sown, and they are even now shooting forth branches which promise, in due time, an abundant harvest.

Enter with me now, please, the near squared-log church. It is the very picture of simplicity and solemnity. Ever kept sacred to the Divine homage, it is always in that perfect order which becometh his sanctuaries. These Indians call Christians the “praying people,” and the church building the “Wigwam of Prayer.” . . . It is a week-day; fifty-six natives are present. The average number of daily attendants is over forty—quite frequently there are fifty; as large a number as you would see at their medicine dance, which occurs but twice in the year! Pagan is well translated into Ojibwa by one word, which signifies the people who do not pray! The small handful of whites you observe in the church are my fellow missionaries in the Lord, who have, male and female, come thither to instruct the heathen in the better way of things, both temporal and spiritual. . . . I am thankful to say I am able to read the liturgy in their own tongue, and thus appear before them in the true light of a clergyman. The interpreter gives the sermon and other instructions by word of mouth to the people, and also leads in the Ojibwa responses, which the people commit to memory and say orally. . . .

How exceedingly thankful, then, should we be, in this remote corner of the wilderness, to see not only a Christian temple built, but a body of daily worshippers in it, to the number that I have stated; not only so, but amongst them three Indians and one white young man actually going through a course of preparation for the ministry. How thankful, I say, should we be for all this evidence of life in the use of all those divers helps which the Lord hath appointed in his church on earth.

From a report by James Lloyd Breck describing his ministry among Native Americans, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Day by day

Daily Reading for April 3 • Richard, Bishop of Chichester, 1253

Born at Droitwich, Richard of Wyche became chancellor of Canterbury under Archbishop Edmund Rich. King Henry III refused permission for Richard to be consecrated Bishop of Chichester, until the Pope threatened to excommunicate the King. Richard was a deeply spiritual man and an excellent administrator. The Prayer of St. Richard of Chichester, which has recently been set to music by several composers, is now one of the most popular in the English language.

Praise to thee, Lord Jesus Christ,
for all the benefits thou has won for me,
for all the pains and insults thou has borne for me.
Most merciful redeemer,
friend and brother,
may I know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly, day by day. Amen.

From Richard of Wyche (1197-1253), quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The struggle against racism

Daily Reading for April 4 • Martin Luther King, Jr., Civil Rights Leader, 1968

How deeply King understood the role of forgiveness in the creation of his beloved community is seen in his assertion that the struggle for justice and the resistance against evil is not a struggle against other persons. It is rather a struggle against the structures of evil that entrap not only the oppressed but the oppressors as well. Thus the struggle against racism was not a campaign of hatred against racists but a militant resistance against racism itself which sought to release those caught on both sides of the battle from the sin of racism. Revenge was to be foreign, forgiveness commonplace.

Christianity, for Dr. King, required not only that we have our own sins forgiven but that we, through forgiveness, dismantle what holds all of us in bondage. The power of forgiveness is a gift of Christ bestowed upon the community for the purpose of ushering in the kingdom, the beloved community. The power to forgive is given to us by the Holy Spirit.

In the process we must be willing to take on suffering ourselves rather than inflict harm on others. We must renounce not only the use of physical violence but the internal spirit of violence as well. We must genuinely love our enemies, not sentimentally, not because we like them or find their actions comprehensible, but because we have been challenged to do so by the Gospels. In this we find cosmic accompaniment, which, King believed, was aligned ultimately with the emergence of justice.

From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Free from death

Daily Reading for April 5

I see flames of orange, yellow and red
shooting upwards to the sky, piercing the whole clouds.
I see the clouds themselves chasing the flames upwards,
and I feel the air itself reaching for the heavens.

Down below I see great, grey rocks beating against the earth,
as if they were pushing their way down to hell.
At your resurrection that which is light and good rises up with you,
and that which is heavy and evil is pushed downwards.

At your resurrection goodness breaks from evil,
life breaks free from death.

“Easter” by Adam of St. Victor, in The Liturgical Poetry of Adam of Saint Victor, translated by D. S. Wrangham (Kegan, Paul & Co., 1881). Quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Something happened

Daily Reading for April 6 • The Third Sunday of Easter

Without the resurrection the Christian movement would have petered out in ignominy and there would have been no Christianity. Without the resurrection Christianity would not be itself, as the distinctiveness of Christianity is not its adherence to a teacher who lived long ago but its belief that “Jesus is Lord” for every generation through the centuries. . . .Something happened so as to vindicate for the apostles the meaning of the cross, and to make the person of Jesus contagious to them. The evidence for a stupendous happening, which the New Testament writers mention, was the survival of the church, the appearances of Jesus in a visible and audible impact on the apostles, and the discovery that the tomb was empty. The several elements in this threefold evidence no doubt had different degrees of evidential weight for different people, and they have such varying degrees still. . . .

The Emmaus story illustrates the various ingredients of belief in the resurrection. There was the climax, Jesus known and recognized in the breaking of the bread and vanishing from their sight: it was the moment of faith and encounter. But there had been previously the reflection on the divine purpose in scriptures which the stranger had unfolded to them on the road. There had been the report that the tomb had been found empty, and that the discovery had been corroborated by other observers. There was the corroboration of the two disciples’ seeing of Jesus at Emmaus by the news that the apostles in Jerusalem had also seen him.

I am suggesting not that the Emmaus story tells us exactly how the Easter faith began, but that it illustrates the apostolic church’s view of the factors in the creation of that faith for the original and subsequent believers. To value these evidential factors is not, as Bultmann suggests, to lapse into a worldly-minded historicism, for the Easter faith, existential as it is, was and is related to evidential history. Christians believe in the resurrection partly because a series of facts are unaccountable without it.

From God, Christ, and the World by Michael Ramsey, quoted in To Believe is To Pray: Readings from Michael Ramsey, edited by James E. Griffiss (Cowley Publications, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Come, receive the light

Daily Reading for April 7 • Tikhon, Patriarch of Russia, Confessor and Ecumenist, 1925

‘Come, receive the light!’

With these words, the entire church, previously waiting in darkness, lights up in splendour. People’s faces shine. It is Easter midnight. The night said to be brighter than any day. Everyone, young and old, whether born into or received into the Orthodox faith, knows by heart the chant that will be repeated over forty days,the song that colours the yearly cycle: ‘Christ is risen from the dead.’ In an age when we look for ways and moments to celebrate life, Easter marks the feast of feasts. . . .

The cross is indeed the final word. In the paradox of the cross, problems and difficulties do not disappear. They simply appear in a new light. They are appreciated in a new perspective. We know differently. They are perceived in the light of the final age that is to come. We understand that, through them and beyond them all, there exists the invincible power of Christ’s crucified love. The light of the cross is stronger than any darkness in the world.

The Greek word for Easter, Pascha, derives from the Hebrew meaning ‘passover’. The crucifixion and the resurrection are a ‘passing over’ from survival to fullness of life, and from mere life to life in abundance. The tomb of Christ was not empty. It was open! It remains for us an open invitation.

The thunderous response to the Easter greeting is: ‘Christ is truly Risen!’

From Light Through Darkness: The Orthodox Tradition by John Chyrssavgis (Orbis, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The more we bring

Daily Reading for April 8 • William Augustus Muhlenberg, Priest, 1877

A good Christian is always fit to partake of the Sacrament; but yet, in order to do it, he will desire to collect himself—to repair himself, as it were—to wipe off the dust and soil of the world, which are forever settling on the soul. . . .The communicant, though conscious of having the main qualification for meeting his Lord acceptably at the Holy Table, yet desires to examine it, again and again—to try himself, as the apostle bids him, “whether he be in the faith.” Every time he ventures into the presence of the King he endeavors to have his marriage garment cleaner and whiter, more thoroughly purified from the stains of earth. He feels as if he must repent anew—believe anew—love anew—make good resolutions anew, and begin, as it were, his whole Christian life anew. True, the grace which is to enable him to do all this, is the very thing he seeks in going to the Eucharist, yet the grace which he obtains is ever in proportion to that with which he comes. . . . So oft the grace of which the Eucharist is the means. The more we have to come with, the more we bring away. If none we bring, then none we gain.

From The Weekly Eucharist by William Augustus Muhlenberg, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Supported by the Bible

Daily Reading for April 9 • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1945

In a few days it will be Easter. That makes me very happy. But do you think that either of us by ourselves could believe or would want to believe these impossible things that are reported in the gospels, if the Bible did not support us in our belief? Simply the Word, as God’s truth, which he vouches for himself. Resurrection—that is not a self-evident idea, an eternal verity. I mean, of course, resurrection as the Bible means it—as a rising up from real death (not sleep) to real life, from life without God to new life with Christ in God. God has said (and we know this through the Bible): “Behold I make all things new.” He made that come true at Easter. Must not this message appear much more impossible, distant, unreal than the whole story of King David, which, by comparison, is quite harmless?

There remains, then, only the decision whether we will trust the Bible or not, whether we will allow ourselves to be supported by it as by no other word, in life and death. And I believe that we can only be happy and at peace when we have made that decision.

From “The Bible Alone: A Letter to Dr. Rudiger Schleicher” (Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law and good friend), quoted in Meditating on the Word by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated and edited by David McI. Gracie, second edition (Cowley Publications, 1986).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The advantage of language

Daily Reading for April 10 • William Law, Priest, 1761

Sometimes the light of God’s countenance shines so bright upon us, we are so affected with the wonders of the love and goodness of God, that our hearts worship and adore in a language higher than that of words, and we feel transports of devotion, which only can be felt. On the other hand, sometimes we are so sunk into our bodies, so dull and unaffected with that which concerns our souls, that our hearts are as much too low for our prayers; we cannot keep pace with our forms of confession, or feel half of that in our hearts which we have in our mouths; we thank and praise God with forms of words, but our hearts have little or no share in them.

It is therefore highly necessary to provide against this inconstancy of our hearts, by having at hand such forms of prayer as may best suit us when our hearts are in their best state, and also be most likely to raise and stir them up when they are sunk into dullness. For, as words have a power of affecting our hearts on all occasions, as the same thing differently expressed has different effects upon our minds, so it is reasonable that we should make this advantage of language, and provide ourselves with such forms of expression as are most likely to move and enliven our souls, and fill them with sentiments suitable to them.

From A Serious Call to the Devout and Holy Life by William Law, from the Treasures from the Spiritual Classics series, compiled by Roger L. Roberts (A. R. Mowbray and Co Ltd, 1981).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A coherent structure

Daily Reading for April 11 • George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand, and of Lichfield, 1878

When George Augustus Selwyn went as bishop to New Zealand, where Queen Victoria had assigned him a large part of Polynesia as well as the two islands of New Zealand itself, he realized the need for synodical forms to be developed to give Anglicanism outside of the Church of England establishment a coherent theological structure. In the twentieth century those synodical forms became the pattern of church polity in all parts of what developed as the Anglican Communion, particularly as churches in Africa and Asia achieved self-government in a way which was often parallel with independence from colonial rule by Britain. With the first Lambeth Conference in 1867, there began the series of Lambeth Conferences which have been a chief means of holding together an increasingly widespread Communion now rooted in many different cultures, and freed from domination first by the British Empire, then by English education and language.

From Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Going to Emmaus

Daily Reading for April 12

Emmaus is where we go when life gets to be too much for us . . . the place we go in order to escape—a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.” . . . Emmaus may be buying new clothes or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred, that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that men have had—ideas about love and freedom and justice—have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish men for selfish ends.

From The Magnificent Defeat by Frederick Buechner (Harper & Row, 1966).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Sheep

Daily Reading for April 13 • The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Most of what I know about sheep is hearsay, undocumented, and not flattering. They are reputed to be stupid, lacking in initiative, and likely to fall over cliffs or entangle themselves in brush. They are not playful. Lambs have an innocent charm, but the adult animal is stolid and a little boring. Rams are distinguished by their horns, and there may be some variation in color; but the average sheep looks just like the rest of the flock. To look into the face of one sheep is to have seen them all.

I am not really pleased to be grouped with the sheep. In this I suspect that I am not alone. We live in a society that places high value on ingenuity, creativity, and individuality. It is better to be a leader than a follower—can you imagine parents urging their children to be good sheep, to aim for mediocrity in things academic and athletic? We admire people with high levels of energy and a zest for exploration. No, to be a good sheep is not part of the American Dream.

Most significantly, sheep need a shepherd. There is no such thing as an independent or self-made sheep. They need the shepherd if they are to be guided and cared for, and—in dire straits—to be rescued. There is nothing sentimental about this relationship: for the sheep it is a matter of survival, and for the shepherd it is a matter of economy. The sheep are not pets, to be cuddled and cosseted; rather, they are valuable property. The shepherd’s treasure, if you will.

There are no sheep on the streets of my neighborhood, but I am increasingly and keenly aware of those people whom we so easily turn into sheep, those people who “all look alike,” who are indistinguishable to the unloving eye. The boisterous, slightly threatening teenagers who rush onto the subway when school is out at three o’clock, the homeless who warm themselves on sidewalk grates and huddle in doorways, the frail aged lined up in their wheelchairs in nursing home corridors, the caged young men in our jails and prisons—they can become sheep, one like another, and easily replaceable. Or not missed, if one disappears. When I see pictures of refugees, those victims of indescribable suffering, they blur and begin to look alike. Even the individual child, with great pleading eyes and the bloated belly of starvation, begins to look like every other starving child, while the mother holding the body of her dead infant looks like all the other mothers.

I want to turn people into sheep because it is easier that way. It shields me from being touched by the depths of their pain and need, and it helps me deny my kinship with them. It lets me forget that I am a sheep too.

From “Sheep” in Just Passing Through: Notes from a Sojourner by Margaret Guenther. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Distinct value

Daily Reading for April 14

It’s quite all right to be a sheep, so long as we pay attention and hear the shepherd’s voice. The essential, crucial point is this: the good shepherd knows the sheep. This is not just a matter of a head count; each is of distinct value.

I yearn to be known, and at the same time I fear it. Most of the time, we let ourselves be known by bits and pieces, and we know others in the same way. My husband of nearly half a century thinks that he knows me, my children are sure they have me figured out, my colleagues and students and friends also would claim that they know me. Foolishly, I think I know myself. Even as I want to be known, I want to be known on my own terms—a carefully constructed and edited version, not as a sheep who gets lost, falls off cliffs, and gets hung up in the brambles. Certainly not as a sheep who can’t find her own way.

To be known, fully known, is not possible in our human relationships, but it is the foundation of our relationship with Christ. To be known, fully known, is both painful and profoundly comforting. It is to accept the humble status of sheep, to let the masks and defenses drop away, and to let ourselves be carried on the shepherd’s shoulders and occasionally poked by his staff. It means sometimes to be thwarted—the edge of that cliff doesn’t look too dangerous, and I wasn’t going to wander very far, honest!— and sometimes to be shut in a pen. It means to listen for the shepherd’s voice and to rejoice that he knows which one I am, in this great, blundering, well-intentioned, sheepish flock.

From “Sheep” in Just Passing Through: Notes from a Sojourner by Margaret Guenther. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The true shepherd

Daily Reading for April 15

I once read about a doorman who worked at the same building in Manhattan for dozens of years. On the eve of his retirement, he was interviewed about his life experience as one who opened the door for so many New Yorkers. What struck me was his faithful service, even when he was essentially ignored. People would come and go, many of them so self-important they just walked through the open door without even a thank-you nod. A large number of them, however, came to appreciate him and often would chat with him as friends.

Regardless, he said, he came to know most everyone who lived in that building better than perhaps they knew themselves. As he did his job, he listened and observed carefully—not to be nosy, but to try to serve them better.

I think of that faithful doorman every time I read this passage. Commentators tell us that in Jesus’ time, shepherds would guard their flocks at night by lying across the opening of the pen, serving personally as the gate. That way they could watch over their sheep, ensure their safety, keep them in for rest and protection, and let them out for pasture and exercise.

Jesus says he does the same with his followers. As a true shepherd, Jesus has the best in mind for us, his loving followers. He came to give us something we could have no other way, something we yearn for from the depths of our being. He came to give us “real and eternal life, more and better life” than we could ever dream of. But we must first find our place in the sheep pen, under his protective care.

What sort of life are you dreaming of? One marked by love and joy, by purpose and meaning, peace and fullness? That is the life Jesus wants you to experience, day by day, forever.

How can you experience it? Pay attention to Jesus as he works in your life. Be aware of the Spirit working out the rough edges of your life, calling you to deeper faithfulness, opening up opportunities to learn about yourself, about God, about serving others. Let him reach out to you when you need to be held, watched over, protected and cared for, and filled with rest and peace.

And when you are ready, go through him, through the Gate and into the world, taking that same love and care and peace with you to share with others, always under his watchful eye. This is real life, eternal life, more and better life than you ever dreamed of.

From Living Loved: Knowing Jesus as the Lover of Your Soul by Peter Wallace. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

He speaks our name

Daily Reading for April 16

The faith in Jesus this prayer [the Collect for Easter 4] expresses is a quality of faith we possessed as a child, wish we possessed now, and, in rare moments of spiritual vision, do possess. When in those moments we do achieve this level of faith in our Lord, we allow him to be our good shepherd. This is what Jesus wishes to be, what he always has been, and what he waits in unrelenting love and patience for us to recognize. This simplicity and sureness of faith in him as God in human flesh is what he waits for his church to recapture and rejoice in again. Whenever and wherever the church does recapture this conviction, it finds that our Lord becomes again its good shepherd. It then becomes possible for him to lead us where he wishes us to go, and to give us grace to follow him into places we sometimes do not wish to go or have the will to go.

This prayer reminds us of something else. It tells us that when we hear the voice of the good shepherd, what we hear is the most powerful of all sounds in our ears—our own name. All our lives we hear our name as we hear nothing else. We hear it called in every conceivable tone and setting, and for reasons and purposes too numerous to mention. Our name has been spoken by voices we will never forget and by voices we wish we could forget and cannot. Our name has been called lovingly, sternly, harshly, gently, angrily, seductively. We have heard it whispered passionately and shouted in exasperation.

To know that our name is on the lips of our Lord is to possess the richest intimacy with him. To know that he speaks our name gives us our ultimate sense of who we truly are. When we know truly who we are we can respond to his invitation to live fully and courageously. As this prayer calls us to do, we become capable of following where he leads.

From Prayers for the Breaking of Bread: Meditations on the Collects of the Church Year by Herbert O’Driscoll (Cowley Publications, 1991).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The open gate

Daily Reading for April 17

As long as we are alive, we are on the move. To become static is to stagnate and die. It is necessary for all living things to move and grow and change. Life is meant to be an adventure; change is a gift that we have to learn to use aright. In Celtic folk-tales a curse that could happen to a person was to enter a field and not to be able to get back out of it. To be stuck in that place for ever. It was seen as a definite curse to be unable to venture or to change. Yet we all know this experience in some small way; we all get ourselves stuck in routines and habits that can act like shackles. We all refuse to open our eyes to the vision that is before us; too often we select only what we want to see. In the same way we restrict what we hear and what we respond to. The open gate is the opposite to this. It is the invitation to adventure and to grow, the call to be among the living and vital elements of the world. The open gate is the call to explore new areas of yourself and the world around you. It is a challenge to come and discover that the world and ourselves are filled with mystery and with the glory of God. It is the ever present call to become pilgrims for the love of God, to take part in a romance that will enrich our hearts and our lives.

From The Open Gate: Celtic Prayers for Growing Spiritually by David Adam. Copyright © 1995. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The gate of glory

Daily Reading for April 18

The open gate is the choice that God is always placing before us. It is a sign of the opportunity that is ours. It is to do with our basic freedom; we can choose to go that way or to ignore it and go along another path. We should look upon the open gate as a way to extend ourselves and our vision. Here we can see further and reach beyond where we have been before. It may take a great deal of discipline to get off the old familiar track and to break with old habits, but in return it offers the excitement of new ground and new vistas. What we have to learn is to recognize when an open gate is presented to us. There are many gates, physical, mental and spiritual, through which we can travel to the ‘other world’, or, as I would prefer, ‘to a greater vision of this world of ours.’ There are always deeper levels of reality to explore. To accept open gates is to accept the role of a frontiersperson, an adventurer going where no one has gone before. Yet there are those who have made like journeys, taken similar adventures, so we are not without guides and fellow travelers. Just as when you go to a new country you can buy a guidebook to help you to get around, so in the venture of life, you can get advice and direction from those who have traveled before and direction from those who have traveled before you. When you make this venture, you will discover riches that you never dreamed of. St. Brendan of Birr says, ‘If you become Christ’s you will stumble upon wonder upon wonder and every one of them true.’ We need to discover that Christ has opened up for us the gate of glory.

From The Open Gate: Celtic Prayers for Growing Spiritually by David Adam. Copyright © 1995. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Alphege of Canterbury

Daily Reading for April 19 • Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Martyr, 1012

In this year,[1011] between the Nativity of St. Mary and Michaelmas, they beset Canterbury, and entered therein through treachery; for Elfmar delivered the city to them, whose life Archbishop Elfeah [Alphege] formerly saved. And there they seized Archbishop Elfeah, and Elfward the king’s steward, and Abbess Leofruna, and Bishop Godwin; and Abbot Elfmar they suffered to go away. And they took therein all the men, and husbands, and wives; and it was impossible for any man to say how many they were; and in the city they continued afterwards as long as they would. And, when they had surveyed all the city, they then returned to their ships, and led the archbishop with them.

Then was a captive
he who before was
of England head
and Christendom; —
there might be seen

great wretchedness,
where oft before
great bliss was seen,
in the fated city,
whence first to us
came Christendom,
and bliss ’fore God
and ’fore the world.

And the archbishop they kept with them until the time when they martyred him.

A.D. 1012. This year came Alderman Edric, and all the oldest counsellors of England, clerk and laity, to London before Easter, which was then on the ides of April; and there they abode, over Easter, until all the tribute was paid, which was 48,000 pounds. Then on the Saturday was the army much stirred against the bishop; because he would not promise them any fee, and forbade that any man should give anything for him. They were also much drunken; for there was wine brought them from the south. Then took they the bishop, and led him to their hustings, on the eve of the Sunday after Easter, which was the thirteenth before the calends of May; and there they then shamefully killed him. They overwhelmed him with bones and horns of oxen; and one of them smote him with an axe-iron on the head; so that he sunk downwards with the blow; and his holy blood fell on the earth, whilst his sacred soul was sent to the realm of God. The corpse in the morning was carried to London; and the bishops, Ednoth and Elfhun, and the citizens, received him with all honour, and buried him in St. Paul’s minster; where God now showeth this holy martyr’s miracles. When the tribute was paid, and the peace-oaths were sworn, then dispersed the army as widely as it was before collected. Then submitted to the king five and forty of the ships of the enemy; and promised him, that they would defend this land, and he should feed and clothe them.

From The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Part 3: A.D. 920-1014, Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #17; http://omacl.org/Anglo/part3.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Just like us

Daily Reading for April 20 • The Fifth Sunday of Easter

The disciples were simple people. They were ordinary folks who worked for a living, paid bills, and had to fulfill all the mundane responsibilities of life. Some were married and had to take care of those relationships properly. A few certainly must have had children. They had all the ingredients for the recipe of ordinary, everyday people.

Just like us.

But Jesus called them. He called them to follow him, to be with him and learn from him. He called them to see him heal and touch and transform people’s lives and to hear him teach amazingly simple yet startlingly counterintuitive truths.

Just as he has called us.

So, the disciples followed him, and they were amazed to see Jesus’ astonishing works, to hear his challenging words. They’d never seen anyone do things like this. But Jesus told them that they would not only do the same work he did, but “even greater things.”

Greater things than Jesus did? It’s hard to believe. Yet Jesus really only touched the lives of a handful of people in a very small area of the planet. The disciples who followed him, and those who followed them even until today, have made an impact on the entire world, sharing the message of God’s loving forgiveness and gracious acceptance in word and deed. As a result of their simple acts of obedience, the world is a different place.

Jesus’ words are meant for us too. He challenges us to follow him, to do even greater things for him. It’s not about who we are—our personality or gifts or background. It’s about how willing we are. How touched we are by Jesus’ love. How filled we are by his Spirit.

So, what’s stopping you? Even greater things await you.

From Living Loved: Knowing Jesus as the Lover of Your Soul by Peter Wallace. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A monastic scholar

Daily Reading for April 21 • Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1109

In the year 1109, on the Wednesday in Holy Week, the Archbishop of Canterbury lay dying. His friends, knowing that they were at the death-bed of a saint, were ready to improve the occasion: ‘My lord and father,’ they said, ‘we cannot help knowing that you are going to leave the world to be at the Easter court of your king.’ But Anselm was not to be caught by pieties and sentimentalities. His reply is the key to his life and a way to begin to understand him: ‘And indeed,’ he replied, ‘if His will is set upon this I will gladly obey His will. However, if He would prefer me to stay among you, at least until I can settle a question about the origin of the soul which I am turning over in my mind, I should welcome this with gratitude, for I do not know whether anyone will solve it when I am dead.’

There is in this reply first the obedience of the monk—a joyful love of whatever might be God’s will for him. And secondly a true estimate of his own intellectual powers as a scholar, without false humility; a mind still employed to its utmost in understanding the things of God for the sake of the people of God. . . .

As a monk Anselm understood theology to be the dynamic reflection upon mysteries already accepted and believed, by which the whole person, engaging in an arduous and totally demanding task—an ascesis—would be transfigured, receiving more and more of the light which is God. Anselm was a man of profound learning and alert mind who made his intellectual genius an integral part of his commitment to God as a monk. . . . Fides quarens intellectum, or, as Hilary of Poitiers said: ‘Bestow upon us, O Lord, the meaning of words, the light of understanding, the nobility of diction, and grant that what we believe that we may also speak.’

From Anselm of Canterbury: A Monastic Scholar by Sister Benedicta Ward SLG (Fairacres Publication No. 62, 1973).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The power of Christ

Daily Reading for April 22

O Christian soul, O soul rid of death’s burden and restored to life, O soul redeemed and liberated by the Blood of God from wretched servitude, exert thy faculties, remember how thou hast been raised, consider thy redemption and thy setting free! Ask of thyself anew what is the power that saved thee, and where it is found; make it thy business to ponder thy salvation, and thy delight to contemplate the same. Shake off disinclination, rouse thyself to effort, constrain thyself to think about these things. Enjoy the Saviour’s kindness, and let love for thy Redeemer kindle thee. Chew on his words, as on a honeycomb; suck out their flavour that is more than honey-sweet; swallow their healthful sweetness down. Chew by thinking, suck by understanding, swallow by loving and rejoicing. Chew happily, suck thankfully, swallow delightedly.

What, then, is the power and might that saved thee, and where is it found? Christ raised thee up from death, assuredly; he was the Good Samaritan who healed thee; he was the Good Friend who laid down his own life to buy thee back and set thee free. Christ, I say. The power that saved thee, therefore, is the power of Christ.

From “A Meditation on Human Redemption” by Anselm of Canterbury, in Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm (Mowbrays, 1952).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Domesticating emptiness

Daily Reading for April 23

The symbol of Easter is the empty tomb. You can’t depict or domesticate emptiness. You can’t make it into pageants and string it with lights. It doesn’t move people to give presents to each other or sing old songs. It ebbs and flows all around us, the Eastertide. Even the great choruses of Handel’s Messiah sound a little like a handful of crickets chirping under the moon.

He rose. A few saw him briefly and talked to him. If it is true, there is nothing left to say. If it is not true, there is nothing left to say. For believers and unbelievers both, life has never been the same again. For some, neither has death. What is left now is the emptiness. There are those who, like Magdalen, will never stop searching it till they find his face.

From “Easter” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Practical mysticism

Daily Reading for April 24

The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realized it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers. It is therefore the function of practical mysticism to increase, not diminish, the total efficiency, the wisdom and steadfastness, of those who try to practice it. It will help them to enter, more completely than ever before, into the life of the group to which they belong. It will teach them to see the world in a truer proportion, discerning eternal beauty beyond and beneath apparent ruthlessness. It will educate them in a charity free from all taint of sentimentalism; it will confer on them an unconquerable hope; and assure them that still, in the hour of greatest desolation, “There lives the dearest freshness of deep down things.”

From Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Gospel writing

Daily Reading for April 25 • St. Mark the Evangelist

The authors of the New Testament were very much like the scribes who would later transmit those authors’ writings. The authors too were human beings with needs, beliefs, worldviews, opinions, loves, hates, longings, desires, situations, problems—and surely all these things affected what they wrote. They too were Christians who had inherited traditions about Jesus and his teachings, who had learned about the Christian message of salvation, who had come to believe in the truth of the gospel—and they too passed along the traditions of their writings. . . . Matthew, in fact, is not exactly like Mark; Mark is not the same as Luke; or Luke as John; or John as Paul; or Paul as James. Just as scribes modified the words of the tradition, by sometimes putting these words “in other words,” so too had the authors of the New Testament itself, telling their stories, giving their instructions, and recording their recollections by using their own words (not just the words they had heard), words that they came up with to pass along their message in ways that seemed most appropriate for the audience and the time and place for which they were writing. . . .

The point is that Luke changed the tradition he inherited. Readers completely misinterpret Luke if they fail to realize this—as happens, for example, when they assume that Mark and Luke are in fact saying the same thing about Jesus. If they are not saying the same thing, it is not legitimate to assume they are—for example, by taking what Mark says, and taking what Luke says, then taking what Matthew and John say and melding them all together, so that Jesus says and does all the things that each of the Gospel writers indicates. Anyone who interprets the Gospels this way is not letting each author have his own say; anyone who does this is not reading what the author wrote in order to understand his message; anyone who does this is not reading the Gospels themselves—he or she is making up a new Gospel consisting of the four in the New Testament, a new Gospel that is not like any of the ones that have come down to us.

From Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Let nothing trouble you

Daily Reading for April 26

Given the reality of medieval office politics (as real for us in the twenty-first century as it was in the thirteenth), Hadewijch offered two main pieces of advice: “be on your guard against instability” and “never abandon the true life of good works.” Hadewijch seems to understand how easy it is to lose one’s center, and how detrimental that can be to one’s spirituality. She writes, “For there is nothing so able and so quick to separate you from our Lord as instability.” As an antidote, she gives us a sort of mantra with a warning attached.

“Whatever troubles may come to you, do not commit the folly of believing that you are set for any other goal than the great God Himself, in the fullness of His being and His love; do not let folly or doubt deflect you from any good practice which can lead you to this goal. If you will confide yourself to His love, you will soon grow to your full stature, but if you persist in doubting, you will become sluggish and grudging, and everything which you ought to do will be a burden to you. Let nothing trouble you [as Teresa of Avila will also advise three centuries later], do not believe that anything which you must do for Him whom you seek will be beyond your strength, that you cannot surmount it, that it will be beyond you. This is the fervor, this is the zeal which you must have, and all the time your strength must grow.”

From Wisdom from the Middle Ages for Middle-Aged Women by Lisa B. Hamilton. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A love gift

Daily Reading for April 27 • The Sixth Sunday of Easter

If you love me, Jesus says, you will do something and I will do something. You will do what I have set out for you to do: Love one another. Serve others humbly. Reach out to those in need. Be an agent of healing and life. And, if you love me, I will provide you with another Friend. I will not be with you in the flesh, but Someone will be with you always: the Spirit of Truth.

That’s quite a love gift.

So often we leave a token of our love for someone when we have to be away from them—a card, a stuffed animal, a piece of jewelry or a book that means something to us. I still have Taffy, the stuffed toy dog my parents gave me when I was five years old and had to stay alone in a children’s hospital—something to hug in their absence. But Jesus gives us something beyond our wildest imaginings: He gives us the very presence of God in the form of the Spirit. As a child of God and lover of Jesus, you have God’s Spirit with you, within you, and around you at all times.

You can’t see him. The world certainly is unable to see him. But you can know the Spirit is with you and in you, holding you up, giving you strength, showing you the road ahead, filling you with peace and purpose and love. The Spirit helps you do what Jesus has told you to do, to share and to serve. You aren’t on your own. You have a constant companion, a Friend to help you and guide you.

You can plumb the depths of even the simplest pronouncements of Jesus about the love relationship you share with him and still feel as though you never touch bottom. Understanding it—living it—requires a lifetime. But it all starts with your love for Jesus. And it will never end.

From Living Loved: Knowing Jesus as the Lover of Your Soul by Peter Wallace. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Wisdom of the cross

Daily Reading for April 28

The wisdom of the cross was, then, the disclosure not only of human morality but of divine love. Placing this at the center of his description of what Christ had done by his life and his death, Peter Abelard, in a sermonic essay entitled “The Cross,” emphasized that the love of God in Christ lay beyond “our own power to share in the passion of Jesus by our suffering and to follow him by carrying our own cross.” Therefore he insisted that it was unfair to accuse him of teaching that Christ had only provided an example for our imitation, as though such imitation were possible for the powers of an unaided human nature to achieve. On the contrary, the fundamental meaning of the wisdom of the cross was that contained in the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Such love had its ground and origin only in God; but from God it came to humanity, and it did so through the cross. For “by the faith which we have concerning Christ, love is increased in us, through the conviction that God in Christ has united our nature to himself and that by suffering in that nature he has demonstrated to us the supreme love of which he speaks.” Nowhere else but in Jesus and in his cross was the true nature of love visible. The purpose of the cross, therefore, was to bring about a change in sinners, to thaw their frozen hearts with the warmth of the sunshine of divine love. Christ did not die on the cross to change the mind of God (which, like everything about God, was unchangeable), but to “reveal the love [of God] to us or to convince us how much we ought to love him ‘who did not spare even his own Son’ for us.” True love was self-sacrificing love, and God had demonstrated it uniquely by giving up his own Son to the death of the cross. This exhibited the authentic nature of love and the depth of divine love, thus making human love, even self-sacrificing human love, possible.

From Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan (Perennial Library, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Remaining sane

Daily Reading for April 29 • Catherine of Siena

A common trick a lot of midlife women play on ourselves is to feel, and act, responsible for everything. But Jesus, via Catherine of Siena, doesn’t recommend this: “I in my providence did not give to any one person or to each individually the knowledge for doing everything necessary for human life. No, I gave something to one, something else to another, so that each one’s need would be a reason to have recourse to the other.” In other words, there’s a divine plan for us to need each other. So don’t go trying to do everything for everybody all at once. Treat your psyche with care—mental illness is not in the divine plan for you.

Even Catherine of Siena felt overwhelmed sometimes, and tried to protect herself. Apparently, at least once she did so by retreating to the roof. Some local parents were worried that their baby was possessed by demons, so they set out to ask Catherine for help. When Catherine saw the three on their way to her cottage, she felt so overwhelmed that she hid herself on the roof, muttering all the while, “Alas, every day I am tormented by evil spirits: Do you think I want somebody else’s?” On Catherine’s less stressful days, she poked fun at the devil, calling him “the Old Pickpocket.” Then, as now, the devil could steal enjoyment of life from you—and one of Catherine’s strategies to keep him at bay was humor. . . . Clearly, Catherine viewed the incessant demands that could lead to depression, anxiety, and mental illness as the work of the devil. And she was determined to remain sane.

From Wisdom from the Middle Ages for Middle-Aged Women by Lisa B. Hamilton. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The leaving of life

Daily Reading for April 30

The followers of Jesus came very early to the conclusion that he had lived in order to die, that his death was not the interruption of his life at all but its ultimate purpose. Even by the most generous reading, the Gospels give us information about less than a hundred days in the life of Jesus; but for the last two or three days of his life, they provide a detailed, almost hour-by-hour scenario. And the climax of that scenario is the account of Good Friday and of his three hours on the cross. The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed recognized this when they moved directly from his birth “from the Virgin Mary” to his crucifixion “under Pontius Pilate.” What was said of the thane of Cawdor in Macbeth was true preeminently of Jesus: “Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving of it.”

From Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan (Perennial Library, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on April 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Opening heaven

Daily Reading for May 1 • The Ascension

Jesus, having fulfilled his earthly mission, went to the Mount of Olives, took leave of his mother and the disciples, and ascended from there to his Father in heaven. It was his final act on this earth, but it was an act that opens to us, his followers, endless possibilities, for Jesus did not return to the Father alone. Through the mystery of the Incarnation, Jesus assumed all of humanity into himself, and now all of us are part of him. As the doors of the kingdom of heaven opened wide to receive the triumphant Lord, the whole of redeemed humanity was also being received and accepted by the Father. The feast of the Ascension celebrates not only Jesus’ glorification by the Father, but also the Father’s acceptance of each one of us. Jesus opens heaven to us, makes it our destination and permanent home, where one day we will also be received into the warm embrace of a loving Father.

From A Monastic Year by Brother Victor-Antoine, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Philip the Realist

Daily Reading for May 2 • St. Philip and St. James, Apostles

The last time we see Philip is in that great passage at the Last Supper, when Jesus was preparing his disciples for what was about to come. . . . In spite of all that Jesus had taught them, Philip asked for more: “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus’ response must have been filled with genuine frustration and sadness as he asked, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” We may think of Philip as a slow learner to have been with Jesus for three years without understanding that he was in the presence of God, but the idea that the Messiah was both man and God was a radically foreign concept to first-century Jews. We owe Philip a debt of gratitude for his dogged inquisitiveness, because Jesus’ response to him has blessed Christians for twenty-one centuries: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:1-9). . . .

In time, these words must have worked their way into Philip’s consciousness. It is generally accepted that he became one of the great missionary preachers of Asia, and was martyred for his faith in the Roman-Greek city of Hierapolis in Phyrgia. There are many legends about Philip, but there is considerable doubt that any of them are true. The only other mention of him in Scripture is that he was part of the group that met in the upper room in Jerusalem after Jesus’ ascension. . . . Philip had a long way to go when he first encountered Jesus, but the invitation to come and follow began a remarkable pilgrimage through which his life was transformed by the grace of Jesus.

From “Philip, the Careful Realist” in The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus by John R. Claypool, edited by Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

James the Less

Daily Reading for May 3

The other apostle named James has been referred to as “the lesser,” “the less,” or “the younger” (Mark 15:40). We don’t know as much about this disciple as we do the others, because his name is mentioned in Scripture only a few times, and each time it is part of a list. All we know besides his name is that he was the son of Alpheus. Since Matthew was also the son of a man named Alpheus, many scholars believe that Matthew and James were brothers. They were both natives of Capernaum, from the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee. We know nothing more about this particular disciple, so he is a symbol to me of all the wonderful unsung heroes and heroines whose names are forgotten in spite of their great efforts and accomplishments. . . .

James, the son of Alpheus, will always have the honor and distinction of having been chosen by Jesus to be his apostle. I like to think of him as one of those special people who have the kind of humility to do whatever they can quietly, without any need to call attention to themselves or be recognized. We all know people like this, and we usually like them for their gentle, dependable, and steadfast ways. They usually show up to help when there is a job to be done, or someone in need, without asking much in return. Thus I think of James “the less” as James “the humble,” ministering in an unassuming way, concerned only with doing God’s will whether or not he got credit or praise. The world needs people like this even more than it needs leaders.

From “James and James, the Greater and Lesser” in The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus by John R. Claypool, edited by Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

That they all may be one

Daily Reading for May 4 • The Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday After Ascension Day

The good news of God is trapped in competitive Christianity. Yes, we know we are supposed to reach out with the gospel. And surely we are meant to spread Christ’s love throughout the earth. But, there are too many steeples to keep painted. Too many church lawns to be mowed. We spend ourselves in maintenance! Let’s take a case in point. A few years ago there was a town in West Virginia—a little more than five thousand people. Yet they had twenty-seven churches there lined up in a row. So when the Presbyterian church bought a new mimeograph, every church wanted a new mimeograph. And when the Methodists picked up an opaque projector for their education program—a kind of opaque projector lust spread through the community. But, that same year, you could take a plane to New York City and drop in on a tiny church down near the Brooklyn Bridge. In four city blocks near the church there were ninety thousand unchurched people living in housing projects. Yet a denomination closed down the tiny church because it didn’t seem to be self-supporting. Why? Because we had to keep twenty-seven churches competing for the American soul somewhere in West Virginia! Free enterprise may be a swell idea when you’re selling hamburgers—fast-food stores cluster—but when it comes to serving Jesus Christ, ecclesial free-enterprise simply scuttles the gospel. So we cling to our separate steeples, and the work of God suffers.

Now mark this: We don’t seem to be able to change. We can’t seem to break out of the pattern, can we? Somehow we are locked into denominational loyalties. Maybe it’s because we have to belong. Or maybe, deeper still, our own identities are at stake. Look, we know it’s wrong. Did not Jesus Christ throw back his head on the night before the cross and pray that all his disciples be one? . . . And, yet, we aren’t. There are buildings involved and cash down and jobs at stake (every denomination has a power structure) and—well, what can you do? Some years ago a statue was on display in a Pittsburgh art gallery. It was a Crucifixion: Jesus Christ stretched on the cross. The only trouble was that he was disconnected; his arms didn’t join his shoulders or his head on his neck, and his legs were not hooked onto his torso. Jesus Christ was broken into pieces. The title of the sculpture? “Denominationalism”! Can the dividing up of Jesus Christ be anything but sin? No. Yet, we seem to be helpless. Somehow we can’t seem to let go of ourselves.

From “The Churchless Kingdom of God” by David G. Buttrick, quoted in Best Sermons 3 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

How will church unity happen?

Daily Reading for May 5

So, time to ask a question. How will church unity happen? What will it take to draw us together? Answer: Jesus Christ. . . .Our only loyalty is to Jesus Christ, who died so that something new might happen in the world. We are called to follow him all the way to the cross, willing to die as denominations for God’s future. For in God’s strange ways, new life can only come by death and resurrection. There’s a great story about the artist Rodin, who one day saw a huge, carved crucifix beside a road. He arranged to have the crucifix carted back to his house. But, unfortunately, it was too big for the building. So, of all things, he knocked out the walls, raised the roof, and rebuilt his home around the cross. The calling of the American church! How can we let go of ourselves and, renewed by Jesus Christ, rebuild ourselves into the larger Church, the one Church that dares follow Jesus Christ? Bluntly, we must be willing to die as denominations so that a new, freer, braver, united Christian word may be spoken. . . .

You wonder how church unity survives, particularly nowadays when denominations are digging in. Do you know the secret? Because church unity is clearly a part of God’s future, that’s why. And you who are here, you must be brave enough to sit loose in your traditions, not holding onto yourselves too much. For in Spirit you know we are meant to be one—one in faith, with one Lord, under one holy God. Amen.

From “The Churchless Kingdom of God” by David G. Buttrick, quoted in Best Sermons 3 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Real and eternal life

Daily Reading for May 6

When I was just out of college, I was going through a particularly rough time. I was alone in a new town, far away from home and family and friends, and trying to figure out a new job, cope with an eccentric boss, and learn a new way of life. It was a rough transition. I was starting over from scratch, building a new life. It was hard and lonely work.

One day I received a greeting card in the mail from a friend who knew that I had been down about all this. The front of the card said, “Keep looking down.”

I reacted with a smirk. I’m already looking down! That’s my problem! But then I opened the card. “Keep looking down . . . you are seated with Christ in the heavenlies.”

According to Ephesians 2:6, that’s the way Jesus looks at our lives. We’re already with him in eternity. We are living above the counterfeit and have entered into the authentic. We are beyond the temporal and temporary and fleeting, and we are living in the eternal with the one who loves us so much he died for us.

Jesus knew his death was approaching. He knew the purpose of that death: to give “real and eternal” life to those who had entered into his circle of love. You are in that circle now. It is the circle of those who know God, the one and only true God, and the Son whom he sent. It is the circle of those who are living, right now, the “real and eternal life.”

Realizing this can put your life into context. The fears, doubts, loneliness, and longings you may be feeling are not the ultimate reality. Yes, they’re real. You feel them deeply. But they are temporary. They’re not the whole story. The real and eternal life you’ve been given is happening right now.

Do you realize it? Can you see it?

From “The Eternal Now” in Living Loved: Knowing Jesus as the Lover of Your Soul by Peter Wallace. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The basis of our praying

Daily Reading for May 7

For the sake of love let us all pray
together with God’s working—
thanking,
trusting,
rejoicing,
for thus would our good Lord be prayed to
(as is the understanding that I received in all His own meaning, and in the sweet words where He says most merrily, “I am the basis of thy praying”).

Truly I saw and understood in our Lord’s meaning that He showed it because He wished to have it known more than it is,
and in this knowledge He will give us grace to love Him
and cleave to Him.

For He beholds His heavenly treasure with such great love on earth
that He wills to give us more light and solace in heavenly joy by
drawing our hearts from the sorrow and darkness
which we are in.

From A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, edited and translated for devotional use by Father John-Julian, OJN (Walker and Company, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Lord's meaning

Daily Reading for May 8 • Dame Julian of Norwich, c. 1417

From the time that it was shown, I desired frequently to know what our Lord’s meaning was. And fifteen years after (and more) I was answered in spiritual understanding, saying thus:
“Wouldst thou know thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?
Be well aware:
love was his meaning.
Who showed it thee? Love.
What showed He thee? Love.
Why did He show it thee? For love.
Keep thyself in that love and thou shalt know and see more of the same,
but thou shalt never see nor know any other thing therein without end.”

Thus was I taught that love was our Lord’s meaning.
And I saw full certainly in this and in all the showings,
that before God made us, He loved us
and this love was never slackened
nor ever shall be.

In this love He has done all His works,
and in this love He has made all things beneficial to us,
and in this love our life is everlasting.

In our creation we had a beginning,
but the love in which He created us was in Him from without beginning,
and in this love we have our beginning.

And all this we shall see in God without end,
which may Jesus grant us. Amen.

From A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, edited and translated for devotional use by Father John-Julian, OJN (Walker and Company, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The generosity of God

Daily Reading for May 9 • Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople, 389

Recognize to whom you owe the fact that you exist, that you breathe, that you understand, that you are wise, and, above all, that you know God and hope for the kingdom of heaven and the vision of glory. . . . Is it not God who asks you now in your turn to show yourself generous above all other creatures and for the sake of all other creatures? Because we have received from him so many wonderful gifts, will we not be ashamed to refuse him this one thing only, our generosity? Though he is God and Lord he is not afraid to be known as our Father. Shall we for our part repudiate those who are our kith and kin?

Friends, let us never allow ourselves to misuse what has been given us by God’s gift. If we do, we shall hear Saint Peter say: “Be ashamed of yourselves for holding on to what belongs to someone else. Resolve to imitate God’s justice, and no one will be poor.” Let us not labor to heap up and hoard riches while others remain in need. If we do, the prophet Amos will speak out against us with sharp and threatening words: “Come now, you that say: When will the new moon be over, so that we may start selling? When will Sabbath be over, so that we may start opening our treasures?”

Let us put into practice the supreme and primary law of God. He sends down rain on just and sinful alike, and causes the sun to rise on all without distinction. To all earth’s creatures he has given the broad earth, the springs, the rivers and the forests. He has given the air to the birds, and the waters to those who live in water. He has given abundantly to all the basic needs of life, not as a private possession, not restricted by law, no divided by boundaries, but as common to all, amply and in rich measure. His gifts are not deficient in any way, because he wanted to give equality of blessing to equality of worth, and to show the abundance of his generosity.

From Oration 14: On the Love of the Poor by Gregory of Nazianzus, quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Kindle fire in us

Daily Reading for May 10 • Eve of Pentecost

Christ has gathered the church in unity through the Spirit. With sure hope, let us pray:
Lord, hear our prayer.

Maker of all things, in the beginning, you created heaven and earth. In the fullness of time, you restored all things in Christ. Renew our world, in this day, with your grace and mercy.
Lord, hear our prayer.

Life of the world, you breathed life into the flesh you created. Now, by your Spirit, breathe new life into the children of earth. Turn hatred into love, sorrow into joy, and war into peace.
Lord, hear our prayer.

Lover of concord, you desire the unity of all Christians. Set aflame the whole church with the fire of your Spirit. Unite us to stand in the world as a sign of your love.
Lord, hear our prayer.

God of compassion, through your Spirit you supply every human need. Heal the sick, and comfort the distressed. Befriend the friendless, and help the helpless.
Lord, hear our prayer.

Source of peace, your Spirit restores our anxious spirits. In our labor, give us rest; in our temptation, strength; in our sadness, consolation.
Lord, hear our prayer.

After a brief silence, the leader concludes the litany:

God eternal, as you sent upon the disciples the promised gift of the Holy Spirit, look upon your church and open our hearts to the power of the Holy Spirit. Kindle in us the fire of your love, and strengthen our lives for service in your kingdom; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

“A Litany for Pentecost” from the Book of Common Worship (1993), quoted in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised and updated edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery Rowthorn with W. Alfred Tisdale. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Being Pentecostal

Daily Reading for May 11 • The Day of Pentecost

Pentecost is a noun. It is a good noun, strong and clear, confident of its identity, able to stand up in any room and say what it is. That’s what nouns are; that’s what nouns do. If you want definitions, nouns can give you definitions. Pentecost: An early harvest festival celebrated in the ancient Near East, among many peoples, including the Jews. Pentecost: An early harvest festival transformed into a celebration of the revelation of the law given at Sinai. Pentecost: The birthday of the church. Pentecost: A festival celebrated fifty days after Easter or, in Judaism, seven weeks and one day after Passover. Pentecost: The last day of the liturgical year and the beginning of ordinary time. Pentecost: The last Sunday of Easter. Pentecost is a noun: clear-eyed, level-gazed, certain of its identity.

But when you make Pentecost into an adjective, it grows anxious, nervous, and uncertain, standing first on one foot, then on the other. It wants to be a good adjective, as it runs around looking for a noun to modify, but doesn’t know which nouns and doesn’t know what we are talking about. The adjective is “Pentecostal.” We don’t admit we don’t know; we use the word and assume we know. . . . In spite of the fact that the church doesn’t know what the adjective means, the church insists that the word remain in our vocabulary as an adjective. The church is unwilling for the word simply to be a noun, to represent a date, a place, an event in the history of the church, refuses for it to be simply a memory, an item, something back there somewhere. The church insists the word is an adjective; it describes the church. . . . In the renewal of its life and witness, especially in times of faltering evangelism, the church seeks to reclaim, to recover that quality, perhaps reading, praying, asking, thinking, reflecting again on Pentecost. Perhaps that day will not be just a memory, but also a hope, something that will occur again.

From “On Being Pentecostal” by Fred B. Craddock, quoted in Best Sermons 1 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Liturgy as proclamation

Daily Reading for May 12 • The First Book of Common Prayer

The book of 1549 was a tremendous achievement and has earned for Thomas Cranmer, who as far as we know produced it almost single-handed, a place in the first rank of the liturgists of Christendom. In view of its excellence, it is astonishing that it was used in English churches for only three years. Yet when one considers what a moderate and irenic production it was, intended to reconcile opposing points of view so that all England could worship as a united body of Christians, it is not so surprising that it should finally have pleased no one—as so often happens with compromises. In any case it was withdrawn under pressure in 1552 and another book substituted for it. . . .

What we need to observe now is the fact that no liturgical production is perfect, nor will it satisfy the needs of the church forever. Not only did the book of 1549 not go as far in a Protestant direction as the ruling powers desired, but it also had other liabilities that later generations have discovered. Some of these it passed on to its successors.

In some cases its work of removing the accretions of generations did not go far enough. The service of baptism is a good example. In some cases, the book went too far and eliminated valuable liturgical material that has only gradually been recovered. The special services for Holy Week are an example. . . .

Even with these faults, the English Book of Common Prayer and its counterparts in many countries around the world have been an unusually effective means for proclaiming the Gospel. Gospel is good news, and news can be spread only by telling other people about it. It cannot be figured out like a puzzle or dredged out of our subconscious minds by meditation or analysis. . . .The effectiveness of the Book of Common Prayer in proclaiming what God has done for us in Christ is connected in the first place to its intelligibility. When the acts of God are told in a strange tongue, they can hardly be appropriated. . . .From one end of the Prayer Book to the other, in Daily Office, Eucharist, Pastoral Offices, and Ordinal, the English liturgy has vividly proclaimed the great deliverance God has brought to us through his people Israel, and most of all, though his Son, Jesus Christ.

From Liturgy for Living, revised edition, by Charles P. Price and Louis Weil. Copyright © 1979, 2000. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Opening day

Daily Reading for May 13

To understand Luke’s Pentecost it is necessary to understand that the gospel doesn’t just go to the ends of the earth; the ends of the earth are present from the very first day. There is no secondhand, third-hand or fourth-hand faith. There is no church or nation that can say, “It belonged to us and now we are going to give it to you through our benevolence, evangelism, and mission work.” No, No, No! Our listeners rise up and say, “We were there that same opening day you were there.” For any church that would be Pentecostal, Pentecost removes all ground for any sense of triumphalism, for that ugly sense of arrogance and superiority that takes over the church sometimes simply because we get the notion that the salvation of other people in the world depends upon our behavior. Luke says it started in all the world at the same time. . . .

Luke’s word for us is simply this: “Do you want to be Pentecostal in a good, healthy, lively, renewing sense? Do you want the church to be Pentecostal? Then spend some thoughtful, careful, prayerful, listening time—listening to the listeners, in their concrete, historical circumstances.” And if we listen to the listeners, carefully, prayerfully, thoughtfully, then we will notice, and will stand among them and say, “I think I speak for every person here, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Europeans, Asians, Americans, Chinese, Africans, South Americans . . . I think I speak for every person here when I ask, “Show us God and we’ll be satisfied.”

From “On Being Pentecostal” by Fred B. Craddock, quoted in Best Sermons 1 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Breathing together

Daily Reading for May 14

Did you know the word “conspire” means to breathe together? Take a breath. Now blow it out again. There! You have just launched a conspiracy. You can hear the word “spirit” in there too—to conspire—to be filled with the same spirit, to be enlivened by the same wind. That is why the word appeals to me, anyhow. What happens between us when we come together to worship God is that the Holy Spirit swoops in and out among us, knitting us together through the songs we sing, the prayers we pray, the breaths we breathe. It can happen with two people and it can happen with two thousand people. It can scare us or comfort us, confuse us or clarify things for us, but as far as I can tell the Holy Spirit never bullies us. We are always free to choose whether or how we will respond. . . .

In the book of Acts, we learn the good news of what God did through the Holy Spirit, by performing artificial resuscitation on a room full of well-intentioned bumblers and turning them into a force that changed the history of the world. The question for me is whether we still believe in a God who acts like that. Do we still believe in a God who blows through closed doors and sets our heads on fire? Do we still believe in a God with power to transform us, both as individuals and as a people, or have we come to an unspoken agreement that our God is pretty old and tired by now, someone to whom we may address our prayer requests but not anyone we really expect to change our lives?

From “The Gospel of the Holy Spirit” in Home By Another Way by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Holy Spirit prayer

Daily Reading for May 15

Of all the persons of the Trinity, I suppose the Holy Spirit is the hardest to define. Most of us can at least begin to describe the other two: God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, who makes the sun shine and the rain fall. God the Son, who was human like us: our savior, teacher, helper, and friend. But how would you describe God the Holy Spirit to a five-year-old child? Even Jesus had a hard time with that one. “The Spirit blows where it chooses,” he said in John’s gospel, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (3:8).

There is some very fine teaching available on the Holy Spirit, and I hope none of you is satisfied with it. I hope none of you rests until you have felt the Holy Spirit blow through your own life, rearranging things, opening things up and maybe even setting your own head on fire. There is nothing you can do to make it happen, as far as I know, except to pray “Come, Holy Spirit” every chance you get. If you don’t want anything to change in your life, then for heaven’s sake don’t pray that, but if you are the type of person who likes to stand out on the porch when there is a storm moving through so you can feel the power that is pushing the trees around, then you are probably a good candidate for the Holy Spirit prayer.

From “The Gospel of the Holy Spirit” in Home By Another Way by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Looking forward

Daily Reading for May 16

Luke has a great sense of symmetry, and his traditions are organized in orderly patterns of time and space. The ministry of Jesus began with the descending of the Spirit, and so Jesus progresses from the provinces to the city of Jerusalem. Now the life of the church begins in Jerusalem, in the Temple, with the descending of the Spirit on the disciples, and in the power of that Spirit they will bear witness in words and actions and through martyrdom far beyond the lands traversed by Jesus. The Book of Acts itself brings the witness all the way to Rome, the capital of the world that Luke knew.

Now the Spirit is the energy and the guide engineering the life and expansion of the church in the world of the Jewish diaspora and through it to the Gentile world. . . .The Acts of the Apostles could just as well, or even better, be called “the Acts of the Holy Spirit,” and there are indeed few chapters in the book without specific references to such acts. . . . It is striking that the followers of Jesus did not dream themselves back to the time when he had walked with them and talked with them. It is astonishing how small a role the words of Jesus, which were later made part of our Gospels, play in the early Christian writings, the letters of Paul and of others, and even in Luke’s account of the first decades of the church. . . .They did not look back in nostalgia. They looked forward and they lived powerfully in the now of the Holy Spirit. One really feels the truth of Jesus’ words of farewell in the Gospel of John: . . . “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, it will guide you into all truth.”

Thus, when we pray: Come, Holy Spirit, our prayer is well in keeping with the mode and mood of faith which was tried and tested as the church began to understand itself, its promises, and its identity.

From “Come, Holy Spirit—Renew the Whole Creation” by Krister Stendahl, in The Best Christian Writing 2000, John Wilson, series editor (Harper SanFrancisco, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Paraclete

Daily Reading for May 17

The work of the Spirit, [according to John’s gospel,] is to teach, witness, convince, guide into truth, and declare what is to come, and every part of this ministry is derived from, and in turn points to, the historic mission and teaching of Jesus. Four times the Spirit is named as the Paraclete, and in the first of these instances he is called ‘another Paraclete’. Jesus, it is implied, has been the first Paraclete; now, with the departure of Jesus, the second Paraclete will be sent. We need to ask what the word means. . . .

The usual meaning of parakletos outside the New Testament is ‘one called to help’—the pleader, the legal assistant, the advocate in a court of law. There is much in the discourse which suggests this sense; the work of the Paraclete includes convicting the world, and witnessing to the truth. But it is also relevant that the verb parakalein and the noun paraklesis are used of Christians preaching (cf. Acts 2.40), and this may give to the word Paraclete a nuance reaching beyond the legal sense. So, too, in the Greek Bible, both the verb and the noun are used of the divine consolation expected in the messianic age, and this justifies the rendering ‘Comforter’. It is, then, both as Advocate and as Comforter that the Spirit will aid the disciples.

From Holy Spirit: A Biblical Study by Michael Ramsey (Cowley Publications, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Three in one

Daily Reading for May 18 • Trinity Sunday

The feast of the Holy Trinity is unique to the Anglican communion. Originating in Spain in the early Middle Ages, spreading through the Gallican church in France, it survived only in England. This festival of the triune God is dedicated not to the commemoration of an event such as Christmas and Easter, nor to a person such as a saint, but to a theological doctrine. Following the festival of the Holy Spirit, Trinity Sunday is logically dedicated to the task of pulling together the total experience of the Christian with the God whom he worships and adores.

There are many difficulties involved in the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. The arguments of the Church fathers of Nicea as to how one almighty God could be divided into three separate and distinct persons and yet retain his oneness seems sadly irrelevant to the unphilosophical mind. It is inconceivable to us that fellow Christians could have fought so bitterly over the precise meanings of the word, and then come up with the seeming contradictions of three in one and one in three. . . .

Whether this Holy Spirit, this God within, proceeds from the Father or the Son is relatively unimportant. For me this God who, at times, moves me to deep awe and wonder at the power and beauty of creation, speaks to my human need through Jesus Christ, or brings me suddenly to life, seemingly from within my own mind and soul or in a worshiping group of which I am a part, is one God, known in various ways, experienced in differing situations. For purposes of clarification of my thinking or description of my experience, it is useful to call him Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But he is the same no matter how I try to describe him. He is a great God—too great for any human mind to explain or classify completely. But he is not too great to worship and adore as Lord and giver of life. This is the heart of Christian faith, the cause of our devotion, and the goal of all our striving.

From “Three In One—One In Three” in Go Into the City: Sermons for a Strenuous Age by John Compton Leffler (Madrona Publishers, 1986).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Dunstan's prayer

Daily Reading for May 19 • Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 988

O Lord; O King, resplendent on the citadel of heaven,
all hail continually;
and of your clemency upon your people still have mercy.

Lord, whom the hosts of cherubim in songs and hymns
with praise continually proclaim,
upon us eternally have mercy.

The armies aloft, O Lord, sing high praise to you;
those to whom the seraphim reply, ‘have mercy.’

O Christ, enthroned as king above,
whom the nine orders of angels in their beauty praise without ceasing,
upon us, your servants, ever have mercy.

O Christ, hymned by your one and only church throughout the world,
to whom the sun, and moon, and stars, the land and sea,
ever do service, have mercy.

O Christ, those holy ones, the heirs of the eternal country,
one and all with utter joy proclaim you in a most worthy strain:
have mercy upon us.

O Lord, O gentle son of Mary free;
O King of kings, blessed redeemer;
upon those who have been ransomed from the power of death,
by your own blood, ever have mercy.

O nobles unbegotten, yet begotten Son, having no beginning,
yet without effort (in the weakness of God) excelling all things,
upon this your people in your pity, Lord have mercy.

O sun of righteousness, in all unclouded glory,
supreme dispenser of justice,
in that great day when you strictly judge all nations,
we earnestly beseech you, upon this your people,
who here stand before your presence,
in your pity, Lord, then have mercy on us.

A prayer of Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury and Archbishop of Canterbury, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The scholarly deacon

Daily Reading for May 20 • Alcuin, Deacon, and Abbot of Tours, 804

Charlemagne invited a number of scholars to come to the court to assist him, most notably Alcuin, the celebrated deacon of York. . . .The prayers of the Carolingian period bore a personal and devotional character. Several good examples of prayer books (libelli precum--small booklets of prayer) have survived. It has long been held that Alcuin was the compiler of libelli such as these. While questions of authority and textual originality are far from settled, the choice of texts and their compilation prove especially revelatory of the spirituality of the early Middle Ages and serve to delineate the boundaries of the penitential and confessional discipline of this period. Far from being original, the libelli are rather evidence of prayer collections that had been fairly well circulated. The books are punctuated by prayers of Irish and Anglo-Saxon origin, called confessions, along with many other penitential prayers. Furthermore, these booklets, which were compiled principally in the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon lands, are patterned after the monastic psalter. Most of the prayers that are of devotional nature seem to have been intended for private use, a characteristic typical of Irish spirituality at this time. . . .

One feature of the Celtic prayers is the confession of sins. The sinner enumerates all the parts of the body as though each part has been guilty of perpetrating sin. . . .The confession attributed to the pen of Alcuin is of an equivalent length to the Irish examples and contains the typical anatomical list. However, this list is in reverse order, beginning with the feet and terminating with the head. Composed for Charlemagne, this prayer demonstrates the Celtic influence on the deacon from York. The way in which sins are spoken of is very dynamic: the feet are slow to obey the commandments of the Lord, the knees bend more in fornication than in prayer, and the stomach swells with gluttony and drunkenness. . . .Contrasted with the Roman style of prayer, these texts are marked by affective exuberance, a trait characteristic of Irish devotion.

From “The Conversion of the Nations” by Michael S. Driscoll, in The Oxford History of Christian Worship, edited by Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker (Oxford, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prayers of Alcuin

Daily Reading for May 21

Christ, why do you allow wars and massacres on earth? By what mysterious judgement do you allow innocent people to be cruelly slaughtered? I cannot know. I can only find assurance in the promise that your people will find peace in heaven, where no one makes war. As gold is purified by fire, so you purify souls by these bodily tribulations, making them ready to be received above the stars in your heavenly home.

Dear God, here on earth you are constantly seeking to change us. At times we wish to flee into the wilderness to avoid you. But let us learn to love the lasting things of heaven, rather than the dying things of earth. We must accept that time always brings change; and we pray that by your grace the change within our souls will make us worthy of your heavenly kingdom, where all time will cease.

Good Jesus, you have deigned to refresh our souls with the sweet stream of knowledge; grant that one day we may come to you, its source and spring.

Prayers of Alcuin of York, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Taking our time

Daily Reading for May 22

Ordinary Time [the Seasons after Epiphany and Pentecost] is the time of the Church, of the daily life of every Christian community, and of each one of us. It is the time not of a brief effort during which one hurries or even runs in order to progress on the way, but the time when one goes at a measured pace in order to cover a long distance.

As a rule, it is not the time for great conversations, for decisive choices made at one time or another in one's life. But it is the time for a painstaking, though at times wavering, faithfulness; the time for an obscure faith that sustains daily life; the time for a self-effacing hope that holds us steadfast and keeps us from stopping at the first difficulty; the time for charity writ small.

To be sure, this is not the time when we can overcome large obstacles in one leap. But this is the time when progress is made in spite of the rocks or holes along the way. This is the time for unceasingly announcing and preaching the gospel, not with raised voices, but in season and out of season. This is the time that allows for the slow germination of God's Word, the cultivating of the vine, the regular treatments that prevent and cure diseases, the fertilizing repeated whenever rain or storm have compromised the preceding application. This is the time for lamps to be replenished with oil; for the daily bread, sometimes stale but nonetheless nourishing; for the simple glass of water that quenches thirst. This is the time when one draws new and old from the treasury of the Church and of God's Word. This is the time of regular prayer, of assiduous attention to the apostles’ teaching, and to the breaking of the bread dispensed by the Church, Sunday in and Sunday out.

Ordinary Time is the opportunity for us to take our time without wasting it.

From Days of the Lord: The Liturgical Year, Volume 4, Ordinary Time, Year A (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Dance of the Trinity

Daily Reading for May 23

In one of the apocryphal Christian books, the Acts of St. John, we learn that after the Last Supper our Lord, Jesus Christ, came down from the table and danced a sacred round with his twelve disciples and ‘Having danced these things with us, the Lord went forth. And we, as though beside ourselves, or wakened out of deep sleep, fled our separate ways.’ The second council of Nicaea attacked and condemned the Acts of St. John. At the time of the council, the dance round, the Hymn of Jesus with words sung by Christ, was widely believed to be a ritual of imitation with Christ as the mystagogue or teacher of the mysteries.

Why did the early Church Fathers suppress the apocryphal Acts of St. John? Sacred dance and holy liturgy involves us bodily, emotionally and intellectually, for through the dance of the liturgy my own person and the group are brought into an expected relationship. Even though it may be conceived and born from group and self, that relationship is a new thing with a life of its own, and in turn renews all three . . . the threefold dance of creation and of the Holy Trinity. . . . When we dance, when we celebrate, we are writing our theology with our hands and feet and voices, into our bodies.

The danced hymn of praise signifies the fulfilment of the Lord’s Supper. The inward dynamic consists in the offering of praise with Christ standing in the centre and the twelve apostles moving around him in a circle. Here the disciples are united with their Master in the mystery of at-one-ment. Sounding through the dance is the voice of Christ and this voice as the original sound at the beginning and end of creation, is there imparting the essence of its mystery through the dance.

In the early Church it was held that angels were always present during the celebration of the Eucharist. They participated with Christ in the performance of the sacred mystery. Christian art has, throughout the centuries, amply illustrated this notion of the singing and dancing angels. Early Fathers of the Church often commented on the dance as a means of worship and of linking the faithful to the angels and blessed souls in Paradise:

“Could there be anything more blessed than to imitate on earth the ring-dance of the angels, and at dawn to raise our voices in prayer and by hymns and songs to glorify the rising creator?” (St. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, fourth century)

From Lord of Creation: A Resource for Creative Celtic Spirituality by Brendan O’Malley. Copyright © 2005, 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Ride like a cowboy, pray like a saint

Daily Reading for May 24 • Jackson Kemper, First Missionary Bishop in the United States, 1870

Jackson Kemper’s ministry is tied up with the organization called the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, which in turn is tied up with the story of Episcopal expansion in areas west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. As early as 1792, the General Convention considered a proposal to send Episcopal missionaries to the frontiers of the United States. From 1796 on, the individual dioceses formed missionary societies. Though the General Convention had asked them to send missionaries west, the societies, with very few exceptions, limited their work to the boundaries of their own states. . . .

In 1835, using the New Testament for its model, the General Convention decided that missions should not be a subsidiary committee but rather a responsibility of the entire church. . . . Changing missions into a church-wide responsibility was the first innovation of 1835. A second was the General Convention’s decision to create missionary districts in those new areas of America and to send missionary bishops to them even before any Episcopal work had been started. The model for the new plan was that of the New Testament apostle.

A forty-five-year-old graduate of Columbia and a high churchman, Kemper was the first missionary bishop sent west. . . . Kemper had responsibility for the areas that are now Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. . . . After the first tour of his district, Kemper reported that he could immediately employ one hundred clergy; seven years later, he had been able to secure only thirty-one. By 1840 the Baptists had almost as many clergy at work in Missouri as the Episcopal Church had in all states and territories west of the Alleghenies combined.

The shortage of clergy stemmed from more than lack of funding. Most Episcopal clergy came from reasonably comfortable backgrounds; the frontier mission had relatively little appeal. Missionaries who went west could anticipate low salaries, isolation, danger, substantially lowered lifestyles, and unremitting work. . . .In a memorable but rather archaic wording, Bishop Alexander Garrett of North Texas said that he needed clergy who could “ride like a cow-boy, pray like a saint, preach like an apostle, and having food and raiment be therewith content.”

From A Brief History of the Episcopal Church by David L. Holmes (Trinity Press International, 1993).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Consider the monkeys

Daily Reading for May 25 • The Second Sunday after Pentecost

How do you prepare yourself to write the Declaration of Independence? On what was Thomas Jefferson nourishing his mind and soul? His account books reveal that on May 24 Jefferson paid someone named Hillegas twenty-seven shillings for fiddle strings. May 27, Jefferson spent “one and seven” for toys. May 28, he gave two shillings for a doll. The ledgers further show that, during the remainder of that momentous session of the Continental Congress, Jefferson also bought fishing tackle, a pair of boots, a hat, and guitar strings. . . .Apparently Thomas Jefferson solved this creative crisis when on that same pregnant day he shelled out—this is the item I love—“one shilling for seeing a monkey.”

We’ve got a revolution on our hands, a cataclysmic international upheaval, erupting hopes and dreams of freedom, and Thomas Jefferson is off looking at a monkey. . . .Who says that frivolity isn’t part of God’s creative design? The Puritans, those promulgators of the “Protestant work ethic,” said it wasn’t. But Jefferson wasn’t buying that, and the balance seems to tip in his favor. How logical is it to assume that inspiration—the operation of God’s creative Spirit—is bound by our conceptions of “logic”? The wisest people know how to press beyond such limited thinking. Creativity follows its own logic. . . .

Now consider Jesus, who taught his disciples to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air (Matt. 6:26-28). . . . Maybe part of salvation is looking at lilies, not for any particular purpose or use, but just because God put lilies here for looking at. And to look at the lilies is to salute God and to acknowledge the work of God’s hands, and somehow that salutation, that acceptance of God’s grace, is part of our salvation. . . .

The danger is that people who will not pay “one shilling for seeing a monkey” eventually pay by getting monkeys on their backs. People who won’t look at lilies develop tunnel vision. People who won’t gaze at the birds of the air grow blind to God’s gifts of grace. And people who haven’t time or heart to hug little children can’t be trusted to hold anything. . . .

It’s possible that taking time out for opening to grace may produce better results than banging your head against a wall. It’s possible that lilies and birds may charm away the boulder that blocks your brain. After all, God did not design this world to be a penitentiary but a paradise, and God created it all for you as well as for every other creature. Consider the lilies—and don’t miss the monkeys.

From “Consider the Monkeys” by Robert John Versteeg, quoted in Best Sermons 4 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1991).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Common security

Daily Reading for May 26 • Memorial Day

Said de Tocqueville, “America is great because America is good. If she ceases to be good, she ceases to be great.” With less power, we Americans will be better able to be good, both to ourselves and to others. I have great confidence in America. We are still a young country, with lots of raw energy. We’re a country of immigrants, whose sons and daughters still harbor a love for the impossible task. Yet we must change the national imagination, shed our self-righteousness, rid ourselves of our macho love of weapons inherited from our macho frontier past. It is time now to honor the countless Americans who have died in wars they shouldn’t have been asked to fight, wars that might have been avoided, settled by negotiations—honor them by putting an end to the vainglory, the blunderings, and the carnage that cost them their lives.

American churches can contribute enormously by seeing how pathologically dysfunctional war is rapidly becoming. Let them affirm the psalmist’s contention that “the war horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (33:17). Churches have a special obligation to point out that “God’n’country” is not one word, and to summon America to a higher vision of its meaning and destiny.

Churches all over the world must see to it that nonviolence becomes a strategy not only for individuals and groups, but one taught to governments. If arms reductions are to become more likely and wars less so, then new measures have to be devised for conflict resolution. . . . Mediation must become the order of the day. Every nation should abandon its claim to be a judge in its own cause. Nations must learn to listen to one another, to affirm the valid interests of adversaries, to cease judgmental propaganda, to heed international law. We must replace the concept of national security with that of common security, an understanding that the security of countries cannot be imagined separately, for none is really secure until all are secure.

From “Beyond War” in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches by William Sloane Coffin (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Augustine of Canterbury

Daily Reading for May 27 • Augustine, First Archbishop of Canterbury, 605 (transferred)

Reassured by the encouragement of the blessed father Gregory, Augustine and his fellow-servants of Christ resumed their work in the word of God, and arrived in Britain. At this time the most powerful king there was Ethelbert, who reigned in Kent. . . .To the east of Kent lies the large island of Thanet. . . .It was here that God’s servant Augustine landed with companions, who are said to have been forty in number. At the direction of blessed Pope Gregory, they had brought interpreters from among the Franks, and they sent these to Ethelbert, saying that they came from Rome bearing very glad news, which infallibly assured all who would receive it of eternal joy in heaven and an everlasting kingdom with the living and true God. . . .After some days, the king came to the island and, sitting down in the open air, summoned Augustine and his companions to an audience. . . .When, at the king’s command, they had sat down and preached the word of life to the king and his court, the king said: ‘Your words and promises are fair indeed; but they are new and uncertain, and I cannot accept them and abandon the age-old beliefs that I have held together with the whole English nation. But since you have traveled far, and I can see that you are sincere in your desire to impart to us what you believe to be true and excellent, we will not harm you. We will receive you hospitably and take care to supply you with all that you need; nor will we forbid you to preach and win any people you can to your religion.’ The king then granted them a dwelling in the city of Canterbury, which was the chief city of all his realm, and in accordance with his promise he allowed them provisions and did not withdraw their freedom to preach. . . .

As soon as they had occupied the house given to them they began to emulate the life of the apostles and the primitive Church. They were constantly at prayer; they fasted and kept vigils; they preached the word of life to whomsoever they could. They regarded worldly things as of little importance, and accepted only the necessities of life from those they taught. They practiced what they preached, and were willing to endure any hardship, and even to die for the truth which they proclaimed. Before long a number of heathen, admiring the simplicity of their holy lives and the comfort of their heavenly message, believed and were baptized. On the east side of the cit stood an old church, built in honour of Saint Martin during the Roman occupation of Britain. . . .Here they first assembled to sing the psalms, to pray, to say Mass, to preach, and to baptize, until the king’s own conversion to the Faith gave them greater freedom to preach and to build and restore churches everywhere.

From A History of the English Church and People by Bede, translated by Leo Sherley-Price (Penguin Books, 1968).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A divided heart

Daily Reading for May 28

Teilhard de Chardin outlines the dangers of a divided heart and mind if we do not love God and the world aright. He suggests that most Christians are in danger of becoming ‘distorted, disgusted, or divided’. We become distorted when we deny our taste for the tangible world and make ourselves purely religious objects. To do this we need to banish so much of the beauty and splendour that is about us. In denying our natural love for the world we distort the truth about ourselves and our God. The disgusted decide that the world is too wonderful to deny and they turn their backs on God, like the man who went away sorrowing because he had too many riches. They seek to live thoroughly human lives without recourse to any higher being. Yet they know in themselves that there is more to this world and in themselves than they are acknowledging. To deny all mystery and wonder is to diminish ourselves and our horizons. The third group is the most common and that is the divided. They give up any attempt of making sense of the situation; they never belong wholly to God or wholly to things. Such people often live by double standards and are seen as insincere.

We can all experience this division in ourselves at times. There are many times in our lives when we are not wholly there, when we are not giving our attention or ourselves. To travel in body but not in spirit is to be a tourist but not a pilgrim. Yet even a tourist needs to be there; Annie Dillard says, ‘Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there’.

From The Road of Life: Reflections on Searching and Longing by David Adam. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Created for love

Daily Reading for May 29

God freely created us so that we might know, love and serve him in this life and be happy with him for ever. God’s purpose in creating us is to draw forth from us a response of love and service here on earth, so that we may obtain our goal of everlasting happiness with him in heaven.

All things in this world are gifts of God, created for us, to be the means by which we can come to know him better, love him more surely and serve him more faithfully.

As a result, we ought to appreciate and use these gifts of God insofar as they help us towards our goal of loving service and union with God. But insofar as any created things hinder our progress toward our goal, we ought to let them go.

From The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (The Institute of Jesus Sources, 1978).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

What is enough?

Daily Reading for May 30

Merely being satisfied with what we already have is not sufficient; we also have to confront our desire to have more things and more money. We have to “decide what is enough and then stick to it in order to save our very souls.”

This is far from easy. Right now I am looking out my back door at the place where I would really like to have a deck. It is close to the kitchen, and I can foresee easy, lazy summer meals under the trees. We do not need the deck—we have other places to sit outside—but I have been thinking about it for years. Every time I get ready to call the carpenter, however, I hold back. I cannot feel good about spending $5,000 on something we do not really need. I know I would feel even better if I would just make a decision to forget the deck and send the money to support Habitat for Humanity in Guatemala or Judith’s weavers in Mexico. I am also a little angry with myself for getting stuck on something so frivolous when I know that such a question is pure luxury in a world of want. While we try to be responsible with our funds and carefully think through what we want to give away and to whom, we probably do not give away nearly enough and we have certain blind spots. And, to be honest, we tend to console ourselves with what we do give away and ignore some of the nagging issues. Like the deck.

Nonetheless, I know that if I am going to maintain a vibrant faith, hard questions about money have to be asked and answered. If you are like me, perhaps you will join me in asking a few hard questions such as these:

How much money is enough? How much do I really need to keep for myself and my family?

What addictions does my money feed, such as spending, shopping, the appearance of success, luxury, power, control?

Where does my money come from? Do I benefit from systems that oppress others? What kinds of seeds are my investments growing in the world?

How does my faith direct the use of my money? What people, causes, movements, programs, political candidates would I like my money to support?

What messages do I want to give to my children and grandchildren about my use of money?

Do our children really need the money we want to give them? Are there others who need it more?

How can we open up a conversation about money with members of our families, our communities, and our churches?

How much is left over after we have done our giving? How can we live on less and give more and still live in this culture?

We cannot brush off these questions. If we have been educated beyond high school, if we have jobs, insurance, and retirement packages, if we own our own home or can comfortably afford a rental, we are wealthy. Most of you are probably not millionaires but are more like me, worrying about whether or not to build the deck in the back of the house. Wherever we are on the continuum between “getting by” and wealthy, the answers we give to questions of wealth and the actions that flow from them might just, as Pierce suggests, save our very souls.

From Your Daily Life is Your Temple by Anne Rowthorn. Copyright © 2006. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Magnificat

Daily Reading for May 31 • The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

At first I had no idea where the lovely Magnificat we sang every night was from: “My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior” (Luke 1:46). When I eventually found it in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, I was startled but glad to see that it was one pregnant woman’s response to a blessing from another. It is the song Mary sings after she has walked to her cousin Elizabeth’s village, and on greeting Mary, Elizabeth, who is bearing John the Baptist, recognizes that Mary bears the Messiah. . . .

The Magnificat’s message is so subversive that for a period during the 1980s the government of Guatemala banned its public recitation (a sanction that I’m sure the monasteries in that country violated daily). But when I came to its words knowing so little about them, I found that all too often they were words I could sing with ease at evening prayer, with a facile (and sometimes sleepy) acceptance. On other nights, however, they were a mother’s words, probing uncomfortably into my life. How rich had I been that day, how full of myself? Too full to recognize need and hunger, my own or anyone else’s? So powerfully providing for myself that I couldn’t admit my need for the help of others? Too busy to know a blessing when it came to me?

From “Virgin Mary, Mother of God” in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on May 31, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

I never knew you

Daily Reading for June 1 • The Third Sunday after Pentecost

“I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers” (Matthew 7:23). The New Testament contains many descriptions of the last judgment like this one: Be on the right side, they all say, or at the end of time Jesus will not choose you. It will be like those terrible, unforgettable moments in elementary school then, when you were last to be chosen to be on a team. So that’s what it’ll be like, then: It’s a competition in the afterlife, just as it is here on the earth.

We were hoping for something different.

And I think what we have is something different. That the people writing the many different books and letters that comprise these earliest documents of our faith were preoccupied with the end of the world is clear. They thought it was imminent, a matter of months, a year or two at the most. . . . They wrote out of who they were. Who they were was competitive and afraid of being wrong, defensive of their territory and their ways, anxious about being overrun by other cultures. In short, they were rather like us. They imagined that God was probably like that, too: territorial, anxious, defensive. We imagine that, as well.

But God is very different from us. We don’t get very far at all in our project of imagining God. Mostly, we try to stay in touch: to be still and hear the voice of God, always aware that we tend to mistake other voices for his. I never knew you, a gatekeeper Jesus says at the end of time, in the imagination of a New Testament writer. But he does know us. Better than we know ourselves.

From Let Us Bless the Lord, Year One: Meditations on the Daily Office, Vol. 1, Advent through Holy Week by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

On prayer

Daily Reading for June 2 • The Martyrs of Lyons, 177

Prayer is the spiritual offering which has abolished the ancient sacrifices. . . . We learn from the gospel what God has asked for. ‘The hour will come,’ we are told, ‘when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. God is spirit, and so this is the kind of worshipper he wants.’ We are the true worshippers and the true priests: praying in spirit, we make our sacrifice of prayer in spirit, an offering which is God’s own and acceptable to him. . . . What will God deny to a prayer which proceeds from spirit and truth, seeing it is he who demands it?

How great are the proofs of its efficacy which we read and hear and believe. . . . It has no special grace to avert the experience of suffering, but it arms with endurance those who do suffer, who grieve, who are pained. It makes grace multiply in power, so that faith may know what it obtains from the Lord, while it understands what for God’s name’s sake it is suffering. . . .

It was Christ’s wish for it to work no evil: he has conferred upon it all power concerning good. And so its only knowledge is how to call back the souls of the deceased from the very highway of death, to straighten the feeble, to heal the sick, to cleanse the devil-possessed, to open the bars of the prison, to loose the bands of the innocent. It also absolves sins, drives back temptations, quenches persecutions, strengthens the weak-hearted, delights the high-minded, brings home wayfarers, stills the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, rules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports the unstable, upholds them that stand.

From On Prayer by Tertullian of Carthage (c. 160-c. 220).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Choosing faith

Daily Reading for June 3 • The Martyrs of Uganda

On Nov. 15 1885, Mukasa became the first Catholic martyr, when he was beheaded at Nakivubo. Between December of 1885 and May of 1886 many more converts were wantonly murdered. Mwanga precipitated a showdown in May by ordering the converts to choose between their new faith, and complete obedience to his orders. Those unwilling to renounce their new faith would be subject to death. Courageously, the neophytes chose their faith. The execution of twenty-six Christians at Namugongo on June 3, 1886 was the climax of the campaign against the converts. The last person killed in this crusade was Jean-Marie Muzeeyi, who was beheaded at Mengo on Jan 27, 1887. The list of forty-five known Catholic and Protestant martyrs includes only those who could be formally accounted for; many more murders went unreported and without a record.

In his efforts to curb the Christian influence and try to regain the traditional and customary powers and authorities over his subjects, Mwanga was adding more chaos to an already chaotic situation. In the north Kabarega (the king of Bunyoro Kitara, a traditional arch enemy of Buganda) was raging, . . . Further south it was reported that the Germans were annexing territories in the regions of the present Tanzania, and Mwanga was caught in a threatening position. His suspicion of the missionaries was therefore real. Buganda also was experiencing internal strife; the Moslems were plotting to overthrow him and replace him with a Moslem prince. The political upheavals combined with religious instability constrained the country’s moral stamina. The kingdom was thrown into turmoil; Moslems fighting Christians, traditionalists plotting against all creeds, untimely alliances concocted to survive against a common foe and later unceremoniously discarded. The kingdom broke into civil strife, during which Mwanga was briefly deposed, although he was able to regain his throne later.

Rather than deter the growth of Christianity, the martyrdom of these early believers seems to have sparked its growth instead. As has been observed in many other instances, the blood of the martyrs proved to be the seed of faith. Christianity (in its various flavours) is now the dominant faith in Buganda and Uganda as a whole.

From “The Christian Martyrs of Uganda” at http://www.buganda.com/martyrs.htm.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A prayer of St. Francis

Daily Reading for June 4

You alone are holy, Lord God, you do wonderful things.
You are strong. You are great. You are the Most High.
You are the almighty King, the holy Father, King of heaven and earth.
You are Trinity and Unity, O Lord God, all goodness.
You are good, all good, the supreme good,
Lord God, living and true.
You are charity and love. You are wisdom.
You are humility. You are patience.
You are serenity. You are peace.
You are joy and gladness. You are justice and self-restraint.
You are our wealth, our treasure, and our satisfaction.
You are beauty. You are mercy.
You are our protector. You are our guardian and defender.
You are strength. You are refreshment.
You are our hope. You are our trust.
You are our delight. You are eternal life,
Great and wondrous Lord,
Almighty God,
Merciful Saviour.

From St. Francis’s blessing of Brother Leo, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A letter from Boniface

Daily Reading for June 5 • Boniface, Archbishop of Mainz, 754

To his friend in loving embrace, to his brother in the bonds of the Spirit, to Archbishop Egbert, invested with the insignia of the highest office, many greetings and unfailing love in Christ, from Bonifice, a lowly bishop, legate in Germany of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The gifts and books you have sent us have been received with a joyful and grateful heart. With hands upraised to heaven we beseech the Supreme Majesty to repay you with an ample reward amongst the angels in heaven. But now we beg Your Holiness with earnest prayer that in your kindness and affection you would deign to pray for us in our struggles and trials. The great burden that weighs upon us compels us to seek the help of good men, as it is written: “The earnest prayer of the just man availeth much.” The brevity of this letter, however, prevents us from telling you all the ills we suffer both within and without.

For the present, we beg you from the bottom of our hearts to comfort us in our sorrow, as you have done before, by sending us a spark from that light of the Church which the Holy Spirit has kindled in your land; in other words, be so kind as to send us some of the works which Bede, the inspired priest and student of Sacred Scripture, has composed—in particular, if it can be done, his book of homilies for the year (because it would be a very handy and useful manual for us in our preaching), and the Proverbs of Solomon. We hear that he has written commentaries on this book.

In the meantime, we are greatly in need of your advice and counsel. When I find a priest who in the past has fallen into sin and has been restored to his office by the Franks after due penance, and now lives in a district where there are no other priests and continues to administer Baptism and celebrate Mass for a population which, though Christian, is prone to error, what should I do? If I relieve him of his post, acting on the established canons, then owing to the scarcity of priests, children will die without the sacred water of rebirth until I can find some better man to replace him.

Judge therefore between me and the living people. Is it better, or at least a lesser evil, to allow such a man to perform his sacred functions at the altar, or to leave the bulk of the people to die as pagans, seeing that they have no way of securing a better minister? Where there is no lack of priests, and I find one who has fallen into that same sin and, after doing penance, has been reinstated in his former rank, so that the whole body of priests and people have confidence in his good character, should I remove him? If at this stage he were to be degraded his secret sin would be revealed, the people would be shocked, many souls would be lost through scandal, and there would be great hatred of priests and distrust of the ministers of the Church, so that they would all be despised as faithless and unbelieving.

For this reason we have boldly ventured to tolerate the man under discussion and allow him to remain in the sacred ministry, thinking the danger from the offence of one man a lesser evil than the loss of the souls of almost the entire people. On this whole subject I earnestly desire to have your holy advice in writing. Tell me how far I must exercise forbearance in order to avoid scandal, and how much I must repress.

Finally, we are sending you by the bearer of this letter two small casks of wine, asking you in token of our mutual affection to use it for a merry day with the brethren. We beg you so to treat our requests that your reward may shine forth in the heavens.

A letter from Boniface to Archbishop Egbert asking for the works of Bede, quoted in C. H. Talbot, The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, Being the Lives of SS. Willibrord, Boniface, Leoba and Lebuin together with the Hodoepericon of St. Willibald and a selection from the correspondence of St. Boniface (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Summer glory

Daily Reading for June 6

O Lord, bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part of the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is thee thyself; but they are not thy fullness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of thine image; they are but the crumbs from the table. Shine forth, O Lord, as when on thy Nativity thy angels visited the shepherds; let thy glory blossom forth as bloom and foliage on the trees.

A prayer of John Henry Newman (1801-1890), quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Wisdom from the desert

Daily Reading for June 7

A brother said to a hermit, “How does the fear of God come into the soul?” He said, “If there is humility and poverty, and no judgment of others, the fear of God will be present there.”

Some of the hermits used to say, “Whatever you hate for yourself, do not do it to someone else. If you hate being spoken evil of, do not speak evil of another. If you hate being slandered, do not slander another. If you hate him who tries to make you despised, or wrongs you, or takes away what is yours, or anything like that, do not do such things to others. To keep this is enough for salvation.”

A hermit said, “This is the life of a monk: work, obedience, meditation, not to judge others, not to speak evil, not to murmur. For it is written, ‘You who love God, hate the thing that is evil’ (Ps. 97:10). This is monastic life: not to live with the wicked, not to see evil, not to be inquisitive, not to be curious, not to listen to gossip, not to use the hands for taking but for giving, not to be proud in heart or bad in thought, not to fill the belly, in everything to judge wisely. That is the life of the true monk.”

From “The Monastic Wisdom of the Christian Desert: A Selection of Sayings” by Laurence Freeman, in Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another by Rowan Williams (New Seeds, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Into the circle of God's love

Daily Reading for June 8 • The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

One of the things that will become increasingly obvious when we study the apostles is that Jesus did not wait for people to be perfect in order to call them into the circle of God’s love. It is important theologically where you place perfection in the great saga of our experience. If perfection were something we had to have before God would accept and help us, then there would be no hope for any of us. The Baptist preacher Carlisle Marney always said that it is too late to worry about innocence. Eventually, all we have left is a guilty self and the need to know what to do with it. Perfection is not a prerequisite of divine interaction, but the goal toward which we strive. Although we cannot fully embody it in this life, it is that omega point by which we measure our progress.

Extreme perfectionism is one of the highest forms of self-abuse. It is a dangerous misconception held by many throughout the Christian church that we have to be perfect before God will have anything to do with us. Since we are all flawed, perfectionism leads to the unbecoming pretense of being better than others, in order to hide our human failings and feelings of inadequacy. Trying to hide who we really are separates us from an authentic relationship with God. I believe that a true understanding of the Christian vision holds that we are acceptable to our gracious and merciful Lord just as we are, with all our imperfections. As I look at these disciples Jesus chose, it is clear that there is hope for every one of us, for they were far from perfect.

From the Introduction to The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus by John R. Claypool, edited by Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Iona

Daily Reading for June 9 • Columba, Abbot of Iona, 597

Delightful it would be
From a rock pinnacle to trace
Continually
The Ocean’s face:
That I might watch the heaving waves
Of noble force
To God the Father chant their staves
Of the earth’s course.

That I might mark its level strand,
To me no lone distress,
That I might hark the seas-bird’s wondrous band—
Sweet source of happiness.
That I might hear the clamorous billows thunder
On the rude beach.
That by my blessed church side might I ponder
Their mighty speech. . . .
That I might well observe of ebb and flood
All cycles therein;. . .
That I might bless the Lord who all things orders
For their good.

The countless hierarchies through heaven’s bright borders—
Land, strand and flood
That I might search all books and from their chart
Find my soul’s calm.
Now kneel before the Heaven of my heart,
Now chant a psalm;
Now meditate upon the king of heaven,
Chief of the Holy Three;
Now ply my work by no compulsion driven
What greater joy could be?

Now plucking dulse from rocky shore,
Now fishing eager on,
Now furnishing food unto famished poor;
In heritage anon:
The guidance of the king of kings
Has been vouchsafed to me;
If I keep watch beneath His wings,
No evil shall undo me.

From “St. Columba on Iona,” quoted in A Celtic Primer: The Complete Celtic Worship Resource and Collection, edited and compiled by Brendan O’Malley. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Glorious incarnation

Daily Reading for June 10 • Ephrem of Edessa, Deacon, 373

Glorious is the Wise One Who allied and joined
Divinity with humanity,
one from the height and the other from the depth.
He mingled the natures like pigments
and an image came into being: the God-man.

Glorious is the Compassionate One Who did not use
violence, and without force,
by wisdom He was victorious. He gave a type
to human beings that by power
and wisdom they might conquer discerningly.

Blessed is Your flock for You are her gate,
and You are her staff, and You are her Shepherd,
and You are her drink; You [are] her pilot
and You are her overseer. O to the Only-begotten
who was fruitful and multiplied in all [His] benefits.

The farmers who cultivated life
came and worshipped before Him. They prophesied to Him,
bursting into song, “Blessed is the Farmer
by Whom is worked the earth of the heart;
He gathers His grains of wheat into the storehouse of life.”

The children cried out, “Blessed [is] He Who was for us
a brother and companion in the streets.
Blessed is the day that with branches
glorified the Tree of Life
Who inclined His height toward our childishness.”

Women heard that behold a virgin indeed
would conceive and bring forth. Well-born women hoped
that He would shine forth from them, and elegant women
that He would appear from them. Blessed is Your height
that bent down and shone forth from the poor.

From “Nativity Hymn 8” by Ephrem the Syrian, translated by Kathleen McVey. Quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The book of Barnabas

Daily Reading for June 11 • St. Barnabas, Apostle

Greetings, sons and daughters, in the name of the Lord who loved us, in peace. so great and abundant are the righteous acts of God toward you that I am exceedingly overjoyed, beyond measure, by our blessed and glorious spirits. For you have received such a measure of this grace planted within you, the spiritual gift! And so I share your joy all the more within myself, hoping to be saved; for truly I see that, in your midst, the Spirit has been poured out upon you from the abundance of the Lord’s fountain—so amazed have I been by the sight of your face, which I have so desired.

And so, since I have been persuaded about this and realize that I who have spoken to you know many things (since the Lord has traveled along with me in the path of righteousness), I have also felt fully compelled to love you more than my own soul. For a great faith and love dwell within you in the hope of his life. I have thus come to realize that I will be rewarded for serving spirits like yours, if I care for you enough to hand over a portion of what I have received. I have hastened, then, to send you a brief letter, that you may have perfect knowledge to accompany your faith.

There are three firm teachings of the Lord of life: hope, which is the beginning and end of our faith; righteousness, which is the beginning and end of judgment; and love, which is a testament to our joy and gladness in upright deeds. For through the prophets the Master has made known to us what has happened and what now is; and he has given us the first fruits of the taste of what is yet to be. And as we see that each and every thing has happened just as he indicated, we should make a more abundant and exalted offering in awe of him.

From “The Letter of Barnabas,” chapter 1, translated by Bart D. Ehrman, who notes: “The second- and third-century Christians who refer to the book attribute it to Barnabas, the companion of the apostle Paul. But this may have involved little more than guesswork on the part of Christians who were eager to have the book read and accepted as ‘apostolic.’ It was considered part of the New Testament Scriptures in some Christian communities down to the fourth century.” Quoted in The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader by Bart D. Ehrman (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In the spaces between

Daily Reading for June 12 • Enmegahbowh, Priest and Missionary, 1902

The irony in Enmegahbowh’s name is evident in his life and ministry. Born Ojibwa, and reborn a Christian by baptism, he was a man of two peoples. To be “the man who stands by his people” meant, in his case, to be forever in the middle ground between two peoples. . . .Those in the middle really know the poverty of having no country of their own; to them God’s kingdom is offered as homeland. Those in the middle cannot rely upon either side to feed or nurture them; for them God will provide sustenance and the laughter that balances and buttresses the spirit against heartbreak. Those in the middle know what it is to be hated and mistrusted by both sides; their reward in this life is elusive, their reward in God’s realm guaranteed.

Enmegahbowh reveals that all Christians are called to the centrism we Episcopalians can only emphasize, but never monopolize. We are all of at least two peoples, and sometimes more. Standing by our own peoples of necessity puts us in the margins, in the spaces between. Thus we do not minister at the center so much as on the edge, in the hard places, where emotions are conflicted, opinions divided, and motives mixed.

But Enmagahbowh reveals also that this is the work of the true “Medicine Man,” that this is where and how healing comes to the peoples who, despite their pluralism, are all God’s people. In baptism we are made members of multiple peoples in order that we might be ministers to all peoples. In a world increasingly balkanized, tribalized, atomized, particularized, individualized, and personalized, we die to our singularity that we might rise to new life and new ministry as old as humankind and as urgent as ever—to be medicine to this fragmented, broken world.

From Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The food is good here

Daily Reading for June 13

Returning from the nursing home, I feel empty.
She who nurtured me no longer knows me.
Suddenly, I need to be taken care of.
The unkempt homeless man on the steps of the church invites me in.
“The food here is good,” he says.
Trained early not to talk to strangers, I think only, “Do I look poor or hungry?
Why should he call to me?” It’s his soup kitchen, and more his church than mine.
There is a noon Eucharist. How I’ve missed it.
Communion, and the taste of my mother’s kitchen. A meager celebration.
But the bread and wine feed my soul.
Outside, he calls to me again as I walk past.
“Did you get to eat? Did they feed you? Did you get what you needed?”
I glance back over my shoulder. He smiles.
“Yes,” my heart silently shouts.
He nods.

“Homeless Angel” by Julie Krause, in Women’s Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated edited by Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Marjorie A. Burke, and Ann Smith. Copyright © 2000. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In community

Daily Reading for June 14 • Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea, 379

Community life offers more blessings than can be fully and easily enumerated. It is more advantageous than the solitary life both for preserving the goods bestowed on us by God and for warding off the external attacks of the Enemy. . . . Wherein will [the solitary] show his humility, if there is no one with whom he may compare and so confirm his own greater humility? Wherein will he give evidence of his compassion, if he has cut himself off from association with other persons? And how will he exercise himself in long-suffering, if no one contradicts his wishes? If anyone says that the teaching of the Holy Scripture is sufficient for the amendment of his or [her] ways, they resemble a person who learns carpentry without ever actually doing a carpenter’s work or a person who is instructed in metal-working but will not reduce theory to practice. . . .Consider, further, that the Lord by reason of His excessive love for humanity was not content with merely teaching the word, but, so as to transmit to us clearly and exactly the example of humility in the perfection of love, girded Himself and washed the feet of the disciples. Whom, therefore will you wash? To whom will you minister? . . . So it is an area for combat, a good path of progress, continual discipline, and a practicing of the Lord’s commandment, when Christians dwell together in community.

From “The Long Rules” by Basil the Great, translated by Sister M. Monica Wagner. Quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Answering readiness

Daily Reading for June 15 • The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

One of the first things that Jesus did in his ministry was to reach out to twelve individuals and draw them into a circle of close companionship with him. . . . Jesus began his ministry alone, but it soon became a communal movement as he called followers to his side, not only because he sensed their potential in helping to build the kingdom of God but also because they were so curious about what he was doing. . . . It was to those who showed the greatest curiosity about what he was teaching that he gave the most of himself, saying, “To you has been give the secret of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4:11). One of my wisest seminary professors told his classes, “You need to distinguish between the people who really want to hear what you have to say and those who are not interested. It is important to remember that you cannot bless them all.” I think he was right on the point that the key to effective ministry is to answer readiness rather than to press reluctance. As we read Scripture, we clearly see that Jesus was answering readiness in others, rather than pressing those who were less inclined toward him. He sought those who showed the greatest interest, and drew them into a close, intimate relationship. As we look at the first disciples that Jesus called and consider ourselves as part of that enlarging circle, I hope we gain a deeper sense of our own spirituality and how Christ would like to relate to us.

From the Introduction to The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus by John R. Claypool, edited by Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Love will be all

Daily Reading for June 16 • Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham

That which we more strictly call piety, or the love of God, and which is an essential part of a right temper, some may perhaps imagine no way connected with benevolence: yet surely they must be connected, if there be indeed in being an object infinitely good. Human nature is so constituted, that every good affection implies the love of itself; i.e., becomes the object of a new affection in the same person. Thus, to be righteous, implies in it the love of righteousness; to be benevolent, the love of benevolence; to be good, the love of goodness; whether this righteousness, benevolence, or goodness, be viewed as in our own mind, or in another’s: and the love of God as being perfectly good, is the love of perfect goodness contemplated in a being or person. Thus morality and religion, virtue and piety, will at last necessarily coincide, run up into one and the same point, and love will be in all senses ‘the end of the commandment.’

O Almighty God, inspire us with this divine principle; kill in us all the seeds of envy and ill-will; and help us, by cultivating within ourselves the love of our neighbour, to improve in the love of Thee. Thou has placed us in various kindreds, friendships, and relations, as the school of discipline for our affections: help us, by the due exercise of them, to improve to perfection; till all partial affection be lost in that entire universal one, and Thou, O God, shalt be all in all.

From “Sermon II: Upon Human Nature” in The Works of Bishop Butler, vol. 1, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A five-act play

Daily Reading for June 17

We can understand the Bible best if we read it as a five-act play, the five acts being Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, and Church. We are not living in an unfallen creation; or in a fallen world without promise; or in the time of Israel BC; or, indeed, in the time of Jesus himself. We are living in the fifth act, and have to improvise, under the guidance of the Spirit, in such a way as to bring this narrative (not some other one!) to its appointed and proper conclusion: in other words, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thus to anticipate the promise of new heavens and new earth.

The Bible is here to equip God’s people to carry forward his purposes of new covenant and new creation. It is there to enable people to work for justice, to sustain their spirituality as they do so, to create and enhance relationships at every level, and to produce that new creation that will have something of the beauty of God himself. The Bible isn’t like an accurate description of how a car is made. It’s more like the mechanic who helps you fix it, the garage attendant who refuels it, and the guide who tells you how to get where you’re going. And where you’re going is to make God’s new creation happen in his world, not simply to find your own way unscathed through the old creation.

From an interview with N. T. Wright, quoted in Rising From the Ashes: Rethinking Church by Becky Garrison. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Deadly friendship

Daily Reading for June 18 • Bernard Mizeki, Catechist and Marytr in Rhodesia, 1896

The word “friend” recurs frequently in the story of Bernard Mizeki’s life, ministry, and martyrdom. Fleeing oppression in Portuguese East Africa, Mizeki was befriended by Anglican missionaries and became a Christian. He, in turn, befriended the people of Central Africa, and they likewise came to Christianity. In Mashonaland he was caught in conflict between the natives and the Europeans who lived there—both of whom he loved as friends—and was killed. Bernard’s experience is a story of deadly friendship. . . .

Even when they are not fatal, friendships can be life-changing, introducing death in another guise. Friendship can change us, profoundly convert us, challenge and confront us. Friendship can bring death to old ideas, set us in opposition to prevailing norms, bind us in loyalty to the undesirable or despised. Deadly friendships can cost us our jobs, our securities, our lives. White students from Princeton Seminary were felled by bullets in the South because they befriended blacks; physicians and nurses have lost their own lives caring for persons with AIDS and other deadly diseases; congregations have died because they befriended the unlovely, the untouchable, the unfortunate. Bernard Mizeki reminds us that the measure of ministry is sometimes taken in friendships—deadly friendships.

From Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 18, 2008 4:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Homecoming

Daily Reading for June 19

Recognizing our origins in earth and in God prepares the ground for our understanding of our place on this planet. It saves us from the terrible hubris, or pride, which is the source of so much of our destructiveness. When we feel disconnected from our bodies, from our earthiness, we are also disconnected from the rest of creation. But once we fully experience our own creatureliness, we can discover new pleasure in God’s other creatures—animal, mineral, and vegetable. We will care about them because they are our extended family, sharing with us the molecules that make up adamah.

When we feel disconnected from God, from ruach or “spirit,” we are disconnected from the very source of our being. How often we let other kinds of breath fill us—the breath of selfishness, acquisitiveness, power, greed—so that we fall prey to a kind of spiritual and moral “breathlessness.” Once we begin to allow God’s breath to fill us, we will find we are more human, not less so. My favorite second-century theologian, Irenaeus of Lyons, who said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive,” would have enjoyed looking over his compatriot’s shoulder as Rodin chiseled the Hand of God.

One of humanity’s most destructive misconceptions is that, since we consider ourselves the apex of creation, we are therefore separated from nature. The Judeo-Christian tradition, in its attentiveness to another verse of Genesis—“have dominion...over every living thing that moves upon the earth”—to the neglect of the wisdom contained in Genesis 2:7, has much to answer for.

We can no more be happy separated from nature than we can be happy separated from God. When we acknowledge our place on earth and celebrate our unity in God with the creation that surrounds us, we take our place in the community composed of all living things, and it feels like a homecoming.

From Organic Prayer: A Spiritual Gardening Companion by Nancy Roth. Copyright © 1993, 2007. From Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 19, 2008 4:03 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Abundance

Daily Reading for June 20

God, fill my heart with gratitude.
Like a child, I cry for my wants, rather than my needs.
My sense of entitlement is immense.
Focus my mind on abundance rather than lack.
Keep me aware that I have all that I need—and then some.

Amen.

A prayer by C. Lee Richards, quoted in Women’s Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated edited by Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Marjorie A. Burke, and Ann Smith. Copyright © 2000. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The living and true God

Daily Reading for June 21 • Alban, First Martyr of Britain, c. 304 (transferred)

When these unbelieving Emperors were issuing savage edicts against all Christians, Alban, as yet a pagan, gave shelter to a Christian priest fleeing from his pursuers. And when he observed this man’s unbroken activity of prayer and vigil, he was suddenly touched by the grace of God and began to follow the priest’s example of faith and devotion. Gradually instructed by his teaching of salvation, Alban renounced the darkness of idolatry, and sincerely accepted Christ. But when the priest had lived in his house some days, word came to the ears of the evil ruler that Christ’s confessor, whose place of martyrdom had not yet been appointed, lay hidden in Alban’s house. Accordingly he gave orders to his soldiers to make a thorough search, and when they arrived at the martyr’s house, holy Alban, wearing the priest’s long cloak, at once surrendered himself in the place of his guest and teacher, and was led bound before the judge.

When Alban was brought in, the judge happened to be standing before an altar, offering sacrifice to devils. Seeing Alban, he was furious that he had presumed to put himself in such hazard by surrendering himself to the soldiers in place of his guest, and ordered him to be dragged before the idols where he stood. ‘Since you have chosen to conceal a sacrilegious rebel,’ he said, ‘rather than surrender him to my soldiers to pay the well-deserved penalty for his blasphemy against our gods you shall undergo all the tortures due to him if you dare to abandon the practice of our religion.’ But Saint Alban, who had freely confessed himself a Christian to the enemies of the Faith, was unmoved by these threats, and armed with spiritual strength, openly refused to obey this order. ‘What is your family and race?’ demanded the judge. ‘How does my family concern you?’ replied Alban; ‘if you wish to know the truth about my religion, know that I am a Christian, and carry out the Christian rites.’ ‘I demand to know your name,’ insisted the judge, ‘tell me at once.’ ‘My parents named me Alban,’ he answered, ‘and I worship and adore the living and true God, who created all things.’

From A History of the English Church and People by Bede, translated by Leo Sherley-Price (Penguin Books, 1968).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Human becomings

Daily Reading for June 22 • The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Desmond Tutu of Capetown observed recently that “God is continually breathing into our nostrils.” It is a vivid way of expressing the fact that not only is our life the creation of God, but that every moment of our life is also sustained by God. We are not only made. We continue to be made. It is possible to say that we are not so much human “beings” as human “becomings.”

[The collect for this day] begins, “O Lord, make us. . . .” It is so easy to leave those four words behind, so easy to hurry on to the seemingly more significant words that immediately follow. But we would be wrong to do so. Instead, it is very much worth our while to stop and reflect on the fact that God not only has made us, but continually makes us. . . .

In what sense does God make us? We are most aware of being made physically. . . .As we learn to see life more in terms of the whole, we come to perceive it as a great web of being. We realize we are being made in every way—physically, mentally, psychologically, spiritually.

The reason it is so important for us to realize this is that only then can we open all the elements of our lives to God. Western culture has so thoroughly divided up reality that we have lost a sense of the whole being through which God’s grace is manifested. Our physical exercise, our eating habits, our sexuality, our thinking—all these can become as spiritual an activity as receiving the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Our reading, our use of television or movies, our education, and our job can all be channels for God. Our concern for self-development and the development of others around us, our fostering of relationships, all this energy in our lives can be understood as the process of God’s making of us. Thus our spirituality does not float around on the margin of our lives, but every activity is the stuff of spirituality. To achieve this realization is to become a man or woman made by and for God, a truly whole human being.

From Prayers for the Breaking of Bread: Meditations on the Collects of the Church Year by Herbert O’Driscoll (Cowley Publications, 1991).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Compost

Daily Reading for June 23

We have three compost heaps, and even they are not capacious enough to contain all the castoffs of our garden and our kitchen. When the leaves begin to fall, we will have to begin a new pile near the border of our small woods. Our compost piles include a variety of vegetable material: carrot peelings, strawberry hulls, tomato prunings, the weeds I have dug before they have gone to seed, grass clippings, coffee grounds, eggshells, cornhusks, dry leaves, melon rinds. Although some people might consider the contents of our piles to be “garbage,” this material is not garbage. As it decays, assisted by earthworms as well as by organisms I cannot even see, my compost becomes “black gold,” rich humus that will contribute to the garden’s future well-being.

Composting teaches me that nothing in life is, in fact, “garbage.” The way of nature is the way of use and reuse. When this lunchtime’s carrot peeling is dumped on top of the seething compost pile, it enters into the slow process of becoming fertilizer for next summer’s crop of carrots.

I learn, from observing nature’s economy, that God intends me also to use all that I am given. I am meant to use my gifts and skills, my sorrows, and all the random happenings of life, spreading them out, as it were, in the fresh air of God to be transformed so that they can become life-giving, both for myself and for the world around me.

From Organic Prayer: A Spiritual Gardening Companion by Nancy Roth. Copyright © 1993, 2007. From Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Pregnant with God

Daily Reading for June 24 • The Nativity of St. John the Baptist

According to legend, Anne yearned in vain for a child until she was well advanced in years. Then, miraculously, she became the mother of Mary. . . . Anne’s legend fits comfortably into scriptural tradition; it is a repetition of the familiar story of the matriarchs, our foremothers. It is a variation on the theme of barrenness over against the divine promise of fruitfulness. Sarah, the mother of Isaac; Rebekah and Rachel, the mothers of Jacob and Joseph; Hannah and Elizabeth, who bore the prophets Samuel and John the Baptist late in their lives—these are the women of our family history, our direct ancestors. . . .

These are stories about women who want children desperately and who feel ashamed and deficient because of their childlessness. There is a quality of expectancy about them; it is vital that they bring forth new life. Without children, they are nothing. Their plight is accentuated by the presence of “lesser” women around them who bear children easily—slaves like Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah, or Leah, the unloved and unwanted wife. “Why,” the barren women must have asked, “are they rewarded so undeservedly while we are denied what is rightfully ours?”

Human fertility is a powerful metaphor. I would in no way minimize either the almost numinous experience of birthgiving or the suffering of those who yearn in vain for children. Some women choose not to give birth, and men can be fathers but not mothers. Hence for some of us, the imagery of childlessness is painful, and for others it seems irrelevant. It remains, however, a compelling evocation of spiritual barrenness.

In the fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart, the learned Dominican mystic whose personal life must have been far removed from the intimate concerns of human reproduction, preached compellingly of the birth of God in the soul. Again and again he drove home his point: we can all become pregnant with God. Conversely, man or woman, old or young, we can also share in the barrenness of Sarah and her sisters. . . . A barren landscape is colorless, bleak, and dry; so, perhaps, is a barren person. Yet there is, albeit hidden, the potential for new life awaiting the right conditions for fertility—perhaps darkness, moisture, or enriching nutrients. Perhaps the acceptable time. Perhaps the gracious action of God.

From Toward Holy Ground: Spiritual Directions for the Second Half of Life by Margaret Guenther (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Conflict advances truth

Daily Reading for June 25

All religious groups I know about seem to have many people who are afraid of conflict. They cannot distinguish in their minds between disagreement and condemnation. Afraid to say “no,” they live with things they cannot agree with or do jobs they do not really want to do. One day they explode. Then the situation often cannot be repaired, and the group has a problem that may take years to overcome, if it can be overcome. . . .

I have been aware of people storming out of meetings after committing atrocious behavior, and the rest of the group then nervously wondering how they could get the offender back. Such groups operate with the unspoken belief that if they stand up against bad behavior and for their basic principles, they will not survive. The opposite, in fact, is true. One compromise leads to another, and their major goals are missed altogether, because there is no backbone in the organism.

There is no law against conflict in either the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures. Rather than encouraging silence, the New Testament urges readers to “speak the truth in love.”. . . Jesus is not remembered as just going along with things for the sake of apparent peace. In fact, the gospels have him on one occasion more or less “disowning” his mother and brother and sisters when they tried to stop him from disturbing the public mind. . . .

There is nothing wrong with saying, “I think you did the wrong thing,” or, “Where I disagree with you is. . . .” (It is often helpful to ask a question first, however!) There is everything wrong with saying, “Because you did such and such, you are stupid, worthless, etc.”. . .

Conflict—disagreement discussed thoroughly and fairly—is the primary means of advancing the truth. Careful listening and thoughtful response advance common understanding and progress. Conflict that is kept on the level of ideas but does not discuss personalities is a sign of health, of thinking. . . .It is no sin to disagree vigorously with an idea or someone’s perception of events. On the other hand, perhaps it is a sin to confuse being valuable with being right. Surely, no one is always right! The first sign of healthy humility is the ability to be taught. Conflict without nastiness, then, may be the most caring path of all.

From “Conflict Advances Truth” in Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less by Paul V. Marshall. Copyright © 2008. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Can the center hold?

Daily Reading for June 26

“Too often in the past, the appointment of a prior has been the source of serious contention in monasteries. Some priors, puffed up by the evil spirit of pride and thinking of themselves as second abbots, usurp tyrannical power and foster contention and discord in their communities.” . . . (The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 65)

This is the least prayerful chapter in the Rule. It is fairly bristling with tension. Perhaps because of his own personal experience, Benedict is wary of the office of prior, probably because of the problems arising from the appointment by an outside authority and the dangers of a power struggle that it carries. The ideal, of course, is what we have been given in the previous chapter, a community of “peace and love.” But Benedict is completely realistic about human nature and its weaknesses and what happens when the spirit of pride enters in. . . .

When there is a split between the head and one of the responsible members, it leads to a state of confusion in the whole community, becomes an open invitation to faction and disorder of every kind and to the envy, quarrels, slander, and rivalry that he lists in verse 7. He is worried that the abbot may get drawn into this maelstrom of violence and fears how destructive such conflicting aims and goals will become. This is the price that is paid for anyone putting his or her personal ends above the interests of the group. It is a dark warning against exploiting a position of power or authority for self-advancement to the detriment of the whole. . . .

A split personality can be as dangerous to the corporate situation as to the individual. It is something that we can all be only too aware of around us. We can see it at work in a marriage where husband and wife are deeply at odds and damage the whole family, in a parish where people split into factions and tear apart the tissue of the congregation, and in a community caught in a power struggle and living off negative energy because it fails to deal with the underlying issues. But if Benedict knows how destructive divergent and centrifugal elements can be, he also knows the importance of accepting the wide range and variety of human nature and human experience. The question is how to hold these elements together and integrate them so that the whole body becomes life-giving rather than life-denying. In the previous chapter Benedict has been showing us the role of the abbot holding the center with loving firmness. So that is what I now ask myself: Can the center hold? Where is the axis on which everything turns? If the abbot points me to Christ, it will be there that I shall find the creative force and power to make my relationships meaningful and life-giving.

From A Life-Giving Way: A Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal (Liturgical Press, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Losing one's life to save it

Daily Reading for June 27

I suppose my greatest curiosity about the afterlife is whether I will continue to be me. I want to continue being me, of course. I want not only to see all of those creatures that I have rescued through the years; I also want to see the loved ones whom I have lost. I want to lay my head on Grandma Lucy’s lap again. I want to shell field peas with Fannie Belle and listen to Schubert with Earl. The problem with this scenario is that it turns heaven into my perfect version of earth, with a perfect me in the middle of it. As appealing as this is, it strikes me as an underutilization of God’s gifts.

Since ecstatic union with God is my best idea of heaven, I think I have to be ready to let myself go—literally, I mean. I think I have to entertain the possibility that joining God in heaven may mean surrendering everything I hold dear on earth, including my me-ness, in order to be made entirely new. In Christian terms, I think I really do have to die, and be willing to leave the rest to God.

When my father lay dying several years ago, I hardly left his room for the last two weeks of his life. This gave me a lot of time to think about what was happening to him, and where he might be going. . . .One Sunday afternoon I lay my head on my father’s pillow so I could whisper in his ear. “I think I finally get what’s taking you so long,” I said. “You’re having to let it all go, aren’t you? All the places you haven’t traveled yet, all the places you’ve been. Your first girlfriend, your favorite chair, your prize students, your grandsons.” I was crying now. “Everything that makes you you, you’re having to let go now. Oh, Poppa, I don’t know how you can do it. It has to be so hard.”

He died at three that afternoon. After the undertaker had taken my father’s body, I lay down in his hospital bed. I fully expected him to be there in spirit somehow, but when I got up, the room was dark and empty as a tomb. Around the same time the next day, I was thinking of him when I felt him take off like a rocket. For about three seconds, a wave of pure bliss washed through my body. Then I knew my father was gone. He had left all his Earl-ness behind.

Maybe he got it all back again when he arrived where he was going, or maybe he discovered that “me” was too small a box for who he became in God. I may never know, but ever since then I have become less attached to my beliefs about heaven. In their place, I am cultivating what I hope is radical trust in God. In the face of all that I do not know about heaven, I am still willing to go where God wants me to go and to be what God wants me to be, even if I have to leave me behind.

From “Leaving Myself Behind” by Barbara Brown Taylor, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. Copyright © 2007. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The harmony of the whole

Daily Reading for June 28 • Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, c. 202

Many and various are the things that are made. When you take them in detail they are mutually antagonistic and discordant. But, taken in connection with the whole creation, they are agreeable and harmonious. Just as the sound of the harp, composed of many different notes, makes one symphony. The love of truth must not be misled by the difference of each sound, nor suspect that there was one author for this and another for that, or that one composed the bass, another the treble, and a third the middle notes; but considering the wisdom, justice, goodness and service of the whole work he should regard it as one thing. For they who hear a melody ought to praise the musician, and admire the raising of some notes, attend to the lowering of others and listen attentively to the careful modulation of chords. . . .

Suppose we agree and confess that not one of the things that have been made or are being made escapes the knowledge of God, but through His providence each individual thing received and receives its condition, order, number and quantity, and that not one of these has been made or is being made casually or without significance, but with great skill and sublime understanding, and that the reason is wonderful and truly divine which can analyze and announce the particular causes of this kind. . . .A sound and safe and reverent mind that loves the truth will study with eagerness the things that God has left within the reach of man. . . . Having, then, the very rule of truth, and the testimony openly given about God, we ought not reject the sound and sure knowledge of God; but rather directing our solutions of our problems to this end, we should be disciplined by the investigation of the mystery and dispensation of the God who is, and grow more and more in our love of Him, who has done and does so much for us. But if we cannot find the solution of every scriptural difficulty we should not be driven to seek another God, for that were gross impiety. All such matters we should leave in the hands of God, who has made us, being duly aware that the Scriptures are perfect, having been uttered by the Word of God and His Spirit. It is no wonder if in spiritual and celestial matters we have this experience, seeing that many things which are practically before our eyes are beyond our ken. These very things we commit to God.

From “The Treatise of Irenaeus of Lugdunum Against the Heresies,” quoted in Readings in Christian Thought, edited by Hugh T. Kerr (Abingdon, 1983).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Presence matters

Daily Reading for June 29 • The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Benedictine life is full of reminders that each monk is a sacrament of the presence of God to his brethren. The times of community prayer, for example, are a daily affirmation of the commitment of the community’s members one to another. Sheer physical presence—something that abbots always have to nag monks about—matters immensely. I remember being very struck as a novice by hearing of an abbot who told his community: “Fathers, please do try to fit the office into your timetables.” The comment might surprise those who have never lived as monks. But it can seem that by being in the choir for office we are achieving nothing, and—especially if we are not the world’s greatest singers—we might suppose that really we would accomplish more by being somewhere else. The school, the parish, the retreat house—anywhere.

There is, in fact, a vital significance in the community being physically together in the same place at the key moments of our lives. A former abbot of my own community used to say that attendance at office was the way each monk gave himself to the brethren. Certainly in common prayer the monk tries to give himself to God, but there is an important sense in which we are giving ourselves to one another in these times—supporting one another’s prayer, simply being there because presence matters. Monks go to God together, and are the vehicles of grace to one another, just as spouses are. The parallel is very far from exact, but there are common features. It was such an experience of the power of the presence of monks to one another that gave me the insight I needed to enter religious life.

From Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscape of Our Lives by Mark Barrett. Second edition. Copyright © 2002, 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

First encounter

Daily Reading for June 30 • St. Peter and St. Paul, Apostles (transferred)

Nobody knows where Saul is, although it is said he has changed his name to Paul. Now he appears in Jerusalem, asking to meet Peter.

If we can trust the second-century writer Onesiphoros, the figure who entered the room that day and walked forward to meet Peter and James was not impressive. We have Onesiphoros’s detailed description of Paul: “A man rather small in size, bald-headed, bow-legged, with meeting eyebrows, and a large, red, and hooked nose.” . . . Appearances aside, he was a brilliant scholar, sophisticated, a mind like a razor, politically astute, at home in any society, with the social advantages of full Roman citizenship.

The introductions over, the questions began. It was probably not easy sailing. Luke suggests that the local communities still mistrusted Paul; as he puts it bluntly, “They did not believe that he was a disciple.”

Whatever the outcome and however long it took to make the alliance, that was the first encounter of Peter and Paul, who were to become two of the great change agents in history. The relationship between them fascinates Christians for many reasons, not least because their differing gifts, personalities, and roles provide a pattern of contrasts that were to be important in the formation of the future church. These two were to have their moments of deep disagreement and confrontation. Given what we know of both of them—one a seasoned fisherman in the harsh environment of the lake, the other a seasoned debater in the cut and thrust of the Greco-Roman schools of rhetoric and law—we can imagine the intensity of their disagreement over eating with Gentiles! Who knows what went on between them as they hammered out their response to the challenges presented by the first council of Jerusalem? . . . Yet, at the end of the day, the instinctive conservatism of the one met the far-seeing vision and boundless energy of the other to rocket the news of their Lord from one end of that empire to the other.

From For All the Saints: Homilies for Saints’ and Holy Days by Herbert O’Driscoll (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on June 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Picking up broken pieces

Daily Reading for July 1

I can illustrate an important part of what I have learned from Simon Peter in a story about something that happened to a friend of mine. His young son had eagerly begun kindergarten and, in October of his first year of school, the teacher said to his class, “Would you like to make something with your own hands to give to your folks for Christmas? They will get lots of store-bought gifts, but might prefer something you made yourselves. What do you think of that idea?” My friend’s son held up his hand, and said, “My father smokes a pipe, and I’d like to make him an ash tray.” So the teacher said that she would help him do that. She gave him some clay, and they shaped it in the form of an ashtray. She asked him his father’s favorite color, and he said, “blue,” so they colored it blue. . . . At every stage of this process, the five-year-old boy’s hopes and expectations for Christmas Day increased. He could just imagine his father unwrapping a tie, or some socks, and then opening his present, made by his son’s own hands, and being overwhelmed with pride and joy.

The traditional Christmas pageant was performed on the last day before school was dismissed. . . . The little boy went to his classroom to get the carefully wrapped package for his father. He headed back to his parents but in his haste . . . he suddenly tripped. His precious package flew up in the air and came crashing down on the floor, with the terrible sound of breaking. . . . He began to cry as if his heart had broken.

My friend . . . walked over to his child and said in a brusque manner, “Don’t worry, son, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make any difference at all.” However, his wife brushed him aside, and said, “Yes, it does make a difference that something this precious has gotten broken,” and he watched as she did two wonderful things. She swept the child up in her arms, and wept with him the tears that are always appropriate when we break the things that are precious. Then, she reached into her purse, took out a handkerchief, and gently wiped the tears from their little boy’s eyes, and then from her own eyes. Her husband listened with wonder as he heard her say, “Come on, son, come on. Let’s pick up the pieces, take them home, and see what we can make of what is left.”

In that touching story you have an image of the alternatives we have in response to those times when the things that are most precious to us have been broken. You can cry as the little boy did, as if one mistake is irreparable and leaves nothing but loss and despair; or you can deny the significance of what has happened, as my friend did, and drain any meaning out of the experience. However, I think that God would want us to respond like that wise mother, descend into the crucible of pain, and weep the tears that are always appropriate when we have broken the blessed things of God. To do less would minimize the impact of any occasion of loss or sin, but then, you can pick up the pieces, take them home, and see what can be made of what is left. Jesus helped Simon Peter pick up the broken pieces of his life and create something worthwhile out of what was left. Therein lies the basis for hope for the future, in spite of the past.

From “Simon Peter: A Man of Extremes” in The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus by John R. Claypool, edited by Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Religion in early America

Daily Reading for July 2

To discuss the religion of the founding fathers means to discuss religion in the United States of their time. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were born and baptized in what Virginians of the time called “the Church,” “the Church of England,” “the Established Church,” or “the Church of Virginia.” The independence of the thirteen colonies from the mother country prompted the American members of the Church of England to discard the word “England.” In its place they adopted the term “Episcopal” (essentially meaning “we have bishops”) and renamed their denomination “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.” . . .

State churches represented the norm in European Christianity beginning in the fourth century. Of the thirteen colonies, nine—almost 70 percent—had established churches. Congregationalism (or the faith of the Puritans) was established in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Anglicanism was established in the lower counties of New York, as well as in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. It was strong, however, only in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. . . .

The Anglican faith of Virginia differed from the New England Puritanism out of which Adams and Franklin emerged. Both Adams and Franklin changed their religious views and embraced a form of Deism. So, too, did Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. But all of these men, except Franklin, continued to worship at least occasionally in the church of their ancestors—and their wives and daughters were usually devout supporters of it. The Virginia founding fathers married under the church’s auspices, consigned their children to its care, and were buried by its clergy. The impress of their religious background remained strong, even though their questioning of certain of their church’s fundamental doctrines led them to Deism.

From “The Anglican Tradition and the Virginia Founding Fathers” in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The faith of Franklin

Daily Reading for July 3

[Benjamin] Franklin was also among those Deists who remained open to the possibility of divine intervention or special providence in human affairs. . . . Unlike radical, or anti-Christian Deists, Franklin perceived that organized religion could benefit society by encouraging public virtue as well as by promoting social order. He believed in a benevolent Creator, whom humans should worship through virtuous behavior. Thus Franklin urged his daughter Sarah to “go constantly to church.” He himself was an infrequent churchgoer. But because he developed a certain fondness for ceremony and ritual, the church he most frequently attended was Christ Church, one of Philadelphia’s three Episcopal churches. . . .

Insatiably curious, ambivalent about religion, prudent in his declarations about it, offended by dogmatism and intolerance, opposed to the highly emotional conversion experiences of the Great Awakening, Franklin made morality primary in his interpretation of religion. Like other Deists, he believed that humans served God best when they performed good works on behalf of humanity and society. “I think vital religion has always suffered,” Franklin wrote to his parents shortly after his thirtieth birthday, “when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtues.”

From “The Religious Views of Benjamin Franklin” in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Faithful servants

Daily Reading for July 4 • Independence Day

The 4th of July has been celebrated in Philadelphia in the manner I expected. The military men . . . ran away with all the glory of the day. Scarcely a word was said of the solicitude and labors and fears and sorrows and sleepless nights of the men who projected, proposed, defended, and subscribed the Declaration of Independence. Do you recollect your memorable speech upon the day on which the vote was taken? Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants?. . . .

I visited the late Reverence Mr. Marshall of this city in his last illness. A few days before his death he thanked me affectionately for my services to him and his family, and afterwards said some kind of flattering things to me upon the pursuits and labors of my life. I replied to the letter by saying that I had aimed to do all the good I could to my fellow citizens, but that I had been so much thwarted and opposed that I did not know that any of my labors had ever been attended with success. “Well, well,” said this dying saint, “remember your Saviour at the day of judgment will not say, ‘Well done, thou successful, but well done thou faithful servant.’ You have been ‘faithful,’ Doctor, and that is enough.”

From a letter from Dr. Benjamin Rush to John Adams, July 20, 1811. Quoted in Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters, edited by Andrew Carroll (Kodansha International, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A reformer in religion

Daily Reading for July 5

Thomas Jefferson epitomized what it meant in America to be a man of the Enlightenment. At his estate of Monticello, he displayed busts of Bacon, Locke, and Newton. Incredibly broad in interests and abilities, Jefferson was sufficiently interested in religious matters that one scholar has described him as “the most self-consciously theological of all America’s presidents.” Religion, the writer declares, “mesmerized him, enraged him, tantalized him, alarmed him, and sometimes inspired him.” . . .

Jefferson came to believe that the combined effect of power-hungry monarchs and corrupt “priests” had despoiled the original, pristine teachings of Jesus: “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which I believe Jesus wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.” . . .

In his last years, Jefferson clearly moved toward a more traditional interpretation of Christianity. He valued Jesus as a person ever more highly. Unlike some Deists, he came to believe in prayer and in a life after death. But belief in an afterlife and in a God who hears prayer were standard Unitarian beliefs of the time. . . . Jefferson’s religion was monotheistic, restorationistic, reason-centered, anti-medieval, anti-Calvinist, anti-clerical, and combative toward mystery. A reformer in religion as well as in politics, . . . an American who believed he had separated the gold from the dross in government and religion, Jefferson wanted to tear down what he considered false to allow what he considered true to shine through.

From “The Religious Views of Thomas Jefferson” in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Resting

Daily Reading for July 6 • The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

This morning’s reading contains one of the great consolation passages of all time. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.” It is a passage you can find etched on tombstones or worked into stained glass windows or maybe even stitched in needlepoint and hung in the church parlor. . . .

Human beings have a perverse way of turning Jesus’ easy yoke into a hard one again, by driving ourselves to do, do, do more and whipping ourselves to be, be, be, be more when all God has ever asked is that we belong to him. That comes first; everything else follows that, but we so often get the order reversed. We think there are all kinds of requirements to be met first, all kinds of rules to follow, all kinds of burdens to bear, so that we are not yet free to belong to God. We are still loaded down, not only by our jobs and our families and all our other responsibilities but by something deeper down in us, something that keeps telling us we must do more, be better, try harder, prove ourselves more worthy that other human beings or we will never earn God’s love. It is the most tiring work in the world, and it is never done.

One September a couple of years ago, I had more to do than any one person could do, and it was my own fault. I was not very good at saying, “No.” I liked being needed and I liked being liked and carrying a heavy load seemed like the best way to get to be both of those. Carrying it alone worked even better, because I did not have to share the rewards of my labor with anyone else. While I would not have admitted it at the time and I do not like admitting it now, I somehow had the idea that God expected more of me than of other people and that I could not let God down.

So I worked a couple of sixty hour weeks in a row and told myself that I could rest as soon as I got it all done. I did not sleep well and my back began to hurt but I pressed on, until one morning an unexpected thing happened: I could not get out of bed. The muscles in my back had gone on strike, and I could not move. . . . I lay for the next week, my list of things to do gathering dust on the bureau, my appointment book lying neglected on the bed. At first it drove me crazy to look at them but slowly, as the week wore on, they lost their power over me. . . .

It was an easy time that I remember now quite fondly. It was an easy yoke, but not one I would voluntarily have chosen. I thought that the way to find rest for my soul was to finish my list of things to do and present it to God like a full book of savings stamps, but as it turned out that was not the ticket at all. The way to find rest for our souls is simply to stop, to lay down our list of things to do and be, the heavy yokes we have designed for ourselves, and to accept the lighter ones God has made for us instead.

From “The Open Yoke” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Shared yokes

Daily Reading for July 7

If you have traveled around the world or even if you have read National Geographic from time to time, you know that there are two basic kinds of yokes that can be used to bear burdens: single ones and shared ones. The single ones are very efficient. By placing a yoke across the shoulders and fitting buckets hung from poles on each side, human beings can carry almost as much as donkeys. They will tire easily and have to sit down to rest, and their shoulders will ache all the time—their backs may even give out—but still it is possible to move great loads from one place to another using a single creature under a single yoke.

A shared yoke works quite differently. It requires twice as many creatures, for one thing, but if they are a well-matched pair they can work all day, because under a shared yoke one can rest a little while the other pulls. They can take turns bearing the brunt of the load; they can cover for each other without ever laying their burden down because their yoke is a shared one. They have company all day long and when the day is done both may be tired but neither is exhausted, because they are a team.

Plenty of us labor under the illusion that our yokes are single ones, that we have got to go it alone, that the only way to please God is to load ourselves down with heavy requirements—good deeds, pure thoughts, blameless lives, perfect obedience—all those rules we make and break and make and break, while all the time Jesus is standing right there in front of us, half of a shared yoke across his own shoulders, the other half wide open and waiting for us, a yoke that requires no more than that we step into it and become part of a team.

From “The Open Yoke” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Letter to a child

Daily Reading for July 8

My Dear Child,

Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. Something about the prospect of battle moves me to write you a letter. I’m sitting here in the tent. The flaps are rolled up on the sides, and I can see out across the desert to where the sun is sliding down into the sand. . . . I suppose war has a way of helping a person see what is really important in life. . . . It makes me think of you. . . .

I have my Bible here. As I have grown older it has become more precious to me. There is one passage in particular that I ask you always to remember. I guess I don’t really ask you to remember it as much as to live by it. I have found it true for my life. Jesus is teaching the crowds, and he invites them to come to him and learn from him. The words are, as Matthew recalls them, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” This is Jesus’ promise to nurture all those who come to him. You will need that promise. Put it into your backpack with the other treasures you carry.

Of course, Jesus isn’t only offering rest. Immature faith looks to God just for relief from burdens. I pray that you will move beyond that stage into the maturity of faith that will make you a productive worker in God’s work force. There is no discipleship without a task. Don’t settle for welfare and let someone else do your work for you. Don’t be a Christian consumer, like the world teaches us to be. You have more in you than that, and you will miss the greatest joy of your faith. . . .

Besides that, Jesus said you have to take his yoke to have his rest. Here is the hard part that may make you stumble. The yoke is something that you work with. It helps you bear burdens. Jesus puts it on his followers, if they come to him and ask for it. But that is really no different from the desires of our lives, because they put yokes on us and work us in their service. The difference is that Jesus said his yoke fits and is light, and strangely enough, this yoke and this work don’t tire a person out; they refresh. . . .

But enough of this. You can’t learn about rest and joy from me and my journey of faith, only from this mysterious one who says, “Come and learn of me.” It’s your call, but I trust you will find in him what I also have found. That is why I don’t have to give you much advice about your life.

Well, the sun has long since set. You know I love you and want the best for you. You are a joy to me. Forever. Choose your teachers well. I will see you when the sun rises.

From “Letter to a Child” by Stuart G. Collier, quoted in Best Sermons 6, edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1993).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Together and apart

Daily Reading for July 9

Hospitality is a particular Benedictine virtue, “Let all who come be received as Christ” is perhaps one of the most familiar aphorisms of the Rule. And yet the final paragraph is quite clear: “No one is to speak or associate with guests unless he is bidden; however, if a brother meets or sees a guest he is to greet him humbly as we have said. He asks for a blessing and continues on his way explaining that he is not allowed to speak with a guest” (53.23, 24).

Again, there is a line to be drawn. There is a limit to the amount of giving to another. There can be no doubt at all about the respect for the guest, the welcome given, the love shown. Yet there is also respect for one’s self and for one’s own way of life. The peace and silence of the monastery must be protected.

There is a nice balance here of togetherness and apartness, of intimacy and distance. If the life of the community does not go on, there is nothing to give the passing stranger, nothing for him to share or gain from. Its value for him lies precisely in its inner strength, in its certainty that its own way of life has an integrity that must be maintained. No one can be a good host who is not at home in his own house. Nor can I be a good host until I am rooted in my own centre. Then, and only then, have I something to give to others. . . .

Those who live closely together know that too much sharing, too much togetherness is destructive not only of the individual but of the community. . . . Any community must be poised between these two poles of solitude and togetherness, for they are essential to each other. David Steindl-Rast puts this bluntly: “Togetherness without solitude is not truly togetherness, but side-by-sideness. To live merely side by side is alienation. We need time and space to be alone, to find ourselves in solitude before we can give ourselves to another in true togetherness. One needs strong roots in togetherness to be solitary rather than lonely when one is alone. . . . Solitude is aloneness supported by togetherness.”

From Living With Contradiction: Reflections on the Rule of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal (Harper and Row, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Awake or asleep

Daily Reading for July 10

The ancient monastic practice of rising sometime between midnight and two in the morning to pray sanctifies the night hours. To me the idea of nuns and monks rising from their beds in the middle of the night and shuffling down a darkened hall in pairs by candlelight, half asleep, to sing and pray in a cold chapel is both appalling and comforting.

The practice appalls me because I cannot imagine myself rising voluntarily in the night. . . . As a mother, I have no memory at all of my second child's first year when he could not sleep through the night while the oldest, an active toddler, stayed awake by day. . . . Beyond these memories of sleep deprivation, however, the image of nuns and monks singing in the cold chapel in the middle of the night is comforting. I know a practiced spirit stands as a sentry on the boundary of the soul, watching the horizon for danger or delight. . . .

A friend of mine who is a hermit calls Vigils “the prayer office for pious insomniacs.” On a more serious note, though, many religious people are wakened by the Spirit in the middle of the night in order to pray for someone in need. It is a common experience among Christians to discover that at the exact hour when someone needing to be commended to God was ministered to, a friend was raised from sleep on the other side of the globe. A nun once told me about the uncanny intuitiveness of people in parts of Africa, where she served for many years. “People knew of things even before the drumming began,” she said. “This knowing is not such a miracle. It is simply that here in the west, we have forgotten how to be connected.”. . .

So I commend myself to God in prayer before I sleep. Something of our soul will remained linked to that warm darkness beyond its boundary, even in sleep. This dark love, more intimate than a mother’s womb, nourishes, encourages, and guides us, enveloping us in its loving, wordless darkness. When we pay attention, and respond with wordless, loving prayer in the darkness of our souls, we know we are connected to divine life. When we commend our souls to God at night, we take this connection for granted. Awake or asleep, we live in the Lord.

From Praying the Hours by Suzanne Guthrie (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Harmony and balance

Daily Reading for July 11 • St. Benedict of Nursia, c 540

Benedictine harmony and balance and awareness call us all to life drunk deeply. And, interestingly enough, there has probably never been a better moment in history to do that. We have information that has never been known before. We have a vision of the world and all of its people and all of their needs that has never been known to humankind before this time. We have scientific insights that are far beyond the understandings of our ancestors. We have a level of technology that frees us to be humans, not beasts of burden, that frees us to be thinkers on the planet rather than mere survivors of its rigors. We have a mechanized life, a computerized life, and a connected life that frees us and bonds us as at no other time in human history.

All we lack, now that life has become so speeded up, is the will to slow it down so that we can live a little while life goes by. We need to want to be human as well as efficient; to be loving as well as informed; to be caring as well as knowledgeable; to be happy as well as respected.

It’s not easy. But the Rule of Benedict says:

Take care of everything,
revere one another,
eat and drink moderately,
pray where you work,
think deeply about life every day,
read,
sleep well,
don’t demand the best of everything,
pray daily,
live as community. (RB 4)

Be sure that one part of your life is not warring against the other.

From Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today by Joan Chittister, OSB (HarperCollins, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Essential commitments

Daily Reading for July 12

We are frequently told that we live in an age that doubts the wisdom, perhaps even the possibility, of commitment. At the same time, we can see a profound yearning for the values of community in the society of our times: the stability and sense of identity, the rootedness, that is so often lacking for those who live in the modern city. As Simone Weil puts it, ‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.’ Lacking a trust in the essential commitments we would like to believe in, but finding no other path to follow, can be a dispiriting descent into a nihilistic wilderness. Paradoxical as it may seem, only when we are rooted have we really begun to take risks.

As the experience of spending time in a monastic choir makes immediately apparent, monks are one of the clearest signs in the contemporary church of the reality of commitment. The vowed life, the patterned, regular way of living—in a world in which every involvement becomes provisional, in which the individual is all too often only the sum of her economic parts, these are signs of something we say that we want.

Nevertheless, we fear this commitment. It is no accident that people of our time prefer to keep their options open. The ‘deadly theatre’ that we see all around us—the relationships we know to be sham, the ruts we see ourselves and others slipping into, the numbing routine in dead-end situations—all these realities frighten us, as well they might. Commitment is a response, not an initiative. Unless there is something that evokes from us a desire to be committed we will never be able to make that leap. Underpinning all commitments by men and women is the belief that God is committed to us. We can see all too clearly that in the absence of the rising sun of salvation, we do not have the confidence to leap on our own.

From Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscape of Our Lives by Mark Barrett. Second edition. Copyright © 2002, 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Different kinds of ground

Daily Reading for July 13 • The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

I remember seeing this parable [of the sower] acted out in the stage production of “Godspell,” a good-humored play based on the gospel according to Matthew. . . . Watching all of that, I had the same response I always do to this parable: I started worrying about what kind of ground I was on with God. I started worrying about how many birds were in my field, how many rocks, how many thorns. I started worrying about how I could clean them all up, how I could turn myself into a well-tilled, well-weeded, well-fertilized field for the sowing of God’s word. I started worrying about how the odds were three to one against me—those are the odds in the parable, after all—and I began thinking about how I could beat the odds, or at least improve on them, by cleaning up my act.

That is my usual response to this parable. I hear it as a challenge to be different, as a call to improve my life, so that if the same parable were ever told about me it would have a happier ending, with all the seed falling on rich, fertile soil. But there is something wrong with that reading of the parable, because if that is what it is about then it should be called the parable of the different kinds of ground.

Instead, it has been known for centuries as the parable of the sower, which means there is a chance, just a chance, that we have got it all backwards. We hear the story and think it is a story about us, but what if we are wrong? What if it is not about us at all but about the sower? What if it is not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be fazed by such concerns, who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon, who feeds the birds, whistles at the rocks, picks his way through the thorns, shouts hallelujah at the good soil and just keeps on sowing, confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes at last it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?

From “The Extravagant Sower” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Another parable of the sower

Daily Reading for July 14

Once upon a time a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came along and devoured them. So he put his seed pouch down and spent the next hour or so stringing aluminum foil all around his field. He put up a fake owl he ordered from a garden catalog and, as an afterthought, he hung a couple of traps for the Japanese beetles.

Then he returned to his sowing, but he noticed some of the seeds were falling on rocky ground, so he put his seed pouch down again and went to fetch his wheelbarrow and shovel. A couple of hours later he had dug up the rocks and was trying to think of something useful he could do with them when he remembered his sowing and got back to it, but as soon as he did he ran right into a briar patch that was sure to strangle his little seedlings. So he put his pouch down again and looked everywhere for the weed poison but finally decided just to pull the thorns up by hand, which meant he had to go back inside and look everywhere for his gloves.

Now by the time he had the briars cleared it was getting dark, so the sower picked up his pouch and his tools and decided to call it a day. That night he fell asleep in his chair reading a seed catalog, and when he woke the next morning he walked out into his field and found a big crow sitting on his fake owl. He found rocks he had not found the day before and he found new little leaves on the roots of the briars that had broken off in his hands. The sower considered all of this, pushing his cap back on his head, and then he did a strange thing: he began to laugh, just a chuckle at first and then a full-fledged guffaw that turned into a wheeze at the end when the wind ran out.

Still laughing and wheezing he went after his seed pouch and began flinging seeds everywhere: into the roots of trees, onto the roof of his house, across all his fences and into his neighbors’ fields. He shook seeds at his crows and offered a handful to the dog; he even tossed a fistful into the creek, thinking they might take root downstream somewhere. The more he sowed, the more he seemed to have. None of it made any sense to him but for once that did not seem to matter and he had to admit that he had never been happier in all his life.

From “The Extravagant Sower” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Smothered by riches

Daily Reading for July 15

In his explanation of this parable [of the sower], Jesus says that riches smother. They smother because they choke our hearts by the constant thoughts that they arouse. When they prevent good desires from entering our hearts, it is as if they are cutting off the intake of the breath we need to live.

We must notice the two things Jesus links to riches: anxieties and pleasures. Riches overwhelm our hearts with care, and cause them to be dissipated by surfeit. Contrary to our expectations, they make those who possess them both wretched and insecure. Pleasure cannot coexist with wretchedness. At one time riches make us wretched, because we are concerned with protecting them, and at another time they weaken us by providing a surfeit of pleasures.

Good ground brings forth fruit by patience. . . . The more we progress, the more we find things in this world which are hard to bear. As our love for this present age declines, the adversity caused by this age increases. This is the reason we see so many people doing good and yet laboring under a heavy burden of distress. They are fleeing from their earthly desires, and yet heavy afflictions are wearing them out. But according to the word of the Lord they are bringing forth fruit in patience.

From Be Friends of God: Spiritual Reading from Gregory the Great in an English version by John Leinenweber (Cowley Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Essential humility

Daily Reading for July 16

Prayer for the Lambeth Conference, for the ACC, for the Primates, for the Congress, is increasingly needed, that in our talking together we are at the same time listening to God. I have been convinced, however, more so in recent months, that it is not enough. In particular, it was the passage we had for the epistle that has shaped my thinking. . . . “Consider others better than yourselves, look out for one another’s interests, not just your own.” That’s one translation. Another is—“in humble mindedness each counting the other better than himself, each looking not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others.” . . . Now, let us put those injunctions in the context of the tensions and divisions we face in the Communion.

I can illustrate the sharpness of the challenge from my own personal history. For some 25 years I strongly supported the cause of women’s ordination in writing, in planning with others. In the opposition ranks were men and women whose attitudes on this matter I disliked, whose arguments I regarded as fault-ridden, though I did not doubt their sincerity. But I have asked myself—“Did I meet this test of St. Paul?” “Did I count the others as better than myself?” “Did I look to their interests as well as my own?” If these verses from Philippians 2 are about unity in the Church, then, at the heart of the matter is the creation of this humble-minded attitude, this spirit, mutually shared by Christian people. . . .

I recently read an article by one of our most respected newscasters on British TV. Trevor McDonald . . . is the main newscaster on Independent TV. Some years ago he had been to interview Nelson Mandela. . . . McDonald turned to political considerations and suggested there was really no possibility of a meeting of minds between the ANC and the National Party about South Africa’s future. McDonald says, “Mr Mandela’s response was unforgettable.” He said, “when two parties begin serious negotiations you must be prepared to compromise on fundamental principles.” McDonald thought he could not have heard right and Mandela could not have meant that, but Nelson Mandela said it again and again.

To Anglicans, to Christians locked in disagreement over divisive issues—does Mandela’s line sound like heresy? “Being prepared to compromise on fundamental principles.” Apply it to any divisive issue we face! I do not suggest, of course, we have to accept ideas that seem quite wrong—to us dishonest! But I do suggest that if we can recognize that even in the convictions we feel most sure about, regarding contemporary divisive issues in our Communion, we may not possess the whole truth—we are getting to that humility which is essential to true harmony and unity.

From the sermon by the Rev. Canon Colin Craston at the closing Eucharist of the 10th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, October 1996, quoted in Being Anglican in the Third Millennium, edited by James Rosenthal and Nicola Currie. Copyright © 1997. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

An American bishop

Daily Reading for July 17 • William White, Bishop of Pennsylvania, 1836

In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, many believed that the Church of England was doomed to become extinct in the New World. . . . William White, rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, was one of the few who believed that the pattern of Christian life established in the Book of Common Prayer could have a place in the new nation. In 1787, he went to England and was consecrated a Bishop for Pennsylvania by English bishops. He set to work with Bishop Seabury of Connecticut and others to establish an Anglican Church in the United States. That a united Episcopal Church did indeed emerge out of the conflict is due in no small part to White’s judicious wisdom and perseverance.

White was not by temperament an evangelist. He protested against the notion that a bishop should spend time to travel on the grounds that it was “inconsistent with the expectation of a learned episcopate” and “oppressive on a bishop advanced in years.” Furthermore he noted, “a bishop will generally have a family, to whom a reasonable portion of his time will be as much due, as are any of his services to the church.”

But perhaps such a cool and dispassionate approach was exactly what the Episcopal Church needed in those early days. If the Connecticut clergy thought laity should be excluded from the government of the church while Virginians were inclined to place church government in the hands of the laity, White could reason with both and find a way to settle the differences.

From the introduction to William White in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A place just right

Daily Reading for July 18

Many years ago, when our children were very little, one of the girls turned to me and asked, “Will it be all right?” I wasn’t sure what the “it” referred to, but her question held a kind of cosmic significance. “Will it be all right?” I said yes, with my fingers crossed behind my back. That desire and wonder—will everything be all right? Are you all right? Will it be all right? Truth has something to do with our wanting things to turn out right. One word for this “rightness” is God’s glory. The place of glory is where everything turns out right.

To come round where we ought to be is to be in a place just right: this is what it is to be righteous. Things will come out right when we discern that life is a gift from God. It is all gift. The truly moral life begins on the other side of our accepting God’s first gift to us of our own fragile selves. Life as a moral adventure begins on the other side of forgiveness. Only then does truth-telling become an adventure. We begin to see ourselves as actors in a love story. “Every single one of us has a good work to do in life,” writes Elizabeth O’Connor. “This good work not only accomplishes something needed in the world, but completes something in us. When it is finished, a new work emerges that will help make green a desert place as well as scale another mountain inside ourselves.”

O’Connor is telling us what it means to be righteous. No wonder that the Bible tells us that we have no righteousness of our own. We are in enough trouble as it is without adding inflammatory self-righteousness to the fires of human suffering. . . .

What a joy to come down in a place just right, in the valley of love and delight. There is a “rightness” to things and it is hard won. After much pain and a deep vision of the Crucified Christ, the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich could say, “And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Things do come round right.

From Living the Truth by Alan Jones (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Consecrated women

Daily Reading for July 19 • Macrina, Monastic and Teacher, 379

The best-known of the self-consecrated virgins was Macrina, sister of the two great Capadoccian fathers, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory wrote an account of her life and a philosophical dialogue purporting to record her reflections during her last days. Macrina’s desire to remain a virgin received the sympathetic support of her mother, Emilia. But their combined pleas made no impression on her father, who was determined that she would be suitably married. Like so many of her contemporaries, Macrina ultimately bowed to his will and accepted betrothal to a young man who unexpectedly died before the marriage could be completed. This extraordinary circumstance enabled the sharp-witted young woman to argue that, since betrothal was legally held to be as binding as marriage, she was not a maiden but a widow, bound to remain faithful to a husband who was only transported to another world. Popular Christian feeling of the day tended to look with disfavor upon second marriages, as did pagan sentiment. In any case, this argument seems to have borne more weight with her father than had her initial pleas. As a virgin, Macrina lived with her parents and, after her father’s death, she and her mother made their home into an ascetic community. Gregory credited her with drawing him and his brother into the ascetic movement. . . .

Most consecrated women . . . had a least one chaperone, if not a house full of them. Macrina persuaded her mother to join her in establishing a household retreat. Gregory of Nyssa gives the superficial impression that his mother and sister lived a life of complete poverty and seclusion. But then he notes the testimony of a visitor to their establishment that they entertained him and his wife (and their retinue) generously, if temperately, installing them in separate quarters according to sex. The couple were delighted enough with the uplifting atmosphere of the household that they exchanged notes through the servants agreeing to lengthen their stay.

In short, where fortune allowed it, the consecrated woman of the fourth century, virgin or widow, who lived in her own home was usually accompanied by relatives and a fairly large number of servants. In addition, she might add one or more ascetic companions to her familia, which may well have provided a much-needed refuge for religious women without the fortune to support independent establishments.

From “Muffled Voices: The Lives of Consecrated Women in the Fourth Century” by Jo Ann McNamara, in Distant Echoes: Medieval Religious Women, Volume 1, edited by John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (Cistercian Publications, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Living with weeds

Daily Reading for July 20 • The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew may have been clear that there are only two kinds of people in the world—the wheat and the weeds—but it is a clarity that escapes most of us, we who have encountered both kinds in ourselves, and in our neighbors, and in the world. Most of our fields are full of mixed plantings, or worse. Sometimes I think that if I examined mine closely I would not find wheat or weeds anymore. They have grown together for so long that a hybrid would be more likely, a mongrel seed that is neither one nor the other. So the business about gathering and burning the weeds tends to make me a little nervous, and the burning question is: which am I? Wheat or weed? Blessed or cursed? . . .

Sometimes it is might hard to tell the difference between a good plant and a bad one, especially when it can act both ways. I suppose we have all had the experience of uprooting the raspberries by mistake or protecting something interesting that turns out to be a thistle. I don’t know what makes us think we are any smarter about ourselves or about the other people in our lives. We are so quick to judge, as if we were sure we knew the difference between wheat and weeds, good seed and bad, but that is seldom the case. Turn us loose with our machetes and there is no telling what we will chop down and what we will spare. Meaning to be good servants, we go out to do battle with the weeds and end up standing in a pile of wheat.

Or else we do not, because we have the good sense to listen to the sower, whose orders sound foolhardy if not downright dangerous. Leave the weeds and the wheat alone; let them both grow together, he says, letting us know that he does not share our appetite for a pure crop, a neat field, an efficient operation; letting us know that growth interests him more than perfection and that he is willing to risk fat weeds for fat wheat.

From “Learning to Live with Weeds” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Roses and weeds

Daily Reading for July 21

Building and nurturing community—relationships with common purpose and common support—is very much like planting and nurturing a garden. Just a few weeds, if not attended to, can kill what you are trying to grow. Like the weeds in a real garden, if considered alone, they are just healthy plants; in the context of the garden they are killers.

One of these hearty perennials is accidental bomb throwing. Though done by a person of perfectly good will with the best of intentions—that is often the problem—bombing a positive conversation with an emotionally charged issue inevitably brings the potential creativity of the conversation to a screeching halt. . . .

More depressing still is the release of negativity that all too clearly gives speakers a sense of power—and a free ride. If challenged about raining on other people’s parades, they can reply that they were just expressing their feelings and ideas. How often has “just telling the truth” or “what I’m feeling” done irreparable harm?

Anyone is able to report the data or express their feelings. Community builders, however, know the wisdom of the New Testament injunction to speak the truth in love. Love here is not the emotional attachment that makes people tell their beloved that yes, their new hairstyle does look good. Love in this context is the carefully examined concern for how things will turn out for the health of the community as a whole—and, on that basis, some reasonable determination of how much truth to tell at any given time. . . .

As we speak strongly held opinions or feelings, then, it is important to look at the garden in which one speaks. Am I planting a rose or a weed in this community? For the health of the community, one’s motives are not nearly so important as results.

The larger challenge to any community is to take a stand about weeds. If we don’t stand up to dandelions, the lawn will be gone. Often people in communities or organizations that center on doing good have difficulty saying no to the weeds that clog their progress lest someone’s feelings be hurt. Perhaps the next time someone sidetracks progress in our group, we might think of our lawns and politely but firmly say no.

From “The Importance of Pulling Weeds” in Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less by Paul V. Marshall. Copyright © 2008. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

First witness

Daily Reading for July 22 • St. Mary Magdalene

The tradition that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute is among the most extraordinary and implausible inventions ever woven out of gospel texts. The reasoning behind the tradition followed this far-fetched course: the woman who anointed Jesus in Luke (7:36-50) was ‘a sinner’; the scandal of Jesus allowing himself to be touched by a sinner (Luke 7:39) may imply that she was a prostitute (this despite the fact that Luke uses a different word for prostitute elsewhere: 15:30); the woman who anoints Jesus in John’s gospel is Mary of Bethany (John 12:1-8); therefore Mary of Bethany was a prostitute; Luke’s anointing story is immediately followed by information that Mary Magdalene was one of Jesus’ followers, and that seven devils had been driven out of her; therefore Mary Magdalene was a terrible sinner (this despite the fact that this exorcism is given as an example of healing from infirmity, 8:2, and that exorcism usually refers to illness rather than sin); therefore Mary Magdalene may have been the sinner referred to a moment before (this despite the fact that no link is made with the previous mention, but remember that it has been decided that the ‘sinner’ was called Mary); therefore Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Strangely the idea has remained that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute even after her supposed identification with Mary of Bethany—on which it depends—has been largely forgotten. . . .

The tradition of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute has become almost immovable in our received tradition, largely because of the rich artistic work it has inspired. Mary Magdalene is portrayed as an emotional, even hysterical woman with long, loose red hair and a brilliant scarlet dress, weeping at the cross or seeing the risen Jesus in the garden. Though this character has its own appeal, the drawback is that it has also reinforced the identification of women with sexual temptation, for the two classic ways in which a woman can follow Jesus are summed up in the archetypes of Mary the blue-robed mother of Jesus, who has never known sex, and the red-robed Mary Magdalene who has repented of knowing sex.

It is also to be deplored that the prostitute tradition has robbed Mary Magdalene of her dignified stance as leading woman disciple and first witness to the resurrection: from being an example of women’s leadership and ministry she has been sidetracked into being an example of women’s weakness, changeability and need for repentance. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendell comments: ‘Anyone who loves the biblical Mary Magdalene, and compares her with the “Christian” Mary Magdalene, must get very angry. . . . The great sinner, of whom Luke speaks (Luke 7), and Mary Magdalene, whom all four gospels report, have as little to do with each other as Peter and Judas’ (The Women Around Jesus, p. 64).

From “Mary of Magdala” in Six New Gospels: New Testament Women Tell Their Stories by Margaret Hebblethwaite (Cowley Publications, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Love trumps dogma

Daily Reading for July 23

The current state of the Anglican Communion is tenuous. Of all the issues confronted in the church’s two millennia—persecution, war and famine, the rise and fall of nations, of economies, of political systems, of churches—why should this great expression of the Christian faith be shaken to its core over issues of sexuality? Why should the ordination of homosexuals, particularly to the episcopate, be so cataclysmic for Anglicans today? . . .

At our best we are, like most healthy families, composed of individuals very different from one another, occasionally disapproving of these differences, but respectful of them, and in any case committed to preserving the family—not because of some ill-conceived chauvinism or vague notion of inclusivity, but because we love one another. That is the essence of Anglicanism. If at present we are not at our best, perhaps it is less because some people are right and some are wrong than because in our eagerness to be right, we have forgotten to love.

To identify the issue as love may seem to over-simplify it, but there is nothing easy about loving across battle lines. For women and gays to love those who appear to want to deprive them of full membership in their church and of equality as human beings is not easy. For those who believe the church is abandoning its core beliefs, loving those they see as attacking those beliefs is not easy. So much seems to be at stake: in the first instance, full humanity for particular children of God; in the second, the integrity of the church. . . .

So why not simply go our separate ways? Because to do so would break faith with the very heart of Anglicanism—the legacy of Cranmer and the Elizabethan Settlement. To divorce because we don’t agree on matters of belief would be to give up on what has been the noblest impulse of the Anglican dream: that all our understandings of God and God’s will are limited, that love trumps dogmatic belief, and that it is possible to build a Christian communion embracing people who can’t agree on what a Christian communion is.

From “Why the Anglican Communion Matters” by Frank C. Strasburger (Forward Movement Publications, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The cross is everything

Daily Reading for July 24 • Thomas à Kempis, Priest, 1471

Take up your cross, therefore, and follow Jesus, and you will inherit everlasting life. Behold, in the cross is everything, and upon your dying on the cross everything depends. There is no other way to life and to true inward peace than the way and discipline of the cross. Go where you will, seek what you want, you will not find a higher way, nor a less exalted but safer way, than the way of the cross. Arrange and order everything to suit your desires and you will still have to bear some kind of suffering, willingly or unwillingly.

There is no escaping the cross. Either you will experience physical hardship or tribulation of spirit in your soul. At times you will be forsaken by God, at times troubled by those about you and, what is worse, you will often grow weary of yourself. You cannot escape, you cannot be relieved by any remedy or comfort but must bear with it as long as God wills. . . .

If you willingly carry the cross, it will carry you. It will take you to where suffering comes to an end, a place other than here. If you carry it unwillingly, you create a burden for yourself and increase the load, though still you have to bear it. . . . When you willingly carry your cross, every pang of tribulation is changed into hope of solace from God. Besides, with every affliction the spirit is strengthened by grace. For it is the grace of Christ, and not our own virtue, that gives us the power to overcome the flesh and the world. . . . When you get to the point where for Christ’s sake suffering becomes sweet, consider yourself fortunate, for you have found paradise on earth. But as long as adversity irks you, as long as you try to avoid suffering, you will be discontent and ill at ease.

From “The Royal Road” by Thomas à Kempis, in The Imitation of Christ, quoted in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Plough Publishing House, 2003).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The best of things

Daily Reading for July 25 • St. James the Apostle

The sidelong glance of envy distorts our ability to see ourselves realistically, because there will always be people in every category who are better or worse than we are. James may not have gotten much individual attention, but he must have developed a healthy self-acceptance that enabled him to be a valuable part of the group. It seems clear that he was transformed by the power of Jesus from a “son of thunder” to a “team player,” who did not push to get attention merely for himself. That is a remarkable change for one who had boldly said to Jesus, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you” and wanted to be sure he and his brother would be sitting right by Jesus when he came into his glory.

Instead of that glorious end, James became a martyr for his faith. Herod Agrippa, the nephew and successor of Herod Antipas, who put Jesus on trial, “laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword” (Acts 12:1-2). . . .There is an inspiring legend about the way James responded when Herod abused him as Caiaphas and the Roman authorities abused Jesus. There had been a time when James had wanted to call down fire on the Samaritans who had refused him hospitality. Now he did not call out for revenge in the face of being treated like an animal but was compassionate and dignified instead. He did not become a beast in reaction to the beast, but—as did Stephen when he was being stoned, and Jesus when he was crucified—looked up to heaven and asked God’s forgiveness for the people who were putting him to death. This was the great witness of the martyrs when, in the worst of times, they did the best of things.

From “James and James, the Greater and Lesser,” in The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus by John R. Claypool, edited by Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Food from an angel

Daily Reading for July 26 • Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Suddenly, an angel of the Lord stood in front of her, saying, “Anna, Anna, the Lord God has heard your prayer. You will conceive and give birth and your child will be spoken of everywhere people live.” And Anna said, “As the Lord God lives, whether I give birth to either a male or a female child, I will bring it as an offering to the Lord my God and it will be a servant to him all the days of its life.”

Next, two angels came, saying to her, “Look your husband Joachim is coming with his flocks.” For an angel of the Lord had gone down to Joachim, saying, “Joachim, Joachim, the Lord God has heard your prayer. Go down from here. Look, your wife Anna has conceived in her womb.” Immediately, Joachim went down and called the shepherds, telling them, “Bring ten lambs without spot or blemish here to me; the ten lambs will be for the Lord God. Bring twelve tender calves; the twelve calves will be for the priests and the elders. And bring one hundred male goats; the one hundred male goats will be for all the people.” Then, Joachim came with his flocks. Anna was standing at the gate. When she saw Joachim coming with his flocks, Anna ran and wrapped herself around his neck, saying, “Now I know that the Lord God has blessed me greatly. See, the widow is no longer a widow and the childless woman has conceived in her womb.” And Joachim rested for the first day he was home. . . .

And his wife’s pregnancy came to term. After nine months, Anna gave birth and she said to the midwife, “What is it?” The midwife said, “A girl.” Anna said, “My soul exalts this day.” And she put her baby to bed . . . and gave her the name Mary. . . .When the child’s first birthday came, Joachim held a great celebration. He invited the high priests and the priests and the Sanhedrin and the whole nation of Israel. And Joachim brought the child to the priests and they blessed her, saying, “God of our ancestors, bless this child and give her name eternal fame among all generations.” And all the people said, “Let it happen, amen.” And he brought the child to the high priests and they blessed her, saying, “Exalted God, look upon this child and give her a final blessing which will not be succeeded.” . . .

When the child turned three, Joachim said, “Let’s call the pure women of the Hebrews. Let them take up lamps and light them so that the child will not turn back and her heart will never be led away from the temple of the Lord.” And they did these things until they went up to the temple of the Lord. And the priest welcomed her. Kissing her, he blessed her and said, “The Lord God has magnified your name for all generations; through you the Lord will reveal deliverance to the children of Israel in the last days.” And he set her down on the third step of the altar and the Lord God poured grace upon her. She danced triumphantly with her drinks and every house in Israel loved her. And her parents went down, marveling at and praising and glorifying the Lord God because the child had not turned back to look at them. While Mary was in the temple of the Lord, she was fed like a dove and received food from the hand of an angel.

From The Infancy Gospel of James, in a translation based on the Greek text printed in Ronald F. Hock’s The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. http://www.gospels.net/translations/infancyjamestranslation.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Creative change

Daily Reading for July 27 • The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

After the farmer discovered the buried treasure and the merchant found the unique pearl, their lives became genuinely different. All that they had was seen in a new light, and there was a joyful rearrangement of things. Suddenly, there was a willingness to let go of what one did have in order to acquire something that was obviously better. In other words, when the summon bonum comes along and is recognized, it changes the way we evaluate everything and can lead to the radical reordering of our lives. It seems clear that in these parables Jesus was addressing the whole issue of change and how it can occur in positive and creative ways.

If you stop and think about it, every experience of change has two very different aspects. On the one hand, we get something that we did not have, and on the other hand, we give up something that we did have: we gain something at the same time that we lose something. At the most basic level, this is what change is and does. In these first two parables, Jesus is saying that healthy change occurs when we discern that the thing that is being offered is greater and better than the thing that is being taken away. This is why he tells us that the man who found the treasure went and sold everything he owned to buy the field, and he did it with great joy.

Creative changes occur in our lives when we discern that what is being given is really of a greater value than what is being asked of us. The same experience, however, becomes destructive when the gain dimension is not obvious, and when all we can think about is the loss dimension. From this perspective, change is by no means a life-enhancing and life-enriching process, but rather a diminishment and a lessening of the good. . . .

The experience of change gives us something as well as takes something away. If we can learn to focus on what we are given, then our attitude toward change can become genuinely different. Instead of digging in our heels and saying, “Come weal, come woe, my status is quo,” we can begin to search through the new and different landscape which change necessarily brings for the gift that we are being given.

From Stories Jesus Still Tells by John Claypool, revised second edition (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

What kind of kingdom?

Daily Reading for July 28

What kind of kingdom will this be? It will be a kingdom where, in accordance with Jesus’ prayer, God’s name is truly hallowed, his will is done on earth, human beings will have everything in abundance, all sin will be forgiven and all evil overcome.

It will be a kingdom where, in accordance with Jesus’ promises, the poor, the hungry, those who weep and those who are downtrodden will finally come into their own; where pain, suffering, and death will have an end.

It will be a kingdom that cannot be described, but only made known in metaphors: as the new covenant, the seed springing up, the ripe harvest, the great banquet, the royal feast.

It will therefore be a kingdom—wholly as the prophets foretold—of absolute righteousness, of unsurpassable freedom, of dauntless love, of universal reconciliation, of everlasting peace. In this sense therefore it will be the time of salvation, of fulfillment, of consummation, of God’s presence: the absolute future.

From Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, translated by Edward Quinn (William Collins, 1977).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Absorbed in trivialities

Daily Reading for July 29 • Mary and Martha of Bethany

From struggling through Paradise Lost in freshman English, we “know” that the worst sin is overweening pride. . . . The time I have spent listening to women’s stories, however, has convinced me that there are distinctly feminine patterns of sinfulness, and pride is not their besetting sin, even though many readily accuse themselves of it. . . . Far from being pride, women’s distinctive sin is self-contempt. . . .

Women’s self-contempt manifests itself as an unwillingness to grow and take the risks that growth demands. It is often difficult for women to see that their reluctance to accept maturity is a tacit refusal of adult responsibility. “How can this be?” they ask, as they feel themselves burdened, indeed overwhelmed, by their responsibilities as wives, mothers, employees, and professionals. Yet by over-zealousness in their obligations toward others, especially husbands and children, and a corresponding neglect of themselves, women manage to avoid inner growth. There is no quality of careless abandon to this spiritual irresponsibility; on the contrary, it is grim and confining.

Women’s tentativeness is another manifestation of self-contempt, as is an apparent absorption in triviality. Both are a noisy kind of silence, a screen erected—perhaps unconsciously—against clarity. By hesitating to take firm stands or express herself in decisive language, she sends a strong message that she does not deserve to be heard. By letting herself become immersed in trivialities, she sends a message that she does not deserve to be seen, at least not as an aware adult. Furthermore, absorption in trivialities deadens pain, for the woman is too preoccupied to face herself, her human relationships, and—of course—God.

From “Women and Spiritual Direction” in Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction by Margaret Guenther (Cowley Publications, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Tenderness of conscience

Daily Reading for July 30 • William Wilberforce, 1833

Let him, then, who would be indeed a Christian, watch over his ways and over his heart with unceasing circumspection. Let him endeavour to learn, both from men and books, particularly from the lives of eminent Christians, what methods have been actually found most effectual for the conquest of every particular vice, and for improvement in every branch of holiness. Thus whilst he studies his own character, and observes the most secret workings of his own mind, and of our common nature; the knowledge of which he will acquire of the human heart in general, and especially of his own, will be of the highest utility, in enabling him to avoid or to guard against the occasions of evil: and it will also tend, above all things to the growth of humility, and to the maintenance of that sobriety of spirit and tenderness of conscience, which are eminently characteristic of the true Christian. It is by this unceasing diligence, as the Apostle declares, that the servants of Christ must make their calling sure; and it is by this only that their labour will ultimately succeed; for ‘so an entrance shall be ministered unto them abundantly, into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’

From A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System, or Professed Christianity in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country contrasting with Real Christianity (1797) by William Wilberforce, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Examen

Daily Reading for July 31 • Ignatius of Loyola, 1556

Making the General Examination of Conscience

The First Point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits I have received from Him.

The second is to ask grace to know my sins and rid myself of them.

The third is to ask an account of my soul from the hour of rising to the present examen, hour by hour or period by period; first as to thoughts, then words, then deeds. . . .

The fourth is to ask pardon of God our Lord for my faults.

The fifth is to resolve, with His Grace, to amend them.

Close with an Our Father.

From “A Method for Making the General Examination of Conscience” by Ignatius of Loyola, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on July 31, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Christianity in England

Daily Reading for August 1 • Joseph of Arimathea

The legends connecting Jesus and Joseph with Cornwall/Somerset go something like this: 1) There is an Eastern tradition that Joseph was the Uncle of Mary, Mother of Jesus. 2) Further tradition states that Joseph was a merchant in the tin trade that flourished between the west coast of England, and Europe and the Mediterranean. 3) On one or more occasions, the legends state that Joseph brought his grandnephew Jesus with him on business trips to the mines in Cornwall/Somerset. On one of those trips, Jesus and Joseph built the church in Glastonbury (later to be used by Joseph and his followers after the death and resurrection of Jesus). Jesus dedicated the church to his Mother (the niece of Joseph of Arimathea).

As stated earlier, there are no direct early historical, or even literary references to these legends. The earliest reference of any kind may be in William Blake’s famous poem, “Jerusalem,” which is now a much-loved hymn in England:

And did those feet in ancient times
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills? . . .

(William Blake, 1757-1827)

There is some background and indirect evidence that just prevent the legend from being totally implausible. There is no question that there were tin mines in Western Britain in the early first century. And there is no question that the tin was traded with other parts of the Continent. Proponents of the legend point to several place names in Cornwall/Somerset that have Jewish names, or that refer directly to Christ (“Jesus Well,” “Penzance”). . . .

So, are the stories and legends true? In my personal opinion, the idea that Joseph brought a small band of followers to Britain in the first century, and started a church at Glastonbury seems reasonably credible (although not absolutely provable). . . . However, I can speak quite personally that Glastonbury is a very eerie place, and if miracles could occur anywhere in the world, I could believe that they could occur there.

From “Joseph of Arimathea: Biblical & Legendary Accounts” by Robert C. Jones. Copyright 1997. http://www.sundayschoolcourses.com/joseph/joseph.htm

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Creatures of habit

Daily Reading for August 2

When we are nearby to our usual place of meditation, we should return to that place at the appointed times, for we are sustained by such continuity. We are physical creatures, and concrete reinforcement of habits of meditation, prayer, and gratefulness will assist us in the work.

Similarly, when we are nearby to our friends and family at mealtimes, we should return to them to take our meals in community, renewing and continuing the relationships that make up the fabric of our lives.

We are ceremonial creatures. A special place for worship services should be maintained, and in that place only such work on our spirits should take place. It should be made available between services for individual prayer and meditation. It should at all times be treated with reverence, and when services are not taking place a deep silence should be preserved there.

We must not allow criticisms of the failings of organized religions to keep us from worshiping in community. No one can live up to the true standards of the great religions. There is no church, synagogue, or temple that does not contain some number of persons who are sincere, worthy of friendship, and from whom we can learn.

From Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living by John McQuiston II. Copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The problem with miracles

Daily Reading for August 3 • The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

The problem with miracles is that we tend to get mesmerized by them, focusing on God’s responsibility and forgetting our own. Miracles let us off the hook. They appeal to the part of us that is all too happy to let God feed the crowd, save the world, do it all. We do not have what it takes, after all. What we have to offer is not enough to make any difference at all, so we hold back and wait for a miracle, looking after our own needs and looking for God to help those who cannot help themselves. . . .

“They need not go away,” Jesus says, “you give them something to eat.” Not me but you; not my bread but yours; not sometime or somewhere else but right here and now. Stop looking for someone else to solve the problem and solve it yourselves. Stop waiting for food to fall from the sky and share what you have. Stop waiting for a miracle and participate in one instead.

From “The Problem with Miracles” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

God in the midst of chaos

Daily Reading for August 4

All of us go through transitions in life. We move away, get married, have children; we get hired and fired; relationships bloom and fracture. Flexibility may be the ultimate spiritual virtue. Because if we wait until things calm down in our lives before seeking to forge a fruitful relationship with the divine, it will never happen. God’s voice and presence is everywhere, even in the midst of the chaos that so often defines our lives.

Eventually I realized that through the chaos of having young children, God opened my eyes to new possibilities and new ways of experiencing the divine. Finding God in the midst of domestic chaos was a revelation that relationship with God can be a very messy affair. And that’s okay. God is just as present in our lives when we walk around the block in pajamas at 2:00 a.m. with a crying baby as in a reflective ten minutes of silence before a worship service. The trick is balance. And recognizing that there is no ordinary time; it is all blessed by God. . . .

I once saw a bumper sticker that read, THERE IS NO SECULAR WORLD. I’m not big on bumper sticker theology—HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS and the like—but this proclamation said it all. There is no secular world. It is all sacred because God pervades everything. The divine presence weaves its way throughout our daily lives. . . . We often see snippets of the truth on the highways and byways of life, just as we do in the midst of domestic chaos. We simply need to open our eyes to the possibilities.

From What Size are God’s Shoes? Kids, Chaos, and the Spiritual Life by Tim Schenck, with a foreword by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Stories of unseen things

Daily Reading for August 5

“I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love . . .”

This Sunday School song, echoing from my earliest childhood memories, suggests a question—just how do we tell the story of the unseen? So, it’s about Jesus and his glory—but how and when have we witnessed heavenly glory? We can perhaps speak of Jesus’ love with great personal authenticity, but without viewing Jesus in the flesh, without seeing him at his Father’s right hand, words fail us again. . . .

We try, in the moment, to make sense out of what may often seem surreal, horrifying, incongruous, paradoxical, irrelevant, absurd, while retaining a kind of eschatological hope that God’s order, peace, design, glory, and joy will fill all the spaces in our widely scattered personal and cosmic jig-saw puzzles. We look forward to a time when, like Moses, after his Sinai encounter with Yahweh, our faces will shine in a way that no earthly description could illuminate. . . .

We are all, whether or not we are conscious of it, swimming in waters of unknown depth. St. Paul prayed for his friends that “the eyes of their hearts might be enlightened.” The stories, the poems, are there to be attended to, to be absorbed if we are willing to give them our attention, to follow the path of exploration and observation, eyes and ears alert, to follow the word, even giving over our conscious control of where it will lead. Madeleine L’Engle calls this way of life “becoming the servant of the word.”

Like Mary, with her available womb, like the ancient prophets, standing in the gap, a foot in two worlds, with souls attuned to both heaven and earth, like the psalmists listening for celestial tunes and translating them into the real poetry of both desolation and exaltation, like the Son of God himself become flesh, we fulfill our destinies by telling and re-telling the story that weaves together divine transcendence and earthy human experience.

From “Reversing Entropy” by Luci Shaw, quoted in Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith, edited by Jennifer L. Holberg (Eerdmans, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Lifted into orbit

Daily Reading for August 6 • The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Transfiguration is a central theme of Christianity, the transforming of sufferings and circumstances, of men and women with the vision of Christ before them and the Holy Spirit within them. The language both of vision and of transformation is found in the Pauline, Johannine, and Petrine writings in the New Testament, and the language tells of Christian experience which recurs through the centuries. This is not to say that there are many conscious references to the transfiguration story in the New Testament writings, but only that the themes are recurring Christian themes and the transfiguration is a symbol of them.

The transfiguring of suffering is attested in Christian life. Sometimes a person suffers greatly, and the suffering continues and does not disappear; but through nearness to Christ there is seen a courage, an outgoing love and sympathy, a power of prayer, a Christlikeness of a wonderful kind. It is a privilege of the Christian pastor to be meeting these experiences and to be learning from them more than he or she can ever teach. . . .

Circumstances are transfigured. Something blocks your path, some fact of life or person or obstacle which is utterly thwarting and frustrating. It seems impossible to remove it or ignore it or surmount it. But when it is seen in a larger context, and that context is Jesus crucified and risen, it is in a new orbit of relationships and while it remains, it remains differently. A phrase of St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 4 seems to interpret the experience, when he contrasts our “light affliction” with the “exceeding weight of glory,” the one belonging to time and the other to eternity. Such is the transforming of circumstances, not by their abolition but by the lifting of them into the orbit of a crucified and risen Jesus.

From “The Mount and the Plain” in Be Still and Know by Michael Ramsey, quoted in To Believe is To Pray: Readings from Michael Ramsey, edited by James E. Griffiss (Cowley Publications, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

John Mason Neale

Daily Reading for August 7 • John Mason Neale, Priest, 1866

With particular gifts as a hymn writer, Neale was responsible for English translations of many notable hymns from both the Greek and Latin traditions, as well as writing many original compositions. . . . He had a particular interest in the Eastern Church and his writings and translations of Eastern hymns helped to make Orthodox history, theology, and devotion known to Anglicans.

The Ascension and Pentecost

Holy gift, surpassing comprehension!
Wound’rous mystery of each fiery tongue!
Christ made good His Promise in Ascension:
O’er the Twelve the cloven flames have hung! . . .

O that shame, now ended in that glory!
Pain untold, now lost in joy unknown!
Tell it out with praise, the whole glad story,
Human nature at the Father’s Throne! . . .

Eternal! After Thine own will
Thou born in time would’st be:
After the self-same counsel still
was Thine Epiphany:

Thou in our flesh didst yield Thy breath,
Immortal God, for man:
Thou by Thy death didst conquer Death,
Through Thine Almighty plan:
Thou, rising Victor to the sky,
Fill’st Heav’n and earth above:
And send’st the Promise from on high,
The Spirit of Thy love!

From “The Ascension and Pentecost” and an introduction to John Mason Neale, in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The discipline of the mind

Daily Reading for August 8 • Dominic, Priest and Friar, 1221

The centers of intellectual and theological enquiry increasingly moved during the twelfth century to new cathedral “schools” that eventually gave birth to the great European universities. This involved a geographical shift of learning from countryside to new cities. However, the move involved more than geography. The theological enterprise was no longer focused in centers explicitly dedicated to a religious way of life. The new universities existed primarily to foster teaching and learning. The new theology gradually gave birth to a belief that the discipline of the mind could be separated from the discipline of an ordered lifestyle, ascesis, or what we call “spirituality.”

The new mendicant religious orders were essentially an urban phenomenon. Their foundation in so many ways parallels the birth of the universities and it was not long before the new orders became deeply involved in teaching—indeed often taking a leading role in university development. Inevitably this link gave birth to an intellectualist shift in spirituality. So, for example, the Dominicans entered the universities initially to educate their own members to be effective preachers. Gradually, however, they developed an intellectual ministry—indeed were the originators of the idea that the intellectual life was a spiritual path. The Dominicans led the way in exploring how to cope theologically and spiritually with the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle (as in the works of Thomas Aquinas).

Although by the sixteenth century, the Protestant reformers decried to a large extent the curriculum and focus of late medieval universities—because it seemed to prepare students in a form of theology devoid of spirituality—it should be remembered that throughout the greater part of the Middle Ages, the university in the city was an institution that acted as a bearer of religious life and spirituality for the Western world.

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Gathering the broken pieces

Daily Reading for August 9

There is a great waste of power in our failure to appreciate our opportunities. ‘If I only had the gifts that this man has I would do the large and beautiful things that he does. But I never have the chance of doing such things. Nothing ever comes to my hand but opportunities for little commonplace things.’ Now, the truth is that nothing is commonplace. The giving of a cup of cold water is one of the smallest kindnesses anyone can show to another, yet Jesus said that God takes notice of this act amid all the events of the whole world, any busy day, and rewards it. It may not be cabled half round the world and announced with great headlines in the newspapers, but it is noticed in heaven. We do not begin to understand what great waste we are allowing when we fail to put the true value on little opportunities of serving others. Somehow we get the feeling that any cross-bearing worthwhile must be a costly sacrifice, something that puts nails through our hands, something that hurts till we bleed. . . .

When the great miracle of the loaves had been wrought, Jesus sent his disciples to gather up the broken pieces, ‘that nothing be lost’. The Master is continually giving us the same command. Every hour’s talk we have with a friend leaves fragments that we ought to gather up and keep to feed our heart’s hunger or the hunger of others’ hearts, as we go on. When we hear good words spoken or read a good book, we should gather up the fragments of knowledge, the suggestions of helpful thoughts, the broken pieces, and fix them in our hearts for use in our lives. We allow large values of the good things we hear or read to turn to waste continually because we are poor listeners or do not try to keep what we hear. We let the broken pieces be lost and thereby are great losers. If only we would gather up and keep all the good things that come to us through conversations and through reading, we would soon have great treasures of knowledge and wisdom.

From The Book of Comfort by James Russell Miller, quoted in The Westminster Collection of Christian Meditations, compiled by Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild (Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Seeing Jesus

Daily Reading for August 10 • The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“In the fourth watch of the night he came to them walking on the sea.” That is to say, Jesus has been on the way to his disciples for a long time already, long before they notice it. “But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’” That is just how it is: Even if we get a glimpse of something, we do not for a moment notice that he is the one who is coming. We have just expected him in an altogether different way. . . . Jesus has seen his disciples for a long while already, but they do not see him. That is to say, they see that something is happening, but they do not perceive that Jesus is coming to them in it. . . .

“So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus.” For one brief moment Peter is the mighty hero of faith. “But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink . . .” In one moment a fantastic experience of faith is bestowed on him, and in the next moment comes its complete breakdown. He sees nothing but the storm. We too know what that is like—situations in which we really experience God and in which, immediately afterward, doubt returns and everything again seems dead. . . .

“Jesus immediately reached out his hand.” He does not keep him in suspense. At this point, there is no moral lesson, and Jesus applies none of the disciplinary actions that we are so eager to apply in just such cases. Jesus takes our efforts seriously, even if everything goes wrong. . . . That is the first thing that Jesus wants to say to us today. There are tensions in the life of the church. We should learn to be completely open to new ways and, for a change, even to dare the almost impossible. At the same time, we must know in the deepest sense that this is never simply “practicable,” that we therefore can only pray and hope that he will bless our venture, our starting out, our work. . . . Nothing is wrong with Peter’s seeing wind and waves. It is rather a matter of our seeing Jesus throughout all these realities; not seeing the waves at one time on the left and then again Jesus on the right, but rather seeing him there behind all that threatens.

From “In the Storm with Jesus” by Eduard Schweizer, quoted in Best Sermons 7 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1994).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Holy poverty

Daily Reading for August 11 • Clare, Abbess of Assisi, 1253

As I hear of your holy conduct and irreproachable life, which is known not only to me but to the entire world as well, I greatly rejoice and exult in the Lord. . . . For, though you, more than others, could have enjoyed the magnificence and honor and dignity of the world and could have been married to the illustrious Caesar with splendor befitting you and His Excellency, you have rejected all these things and have chosen with your whole heart and soul a life of holy poverty and destitution. Thus you took a spouse of a more noble lineage, who will keep your virginity ever unspotted and unsullied, the Lord Jesus Christ.

When you have loved [Him], you shall be chaste;
when you have touched [Him], you shall become pure;
when you have accepted [Him], you shall be a virgin.
Whose power is stronger,
Whose generosity is more abundant,
Whose appearance more beautiful,
Whose love more tender,
Whose courtesy more gracious.
In Whose embrace you are already caught up;
Who has adorned your breast with precious stones
and has placed priceless pearls in your ears
and has surrounded you with sparkling gems
as though blossoms of springtime
and placed on your head a golden crown
as a sign [to all] of your holiness.

Therefore, most beloved sister, or should I say, Lady, worthy of great respect: because you are “the spouse” and “the mother” and “the sister” of my Lord Jesus Christ, and have been adorned resplendently with the sign of inviolable virginity and most holy poverty: Be strengthened in the holy service which you have undertaken out of an ardent desire for the Poor Crucified, who for the sake of us took upon Himself the passion of the cross and delivered us from the power of the Prince of Darkness to whom we were enslaved because of the disobedience of our first parent, and so reconciled us to God the Father.

From one of the letters of Clare of Assisi to Agnes of Prague, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Generous Christianity

Daily Reading for August 12 • Florence Nightingale, Nurse, Social Reformer, 1910

Florence Nightingale evoked very different opinions from contemporaries and later critics. The novelist Mrs. Gaskell thought her ‘completely led by God as Joan of Arc. . . . It makes one feel the livingness of God more than ever to think how straight he is sending his spirit down into her, as into the prophets and saints of old.’

Lytton Strachey, however, remarked that her conception of God was ‘certainly not orthodox. She felt towards him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer. . . . One has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if she is not careful, she will kill him with overwork.’ Half a century later, for Ida Görres, the practical achievements of Nightingale surpassed making up ‘spiritual posies’, and stressing the supernatural to avoid facing reality. She was a ‘glorious embodiment of the best of the nineteenth century—with its enthusiasm for Progress in all its pristine freshness. . . . Did she not still live up to all three evangelical counsels, and on a heroic scale at that: virginity, forgoing the cravings of the heart again and again for the sake of her vocation; obedience, to its wearing, merciless claims; poverty, in the austere and selfless privations involved in her utter surrender to the “one thing needful”? Is her broad, glowing, generous Christianity not more truly human, more truly Christian than at least our present-day cloister ideal?’ (Broken Lights, London, 1964).

In 1850-1851 Florence Nightingale wrote in her diary: “I am 30 . . . the age at which Christ began his mission. No more childish things, no more vain things, no more love, no more marriage. Now, Lord, let me only think of thy will. . . . But why, oh my God, cannot I be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people?”

From Invincible Spirits: A Thousand Years of Women’s Spiritual Writings, compiled by Felicity Leng (Eerdmans, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Faith and charity

Daily Reading for August 13 • Jeremy Taylor, 1667

Faith supplies charity with argument and maintenance, and charity supplies faith with life and motion; faith makes charity reasonable, and charity makes faith living and effectual. . . . For to think well, or to have a good opinion, or an excellent or a fortunate understanding, entitles us not to the love of God and the consequent inheritance; but to choose the ways of the Spirit, and to relinquish the paths of darkness, this is the way of the kingdom, and the purpose of the gospel, and the proper work of faith.

. . . .

God is present in his essence; which, because it is infinite, cannot be contained within the limits of any place; and as the sun, reflecting upon the mud of strands and shores, is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonored when we suppose him in every one of his creatures, and in every part of every one of them.

From “Discourse on Faith” in The Great Exemplar (1649) and Holy Living by Jeremy Taylor, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Extraordinary commitment

Daily Reading for August 14 • Jonathan Myric Daniels, 1965

As soon as [ESCRU’s executive director, the Rev.] John Morris learned of Daniels’s death, he made arrangements for the body to be flown back to Daniels’s home in Keene, New Hampshire, for burial. In place of a formal eulogy at the funeral service, excerpts from Daniels’s theological writings were read aloud to the mourners gathered at St. James’ Church. In one of those selections, he wrote that he had stopped being afraid of death in Alabama, for he realized that “I had truly been baptized into the Lord’s death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”

Stokely Carmichael, the SNCC organizer with whom Daniels had worked most closely in Alabama, was deeply upset by the murder and remarked that Daniels had “lived like Christ.” In tears at the interment following the funeral, Carmichael joined hands with other mourners, who softly sang “We Shall Overcome” beside the grave.

At the same time, memorial services were held in many other churches throughout the country, and the slain seminarian received numerous tributes. Frank Mathews expressed shock at what had happened and offered prayers at St. Paul’s. William Stringfellow, who had been one of Daniels’s mentors, called him “an authentic Christian” who had died simply for doing what the gospel demanded; Judith Upham believed his witness demonstrated that “God requires not extraordinary people, but ordinary people with an extraordinary commitment as channels for His grace-full action in the world.”

From Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights by Gardiner H. Shattuck (The University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Theotokos

Daily Reading for August 15 • St. Mary the Virgin

All of eastern piety, according to Vladimir Lossky, consists of the celebration of what is the goal of our salvation: overcoming the abyss between God and man. This is why there is added to the Christians’ devotion to an incarnate divine hypostasis, Jesus Christ, a deified human hypostasis, Mary, whom Gregory Palamas calls: ‘the boundary between the created and the uncreated’.

We hear about ‘the eschatologism of the eastern Church’. Is the mystery of Mary not one of the most effective expressions of this hope? ‘The last glory of the Mother of God’, Lossky continues, is ‘the eschaton realized in a created person before the end of the world. Tradition shows us the Mother of God in the midst of the disciples on the day of Pentecost. . . . The Mother of God received with the Church the last and only thing she lacked, so that she might grow to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’

In pre-revolutionary Russia, close to a thousand icons of Mary were venerated in the liturgical calendar under various names—for example, ‘Our Consolation’, ‘Provident’, ‘Softening of our evil hearts’, and so on. The icon called Pokrov (Protection) represents the Virgin covering the entire earth with her mantle. The icon Znamenye (Sign, Miracle) shows Mary in the orans posture, with the Word of God on her breast. This is symbolic of the deifying contemplation which makes God present in the soul. On the icon of the Ascension, the Virgin represents the Church imploring the descent of the Spirit and the second coming of the Saviour. The veneration of the Mother of God represents one of the typical traits of eastern Christians because devotion to the Theotokos (God-bearer) agrees well with the characteristics of eastern spirituality.

From Prayer: The Spirituality of the Christian East, Volume 2 by Tomaš Špidlík SJ (Cistercian Publications, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Transforming presence

Daily Reading for August 16

In the end, Jesus raises Peter up from the water (still without having calmed the storm) and climbs into the boat with the other disciples. It is only now that the wind drops and the sea is calm. In the boat, gathered around Jesus, there is calm and peace. Peter and the others have been saved from the storm, not through their own efforts and abilities or their skills as fishermen, but by the presence of the Son of God in their boat. Gathering around that presence in humble acknowledgment of who he is transforms their world. They now have a new perspective, a new understanding and are now able to complete their journey to the other side of the lake. They know that storms are as much a part of life on the lake as they are a part of life and discipleship. Now they have been shown in a most dramatic way that it does not matter how severe the storm; for the one who believes there is always peace and calm.

Jesus is not presented here as the one who calms the sea and quietens the wind. He is the one who comes to the disciples in the midst of the storm, unhindered by what is raging around them, and who brings peace and comfort—who enables them to continue with their journey in safety. He is the one who is able to do what they, with all their strengths and talents, could not achieve. He comes to them not as the transformer of the world but as the transformer of human lives. The disciples are the ones who are changed in this story, and once they are changed the storms die down. Whether or not it continued to rage is irrelevant, because they now approach it differently, with a new perspective. In their boat, regardless of the sea around them, they have courageous hearts and peaceful minds.

From “For Those Who Trust in God” by Michael Hough, quoted in Best Sermons 5 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Crossing the line

Daily Reading for August 17 • The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

This passage from Matthew describes one of those difficult moments in Jesus’ life that we might skip altogether if the lectionary did not direct us to deal with it. What makes it so difficult is how harsh Jesus sounds, how harsh and downright rude. . . .

He does not answer [the Canaanite woman] a word. He draws the line, as surely as if he had leaned down and traced it in the dust at his feet. Enough is enough. He will go no further. . . . But the woman will not stay on her side of the line. Kneeling at his feet, she says, “Lord, help me.” . . .

Her responses to Jesus remind me of that game children play, in which two of them look steadily into each other’s eyes, each trying to make the other blink first. Jesus all but claps his hands in the woman’s face but she does not blink. “Yes, Lord,” she says when he calls her a dog, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” When she says that, something in him is rearranged and changed forever, a change you can hear in his voice. “O woman, great is your faith,” he says to her. “Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter is healed instantly.

The line he had drawn between himself and the woman disappears; the limits he had placed on himself vanish, and you can almost hear the huge wheel of history turning as Jesus comes to a new understanding of who he is and what he has been called to do. He is no longer a Messiah called only to the lost sheep of Israel, but God’s chosen redeemer of the whole world, Jews and gentiles alike, beginning with this Canaanite woman.

Through her faith he learns that God’s purpose for him is bigger than he had imagined, that there is enough of him to go around, and in that moment there is no going back to the limits he observed even a moment ago. The old boundaries will not contain his new vision—he must rub them out and draw them bigger, to include this foreign woman today and who knows what tomorrow—it looks like answering God’s call means that he can no longer control his ministry or narrow his mission. There is no more safety or certainty for him, no more guarding against loss or hanging on to his cherished notions about the way things ought to be. Faith works like a lever on him, opening his arms wider and wider until there is room for the whole world in them.

From “Crossing the Line” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Jesus' universality

Daily Reading for August 18 • William Porcher DuBose, Priest, 1918

DuBose urges that Jesus’ humanity was not merely the humanity of an individual man, but rather “the common and universal nature of us all.” Therefore Jesus’ human holiness, righteousness, and life possess a “universal” significance. Accordingly, Jesus “can be nothing less than God our holiness, our righteousness, our life.” Jesus was no mere sample or example of human salvation: “it was not one man but humanity that He was.”

The universality of Jesus’ human nature is significant for our salvation. Jesus “included all selves in Himself, and suffers, and is crucified and put to shame, or lives anew, rejoices, and is glorified in the whole body and in every member of the humanity that is Himself and His own.” Jesus “is present in us every one; and operative unto salvation in every one of us who believes and realizes His presence.” The universality of the Incarnation is a distinctive feature of DuBose’s Christology. In the Incarnation, humanity is saved through Jesus who “is the human, but the divine-human, conqueror and destroyer of sin and of death.” Jesus “brought with Him something into our nature and life which was not there before, and raised them into something which was not themselves or their own, and to which they could attain only in and through Him. Jesus’ divine-human accomplishment is exceptional, unique, and beyond unaided human possibility."

From The Theology of William Porcher DuBose: Life, Movement, and Being by Robert Boak Slocum (University of South Carolina Press, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Pushing old boundaries

Daily Reading for August 19

Over and over, God’s call to us means pushing old boundaries, embracing outsiders, giving up the notion that there is not enough of us to go around. We may resist; we may even lose our tempers, but the call of God is insistent, as insistent as the Canaanite woman who would not leave Jesus alone. The call of God keeps after us, calling us by name, until finally we step over the lines we have drawn for ourselves and discover a whole new world on the other side. . . .

The best lesson, I suppose, is that God’s face can turn up anywhere, and especially on the far side of the lines we draw to protect ourselves—in the face of a Canaanite woman, or a person with AIDS, or in any of the other faces that turn toward us seeking help, seeking care, seeking relationship with us that we are reluctant to give. The call of God is insistent, and whenever we limit who we will be to other people or who we will let them be for us, God gets to work, rubbing out the lines we have drawn around ourselves and calling us into the limitless country of his love. We may well formulate new limits and draw new lines, but none of them last very long, because that is the way it is when people have been called out by God. Once God has called us out there is no going back—whatever we choose to do—God never calls us back behind our lines.

From “Crossing the Line” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Stages of love

Daily Reading for August 20 • Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, 1153

Human love for God progresses through four stages, Bernard says. We begin by loving ourselves only, a sterile love that produces nothing and leads nowhere. But in time we notice that we cannot survive alone and that God graciously meets our needs. We then begin to love God, but only because of what God does for us. This is the second stage of love. Gradually, as we experience God’s love, our love is purified and expanded so that we are moved to love God for God’s own sake, not merely for the benefits he bestows upon us. This is the third stage of love, but one final stage remains: the love of ourselves—as God loves us and for God’s sake. We grow inebriated with divine love and forget ourselves, becoming like broken dishes, rushing toward God, clinging to him, becoming one with him in spirit. “To lose yourself, as if you no longer existed, to cease completely to experience yourself, to reduce yourself to nothing is not a human sentiment but a divine experience,” Bernard writes. In this life, we experience this final stage of love only fleetingly, if at all. In one of his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard speaks of “a sudden momentary blaze of glory, so that a great flame of love is enkindled in the soul.”

This, of course, is the language of mysticism. . . . For Bernard, the human soul retains its identity and becomes all the more alive. Others, like Gregory of Nyssa, speak of moving into a darkness where God discloses himself. Bernard, however, writes of gazing upon God in the luminous face of Christ. Bernard’s mystical experience is an intense relationship of love, preceded by much prayer and longing; it is the culmination of a long, plodding ascent. When the moment passes, it leaves one craving more. It is a foretaste of heaven.

From God Seekers: Twenty Centuries of Christian Spiritualities by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Growing from mistakes

Daily Reading for August 21

This is one of the Scripture passages that fall under the category of “The Hard Sayings of Jesus,” those recorded moments when he doesn’t behave as we think he should. Who wants a Savior who acts like a New York waiter? Earnest church people have gone to great lengths to excuse such hard sayings or find a way around them—that Jesus didn’t really mean it, that there was an obscure slang linkage between gentiles and dogs, so that this is really a commentary about first-century Judaism. We have a pretty rigid idea of what Jesus should and shouldn’t do, and we’ll do just about anything to protect it. . . . We talk about a Jesus who “was in every way tempted as we are, yet did not sin.” And we think this means he was without error.

But being without sin doesn’t mean he never did anything incorrect. “Without sin” means that there was no separation from God. Jesus was truly human and truly divine, we say. If so, surely part of being human is learning from your errors. You grow from your mistakes, and deepen from repentance. These things are our primary means of moral and spiritual learning, and Jesus—as both the Son of God and a human being—is meaningless if we strip him of them. . . . Who would Jesus be if his temptations were somehow less real than ours? His temptations were terrible—and they would get a lot worse than having a bad day and snapping at somebody.

It is never too late to do things differently. Correction can come from some pretty unexpected places, and we’d better be ready for it—if we want to become everything we can become. We should not be ashamed of error when it appears: shame cannot correct itself. It can only hide in silence, or stammer out a self-justification that doesn’t hold water. Better to hear ourselves, and hear others, and have the guts to change.

From “Was Jesus Always Right?” in From the Geranium Farm: A Second Crop of Daily eMails from Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Unbearable burdens

Daily Reading for August 22

The practice of exorcism by rituals and prayers was common in the ancient world, among Jews, pagans, and Christians alike. Today we are blessed to have other means of treating the physical and mental ailments that our ancestors termed “possession.” But I doubt that this is the whole story; I suspect that exorcism still has a place in our lives. Who has not felt the sudden lifting of what had seemed an unbearable burden, the removal of what for too long had been an unsurmountable obstacle? Who does not have something deep within that they would not wish to exorcise, so that it no longer casts a shadow on their capacity to receive and give love? . . .

When I think of the demons I need to exorcise, I have to look elsewhere; inward, to my heart and soul. Anger is my best demon, useful whenever I have to go into a Woman Warrior mode, harmful when I use it to gratify myself, either in self-justification, or to deny my fears. My husband, who has a much sweeter nature than I, once told me that my mean streak grieved him not just because of the pain it caused him but because it was doing me harm. His remark, as wise as that of any desert abba, felt like an exorcism. Not that my temptation to anger was magically gone, but I was called to pay closer attention to something that badly needed attention, and that was hurting our marriage. It confirmed my understanding of marriage as a holy act: one can no more hide one’s true faults from a spouse than from God, and in exorcising the demon of anger, that which could kill is converted, transformed into that which can heal.

From “Exorcism” in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Bold devotion

Daily Reading for August 23

You, too, daughter of Canaan,
conquered the Unconquerable One
by boldness for that justice.
The Just One set a boundary for the land of the Gentiles
that the Gospel might not cross over.
Blessed are you who broke through the fence fearlessly.
The Lord of boundaries extolled you
for the strength of your faith.
He healed your daughter inside your house from afar.
(From St. Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Virginity)

Mother Spirit, we praise you for your nameless Syro-Phoenician daughter. A fiercely devoted and loving mother, she prevailed upon Jesus—a Jewish teacher and stranger to her—to cast a demon out of her daughter. Thank you for the woman’s persistence in doing what was necessary for her daughter’s well-being. We especially praise you that she did not give up when Jesus refused her at first, but continued to reason with him until he changed his mind and did what she asked of him. When we feel like outsiders and hit obstacles as we try to help others, remind us of the Syro-Phoenician Woman. Give us the words to touch the hearts of those with the power to make changes to benefit those in need. Amen.
(Collect for remembering the Syro-Phoenician or Canaanite Woman)

From She Who Prays: A Woman’s Interfaith Prayer Book by Jane Richardson Jensen and Patricia Harris-Watkins. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Who do you say I am?

Daily Reading for August 24 • The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

What saddens me these days is how many Christians I meet who identify themselves as “heretics”—jokingly if they are still in churches and defiantly if they are not. For some, the issue is that they believe less than they think they should about Jesus. They are not troubled by the thought that he may have had two parents instead of one, or that his real presence with his disciples after his death may have been more metaphysical than physical. The glory they behold in him has more to do with the nature of his being than with the number of his miracles, but they have suffered enough at the hands of other Christians to learn to keep their mouths shut.

For others, the issue is that they believe more than Jesus. Having beheld his glory, they find themselves better equipped to recognize God’s glory all over the place, including places where Christian doctrine says that it should not be. I know Christians who have beheld God’s glory in a Lakota sweat lodge, in a sacred Celtic grove, at the edge of a Hawaiian volcano and in a Hindu temple during the festival of lights, as well as in dreams and visions that they are afraid to tell anyone else about at all. These heretics not only fear being shunned for their unorthodox narratives; they also fear sharing some of the most powerful things that have ever happened to them with people who may ridicule them.

Given the history of Christians as a people who started out beholding what was beyond belief in the person of Jesus, this strikes me as a lamentable state of affairs, both for those who have learned to see no more than they are supposed to see as well as for those who have excused themselves from traditional churches because they see too little or too much. If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know as we reach out to one another is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do?

From “Way Beyond Belief: The Call to Behold” by Barbara Brown Taylor, quoted in Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith, edited by Jennifer L. Holberg (Eerdmans, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The quiet apostle

Daily Reading for August 25 • St. Bartholomew the Apostle

The remarkable characteristic of Bartholomew is his low profile. We cannot even be sure who he was. Early sources suggest his full name was Nathanael bar (son of ) Tolmai—later, Bartholomew—the Nathanael who was the friend of Philip and who questioned, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Even though he is reputed to have written a gospel, it did not survive. Neither do we know for certain of his ending. While not the only one of the twelve to live in relative obscurity, Bartholomew represents a quiet alternative to the more visible and vocal public witnesses so frequently associated with the apostles.

Is it purely by accident that Bartholomew is overshadowed? Is it merely that his signal contributions, like so many, were lost for lack of archival care or scattered in subsequent upheavals? Were his contributions intentionally destroyed by jealous or rival factions of the kind that divided the post-resurrection community into separate cohorts of loyalty to Peter or Paul or Apollos? Was Bartholomew one of those persons who actually did very little, who only went along for the ride, so to speak? Or was Bartholomew the thoughtful one, prone to process his faith internally and intellectually, without a big fuss? . . .

We are never to excuse cowardice or demur from opportunity, but neither can we look down on those whose genuine gifts manifest themselves quietly. The meditative and thoughtful, the quiet and unassuming, also serve. That we have a written witness of Jesus’ life and teachings at all we owe probably not to the flamboyant but to the cloistered imaginations that shaped the narratives and hands that recorded them. That we have a faith at all we owe to the multitude of anonymous scholars and scribes who wrote, tended, and translated the story.

From Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts by Sam Portaro (Cowley, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Risk of surrender

Daily Reading for August 26

John of the Cross speaks to people who feel unable to change. We may have sensed in our lives a call to freedom, to wholeness, to more than what we are now. John felt this as a call to reach out for God. But within us, an unvoiced fear can make change impossible. It is the fear that when we reach, we may not find. It begs the question: If I give myself, will God fill me in my life?

Our being naturally hesitates to say ‘yes’ to a one-way track that may end only in wasteland. This is the undermining fear, and while we may not opt for a different track, we may never fully choose this one.

Here John of the Cross has something helpful to say. Poet, pastor, mystic, John is first a witness to the impact of God in his life. He has taken the risk of surrender, and can speak with the authority of one who has been there. He testifies to a God who, precisely, is pressing in to meet, to change, and to fill us in our deepest need.

From The Impact of God by Ian Matthew, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Preacher with the hands

Daily Reading for August 27 • Thomas Gallaudet, 1902 and Henry Winter Syle, 1890

I remember very vividly the first time that I ever saw Dr. Gallaudet. I was a candidate for Holy Orders. I do not want to say anything to give anybody pain--certainly not a priest of the Church, whose office it is to minister in the City of New York; but I was wandering about the streets of New York on a summer day--it was in August, I remember--to find, if I might, a church that was open on a Sunday afternoon in August. I am sorry to say that I was not very successful, till I came to St. Ann’s Church, where I supposed, curiously enough (such was my ignorance) that I had found my way into a church of extreme ritualistic usage, because the priest was standing before the altar in a black gown, in absolute silence, communicating by motions what he had to communicate to the people. Presently I discovered where I was, and soon fell under the spell of what I think nobody who ever saw him failed to recognize, and that was the spell of the singular eloquence--let me say it to my friends whose office is to communicate the Word of God and the mind of God by human gestures, and not by human speech--the singular grace and beauty and eloquence of Dr. Gallaudet’s action as a preacher with the hands, and by signs. Nobody who ever heard him read the service, and who knew what a singularly fine organ he had, and with what dignity and stateliness he could make himself heard in any congregation, could be unmindful that he was, as it were, putting one gift upon the shelf, in order that he might use the other for that people to whom he was bound in so many and such tender ways. I have always thought that his consecration of his gifts to their service was one of the finest things in the history of religion in this land. . . .

Dr. Gallaudet could easily be differentiated from other men by what he was not; but I prefer to remember what he was; to remember how he moved to and fro among all sorts and conditions of men, making life sweeter because he was part of it and human speech more tender, and our judgments of men more forbearing, by the exquisite patience which I sometimes think was the finest note of his character, however imperfectly we imitate and reproduce it.

I thank God for his great ministry; and I beseech you, my brethren, to whom especially he spoke, and for whom especially he lived, to carry forward the power of his life by the strong and consistent and ardent faith with which you follow and serve your Master, even as he followed and served his!

From “A Memorial Tribute to the Rev. Thomas Gallaudet, D.D. L.H.D.,” delivered at the funeral of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Gallaudet by the Rt. Rev. Henry Codman Potter, Bishop of the Diocese of New York. Originally published by The Fanwood Press, New York, in 1902. Transcribed by Wayne Kempton, Archivist of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, in 2007. http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/gallaudet/memorial1902.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Augustine on patience

Daily Reading for August 28 • Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 430

Augustine of Hippo’s On Patience. . . confines itself to two questions: where does Christian patience come from and what is its character? . . . Augustine argues that patience has but a single source, the free and unmerited grace of God, and defines patience as that which helps us “endure evils with equanimity so as not to abandon, through a lack of equanimity, the good through which we arrive at the better.” But calm and faithful endurance is a theme that gathers about itself a cluster of associated ideas: forbearance, expectation, and perseverance. “The patient,” he continues, “who prefer to bear wrongs without committing them rather than to commit them by not enduring them, both lessen what they suffer in patience and . . . do not destroy the good which is great and eternal.” Through a forbearance that has no thought of punishment or revenge, those who are patient neither permit an injury to become an obsession even more painful than the original hurt, nor do they retaliate, which would cancel out the difference between themselves and those who harm them. Leave judgment to God, counsels Augustine, . . . lest you yourself be found wanting because you have yielded to the stirrings of impatience.

From “The Gift of Perseverance” in Patience: How We Wait Upon the World by David Baily Harned (Cowley Publications, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Inexperienced motorists

Daily Reading for August 29

The first recommendation tonight is: don’t let us waste much time gazing at ourselves. A deepened and enriched sense of God is far more important than increased and detailed knowledge of the self. God, our redeemer and sustainer, is all and does all, and is the one Reality. Life comes with such thoughts. Plunging more deeply in him with faith and love will do more than self-concerned efforts. We can do nothing of ourselves but depress ourselves and get fussy.

Don’t behave like the inexperienced motorist who goes for a drive and spends all day lying in the road under the machine examining the works. The soul is a delicate and intricate machine. When it needs pulling to pieces, it is best to leave it to God. Our prayer should be that of Saint Augustine: “The house of my soul is narrow. Enlarge it, so that you may enter in. It stands in ruins: do you repair it and make it fair.”

First to last, put all emphasis on God. Attend to him. Forget yourselves if you can. Bathe in his light. Respond to the unmatched attraction. Be energized by his power. Try to realize a little of the perpetual molding action of his Spirit on your souls.

Have you ever seen the popular experiment of iron filings in the field of a magnet? Those little specks of matter are nothing in themselves, but when they are placed in the field of a magnet, each becomes a centre of energy, instantly influenced by an invisible power. They align themselves parallel to the lines of the magnet’s force.

From The Ways of the Spirit by Evelyn Underhill, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Claiming our truths

Daily Reading for August 30

The end of Benedictine spirituality is to develop a transparent personality. Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed.

From The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittister (Crossroad, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Messiahship and discipleship

Daily Reading for August 31 • The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Here we have two rich biblical themes—messiahship and discipleship. Here we have also two illustrations of the human tendency to try to redefine the meaning of biblical teachings to make them more palatable, thereby distorting or corrupting them. But something else is also illustrated here. We can see at work here two fundamental moral impulses that are part of our essential God-given human nature. . . .

The first of these impulses is our human desire to achieve a good end or purpose, to bring about a final victory of the righteous over the unrighteous, to resolve the contradictions of life by realizing some perfect state of things, some version of the Kingdom of God. Hence Peter’s negative response to the idea of a suffering Messiah, one who would only take sin onto himself but not finally resolve the contradictions and tragedies of human history. The second impulse is the human need to live in accord with some understanding of human obligation, to be faithful to that to which we have given allegiance, to do what is right. Hence our desire to water down the demands of discipleship to the level of the humanly possible, so that we can have the satisfaction of being obedient, but without excessive cost. The first impulse is to achieve some state of affairs we acknowledge to be good—peace, a just society, the Kingdom of God. The second is to act rightly in obedience to what we acknowledge to be our highest law—the Constitution, social expectations, the great commandment. The first asks, “What goal am I to seek?”; the second asks, “What is it my obligation to do?”

Those were in fact the underlying questions in the encounter between Jesus and his disciples. They are also the underlying questions for us in our Christian pilgrimage.

From “Jesus’ Messiahship and Our Discipleship” by Allan M. Parrent, quoted in Best Sermons 2 edited by James W. Cox (Harper & Row, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on August 31, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A faith born in prison

Daily Reading for September 1 • David Pendleton Oakerhater, Deacon and Missionary, 1931

On Sunday, October 6, 1878, a little more than six months after Oakerhater’s release from Fort Marion, Making Medicine and the other three Indian students received Christian Baptism. The service was held at Grace Church in Syracuse, New York. Bishop Frederic D. Huntington conducted the services. The young men were baptized in the order of their age, with the oldest going first. At the time of their baptism, they received their Christian names. Making Medicine was the first to be baptized. His Christian name became David (from the Bible) Pendleton (in honor of the Pendleton family that had sponsored his education with Rev. Wicks). Paul Caryl (Zotom) was the second to be baptized, followed by John Wicks (Okestchei) and Henry Pratt (Taawayite). The reported appearance and conduct of the young men was deeply devout. Their answers in the Baptismal Service were clear and strong. Twenty days later at Paris Hill, New York, the four young men were confirmed.

Upon completion of the confirmation services, it was back to the same routine for David Pendleton. This routine was to continue for several more months until a telegram from Captain Pratt would put David Pendleton on a remarkable and quite unexpected journey. Interest in educating the Indians was beginning to develop a head of steam. The country’s conscience to the need to reform the treatment of Indians was beginning to emerge.

In 1878, Pratt had become aware of an industrial school near Old Point Comfort, Virginia, that he felt would provide the opportunity for the further education of some of the Fort Marion Indians. . . . Not only was Pratt made superintendent of the school, but he was also charged with actually going to the Dakota and Indian Territories to select the prospective students. Pratt suggested that he go to the Dakota Territory while sending someone else to the Indian Territory. Pratt’s thinking was who better to go than someone actually from the Indian Territory, having in mind two Fort Marion graduates—David Pendleton (Cheyenne) and Etahdleuh Doanmoe (Kiowa).

And so it came about that David Pendleton was summoned to Syracuse, New York, on September 19, 1879. Three days later he and an entourage started on the 1,500 mile journey for a month of missionary work among their respective tribes in the Indian Territory. Pendleton’s stay in the Territory was short. During the approximate one month that he was there, in addition to visiting with his family, renewing old friendships, and introducing the “new way,” he managed to recruit twenty-nine Cheyenne and Arapaho to return with him to the east to be enrolled at Carlisle. . . .

All seemed well in David Pendleton’s world. He had but a year to go before his studies in the East would be completed. His wife had been baptized and was being trained in how to be a good “Christian woman.” His son had been baptized and was being prepared for entry into Carlisle. His Indian marriage to Nomee had received a “Christian blessing,” being confirmed with a wedding ring. What had looked like a hopeless existence but a few years earlier, now held all the potential a person could ask. A faith born in prison was beginning to blossom.

But that faith was severely challenged in July of 1880. Just a little over nine months since being reunited with Nomee, she died in childbirth and was buried beside her baby in the Wick’s lot in the cemetery of St. Paul's, Paris Hill. Having lost his wife, Pendleton’s suffering was still not over. On April 19, 1881, after a long illness, his son Frederic Pawwahnee died at the House of the Good Shepherd. He was buried beside his mother at St. Paul’s, Paris Hill. What had appeared to be a road so filled with promise a year ago, was now strewn with the deaths of his wife and son. But the spirit that had allowed David Pendleton to overcome his bitterness and hatred of the white man while imprisoned in Fort Marion, also found its way in consoling and guiding him in accepting the deaths of those closest to him. Placing tragedy behind him, he was eager and ready to return to his people and begin spreading the word of Jesus and the “new road.” Bishop Huntington and Rev. Wicks agreed.

On Tuesday morning, June 7, 1881, (Whitsun Week), at Grace Church, Syracuse, New York, David Pendleton Oakerhater and Paul Caryl Zotom were admitted to the order of deacons. Within a few hours, he was headed to the Indian Territory. There was work to be done.

From “He Goes First: The Story of Episcopal Saint David Pendleton Oakerhater” by K.B. Kueteman. Found at http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Oakerhater/bio.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A demanding course

Daily Reading for September 2 • The Martyrs of New Guinea, 1942

What did the contemporaries of the early martyrs think about the events of their time? Perhaps the complexity of the factors in an historical situation, their own closeness to the events, and even their lack of personal courage prevented them from seeing the significance of occurrences that today seem so clearly to have been heroic testimonies to faith in the Lord. It is a fact that a consensus with regard to what is happening before our eyes is always more difficult to reach; this is because present events, unlike those of the past, are not situated in a world that we regard as idyllic and that we envelop in golden legends. Present events form part of our own universe and demand of the individual a personal decision, a rejection of every kind of complicity with executioners, a straightforward solidarity, an uncompromising denunciation of evil, a prayer of commitment. . . .

According to the very earliest Christian tradition the blood of martyrs gives life to the ecclesial community, the assembly of the disciples of Jesus Christ. . . . Fidelity unto death is a wellspring of life. It signals a new, demanding and fruitful course in the following of Jesus.

From We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People by Gustavo Gutiérrez (Orbis Books/SCM Press, 1984).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 2, 2008 4:01 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The real way into life

Daily Reading for September 3

The expression “bearing one’s cross” has become a feeble, pious commonplace, a trite metaphor for resigning oneself to some unavoidable burden or misfortune. . . . The image of taking up the cross was not some esoteric symbol for Jesus, but a horrible reality of daily life in an enemy-occupied country. No one could travel about Palestine for very long without coming across pitiful processions of condemned criminals, naked, bloody, dragging the crossbars to the places of execution. . . . Why were the condemned forced to take up their crosses and drag them through the streets on the way to the killing fields? No doubt it intensified their degradation to be subjected to the abuse and loathing of the passersby, and it also gave the public an opportunity to disown the victims. As they pelted the victims with filth and jeers, the law-abiding populace could be strengthened in their own sense of rectitude. In this way, between the criminals about to be nailed to the crosses and the decent citizens going about their business a great gulf was fixed.

On the road to Caesarea Philippi Jesus told his disciples that if they wanted to know who he really was, they had to accept that he was the Son of man who was going to suffer. He intended to cross over the gulf, to leave once and for all the company of the upright and decent and to join those under sentence of death. Peter reacted as if Jesus had kicked him in the stomach, and Jesus came back at him with equal vehemence: “Get behind me, Satan!” If Peter tries to hold him back from this crossing over, he will become the very devil—Jesus’ adversary, not his disciple. So they had better get this right. It was not for Jesus alone; anyone who wanted to follow him into true life had to cross over, too. Anyone who wanted to be identified with Jesus and find life with him had to join him in the procession of the condemned, the dying, and the rejected.

Six days after this bombshell Peter, James, and John had the experience we call the Transfiguration. Three days after Jesus actually had crossed over, crucified on Skull Hill with two criminals, God raised him from death, confirming once and for all that the business of crossing over, of taking up one’s cross, is the real way into life.

From “Crossing Over” in Nativities and Passions: Words for Transformation by Martin L. Smith (Cowley Publications, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A prayer for peace

Daily Reading for September 4 • Paul Jones, Bishop and Peace Advocate, 1941

Christ, no one on earth really wants the pain and horror of war.
We do not want to kill or be killed, to hurt or be hurt.
But we all see injustice,
and sometimes it makes us angry
and we see no other way to right the wrong
except by war.
Christ, teach us the ways of peace!
Calm our angry hearts
and grant to all peoples and their leaders
patience in the search for peace and justice.
Help us to be ready to give up
some of our comforts and power and pride,
so that war will leave the face of the earth
and we may work for you in peace.

“Teach Us the Ways of Peace” by Avery Brooke, in Plain Prayers in a Complicated World (Cowley Publications, 1993).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Stepping outside

Daily Reading for September 5

Monasticism tells us something important about the structure of our humanity. Almost every single one of the major world traditions has developed some form of coenobitic life. Just as some people—at all times and in all cultures—have felt impelled to become dancers, poets, or musicians, others are irresistibly drawn to a life of silence and prayer. . . .

The monastic life demands a kind of death—the death of the ego that we feed so voraciously in secular life. We are, perhaps, biologically programmed to self-preservation. Even when our physical survival is not in jeopardy, we seek to promote ourselves, to make ourselves liked, loved, and admired; display ourselves to best advantage; and pursue our own interests—often ruthlessly. But this self-preoccupation, all the world religions tell us, paradoxically holds us back from our best selves. Many of our problems spring from thwarted egotism. We resent the success of others; in our gloomiest, most self-pitying moments, we feel uniquely mistreated and undervalued; we are miserably aware of our shortcomings. In the world outside the cloister, it is always possible to escape such self-dissatisfaction: we can phone a friend, pour a drink, or turn on the television. But the religious has to face his or her pettiness twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. If properly and wholeheartedly pursued, the monastic life liberates us from ourselves—incrementally, slowly, and imperceptibly. Once a monk has transcended his ego, he will experience an alternative mode of being. It is an ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the confines of self.

From Karen Armstrong’s Introduction to A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor (New York Review of Books, 1982).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Signed with the cross

Daily Reading for September 6

What does it mean to bear the cross? The phrase may refer to the practice of actually marking people with the cross. This ancient practice of marking people on the forehead was well known. The prophet Ezekiel put a mark on the foreheads of those who groaned and sighed for the abominations committed in Jerusalem before the slaughter of the idolaters (Ezekiel 9:4), while in Revelation 7:3 the servants of God were sealed on their foreheads before the day of destruction. To be a Christian is to be signed with the mark of the cross, the baptismal mark of incorporation into Christ. To bear the cross in solidarity with Jesus is not to endure some mysterious kind of suffering which is thrust upon us, still less is it a way of describing an interior psychological attitude or orientation. It is a path freely chosen, the social reality of committing oneself in this world to the values of the world to come. This is clearly a call to lose one’s life for the sake of the gospel. It is not a call to imitate Jesus as a figure from the past but to follow the risen and present Jesus of today. Christians do not maintain the memory of a dead Jesus: grieving over the body was prevented by the very large stone which was rolled away from the tomb before the grief could get under way (Mark 16:4). To respond to the cross is to follow, to share; it is to be a disciple. It is to respond with a new and amazing relationship of co-operation with God which is utterly different from the relationship of slave to master. We are sealed not as slaves but as children, as inheritors of the Kingdom of God.

From We Preach Christ Crucified by Kenneth Leech. Copyright © 1994, 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The gift of fragmentation

Daily Reading for September 7 • The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

The image of division haunts the church. It is the image of the eucharistic sacrament. Yet the church resists. The ideal community, according to the prevailing definition, is a group of like-minded people representing organic and institutional unity. The basis for community—the common bond that holds people together—is, at best, any agenda promising common benefit. Shared self-interest, common gain, is the adhesive of most human community. . . . Fragmentation is the very image of sin. Division is an expression of our weakness. Because we fail to build unity into a massive organic whole, we have failed in our mission. But have we?

As he matured in his faith, Paul saw fragmentation creatively. Fragmentation could be God’s gift to the church, even God’s will for the church. After all, in the broken body of Jesus the two very different peoples—Gentile and Jew—found a way to be together in their differences. Could it be that the very Spirit of God spoils our designs for homogenization in order to build the church of God’s own vision? . . .

The mark of God’s church is fragmentation, the eucharistic mark of brokenness. We are the body of Christ, and our ministry ought to look like him. For the sake of unity and for the making of a new humanity, this body—the church—may find its ministry in rending that forever breaks down walls and rips the Temple veil.

The unity God seeks and the new humanity God is making demand a place where all sorts and conditions can meet and be reconciled. To be that place, in this world, we shall have to be broken. We shall have to be torn from the idols of our own ideals. Our orthodoxy will be ruined, and our purity will be sullied. The stones of our walls of division, the rocks with which we have routed the sinner from our midst, will be reduced to sand. The banquets we have made of our resources and by which we have fed ourselves to fatness will be reduced to crumbs. And not to decide may be the hardest decision of all.

The good news, then, may be that those energies we have given for so long to the vain dream of building sanctuaries of sameness may now be given to meeting one another in all our myriad differentness, where we may know the Christ, who “came and proclaimed peace to [those] who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to [God]” (Ephesians 2:17-18).

From Conflict and a Christian Life by Sam Portaro. Copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prayer is natural

Daily Reading for September 8

Prayer is the fundamental activity of the Christian; to be in the image of God means to communicate with God. Many people are intimidated by prayer, believing that there is a right and wrong way, and thinking that they will somehow offend God or make fools of themselves if they do it wrongly. It is helpful to know that our monastic ancestors were convinced that prayer is natural to us, like breathing, if we only discover it in ourselves. It is something we do, but even more, it is a gift of God to us. We do not even have to enter God's presence in prayer, because we are already in God's presence. It may be helpful to think not of entering God's presence, but rather of making ourselves accessible to prayer. Prayer shapes us and transforms us. It centers us in God and at the same time in ourselves. It is always changing, as we are always becoming new in God.

Nevertheless, this discussion of introspection and prayer and overcoming the passions in order to love might suggest that the primary reason we pray has to do with transformation. This is misleading, however, for while prayer makes us who we are, we do not pray in order to become new any more than we marry the person we marry primarily in order to become somebody else. We pray, first of all, to be with God. Secondarily we pray knowing that God has promised good things which we can expect through prayer. If we let prayer be only a means to something else we want, however, it will not be for us what it can be, and we will not be who we can be.

From To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church by Roberta C. Bondi (Fortress Press, 1987).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Even in the darkness

Daily Reading for September 9 • Constance, Nun, and her Companions, 1878

Oh sovereign God, in your bountiful creation,
Rain falls on the just and the unjust,
Signifying life’s Infinite Mystery.
I cannot know your ways;
there is much I will never understand.
Yet still, I bow in humble worship
To a power greater than my own.
And even in the darkness,
I choose to live faithfully and to celebrate life.
Hear me, Oh Lord, and be with me,
Now and forever. Amen.

A Prayer of Celebration by Barbara Bartocci, quoted in Grace on the Go: Quick Prayers for Compassionate Caregivers by Barbara Bartocci. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A chosen people

Daily Reading for September 10 • Alexander Crummell, 1898

We have seen today, the great truth, that when God does not destroy a people, but, on the contrary, trains and disciplines it, it is an indication that He intends to make something of them, and to do something for them. It signifies that He is graciously interested in such a people. In a sense, not equal indeed, to the case of the Jews, but parallel, in a lower degree, such a people are a “chosen people” of the Lord. There is, so to speak, a covenant relation which God has established between Himself and them; dim and partial, at first, in its manifestations; but which is sure to come to the sight of men and angels, clear, distinct, and luminous. You may take it as a sure and undoubted fact that God presides, with sovereign care, over such a people; and will surely preserve, educate, and build them up.

The discussion of this morning teaches us that the Negro race, of which we are a part, and which, as yet, in great simplicity and with vast difficulties, is struggling for place and position in this land, discovers, most exactly, in its history, the principle I have stated. And we have in this fact the assurance that the Almighty is interested in all the great problems of civilizations and of grace carrying on among us. All this is God's work. He has brought this race through a wilderness of disasters; and at last put them in the large, open place of liberty; but not, you may be assured, for eventual decline and final ruin. You need not entertain the shadow of a doubt that the work which God has begun and is now carrying on, is for the elevation and success of the Negro. This is the significance and worth of all effort and all achievement, of every signal providence, in this cause; or, otherwise, all the labors of men and all the mightiness of God is vanity! . . .

With all these providential indications in our favor, let us bless God and take courage. Casting aside everything trifling and frivolous, let us lay hold of every element of power, in the brain; in literature, art, and science; in industrial pursuits; in the soil; in cooperative association; in mechanical ingenuity; and above all, in the religion of our God; and so march on in the pathway of progress to that superiority and eminence which is our rightful heritage, and which is evidently the promise of our God!

From “The Destined Superiority of the Negro” by Alexander Crummell, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Forbearing one another in love

Daily Reading for September 11

The spiritual or moral history of our species could be written as a struggle not to kill or run away from what is different—how we learn to treat those with whom we cannot identify. “Remember that you were strangers once,” Moses reminded Israel. Writing to the Christians of Ephesus, St. Paul begs that we lead a life worthy of our calling, "with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” The apostle is up against nature, and he knows it. He asks us not to assume that anybody else has motives worse than our own. It is especially important to be “lowly and meek” when we are sure that we are right. This is true in part because there are other people in the room who know they are right, too.

Forbearing one another in love is a religious way of saying that because we value one another we don’t crush one another. . . . Paul wants us “eager” to maintain the bond of peace. . . and in Paul’s mind it is the gift of the Holy Spirit. That is one of the reasons Jesus told his disciples to share his body and blood: you can’t easily eat with people you reject. . . . An even bigger gift of the Spirit is to come to difficult discussions eager to help people work things out, to find a way. Such eagerness, for me, is religion at its best.

From “Beating the Inner Reptile” in Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less by Paul V. Marshall. Copyright © 2008. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Zeal awakened

Daily Reading for September 12 • John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, 1830

Let a regard for the honour of the Church, and for the glory of God who delights in order in his worship, awaken the zeal of every member of the Church. Let him preserve silence in the parts of the service performed by the minister, joining in them not with his voice, but with sincerity of mind and heart. Let him, however, consider it as a sacred duty to repeat aloud the parts in the service assigned to the people. He will thus have the satisfaction of performing his share in the important and honourable duty of worshiping God. Confession will be rendered more lively, supplication more animated, and praise more ardent when the people join in the service with their voices as well as with their hearts. Both minister and people thus faithfully performing the respective parts allotted to them, the service of the Church will be exhibited in all its majesty, beauty, and affecting solemnity; and the worship of the Sanctuary will ascend as acceptable incense to the Lord of Hosts.

From ‘A Companion to the Book of Common Prayer’ by John Henry Hobart (1805/1827), in J. Robert Wright, ed., Prayer Book Spirituality. Copyright © 1989. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Competing authorities

Daily Reading for September 13 • Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr of Carthage, 258

In the mid-third century, the church led by Cyprian was defined by its opposition to a new kind of “demonically deceptive imitation” that was identified by its relative leniency toward penitent sinners and the authority granted to martyred saints and confessors. Although the defining issues emerged in the context of the extreme threat posed by the Decian persecution, the outcomes were generated by a clash of competing authorities and either rigorous or lax attitudes toward those who had fallen into the grave sin of idolatry. At first the two competing groups were the confessors [who had survived torture] and the clergy, but soon the groups comprised at least two different church bodies, each asserting that it was the one and true community and each claiming the exclusive power to condemn or absolve sinners and to transmit the Holy Spirit through its sacraments. Individuals staked their eternal salvation on the hope that they had been baptized by the right bishop and in the right church. . . .

The African position, as articulated by Cyprian, recognized baptism as valid only if inside a community under the authority of the duly consecrated bishop. By the end of the persecutions of the mid-third century, the power to cleanse a new convert and to confer the Spirit was limited to those who were within a single, unified body established by Christ when he conferred the power to forgive sin upon the apostles. No other community, clergy, or prophetically inspired individuals could claim to have access to this power, since the Holy Spirit did not reside within them. The flock could have only one shepherd. There could be no halfway position. One was either within the ark of salvation (the true church) or on the outside drowning in the flood. For Cyprian, there could be only one fountain of living water, and that was inside an enclosed garden:

“That the Church is one is declared by the Holy Spirit in the Song of Songs, speaking in the person of Christ. ‘My dove, my perfect one, is but one; she is the only one of her mother, the favourite of her who bore her.’ And the Spirit again says of her: ‘An enclosed garden is my sister, my bride, a sealed fountain, a well of living water.’ Now, if the bride of Christ (that is to say, the Church) is an enclosed garden, then it is just not possible that something which is closed up should lie wide open to outsiders and aliens. . . . And if it is the one and only well of living water and it, too, is found on the inside, then it is just not possible for a man who is placed on the outside to be given life and sanctification through that water; they and they alone who are on the inside are granted permission to drink of it or to make use of it in any way” (Letter 69.2.1).

From “Baptismal Rites and Architecture” by Robin M. Jensen, in Late Ancient Christianity, edited by Virginia Burrus, volume 2 in the series A People’s History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The cross and the kingdom

Daily Reading for September 14 • The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

If there is one fact about which New Testament scholars are agreed, it is that 'the good news of the Kingdom of God' was the heart of Jesus' preaching. Take away the references to the Kingdom in the gospels, and there is no gospel at all. Yet it is common to hear what passes for Christianity preached without reference to the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God was a phrase with a history. It was the heart of the prophetic hope for a new age of justice and mercy when the earth would be filled with the glory of God and when all common things would be holy. It is a deeply Jewish hope, rooted in a Jewish understanding of God in history. Outside of this Jewish approach to history and the world, Jesus makes no kind of sense: this is why the anti-semitic strand of Christianity which blames the Jewish people for his death is so dangerously mistaken. More than any other figure Jesus vindicates and affirms the Jewish religious vision--the vision of spirit embodied and manifested within a community of men and women who seek justice and holiness together, and who realise that it is only within such a community of commitment that justice and holiness can ever be found. . . .

The cross and the Kingdom are intimately connected because the Kingdom of God can never come by gentle progress. Only by tribulation and crisis can the new world emerge from the ruins of the old. The cross stands as a perpetual symbol of the truth that the world system is organized against the Kingdom of God, and that religious powers are just as likely to resist its demands as are the political ones. . . . It was for judgement that Jesus came into the world. The gospel is itself a crisis, a dislocation of order. The language of the tradition is filled with words for change—the proclamation of the Day of the Lord, the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven to earth, the call to repentance, to a total renewal of life. Redemption is a process which takes place within the framework of distress and chaos, the collapse of institutions and power structures, the disruption of earth and seas, the shaking of the powers of heaven, with people’s hearts failing them for fear. It is when such things occur that we are to lift up our heads because our liberation is near. It is against such a background of upheaval that we are called to ‘bear the cross.’

From We Preach Christ Crucified by Kenneth Leech. Copyright © 1994, 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Dream of the rood

Daily Reading for September 15 • Holy Cross Day

Listen, I’ll tell the loveliest of dreams,
what I dreamt in the dark of night
after reason-bearers lay at rest.
It seemed I saw a wondrous tree
led aloft, wound in light,
the brightest of beams. That beacon was
all covered with gold. Gems stood
fair at the ground’s surface; likewise there were five
up at the crossbeam. All beheld there the Angel of the Lord,
fair through eternal decree. There was no felon’s gallows there,
but holy spirits beheld him,
people of earth and all this glorious creation.
Rare was this victory-beam, and I stained in sins,
mauled by misdeeds. I saw glory’s tree,
graced with garments, shine with joy,
girded with gold. Gems had worthily covered the tree of the wild.
Yet through that gold I could glimpse
the old war of wretched ones, for it first began
to bleed on its right side. I was all driven with sorrows;
afraid I was of the fair vision. . . .

I have few friends
powerful on earth, since they have departed
from the world’s joys, sought wonder’s King,
and live now in heaven with the high Father,
dwell in glory. And every day
I look for that time when the Lord’s cross,
which I once beheld here on earth,
will fetch me in this fleeting life
and bring me where the bliss is great,
joy in heaven, where the Lord’s hosts are
seated at the banquet. Endless bliss is there.
It will set me where forever I will
dwell in wonders, taste well
happiness with the holy. May the Lord be my friend,
he who earlier suffered here on earth,
on this gallows tree for our trespasses.
He redeemed us and returned our lives,
gave us a heavenly home. Hope was renewed
among blessings with bliss for those who suffered burning there.
The Son, mighty and successful, was victorious
in that quest, when he came with many,
a host of spirits into God’s glorious kingdom,
the almighty ruler, to the bliss of angels
and all the saints who earlier dwelt in glory
in heaven, when their Creator came,
almighty Lord, back to the land of his home.

From “The Dream of the Rood,” quoted in Anglo-Saxon Spirituality: Selected Writings, translated and introduced by Robert Boenig, in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

A church of stone

Daily Reading for September 16 • Ninian, Bishop in Galloway, c. 430

In the year of our Lord 565, when Justin, the younger, the successor of Justinian, had the government of the Roman empire, there came into Britain a famous priest and abbot, a monk by habit and life, whose name was Columba, to preach the word of God to the provinces of the northern Picts, who are separated from the southern parts by steep and rugged mountains; for the southern Picts, who dwell on this side of those mountains, had long before, as is reported, forsaken the errors of idolatry, and embraced the truth, by the preaching of Ninias, a most reverend bishop and holy man of the British nation, who had been regularly instructed at Rome, in the faith and mysteries of the truth; whose episcopal see, named after St. Martin the bishop, and famous for a stately church (wherein he and many other saints rest in the body), is still in existence among the English nation. The place belongs to the province of the Bernicians, and is generally called the White House, because he there built a church of stone, which was not usual among the Britons.

From A History of the English Church and People by Bede, translated by Leo Sherley-Price (Penguin Books, 1968).

May the King shield you in the valleys,
May Christ aid you on the mountains,
May the Spirit bathe you on the slopes,
In hollow, on hill, on plain,
Mountain, valley, and plain,
May the Three in One bless you.

An early Hebridean blessing, quoted in Lord of Creation: A Resource for Creative Celtic Spirituality by Brendan O’Malley. Copyright © 2005, 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A vision of living brightness

Daily Reading for September 17 • Hildegard of Bingen, 1179

As an old woman, Hildegard described very clearly the two different ways in which her visions presented themselves to her, in a letter to Guibert of Gembloux. (The letter caused Guibert to leave everything he was doing and become her secretary for the last few years of her life, following the death of Volmar.) In the letter, Hildegard observes that “The brightness I see is not spatial, yet it is far, far more lucent than a cloud that envelopes the sun. I cannot contemplate height or length or breadth in it; and I call it ‘the shadow of the living brightness.’ And as sun, moon and stars appear [mirrored] in water, so Scriptures, discourses, virtues, and some works of men take form for me and are reflected radiant in this brightness. . . . And in that same brightness I sometimes, not often, see another light, which I call ‘the living light’; when and how I see it, I cannot express; and for the time I do see it, all sadness and all anguish is taken from me, so that then I have the air of an innocent young girl and not of a little old woman.”

From The Journal of Hildegard of Bingen by Barbara Lachman (Bell Tower, 1993).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A sacramental church

Daily Reading for September 18 • Edward Bouverie Pusey, Priest, 1882

The Oxford Movement called on people to look more deeply into the institutional life of the established Church to discover its inner mystery as the Body of Christ. In reading the Tracts one discovers beneath the concern for institutional structures a deep piety and spirituality, and even more a sense that the Tractarians' concern about institutions and their outward forms arose from what they believed about Jesus Christ as Lord of the Church. The immediate situation called for a defence of the Church against those who would, as they thought, destroy it. As the Movement gathered strength they were more and more nourished by a sacramental spirituality and devotion which had much wider implications. . . .

The Church is sacramental not simply because it was founded by Jesus but because it is his graceful presence in the lives of human beings. It was this vision of the Church which became so central to the Oxford Movement, first as it was expressed in the Tracts and later in sermons, manuals of devotion and theological treatises. The Church was seen as the community of grace, the means through which we share in the life of God in Christ, and as the present embodiment of Christ himself by his Spirit in the world. Therefore, it could be nothing less than sacramental: the visible presence of the invisible God; his redeeming act towards his people in their history, working through people, institutional structures, and the things of creation—water and bread and wine.

Nowhere, perhaps, is such a view better expressed than in Dr. Pusey’s Tract on baptism (Tract 67) and in his several writings on the eucharist (Tract 81 and his sermon ‘The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent’). In those writings Pusey draws upon the scriptures, the writings of the Fathers (especially Cyril of Alexandria) and a host of earlier Anglican divines, to show that in those two sacramental acts of the Church our redemption in Christ is made real and present to us through God’s use of the things of creation, and that through them we are truly incorporated into and participate in the real humanity of Christ himself. In the sacraments a new principle of life is imparted to us as we are united to Christ in the Church.

From Church, Ministry and Unity: A Divine Commission by James E. Griffiss, a volume in the Faith and the Future series, edited by David Nicholls (Basil Blackwell, 1983).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Church foundations

Daily Reading for September 19 • Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, 690

It would, of course, be naïve to assume that the Synod of Whitby settled all differences in favor of Rome. Few immediate changes took place, and there was no immediate large-scale submission of the Celtic Church to the Roman. But the balance had been tipped in favor of the Roman party. Over the next few decades the Roman Easter date took precedence over the Celtic, as did the Roman tonsure over the Celtic. . . . It was not a total victory, however, for the Celtic form of penance was eventually coopted by the Anglo-Saxons, most notably by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus. Accompanying Anglo-Saxon and Celtic missionaries, it gradually permeated the churches of the newly converted Continental Germanic tribes, eventually gaining acceptance in Rome and finally becoming mandatory for all Western Christians at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, long after the Anglo-Saxon era ended.

In Book IV or his Ecclesiastical History Bede recounts the appointment of Theodore of Tarsus as archbishop of Canterbury shortly after the Synod of Whitby. Since Pope Gregory’s days, Western Europe had been suffering from an outbreak of bubonic plague. Archbishop Deusdedit died of it, and his successor, Wighard, contracted it while in Rome for his consecration. Pope Vitalian thus nominated Hadrian, a north African then serving as abbot of a monastery in Naples. He declined in humility, suggested the scholar Theodore, a Greek-speaking cleric of his acquaintance, and agreed to accompany the sixty-six-year-old Theodore to England. This unlikely choice for archbishop was, in retrospect, the wisest choice the pope could have made.

When Theodore and Hadrian arrived in England, they set in motion some basic changes in the Anglo-Saxon Church, ones that would propel England to the forefront in church organization, missionary work, and scholarship. Theodore, in fact, deserves as much credit as his predecessor, Augustine, for founding the English Church, for during his archepiscopacy he laid the foundations on which the English Church in some sense still stands. . . .Even more important, perhaps, than this ecclesiastical reorganization, Theodore with Hadrian’s help established centers of learning and encouraged scholarship. . . .Theodore embodied and thus encouraged the scholarly life, even, it seems, introducing some knowledge of Greek to the island. . . . The greatest of all the scholars trained in the new learning Theodore and Hadrian brought to Anglo-Saxon England was, of course, Bede (d. 734), the Northumbrian monk who dominated Anglo-Saxon scholarship in the next generation.

From Anglo-Saxon Spirituality: Selected Writings, translated and introduced by Robert Boenig, in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Giving life gladly

Daily Reading for September 20 • John Coleridge Patteson, Bishop of Melanesia, and his Companions, Martyrs, 1871

John Coleridge Patteson was born in 1827 and came to New Zealand to assist Bishop Selwyn. He was put in charge of the Melanesian Mission. As its bishop from 1861, he opened up the islands to the gospel, and educated Melanesians to be priests and evangelists. He was a brilliant linguist, and did much to further the work of the mission by his warmth and modest charm. His murder on the island of Nukapu on 20 September 1871 was at the hands of people for whom he would gladly have given his life.

God of the southern isles and seas,
we remember with thanksgiving your servant John Patteson,
whose life was taken by those
for whom he would freely have given it;
grant us the same courage in extending your gospel
and readiness to share our life with others,
for the sake of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.

God of the resurrection, blessed are you in John,
first bishop to the Melanesians;
for by his willing sacrifice
you revealed the people’s cruel suffering,
and their right to hear the gospel.

Introduction and collects for the commemoration of John Coleridge Patteson, in For All the Saints: A Resource for the Commemorations of the Calendar, edited by Ken Booth. Revised edition (The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

End of the line

Daily Reading for September 21 • The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The most curious thing about this parable [of the vineyard owner and his workers] for me is where we locate ourselves in line. The story sounds quite different from the end of the line, after all, than it does from the front of the line, but isn’t it interesting that 99 percent of us hear it from front row seats? We are the ones who have gotten the short end of the stick; we are the ones who have been gypped. We are the ones who have gotten up early and worked hard and stayed late and all for what? So that some backward householder can come along and start at the wrong end of the line, treating us just like the ne’er do wells who do not even get dressed until noon!

That is how most of us hear the parable, but it is entirely possible that we are mistaken about where we are in line. Did you ever think about that? It is entirely possible that, as far as God is concerned, we are halfway around the block, that there are all sorts of people ahead of us in line, people who are far more deserving of God’s love than we are, people who have more stars in their crowns than we will ever have. . . .

God is not fair. For reasons we may never know, God seems to love us indiscriminately, and seems also to enjoy reversing the systems we set up to explain why God should love some of us more than others of us. By starting at the end of our lines, with the last and the least, God lets us know that his ways are not our ways, and that if we want to see things his way we might question our own notion of what is fair, and why we get so upset when our lines do not work.

From “Beginning at the End” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons from the Episcopal Series of the Protestant Radio Hour by Barbara Brown Taylor (Forward Movement Publications, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A community of opposites

Daily Reading for September 22 • Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist

Matthew was exactly the kind of person that Zealots regarded as the scum of the earth. It is easy to imagine that Simon [the Zealot, also one of the twelve disciples] would have gladly killed Matthew with his little curved knife before Jesus came into his life. Similarly, Matthew would have looked on Simon as a hopeless idealist who did not understand the limitations of his situation. Matthew might have expressed himself to Simon in this way: “Look, in order to get along, you have to go along. We can do only so much, and I am just going to make a better place for myself in the world as it is. Forget about any impractical ideas of trying to change the world.” The two apostles were as different as they could possibly be, both temperamentally and ideologically. They would have had an enormous conflict of personalities and beliefs before they met Jesus. . . .

The miracle in this situation was that Jesus had reached out so far in opposite directions with those gracious hands, grasping the hand of Simon the Zealot on one side and the hand of Matthew the tax collector on the other. It is even more astonishing that Jesus wanted two such radically different people to be his close companions, and it illustrates how all encompassing his love was. Something in Jesus drew both of these dissimilar human beings to him. I believe that Jesus offered these opposites a glimpse of the kind of unconditional acceptance and wholeness that gave them a completely new understanding of what it means to be fully human. It was the gift of Jesus to make it possible for people as different as Simon and Matthew to get to know each other, thereby helping one another toward more wholeness and balance. . . . Only the spirit of mutual understanding can lead to lasting solutions or wholeness, and only such broadening acceptance can make it possible for us to grow into the fullness of what it means to be made in the image of God.

From “Simon and Matthew: Unlikely Companions,” in The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus by John R. Claypool, edited by Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Matthew's community

Daily Reading for September 23

Most of those who listened to Matthew’s Gospel in the late first century experienced tough living conditions. Regular food shortages, squalid conditions, hard work, sickness, and poverty marked the life of these followers of Jesus in one of the largest cities of the Roman Empire. . . . The Gospel offers a frequently contestive vision and alternative identity and way of life, even while enmeshed in and imitating imperial values and practices.

Matthew’s Gospel was probably written in the 80s CE. The community for which it was produced is usually located in Antioch, on the Orontes River. The city’s population was approximately 150,000 to 200,000, and it was the capital of the Roman province of Syria. . . .

Conflicts in Galilee and Judea to the south strained relations with Judeans within Antioch. Matthew’s people, comprising one or more assemblies and focused on the prophet-messiah Jesus as their Lord, had not yet distinguished themselves as “Christian.” They had not yet separated from the people and heritage of Israel but still identified themselves as part of the large Judean population resident within Antioch. . . .

Followers of Jesus had existed in Antioch since the 30s or 40s. Matthew’s people had developed from one of the more expansive “assemblies” (ekklesiai) that emerged beyond Palestine in the decade or so after Jesus’ death. They perhaps originated with Jesus-followers forced out of Jerusalem. They maintained active communication with the assembly in Jerusalem headed by Peter and later James, brother of Jesus. And from the assembly in Antioch envoys such as Barnabas and Paul spread out into the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor to begin to catalyze other communities. . . .

After Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE, Matthew’s people were in conflict with other Judean communities over the shape of post-70 Judaism and the role of Jesus. Foundational to their community identity was their conviction that in the mission, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s just and live-giving purposes were being revealed and established as a judgment on and alternative to the Roman imperial order.

From “Matthew’s People” by Warren Carter, in Christian Origins, edited by Richard A. Horsley, Volume 1 in the series A People’s History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Be like the sun

Daily Reading for September 24

An abbot who was immensely depressed wrote to Hildegard to ask for advice. Her reply drew on her visions, and her knowledge of gardens and agriculture.

Drench your thoughts in the streams of scripture
and study the example of the saints, then try to live like them.
Do all this modestly
and let the blossom flourish in your brothers
like leaves and flowers on a tree.
Be like the sun with your teaching,
like the moon in your readiness to adapt,
like the wind by your unwavering guidance,
like gentle breezes in your forbearance,
and like fire in the arousing and inspiring force of your instruction.
Everything should begin
with the first gleam of early dawn
and end in blazing light.

A letter of Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in Invincible Spirits: A Thousand Years of Women’s Spiritual Writings, compiled by Felicity Leng (Eerdmans, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Restoring the primal vision

Daily Reading for September 25 • Sergius, Abbot of Holy Trinity, Moscow, 1392

Let us examine one particular aspect of asceticism in the Christian Orthodox spiritual practice, namely fasting. We Orthodox fast from all dairy and meat products for half of the entire year, almost as if in an effort to reconcile one half of the year with the other, secular time with the time of the kingdom. . . . To fast is to acknowledge that all of this world, ‘the earth, is the Lord’s and all the fullness thereof’ (Ps. 23.1). It is to affirm that the material creation is not under our control; it is not to be exploited selfishly, but is to be returned in thanks to God, restored in communion with God.

Therefore, to fast is to learn to give, and not simply to give up. It is not to deny, but in fact to offer, to learn to share, to connect with the natural world. It is beginning to break down barriers with my neighbour and my world, recognizing in others faces, icons; and in the earth, the face itself of God. Anyone who does not love trees does not love people; anyone who does not love trees does not love God.

To fast, then, is to love; it is to see more clearly, to restore the primal vision of creation, the original beauty of the world. To fast is to move away from what I want, to what the world needs. It is to be liberated from greed, control and compulsion. It is to free creation itself from fear and destruction. Fasting is to value everything for itself, and not simply for ourselves. It is to regain a sense of wonder, to be filled with a sense of good-ness, of God-liness. It is to see all things in God, and God in all things. The discipline of fasting is the necessary corrective for our culture of wasting. Letting go is the critical balance for our controlling; communion is the alternative for our consumption; and sharing is the only appropriate healing of the scarring that we have left on the body of our world, as well as on humanity as the body of God.

From Light Through Darkness: The Orthodox Tradition by John Chyrssavgis (Orbis, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 25, 2008 11:33 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Partakers of the Spirit

Daily Reading for September 26 • Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, 1626

Andrewes declares that on the mystery of the incarnatio Dei, the incarnation of God, there follows a corresponding mystery, the inspiration hominis, the in-spiration of man. The once for all event of the birth of Christ finds its fulfillment in the ever-renewed process of the coming of the Spirit. Both in the life of the Church and in the life of each member of the Church, progress and change are as necessary as fidelity and stability. Only in the unpredictable and infinitely varied action of the Spirit who is God and Lord and giver of life, and who moves with sovereign freedom throughout the affairs of men, do we begin to see the riches of God’s glory and God’s wisdom revealed. Only thus do we see how it is that while the history which led up to Jesus was full of the promise of his coming, the history which follows from him is full of an even greater and more mysterious expectation, the coming of the Spirit to dwell at the very heart of humanity and of all creation. The whole movement tends towards this in-spiration of man, this taking of humankind into the very life and being of the Triune God. We are caught up in a process as yet incomplete.

This aspect of the work of the Holy Spirit is fully developed in the preaching of Andrewes. A single quotation will give an example of it:

“Now to be made partakers of the Spirit, is to be made ‘partakers of the divine nature’. That is this day’s work. Partakers of the Spirit we are by receiving grace, which is nothing else but the work of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of grace. Grace into the entire substance of the soul, dividing itself into two streams; one goes to the understanding, the gift of faith; the other to the will, the gift of charity, the very bond of perfection. The tongues to teach us knowledge, the fire to kindle our affections.”

From Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition by A.M. Allchin (Morehouse-Barlow, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Birth is windfall

Daily Reading for September 27

The first time I read this parable [of the vineyard owner and his workers], I must admit it struck me as being rampantly unfair. I found myself saying, “But that is not just!” After some reflection, it dawned on me that I was starting at the wrong place. If you and I had earned our way into this world or had received our existence as some sort of entitlement, then there might be validity to such a complaint. But the beginning point of this parable is grace, not entitlement, and the same is true of life as well. Birth is windfall, and life is gift. We were called out of nothing into being in an astonishing act of generosity for which we can claim no right. Once that gift becomes our central focus, it changes forever how we interpret things. If entitlement is our vantage point, we evaluate the particulars of our lives from that perspective. On the other hand, if grace is our starting point, everything begins to appear in a very different light.

From Stories Jesus Still Tells by John Claypool, revised second edition (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Emptying ourselves

Daily Reading for September 28 • The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

No one can enter into their deepest centre
and pass through that centre into God,
unless they are able to pass entirely out of themselves
and empty themselves
and give themselves to other people
in the purity of a selfless love.

From Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton (Burns & Oates, 1960).

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
"who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness." (Philippians 2:5-7)

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Unseen angels

Daily Reading for September 29 • St. Michael and All Angels

Sleight-of-hand magic is based on the demonstrable fact that as a rule people see only what they expect to see. Angels are powerful spirits whom God sends into the world to wish us well. Since we don't expect to see them, we don’t. An angel spreads its glittering wings over us, and we say things like, “It was one of those days that made you feel good just to be alive,” or “I had a hunch everything was going to turn out all right,” or “I don’t know where I ever found the courage.”

From “Angels” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Three-language man

Daily Reading for September 30 • Jerome, Priest and Monk of Bethlehem, 420

After various early attempts at a Latin translation of the Bible, in whole or in part, . . . the assignment of bridging the chasm between Latin and the biblical languages in a definitive version fell to Jerome—or, to give him his full proper name, Eusebius Hieronymus—at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century. Fortunately—or even providentially—Jerome was quite simply the greatest scholar of his time in the West. Almost uniquely among his contemporaries and successors, he was a “three-language man,” as Augustine once called him with an unmistakable envy for his command of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. . . .

The Vulgate was the Bible of Europe for over a thousand years, and it was the mother lode of the Latin Mass. Those who, from the perspective of the Protestant Reformation with its doctrine of “the Bible only,” criticize the Middle Ages for having neglected the study of the Bible should examine the text of the Latin Mass with a concordance to the Vulgate in hand. Phrase by phrase, sometimes word by single word, it is a daisy chain of biblical quotations.

From Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan (Viking, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on September 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Worship what you burned

Daily Reading for October 1 • Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, c. 530

Then the queen asked saint Remi, bishop of Rheims, to summon Clovis secretly, urging him to introduce the king to the word of salvation. And the bishop sent for him secretly and began to urge him to believe in the true God, maker of heaven and earth, and to cease worshipping idols, which could help neither themselves nor any one else. But the king said: “I gladly hear you, most holy father; but there remains one thing: the people who follow me cannot endure to abandon their gods; but I shall go and speak to them according to your words.” He met with his followers, but before he could speak the power of God anticipated him, and all the people cried out together: “O pious king, we reject our mortal gods, and we are ready to follow the immortal God whom Remi preaches.” This was reported to the bishop, who was greatly rejoiced, and bade them get ready the baptismal font.

The squares were shaded with tapestried canopies, the churches adorned with white curtains, the baptistery set in order, the aroma of incense spread, candles of fragrant odor burned brightly, and the whole shrine of the baptistery was filled with a divine fragrance: and the Lord gave such grace to those who stood by that they thought they were placed amid the odors of paradise. And the king was the first to ask to be baptized by the bishop. . . . And when he entered to be baptized, the saint of God began with ready speech: “Gently bend your neck, Sigamber; worship what you burned; burn what you worshipped.” . . . And so the king confessed all-powerful God in the Trinity, and was baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and was anointed with the holy ointment with the sign of the cross of Christ.

From History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (539-594). The entire text may be found at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gregory-hist.html.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Inner poverty

Daily Reading for October 2

For Francis, poverty was the key to the loving, Christ-like life. He looked upon money as a kind of drug, addictive and lethal, to be shunned. Even minimal private property was repulsive to him. To own something, Francis believed, was to grasp for a security found only in day-to-day dependence upon God and would likely lead to divisions among people. When his bishop urged him to moderate his lifestyle, Francis said, “My lord, if we had possessions, we would need arms for our protection, for disputes and lawsuits usually arise out of them, and, because of this, love of God and neighbor are greatly impeded. Therefore, we do not want to possess anything in this world.” The only time Francis is recorded as having been angry was when he heard talk of modifying the rule of absolute poverty.

Real poverty is a state of the soul, not an outward circumstance, Francis felt. It must therefore be purely voluntary, an act of love—poverty that is imposed is not an act of love. Only in complete, chosen, inner poverty is freedom found, Francis believed, for it enables people simply to be who and what they are, neither dominating nor dominated. “You could not threaten to starve a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce him to beggary, for he was already a beggar,” Chesterton observes.

From God Seekers: Twenty Centuries of Christian Spiritualities by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Humble sublimity

Daily Reading for October 3

Let all humankind tremble,
let the whole world shake
and the heavens rejoice
when Christ, the Son of the living God,
is on the altar
in the hands of a priest.
O admirable heights and sublime lowliness!
O sublime humility!
O humble sublimity!
That the Lord of the universe,
God and the Son of God,
so humbles himself
that to save us
he conceals himself in a tiny piece of bread!

From the “Letter to the Entire Order” of Francis of Assisi, quoted in God Seekers: Twenty Centuries of Christian Spiritualities by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Francis and the "other"

Daily Reading for October 4 • Francis of Assisi, Friar, 1226

Francis’ famous embrace of the leper he met on the road was not merely a response to human suffering but, in medieval terms, an encounter with the excluded “other.” Lepers were not simply infected with a fearful disease. They symbolized the dark side of existence onto which medieval people projected a variety of fears, suspicions, and guilty sinfulness that must be excluded from the community of the spiritually pure. Lepers were outcasts banished from society. As his Earlier Rule enjoins, the brothers that Francis gathered around him “must rejoice when they live among people of little worth and who are looked down upon, among the poor and the powerless, the sick and the lepers, and the beggars by the wayside.”

Even the famous Canticle of Creation expresses more than a rather romantic love of the natural world. The underlying meaning is more complex. The key notion is that all our fellow creatures as brothers and sisters reflect to us the face of Christ. . . . Verses 10-11 celebrate the peace that comes from mutual pardon or reconciliation.

“Be praised, my Lord,
Through those who forgive for your love,
Through those who are weak,
In pain, in struggle,
Who endure with peace,
For you will make them Kings and Queens,
O Lord Most High.”

The created world is to be a “reconciled space” because of the fraternity of all things in Christ. There is no room for violence, contention, or rejection of the “other.”

From A Brief History of Spirituality by Philip Sheldrake (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Propelled into life

Daily Reading for October 5 • The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

It is not necessary to withdraw from the world in order to be holy. In fact, it may be more difficult to make a spiritual case for withdrawal than it is to understand creative immersion in the world around us. Otherwise, how do we explain the Jesus who walked from Galilee to Jerusalem, curing lepers, giving sight to the blind, raising women from the dead? Does Jesus qualify as a contemplative or not? And if so, then surely withdrawal is not the only way to get to be one.

We must learn that life itself is of God, that the natural is sacred, and that an inward life and immersion in life are of a piece. If we are in God, then all of life becomes sacred to us. To seek God means to find God around us. The God-questions propel us into life, in fact. It is precisely when we begin to see the world through the eyes of God that life becomes the measure of our own godliness. Then life becomes the stuff of holiness for us, not a spiritual threat. Human life becomes the eternal life of the spirit.

From 40-Day Journey with Joan Chittister, edited by Beverly Lanzetta (Augsburg, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Dangerous reading

Daily Reading for October 6 • William Tyndale, Priest, 1536

The availability of printed Bibles in the language of the common people helped bring about what has been called a “Copernican revolution” in the history of spirituality. Although statistics are notoriously unreliable, there was clearly a symbiotic relation between literacy among the laity, Protestant piety, and the reading of the printed Bible. Popular preaching from the Bible, which had been experiencing an upsurge in the later Middle Ages; detailed portrayal of Bible stories from both the Old and the New Testament in stained glass and fresco; and narrative poems going back to Heliand and similar vernacular works—through all of these medieval channels the knowledge of the Bible had been far more extensive and thorough than Protestant propaganda usually gives it credit for being. Nevertheless, the Reformation did produce a growth in Bible-centered piety. The lives of the saints and the countless holidays and feast days devoted to their commemoration, especially the many days consecrated to legends of the Virgin Mary, slowly yielded to a church year and a devotional calendar shaped much more directly by the Bible. One index of the change was a gradual supplanting of saints’ names by biblical names (especially the more colorful and plentiful ones in the Old Testament such as Jedidiah and Hephzibah) at baptism.

Medieval warnings abut how difficult or even dangerous it was to read the Bible privately without the proper guidance of church and clergy yielded to earnest admonitions to read it between sermons, even to bring it to church—although those medieval warnings often seemed to be coming true whenever yet another sect arose, based on yet another idiosyncratic reading of the biblical text in the vernacular. The existing sources do give us occasional information about how biblically grounded the faith and life and everyday speech of common people became. It is difficult to imagine that any of this could have happened if the Bible had not been translated and printed for popular consumption.

From Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan (Viking, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mom, teach us to pray

Daily Reading for October 7

My five-year-old daughter asked me at breakfast one morning about her bedtime prayers. She wasn’t really sure, she admitted, just what to say to God. (Now this is the sort of opening I like: “Mom, teach us to pray.”) I poured orange juice and congratulated myself on such a splendid opportunity for age-appropriate instruction in confession and petition. “God likes to hear from us,” I told Emily, “the same things all mommies and daddies like to hear from their children: please and thank you and I’m sorry.”

Emily considered this, licking jam from her fingers in order to count to three: please; thank you; I’m sorry. She nodded, then waved the two unaccounted-for fingers and said, “Maybe there are two other things I say a lot that God would like to hear from me.”

“What’s that, honey?” I asked absently, beginning to clear the table (the lesson being over). “Maybe,” she suggested, “I could tell God ‘Wow!’ and ‘I love you.’”

I sat down, my hands full of silverware. “Yes, of course, darling, what a wonderful idea. Those are excellent prayers,” I assured her, and sent her off to brush her teeth. But when I got up a few moments later, I was under no illusions about who had received the lesson. I had forgotten—as I so often forget—that prayer begins in praise and adoration.

From The Praying Life: Seeking God in All Things by Deborah Smith Douglas. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Hatching of the heart

Daily Reading for October 8

The “closed heart” is a striking image for our condition. It is as if our selves are normally encased in a hard rind, in a tough shell. Why is this so? Why do we commonly have closed hearts? For some, it is the result of a chaotic childhood marked by abuse or radical instability. The self builds up layers of protection to defend itself against an unreliable and hurtful world.

But the condition does not develop only in people with difficult childhoods. The closed heart is the natural process of growing up. The birth and development of self-awareness involves an increasing sense of being a separated self. We live within this separated self, as if the self is enclosed in a dome, a transparent shell. Like an invisible shield, the dome is a boundary separating the self from the world. It can become hard and rigid. It closes us off from the world, and we live centered in ourselves. The same process of growing up that creates the need to be born again creates the need for our hearts to be opened. To mix metaphors, the reason we need to be born again is because we have closed hearts.

It is interesting to reflect about what opens and closes our hearts on a daily basis. I am aware that some days my heart is more open than other days. Even in the course of a single day, there are moments when my heart is more open or more closed. Sometimes it is closed because of tiredness, worry, or busyness. I know that my heart is closed whenever I feel grumpy or self-preoccupied, when the world looks ordinary, or when the critical voice is strong in my head, whether directed at myself or others. When I stand in a supermarket checkout line and all the people I see look kind of ugly, I know that my heart is closed.

When our hearts are closed, we live within a shell. To extend the egg metaphor: the shell needs to be broken open if the life within it is to enter into full life. What we need is the “hatching of the heart.” And if the heart is not hatched, we die. This hatching of the heart—the opening of the self to God, the sacred—is a comprehensive image for the individual dimension of the Christian life.

From The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith by Marcus J. Borg (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The unity of knowledge

Daily Reading for October 9 • Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1253

In the opinion of Luard, the editor of [Robert Grosseteste’s] Letters, “probably no one has had a greater influence upon English thought and English literature for the two centuries that followed his age.” Wyclif ranks him even above Aristotle, and Gower calls him “the grete clerc.”

Apart from his important position as a patriot, a reformer and a statesman, and as a friend of Simon de Montfort, he gave, in the words of his latest biographer, F. S. Stevenson, “a powerful impulse to almost every department of intellectual activity, revived the study of neglected languages and grasped the central idea of the unity of knowledge.” One of the earliest leaders of thought in Oxford, a promoter of Greek learning, and an interpreter of Aristotle, he went far beyond his master in the experimental knowledge of the physical sciences. Roger Bacon lauds his knowledge of science, and he is probably referring to Grosseteste when he says that no lectures on optics “have as yet been given in Paris, or anywhere else among the Latins, except twice at Oxford.”

Matthew Paris, who resented his zeal for the reform of the monasteries, generously pays the following tribute to his memory: “Thus the saintly. . . bishop of Lincoln passed away from the exile of this world, which he never loved. . . . He had been the rebuker of pope and king, the corrector of bishops, the reformer of monks, the director of priests, the instructor of clerks, the patron of scholars, the preacher of the people, . . . the careful student of the Scriptures, the hammer and the contemner of the Romans. At the table of bodily food, he was liberal, courteous and affable: at the table of spiritual food, devout, tearful and penitent: as a prelate, sedulous, venerable and never weary in well-doing."

From The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume 1, From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The source of wealth

Daily Reading for October 10 • Vida Dutton Scudder, Educator and Witness for Peace, 1954

[The doctrine of stewardship is the] belief that the Christian holds all his worldly possessions in trust for God and for his brothers. . . . The doctrine of stewardship is unsatisfactory on two counts. First . . . it implies no responsibility toward the source of wealth but only toward the use of it. . . . [Christians must] consider the connotation of their incomes in human values at the source. . . .

Stewardship taken by itself has nothing to say to us about property as an instrument of power. But . . . the concentration of power is the chief evil which progress toward social justice has to dread. . . . The main reason why possessions are valued is less the luxury they offer than the power they confer. . . . It behooves us to search our hearts, whether we escape the horrid dangers involved in [the] ability to give money away.

From The Christian Attitude Toward Private Property (1934) by Vida Dutton Scudder, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Evangelism: a spiritual practice

Daily Reading for October 11 • Philip, Deacon and Evangelist

Evangelism is fundamentally a spiritual practice, as important to our spiritual health as prayer, worship, fellowship, and study. As such, evangelism is not simply an act or a set of Christian techniques. It is not a programmatic effort or a formulaic recitation of a memorized speech. It is not a generation of false sentiments or a sale of artificial emotion. It is not wanton advertising of religious slogans. It need be neither demonstrative nor dogmatic. It is not recruitment. It is not judgment.

True evangelism emerges from a practiced disposition of gratitude, a willfully embraced motivation arising from our experience of wonder, delight, and gratification in the Holy Spirit that propels us out to others to share our good news. And it is a new way of seeing and hearing others—as people who also have stories of delight and gratitude for God’s movement in their lives. Evangelism is a willful, joyful spiritual discipline of seeing and naming the Holy Spirit at work in ourselves and those we encounter—giving voice to our own grace-filled experiences, and helping others find their voice. It is practicing what we read in the Psalms—no matter what our current state, we can recall for ourselves and others the great works of God in each others’ lives.

Evangelism begins most fundamentally with you. On your holy pilgrimage you carry gifts for the world that are far deeper than you can even begin to recognize.

From Transforming Evangelism by David Gortner, a volume in the series Transformations: The Episcopal Church of the 21st Century, edited by James Lemler. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A heap of fragments

Daily Reading for October 12 • The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

I can respond to all the myriad small demands each day presents only if I never stop moving. I can hold chaos at bay only by breaking each moment into as many pieces as possible, hoping almost desperately that there will be enough to go around, that I can spread myself thin enough to cover it all. Sometimes it feels not only as though time and strength and order are steadily eroded, but that somehow I am diminished as well; sometimes I feel myself disappearing.

It was at the Eucharist that an insight was given me that may help in my struggle against the entropic forces that regularly disintegrate my life.

As I watched, the priest cast a practiced eye over the congregation and proceeded to break the consecrated wafer into a corresponding number of pieces. The perfect unblemished circle of the host was broken. All that remained of its original integrity was a heap of fragments on the plate. “My life is like that,” I realized.

The fractioning of my days is not likely to end any time soon. But perhaps—by a miracle of grace, by the grace of God—I can come to see myself not as meaninglessly disintegrated but as broken and given like bread, poured out like wine. Maybe God will so enlighten the eyes of my heart that I will come to see that all my time—no matter how broken and scattered—is in God’s hand. There may even be such a miracle that I can come to see God present in small moments as surely as I find grace offered in a crumb at the Lord’s table.

From The Praying Life: Seeking God in All Things by Deborah Smith Douglas. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Calling our name

Daily Reading for October 13

I am lying on my back. Maybe I am in a crib or a baby carriage, but I am not on someone’s lap. I am alone but I am not lonely. My eyes are following the yellow-green sparkles of light through a hazy screen. My arms are free and my hands reach to touch what my eyes can see and my heart can feel. I feel breath in me and in the trees and gently whirling between us.

Forty-five years later I ask my mother whether our house in Nashville, where I was born, had a porch. At first she says she can’t remember. “Tree tops,” I say, “where I might have been taking a nap in a baby carriage, looking through the screen at tree tops.” Still she remembers nothing. “Was there a street?” I press on. It feels important to me to remember. “A street. Yes, there was Meharry Boulevard. We lived in Mr. Price’s house, and oh, how he loved you. He’d come up the back steps and—oh yes, you were napping on the side porch.” But Mom is so anxious to tell me the rest that she doesn’t pause on the answer to my original question. “Mr. Price would bound up the porch steps, lift you up in the air and bellow out, ‘I love my little Charlie!’”

Yes. This is what I remember. Not Mr. Price. Not a person. But the feeling. I remember the feeling of being at peace, the feeling of the breath of God at once hidden deep within me and all around me, the feeling of being expectant, of being lifted up, of being safe and loved and adored in everlasting arms. It is a treasure that God hides inside of me and then sends me on a lifetime of seeking to find it. One day I will hear a call that draws me back to the place of this hidden treasure. And as it is revealed to me, I will hear the rejoicing: Somebody’s calling my name.

From A Gathering of Gifts by Paula Lawrence Wehmiller. Copyright © 2002. A Journey Book from Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Zeal without knowledge

Daily Reading for October 14 • Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, Bishop of Shanghai, 1906

There have, indeed, been missionaries who, almost immediately after their arrival, having picked up a few broken phrases, commenced, as they supposed, to preach the Gospel to the heathen, but which preaching most likely consisted in nothing more than uttering some sounds wholly unintelligible to the hearers. It can be fairly asserted that preaching the Gospel in such a manner is exhibiting a zeal without much knowledge. The Gospel of Christ is to be made honorable in every respect. Now, to preach in an incomprehensible gibberish to such a people as the Chinese, who, perhaps, more than any other people, are fastidious about language, is anything but making it honorable.

In my humble opinion it will require at least eighteen months’ very hard study before one would be enabled to express himself on any topic, not belonging to the routine of common life, intelligibly and clearly in a foreign tongue. This is true with reference to all other languages—some of the easy European languages, perhaps, excepted—but more especially is this the case with regard to the Chinese language. I say Chinese language; I should rather say the Chinese languages, for really one desiring to become usefully familiar with the speech of China has to study at least two, if not three distinct languages.

Quoted in They Still Speak: Readings for the Lesser Feasts, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1993. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The prayer of union

Daily Reading for October 15 • Teresa of Avila, Nun, 1582

In explaining the nature of union to me, He said:

1. “Don’t think, daughter, that union lies in being very close to me. For those, too, who offend me are close, although they may not want to be. Neither does it consist in favors and consolations in prayer, even though these may reach a very sublime degree. Though these favors may come from Me, they are often a means for winning souls, even souls that are not in the state of grace.”

I was experiencing a lofty elevation of the spirit when I heard those words. The Lord gave me understanding of what spirit was and in what state my soul then was and how to understand the words of the Magnificat, Exultavit spiritus meus. I wouldn’t know how to describe this experience. It seems to me I was given an understanding that the spirit is the higher part of the will.

2. Getting back to union, I understood that it consists in the spirit being pure and raised above all earthly things so that there is nothing in the soul that wants to turn aside from God’s will; but there is such conformity with God in spirit and will, and detachment from everything, and involvement with Him, that there is no thought of love of self or of any creature.

A spiritual testimony on the nature of union by Teresa of Avila, quoted in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume 1, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD (Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Our common Father

Daily Reading for October 16 • Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, Bishops, 1555, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1556

But one word is left, which we must needs consider; Noster, ‘our.’ He saith not ‘my,’ but ‘our.’ Wherefore saith he ‘our’? This word ‘our’ teacheth us to consider that the Father of heaven is a common Father; as well my neighbour’s Father as mine; as well the poor man’s Father as the rich: so that he is not a peculiar Father, but a Father to the whole church and congregation, to all the faithful. Be they never so poor, so vile, so foul and despised, yet he is their Father as well as mine: and therefore I should not despise them, but consider that God is their Father as well as mine. Here may we perceive what communion is between us; so that when I pray, I pray not for myself alone, but for all the rest: again, when they pray, they pray not for themselves only, but for me: for Christ hath so framed this prayer, that I must needs include my neighbour in it. Therefore all those which pray this prayer, they pray as well for me as for themselves; which is a great comfort to every faithful heart, when he considereth that all the church prayeth for him. For amongst such a great number there be some which be good, and whose prayer God will hear. . . . So that it is a great comfort unto us to know that all good and faithful persons pray for us.

From Hugh Latimer’s “First Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer,” in The Works of Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie (Parker Society, 1844).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Join the choir

Daily Reading for October 17 • Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, and Martyr, c. 115

From Ignatius, whose other name is Theophorus, to the deservedly happy church at Ephesus in Asia; notably blessed with greatness by God the Father out of His own fullness; marked out since the beginning of time for glory unfading and unchanging; and owing its unity and its election to the true and undoubted Passion, by the will of the Father and Jesus Christ our God. Every good wish to you for perfect joy in Jesus Christ.

Your visit to me was a godsend. The warm affection your name inspires is yours by right of nature, as well as by virtue of your faith and your love for our Saviour Jesus Christ. Taking God as your pattern and example, you have indeed fulfilled to perfection the duties of brotherliness, with an ardour kindled into flame by the Divine Blood. For as soon as you heard that I was on my way from Syria, as a prisoner for the Name and the Hope we all share (and trusting through your prayers to be granted an encounter with the wild beasts at Rome—a boon that will enable me to become a true disciple), you were all eagerness to visit me. Thus I have now been able to play the host, in God’s name, to your whole community in the person of your bishop Onesimus. His endearing kindliness is beyond all words; I pray you to cherish him in the true spirit of Jesus Christ, and that every one of you may be the sort of man that he is. Blessings on Him who gave you the privilege of having such a bishop, and well indeed do you deserve it. . . . For we can have no life apart from Jesus Christ; and as He represents the mind of the Father, so our bishops, even those who are stationed in the remotest parts of the world, represent the mind of Jesus Christ.

That is why it is proper for your conduct and your practices to correspond closely with the mind of the bishop. And this, indeed, they are doing; your justly respected clergy, who are a credit to God, are attuned to their bishop like the strings of a harp, and the result is a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ from minds that are in unison, and affections that are in harmony. Pray, then, come and join this choir, every one of you; let there be a whole symphony of minds in concert; take the tone all together from God, and sing aloud to the Father with one voice through Jesus Christ, so that He may hear you and know by your good works that you are indeed members of His Son’s Body.

From The Epistle to the Ephesians of Ignatius of Antioch, quoted in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, translated by Maxwell Staniforth (Penguin Books, 1968).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Physician and evangelist

Daily Reading for October 18 • St. Luke the Evangelist

Luke, which is a familiar form of Lucius, was a Gentile, a physician, and a close friend of Paul (Col. 4:10ff.), a fellow worker with Paul (Phlm. 24), and a companion of Paul’s in prison, probably in Rome (2 Tim. 4:11). Greek was obviously his native tongue, as his language is flawless Koine, the common Greek of the time (which was much less sophisticated than the language of Homer and the great philosophers). He was a Gentile, and thus probably a Greek, although Lucius was a common Roman name and all upper-class Romans were fluent in Greek. It is most likely that he was Greek, however, and there is much circumstantial evidence that he was from Philippi.

No one knows how he came to be in Judea. . . .It is possible that as a physician Luke was attached to the Roman army. Most good physicians spent at least some time in their training as army doctors or as surgeons to the gladiators. This exposed them to a wide variety of critical wounds through which they could learn anatomy and surgery on a living patient. . . .

There is no evidence that Luke ever met Jesus, and he was thus never considered an apostle. He was highly regarded by Paul as an evangelist, however. Also, his knowledge of many details of Jesus’ birth and childhood support the ancient tradition that he was a close friend of Mary, who shared these stories with him. His account of the crucifixion also indicates that, while he probably did not witness it, he was particularly interested in the physiological aspects of it. One would expect this of a physician. If he were a Roman or associated with the Roman army, he would have seen many crucifixions. . . .

He apparently worked alongside Paul for years, remaining with him right to the end. He was obviously loved and admired by Paul. After Paul’s death in about 64 CE, Luke apparently continued to evangelize in his home region, and sometime in the early 80s CE he wrote his Gospel and the book of Acts, the first history of Christianity.

From “Luke” in All the People in the Bible: An A-Z Guide to the Saints, Scoundrels, and Other Characters in Scripture by Richard R. Losch (Eerdmans, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Glory among the nations

Daily Reading for October 19 • The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

Almighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Collect for Proper 24)

This prayer links the glory of God not only to Christ but to the church, the body of Christ. The church is the primary means by which God’s glory is manifest in the world today, but Christians must be careful not to take that truth for granted. The glory of God is not automatically or always found in the Christian church. When the church devotes more energy to maintaining her institutional privileges than to walking humbly in the footsteps of her Lord, more time bickering over secondary things than proclaiming primary things, the church cannot reflect the glory of God to others. The glory of God shines on; it is not within the church’s power to diminish or extinguish it, but the church can exclude herself from it. At such times God does not abandon his church; it is the church that abandons God. . . .

The glory of God is broader than the church. We must not think too narrowly of that glory, limiting God’s domain to the places and people where we expect to find him. All things shine with the glory of God, and when we pray to God to “preserve the works of your mercy,” we ask his blessing on all things, seen and unseen, good and evil. . . . To “persevere with steadfast faith” is to trust God when no one else does and when we cannot see him clearly, to sing his praises when every other voice is singing a different song.

From A Gracious Rain: A Devotional Commentary on the Prayers of the Church Year by Richard H. Schmidt. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Scripture as a living force

Daily Reading for October 20

The word healing comes from a word meaning “entire” or “complete,” and signifies a restoration to wholeness. For that reason it is a more “holistic” word than therapy. While many people are helped by psychotherapy, I suspect that there are also many like me who have benefited from occasional counseling but have received more help from spiritual practices such as prayer and lectio divina, or holy reading. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the psychology of the desert monastics is the extent to which they believed that Scripture itself had the power to heal. In The Word in the Desert, his study of how thoroughly the early monks integrated Scripture into their lives, Douglas Burton-Christie notes that they regarded these “sacred texts [as] inherently powerful, a source of holiness, with a capacity to transform their lives.”

Appreciating this monastic perspective on the Bible means abandoning the modern tendency to regard it as primarily an object of intellectual study, or as a handy adjunct to our ideology, be it conservative or liberal. The desert father who expounds on the inherent value of meditating on Scripture by observing, “Even if we do not understand the meaning of the words we are saying, when the demons hear them, they take fright and go away,” insults our intelligence. What is left to us, if we relinquish our intellectual comprehension? Isn’t it necessary to retain more control than that? Maybe not, if we want to experience the Word of God as these monks did, as “a living force within them.”

From Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Giving life

Daily Reading for October 21

I once had a colleague whose home contained an impressive array of house plants. Looking at the abundance of healthy green foliage, I asked her to share her secret. “My secret?” she responded. “When they begin to die, I throw them on the compost heap.”

Throwing away plants—whether they be houseplants at the end of their lives or vegetable seedlings at the beginning of theirs—onto the compost heap is extremely difficult for me. The back of the carrot seed package directs me to “scatter seed in the row at the rate of three to five seeds per inch.” Then come those awful words: “When seedlings have three leaves, thin to stand two inches apart.” I usually cannot bring myself to follow the directions to the letter. I cheat, hoping that they will grow equally well if they are only one-and-a-half inches from their neighbors. I want to hold on to the houseplants and to each carrot seedling. I need, instead, to learn that their dying is a way of giving. Their dying contributes to living.

On our nature walk, Stuart Mace explained that death is the keystone of nature’s life cycle. If deciduous trees stubbornly clung to their leaves, there would be no black loam at their roots to nurture next year’s greenery. Giving is the pattern in the animal world as well, although it might also be seen as taking, depending on one’s place in the chain! Algae give their lives in the fish’s watery cafeteria, who in turn meet their end when a sharp-eyed seagull plunges to spear them. Each death gives life to something else. The things of the earth give themselves for one another and for future generations.

From Organic Prayer: A Spiritual Gardening Companion by Nancy Roth. Copyright © 1993, 2007. From Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Only compost

Daily Reading for October 22

Receiving, and then giving back, is the way nature works. Since we are part of God’s earthly creation, we share in its cycles of living and dying. . . . Knowing that we will ultimately give back our physical selves—“these last few molecules of ‘I’”—to the earth, we can choose to live with either gloom or humor, which is delightfully related to the word humus, the Latin form of adamah.

A teacher . . . once spoke the language of the mountain valley: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). When I have learned that truth, I can apply it elsewhere, letting die what needs to die. Perhaps I can even learn to welcome change, or at least to make peace with it. Most of it I cannot control, after all. Our bodies shed dead cells, and new ones take their place. One kind of family life—life with young children—dies, so that it can grow into another kind of family life in which young adults and their parents discover a new mutuality. Our work changes, our friendships change, we move, we age, we lose dear ones. All of the dying is the compost of our lives, even as we resist it. It is, in the end, the way we live. . . .

Nature teaches me to let go of past sorrows or resentments so that I can move on. It is an environmental issue: if my inner landscape is polluted with hoarded resentments and sadness, I cannot see beyond myself to the world around me. Infertile lives beget infertile meadows, woodlands, or communities. When I allow myself to let go, I am often surprised by the power of healing, as gratuitous and surprising as the sun bursting through clouds on a dull day.

Like the plants in the mountain meadow, we are dying and growing all the time. Every event of life, no matter how tragic, can become a means of growth for us; it depends on what we do with it. There is no garbage—only compost.

From Organic Prayer: A Spiritual Gardening Companion by Nancy Roth. Copyright © 1993, 2007. From Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Liturgy of St. James

Daily Reading for October 23 • St. James of Jerusalem, Brother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Martyr, c. 62

Then the Priest signs the Gifts, bows and says:

We make this offering to you, Master, for your holy places also, which you glorified by the divine Epiphany of your Christ, and by the visitation of your all-holy Spirit, especially for the holy and glorious Sion, the mother of all the Churches; and for your holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church throughout the whole inhabited world. Richly bestow on it now too, Master, the gifts of your all-holy Spirit.

People (quietly, many times, as the Priest prays): Remember, Lord our God.

Remember, Lord, also our holy fathers and bishops in your Church, who throughout the inhabited world rightly proclaim the word of truth. . . .

Remember, Lord, the honourable order of presbyters here and everywhere, the diaconate in Christ, all the rest of the ministers, every order in the Church and our brotherhood in Christ and the whole Christ-loving people.

Remember, Lord, the deacons who stand round your holy altar and them a life without reproach, preserve their diaconate unstained and grant them good standing.

Remember, Lord, those who travel by land, sea and air, Christians who live far from home, those in bondage and prisons, those in captivity and exile, those in mines and in tortures and bitter slavery, our fathers, mothers and brethren, and a peaceful return for each of them to their own homes.

Remember, Lord, those in old age and incapacity, the sick, the suffering, those troubled by unclean spirits, and for their speedy healing from God and for their safety and salvation.

Remember, Lord, those who pass their lives in virginity, purity and asceticism, and in holy wedlock, and for our venerable fathers, mothers and brethren who struggle on mountains, in caves, and in the hollows of the earth, and Orthodox communities in every place and for our community in Christ in this place.

Remember, Lord, all for their good. Have mercy on all, Master. Be reconciled with us all. Give peace to the multitudes of your people. Disperse scandals; put an end to wars; ends the schisms of the churches; speedily dissolve the uprisings of heresies; throw down the pride of the nations; exalt the horn of Christians; grant us your peace and your love, O God, our Saviour, the hope of all the ends of the earth.

Remember, Lord, seasonable weather, gentle showers, fair dews, abundant harvests, perfect seasons and the crowning of the year with your goodness. For the eyes of all hope on you, and you give them their food in due season; you open your hand and fill every living being with your good pleasure.

Remember, Lord, those who have brought and those who bring offerings in the holy Churches of God, those who remember the poor, and those who have asked us to remember them in our prayers.

Also be pleased to remember, Lord, those too who have brought offerings today for your holy altar, and those for whom each has brought them, or whom each one has in mind, and those whose names are now read to you. And he commemorates those whom he wishes of the living. . . .

Also be pleased to remember, Lord, those who have been well-pleasing to you from the beginning of time, generation by generation, holy Fathers, Mothers, Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, Teachers, Ascetics, and every righteous spirit, made perfect in faith.

Deacon: And for the peace and stability of the whole world and of the holy Churches of God, and those for whom each has made offerings or whom they have in mind and for the people here present, and for all people.

Priest (aloud): Through whom for us and for them, for you Master are a good God and a Master who loves humankind:

People: Remit, forgive, pardon, O God, our transgressions, voluntary and involuntary, in knowledge and in ignorance.

Priest (aloud): By the grace, compassion and love for humankind of your Christ, with whom you are blessed and glorified with your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and for ever, and to the ages of ages.

People: Amen.

Excerpts of prayers offered with the gifts in the Divine Liturgy of St James, which until recently was only celebrated on the island of Zakynthos on his feast on 23 October and in Jerusalem on the Sunday after Christmas, but is today celebrated in an increasing number of Orthodox churches. It was the ancient rite of Jerusalem, as the Mystagogic Catecheses of St Cyril of Jerusalem imply. The entire text may be found at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ephrem/lit-james.htm.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Seeing the back

Daily Reading for October 24

When the Lord who spoke to Moses came to fulfill his own law, he likewise gave a clear explanation to his disciples, laying bare the meaning of what had previously been said in a figure when he said, If anyone wants to be a follower of mine and not “If any man will go before me.” And to the one asking about eternal life he proposes the same thing, for he says Come, follow me. Now, he who follows sees the back.

So Moses, who eagerly seeks to behold God, is now taught how he can behold Him: to follow God wherever he might lead is to behold God. His passing by signifies his guiding the one who follows, for someone who does not know the way cannot complete his journey safely in any other way than by following behind his guide. He who leads, then, by his guidance shows the way to the one following. He who follows will not turn aside from the right way if he always keeps the back of his leader in view.

For he who moves to one side or brings himself to face his guide assumes another direction for himself than the one his guide shows him. Therefore, he says to the one who is led, My face is not to be seen, that is, “Do not face your guide.” If he does so, his course will certainly be in the opposite direction, for good does not look good in the face, but follows it.

From The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa, translated and introduced by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. A volume in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 1978).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Just give

Daily Reading for October 25

Give, looking for nothing again, that is, without consideration of future advantages: give to children, to old men, to the unthankful, and the dying, and to those you shall never see again: for else your alms and curtesy is not charity, but traffick and merchandise: and be sure that you omit not to relieve the needs of your enemy and the injurious; for so possibly you may win him to your self; but do you intend the winning him to God.

From Holy Living by Jeremy Taylor, quoted in Readings in Anglican Spirituality, complied by David Hein (Forward Movement Publications, 1991).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

With eyes undimmed

Daily Reading for October 26 • The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Moses did not set foot on the land below for which the people were longing by reason of the promise. He who preferred to live by what flowed from above no longer tasted earthly food. But having come to the very top of the mountain, he, like a good sculptor who has fashioned well the whole statue of his own life, did not simply bring his creation to an end but he placed the finishing touch on his work.

What does the history say about this? That Moses the servant of Yahweh died as Yahweh decreed, and no one has ever found his grave, his eyes were undimmed, and his face unimpaired. From this we learn that, when one has accomplished such noble actions, he is considered worthy of this sublime name, to be called servant of Yahweh. . . .

What then are we taught through what has been said? To have but one purpose in life: to be called servants of God by virtue of the lives we live. . . .The goal of the sublime way of life is being called a servant of God.

From The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa, translated and introduced by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. A volume in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 1978).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Praying to love

Daily Reading for October 27

A Prayer for Morning

I am so weary, Father, of using myself
as the measure of everything and everybody.
Just for this one day, I beg you,
help me to find release from the old pattern
of seeing the different-from-me
as either less-than or more-than me.
Grant instead that, for just this one day at least,
I may see everything and everybody I meet
in terms of how I want you to see me
at this day’s end.

—Phyllis Tickle

An Intercession

God of diversity,
Help us to love otherness.
God of the Jesus mystery,
Help us to burn out hatred.
God of the Woman at the Well,
Help us to know our true need.
And God of the Ethiopian,
Help us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
Amen.

—Michael Battle

From Race and Prayer: Collected Voices, Many Dreams, edited by Malcolm Boyd and Chester Talton. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Follow me

Daily Reading for October 28 • St. Simon and St. Jude, Apostles

O Lord Jesus our God,
Who called people from their daily work
Saying to them, ‘Come ye after me’,
May your children today hear your voice
And gladly answer your call
To give their lives to you,
To serve your Church,
To offer their gifts
And give away their hearts
To you only.
Bless their hopes,
The first tiny stirrings of desire,
The little resolve to go forward,
The small vision of what might be.
Deal gently with their fears
The hesitation of uncertainty,
The darkness of the unknown,
The lack of confidence in their own capacity,
And turn it all to trust in you.

A prayer by Gabrielle Hadington of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, quoted in The Oxford Book of Prayer, edited by George Appleton (Oxford, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mission today

Daily Reading for October 29 • James Hannington, Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa and his Companions, Martyrs, 1885

But now, I think that almost all missionaries come as people who want to be servants. Now the exchange of missionaries tends to affirm the good that is in each culture and also allow Christ to judge every culture, as Christ does. Yes, there are some elements of African culture that are not compatible with the Christian gospel, just as there are many aspects of European culture that are contrary to the gospel. But I prefer to think on the many things that the Christian gospel affirms about every one of us. Now we have mission companions who, on the whole, are not prone to using verbs in the imperative mood. . . . A more healthy exchange has developed and the giving is no longer in one direction. Today I would say there is a mutuality in the mission relationship. . . .

I hope those involved in the mission movement will continue in a gentle, non-abrasive way to stand for the truth that they believe. I hope that by who they are they will break down those barriers that tend to make people unresponsive to other aspects of truth. I think one of my greatest weaknesses, looking back in the struggle against apartheid, was that I became too abrasive. When you are right it is so easy to become self-righteous. Those who seek to be messengers of the gospel of grace do well to remember that it helps enormously if they communicate that message graciously.

It was an American philosopher who said, “What you are is so loud that I can’t hear what you’re saying.” Some of the most eloquent witnesses to the Christian gospel are those who are side by side with people in need, incarnating God’s concern and love. If they do that with integrity people may ask, “What makes you want to do this?” And then you have the opportunity to say, “I am here really because I love Jesus, and Jesus has impelled me to come here and I hope that my touch will be to some extent his touch.”

From Desmond Tutu’s Foreword to The Scripture of Their Lives: Stories of Mission Companions Today, edited by Jane Butterfield. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Holiness is in the Now

Daily Reading for October 30

The messages of the Prologue [to the Rule of St. Benedict] are clear: Life is very short. To get the most out of it, we must begin to attend to its spiritual dimensions without which life is only half lived. Holiness is in the Now but we go through life only half conscious of it, asleep or intent on being someplace other than where we are. We need to open our eyes and see things as they exist around us: what is valuable and what is not, what enriches and what does not, what is of God and what is not. It may be the neighborhood we live in rather than the neighborhood we want that will really make human beings out of us. It may be the job we have rather than the position we are selling our souls to get that will finally liberate us from ourselves. It may be what we do rather than the prayers we pray that will finally be the measure of our sanctity.

God is calling us to more than the material level of life and God is waiting to bring us to it. All we have to do is to live well with others and live totally in God. All we have to do is to learn to listen to the voice of God in life. And we have to do it heart, soul, and body. The spiritual life demands all of us.

From The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittister (Crossroad, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Glimpses

Daily Reading for October 31 • All Hallows Eve

Each occasion
we glimpse them:
that turn of a head,
that smile,
the way she walked,
his sense of humor,
each time
a knife turns
in our heart.
In time,
through the windows of our tears
we see them
and smile.
In time,
we let go of sorrow.
In time,
beauty and music,
remembered places
bring solace not pain.
In your time,
God of all time,
may what we have sown in pain
be reaped in joy.

“Surrounded by a Cloud of Witnesses,” in The Pattern of Our Days: Worship in the Celtic Tradition from the Iona Community, edited by Kathy Galloway (Paulist Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on October 31, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Local saints

Daily Reading for November 1 • All Saints’ Day

God of grace,
we thank for the saints whom we ourselves
have known and loved.
It does not come easily to us to call them saints,
it seems as if ordinary mortals
are not good or great enough.
But you have given your people this name
and invited us into your company,
and you know how much we loved them.
So for these good companions,
whom we name before you for their love,
and for our love of them,
we give you grateful thanks: names.
In the mystery of your love,
in the power of your spirit,
we are one with them.
We give great thanks.

“Communion of Saints,” in The Pattern of Our Days: Worship in the Celtic Tradition from the Iona Community, edited by Kathy Galloway (Paulist Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Holding the world together

Daily Reading for November 2 • The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, and the Feast of All Saints

The subway car tears through the darkness of the tunnel and blasts into the light of the stations for a rapid few seconds, only to tear into the darkness again; light and dark, light and dark, the clap-and-screech rhythm of the subway. A group of Hispanic women all talking at once sit directly across from me, while a tall Hasidic Jew stands in the aisle. On my right sits an Indian woman in western dress. Her little boy, about five years old, plays between her knees. The man across from the empty seat laughs loudly to himself.

Speeding through this dark tunnel scares me. I look to the faces nearby. The women across the aisle talk and laugh; their throaty, maternal voices remind me of my friends in San Antonio. . . .These women on the subway do not know me, but I feel linked through the musical cadence of their voices. I also feel linked to the Hasidic Jew, someone called to read the Torah, to take the scroll out and dance with it. So many times I have approached the Christian altar to lift the gospel book and carry it down the aisle. My eyes stinging, I have often wanted to turn and then dance through the congregation with the book. Instead, I walk down the aisle very properly, reverently, but not reverently enough. Someday, I think, I’ll just dance.

When I see a prayer shawl, when I see a nun’s veil, when I hear a chapel bell ring for vespers, I think we will survive. Sometimes I imagine that the idea of the Lamed-Vov is true, that the world is held together by thirty-six hidden righteous people. Instead of gravity, devotion holds together the world for the rest of us who are rushing through our lives. Maybe this speeding subway car would explode into thousands of pieces if people in hidden places all over the world were not at prayer.

From “Downtown Express” in Grace’s Window by Suzanne Guthrie. Copyright © 1996, 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

On bishops

Daily Reading for November 3 • Richard Hooker

As for us over whom Christ hath placed them [bishops] to be the chiefest guides and pastors of our souls, our common fault is that we look for much more in our governors than a tolerable sufficiency can yield, and bear much less than humanity and reason do require we should. Too much perfection over rigorously exacted in them, cannot but breed in us perpetual discontentment, and on both parts cause all things to be unpleasant.

From Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prayers for election day

Daily Reading for November 4

Almighty God, to whom we must account for all our powers and privileges: Guide the people of the United States and of this community in the election of officials and representatives; that, by faithful administration and wise laws, the rights of all may be protected and our nation be enabled to fulfill your purposes; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayer for an Election, from the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.

Give us, O God, leaders whose hearts are large enough to match the breadth of our own souls, and give us souls strong enough to follow leaders of vision and wisdom. In seeking a leader, let us seek more than development of ourselves—though development we hope for; more than security for our own land—though security we need; more than satisfaction for our wants—though many things we desire. We pray for the grace and the courage to vote with insight and wisdom, with heart and conviction. Let us pray for the leaders who will help us create the world we envision.

Adapted from Prayer for Leadership by Joan D. Chittister, OSB.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A united nation

Daily Reading for November 5

Bless our beautiful land, O Lord,
with its wonderful variety of people,
of races, cultures and languages.
May we be a nation of laughter and joy,
of justice and reconciliation,
of peace and unity,
of compassion, caring and sharing.
We pray this prayer for a true patriotism,
in the powerful name of Jesus our Lord.

A prayer of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

He reigns

Daily Reading for November 6 • William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1944

While we deliberate, he reigns; when we decide, he reigns; when we decide foolishly, he reigns; when we serve him in humble loyalty, he reigns; when we serve him self-assertively, he reigns; when we rebel and seek to withhold our service, he reigns—the Alpha and the Omega, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

From a sermon at Lambeth Conference (1930) by William Temple, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Preaching the gospel

Daily Reading for November 7 • Willibrord, Archbishop of Utrecht, Missionary to Frisia, 739

When the man of God, Egbert, perceived that neither he himself was permitted to preach to the Gentiles, . . . nor that Wictbert, when he went into those parts, had met with any success, he nevertheless still attempted to send some holy and industrious men to the work of the word, among whom was Wilbrord, a man eminent for his merit and rank in the priesthood. They arrived there, twelve in number, and turning aside to Pepin, duke of the Franks, were graciously received by him; and as he had lately subdued the Hither Frisland, and expelled King Rathbed, he sent them thither to preach, supporting them at the same time with his authority, that none might molest them in their preaching, and bestowing many favors on those who consented to embrace the faith. Thus it came to pass, that with the assistance of the Divine grace, they in a short time converted many from idolatry to the faith of Christ. . . .

At their first coming into Frisland, as soon as Wilbrord found he had leave given him by the prince to preach, he made haste to Rome, where Pope Sergius then presided over the apostolical see, that he might undertake the desired work of preaching the Gospel to the Gentiles, with his licence and blessing; and hoping to receive of him some relics of the blessed apostles and martyrs of Christ; to the end, that when he destroyed the idols, and erected churches in the nation to which he preached, he might have the relics of saints at hand to put into them, and having deposited them there, might accordingly dedicate those places to the honor of each of the saints whose relics they were. He was also desirous there to learn or to receive from thence many other things which so great a work required. Having obtained all that he wanted, he returned to preach. . . .

Pepin gave him a place for his episcopal see, in his famous castle, which in the ancient language of those people is called Wiltaburg, that is, the town of the Wilts; but, in the French tongue, Utrecht. The most reverend prelate having built a church there, and preaching the word of faith far and near, drew many from their errors, and erected several churches and monasteries. For not long after he constituted other bishops in those parts, from among the brethren that either came with him or after him to preach there; some of which are now departed in our Lord; but Wilbrord himself, surnamed Clement, is still living, venerable for old age, having been thirty-six years a bishop, and sighing after the rewards of the heavenly life, after the many spiritual conflicts which he has waged.

From Book V of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-book5.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A weary heart

Daily Reading for November 8

[Acedia is] a wearied or anxious heart. It is akin to sadness and is the peculiar lot of solitaries and a particularly dangerous and frequent foe of those dwelling in the desert. . . . Once [acedia] has seized possession of a wretched mind it makes a person horrified at where he is, disgusted with his cell, and also disdainful and contemptuous of the brothers who live with him or at a slight distance, as being careless and unspiritual. Likewise it renders him slothful and immobile in the face of all the work to be done within the walls of his dwelling: It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading.

From John Cassian (360-435), The Institutes, quoted in Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

God's comings

Daily Reading for November 9 • The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Why are so many Christians uncomfortable with the Second Coming? I think it is because in the past five centuries, the mainline churches of western Europe and North America have largely lost the sense of the transcendent. Sophisticated, modern people no longer take for granted the existence of a reality beyond what can be touched, measured, and managed by human ingenuity. The Bible and the church’s liturgy may say otherwise, but for many people, even many Christians, God is no longer seen as moving and acting in his world. If we want something done, we go to the union hall, a psychiatrist, our congressman, a lawyer, or a doctor. Then, if all that fails, we may “take it to the Lord in prayer.”

The Incarnation lies at the heart of the Christian story, and that doctrine arises out of belief in a transcendent reality. Without the transcendent, the idea that God became man, Word became flesh, is nonsense, because there is no God to become man, no Word to become flesh. Jesus becomes merely a great teacher, example, or pattern for healthy living. The reason many modern Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of the Second Coming is that their worldview doesn’t allow for any comings at all. They have lost sight of any transcendent reality that might have or could have come to earth and assumed human flesh. Those who cannot see God moving and acting in his world, whose lives have not been touched, much less transformed, by the First Coming are understandably bewildered by talk of a Second Coming.

From A Gracious Rain: A Devotional Commentary on the Prayers of the Church Year by Richard H. Schmidt. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In God's image

Daily Reading for November 10 • Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome, 461

Our Lord Jesus Christ, born truly human without ever ceasing to be true God, began in his person a new creation and by the manner of this birth gave humanity a spiritual origin. What mind can grasp this mystery, what tongue can fittingly recount this gift of love? Guilt becomes innocence, old becomes new, strangers are adopted and outsiders are made heirs. Rouse yourself, and recognize the dignity of your nature. Remember that you were made in God’s image; though corrupted in Adam, that image has been restored in Christ.

From a sermon for the Nativity by Leo the Great, quoted in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Friend of God

Daily Reading for November 11 • Martin, Bishop of Tours, 397

Perhaps nowhere is the overlapping of popular enthusiasm and episcopal initiative better illustrated than at sixth-century Tours, episcopal see of the fourth-century miracle-working ascetic Martin (ca. 372-97). . . . By the time Gregory became bishop in 573, Tours was already well established as “the city of Martin.” The paintings near his tomb related Martin’s life and miracles. The inscriptions in his funerary church proclaimed both his journey through the stars and his abiding presence in the tomb. That tomb, as well as certain sites hallowed by events of Martin’s life, now drew pilgrims from across northern and central Gaul. Gregory himself had once come to Tours as just such a pilgrim. Now, as the city’s bishop, Gregory immersed himself in Martin’s cult. Episcopal routines and personal piety brought him frequently to Martin’s church outside the city walls. And almost immediately he began to compile his own dossier of Martin’s contemporary miracles, believing that careful documentation might allay any doubt about the wonders worked by the living Martin two hundred years before.

The four books of Gregory’s Miracles of the Bishop St. Martin now seem a remarkable portrait of the dilemmas and hopes of his age. Gregory began his second book with an account of his own recovery from near-fatal dysentery, cured by a drink of water laced with dust from Martin’s tomb when the wisdom of the doctors had run dry. Thereafter he would continue to record his recourse to the tomb for aid and comfort. But Gregory would seldom, if ever, have been alone there. The Miracles portray Martin’s church as the refuge of the afflicted. The sick, blind, and possessed crowd in upon the doorways and lie in the courtyard. They represent every level of society. Often they arrive in wagons or carried by friends and family. They stay for days; they return annually. They favor Martin’s feast days and other holy days. The fortunate are healed or cleansed, and some stay on to become monks or nuns. Many return home with relics, a bit of dust from the tomb or a candle. Some go away with a lesson learned about Sabbath purity or charity. But few apparently departed unawed by the power of Martin, the “friend of God” (Miracles 4.Preface.).

From Late Ancient Christianity, edited by Virginia Burrus, volume 2 in the series A People’s History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Living to preach

Daily Reading for November 12 • Charles Simeon, Priest, 1836

Simeon lived to preach. This was unusual at a time when most sermons were dry, learned discourses, memorized word-for-word or read from a manuscript. Many preachers used sermons written by other people, taken from books. Listeners were expected to think about the ideas expressed, but rarely were they challenged to change their lives. This was not for Charles Simeon, who saw such preaching as an invitation to a self-satisfied, lukewarm piety. Simeon not only wrote his own sermons, but spent twelve hours preparing each one, sometimes longer. And he sought to engage not only the minds, but the hearts and wills of his listeners. Although he shared the distrust of “enthusiasm” typical of the day, he did not hesitate to appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect. His sermons were dramatic and fervent. Cambridge was not ready for Simeon, and congregations were small at first (due in part, no doubt, to the creative efforts of the wardens to keep them small). But within a decade, people began to fill the pews of Holy Trinity (new, more sympathetic wardens opened the pews in 1790), and by the early 1800s, a Sunday congregation of a thousand worshipers was not unusual. . . .

The most distinctive feature of Simeon’s preaching was his faithfulness to scripture. He rose daily at 4:00 am and spent four hours a day in Bible study and prayer. Simeon knew the scriptures—he read the Bible far more than anything else—and believed the preacher’s task was to allow the scripture to speak. “My goal,” he said in the preface to Horae Homileticae, is to bring out of the scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there.”

From the introduction to Charles Simeon in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Watching for the sunrise

Daily Reading for November 13

Holiness, Benedict argues, is not something that happens in a vacuum. It has something to do with the way we live our community lives and our family lives and our public lives as well as the way we say our prayers. The life-needs of other people affect the life of the truly spiritual person and they hear the voice of God in that. . . .

Monastic spirituality depends on direction. It is a rule of life. Self-control, purpose, and discipline give aim to what might otherwise deteriorate into a kind of pseudo-religious life meant more for public show than for personal growth. It is so comforting to multiply the practices of the church in our life and so inconvenient to have to meet the responsibilities of the communities in which we live.

But the spiritual life is not a taste for spiritual consolations. The spiritual life is a commitment to faith where we would prefer certainty. It depends on readiness. It demands constancy. It flourishes in awareness.

The ancients say that once upon a time a disciple asked the elder, “Holy One, is there anything I can do to make myself Enlightened?” And the Holy One answered, “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”

“Then of what use,” the surprised disciple asked, “are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”

“To make sure,” the elder said, “that you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”

From The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittister (Crossroad, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Frequent communion

Daily Reading for November 14 • Consecration of Samuel Seabury, First American Bishop, 1784

Parish worship on the whole continued along prerevolutionary lines once the Episcopal Church had organized itself and adopted a Prayer Book. Regional variations persisted. Connecticut’s Bishop Seabury devoted himself energetically to his episcopal ministry, ordaining clergy for New England, making episcopal tours to administer confirmation (a rite previously unknown in a colonial church without bishops), and urging more frequent celebration and reception of Communion. When Seabury was consecrated in Scotland, his eucharistic theology seems to have been of the ordinary high-church kind characteristic in Connecticut in his day. But the Scots sent him back with a collection of pamphlets and books which set forth their own distinctive outlook, and in the next few years he seems to have adopted this outlook in its entirety. Others share with him the credit for the adoption of a variant of the Scottish eucharistic prayer in the 1789 Prayer Book, but none seem to have so consistently advocated the theology to which that text gives expression as Seabury did. He issued in 1789 An Earnest Persuasive to Frequent Communion and in 1791 reprinted the catechism of the Scottish bishop George Innes of Brechin, which lists as first of the duties of the Sabbath “to offer and receive the Holy Eucharist.” In New London, he himself adopted the practice of a celebration each Sunday. He was ahead of his time, however, and was unsuccessful in persuading others to follow his example.

From Eucharistic Celebration 1789-1979 by Byron D. Stuhlman (Church Hymnal Corporation, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Work as pilgrimage

Daily Reading for November 15

In work, it has always taken courage to follow a unique and individual path exactly, because making our own path takes us off the path, in directions which seem profoundly unsafe. A pilgrimage into the night and the night wind. The territory through which we must travel to make a life for ourselves is always more difficult than we could first imagine; it takes us to the cliff edges of life. The amusing part is that you can spend years preparing for the possibility of falling off the cliff and then find yourself suddenly under the cliff, approaching it from another, equally terrifying direction.

Finding a work to which we can dedicate ourselves always calls for some kind of courage, some form of heartfelt participation. It needs courage because the intrinsic worth of work lies in the fact that it connects us to larger, fiercer worlds where we are forced to remember first priorities. The farm laborer knows the toil that literally puts bread on the table. The police officer knows firsthand the invisible line between order and disorder in society. I remember a recent dinner conversation with a water utility executive who had been in the midst of a massive Turkish earthquake. Awake night after night, doing work that was not part of his official job description, he and his team brought water, medicines, and supplies to bereft, panicking communities. Once the crisis was past, he wondered if he would ever feel that aliveness and urgency again the rest of his days. He was wistful for the frontier encounter, the cliff edge. This cliff edge is a frontier where passion, belonging, and need call for our presence, our powers, and our absolute commitment. To approach work in this manner is not merely to look for constant excitement but to join a conversation with the great cycles of existence, cycles that often terrify us even as they call on the best of us.

From Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte (Riverhead Books, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Parable of the talents

Daily Reading for November 16 • The Twenty-seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Now we need to look at the shadow side of this parable [of the talents]: the third slave who was given only one talent and did not do anything with it. Here is a somber warning without doubt. There are two ways of being unfaithful. There is the “hot” way, which is to abuse our powers and use them destructively. This is the sin of commission. Then there is the “cold” way of being unfaithful, which is to do nothing at all and therefore neglect and abort one’s potential. . . .

[It] may have been that the smallness of his talent led him to conclude that what he did with it did not matter. If I believe anything at all, it is this: in God’s universe, there is nothing that is insignificant. The great things were first of all little things that were lifted up to God in reverence and gratitude, and then used to the fullest. It is a mistake to confuse size with value. . . . But the text itself suggests that the real problem was one of mistrust. . . . Nothing distorts our humanity quite as much as the sense that there is not enough and therefore one has to fight or flee. Of course, more than anything else, this distortion is what Jesus came to cast out. The serpent put the whole human race off track by casting false aspersions on God’s character. He projected onto God what this slave projected onto his master—that God was hard, cruel, dishonest, and untrustworthy. It was to undo this misrepresentation that Jesus entered into history. In a study group, I heard author John Killinger claim that “Jesus was God’s answer to the problem of a bad reputation.” Killinger believes that reconciliation finally occurs when we let Jesus “show us the Father” and disprove forever the serpent’s distortion.

From Stories Jesus Still Tells by John Claypool, revised second edition (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Tender compassion

Daily Reading for November 17 • Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, 1200

It is impossible adequately to record amongst the other marks of his devotion, his great compassion and tenderness towards the sick, and even to those afflicted with leprosy. He used to wash and dry their feet and kiss them affectionately, and having refreshed them with food and drink gave them alms on a lavish scale. He often did this privately in his chamber with few people present to thirteen patients, when that number could be found in the place where he was. There were hospitals on certain of the episcopal manors, where many men and women afflicted by this disease were maintained. He made a practice of giving gifts of many different kinds to these in addition to the revenue already assigned to them by his predecessors, and frequently visited them himself with a few of his more God-fearing and devout retainers. He would sit in their midst in a small inner room and would comfort their souls by his kindly words, relieving their sorrow by his motherly tenderness, and encouraging those who were so desolate and afflicted in this life to hope for an eternal reward, combining with amazing gentleness words of consolation and exhortations to good conduct. Also if he noticed any tendency to wrong-doing, he would exhort them not to give way to it, and if they had done so to repent, and from henceforth neither to dare nor desire to do wrong. Before his address the women withdrew at his command and he went to kiss the men one by one, bending over each of them and giving a longer and more tender embrace to those whom he saw worse marked by the disease. . . . He declared such to be blessed, and called them the flowers of Paradise and the lucent pearls in the crown of the eternal king. These, he said, could confidently await the coming of Our Saviour Jesus Christ who would transform their vile bodies into the glory of His risen body.

From Magna vita Sancti Hugonis by Adam of Eynsham, edited by Decima L. Douie and David Hugh Farmer, Volume 2, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford University Press, 1961).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mingling of traditions

Daily Reading for November 18 • Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, 680

Why some of the Irish and also some of the English differed from the new Roman missionaries about [the date of Easter] was not a matter of alternative symbolism or theology or biblical study, but of calendric calculation. . . . When we look at who said what and why, it was all more mixed-up than at first appears. It was not a matter of the arrogant men from Rome baring their teeth at the simple Irish at all. At the Council of Whitby, who supported which side? There was no clear-cut division in terms of nationalism. An epitome of the mingling of traditions is seen in Hilda, the hostess on this occasion.

Hilda was an Anglo-Saxon princess (614-680). . . [and] was thus by birth one of the Saxon invaders, and her first experience of Christianity was of that brought by the Roman missionaries. In 647, when she was 33, Hilda decided to be a nun and went to her nephew in East Anglia for a year, planning to go to join her sister in the Gaulish convent at Chelles. But she came to know and revere the missionary from Iona, Aidan, and he persuaded her to stay in England, first as part of a new group at Hartlepool. Then, when the abbess Heiu left for a life of greater seclusion, Hilda became abbess.

She was given charge of Aelfflaed, one-year-old daughter of King Oswiu of Northumbria, after his success at the battle of the Winwead. Two years later Oswiu gave her more land at Whitby, where she ruled a new monastery. She was greatly revered and loved: ‘All who knew her called her mother.’ She made the royal monastery of Whitby, the place of the burial of the rulers of Northumbria, a place of serious Christian education, where she trained five bishops including the saintly John of Beverley. There also the first English poet, Caedmon, became a monk and there the earliest Life of Pope Gregory the Great was written. Hilda was hostess to the Council of Whitby where, under the influence of Aidan and Colman, she inclined at first towards the Irish side. . . . Hilda died in 680, the year in which Bede entered Wearmouth. In her life there is a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Roman and Irish elements which blended together imperceptibly. . . . Almost everyone at Whitby had close and friendly contact with both Roman and Irish missionaries; it was not a clash of opposites, but an argument between friends on a matter the importance of which united them far more than the details divided.

From High King of Heaven: Aspects of Early English Spirituality by Benedicta Ward SLG (Mowbray, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Compassionate hearts

Daily Reading for November 19 • Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary, 1231

Lord Jesus, as God’s Spirit came down and rested upon you,
may the same Spirit rest upon us,
bestowing his sevenfold gifts.

First, grant us the gift of understanding,
by which your precepts may enlighten our minds.

Second, grant us counsel,
by which we may follow in your footsteps
on the path of righteousness.

Third, grant us courage,
by which we may ward off the Enemy’s attacks.

Fourth, grant us knowledge,
by which we can distinguish good from evil.

Fifth, grant us piety,
by which we may acquire compassionate hearts.

Sixth, grant us fear,
by which we may draw back from evil
and submit to what is good.

Seventh, grant us wisdom,
that we may taste fully
the life-giving sweetness of your love.

A prayer of Bonaventura (1217-74), General of the Franciscans, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Knowing our soul

Daily Reading for November 20 • Edmund, King of East Anglia, 870

Did I find solace in reading? Yes, but not at first. . . . Isola gave me a book called Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle, and a tedious thing he was—he gave me shooting pains in my head—until I came to a bit on religion.

I was not a religious man, though not for want of trying. Off I’d go, like a bee among blossoms, from church to chapel to church again. But I was never able to get a grip on Faith—till Mr. Carlyle posed religion to me in a different way. He was walking among the ruins of the Abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, when a thought came to him, and he wrote it down thus:

“Does it ever give thee pause, that men used to have a soul—not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech; but as a truth that they knew, and acted upon! Verily it was another world then. . . but yet it is a pity that we have lost the tidings of our souls. . . we shall have to go in search of them again, or worse in all ways shall befall us.”

Isn’t that something—to know your own soul by hearsay, instead of its own tidings? Why should I let a preacher tell me if I had one or not? If I could believe I had a soul, all by myself, then I could listen to its tidings all by myself. I gave my talk on Mr. Carlyle to the Society, and it stirred up a great argument about the soul. Yes? No? Maybe?

From The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: A Novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Random House/Dial Press, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Wild geese

Daily Reading for November 21

The wild goose is a Celtic symbol of God’s Spirit. Hundreds of migrating wild geese alight on Holy Island each year. They include Canadian Brent and Pink-footed geese. A BBC TV programme entitled Hidden Forces stated: ‘We’ve only just begun to unravel some of the magnetic senses which guide the geese across the world.’ Some geese return to a place after over thirty years of absence.

On Easter Day 1996 I lingered, with some sadness, outside my house with two friends. The church community which had been my family for many years had just said farewell to me. Now I faced a day of packing before moving to the unknown quantity of Lindisfarne. There was a great cry overhead. It was a wild goose. I had neither seen nor heard a wild goose in all my years in that place. The Holy Spirit was saying, ‘I am going ahead of you to Lindisfarne.’

Great Spirit, Wild Goose of the Almighty
Be my eye in the dark places
Be my flight in the trapped places
Be my host in the wild places
Be my formation in the lost places
Be my brood in the barren places.

From “Midday reflection at Cuddies Beach” in A Holy Island Prayer Book: Morning, Midday, and Evening Prayer by Ray Simpson. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The map of theology

Daily Reading for November 22 • C. S. Lewis, Apologist and Spiritual Writer, 1963

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

From Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (Macmillan, 1943).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Inherit the kingdom

Daily Reading for November 23 • The Last Sunday after Pentecost (Christ the King)

The whole point of Jesus giving us the final exam in the middle of the course is not to frighten us into failure, but to inspire us to recognize and begin to actualize our true identities. The purpose of this parable [of the sheep and the goats] is not to scare us into contriving a lot of humanitarian acts in order selfishly to acquire salvation. If we start feeding the hungry and clothing the naked simply to gain a reward, we have missed the whole point. Jesus came to change the way we understand ourselves and our relationship to God. The most important truth of all is this: God’s love is gift-love, not need-love, and we are made in the image of that reality. There is an artesian well in everyone whose source is the abundance of God. We are what we are because of who our Parent is, and once this identity becomes deeply rooted in our being, then an unself-conscious giving of self will become a way of life. This in another way of saying that we “inherit the kingdom prepared for us from the foundations of the world.”

From Stories Jesus Still Tells by John Claypool, revised second edition (Cowley Publications, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

All shall be well

Daily Reading for November 24

Julian lived in a time of great upheaval. The Black Death swept through Europe several times, killing millions and almost certainly touching Julian’s family and neighbors. The Catholic Church was in schism, and the theology of the day was that God was angry with a world of sinners and inflicted these ills as punishment. Yet Julian’s most famous saying and prayer was that “all manner of things would be well.” . . . For Julian, God was in everything, even the bad things, working to bring about the best end. “God is more nearer to us than our own soul,” she wrote. She planted herself not in the darkness, but in the light. For that reason, I find praying her words on prayer beads to be a rallying cry in the darkest of times, a way to trust God to bring peace and love, hope and redemption.

On the Cross
I am that which is highest,
I am that which is lowest,
I am that which is All.

On the Invitatory Bead
The Lord’s Prayer

On the Cruciform Beads
God of your goodness, give me yourself
For you are enough for me.
I cannot properly ask anything less to be worthy of you.
If I were to ask less, I should always be in want
For only in you have I all.

On the Weeks Beads (on Every Bead)
All shall be well and all shall be well,
And all manner of thing shall be well.

From “Praying the Anglican Rosary with the Saints” in Bead One, Pray Two: A Guide to Making and Using Prayer Beads by Kimberly Winston. Copyright © 2008. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A monk among the poor

Daily Reading for November 25 • James Otis Sargent Huntington, Priest and Monk, 1935

For something short of ten years, the two priests, then constituting this small religious group, carried on the work at Holy Cross Mission Church, which afforded them an unparalleled opportunity amongst the poor and depressed. They had large numbers of children under their care. The boys and young men were a special charge, as the Sisters taught and trained the girls. The work was very engrossing, visiting, day and night, teaching, carrying on the guilds, keeping up the choir offices and the public services and in summer conducting a Fresh Air work for boys in a barn-like building put up for the purpose and known as “St. Andrew’s Cottage,” on a lot next to the Mission. When in New York they rarely left the East Side and had few acquaintances among “up-town” folk. All along, however, they had many visitors, and almost always one or two priests and laymen living with them. Many years afterwards Father Huntington wrote:

“We came gradually to understand something as to the attitude of mind of those among whom we laboured. We knew how they ate (or starved), toiled, slept (often on the floor), sickened (tuberculosis was rife), and died. Yet I think that we never succeeded in realizing how they felt,—what it must have meant, for instance, to grow up without having ever been out of the presence of other people, so crowded were the conditions. One thing was to us surprising and significant. Poor as our people were, always on the edge, at least, of utter destitution, they scarcely ever came to us for material assistance. They had the pride of their race, honest German peasants or craftsmen, and they wanted to feel that what they had of religion was not spoiled for them by mendicancy and material dependence. When we had a two weeks’ Mission at Holy Cross Church, under the Cowley Fathers our people gave, from their scant earnings, nearly five hundred dollars for the expenses of the Mission.”

Those who know the pathos and tragedy of work amongst the poor, haloed as it always is with something close akin to romance, can understand the life that the Order lived on the East Side. It was a drive, but a happy drive. In and out of the lofty tenements, day and night seeking out the sick, the poor; ministering incessantly to bodies and souls—in such a work every day offered opportunities for cementing sacred spiritual relationships that filled life with a satisfaction which those who have not ministered under such conditions can never know.

From An American Cloister: The Life and Work of the Order of the Holy Cross by Shirley Carter Hughson, O.H.C. (West Park, N.Y.: Holy Cross Press, 1948). http://anglicanhistory.org/religious/hughson_cloister1948/02.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Judgment

Daily Reading for November 26

We are all of us judged every day. We are judged by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces and lives of our children and by our dreams. We are judged by the faces of the people we do not love. Each day finds us at the junction of many roads, and we are judged as much by the roads we have not taken as by the roads we have.

The New Testament proclaims that at some unforeseeable time in the future, God will ring down the final curtain on history, and there will come a Day on which all our days and all the judgments upon us and all our judgments upon each other will themselves be judged. The judge will be Christ. In other words, the one who judges us most finally will be the one who loves us most fully.

Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ’s love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ’s love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering that Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.

From “Judgment” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A Thanksgiving litany

Daily Reading for November 27 • Thanksgiving Day

Give thanks to the Lord who is good.
God’s love is everlasting.

Come, let us praise God joyfully.
Let us come to God with thanksgiving.

For the good world; for things great and small, beautiful and awesome; for seen and unseen splendors:
Thank you, God.

For human life; for talking and moving and thinking together; for common hopes and hardship shared from birth until our dying:
Thank you, God.

For work to do and strength to work; for the comradeship of labor; for exchanges of good humor and encouragement:
Thank you, God.

For marriage; for the mystery and joy of flesh made one; for mutual forgiveness and burdens shared; for secrets kept in love:
Thank you, God.

For family; for living together and eating together; for family amusements and family pleasures:
Thank you, God.

For children; for their energy and curiosity; for their brave play and their startling frankness; for their sudden sympathies:
Thank you, God.

For the young; for their high hopes; for their irreverence toward worn-out values; for their search for freedom; for their solemn vows:
Thank you, God.

For growing up and growing old; for wisdom deepened by experience; for rest in leisure; and for time made precious by its passing:
Thank you, God.

For your help in times of doubt and sorrow; for healing our diseases; for preserving us in temptation and danger:
Thank you, God.

For the church into which we have been called; for the good news we received by Word and Sacrament; for our life together in the Lord:
We praise you, God.

For your Holy Spirit, who guides our steps and brings us gifts of faith and love; who prays in us and prompts our grateful worship:
We praise you, God.

Above all, O God, for your Son Jesus Christ, who lived and died and lives again for our salvation; for our hope in him; and for the joy of serving him:
We thank and praise you, Eternal God, for all your goodness to us.

Give thanks to the Lord who is good.
God’s love is everlasting. Amen.

“Litany of Thanksgiving” from the Book of Common Worship (1993), quoted in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised and updated edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery Rowthorn with W. Alfred Tisdale. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The early church in Hawaii

Daily Reading for November 28 • Kamehameha and Emma, King and Queen of Hawai’i, 1864, 1885

In 1860 the King and Queen sent a request to the British Government for a Bishop and clergy to be sent out to them. After considering the claims of the Congregationalist form of church government, hitherto the only one officially recognised in the island; after weighing the matters which were wanting in them—the comparative dreariness and heaviness of their services to . . . a people, who were gradually, it seemed, being attracted to the Church of Rome by the greater relief to ear and eye afforded by the services of that Mission—they came to the conclusion that the Church of England had the form of worship which would be most suitable to them, together with the great truths held in common with other Protestant bodies, which the Romish Church could not give them. In 1862 Bishop Staley was sent out to Hawaii as Missionary Bishop of Honolulu.

But just before his arrival, the joy of the King and Queen had been changed into mourning; the little prince, now four years old, had been attacked by disease of the brain, and had died after a few days’ illness. He was their only child—they never had another. In the trial the sympathy of the Bishop and his wife was very grateful to the bereaved parents, and thenceforth to the King, who, if not a professedly religious person, had for some time been living respectably, and steadily attending to the duties of his office, became a true and earnest Christian man. He devoted himself to his royal duties more assiduously than ever, and spent his spare time in translating our English Prayer Book into Hawaiian. But a tinge of sadness was thenceforth cast upon his mind. . . .

On one occasion . . . the King and his party attended a little meeting-house of the Congregationalists, served by a native preacher, who preached a strong Calvinist sermon, in which his zeal outran his discretion, and, no doubt, involuntarily caricaturing the doctrines of his teachers, he descanted at large upon the subject of eternal punishment, apparently losing sight of the general drift of the Bible, and of the aspect in which our Father in heaven is there presented to us. The King could not bear to think that his people should be taught no better ideas of the truth than this, and he announced that he would hold another service in the afternoon. The chapel was crowded with natives, and the King, putting on a white surplice, mounted the pulpit, and preached another kind of sermon, taking for his text the words, “Jesus wept.” Instead of trying to terrify his hearers into holiness of life by startling imaginary descriptions of future punishment, the King spoke of the love of God constraining us, and of the hope and of the incentive to goodness which that idea gives. He spoke from his own experience, and his people listened in awe and reverence. That evening he had the first attack of a disease which a few months later released him from a life which had become very weary to him. He died on the 30th of November, 1863, watched over by his devoted wife with tender care to the last.

From “The Four Kamehamehas” in Mission Life, Vol. VI (March 1, 1869). http://anglicanhistory.org/hawaii/kamehamehas1869.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Abba

Daily Reading for November 29

The Cry to God as ‘Father’ in the New Testament is not a calm acknowledgement of a universal truth about God’s abstract fatherhood. It is the Child’s cry out of a nightmare. It is the cry of outrage, fear, shrinking away, when faced with the horror of the ‘world’—yet not simply or exclusively protest, but trust as well. ‘Abba Father’ all things are possible to Thee.

By Rowan Williams, quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community, introduced by Richard J. Foster (HarperCollins, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The coming God

Daily Reading for November 30 • The First Sunday of Advent

Almighty Father
your Son came to us in humility as our saviour
and at the last day he will come again in glory as our judge:
give us grace to turn away from darkness to the light of Christ
that we may be ready to welcome him
and to enter into his kingdom;
where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit
one God, for ever and ever.

Collect for the First Sunday in Advent, from An Anglican Prayer Book 1989 of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa.

‘Peace to you,’ says Revelation 1:4, ‘from him who is, and who was, and who is to come.’ We should expect, ‘. . .and from him who will be’, since according to Greek ideas the presence of God in all three modes of time is an expression of his timelessness and simultaneous eternity: Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus will be: Zeus is eternal. The gods exist in the eternal present of Being, and everything that was, that is, and that will be, is in their eyes present. But here instead of the future of the verb to be (einai), we have the future of the verb to come (erchestai). The linear concept of time is broken through in its third term.

This has a considerable significance for the understanding of God and of time. God’s future is not that he will be as he was and is, but that he is on the move and coming toward the world. God’s Being is in his coming, not in his becoming. If it were in his becoming, then it would also be in his passing away. But as the Coming One (ho erchomenos), through his promises and his Spirit (which precede his coming and announce it) God now already sets present and past in the light of his eschatological arrival, an arrival which means the establishment of his eternal kingdom, and his indwelling in the creation renewed for that indwelling. The coming of God means the coming of a being that no longer dies and a time that no longer passes away. What comes is eternal life and eternal time.

From Jürgen Moltmann’s The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, translated by Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on November 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The God who moves

Daily Reading for December 1 • St. Andrew the Apostle (transferred)

To follow a God who moves and who expects us to move with him is a risky undertaking. It means not playing safe, and it asks for confidence in God’s hidden purposes. In the wilderness at Massah the people of Israel berated the God whom they felt had abandoned them and let them down; they grumbled and tested him as they demanded, ‘Is God amongst us or not?’ It is difficult not to feel sympathy for them, for how often when things are going badly have we not asked precisely the same question: Where is God in all of this? I so often find myself asking:
‘Is God in this or not?’
Can I find God in this apparently unlikely place?
Is God here in these frightening circumstances?
How can I find him in situations of loss, betrayal, depression?
Is he here in times of disappointment and uncertainty?

The commitment, and often the courage, that is needed to place one foot after another each of us knows in our own peculiar circumstances. Without the sense of the support and presence of Christ the journey is impossible. If we are to make the journey of our lives with a sense of his presence with us we should try to hold onto the promise that in the end good will triumph over evil and light over darkness. For this Christ mysteriously present at every step of the way is not only the Way, but also the Truth and the Life. These are three interconnected realities. He is the way because he teaches the truth, and that truth will lead to life.

From Lost in Wonder: Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness by Esther de Waal (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2003).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 1, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The church in Japan

Daily Reading for December 2 • Channing Moore Williams, Missionary Bishop in China and Japan, 1910

Since the last report an event unique in the history of the world has occurred, which is fraught with far-reaching consequences to Japan. On the 11th of February last the Emperor, in fulfilment of the promise made several years ago, gave a liberal constitution to the country. . . . One article of the constitution materially affects us, as a Church having a mission in the country. The 27th article declares that “Japanese subjects . . . shall enjoy freedom of religious belief.” This is but another way of stating that Christianity is henceforward tolerated. For there has been no question of the toleration of Buddhism and Shintoism—the only other religions which can possibly make any efforts at propagation here. This may be considered almost as an invitation to Christians to put forth their strength to spread the religion of Christ in this “Land of the Rising Sun,” and Christians of many names and divers beliefs—from Greek and Roman on the one side to Quakers and Unitarians on the other—are crowding into the country. There were at the end of last year 443 Protestant missionaries, of whom 150 were married men, twenty-seven unmarried, and 124 unmarried women. The Roman Church had two Bishops, eighty Priests, and forty sisters. The Greek Church was represented by one Bishop and two Priests. Our Church has only nine married men, two unmarried, and nine unmarried women—in all only twenty-nine missionaries.

Our Church must settle what part she is to take in the great work of bringing the people of this interesting country to the knowledge of and faith in the Lord Jesus; and what she determines to do must be done without delay. She cannot think that she has, in any sense, come up to the measure of her responsibility. For the truth is the mission has been sadly undermanned from its commencement to the present; and the fact is especially apparent at this time when, by the new treaties, the whole country is to be thrown open to our missionaries to travel and reside where they may please, without restrictions of any kind.

From Bishop Williams’s 1889 annual report, quoted in An Historical Sketch of the Japan Mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A., third edition (New York: The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, 1891). http://anglicanhistory.org/asia/japan1891.html

Waiting is something we do a lot: waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the baby to be born, waiting for someone to come home. Children checking their calendars, “How many days ’til Christmas?”—they’re waiting. . . . And yes, the people of God wait, too. But we, O most fortunate ones, wait for joy; wait for the wolf to accompany the lamb; wait, hearts filled with laughter; wait to bear witness to the light. And we do not wait in vain. by the very power of our expectation, but our very faith, our willing welcome, we assist in the annual birth of love, of hope, of innocence.

This Advent, let us wait well, in faith, in hope, and in sympathy with one another—for together, we wait for joy!

From a “Meditation on Advent” by Barbara Deane Price, quoted in Women’s Uncommon Prayers: Our Lives Revealed, Nurtured, Celebrated edited by Elizabeth Rankin Geitz, Marjorie A. Burke, and Ann Smith. Copyright © 2000. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 2, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prayers for Advent

Daily Reading for December 3

O great Chief,
light a candle in my heart,
that I may see what is in it,
and sweep the rubbish from your dwelling place.

An African schoolgirl’s prayer, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

God of the watching ones,
the waiting ones,
the slow and suffering ones,
and of the angels in heaven,
and of the child in the womb,
give us Your benediction,
Your good word for our souls,
that we might rest and rise
in the kindness of Your company.

Prayer at the lighting of the Advent candles, from Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community (New York: HarperOne, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 3, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

New Jerusalem

Daily Reading for December 4 • John of Damascus, Priest, c. 760

Thou New Jerusalem, arise and shine!
The glory of the Lord on thee hath risen!
Sion, exult! rejoice with joy divine,
Mother of God! Thy Son hath burst His prison!

O heavenly Voice! O word of purest love!
‘Lo! I am with you alway to the end!’
This is the anchor, steadfast from above,
The golden anchor, whence our hopes depend.

O Christ, our Pascha! greatest, holiest, best!
God’s Word and Wisdom and effectual Might!
Thy fuller, lovelier presence manifest,
In that eternal realm, that knows no night!

From Ode 9 of the Canon for Easter Day (“Golden Compass”) of John of Damascus. Found at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/neale/easternhymns.johndmsc.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 4, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Light-bearing eyes

Daily Reading for December 5 • Clement of Alexandria, Priest, c. 210

The commandment of the Lord shines clearly, enlightening the eyes. Receive Christ, receive power to see, receive your light, that you may plainly recognize both God and man. More delightful than gold and precious stones, more desirable than honey and the honeycomb is the Word that has enlightened us. How could he not be desirable, who illumined minds buried in darkness, and endowed with clear vision “the light-bearing eyes” of the soul? . . .

Sing his praises, then, Lord, and make known to me your Father, who is God. Your Word will save me, your song instruct me. I have gone astray in my search for God; but now that you light my path, Lord, I find God through you, and receive the Father from you. I become co-heir with you, since you were not ashamed to own me as your brother. Let us, then, shake off forgetfulness of truth, shake off the mist of ignorance and darkness that dims our eyes, and contemplate the true God, after first raising this song of praise to him: “All hail, O light!” For upon us buried in darkness, imprisoned in the shadow of death, a heavenly light has shone, a light of a clarity surpassing the sun’s, and of a sweetness exceeding any this earthly life can offer.

From Clement of Alexandria’s Exhortation to the Greeks II, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 5, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Glowing spirit, pure heart

Daily Reading for December 6 • Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, c. 342

An example of the Faith and a life of humility,
as a teacher of abstinence
you did inspire and lead your flock
and through your truthfulness of your deeds
were exalted by greatness through your humility
uplifting all and by poverty gaining wealth.
Father and hierarch Nicholas intercede
with Christ our God that our souls be saved.

The Apolytikion or Troparion (Hymn) of Saint Nicholas.

The four corners of the world glorify you
As a knight of the powerful Faith,
The Faith of God, the true Faith.

From the cradle he was devoted to God,
From the cradle until the end;
And God glorified him—
His faithful Nicholas.

Famous was he throughout his life,
And even more renowned after death;
Mighty on earth was he,
And even more mighty is he in heaven.

Glowing spirit, pure heart,
He was a temple of the Living God;
For this the people glorify him
As a wondrous saint.

Nicholas, rich in glory,
Loves those who honor him as their Krsna Slava;
Before the throne of the eternal God,
He prays for their good.

O Nicholas, bless us,
Bless your people
Who, before God and before you,
Humbly stand in prayer.

Hymn of Praise: “Saint Nicholas the Miracle-Worker,” from The Prologue from Ohrid copyright © 1999 Serbian Orthodox Church, Diocese of Western America. Both hymns found at http://www.stnicholascenter.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 6, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Lights in a dark world

Daily Reading for December 7 • The Second Sunday of Advent

O God our Father, we thank you for your servant John,
who like a burning lamp and faithful to his calling,
announced the advent of our Lord
and people rejoiced for a while in his light,
for he was just a witness
to the greater light of your Son Jesus Christ,
the light of the World.
May we too through the enabling of your Son Jesus,
be like lights in a dark world,
to lead the people into the knowledge of Jesus
our Lord and the light of the world.

Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, in Our Modern Services of the Anglican Church of Kenya.

The God of hope is himself the coming God (Isa. 35:4; 40:5). When God comes in his glory, he will fill the universe with his radiance, everyone will see him, and he will swallow up death for ever. This future is God’s mode of being in history. The power of the future is his power in time. His eternity is not timeless simultaneity; it is the power of his future over every historical time. It is therefore logical that it was not only God himself who was experienced as ‘the Coming One’, but that the conveyers of hope who communicate his coming and prepare men and women for his parousia should also be given this title: the Messiah, the Son of man, and Wisdom. The coming God is older than the various expectations of the messiah and the Son of man. These live from the hope for him. By virtue of hope for the coming God, the expected future acquires an inexhaustible ‘added value’ over against present and past in the experience of time. Sub specie aeternitatis not all times are of equal significance. Nor is time experienced as the power of transience, like Chronos, who devours his own children. If God’s being is in his coming, then the future that comes to meet us must become the theological paradigm of transcendence.

From Jürgen Moltmann’s The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, translated by Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 7, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Here make Thy home

Daily Reading for December 8 • Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, c. 397 (transferred)

Savior of the nations, come;
Virgin’s Son, here make Thy home!
Marvel now, O heaven and earth,
That the Lord chose such a birth.

Not by human flesh and blood;
By the Spirit of our God
Was the Word of God made flesh,
Woman’s offspring, pure and fresh.

Wondrous birth! O wondrous Child
Of the virgin undefiled!
Though by all the world disowned,
Still to be in heaven enthroned.

From the Father forth He came
And returneth to the same,
Captive leading death and hell
High the song of triumph swell!

Thou, the Father’s only Son,
Hast over sin the victory won.
Boundless shall Thy kingdom be;
When shall we its glories see?

Brightly doth Thy manger shine,
Glorious is its light divine.
Let not sin o’ercloud this light;
Ever be our faith thus bright.

Praise to God the Father sing,
Praise to God the Son, our King,
Praise to God the Spirit be
Ever and eternally.

From the hymn Veni Redemptor gentium by Ambrose of Milan; translated into German from the Latin by Martin Luther (1523); translated from German to English by William M. Reynolds (1851).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 8, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Living with uncertainty

Daily Reading for December 9

“Where there is patience and humility,
there is neither anger nor disturbance.”
(Francis of Assisi, The Admonitions

Lord, being a Christian means that I am called to live a life that involves a degree of uncertainty. Like Mary, I am unsure what your call will require of me in the recent moment, tomorrow, or many years from now. Strengthen my trust in you so that I may be your faithful servant in the world. Lord of all longing, in our society of instant gratification, patience is not a cultivated virtue. Remind me that I do not need to immediately have all the things I long for and all the answers to my questions.

In the waiting, we often learn much about ourselves, come to a greater awareness of what is truly important in life, and gain a better appreciation for the things we must await. When someone or some circumstance causes you to wait today, slow down and view that person or circumstance as a blessing. Is it really that important that you immediately have what you want? What do you learn about yourself as you wait? What do you notice around you when you slow down to wait?

From Advent and Christmas Wisdom from Saint Francis of Assisi by John V. Kruse (Liguori, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 9, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Daily collects for Advent

Daily Reading for December 10

Morning Prayer
Ever faithful God,
your prophets foretold the coming of the light.
In your name they promised
that the eyes of the blind would be opened.
We confidently await the coming of your Son,
and the day when he will gather all people
to live in your light, for ever and ever.

Evening Prayer
God our Father,
you overcame the stubbornness of human hearts,
and their resistance to your call,
as you prepared the coming of the Messiah.
Grant that we too may be faithful
and persevere to the end in the ways that you have called us,
and in waiting for him who is to come,
Jesus, our Lord.

Collects for Advent, from A Celtic Primer: The Complete Celtic Worship Resource and Collection, edited and compiled by Brendan O’Malley. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 10, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Be a dwelling for God

Daily Reading for December 11

Lots of people these days are seeking recollection, writing books about it, urging us to do it. It seems like a nice idea all right—until you try it. What a lot of the books don’t tell you about is the terror. To know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge may mean not knowing much of anything else.

With the peace and quiet of recollection may come the stark edge of fear that this doing nothing, this being, this offering of oneself for God to be the actor, cannot possibly be enough. It all seems so passive. Do something, produce, perform, earn your keep. Don’t just sit there. It may be good and well for Mary to offer space in herself for God to dwell and be born into the world, but few of us possess the radical belief such recollection requires.

What matters in the deeper experience of contemplation is not the doing and accomplishing. What matters is relationship, the being with. We create holy ground and give birth to Christ in our time not by doing but by believing and by loving the mysterious Infinite One who stirs within. This requires trust that something of great and saving importance is growing and kicking its heels in you. . . .

The intensity and strain that many of us bring to Christmas must suggest to some onlookers that, on the whole, Christians do not seem to have gotten the point of it. Probably few of us have the faith or the nerve to tamper with hallowed Christmas traditions on a large scale, or with our other holiday celebrations. But a small experiment might prove interesting. What if, instead of doing something, we were to be something special? Be a womb. Be a dwelling for God. Be surprised.

From Letters from the Holy Ground by Loretta Ross-Gotta (Franklin, Wis.: Sheed & Ward, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 11, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Almost

Daily Reading for December 12

One of the classical themes of Advent is patience, the virtue ascribed to Mary and urged by the prophets upon Israel. But patience comes to me as easily as vegetarianism to a lion. From the looks of our lives, I seem to have abundant company. We are all busy, laboring diligently, noisily, impatiently to usher in a new and presumably improved life on earth. . . .

Among the derivations of the word “patience” is the Latin word paene, “almost.” There is an “almost" quality to patience that bears attention, precisely because it challenges our drive to achieve perfection, fulfillment. Learning to live with the “almost.” That doesn’t come easily. . . .

Struggling to achieve what we believe to be true and noble, locked in combat against time and decay, we rush to accomplish all things and savor few. Yet in Advent we are called to sit quietly in the dark and peer into deepest night, abiding in the almost, looking for the light. But it does not come easily, and we do not usually go there willingly. It usually comes by force of sheer exhaustion, when energy is gone, no option remaining.

When I survey the greatest gifts of my life, I must admit they were not found in the busy rush of accomplishment. The greatest gifts, like the call to serve as a priest, the wonderful people with whom I have shared life and ministry, the profound love freely offered by others—these all came quietly, in the almost. Exhaustive activity, insistence on my own will and accomplishment, these have been barriers between me and the God who loves me, the people in whom God loves me. The gifts have come unbidden, in the darkness, sitting sometimes alone, sometimes with others, in the almost, searching the void for a sliver of light, a glimpse of the whole—closer to God, and one another, when we are sharing a vision than when we are fighting for one.

From Daysprings: Meditations for the Weekdays of Advent, Lent, and Easter by Sam Portaro (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 12, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Bearer of light

Daily Reading for December 13

A favorite Scandinavian holiday tradition is tied to the beautiful white clad figure of Lucia, the “bearer of light,” who illuminates the darkness of winter on the morning of December 13th. Very early, before dawn, when the world is still blanketed in darkness, Lucia appears at each bedside, dressed in a white gown with a red sash. Wearing a crown of candles on her head, she awakens each member of the family with light saying: “Saint Lucia brings you light and bids you come to breakfast.” In her hands she carries a tray of coffee, sweet rolls and cookies. . . .

This dark, cold time of the year is a paradox; both the most depressing and most hopeful of times. It is the period when, in early history, people sometimes actually feared that the light might not return. In Northern Hemisphere cultures, this period of cold and darkness was also actually the most dangerous time of the year; there was always the very real possibility that food and fuel might run out, with no means left for survival, as well as the always present potential that the weather itself could bring destruction. . . .

It is during this time of darkness that people have traditionally turned inward to contemplate the meaning and the vulnerability of life. In the long Arctic night, hearts have always looked forward with longing toward the return of the light. Though the nights are the longest, and the darkness is at its deepest in December, it is at this point, at the point of Solstice, Yule or Sun Return, that everything shifts. The circling journey is no longer a descent into darkness, but a rise toward the reawakening of the light. It is not surprising that the people of Scandinavia would be fascinated by and adopt as their own, a saint who came bearing hope and light.

From “The Celebration of Saint Lucia’s Day” by Edwina Peterson Cross (2003); quoted in the Made in Australia Advent calendar. http://www.outbackonline.net/Advent%20Calendar/Advent_SaintLucia.htm

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 13, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Lord's servant

Daily Reading for December 14 • The Third Sunday of Advent

Lord Jesus, we know we are privileged to share
in the sufferings of those like your servant John,
for whom bold honesty led to his death.
Lead us to boldly stand for the truth
and declare the same with courage and wisdom
that comes from you.
Stand with your servants in times of crises and hardships
that they may not compromise their stand,
but continue shining like heavenly lights
in a world that is so full of darkness and sin.

Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent, in Our Modern Services of the Anglican Church of Kenya.

‘The Lord’s servant.’ Here is Mary as the Servant-Mother. Hold on to that reply and ponder it. For it may be that it gives us a clue—the clue?—to the meaning of her son’s life and death. The Servant-Mother was about to bear him who, above all others, was to be the servant of the Lord.

Who knows the influence of a mother on her unborn child? Here is a world of mystery which is still not wholly understood. But is it not possible that something of the concept of dedicated servanthood which was at the very heart of this young pregnant woman ‘got through’ to the child as yet unborn, and became an integral part in the shaping of his manhood and ministry? . . .

Mary saw, with a God-given clarity, at the moment of her greatest crisis, that servanthood lies at the very centre of the meaning of life as God intends it to be lived. Servanthood, obedience, in the great crises of life and in the little decisions of everyday, Mary saw as things of first importance. And so she doubtless taught the little boy on her lap, at her knee, through all his formative years. What greater prayer could she offer for her son than that he might grow up to be a servant of the Lord—possibly (did she glimpse it as she pondered on these things in her heart?) he might be even the servant of the Lord.

One of the greatest gifts that a mother can give to her children is not only to pray for them but, from their earliest years, to teach them to pray. We may be sure that Mary's little boy was not very old when he began to pray the prayer which his mother used when first she knew she was pregnant: ‘I am the Lord’s servant; may it be to me as you have said’, or, to put it more simply and shortly, ‘Your will be done’.

From The Servant-Son: Jesus Then and Now by Donald Coggan, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 14, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Lightness of being

Daily Reading for December 15

May God who sent us the light of the world
and who has given us the light of this day,
grant that we may come to know the lightness of being
which allowed Mary to say, “Yes.” Amen.

A morning prayer from Mary’s Hours: Daily Prayer with the Mother of God by Penelope Duckworth. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

All you big things, bless the Lord
Mount Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria
The Rift Valley and the Serengeti Plain
Fat baobabs and shady mango trees
All eucalyptus and tamarind trees
Bless the Lord
Praise and extol him for ever and ever.
All you tiny things, bless the Lord
Busy black ants and hopping fleas
Wriggling tadpoles and mosquito larvae
Flying locusts and water drops
Pollen dust and tsetse flies
Millet seeds and dried dagaa
Bless the Lord
Praise and extol him for ever and ever.

An African canticle, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 15, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mystery unsearchable

Daily Reading for December 16

It surpasses all thought, it amazes, it confounds, to think of God becoming man; the Infinite enshrined within the finite, the Lord of all blended with His servant, the Creator with His creature! It is a depth of mystery unsearchable. We must shrink with awe when we pronounce it. Of old they fell down and worshipped, when, in our Creed, they uttered it—'God was made Man.’ It was an unimaginable condescension for God to create. From Eternity, in Eternity, (since it had no beginning), He was Ever-blessed, Love loving Love in the Holy Spirit, who is the Bond of Love and Unity. He was, in Himself, All-perfect. He needed nothing, changed not. And yet, in that He created, He did a new thing, and formed those who needed Him, as though He needed them. He formed them to serve Him Who needed them not, and He accepted their service. It was much, as Scripture saith, to ‘humble Himself to behold the things which are in Heaven and earth.’ But that He, Who was Perfect in Himself, should take into Himself something without Him; that He, Who is All in all, should add something to Himself; that He Who is a Spirit, should take into Himself that which was material; in a word, that God . . . should take into Himself what is not God; one must stand speechless with awe at so amazing a mystery.

From Sermons during the season from Advent to Whitsuntitde by E. B. Pusey, quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 16, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The hidden plan

Daily Reading for December 17

We did not make ourselves,
it was the Lord who made us,
and it is the Lord, too,
who has remade us,
setting himself from the start
to accomplish the mystery of our salvation. . .
the hidden plan who him alone would redeem us—
his mysterious design. . . .

To appreciate so sublime a plan,
so great a gift,
we need his own light to dawn on us
from the everlasting hills.
It is to those hills
that we must lift up our eyes
to see how we were saved
from hurtling down the path we now climb.

From a letter by St. Paulinus of Nola, quoted in Lost in Wonder: Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness by Esther de Waal (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2003).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 17, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Renew us during our sleep

Daily Reading for December 18

The sun has disappeared.
I have switched off the light,
and my wife and children are asleep.
The animals in the forest are full of fear,
and so are the people on their mats.
They prefer the day with the sun to the night.
But I still know that your moon is there,
and your eyes and also your hands.
Thus I am not afraid.
This day again you led us wonderfully.
Everybody went to his mat
satisfied and full.
Renew us during our sleep,
that in the morning
we may come afresh to our daily jobs.
Be with our brothers far away in Asia
who may be getting up now. Amen.

Prayer of a young Ghanaian Christian, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 18, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Asking for room

Daily Reading for December 19

Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts. But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ. . . .

It would be foolish to pretend that it is always easy to remember this. If everyone were holy and handsome, with alter Christus shining in neon lighting from them, it would be easy to see Christ in everyone. If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her heard, and the moon under her feet, then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her, nor is it Christ’s way for himself, now when he is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.

From Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, edited by Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 19, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Gathering pearl

Daily Reading for December 20

Divers men may walk by the seaside
and the same beams of the sun giving light to them all,
one gathereth by the benefit of that light
pebbles or speckled shells for curious vanity,
and another gathers precious pearl or medicinal amber by the same light. . . .
But, if thou canst take this light of reason that is in thee,
this poor snuff that is almost out in thee,
thy faint and dim knowledge of God that riseth out of this light of nature,
if thou canst in those embers, those cold ashes,
find out one small coal
and wilt take the pains to kneel down and blow that coal with thy devout prayers,
and light thee a little candle
(a desire to read that book which they call the Scriptures,
and the Gospel, and the Word of God);
if with that little candle thou canst creep humbly into low and poor places;
if thou canst find thy Savior in a manger,
and in his swathing clouts, in his humiliation,
and bless God for that beginning . . .
Thou shalt see that thou by thy small light
hath gathered pearl and amber.

From a sermon by John Donne preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Christmas Day, 1621, in John Donne: Selections from Divine Poems, Sermons, Devotions, and Prayers, edited by John Booty (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1990).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 20, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Full of grace

Daily Reading for December 21 • The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Heavenly Father
you chose the Virgin Mary
to be the mother of our Lord and Saviour:
fill us with your grace
that in all things we may, like her,
accept your holy will
and with her rejoice in your salvation;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Collect for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, from An Anglican Prayer Book 1989 of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa.

Loving God, who places us in families that we may experience and grow in love,
give us grace in the midst of our days to ponder your loving kindness
and to reflect on the love that has come to us through others.
Help us, like Mary, to treasure your presence in the unique situations of our lives,
and give us grace to show your love to those who have not known it.
We ask this in the name of him who came among us helpless
and first learned love through his mother. Amen.

From Mary’s Hours: Daily Prayer with the Mother of God by Penelope Duckworth. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 21, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Stand amazed

Daily Reading for December 22 • St. Thomas the Apostle (transferred)

Let us rise in early morning.
Reconciliation’s plan devising,
Fellow-sharer of the Father’s Throne,
Thee, O Christ, we, very early rising,
Tender lover of our spirits, own!

When Thy Friends, with deep dismay confounded,
Stood amazed, and knew not where to fly,
All the darkness that their souls surrounded
Thou didst scatter with Thy drawing nigh

Touch how aweful, how consolatory!
When, O Thomas, thou didst stretch thine hand,
And that Side, resplendent in its glory,
Didst explore, because He gave command!

Unbelief of Thomas was the Mother
Of Thy Church’s most unshaken Creed:
Thou, O Saviour, wise above all other,
Had’st, before the world was, thus decreed.

From Ode 5 of the Canon for St. Thomas’ Sunday of John of Damascus. Found at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/neale/easternhymns.johndmsc.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 22, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The manger

Daily Reading for December 23

The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they’re about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor’s sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them to the shed. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the squares of hay apart, and starts scattering it. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is. The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and the sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of course, is the manger.

He only just saw it. He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye. He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger. The world is the manger.

From “Christmas,” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 23, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

World's true Light

Daily Reading for December 24 • Christmas Eve

Heavenly Father
you made this holy night radiant
with the brightness of your Son Jesus Christ:
help us to welcome him as the world’s true Light
and bring us to eternal joy in his kingdom;
where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit
one God, for ever and ever.

Collect for Christmas Eve, from An Anglican Prayer Book 1989 of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa.

Welcome all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span!
Summer in winter! day in night!
Heaven in earth! and God in man!
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth!

Welcome, tho’ nor to gold, nor silk,
To more than Cæsar’s birthright is:
Twin sister seas of virgin’s milk,
With many a rarely-temper’d kiss,
That breathes at once both maid and mother,
Warms in the one, cools in the other.

She sings Thy tears asleep, and dips
Her kisses in Thy weeping eye:
She spreads the red leaves of Thy lips,
That in their buds yet blushing lie.
She ‘gainst those mother diamonds tries
The points of her young eagle’s eyes.

Welcome—tho’ not to those gay flies
Gilded i’ th’ beams of earthly kings,
Slippery souls in smiling eyes—
But to poor shepherds, homespun things,
Whose wealth’s their flocks, whose wit’s to be
Well read in their simplicity. . . .

To Thee, meek Majesty, soft King
Of simple graces and sweet loves!
Each of us his lamb will bring,
Each his pair of silver doves!
At last, in fire of Thy fair eyes,
Ourselves become our own best sacrifice!

From “A Hymn of the Nativity, sung by the Shepherds” by Richard Crashaw (1613-1649).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 24, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

How good the Lord is

Daily Reading for December 25 • The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Maker of the sun, he himself is made under the sun. Disposing all Ages in the bosom of the Father, he consecrates this unique day in the womb of his mother: in Him he abides, from her he goes forth. Creator of heaven and earth, he was born on earth under heaven. Wisdom too deep for utterance, wise now a baby asleep; filling all the world, he lies in his crib; ruler of the stars, he suckles his mother’s breast.

Great in his divine nature, he is become small to be our servant (Phil. 2:6); yet his greatness is not belittled by this smallness, nor is his smallness overshadowed by his greatness. For when he took these tiny limbs, he did not set aside his divine workings (Wis. 8:1). . . . And when, clothed in feeble flesh, he entered the Virgin’s womb, he was not a prisoner. For the food of wisdom was not taken from the Angels, while we ourselves were tasting how good the Lord is.

From a sermon for Christmas by Augustine of Hippo, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 25, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Peace on earth

Daily Reading for December 26 • St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr

This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities. And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power. . . .

Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are going to perish together as fools. . . .

Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. . . . Be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” . . . With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when there will be peace on earth and good will toward men. It will be a glorious day; the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy.

From “A Christmas Sermon on Peace” by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Wisdom of the Word Love: Great African-American Sermons, edited by Rhinold Ponder and Michele Tuck-Ponder (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 26, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The disciple whom he loved

Daily Reading for December 27 • St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

For John, the irony is that the cross itself is the very place where the community of love is created. In the midst of his suffering, Jesus begins to weave this community from the small band of people who had the courage to keep company with him as he hung upon the cross, starting with his mother and the disciple whom he loved. From the cross where Jesus is drawing all to himself he begins to weave the community of those who will live from intimacy with himself, intimacy with God through him. . . .

Through this simple pledging of Mary to the beloved disciple and of him to Mary at the foot of the cross, the evangelist takes the new commandment to love one another and places it directly in the vortex of death and self-offering. By doing so John squeezes every remaining drop of sentimentality out of our understanding of love. Love, love—the word is always ringing in our ears, but when is it not mixed up with something else? Love and the desire to possess, love and the need to control, love and the need to be needed, love and the lust to absorb, love and condescension, love and narcissism. In the Christian mystery love itself must be crucified, must die to be reborn as the grace of communion, as love set free. In a mysterious sign the evangelist points to the new home of the beloved disciple as the place where this has happened, the household from which the church’s authentic identity has its origin.

From Love Set Free: Meditations on the Passion According to St. John by Martin L. Smith, SSJE (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 27, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The birth of Christ in us

Daily Reading for December 28 • The First Sunday after Christmas Day

Beholding His Glory is only half our job. In our souls too the mysteries must be brought forth; we are not really Christians till that has been done. “The Eternal Birth,” says Eckhart, “must take place in you.” And another mystic says human nature is like a stable inhabited by the ox of passion and the ass of prejudice; animals which take up a lot of room and which I suppose most of us are feeding on the quiet. And it is there between them, pushing them out, that Christ must be born and in their very manger He must be laid—and they will be the first to fall on their knees before Him. Sometimes Christians seem far nearer to those animals than to Christ in His simple poverty, self-abandoned to God.

The birth of Christ in our souls is for a purpose beyond ourselves: it is because His manifestation in the world must be through us. Every Christian is, as it were, part of the dust-laden air which shall radiate the glowing Epiphany of God, catch and reflect His golden Light. Ye are the light of the world—but only because you are enkindled, made radiant by the One Light of the World. And being kindled, we have got to get on with it, be useful. As Christ said in one of His ironical flashes, “Do not light a candle in order to stick it under the bed!” Some people make a virtue of religious skulking.

From Light of Christ by Evelyn Underhill, quoted in Advent with Evelyn Underhill, edited by Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 28, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Yearning for true peace

Daily Reading for December 29 • The Holy Innocents (transferred)

For many years I was so disgusted by the commercialization that Christmas has endured, so sickened by the terror of consumption, the pressures of buying, giving, and eating, that I did not want even to think of Luke 2. The baby in the manger was embarrassing, like rich almond candy. . . .

I understood rather late what the tyranny of the imperium romanum really meant for the people in the subjugated provinces. I had learned to read history only with the eyes of the victor. That the pax Christi was intended precisely for those who could expect nothing from the pax romana gave me a new key to the Christmas narrative and to the whole New Testament. How and under what conditions had people lived then in Galilee? Why had I never noticed the number of sick who appear in the Gospels? Who or what made them sick? . . . At last I saw the imperium from the perspective of those dominated by it. . . .

Whoever wants to proclaim something about this light has to free the stifled longing of people. An interpretation of the Bible that takes seriously concrete, everyday human cares and does not make light of the dying of children from hunger and neglect is helpful in this regard. By showing up the incomparable power of violence in our world today, it deepens our yearning for true peace.

The frightened shepherds become God's messengers. They organize, make haste, find others, and speak with them. Do we not all want to become shepherds and catch sight of the angel? I think so. Without the perspective of the poor, we see nothing, not even an angel. When we approach the poor, our values and goals change. The child appears in many other children. Mary also seeks sanctuary among us. Because the angels sing, the shepherds rise, leave their fears behind, and set out for Bethlehem, wherever it is situated these days.

From On Earth as in Heaven by Dorothee Soelle (Westminster John Knox, 1993).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 29, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

I was in prison and you visited me

Daily Reading for December 30 • Frances Joseph-Gaudet, Educator and Prison Reformer, 1934

At a depot in New Orleans, Mississippian Frances Joseph-Gaudet approached an unknown woman who was in tears, intending to give her a simple word of sympathy and a shoulder to lean on. She quickly learned that the stranger wept over the fate of her son, who was on his way by train to a state penitentiary for a crime that he supposedly did not commit. This railroad encounter lasted only a few minutes and was hardly eventful at the time, but the memory of it lingered and soon became the basis for an epiphany for Joseph-Gaudet that changed her life. “That night, as I knelt by my bed to ask God to comfort that aged mother whose only support was locked behind prison walls, it seemed some one was whispering to me, ‘You must go to the prison and ask the prisoners to pray that God will help them to resist temptation. . . .’” Joseph-Gaudet interpreted the whisper as God’s voice and the chance meeting with the sobbing woman at the train station as a divine sign that she must evangelize among the imprisoned. The next day, she boarded a train for a prison and began a life-long ministry to convert inmates.

From After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915 by John. M. Giggie (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 30, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Time's end

Daily Reading for December 31 • The Eve of the Holy Name

The days are growing noticeably shorter; the nights are longer, deeper, colder. Today the sun did not rise as high in the sky as it did yesterday. Tomorrow it will be still lower. At the winter solstice the sun will go below the horizon, below the dark. The sun does die. And then, to our amazement, the Son will rise again. . . .

Come, Lord Jesus, at the end,
Time’s end, my end, forever’s start.
Come in your flaming, burning power.
Time, like the temple veil, now rend;
Come, shatter every human hour.
Come, Lord Jesus, at the end.
Break, then mend the waiting heart.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness, and the result of our failures in love. In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.

But his love is greater than all our hate, and he will not rest until Judas has turned to him, until Satan has turned to him, until the dark has turned to him; until we can all, all of us without exception, freely return his look of love with love in our own eyes and hearts. And then, healed, whole, complete but not finished, we will know the joy of being co-creators with the one to whom we call.

From The Irrational Season by Madeleine L’Engle (New York: Seabury Press, 1977).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on December 31, 2008 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The power of naming

Daily Reading for January 1 • The Feast of the Holy Name

Naming in myth and fairy story has always been associated with power and identity. Thus, Adam named the beasts; in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; let his name not be remembered; thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; and so on. The process by which we name things and by which we are named is one which gives life its focus and meaning. Our spiritual journey is undertaken in order that we may discover our real name, that is, our true identity. Only God knows our real name, who we really are. We are on the voyage to that discovery.

Naming is the clue to such identity and purpose as we have. It is also the source of inner power. In the famous fairy tale, as soon as the princess had guessed the true name of the dwarf, Rumpelstiltskin, his power over her was destroyed. It can, of course, be taken to mean too much. The fact that my name is Alan has very little to do with my identity and sense of purpose. . . . When a total stranger calls me Alan, the name is virtually meaningless. When my wife calls me Alan, name and identity are very close. When God calls me by name, then and only then, is Alan my real name. . . .On the journey with God and to God in the power of the Spirit, we slowly increase our capacity for bearing reality, for bearing glory. In this way we see, with the professor in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers, that “atheism is the crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.” Belief in God entails fearful risks. For in him we find our true identity. By him we are known by name. As we begin to know who we are, so also the final and eternal imprint of the imago Dei takes hold upon us and fills us with a new spirit even as we are called by name.

From Journey Into Christ by Alan Jones (Cowley Publications, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 1, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Invited to relationship

Daily Reading for January 2

The point of telling infancy stories about the one who was to die bravely and mightily rise is to remind us that we are invited to a relationship with the divine that is never built on force. It is built on vulnerability, intimacy, and complete trust.

This is not to reduce the Christian religion to a club for innocuous ne’er-do-wells whose integrity is fulfilled only when they fail or someone uses them for a doormat. Intimacy, trust, and vulnerability take lots of work. Christians must engage what is amiss in our culture, and do so nonviolently. Vulnerability requires courage. The starving and undereducated children of the world need our constant care. Liking babies requires sacrifice. . . .

The news at Christmas is that in vulnerability there can be community. In trust can be found the power of God. In simple honesty with ourselves about ourselves, grace can flourish. In swallowing pride and accepting forgiveness from God or one another, a new creation can take place. . . . What God wants from us before all else is love. The rest will follow.

From “Behind the Tinsel (Christmas)” in Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less by Paul V. Marshall. Copyright © 2008. Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 2, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A Plygain carol

Daily Reading for January 3

Let us awake, awake and give praise
Before daybreak,
To the divine heir of the heavenly land
There is a welcome.
The stars sang from the morning of the world,
All God’s angels together.
All the prophets sang
Without being false;
And why should we not sing as one
For having great Jehofa himself
In the manner of a man, and in our image
To truly heal us.

But despite his poverty on earth
He is still great.
All treasure under his seal
A gift of the most High;
He is the All-rich, famous One,
A strong tower to save humanity
He has every fullness in Himself
For Adam and his seed;
His is life for the dead to live again
He is a joyful physician to the broken heart,
A garment for the naked, complete and just
And justification.

“The Great Clumsy Carol,” a Welsh carol sung in the Plygain (Christmas carol service); quoted in A Celtic Primer: The Complete Celtic Worship Resource and Collection, edited and compiled by Brendan O’Malley. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 3, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Becoming fugitives

Daily Reading for January 4 • The Second Sunday after Christmas Day

But why was the Christ child sent into Egypt? The text makes this clear: he was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” From that point onward we see that the hope of salvation would be proclaimed to the whole world. Babylon and Egypt represent the whole world. Even when they were engulfed in ungodliness, God signified that he intended to correct and amend both Babylon and Egypt. God wanted humanity to expect his bounteous gifts the world over. So he called from Babylon the wise men and sent to Egypt the holy family.

Besides what I have said, there is another lesson also to be learned, which tends powerfully toward true self-constraint in us. We are warned from the beginning to look out for temptations and plots. And we see this even when he came in swaddling clothes. Thus you see even at his birth a tyrant raging, a flight ensuing and a departure beyond the border. For it was because of no crime that his family was exiled into the land of Egypt.

Similarly, you yourself need not be troubled if you are suffering countless dangers. Do not expect to be celebrated or crowned promptly for your troubles. Instead you may keep in mind the long-suffering example of the mother of the Child, bearing all things nobly, knowing that such a fugitive life is consistent with the ordering of spiritual things. You are sharing the kind of labor Mary herself shared. So did the magi. They both were willing to retire secretly in the humiliating role of fugitive.

From “The Gospel of Matthew, Homily 8.2” by John Chrysostom, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew 1-13, edited by Manlio Simonetti (InterVarsity Press, 2006).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 4, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Light of all the world

Daily Reading for January 5

You know how sometimes on a pitch black night in the country, you see far off one glimmer of light and you follow it and it turns out to be just a candle in a cottage window—but it was enough to assure you of life ahead, to give you the lead you wanted in the dark. In the same way, when the Magi turned from their abstruse calculations in search of heaven and followed a star, they did not arrive at a great mathematical result or revelation of the cosmic mind. They found a poor little family party and were brought to their knees—because, like the truly wise, they were really humble-minded—before a baby born under most unfortunate circumstances, a mystery of human life, a little living growing thing. What a paradox! the apparently rich Magi coming to the apparently poor child. There they laid down their intellectual treasures—all pure gold to them—and, better than that, offered the spirit of adoration, the incense which alone consecrates the intellectual life and quest of truth, and that reverent acceptance of pain, mental suffering and sacrifice, that death to self which, like myrrh, hallows the dedicated life in all its forms.

The utmost man can achieve on his own here capitulates before the unspeakable simplicity of the methods of God. He is the Light of the World—all of it. He does not only want or illuminate spiritual things. His hallowing touch is for the ox and the ass, as afterwards for the sparrows and the flowers. There never was a less high-brow religion or one more deeply in touch with natural life than Christianity, although it is infinite in its scope. Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same shall be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is no use being too clever about life. Only so far as we find God in it do we find any meaning in it.

From Light of Christ by Evelyn Underhill, quoted in Advent with Evelyn Underhill, edited by Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 5, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Baubles brave

Daily Reading for January 6 • The Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ

The first king was very young,
O balow, balow la lay,
With doleful ballads on his tongue,
O balow, balow la lay,
He came bearing a branch of myrrh
Than which no gall is bitterer,
O balow, balow la lay,
Gifts for a baby King, O.

The second king was a man in prime,
O balow, balow la lay,
The solemn priest of a solemn time,
O balow, balow la lay,
With eyes downcast and reverent feet
He brought his incense sad and sweet,
O balow, balow la lay,
Gifts for a baby King, O.

The third king was very old,
O balow, balow la lay,
Both his hands were full of gold,
O balow, balow la lay,
Many a gaud and glittering toy,
Baubles brave for a baby boy,
O balow, balow la lay,
Gifts for a baby King, O.

“The Three Kings” by Dorothy L. Sayers; found at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sayers/opi/dls-opi.html#kings

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 6, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Wise worshipers

Daily Reading for January 7

The mysterious “wise men” from the East caught popular Christian fancy earlier and more often then did Luke’s rather pedestrian shepherds-visitors to Bethlehem. In the Protoevangelium of James (second century) only magi come to pay homage at the Bethlehem cave—an interesting mixture of Matthew and Luke. In the Roman catacombs the magi made their pictorial debut a good two centuries before the shepherds, who belatedly appear in the fourth century in Sts. Peter and Marcellinus as subsidiary to the magi. If interest in relics is taken as a gauge, there is simply no contest between the magi and the shepherds. Indeed, the corporeal relics of the magi traveled on a grander scale than their original owners, to the point that in the twentieth century the relics were still traveling and even going back to their earlier home “by another route.” We are told that the relics of the magi were brought from Persia to Constantinople in 490 by the Emperor Zeno. Relics (the same or others) appeared much later in Milan, and from there they went to Cologne in 1162 as part of the booty dispersed by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who had ravaged Italy. The magi’s remains were none the worse for travel, apparently, for the report speaks of still incorrupt bodies. Today these relics remain in Cologne in a magnificently enameled shrine, although in 1903 the cardinal of Cologne sent some of the relics back to Milan as a gift to the cardinal of that city. . . .

We may smile at the anachronisms in [medieval] descriptions, but this imaginative reflection on the magi is not too far from Matthew’s own intent. In the persons of the magi Matthew was anticipating the Gentile Christians of his own community. Although these had as their birthright only the revelation of God in nature, they had been attracted to Jesus; and when instructed in the Scriptures of the Jews, they had come to believe in and pay homage to the Messiah.

From The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke by Raymond E. Brown (Image Books, 1979).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 7, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A life of friendship

Daily Reading for January 8 • Harriet Bedell, Deaconess and Missionary, 1969

Harriet Bedell, missionary and friend to the Seminole Indians of Florida, was born in Buffalo, New York on March 19, 1875. She was trained as a schoolteacher but was inspired several years later by an Episcopalian missionary who spoke at her church describing the many needs of missionary work. In 1906 she applied to, and was accepted by, the New York Training School for Deaconesses, where her one-year course of study included instruction in religious matters, missions, teaching, hygiene, and hospital nursing. Following her training she was sent as a missionary-teacher to the Cheyenne Indians at Whirlwind Mission in Oklahoma.

Bedell’s duties at the Whirlwind Mission were many. She cared for the sick and the poor, organized social services for the tribe, performed the duties of the rector in his absence, and provided education for the women and children. She provided religious instruction, hoping to win the confidence of the Indians and convert them to Christianity.

Because of her experience in both teaching and working with Indians, in 1916 an Episcopal bishop requested that she consider an assignment in a remote area of Alaska. Saddened by the prospect of leaving Oklahoma, she nevertheless accepted her new assignment in Stevens Village, Alaska. While there, in 1922 she was finally made a deaconess in the church, instilling in her a new and profound dedication to her vocation. The mission at Stevens Village was moved to Tanana so that a boarding school funded by church members' contributions could be established for the children who could not travel in the bad winter weather. However, by 1931, funds were so scarce that Deaconess Bedell traveled to New York to plea for more contributions. Because of the Great Depression, there was little available money, and although the church paid off the school's existing debt, there was little reason for Bedell to return to Alaska.

Through speaking engagements following her service in Alaska, Bedell was invited to visit a Seminole Indian reservation in southern Florida. Appalled by their living conditions, she began her campaign to improve the quality of life among the Mikasuki-Seminole Indians by living and working with them, not merely teaching them. She sought to revive the doll making and basket weaving skills which had become nearly extinct. She encouraged the incorporation of the intricate patchwork designs made by Indian women into articles of clothing for both women and men. Sales from the arts and crafts store at Blades Cross Mission helped to provide improved income for the Mikasuki-Seminoles.

Bedell emphasized health and education rather than religious conversion in her work with the Seminoles; their spiritual and physical comfort was more important to her than religious conversion, and her work and friendship with the Seminoles of Florida reflected those values.

From the Bedell Collection of the State of Florida Archives, found at http://www.floridamemory.com/Photographiccollection/Collection_page.cfm?PR_ID=2

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 8, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A legacy of thanksgiving

Daily Reading for January 9 • Julia Chester Emery, 1922

If we are lucky, once or twice in a lifetime we might experience an example of thanksgiving so deep, so wide, that we can recall it and use it to move ourselves away from the sense of scarcity that the world embraces and move us to the sense of the abundant life which Christ promises us. One of those experiences for me is that I, a man, had the privilege and joy of serving on the United Thank Offering Committee from 1985-1988 as an Executive Council Liaison from the Episcopal Church.

The UTO Committee members were most welcoming. And wow, do those women work hard! A hard worker myself, even as a young man I could scarcely keep up with UTO Committee members, some of whom were old enough to be my mother. In each and everything we did there was a sense of giving thanks at all times and in all places. After all, what other response can we human beings have for the extravagant and unconditional love of our God for us, and for all creation? Mine is a story of how UTO in its mission and ministry has created a sense of thanksgiving in those whose lives it has touched all over the globe.

In 1987, Presiding Bishop Ed Browning sent me to the South Pacific Anglican Council Meeting in Suva, Fiji to represent the Episcopal Church. What an adventure! . . . While we were there a number of people, children in particular, were made very ill with malaria. The Bishop, some clergy and lay leaders, and I agreed to help evacuate the sickest of the children to the only medical facility. We carried them across fast flowing rivers that forced us to hang on to heavy ropes with one hand and carry the children draped over our shoulders, holding them with our other hand. The one medical vehicle on the island in those days was, you guessed it, purchased with a grant from the UTO. The only trained medical personnel in the mid 80’s, there in the rural part of the island, was an Anglican priest who had been trained as an R.N. by an Episcopal Church overseas development grant. After loading the children in the “ambulance” they were taken to the one medical clinic there. Yes: it was built with a UTO grant.

I had been directing Native American ministries in the Dioceses of Minnesota and North Dakota, and every new church building for a Native American community had been built with UTO grants. So I was not surprised, after getting blank stares when he said I was from the Episcopal Church, the Bishop introduced me as “Howard Anderson, from the UTO Committee.” That brought broad smiles, much nodding of heads and the comment, “Oh the Episcopal Church, is that a part of the UTO?”

UTO continues teaching people all across the world to be thankful at all times and in all places, and gives each one of us a concrete way to say “thanks be to God” for all that we have been given.

From “At all times and in all places,” a sermon on the United Thank Offering by the Rev. Howard Anderson in Washington National Cathedral, June 2007; http://www.episcopalchurch.org/88389_88633_ENG_HTM.htm

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 9, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A prayer for the church

Daily Reading for January 10 • William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1645

Gracious Father, I humbly beseech thee
for thy holy catholic church.
Fill it with all truth, in all truth, with all peace.
Where it is corrupt, purge it.
Where it is in error, direct it.
Where it is superstitious, rectify it.
Where anything is amiss, reform it.
Where it is right, strengthen and confirm it.
Where it is in want, furnish it.
Where it is divided and rent asunder,
make up the breaches of it,
O thou holy one of Israel.

From Works, Vol. III of William Laud, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 10, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Baptism of light

Daily Reading for January 11 • The Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord

Today the Source of all the graces of baptism comes himself to be baptized in the river Jordan, there to make himself known to the world. Seeing him approach, John stretches out his hand to hold him back, protesting: Lord, by your own baptism you sanctify all others; yours is the true baptism, the source of perfect holiness. How can you wish to submit to mine? But the Lord replies, I wish it to be so. Come and baptize me. Do as I wish, for surely you cannot refuse me. Why do you hesitate, why are you so afraid? Do you not realize that the baptism I ask for is mine by every right? By my baptism the waters will be sanctified, receiving from me fire and the Holy Spirit. . . .

See the hosts of heaven hushed and still, as the all-holy Bridegroom goes down into the Jordan. No sooner is he baptized than he comes up from the waters, his splendor shining forth over the earth. The gates of heaven are opened, and the Father’s voice is heard: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” All who are present stand in awe as they watch the Spirit descend to bear witness to him. O come all you peoples, worship him! Praise to you, Lord, for your glorious epiphany which brings joy to us all! The whole world has become radiant with the light of your manifestation.

From Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Nativity: Epiphany, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 11, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The abbot of Rievaulx

Daily Reading for January 12 • Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, 1167

Bouts of acute pain from arthritis and the stone had compelled Aelred reluctantly to submit to mitigations in his daily regime from about 1157 onwards, and to find a way of being as little trouble as possible to everyone else on these occasions. His solution had been to erect an outbuilding near the common infirmary of the abbey, where he could have a fire and be close enough to benefit from the provisions normally made for the sick. There, at the same time, he could conduct the business of the monastery and see members of his community without disturbing anyone else. In this place, when he was at home, he more and more worked and talked and prayed.

By Walter Daniel’s account there must have been a good deal of talking to be done. Rievaulx had been growing steadily all through Aelred’s life and, towards the end, on the greater feast days, when the lay brothers came in from the granges, the church was crowded with the brethren “like bees in a hive.” There were, we are told, one hundred and forty monks and five hundred lay brethren at the time of Aelred’s death. Inevitably the life of this large community converged upon the abbot’s simple lodging, where there was an atmosphere of freedom in which to talk about scripture and the problems of monastic life and anything that was wholesome and interesting. For Aelred, who had often had to be very firm with himself in his search for the appropriate self-discipline, knew the importance of allowing the immature their root-room. He understood, as his own ascetic teaching makes clear, when to insist but, unlike disciplinarians whom Walter Daniel calls “silly abbots,” Aelred never crushed the spontaneity of his young men. Twenty or thirty at a time could be found any day round his bed, or sitting on it, talking to him. Walter Daniel says that they felt able to be so open with him that they were rather like children with their mother.

From Aelred of Reivaulx by Aelred Squire, O.P., quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 12, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

An original thinker

Daily Reading for January 13 • Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, 367

St. Hilary of Poitiers is one of the greatest, yet least studied, of the Fathers of the Western Church. He has suffered thus, partly from a certain obscurity in his style of writing, partly from the difficulty of the thoughts which he attempted to convey. But there are other reasons for the comparative neglect into which he has fallen. He learnt his theology, as we shall see, from Eastern authorities, and was not content to carry on and develop the traditional teaching of the West; and the disciple of Origen, who found his natural allies in the Cappadocian school of Basil and the Gregories, his juniors though they were, was speaking to somewhat unsympathetic ears. Again, his Latin tongue debarred him from influence in the East, and he suffered, like all Westerns, from that deep suspicion of Sabellianism which was rooted in the Eastern Churches. Nor are these the only reasons for the neglect of Hilary. Of his two chief works, the Homilies on the Psalms, important as they were in popularising the allegorical method of interpretation, were soon outdone in favour by other commentaries; while his great controversial work on the Trinity suffered from its very perfection for the purpose with which it was composed. It seems, at first sight, to be not a refutation of Arianism, or of any particular phase of Arianism, but of one particular document, the Epistle of Arius to Alexander, in which Arian doctrines are expressed; and that a document which, in the constantly shifting phases of the controversy, soon fell into an oblivion which the work of Hilary has nearly shared. . . .

And furthermore, Hilary never does himself justice. He was a great original thinker in the field of Christology, but he has never stated his views systematically and completely. They have to be laboriously reconstructed by the collection of passages scattered throughout his works; and though he is a thinker so consistent that little or no conjecture is needed for the piecing together of his system, yet we cannot be surprised full justice has never been done to him. . . . It is not his practical share, in word or deed, in the conflicts of his day that is his chief title to fame, but his independence and depth as a Christian thinker. He has, indeed, exerted an important influence upon the growth of doctrine, but it has been through the adoption of his views by Augustine and Ambrose; and many who have profited by his thoughts have never known who was their author.

From the Introduction to Hilary of Poitiers, John of Damascus, volume IX in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II; found at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF2-09/Npnf2-09-03.htm#P89_9093.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 13, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Opening the heavens

Daily Reading for January 14

Do you see, beloved, how many and how great blessings we would have lost if the Lord had yielded to the exhortation of John and declined baptism? For the heavens had been shut before this. The region above was inaccessible. We might descend to the lower parts, but not ascend to the upper. So it happened not only that the Lord was being baptized—he also was making new the old creation. He was bringing the alienated under the scepter of adoption. For straightway “the heavens were opened to him.” A reconciliation took place between the visible and the invisible. The celestial orders were filled with joy, the diseases of earth were healed, secret things made known, those at enmity restored to amity. For you have heard the word of the Evangelist, saying, “The heavens were opened to him,” on account of three wonders. At the baptism of Christ the Bridegroom, it was fitting that the heavenly chamber should open its glorious gates. So when the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove, and the Father’s voice spread everywhere, it was fitting that “the gates of heaven should be lifted up.”

From “The Discourse of the Holy Theophany” by Hippolytus, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 14, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

In the mystery

Daily Reading for January 15

To be “in the mystery,” and thus live a “mystical” life, is to be “in Christ,” dwelling by faith in the light of this great work of God, reconciling his creation. By the same token, “mystical theology” is reflection upon our formation in this “Mysterium Magnum.” Mystical theology asks how we enter, act, and share in this mystery and what we should and should not say of it. This theology seeks to hear what the Spirit of Christ demands of us and how we discern this Spirit from all other spirits, including our own. The mystical theologian strains to articulate the beauty now revealed, the “excellencies of Christ,” the ways of restoration, the suffering that they entail, and the “fullness of time” in preparation for us.

From Quenching Hell: The Mystical Theology of William Law by Alan Gregory. Copyright © 2008 by Seabury Books, an imprint of Church Publishing. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 15, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Do this

Daily Reading for January 16

When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, “Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?” A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at this work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard the angel saying to him, “Do this and you will be saved.” At these words, Anthony was filled with joy and courage. He did this, and he was saved.

Quoted in Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 2008).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 16, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Love Christ alone

Daily Reading for January 17 • Antony, Abbot in Egypt, 356

Whenever a large crowd such as this came to his cell, Antony was never put out. He listened patiently to all they had to tell him and treated each person gently and with immense courtesy. And they recognized that the Living Word informed all his actions and his every utterance. Among those who came to him were many who had all manner of afflictions both of mind and body; and Our Lord healed them by the hand of this blessed man. Moreover God graced his words to them so that everyone found consolation and fresh strength to suffer their particular lot. The sick endured their illness in patience, the proud became humble, the arrogant changed their ways at the very sight of such a holy man. He used to tell them: “We should own nothing superfluous but love Christ alone: neither possessions, nor family, not even our own soul. For if God himself did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for our sins, how much more just is it that we, having tasted and known his Divine grace, should surrender our souls to him. And this we should do, not for his sake for that is not what is wanted: but to save our very lives!”

When he spoke in this way, many were persuaded to give up the world and all its busy ways and hide themselves away where monks lived.

From Life of Antony Abbot by Athanasius of Alexandria, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 17, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Praying for unity

Daily Reading for January 18 • The Second Sunday after the Epiphany and the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Let us thank God that, because we are all made in his image, it is possible for all to be united. Let us thank God for the special unity which those who are new creatures in Christ Jesus can enjoy. Let us ask God to forgive the sin that has destroyed the unity he intended for humanity.
Lord of mercy: Hear our prayer.

Let us thank God for the growth of understanding between Christians of different outlooks and traditions. Let us thank God for the growth in unity of our local churches. Let us pray that we may grow together in truth and love.
Lord of mercy: Hear our prayer.

Let us pray that we may learn from Christians of other traditions. Let us pray that they may learn from us. May they and we remember that Jesus prayed for us to be sanctified in truth before he prayed for us to be one. May God so guide us that we might seek unity through the truth.
Lord of mercy: Hear our prayer.

Let us pray for our own church, that we and all its members may be filled with the spirit of faith, hope, and love, and so attain to that unity which will lead people to acknowledge the truth of the Gospel.
Lord of mercy: Hear our prayer.

Let us pray for the unity of our country, for a greater understanding and sympathy between the young and those who are older, between employers and those they employ, between migrant workers and their host communities, and between the Church and those who have rejected organized religion.
Lord of mercy: Hear our prayer.

Finally, let us pray for the unity of the world, for reconciliation, peace and compassion between rich and poor, white and people of color, followers of one religion and another, and nations which have long been embattled against each other.
Lord of mercy: Hear our prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles, “Peace I give to you; my own peace I leave with you”: Regard not our sins, but the faith of your Church, and give to us the peace and unity of that heavenly City, where with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, now and for ever. Amen.

From Prayers for Today’s Church and The Book of Common Prayer (1979) quoted in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised and updated edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery Rowthorn with W. Alfred Tisdale. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 18, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Courage in word and deed

Daily Reading for January 19 • The Confession of St. Peter the Apostle and a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gracious, loving, and compassionate God of our fathers and mothers, we give you thanks for your faithful servants in every age who have struggled against injustice and oppression and who have fought to root out the evil and sin of racism and discrimination. Through witnesses such as Harriet Tubman, Absalom Jones, and Martin Luther King, Jr., we have learned the merits of self-sacrifice, courageous action, and redemptive suffering. Grant that we in this day, following their example, may continue to resist oppression in all its forms and guises. May we resolve to remain committed to do the work to which you have called each of us and which you require of us all—to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly” with you, our God. Trusting in your grace and mercy, and in the power of your holy enabling and sustaining Spirit, we ask this in the name of our Liberator, your Son Jesus Christ. Amen.

A prayer by Bishop Barbara C. Harris, quoted in Race and Prayer: Collected Voices, Many Dreams, edited by Malcolm Boyd and Chester Talton. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 19, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The church of the martyrs

Daily Reading for January 20 • Fabian, Bishop and Martyr of Rome, 250

By the third century C.E., Christianity had become a widespread religious movement that crossed ethnic, class, and gender lines throughout the Roman Empire. While population numbers for the ancient world are notoriously elusive, conservative estimates suggest that by the year 300, Christians may have numbered in the several millions (out of a population of about 60 million). Despite the highly rhetorical presentation of Christian apologists and historians from these early centuries, however, this rapid growth was neither uniform nor coherent. In its first centuries, Christianity was characterized by diversity and marginalization. From its origins, different groups understood the significance of “faith in Christ” in radically different ways and expressed their belief in different forms.

In addition to this internal diversity, various forms of antagonism from the dominant culture around them meant that Christians were often viewed with suspicion and mistrust. After all, they met in private homes, performed secretive rituals of initiation and communion, and stayed away from the public religious festivals of their friends and neighbors. Organized, government-sponsored persecution was rare in the first two hundred years of Christianity (although no less painful for being rare), but localized and sporadic attempts to root out religious subversives resulted in violence against some Christian communities. Our earliest account of martyrs (witnesses) who died rather than renounce Christianity appear in the mid-second century, and the circulation of martyr texts provided a theological and political framework within which Christian resistance and opposition to “the world” crystallized. This sense of marginalization cut across the diversity of Christian beliefs and practices: the perceived Christian conflict with the “powers of this world” perhaps predominated for a time over the internal pressures and contradictions of diversity within the movement.

From the introduction to Christianity in Late Antiquity: 300-450 C. E.: A Reader by Bart D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs (New York: Oxford, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 20, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The Great Persecution

Daily Reading for January 21 • Agnes, Martyr at Rome, 304

The late third and early fourth centuries brought sweeping changes to the Roman Empire and to Christianity. In 284 a successful general named Diocles assumed the imperial throne under the name Diocletian and set out to enact military, political, and economic reorganizations. He instituted fixed prices, new provincial boundaries, and a system of shared governance between two senior emperors (called Augustuses) and two junior emperors (called Caesars). Diocletian also instituted reform that was designed to ensure religious unity in the Roman Empire, including confiscation of Christian churches and property and punishment of Christian leaders. Diocletian retired in 305, and the Augustuses and Caesars continued his policy of enforcing uniformity around the Empire, including the legal proscription of Christianity.

In 306, Constantine, the son of one of Diocletian’s imperial colleagues, was proclaimed Augustus by the imperial troops stationed in York. . . Constantine passed an edict of religious toleration in 313 that recognized Christianity as a legal religion in the Roman Empire. The last “Great Persecution” initiated by Diocletian came to an end.

From the introduction to Christianity in Late Antiquity: 300-450 C. E.: A Reader by Bart D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs (New York: Oxford, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 21, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

The church triumphant

Daily Reading for January 22 • Vincent, Deacon of Saragossa and Martyr, 304

Some of the basic tensions that existed in Christianity before Constantine’s conversion still remained, now recast into new contexts. Issues of cultural marginalization and internal division persisted as Christians came to terms with their increasingly prominent place in society. Whereas Christians of the second and third century had struggled to achieve intellectual and social legitimacy in the face of their non-Christian neighbors, they now strove to delineate with more care the precise boundaries between Christian and “pagan” culture. The incorporation of classical literatures and philosophies into the elaboration of Christian theology and interpretation caused, for some, a crisis of cultural identity. When was ancient Greek philosophy “pagan,” and when could it be appropriately Christianized? When were classical ideals of family, society, and politics to be rejected as suspect, irreligious remnants of a bygone era, and when might they be fruitfully employed to articulate a new vision of imperial Christianity? The conceptual transition from “Church of the Martyrs” to “Church Triumphant” required reimagining historical and social categories from new vantage points. Cultural and political distinction was increasingly expressed along religious lines. Although the fourth-century non-Christian Roman politician Symmachus tried to argue for religious plurality, famously remarking that “we cannot arrive at so great a mystery by only one road,” Christians in Late Antiquity insisted more and more on creating and policing sharp external boundaries.

Likewise, the manner in which internal religious difference was theorized continued to trouble many Christians as the perils of deviance were projected onto a wider, imperial stage. Christians in the second and third centuries had already introduced the categories of orthodoxy (“right thinking”) and heresy (“deviance”) in ways that drew absolute boundaries among various Christian communities. But as Christian networks of community now overlapped directly with the political concerns of Roman emperors, these intolerant discourses of orthodoxy and heresy took on a new absolutist character. Debates over correct belief and practice were now always intertwined with questions of political loyalty and social deviance. Pre-Constantinian concerns for uniformity within the Roman Empire and within Christian communities now dovetailed, producing new forms of authority and new anxieties about difference. Bishops, charged with enforcing orthodoxy, now operated with the backing of Roman law and imperial troops, and theological debates could now erupt into wide-scale violence.

From the introduction to Christianity in Late Antiquity: 300-450 C. E.: A Reader by Bart D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs (New York: Oxford, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 22, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Beautiful variety

Daily Reading for January 23 • Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, 1893

Here lies the sublime and beautiful variety of human life. It is as beings come to their reality that they assert their individuality. . . . The intense variety of Light! The awful monotony of Darkness! Men are various; Christians ought to be various a thousand-fold. Strive for your best, that there you may find your most distinctive life. We cannot dream of what interest the world will have when every being in its human multitude shall shine with his own light and color, and be the child of God which it is possible for him to be,—which he has ever been in the true home-land of his Father’s thought. . . .

The hope of the world is in the ever richer naturalness of the highest life. “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.” Your hope and mine is the same. The day of our salvation has not come till every voice brings us one message; till Christ, the Light of the world, everywhere reveals to us the divine secret of our life; till everything without joins with the consciousness all alive within, and “the Spirit Itself beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God.”

From “The Light of the World” by Phillips Brooks, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 23, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Changing the church

Daily Reading for January 24 • Ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi, First Woman Priest in the Anglican Communion, 1944

A hundred years ago a baby was about to be born in the fishing village of Aberdeen on Hong Kong island. Its gender was not known. Boy babies were highly prized. At that time, in that culture, a bowl of ash could be at hand to smother unwanted new-born girls. The baby who was born on 5 May 1907 was wanted. Her Christian father, a doctor turned headteacher, valued his new daughter and called her Tim-Oi, “Much Beloved.” That decision began a chain of events which has changed the Church.

Tim-Oi completed her primary schooling at 14, but her five brothers and 2 sisters meant there were no funds for further schooling until she was 21. She left school aged 27. While a student she joined an Anglican church, and at her baptism took the Christian name Florence, because her birth-month, May, is a month of flowers, and because she admired Florence Nightingale.

In 1931 she was at the ordination in Hong Kong cathedral of an English deaconess. The Chinese preacher asked if there was a Chinese girl also willing to sacrifice herself for the Chinese church. She prayed: “God, would you like to send me?” That call never left her. In 1934 she started a four year course at Union Theological College in Canton, where her New Testament tutor was Geoffrey Allen, later to be Bishop of Derby, England. Her family couldn’t afford the college fees which were paid by the Anglican church. While at college she led a team of students rescuing the casualties of Japanese carpet bombing, and narrowly escaped being a casualty herself.

Time does not allow to tell her full story: of her licence to preside for two years at Holy Communion in the absence of a priest in Macau; of the bishop brought up in a Tractarian [High Church] vicarage who was not happy with lay celebration and ordained her a Priest of God on 25 January 1944, because God had clearly shown that He had already given her the gift of priesthood. After the War, pressured by what I call a “Purple Guard,” to the dismay of the Bishop, she resigned her licence as a Priest, but not her Holy Orders. She was put in charge of a parish near Vietnam, and there she started a large maternity home to ensure that new-born girls were not smothered at birth. Her witness to the value of every child, girl and boy, made many friends for Jesus—making friends for Jesus was her mission in life. But also she showed that “It Takes ONE Woman” to change the culture of her community.

From “Memories of Li Tim-Oi” by Canon Christopher Hall, Lambeth Palace, 30 April 2007; http://www.ittakesonewoman.org/lto.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 24, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Free to respond

Daily Reading for January 25 • The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

As you ponder the scene [from Mark’s gospel], you may encounter Jesus taking the initiative and walking into your life, just as he took the initiative and walked into Peter’s life. Jesus always starts the relationship; we respond—or do not respond. We are free to invite Jesus to sit in our boat or to tell him to get out. He never coerces, but waits upon our willing consent to welcome him into our lives. Love is always a gift which we are free to accept or reject.

Again, ponder what it means to be known. What did Peter experience when he suddenly realized he was entirely known? Very few people truly know us, or want to. How difficult it is to enter fully into the heart and mind of someone else, even those we love most deeply! Yet there is One who sees into the depths of our hearts, knows all about us, from whom we can hide nothing. It is both wonderful and terrifying to be known as Jesus knows us!

When the boat starts to sink, we are afraid. Our fear is mixed with guilt, for confronted by the holiness of Christ, we see ourselves as we truly are. Being known by Christ is the means by which we know ourselves. Or ponder the meaning of “Be not afraid.” All our anxiety, loneliness, and fear are wiped away as we know ourselves to be with One who loves us forever and will never leave us alone.

Consider that Jesus always enters our lives in the company of other people. We do not meet him alone, but always with others. At first, we know him through our parents, church school teachers, and friends. But sooner or later, we deal with Jesus alone. This usually involves a struggle, for our first impulse is to tell Jesus to go away—we must choose Jesus or our sins. But once this is settled and we understand that we are known and forgiven and there is nothing to fear, we can go on. We go about our daily living in company with others and with Jesus. And we accept our responsibility to carry Jesus into the lives of people, as he once came into our life through others. Like Peter, James, and John, we become fishers of men.

From Prayer and Personal Religion by John Coburn, revised by Richard Schmidt. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Forward Movement and Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 25, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Praying on the road

Daily Reading for January 26 • The Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

From Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1956).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 26, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

On Christian initiation

Daily Reading for January 27 • John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, 407

The Baptismal Instructions of John Chrysostom, among others, focus our attention on what a Christian initiation into the Church consisted of at one time. Let us briefly summarize the spiritual themes that recur most frequently.

The Christian Identity. The glory of the stars, and that of emperors, is nothing compared to that of Christians.

A Sense of Church, especially of the local church, so typical of the Christian East. Although Chrysostom does not systematize this concept, it is found frequently in his Instructions.

The Good Fight. Evil lies at the gate. His series of warnings should be understood within this context.

Witness. Christians live in the world and are to be its salt and its light.

Eschatological Tension. We live on earth as in an inn, which we will one day have to leave to return to our homeland. The martyrs wonderfully symbolize this pascha (Easter Passover, pesah), which is at one and the same time painful and glorious, and toward which we are all moving.

From Prayer: The Spirituality of the Christian East, Volume 2 by Tomaš Špidlík SJ (Cistercian Publications, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 27, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Should we pray?

Daily Reading for January 28 • Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Friar, 1274

Question II. Is it appropriate to pray? . . .

In the case of prayer we do not pray in order to change God’s plan, but in order to obtain by our prayers those things which God planned to bring about by means of prayers, in order, as Gregory says, that our prayers should entitle us to receive what almighty God planned from all eternity to give us. . . . We do not have to present our prayers to God in order to disclose to Him our needs and desires, but in order to make ourselves realize that we need to have recourse to His help in these matters. . . . Our prayer is not designed to change what God has already planned.

God gives us many things out of sheer generosity, without being asked. The reason why He wants to give us some things in response to our petitions is that it is profitable for us to acquire a certain confidence in running to Him and to recognize that He is the source of all that is good for us. So Chrysostom says, “Consider what a joy is granted you, what glory is bestowed upon you, that you can speak with God in your prayers, that you can engage in conversation with Christ, and plead for whatever you want, whatever you desire."

From “On Prayer” by Thomas Aquinas, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 28, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Should we pray for things?

Daily Reading for January 29

Question V. Should we ask God for particular things when we pray? . . .

Reply: As Maximus Valerius tells us, “Socrates thought we should ask nothing more from the immortal gods except that they would grant us good things, because they know what is good for each individual, whereas we often ask for things it would be better for us not to obtain.” In some ways this view is correct, at least so far as those things are concerned which can turn out badly and which we can use badly or well, such as wealth which, as he goes on to say, “has been a disaster for many people, and honors which have ruined people, and kingdoms which we often see coming to a wretched end, and splendid marriages which sometimes completely destroy families.” But there are some things which we cannot use badly, things which cannot turn out badly: the things by which we are made blessed or by which we earn beatitude. The saints ask for these things unconditionally when they pray: “Show us your face and we shall be saved” [Ps 80:4], or “Lead me in the way of your commandments” [Ps 119:35]. . . . Although of ourselves we do not know what we ought to pray for, the Spirit, as the same text [Rom 8:26] says, helps our weakness by inspiring us with holy desires so making us plead rightly. This is why the Lord says that the true worshipper must worship “in spirit and truth” [Jn 4:23].

From “On Prayer” by Thomas Aquinas, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 29, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Patience

Daily Reading for January 30

Suffering, disappointment, bad economies, lost jobs—all these are part of our lives. We all will have times of dependence, of being patients, of having to be patient. But those are times with a dignity and even a beauty all their own. To be a Christian is to believe that our lives are not our own, and that the worth of our lives is not measured on our resumes. It is to believe that suffering and disappointment come as opportunities to grow and to love and to receive love, and that God is working through all these events. . . .

And our larger public life calls for patience. I remember several years ago when former President Carter had been sent to negotiate with North Korea, former UN Ambassador Andrew Young told an interviewer, “This is the sort of situation which you can afford to talk to death. We ought to be willing to take all the time in the world with this one. We must be patient.” Our leaders need that kind of patience.

Years ago, not long before he was murdered, Archbishop Oscar Romero offered words of encouragement to his companions in the struggle for justice in San Salvador.

“We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. . . .
We plant seeds that will one day grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capability.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
That enables us to do something, and to do it well. . . .
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
Between the master builder and the worker.”

Those are words of patience. Of course patience alone can’t be our only guide. Sometimes we should be impatient—impatient when we see injustices that should be righted. At a conference at Georgetown University this week focusing on stopping the terrible devastation of malaria in Africa, you could feel the impatience in the room. We have the resources, we know what to do, and millions are dying, they said. We have to act. But even that impatience is meant to flow out of a patient discernment of God’s timing, and even that commitment to impatience will require patient persistence over the long haul.

From a sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent, December 14, 2008 by the Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, preached at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. ; http://www.nationalcathedral.org/worship/sermonTexts/stl081214.shtml

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 30, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Peace between all

Daily Reading for January 31

Peace between victor and vanquished
Peace between old and young
Peace between rich and poor
The peace of Christ above all.

Always keep God's peace and love among you, and when you have to seek guidance about your affairs, take great care to be of one mind. Live in mutual good-will also with Christ's other servants. . . .Never think you are superior to other people who share your faith and way of life. —Cuthbert's last words

Christ be within me
Christ be beside me
Christ in the stranger
Christ in the friend
Christ in my speaking
Christ in my thinking
Christ in my working
Christ at my end.

May you see the face of Christ in everyone you meet. May everyone you meet see the face of Christ in you.

From the reflection for “Week 5: Morning” in A Holy Island Prayer Book: Morning, Midday, and Evening Prayer by Ray Simpson. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on January 31, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Faith that works by love

Daily Reading for February 1 • The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

Call to mind with me the time when Peter was praised and called blessed. Was it because he merely said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”? No, he who pronounced him blessed regarded not merely the sound of his words, but the affections of his heart. Compare that with the words of the demons who said almost the same thing: “We know who you are, the Son of God,” just as Peter had confessed him as “Son of God.” So what is the difference? Peter spoke in love, but the demons in fear. . . . So tell us how faith is to be defined, if even the devils can believe and tremble? Only the faith that works by love is faith.

From Augustine’s Sermons on New Testament Lessons, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 1, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Mother in all things

Daily Reading for February 2 • The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple

Opening Sentence
Her hands steadied the first steps
of him who steadied the earth to walk upon;
her lips helped the Word of God
to form his first human words.

Canticle
God chose to be our mother in all things
and so made the foundation of this work,
most humbly and most pure, in the virgin’s womb.
God the perfect wisdom of all,
was arrayed in this humble place.
Christ came in our poor flesh
to share a mother’s care.
Our mothers bore us for pain and for death;
our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.
Christ carried us within him in love and travail,
until the full time of his passion.
And when all was completed
and he had carried us so for joy,
still all this could not satisfy
the power of his wonderful love.

Blessing
Holy One, who has loved us from our first cry to this day and this hour,
help us to find within ourselves the nurture and tenderness you have for all creation.
Help us to be your mothering love for our beautiful and strife-torn planet.
We ask this in the name of him who was once a child of this earth. Amen.

Opening sentence from John of Damascus; Canticle based on Julian of Norwich, from Community of St. Francis Office Book; Blessing by Penelope Duckworth. All quoted in Mary’s Hours: Daily Prayer with the Mother of God by Penelope Duckworth. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 2, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Small things

Daily Reading for February 3 • Anskar, Archbishop of Hamburg, Missionary to Denmark and Sweden, 865

On my worst days, many of which seem to come in February, I need to know of people like Anskar. Anskar labored long and hard, but saw few, if any, accomplishments. His efforts only began to pay off long after his death. I need the memory of Anskar in this hurry-up-and-get-there culture where the bottom line is all that counts for anything; Anskar is the antidote to our demand for instant results.

Little is said these days about the importance of the seemingly small contribution to the world. Yet life is lived and changed in the small things. Our world is made one life at a time, our lives ordered one day at a time. How can we look at this world, and at one another, and not appreciate the care God has lavished in our creation? After all, we Christians claim to have seen the face of God in the face of a child.

God, by whose power this world might be transformed in the twinkling of an eye, has such patient love for us and such admiration for our abilities that all creation awaits our handiwork. God patiently attends our halting attempts to help, even as God waited for Anskar.

From Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts by Sam Portaro (Cowley Publications, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 3, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Making room

Daily Reading for February 4 • Cornelius the Centurion

Our ability to make room for others, and the joy we do or do not find in such activity, depends largely on our experience of being accepted or not. We build shelter for others because somewhere along the way someone sheltered us and thereby taught our hungry heart how to love.

From Daniel Homan’s Radical Hospitality, quoted in Finding Jesus, Discovering Self: Passages to Healing and Wholeness by Caren Goldman and William Dols. © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 4, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Gather us in

Daily Reading for February 5 • The Martyrs of Japan

Gather us in, Thou love that fillest all;
Gather our rival faiths within thy fold.
Rend each man’s temple-veil and bid it fall,
That we may know that Thou hast been of old;
Gather us in.

Gather us in: we worship only Thee;
In varied names we stretch a common hand;
In diverse forms a common soul we see;
In many ships we seek one spirit-land;
Gather us in.

Each one sees one colour of thy rainbow-light,
Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven;
Thou art the fullness of our partial sight;
We are not perfect till we find the seven;
Gather us in.

Prayer by G. D. Matheson (1842-1906), quoted in The Oxford Book of Prayer, edited by George Appleton (Oxford, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 5, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Hear the questions

Daily Reading for February 6

Lord Jesus Christ
alive and at large in the world,
help me to follow and find you there today,
in the places where I work,
meet people,
spend money,
and make plans.
Take me as a disciple of your kingdom,
to see through your eyes,
and hear the questions you are asking,
to welcome all men with your trust and truth
and to change the things that contradict God’s love,
by the power of the Cross
and the freedom of your Spirit.
Amen.

Prayer by John Taylor, Bishop of Winchester, quoted in The Oxford Book of Prayer, edited by George Appleton (Oxford, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 6, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Glorious employment

Daily Reading for February 7

Pray remember what I have recommended to you, which is, to think often of God, by day, by night, in your business, and even in your diversions. He is always near you and with you; leave Him not alone. You would think it rude to leave a friend alone who came to visit you: why then must God be neglected? Do not then forget Him, but think of Him often, adore Him continually, live and die with Him; this is the glorious employment of a Christian; if we do not know it we must learn it.

From The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 7, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Renewing solitude

Daily Reading for February 8 • The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Related to keeping a rule is maintaining the balance between attachment and detachment, between activity and reflection. It is probably fair to say that, without an intentional focus on maintaining such a balance, most of us will end up out of balance most of the time. . . . The fact is, most of us are too heavily weighted on the side of attachment. Necessary periods of self-reflective “space” are largely missing. It is good to remind ourselves that what we are seeking to “claim” when we seek solitude is not an unworldly lifestyle as an alternative to our own but rather a balanced lifestyle, one in which the inner and the outer are in creative harmony.

How do we maintain such a balance in the face of constant intrusions? The answer is, we do what Jesus did: we keep working at it. There were times that Jesus withdrew to a “deserted place” to pray but was pursued by his disciples and the crowds. At such times Jesus responded to the human needs of the moment, telling the disciples, “let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do” (Mark 1:38). But afterward Jesus inevitably returned to the prayerful silence and solitude that renewed him. . . .

If you experience solitude as a familiar rhythm, you will gradually strengthen your ability to experience a solitude of the heart regardless of your external circumstances. Even in the midst of active engagement, you will be able to enter into a silent space inside yourself.

From Solitude: A Neglected Path to God by Christopher C. Moore (Cowley Publications, 2001).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 8, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Praying for healing

Daily Reading for February 9

If your approach to this kind of healing is less ideological and more empirical, you can always give it a try. Pray for it. If it’s somebody else’s healing you’re praying for, you can try at the same time laying your hands on her as Jesus sometimes did. If her sickness involves her body as well as her soul, then God may be able to use your inept hands as well as your inept faith to heal her.

If you feel like a fool as you are doing this, don’t let it throw you. You are a fool, of course, only not a damned fool for a change.

If your prayer isn’t answered, this may tell you more about you and your prayer than it does about God. Don’t try too hard to feel religious, to generate some healing power of your own. Think of yourself instead (if you have to think of yourself at all) as a rather small-gauge clogged-up pipe that a little of God’s power may be able to filter through if you can just stay loose enough. Tell the one you’re praying for to stay loose too.

If God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he’s giving you something else.

From “Healing” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 9, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Body and soul

Daily Reading for February 10

The Gospels depict Jesus as having spent a surprising amount of time healing people. Although, like the author of Job before him, he specifically rejected the theory that sickness was God’s way of getting even with sinners (John 9:1-3), he nonetheless seems to have suggested a connection between sickness and sin, almost to have seen sin as a kind of sickness. . . . This is entirely compatible, of course, with the Hebrew view of the human being as a psychosomatic unity, an indivisible amalgam of body and soul in which if either goes wrong, the other is affected. It is significant also that the Greek verb sōzō was used in Jesus’ day to mean both “to save” and “to heal,” and sōtēr could signify either “savior” or “physician.”

Ever since the time of Jesus, healing has been part of the Christian tradition. Nowadays, it has usually been associated with religious quackery or the lunatic fringe; but as the psychosomatic dimension of disease has come to be taken more and more seriously by medical science, it has regained some of its former respectability. How nice for God to have this support at last.

From “Healing” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 10, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Healing the world

Daily Reading for February 11

How can we bear to pray for all the horrors of the world? The Quakers have a tradition of having “a concern,” usually seen as an area of good works. They believe that God gives each of us one particular concern: to work for peace, or with the blind, the elderly, the homeless, children, and so forth. Not for all the troubles in the world, but just for that one concern to which God is calling someone. And in good works, so in prayer.

Some of us may be called to pray for all the pain and problems of the world, as in the old Hasidic tale in which God says that he hasn’t destroyed the world because of the insistent prayers of a poor widow. But if praying for the whole world seems overwhelming to you, then ask God what specific problem you are called to pray for. I find that I can bear to look deeply at one large and terrible dilemma and hold it up to God in prayer. Opening myself in this way to the despair of one problem I may—with good conscience—say of the others, “They are too much for me, Lord. With gratitude I leave them to you.”. . .

I speak now not about healing prayer specifically but about the landscape of prayer—that deep opening to the Spirit which not only gives us an interior vision but influences how we see our exterior world. It is the Spirit of God who can lead us to see new ways of understanding the church, world, and civilization that are both tied to our traditions and open to the future.

From Healing in the Landscape of Prayer by Avery Brooke (Cowley Publications, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 11, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Caring for the sick

Daily Reading for February 12

Early in September, a solicitation appeared in the Public papers, to the people of colour to come forward and assist the distressed, perishing, and neglected sick [from yellow fever]; with a kind of assurance, that people of our colour were not liable to take the infection. Upon which we and a few others met and consulted how to act on so truly alarming and melancholy an occasion. After some conversations, we found a freedom to go forth, confining in him who can preserve in the midst of a burning fiery furnace, sensible that it was our duty to do all the good we could to our suffering fellow mortals. We set out to see where we could be useful. The first we visited was a man in Emsley's alley, who was dying, and his wife lay dead at the time in the house, there were none to assist but two poor helpless children. We administered what relief we could, and applied to the overseers of the poor to have the woman buried. We visited upwards of twenty families that day—they were scenes of woe indeed! The Lord was pleased to strengthen, and remove all fear from us, and disposed our hearts to be as useful as possible.

In order the better to regulate our conduct, we called on the mayor next day, to consult with him how to proceed, so as to be most useful. The first object he recommended, was a strict attention to the sick, and the procuring of nurses. This was attended to by Absalom Jones and William Gray; and, in order that the distressed might know where to apply, the mayor advertised the public that upon application to them they would be supplied. Soon after, the mortality increasing, the difficulty of getting a corpse taken away, was such, that few were willing to do it, when offered great rewards. The black people were looked to. We then offered our services in the public papers, by advertising that we would remove the dead and procure nurses. Our services were the production of real sensibility;—we sought not fee nor reward, until the increase of the disorder rendered our labour so arduous that we were not adequate to the service we had assumed. The mortality increasing rapidly, obliged us to call in the assistance of five hired men, in the awful discharge of interring the dead. They, with great reluctance, were prevailed upon to join us. It was very uncommon, at this time, to find any one that would go near, much more, handle, a sick or dead person.

From A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications by Absalom Jones (1746-1818) and Allen Richard (1760-1831); http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=history.chapter.Jones

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 12, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Awake!

Daily Reading for February 13 • Absalom Jones, Priest, 1818

Ye Ministers, that are call'd to preaching,
Teachers, and exhorters too;
Awake! behold your harvest wasting!
Arise! there is no rest for you.
To think upon that strict commandment,
That God has on his teachers laid,
The sinner's blood, who dies unwarned,
Shalt fall upon their Shepherd's head.

But oh! dear brethren, let's be doing,
Behold the nation's in distress,
The Lord of Hosts forbid their ruin,
Before the day of grace is past.

We read of wars and great commotions,
Before the great and dreadful day,
Oh, Sinners! turn your sinful courses
And trifle not your time away.

But Oh! dear sinners, that's not all that's dreadful!
You must before your God appear!
To give an account of your transactions,
And how you spent your time, when here.

From a manuscript note inside the back cover to A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793: And a Refutation of some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications by Absalom Jones (1746-1818) and Allen Richard (1760-1831); http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=history.chapter.Jones

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 13, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Priests and teachers

Daily Reading for February 14 • Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop, Missionaries to the Slavs, 869, 885

O Cyril and Methodius, inspired by God,
You became equal to the Apostles by your life.
Since you were teachers of the Slavs,
Intercede with the Master of all
That He may strengthen all Orthodox peoples in the True Faith,
And that He may grant peace to the world
And great mercy to our souls.

Let us praise the two priests of God who enlightened us,
And poured upon us the fount of the knowledge of God by translating the Holy Scripture.
O Cyril and Methodius, as abundant learning has been drawn from this work,
We exalt you who now stand before the Most High,
Interceding with fervor for the salvation of our souls.

Orthodox hymns in honor of Cyril and Methodius, found at http://orthodoxwiki.org/Cyril_and_Methodius

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 14, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Redefining the boundaries

Daily Reading for February 15 • The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

When Jesus chooses to touch the leper he is not just curing him of chronic eczema or psoriasis. Nor is he simply forgiving the man’s sins, although most people who have assumed that the leper’s crawling skin was both the result and the sign of sinfulness. By stretching out his hand and touching the leper, Jesus muddies the boundary separating the clean from the unclean, what is socially acceptable from what is socially anathema.

Such a touch has political as well as therapeutic implications. In effect, it redefines how God acts in the world. Jesus tells the man he is to show himself to the priests, thus starting a process of political and social reintegration that will restore the healed leper to full status in the ritual system that once had cast him out. But Jesus’ touch, as Mark describes it, is more powerful than even Jesus himself had imagined. Instead of going quietly to the priests, the leper spreads the news through all the neighboring towns. It is not a story that can be kept quiet. In the gospel’s larger picture, the leper’s new wholeness is a sign that the entire system that had separated clean from unclean is in jeopardy, about to be blown wide open.

From Sensing God: Reading Scripture With All Our Senses by Roger Ferlo (Cowley Publications, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 15, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

All things are clean

Daily Reading for February 16

And why did Jesus touch the leper, since the law forbade the touching of a leper? He touched him to show that “all things are clean to the clean.” Because the filth that is in one person does not adhere to others, nor does external uncleanness defile the clean of heart. So he touches him in his untouchability, that he might instruct us in humility; that he might teach us that we should despise no one, or abhor them, or regard them as pitiable, because of some wound of their body or some blemish for which they might be called to render an account. . . . So, stretching forth his hand to touch, the leprosy immediately departs. The hand of the Lord is found to have touched not a leper, but a body made clean! Let us consider here, beloved, if there be anyone here that has the taint of leprosy in his soul, or the contamination of guilt in his heart? If he has, instantly adoring God, let him say: “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.”

From Origen’s Fragments on Matthew, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 16, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Suffering for the sake of conscience

Daily Reading for February 17 • Janani Luwum, Archbishop of Uganda and Martyr, 1977

O God our Father, whose Son forgave his enemies while he was suffering shame and death: strengthen those who suffer for the sake of conscience; when they are accused, save them from speaking in hate; when they are rejected, save them from bitterness; when they are imprisoned, save them from despair; and to us your servants, give grace to respect their witness and to discern the truth, that our society may be cleansed and strengthened. This we ask for the sake of Jesus Christ, our merciful and righteous Judge. Amen.

A prayer entitled “For those who suffer for the sake of Conscience,” written by the Rev. Dr. Charles P. Price for the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Copyright © 1979. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 17, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Open gates

Daily Reading for February 18 • Martin Luther, 1546

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that He was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with His righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live’ [Rom. 1:17].” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning; the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “he who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.

From Luther’s Works, Volume 34, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 18, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A widening audience

Daily Reading for February 19

The original audience for Luther’s defense of his writings may have been the university context of Wittenberg or Leipzig, or the Imperial Parliament or Diet at Worms in 1521, where the Holy Roman emperor was flanked by the nobility, the clerical hierarchy, and the wealthy burgesses from the towns. When Luther’s arguments were catapulted into print, however, the ordinary reader in town or village could eavesdrop on them. The audience of theology, then, was widening.

The origins of the whole Reformation have often been traced back to Luther’s perhaps apocryphal nailing of his Ninety-Five Theses against indulgences to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. More important than any such symbolic act is that he tossed out philosophical language in favor of biblical and pastoral. The Latin theses, originally conceived for a scholarly disputation among professional theologians, were then translated into German and rapidly broadcast in print, together with explanatory material. This is a good illustration of the widening ripples of attention, as scholars broke out of the halls of learning and “took to the road,” adapting their language as they did so to their new readers. The language of lay authors, moreover, reflected their very different field of experience. . . . Popular pamphlets, colloquies, and disputations could be seen, therefore, as exciting new vehicles that took the sacred language of theology into the public square, the epicenter of secular life.

From “The Language of the Common Folk” by Peter Matheson, in Reformation Christianity, edited by Peter Matheson. Volume 5 in the series A People’s History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2007).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 19, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

A transparent personality

Daily Reading for February 20

Your way of acting should be different form the world’s way; the love of Christ must come before all else. You are not to act in anger or nurse a grudge. Rid your heart of all deceit. Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love. Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue. —The Rule of St. Benedict

The end of Benedictine spirituality is to develop a transparent personality. Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed. Shakespeare’s Hamlet noted once: “A man can smile and smile and be a villain.” Benedict is intent on developing people who are what they seem to be.

From The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittister (Crossroad, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 20, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Beholding God's glory

Daily Reading for February 21

Almighty God, dwelling in the beauty of holiness, from whom all skills of mind, hand and tongue do come; may those who give their lives to the creation of beauty be surprised by the joy of discovering your presence in your world, and give others the hope of beholding your glory unveiled in heaven, where you are alive and reign, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

A prayer by Michael John Radford Counsell, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 21, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Being transfigured

Daily Reading for February 22 • The Last Sunday after the Epiphany

If anyone asks what the Lord’s garments, which became white as snow, represent typologically, we can properly understand them as pointing to the church of his saints [who] . . . at the time of the resurrection will be purified from every blemish of iniquity and at the same time from all the darkness of mortality. Concerning the Lord’s garments the evangelist Mark remarks that “they became as bright as snow, such as no bleacher on earth can make them white.” It is evident to everyone that there is no one who can live on earth without corruption and sorrow. So it is evident to all who are wise, although heretics deny it, that there is no one who can live on earth without being touched by some sin. But what a cleansing agent (that is, a teacher of souls or some extraordinary purifier of his body) cannot do on earth, that the Lord will do in heaven. He will purify the church, which is his clothing, “from all defilement of flesh and spirit,” renewing [her] besides with eternal blessedness and light of flesh and spirit.

From Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 22, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Joined together in truth

Daily Reading for February 23 • Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr of Smyrna, 156

Let us then persevere unceasingly in our hope, and in the pledge of our righteousness, that is in Christ Jesus, “who bare our sins in his own body on the tree, who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth,” but for our sakes, that we might live in him, he endured all things. Let us then be imitators of his endurance, and if we suffer for his name’s sake let us glorify him. For this is the example which he gave us in himself, and this is what we have believed.

Now I beseech you all to obey the word of righteousness, and to endure with all the endurance which you also saw before your eyes, not only in the blessed Ignatius, and Zosimus, and Rufus, but also in others among yourselves, and in Paul himself, and in the other Apostles; being persuaded that all of these “ran not in vain,” but in faith and righteousness, and that they are with the Lord in the “place which is their due,” with whom they also suffered. For they did not “love this present world” but him who died on our behalf, and was raised by God for our sakes.

Stand fast therefore in these things and follow the example of the Lord, “firm and unchangeable in faith, loving the brotherhood, affectionate to one another,” joined together in the truth, forestalling one another in the gentleness of the Lord, despising no man. When you can do good defer it not, “for almsgiving sets free from death; be ye all subject one to the other, having your conversation blameless among the Gentiles,” that you may receive praise “for your good works” and that the Lord be not blasphemed in you. “But woe to him through whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed.” Therefore teach sobriety to all and show it forth in your own lives.

From Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians, in Apostolic Fathers, translated by Kirsopp Lake (Loeb Classical Library, 1912).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 23, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Light that knows no evening

Daily Reading for February 24 • Saint Matthias the Apostle

Come, true light.
Come, life eternal.
Come, hidden mystery.
Come, treasure without name.
Come, reality beyond all words.
Come, person beyond all understanding.
Come, rejoicing without end.
Come, light that knows no evening.
Come, unfailing expectation of the saved.
Come, raising of the fallen.
Come, resurrection of the dead.
Come, all-powerful, for unceasingly you create,
refashion, and change all things by your will alone.
Come, invisible whom none may touch and handle.
Come, for you continue always unmoved,
yet at every instant you are wholly in movement;
you draw near to us who lie in hell,
yet you remain higher than the heavens.
Come, for your name fills our hearts with longing and is ever on our lips;
yet who you are and what your nature is, we cannot say or know.
Come, Alone to the alone.
Come, for you are yourself the desire that is within me.
Come, the consolation of my humble soul.
Come, my joy, my endless delight.

From Hymns of Divine Love by Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 24, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Move our hearts

Daily Reading for February 25 • Ash Wednesday

God bless this city
and move our hearts with pity
lest we grow hard.

God bless this place
with silence, solitude and space
that we may pray.

God bless these days
of rough and narrow ways
lest we despair.

God bless the night
and calm the people’s fright
that we may love.

God bless this land
and guide us with your hand
lest we be unjust.

God bless this earth
through pangs of death and birth
and make us whole. Amen.

A prayer by Jim Cotter, quoted in 2000 Years of Prayer, compiled by Michael Counsell. Copyright © 1999. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 25, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Known by God

Daily Reading for February 26

For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.

Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.

From The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming by Henri J. M. Nouwen (New York: Image Books, 1992).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 26, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (2)

God's house

Daily Reading for February 27 • George Herbert, Priest, 1633

What doth this noise of thoughts within my heart
As if they had a part?
What do these loud complaints and pulling fears,
As if there were no rule or ears?

But, Lord, the house and family are thine,
Though some of them repine.
Turn out these wranglers, which defile thy seat:
For where thou dwellest all is neat.

First Peace and Silence all disputes control,
Then Order plays the soul;
And giving all things their set forms and hours,
Makes of wild woods sweet walks and bowers.

Humble Obedience near the door doth stand,
Expecting a command:
Than whom in waiting nothing seems more slow,
Nothing more quick when she doth go.

Joys oft are there, and griefs as oft as joys;
But griefs without a noise;
Yet speak they louder, than distemper’d fears.
What is so shrill as silent tears?

This is thy house, with these it doth abound:
And where these are not found,
Perhaps thou com’st sometimes, and for a day;
But not to make a constant stay.

“The Family” by George Herbert, from The Church, quoted in George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple, edited by John N. Wall, Jr., The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1981).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 27, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Live your creed

Daily Reading for February 28 • Anna Julia Heyward Cooper, Educator, 1964

Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion (ought to be if it isn’t) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never. And a life made true cannot confine itself—it must reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its uplifting tendrils.

Do you believe that the God of history often chooses the weak things of earth to confound the mighty, and that the Negro race in America has a veritable destiny in His eternal purposes—then don’t spend your time discussing the “Negro Problem” amid the clouds of your fine havanna, ensconced in your friend’s well-cushioned arm-chair and with your patent leather boot-tips elevated to the opposite mantel. Do those poor “cowards in the South” need a leader—then get up and lead them! Let go your purse-strings and begin to live your creed. Or is it your modicum of truth that God hath made of one blood all nations of the earth; and that all interests which specialize and contract the broad, liberal, cosmopolitan idea of universal brotherhood and equality are narrow and pernicious, then treat that truth as true.

From A Voice from the South by Anna Julia Cooper, quoted in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on February 28, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Spiritually fruitful devotions

Daily Reading for March 1 • The First Sunday in Lent

Soon after Jesus had been baptized, he performed a fast of forty days by himself, and he taught and informed us by his example that, after we have received forgiveness of sins in baptism, we should devote ourselves to vigils, fasts, prayers and other spiritually fruitful things, lest when we are sluggish and less vigilant the unclean spirit expelled from our heart by baptism may return, and finding us fruitless in spiritual riches, weigh us down again with a sevenfold pestilence, and our last state would then be worse than the first. Let us be wary that we do not relight the fires of old obsessions which would wreck us on our new voyage. Whatever sort of flaming sword it is that guards the doorway of paradise has been already effectively extinguished for each of the faithful in the font of baptism. For the unfaithful, however, the gate remains always formidable, and also for those falsely called faithful though they have not been chosen, since they have no fear of entangling themselves in sins after baptism. It is as though the same fire put out in baptism has been rekindled after it had been once extinguished.

From Bede’s Homilies on the Gospels, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 1, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A glimpse of early English church life

Daily Reading for March 2 • Chad, Bishop of Lichfield, 672

One day Chad was alone in his house with a brother whose name was Owini, his other companions having had occasion to return to the church. This Owini was a monk of great merit, who had renounced the world with the pure intention of winning a heavenly reward, so that he was altogether a fit person to receive a revelation of God’s secrets, and one whose word everyone could trust. He had accompanied Queen Etheldreda from the province of the East Angles, and had been her chief thane and steward of her household. Growing in devotion to the Faith, he decided to renounce the world, which he did in no half-hearted fashion; for he rid himself so completely of worldly ties that he abandoned all his possessions, put on a simple garment, and carrying in his hand an axe and an adze, set off for the reverend father Chad’s monastery at Lastingham. This he did to show that he was entering the monastery not for the sake of an idle life, as some do, but in order to work, and he demonstrated this in practice; for since he found himself less able to meditate on the Scriptures with profit, he undertook a larger amount of manual labour. In short, recognizing his reverence and devotion, the bishop admitted him to his house among the brethren; and whenever they were engaged in study, he used to busy himself in essential tasks out of doors.

One day, while Owini was working outside and the other brethren had departed to the church, the bishop was reading and praying alone in his oratory. Suddenly, he heard the sound of sweet and joyful singing coming down from heaven to earth. . . . He listened with rapt attention to what he heard, and after about half an hour he heard the song of joy rise from the roof of the oratory, and return to heaven as it had come with inexpressible sweetness. Owini stood astonished for a while, turning over in his mind what this might portend, when the bishop threw open the oratory window and, clapping his hands, as he often used to do if someone was outside, summoned him indoors. When he hurried in, the bishop said: ‘Go at once to the church, and fetch these seven brethren here, and come back with them yourself.’ On their arrival, he first urged them to live in love and peace with each other and with all the faithful, and to be constant and tireless in keeping the rules of monastic discipline that he had taught them and they knew him to observe. . . . He then announced that his own death was drawing near, saying: ‘The welcome guest who has visited many of our brethren has come to me today, and has deigned to summon me out of this world. Therefore return to the church, and ask the brethren to commend my passing to our Lord in their prayers. And let each prepare for his own passing by vigils, prayers, and good deeds; for no man knows the hour of his death.’ Having said this and much besides, he gave them his blessing, and they left him sadly.

From A History of the English Church and People by Bede, translated by Leo Sherley-Price (Penguin Books, 1968).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 2, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Compelled to preach

Daily Reading for March 3 • John and Charles Wesley, Priests, 1791, 1788

[John] Wesley’s friend and fellow preacher George Whitefield had begun preaching in the open air to anyone who would stop to listen, and he appealed to Wesley for assistance. Preaching out of doors was not an idea Wesley took to immediately. “I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he [Whitefield] set me an example this Sunday,” Wesley wrote on March 29, 1739. “I had been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.” But Wesley, like Whitefield, had a passion to preach, so he preached his first outdoor sermon on April 2, 1739—“I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation,” he wrote. Thus began a half century of preaching, three and four times a day, never repeating a sermon, in fields, highways, streets, and village squares, in churches when invited, wherever he could gather a crowd. And gather them he did, often in the thousands. . . .

Wesley’s problems with the Church of England did not diminish once he took to the open air. . . . In a time of massive social upheaval, with factories opening, agriculture declining, and city populations rising rapidly, vast numbers of people among the poor and laboring classes had never heard the Christian gospel and were entirely untouched by the ministry of the established church. These were the people Wesley was reaching. The problem was not so much ill will on the part of church authorities as that the Church of England was set up to maintain an existing system rather than to adapt to a new social reality.

From “John Wesley: Outside Agitator,” quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 3, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

From the Welsh church

Daily Reading for March 4 • David, Bishop of Menevia, Wales, c. 544 (transferred from March 1)

Pilgrim, faint and tempest-beaten,
Lift thy gaze, behold and know
Christ the Lamb, our Mediator,
Robed in vestments trailing low;
Faithfulness his golden girdle;
Bells upon his garments ring
Free salvation for the sinner
Through his priceless offering.

Think on this when to your ankles
Scarce the healing waters rise—
Numberless shall be the cubits
Measured to you in the skies.
Children of the resurrection,
They alone can venture here;
Yet they find no shore, no bottom
To Bethesda’s waters clear.

O the deeps of our salvation!
Mystery of godliness!
He, the God of gods, appearing
In our fleshly human dress;
He it is who bore God’s anger,
In our place atonement made,
Until Justice cried ‘Release him,
Now the debt if fully paid’.

Blessed hour of rest eternal,
Home at last, all labours o’er;
Sea of wonders never sounded,
Sea where none can find a shore;
Access free to dwell for ever
Yonder with the One in Three;
Deeps no foot of man can traverse—
God and Man in unity.

A hymn by Ann Griffiths, eighteenth-century Welsh Methodist mystic and poet, quoted in Songs to Her God: Spirituality of Ann Griffiths by A. M. Allchin (Cowley Publications, 1987).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 4, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Emptying our cups

Daily Reading for March 5

“Once upon a time,” an ancient story tells, “the master had a visitor who came to inquire about Zen. But instead of listening, the visitor kept talking about his own concerns and giving his own thoughts. After a while, the master served tea. He poured tea into his visitor’s cup until it was full and then he kept on pouring. Finally the visitor could not bear it any longer. ‘Don’t you see that my cup is full?’ he said. ‘It’s not possible to get anymore in.’ ‘Just so,’ the master said, stopping at last. ‘And like this cup you are filled with your own ideas. How can you expect me to give you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’”

A monastic Lent is the process of emptying our cups. Lent is the time for trimming the soul and scraping the sludge off a life turned slipshod. Lent is about taking stock of time, even religious time. Lent is about exercising the control that enables us to say no to ourselves so that when life turns hard of its own accord we have the spiritual stamina to say yes to its twists and turns with faith and hope. . . . Lent is the time to make new efforts to be what we say we want to be.

From The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittister (Crossroad, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 5, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Listening to your heart

Daily Reading for March 6

Listening to your heart is not simple. Finding out who you are is not simple. It takes a lot of hard work and courage to get to know who you are and what you want. I never knew what to say if someone asked me at a party, “What do you do?” Artist, writer, therapist, wife, mother—I would be judged by the label I chose. The Amish make no distinction. No one is labeled cook, quilter, or housewife. In fact, standing out would be a sign of false pride. I remembered Miriam saying, “Making a batch of vegetable soup, it’s not right for the carrot to say I taste better than the peas, or the pea to say I taste better than the cabbage. It takes all the vegetables to make a good soup!” . . .

“The first principle of a warrior is not being afraid of who you are,” a wise Tibetan leader once said. I was beginning to feel what he meant. And I have another choice—to accept what I didn’t get to choose. I could have wished for a calmer nature and on and on, a very long list, but what I finally get to choose is that tiny space between all the givens. In that tiny space is freedom. . . .

The need to be special and stand out, the need for communality, to be part of the whole, the hunger to belong, to be one among the many—these equally competing, conflicting values are all part of me. All the contradictions are still there. I still feel the pulls. I don’t want to go and live on a farm, but I long for a simpler life. To reconcile these seeming opposites, to see them as both, not one or the other, is my constant challenge.

From Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish by Sue Bender (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 6, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Blazing the trail

Daily Reading for March 7 • Perpetua and her Companions, Martyrs at Carthage, 202

Early Christians were all supposed to be martyrs—witnesses—although not all were expected to die. . . . The eagerness with which many early Christians sought a public occasion to give witness indicates that they had already been primed, indeed trained, for the opportunity. It is also likely that they already understood this giving witness in sacrificial terms, so that their witness became a ritual occasion—a sacrificial liturgy parallel to, and with some of the same effects as, the eucharist. Out of this ritual of exaltation in which a martyr became a saint grew the devotion to the saints in early Christianity, along with their relics and the public cycle of ceremonies devoted to their memories.

Early Christian authors, and the martyrs themselves, thus followed Jewish precedent when they construed martyrdoms as liturgical acts, offerings of themselves to God as redemptive sacrifices on their own behalf and on behalf of their congregation (and, indeed, of all humanity) that likewise provided a means for ascending to the throne of God in the manner of previous Jewish prophets and visionaries. What is new in early Christianity is the way in which these martyrdoms are understood as the appropriation of the identity of another through mimesis, thus accomplishing a mass or common exaltation in Jesus. The way of ascent and exaltation is thereby opened not just to a priesthood or restricted class of trained visionaries, but potentially to every Christian. . . . Martyrs, through their actions and the narratives about them, became the quintessential representatives of Christian identity. They blazed a trail into death and the kingdom of God and were understood to mediate God’s favors while they served the community and stood as exemplars of brave faith. . . .

The unordained, sometimes unlearned martyrs were frequently viewed as direct rivals of the bishops, as we see in the works of Cyprian of Carthage, whose authority was challenged by those preparing for martyrdom, or in the dream of Perpetua, in which the bishop abases himself before her as a sign of her higher authority as martyr. The social position of the martyrs, therefore, could be described as inherently ambiguous: selected by the divine will rather than by membership in a socially restrictive association, not required to be learned or even literate, not restricted to wealthy male citizens, martyrs were still, in most Christian textual sources, regarded as the most completely or faithfully Christian members of the church.

From “Martyrdom as Exaltation” by Robin Darling Young, in Late Ancient Christianity, edited by Virginia Burrus, volume 2 in the series A People’s History of Christianity (Fortress Press, 2005).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 7, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Leaving self behind

Daily Reading for March 8 • The Second Sunday in Lent

These are the words of Jesus taken from St Mark’s Gospel: ‘Anyone who wishes to be a follower of mine must leave self behind; he must take up his cross and come with me.’ Now we meditate to do just that: to obey that absolutely fundamental call Jesus makes, which is the basis of all our Christian faith, to leave self behind in order that we can indeed journey with Christ in His return to the Father. . . .

In our own day we have perhaps lost our understanding of what it really means to renounce self. Self-renunciation is not an experience with which our contemporaries are familiar or which they even understand very clearly, mainly because the tendency of our society is to emphasize the importance of self-promotion, self-preservation, self-projection. The materialism of our consumer society puts ‘What I want’ at the centre of our life, and it renders ‘the other’ merely an object which we see in terms of our own pleasure or advantage. But the other is only really Other if approached with reverence for itself and in itself. We must learn to pay complete attention to it and not to its effect upon us. If we begin to objectify the other then its reality, its uniqueness, and essential value escape us and it becomes not the other, but a projection of ourselves. . . .

We can only turn to the Other, we can only make this movement of self, if we leave self behind, that is, if we take our consciousness away from its involvement with me and direct it on the thou. Self-obsession is the means of restricting and limiting the self. Self-renunciation, on the other hand, is the means of liberating the self for its real purpose which is loving the Other.

From “Leaving Self Behind” by John Main, quoted in Word into Silence by John Main OSB (Paulist Press, 1981).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 8, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Comprehending the incomprehensible

Daily Reading for March 9 • Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, c. 394

Now the divine nature, as it is in itself, according to its essence, transcends every act of comprehensive knowledge, and it cannot be approached or attained by our speculation. Men have never discovered a faculty to comprehend the incomprehensible; nor have we ever been able to devise an intellectual technique for grasping the inconceivable. For this reason the great Apostle calls God’s ways ‘unsearchable’, teaching us by this that the way that leads to the knowledge of the divine nature is inaccessible to our reason; and hence none of those who have lived before us has given us the slightest hint of comprehension suggesting that we might know that which in itself is above all knowledge.

Such then is God whose essence is above every nature, invisible, incomprehensible. Yet he can be seen and apprehended in another way, and the ways of this apprehension are numerous. For we can see him, who has ‘made all things in wisdom’, by the process of inference through the wisdom that is reflected in the universe. It is just as in human works of art, where the mind can in a sense see the author of the ordered structure that is before it, inasmuch as he has left his artistry in his work. But notice that what we see here is not the substance of the craftsman, but merely the artistic skill that he has impressed in his work. So too, when we consider the order of creation, we form an image not of substance but of the wisdom of him who has done all things wisely.

From the On the Beatitudes, sermon 6 by Gregory of Nyssa, quoted in Spiritual Classics from the Early Church, an anthology compiled and introduced by Robert Atwell, OSB (London: National Society / Church House Publishing, 1995).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 9, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Terrible simplicity

Daily Reading for March 10

The desert witnesses to the confrontation with God in terrible simplicity, it is the ‘primal scriptural symbol of the absence of all human aid and comfort’. Here, in the experience of waste and emptiness, of liberation through and from oppression, Christians have seen the foreshadowing of the redeeming work of God in Christ. The Exodus thus holds a central place in Christian liturgy and spirituality as we celebrate and experience inwardly our own deliverance from bondage. So St Gregory of Nyssa told his hearers: “Cross the Jordan, hasten towards the new life in Christ, to the land that bears fruit in happiness, flowing with milk and honey, according to the promise. Overthrow Jericho, your former way of life!. . . All these things are figures of the reality which is now made manifest.”

From Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality by Kenneth Leech (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 10, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Competing voices

Daily Reading for March 11

There are many voices competing for our attention in the world today—our families, our coworkers, the homeless and hungry, our politicians. We hear voices hounding us to buy more goods and services, voices instilling fear, hopeful voices, cynical voices, vengeful voices, our own voice of self-preservation. Which voices will we heed? Which words will become the springboards of our action and the source of our vision? I know how easy it is to become torn and scattered in a world of constant and often conflicting voices. My vision may become blurred with such competition for my heart. There are times when I feel imprisoned and voiceless in the midst of the endless demands for my commitment and loyalty. With so much demanding my attention and needing resolution, I often wonder where my place is. I sometimes feel helpless and powerless in the wake of the world’s needs. I must have the courage to stay the course when Jesus invites me, saying, “Make my word your home.”

It all begins in the silence of being present to God. The venue is my open and listening heart. Jesus said, “Out of the heart, the mouth speaks.” My goal is not success in holiness. It is longing to be faithful to the truth of Jesus’ words, regardless of the outcome. In the silence of prayer I have learned the meaning of perfect freedom, the only source of joy. It is what Jesus described as “abundant life,” but it is not a “possession.” Gregory of Nyssa, an early Christian mystic, bishop, and theologian of the church, learned from his own experience that life with God is never fully defined or completed; he speaks of the soul “continually making fresh discoveries.” God’s love for us is always expanding before our eyes and our desire for God is a never-ending journey. Prayer is a limitless vocation to live deeper and deeper into the mystery of God and our own authentic humanity. It is living with enthusiasm, in God.

From Come and See: The Transformation of Personal Prayer by David Keller. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 11, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Physician of souls

Daily Reading for March 12 • Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, 604

Gregory the Great, writing over five hundred years after Paul, composed one of the first manuals on pastoral care and Christian leadership. This work, sent by Gregory to Leander of Seville, was highly praised and enjoyed a wide readership, including Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. Claudia Rapp writes in Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity that “with Pastoral Care, finally, we have a proper and complete manual for priests, a how-to guide for the discharge of the priestly office.” Furthermore, in the words of Bede, Gregory’s Pastoral Care “describes in clear terms the qualities essential to those who rule the Church, showing how they should live; with what discernment they should instruct their various pupils; and with what constant awareness they should daily call to mind their own frailty.”

Gregory, pope from 590 to 604 CE and credited with the conversion of England through Augustine of Canterbury, portrays a leader who is a physician of souls. As a physician of souls, the leader must “‘preach the word, reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all long suffering and doctrine,’ and both by precept and example guide souls in the way of salvation.” Gregory reminds leaders not to take their role lightly or to neglect the duties of their office. In order to be a physician of souls, the leader must practice what is preached and be an example to others. Bede writes with great admiration for Gregory, “for while other popes devoted themselves to building churches and adorning them with gold and silver, Gregory’s sole concern was to save souls.” In other words, Gregory’s pastoral leadership was to heal, transform, restore wholeness, and lead others into deeper relationship with God.

From “The Word of the Cross: Mission, Power, and the Theology of Leadership” by Jennifer Strawbridge, in Anglican Theological Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Winter 2009): 71-72.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 12, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A call for remembrance

Daily Reading for March 13 • James Theodore Holly, Bishop of Haiti, 1911

Saint Paul tells us that “that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual.” (1 Cor. xv., 66.) I have however reversed the order of things set forth by the apostle, and spoken of those facts first which show the spiritual claims that Haiti has upon American Christians. I come lastly to speak of the natural claims of that people upon the grateful remembrance of all patriotic American citizens.

During the revolutionary war, by which the independence of the United States was triumphantly achieved, free colored men, then colonists of France, volunteered to fight in that war of freedom. A body of them, variously estimated at from 800 to 1,100 men, took part in the battle of Savannah, Ga., in 1779, and did effective service.

Inspired by the example of the American revolutionary forefathers, they inaugurated a war of independence in Haiti, then called Santo Domingo; successfully accomplished their object, and in 1804 established the second independent nation in the new world. Having thus secured their own national independence, they next lent a helping hand to Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America; by whom five other independent nations were established in the new world. Five thousand Haitians followed Bolivar from victory to victory until this end was accomplished. Twenty-five thousand dollars were contributed by the Haitian Government to meet the necessities of that great liberator. It was only when those several independent states were established in the western hemisphere, towards the accomplishment of whose independence Haitians had so largely contributed, that it became possible to formulate the Monroe Doctrine. When Washington warned his countrymen against “entangling foreign alliances,” this advice referred only to the European wars of Napoleon, then in progress. The whole of the new world, outside of the United States, was in a colonial position. But when so many other independent states had arisen here, it became necessary to formulate a new policy to meet the situation. Monroe formulated that policy to meet those modified circumstances. Haiti had done as much as, not to say more than, any other American State to create that new situation.

This policy, thus tentatively enunciated in the Monroe Doctrine, now forms an appropriate basis on which the United States, as a great power, may claim the new world as the “sphere” of her influence, and so offset the policy of the great nations of Europe, who have agreed among themselves to bring the whole continent of Africa within their respective “spheres” of influence. This simply means that Americans do not intend quietly to submit to the application of such a policy to the new world, and that they propose to resist all incipient attempts at the same on our shores. Obsta principiis.

Aid and encouragement to organize reformed autonomous churches on the primitive basis of the Anglican Reformation, will be a powerful means to establish the sphere of influence whose watchword is, “America for the Americans.” Hence, the work to which we have put our hands in Haiti, Mexico, Cuba and Brazil, should be strengthened and prosecuted with a large-hearted, patriotic zeal; and supported with an open-handed generosity.

From chapter XII, “Claims of Haiti on the American People” in Facts about the Church’s Mission in Haiti: A Concise Statement by Bishop Holly (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1897). http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/jtholly/facts1897.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 13, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Pursue works of compassion

Daily Reading for March 14

In these days then of the holy fast, let us pursue even more fruitfully the works of compassion which must always be the aim of our zeal. “We must do good to all, and especially to those of the household of the faith,” so that in the very distribution of alms also, we may imitate the goodness of the heavenly Father “who causes his sun to rise on good people as well as evil, and his rain to fall of the just and unjust alike.” Although the poverty of the faithful ought especially to be helped, still those who have not yet received the Gospel must receive mercy in their troubles. We must love the mutual participation in human nature of all people, and it ought to make us benevolent to those also who are subject to us in whatever condition, especially if they are now reborn in the same grace, and redeemed at the same price of the blood of Christ.

We have this together with them, that we are created in the image of God, and they are not separate from us in bodily origin or in spiritual birth. We are sanctified by the same Spirit, we live by the same faith, we come together to the same mysteries. Let this unity not be despised, and let not such a deep communion be cheap to us, but let this very fact make us gentler in everything, that we share their subjection and with them are subjected to the one Lord in the same service. If any of these have hurt their masters by serious offenses, let them now receive leniency in the days of reconciliation. Let pity take away harshness, and let favor destroy vengeance. Let confinement hold no one, let prisons shut no one in, for our God has promised his own mercy on this condition, that people should know that their own sins will be remitted to them only if they remit those of others. Destroy the material of dissension, dearly beloved, and the sting of enmity. Let hatred cease, let envy give way, let all the members of Christ come together in the union of love.

From Sermon 41 of Leo the Great (21 February 443), quoted in The Fathers of the Church: St. Leo the Great, Sermons, translated by Jane Patricia Freeland, C.S.J.B. and Agnes Josephine Conway, S.S.J. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 14, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Cleaned out

Daily Reading for March 15 • The Third Sunday in Lent

At first glance Jesus’ shocking actions in the temple hardly seem loving. Yet they reveal his inexhaustible passion for his Father, a passion and zeal that drives all his actions. The Father yearns to be with his children; he seeks our company and desires that we approach him in right ways.

Jesus knew that. He also knew the ways of the temple merchants actually hindered rather than helped people worship God. God seeks a clean, pure, authentic connection with us, an open channel of relationship. But we tend to clog that connection with human-concocted rules and regulations. We get so focused on the way we approach God that we neglect to actually do the approaching.

In this case, Jesus forcefully cleans out the garbage that chokes the channel of relationship with God. This cleansing is an act of love because its purpose is to restore the direct connection between God and God’s people.

What would Jesus find in your temple—your life, your body, your mind? Would he find something that needed to be cleaned out, overturned, and chased off before you could enjoy a connection with him?

Perhaps shame hinders you from coming to God, or irrational expectations of what should and shouldn’t happen when you fall into Jesus’ embrace. Or maybe busy habits or harmful behaviors distract you from the true way. Perhaps it’s a shattered dream or a broken heart, or a confused mind or a hectic schedule. Or it may be a simple misunderstanding of how one can approach God in faith.

Experiencing Jesus’ cleansing may be painful in the moment, but it is ultimately a loving act. Because it sets things right, it reopens the way to God by cleaning out the garbage in our soul. Jesus is zealous for you, consumed by love for you. He wants you wholly. And holy.

From Living Loved: Knowing Jesus as the Lover of Your Soul by Peter Wallace. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 15, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Twofold character of Lent

Daily Reading for March 16

For the faithful . . . Lent has a two-fold character. On the one hand, it is reparatory and restorative: the time when "all past slothfulnesses are chastised, all negligences atoned for" (Leo the Great, Sermon 39). Ideally, Leo maintains, “we should remain in God's sight always the same, as we ought to be found on the Easter feast itself.” But since few actually do so, “The Divine Providence has with great beneficence taken care that the discipline of the forty days should heal us and restore the purity of our minds, during which the faults of other times might be redeemed by pious acts and removed by chaste fasting” (Sermon 40). On the other hand, it affords opportunity for the virtuous to penetrate more deeply into that ever new life which knows no bounds. Because no one “is so perfect and holy as not to be able to be more perfect and more holy, let us all together,” urges Leo, “without difference of rank, without distinction of desert, with pious eagerness pursue our race from what we have attained to what we yet aspire to, and make some needful addition to our regular devotions” (Sermon 39). In either case the Christian must be ready for combat, trial, and strife, since the enemy of salvation grows more hostile as his reign is threatened. In this way the forty days become a period of spiritual warfare, a theme which Leo develops vividly on the first Sunday. “As we approach then, dearly beloved, the beginning of Lent, which is a time for the more careful serving of the Lord, because we are, as it were entering on a kind of contest in good works, let us prepare our souls for fighting with temptations, and understand that the more zealous we are for our salvation, the more determined must be the assaults of our opponents” (Sermon 49).

From Patrick Regan, O.S.B., “The Three Days and the Forty Days,” reprinted in Maxwell Johnson, editor, Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2000).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 16, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A Celtic declaration of faith

Daily Reading for March 17 • Patrick, Bishop and Missionary of Ireland, 461

There is no other God,
there never was and there never will be,
than God the Father,
unbegotten and without beginning,
the Lord of the Universe,
as we have been taught,
and His son, Jesus Christ,
whom we declare to have always been with the Father
and to have been begotten spiritually by the Father
in a way that baffles description,
before the beginning of the world,
before all beginning;
and by Him are made all things
visible and invisible.

He was made man, defeated death
and was received into heaven by the Father,
who has given Him power over all names
in heaven, on earth, and under the earth;
and every tongue will acknowledge to Him
that Jesus Christ is the Lord God.
We believe in Him
and we look for His coming soon
as judge of the living and the dead
who will treat everyone according to their deeds.

He has poured out the Holy Spirit upon us in abundance:
the gift and guarantee of eternal life,
who makes those who believe and obey
children of God and joint heirs with Christ.

We acknowledge and adore Him as one God
in the Trinity of the Holy Name.

A Declaration of Faith attributed to Patrick, quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community (New York: HarperOne, 2002).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 17, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

On receiving communion

Daily Reading for March 18 • Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, 386

After [the Lord’s Prayer] the Priest says, “Holy things to holy men.” Holy are the gifts presented, having received the visitation of the Holy Ghost; holy are ye also, having been deemed worthy of the Holy Ghost; the holy things therefore correspond to the holy persons. Then ye say, “One is Holy, One is the Lord, Jesus Christ.” For One is truly holy, by nature holy; we too are holy, but not by nature, only by participation, and discipline, and prayer.

After this ye hear the chanter inviting you with a sacred melody to the communion of the Holy Mysteries, and saying, O taste and see that the Lord is good. Trust not the judgment to thy bodily palate—no, but to faith unfaltering; for they who taste are bidden to taste, not bread and wine, but the anti-typical Body and Blood of Christ.

In approaching therefore, come not with thy wrists extended, or thy fingers spread; but make thy left hand a throne for the right, as for that which is to receive a King. And having hollowed thy palm, receive the Body of Christ, saying over it, Amen. . . .Then after thou hast partaken of the Body of Christ, draw near also to the Cup of His Blood; not stretching forth thine hands, but bending and saying with an air of worship and reverence, Amen, hallow thyself by partaking also of the Blood of Christ. And while the moisture is still upon thy lips, touch it with thine hands, and hallow thine eyes and brow and the other organs of sense. Then wait for the prayer, and give thanks unto God, who hath accounted thee worthy of so great mysteries.

From Lecture XXIII (On the Mysteries.V): "On the Sacred Liturgy and Communion" by Cyril of Jerusalem. Quoted in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf207.ii.xxvii.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 18, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

The essential Joseph

Daily Reading for March 19 • St. Joseph

We know little of Joseph. There were dramatic moments in his life, of course: Bethlehem, the flight into Egypt, the temple episode, but my feeling at least is that for the essential Joseph, the body and substance of his life was in the ordinary, simple, working, family life in Nazareth. The child and his mother depended on him for food, a home, love, basic education, a place in the social fabric of their village. He seems to have been a simple man, hidden in his ordinariness, “only” Joseph the carpenter. He did not have any part in Christ’s public life of preaching. It would seem he was dead by then. More profoundly, his contribution to Christ’s work was situated at another level, at the level of his personal relationship with Christ, what he gave of himself to the human person of Jesus. We know how important this is in the development of the personality. Judging by the fruits, he loved much and wisely.

As a Brother, your contribution to the body of Christ which is the Church will have some of the same characteristics. It will be simple yet essential. It will be very much incarnated, yet the fruit of the Spirit. It will be concerned with the material well-being of a small group of Christ’s disciples, yet it will be Jesus whom you will serve in them. Its truth will be plain to see, verifiable in a very concrete obedience, effort, humility and charity, yet it will receive all its energy from within, from a deep, personal love of Christ and a willingness to carry the burdens of his cross as they present themselves in the vicissitudes of real life. Prayer and work will be inextricably interwoven in the silent world of the monastery, not the silence of absence of life, but the harmonious silence of well-ordered activity. Like Mary and Joseph you will follow the way, not of riches or power, but the humble hidden path of Nazareth and so enter, day by day, more deeply into the kingdom of God.

From “Receiving the Habit of a Converse Brother” in The Spirit of the Place by a Carthusian prior, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 19, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Be of one mind

Daily Reading for March 20 • Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, 687

Always keep God’s peace and love among you, and when you have to seek guidance about your affairs, take great care to be of one mind. Live in mutual good-will also with Christ’s other servants, and do not despise Christians who come to you for hospitality, but see that you welcome them, give them accommodation, and send them on their way with friendship and kindness.

Cuthbert’s last words, quoted in A Holy Island Prayer Book: Morning, Midday, and Evening Prayer by Ray Simpson. Copyright © 2002. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 20, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

My joy, my glory

Daily Reading for March 21 • Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1711

Glory be to Thee, O heavenly Father, for first loving us, and giving the dearest thing Thou hadst for us: O help me to love again, and to think nothing too dear for Thee.

I believe, O my God, that Thou art a Spirit most pure and holy, and infinite in all perfections, in power, in knowledge, and goodness; that Thou art eternal, immutable; and omnipresent: all love, all glory be to Thee.

I believe Thy divine nature, O my God, to be in all respects amiable, to be amiableness in itself, to be love itself; and therefore I love, I admire, I praise, I fear, and I adore Thee. Thou, Lord, art my hope, my trust, my life, my joy, my glory, my God, my all, my love. . . .

I believe, O Thou communicative goodness, that Thou dost preserve, and sustain, and protect, and bless all things Thou hast made, suitably to the natures Thou has given them: all love, all glory, be to Thee.

I believe, O mighty wisdom, that Thou dost most sweetly order, and govern, and dispose all things; even the most minute; even the very sins of men, to conspire in Thy glory; O do Thou conduct my whole life, steer every motion of my soul, towards the great end of our creation, to love and to glorify Thee. . . .

Thy works, O Lord, are wonderful and amiable. I love, and admire, and praise Thy universal providence over the whole world: the perpetual flux of Thy goodness on every creature: all glory be to Thee. . . .

The longer I live, O my God, the more reason I have to love Thee, because every day supplies me with fresh experiments and new motives of Thy manifold love to me: and therefore all love, all glory, be to Thee.

From “An Exposition of the Church Catechism,” in The Prose Works of the Right Reverend Thomas Ken, D.D., collected and edited by the Rev. William Benham, B.D. (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, 1889).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 21, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A thaw in our soul

Daily Reading for March 22 • The Fourth Sunday in Lent

For the prescribed forty days coincide in time with that season of the year when nature experiences a thaw; it is the business of fasting to produce a thaw in our soul. This is not a coincidence. God is sketching His will for us through the living motions of nature. The earth during the appointed forty days rids itself of winter’s harshness and is cut through by the plough that it might become suitable for earthly crops. We, during the forty days, give up the harshness of sin; fasting digs up our earth to render it receptive to heavenly seeds. And just as this is the season for the young twig of a tree to become fruitful and for new branches to produce buds so also at this time man’s lifeless hope revives and lost faith is restored to glory. Nature adorns herself with blossoms and seems to honor the great feast day with her splendor. We, likewise, should now produce roses from our thorns, that is, justice instead of sin, compassion in place of sternness, and instead of avarice, liberality. Only by fasting can we be free of the thorns of our sins. For fasting produces chastity, humility and moderation—the blossoms of our life which blossoms Christ finds fragrant.

From Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, quoted in Liturgical Practice in the Fathers by Thomas K. Carroll and Thomas Halton (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1988).

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 22, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Armenian prayers

Daily Reading for March 23 • Gregory the Illuminator, Bishop and Missionary of Armenia, c. 332

Prayer Before Meals

The head of the table says:
O Christ our God, bless this food and this drink of your servants with a spiritual blessing, and make us healthy in soul and body; so that as we enjoy the food our bodies require in the modesty appropriate to our religious calling, we may share in your infinite blessings, and in the kingdom of heaven, together with your saints. So that in thanksgiving, we may glorify you, with the Father and with the all-holy Spirit, now and always and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

All respond:
Let us eat this meal in peace, which the Lord has given us as a gift. Blessed is the Lord for all his gifts. Amen.

Prayer After Meals

The head of the table says:
Glory to you, Lord. Glory to you, King of glory, for you have given us the food of joy and have filled our hearts out of the fullness of your all-satisfying mercy. Fill us now with your Holy Spirit, so that we may please you and not be ashamed. For you will come and reward us each according to our deeds. And you are worthy of glory, dominion and honor, now and always and unto ages of ages. Amen.

All respond:
May Christ our God, who has fed us and filled us, make the fullness of this table constant and abundant. Glory to him forever. Amen.

Daily prayers from the Armenian Church, found at their website, http://www.armenianchurch.net/prayer/daily.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 23, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (1)

Participation

Daily Reading for March 24 • Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, and the Martyrs of El Salvador

One of the signs of the present time is the idea of participation, the right that all persons have to participate in the construction of their own common good.

For this reason, one of the most dangerous abuses of the present time is repression, the attitude that says, “Only we can govern, no one else; get rid of them.” Everyone can contribute much that is good, and in that way trust is achieved.

The common good will not be attained by excluding people. We can’t enrich the common good of our country by driving out those we don’t care for. We have to try to bring out all that is good in each person and try to develop an atmosphere of trust, not with physical force, as though dealing with irrational beings, but with a moral force that draws out the good that is in everyone, especially in concerned young people.

Thus, with all contributing their own interior life, their own responsibility, their own way of being, all can build the beautiful structure of the common good, the good that we construct together and that creates conditions of kindness, of trust, of freedom, of peace. Then we can, all of us together, build the republic—the res publica, the public concern—what belongs to all of us and what we all have the duty of building.

From The Violence of Love by Oscar Romero, Copyright 2007 by Plough Publishing House. Used with permission. An e-book found at http://www.plough.com/ebooks/pdfs/ViolenceOfLove.pdf

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 24, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Humble Mary

Daily Reading for March 25 • The Annunciation

A humble person is one who, like the humble Mary, says, “The Powerful One has done great things in me.” Each of us has an individual greatness. God would not be our author if we were something worthless. You and I and all of us are worth very much, because we are creatures of God, and God has prodigally given his wonderful gifts to every person. And so the church values human beings and contends for their rights, for their freedom, for their dignity. That is an authentic church endeavor. While human rights are violated, while there are arbitrary arrests, while there are tortures, the church considers itself persecuted, it feels troubled, because the church values human beings and cannot tolerate that an image of God be trampled by persons that become brutalized by trampling on others. The church wants to make that image beautiful. . . .

Faith consists in accepting God
without asking him to account for things
according to our standard.
Faith consists in reacting before God as Mary did:
I don’t understand it, Lord,
but let it be done in me according to your word.

From The Violence of Love by Oscar Romero, Copyright 2007 by Plough Publishing House. Used with permission. An e-book found at http://www.plough.com/ebooks/pdfs/ViolenceOfLove.pdf

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 25, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

A more noble sense of obligation

Daily Reading for March 26 • James DeKoven, Priest, 1879 (transferred from March 22)

And so I assert that there are no less than six ways in which a man can believe in Eucharistic adoration—two of them which are not held in our Church at all, one of them which no logical mind can possibly hold, and the other three of which, I firmly believe, include in some one of their forms ninety-nine one-hundredths of the churchmen of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America; and therefore I assert that when a man says he does not believe in Eucharistic adoration, or asserts that it is tolerated or not tolerated, without further explanation, he says something that is totally unintelligible. . . . Now let me say, about the doctrine of the Eucharist, there is precisely this, that we have not arrived at a full and clear determination about it. Better a thousand times, my brethren, that rash and incautious expressions should be used, better that things should be said that the great heart of this Church may possibly condemn, than that we should hastily formulate this doctrine. . . .Let this Church on this doctrine preserve its equanimity. Let it study. Let it read. Let it pray. Let it think. Let men who have the grace and the gift of understanding pour forth their contributions; and if there are things that ought not to be said, we may be sure that free thought, free play, free consideration, and full consideration, never harmed the Church in any way; for, mark you, it is a philosophical truth, which no man can read ecclesiastical history without understanding, that no doctrine, though it be formulated never so often, becomes the doctrine of any Church until that doctrine receives the moral unanimity of its members; and if any one here should be tempted either by Rubric or by Article to attempt to take away from the doctrine of this Church on the Eucharist, it would only be endeavoring to do something which in time to come this Church will rise as one man, clerical and lay, and sweep away. . . .

Mr. President, we live in troublous times, and around us are all sorts of terrible questions. It does seem to me the need of the day is not now to legislate on nice points of doctrine, or to prescribe exactly the measure of a genuflexion, or the angle of inclination which can express an orthodox devotion. The answer to all this panic and all this outcry is one, and one only. It is Work; work for the cause of Christ; work for the souls of men; and a fuller, deeper, more noble sense of the obligation of the Church, developing its powers, and sending it forth to mould and form this mighty nation, and to give new life and vigor to every effort that is made for the salvation of men. I see the storm-cloud gathering. I see the lightnings flash. I hear the thunder roll afar. I hear the trumpet call. In my ears the bugle blast is ringing. And I call you, brethren, in a time like this, not to narrow-hearted legislation, but to broad, Catholic, tolerant charity, and to work, as never men worked before, for the souls of those for whom the Saviour died.

From The Canon on Ritual, and the Holy Eucharist; A Speech Delivered in the General Convention, October 26th, 1874, by the Rev. James DeKoven, D.D. Found at http://anglicanhistory.org/dekoven/canon.html.

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 26, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Prayers for a restful night

Daily Reading for March 27 • Charles Henry Brent, Bishop of the Philippines, and of Western New York, 1929

The kind of a night we spend is in a large degree for us to determine. The Christian should at times leave everything in God’s hands, and do nothing but lie back on God’s bosom. The opportunity comes every night when we go to sleep. This is the season when the mind and soul should rest not less than the body. We can train ourselves to shed our cares into God’s arms if we try. So far from gaining anything, we lose much by submitting to wakefulness begotten of anxiety. Anxiety gnaws at the cords of good judgment and leaves us with a warped mind when the day dawns after a troubled night. Sweet sleep delights to respond to the invitation of a peaceful conscience and a mind whose last thoughts sway to and fro in the cradle of God’s love. A trustful consideration of God’s care of our concerns is frequently the only sleep-giving medicine necessary for distraught nerves.

O God, who hast drawn over weary day the restful veil of night, wrap our consciences in heavenly peace. Lift from our hands our tasks, and all through the night bear in Thy bosom the full weight of our burdens and sorrows, that in untroubled slumber we may press our weakness close to Thy strength, and win new power for the morrow’s duty from Thee who givest Thy beloved sleep. Amen.

Peace comes when we are assured that there is no earth-born cloud between our lives and God. Peace is the consequence of forgiveness, which in turn is God’s removal of that which hides or obscures His face, and breaks union with Him. The happy sequence culminating in fellowship with God is penitence, pardon, peace—the first of which we offer, the second we accept, and the third we inherit.

From “In the Evening,” part 3 of With God in Prayer by the Right Rev. Charles H. Brent (Philadelphia and London: George W. Jacobs and Co, 1907). http://anglicanhistory.org/asia/brent/withgod1907/03.html

Posted by Vicki K. Black on March 27, 2009 4:00 AM | Permalink | Digg this | Comments (0)

Penitence and thanksgiving

Daily Reading for March 28

The earliest step in penitence is to give heed to good desires. They are the voice of our capacity crying out for fulfilment. Desires should crystallize into resolution. The human will is of great power to set the life free from bondage. We do not honour God’s power by depreciating the ability of the human will to do strong deeds. The whole of human advance, the entire process of self-improvement hinges on a stiff will. The first stage in penitence is to bend the will away from sin and stiffen it toward goodness. . . . Penitence springs from a consciousness of having pained a loving God, and continues in a sustained effort not to offend that love again. If the expression of penitence is in the will, the motive is in the heart.

O God, who requirest of me only such things as will turn to my profit, and who art pained by my least act of waywardness, warm my heart until it is aflame with love toward Thee, that my chief delight may be to bring Thee joy by my fidelity to Thy counsels; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. . . .

Pardon is valuable only so far as we use it. It introduces us into the near presence of God, with whom we

CATEGORIES

Saints

Feeds

SEARCH