By Heidi Shott

Maybe most long-term relationships develop similar weirdnesses, I don’t know. But I do know that every few years my husband Scott latches onto a phase that he repeats several times a day for no discernable reason. In the late 1980s, when we first moved to Maine, he started waking me up by saying, “These are the things we’ve come to expect from you. These are the sorts of things.”

Throughout the middle years of the last decade, whenever he entered a room, I’d hear, “You don’t care. You don’t care. I know you don’t care.”

“You got that right, bud,” I’d say without looking up from my book.

A few months ago he invented a new line that I find entertaining.

Out of the blue he’ll catch my eye and say, “I know the truth about you.”

Now this is someone I met when I was a 17 year-old college freshman. He knows a lot about me, but despite all we’ve shared – twin sons, several house renovations, his middle-aged scooter obsession, those few bad months when he was senior warden and the person renting the rectory was keeping a secret flock of chickens, all this day-to-day life for more than two decades – he can’t begin to know the truth about me and he knows it. That’s why it’s funny. That and because we both know that the truth about me, known and unknown, is not outrageously exciting.

Last June at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention I found myself alone in a hotel elevator with Martyn Minns, the newest Virginia-based bishop in the Anglican Church of Nigeria. I could have asked him anything in this intimate space, (I am, after all, supposed to be a church journalist,) but what I heard my idiot-self say was, “I have a son named Martin.” Now this is indeed true, but who the hell cares? After a second, I caught myself and added wryly, “but we spell it the traditional way.”

So for a few moments before the elevator stopped for more passengers, we spoke about the return to old-fashioned names. He told me his children were naming his grandchildren names like, (let’s say, for example, because it’s slipped my mind,) Celia and Walter. He seemed bemused and slightly perplexed at this return to the old ways. Here was a man I’d read a lot about over the past few years standing right before me, but it occurred to me that there was no truth about him that I knew with any certainty. Nor did he know anything about me. The video piece I’d done the night before for the General Convention Nightly News about the newest split in the Episcopal Church – those who like jello dishes at potluck suppers and those who don’t – didn’t tell a fraction of the truth about my history or my life or my faith or what is dear to me. It merely suggested that one opinion I hold is that we Episcopalians take ourselves way too seriously.

I know the truth about you. When you come face-to-face with someone, when you look him in the eye, it is impossible to say with any certainty “I know you.” When we examine our burgeoning on-line culture of chatter with its easy, facile insta-response, we kid ourselves by assuming we can know anyone simply by what he or she writes on a given day in a given mood.

The saddest and most horrific example of this unknowability was made manifest on the Virginia Tech campus this week. Mental illness and a deep detachment may have made knowing the truth about Cho Seung-Hui impossible, but those who knew him as “the question mark kid” didn’t know him at all. And in my deepest heart, though I so wish it were different, I suspect I would have looked over him as well. When people are unappealing or difficult or somehow different, isn’t brushing past them the easiest way?

There is so much to know in this remarkable age. As I sit at my desk each day, my head reels at all the pieces I don’t have time to read thoroughly. Things I want to know as well as topics and ideas that pique the edges of my interest. How quickly my opinions are formed by the fleeting glance of this person’s response on this particular blog. How much I assume I know about people I know virtually nothing about.

As Christians this business of being deeply known and loved by God is at the core of our faith. Being completely known and loved anyway is what allows us to reach to those who may not be loveable or agreeable or fathomable in any way. The truth, Jesus assures us, will set us free. In the swirl of that kind of knowing and love we are free to be vulnerable, free to ask questions, free to place our lives in the hands of people we don’t entirely know…and will never fully know. That kind of vulnerability and self-revelation is hard enough to do with those we draw deeply into our daily lives. How much harder to know and be known by the people at our margins.

“I know the truth about you,” my husband says to me this morning as he knots his tie at the foot of our bed. “You are a slug.” It’s true. It’s school vacation week. I’ll get to work when I get to work. But because he has nailed me, I resent him. From the middle of the bed I grab the big body pillow he sleeps with to keep his shoulder from becoming stiff – the pillow he’s named Evangeline after the actress who plays Kate on the TV show Lost – and chuck her onto the floor.

“Ha,” I say.

He looks aghast, but recovers quickly. “These are the things we’ve come to expect. These are the sorts of things.”

Heidi Shott, press officer for the Diocese of Maine, is communications director of the Genesis Community Loan Fund. She keeps the blog Heidoville.

By Helen Thompson

Isn't it funny the way we connect with our past in our present, sometimes? Randomly? Like running into an old friend after many years, and being able to strike up a conversation as if no time had passed, and yet realizing that the entire context of the conversation has changed.

Around the time I came back to church in 2003, I rediscovered an old Japanese comic an ex-boyfriend had turned me on to. In this comic, you have a dysfunctional superhero, sorta like Batman, except she's a cyborg scraped together from junk and waste that gets cast off a floating utopian city. You get where this is going. She'd been tossed off the floating utopian city to rot in the junk pile, and of course someone comes along and sees her potential and brings her back to life, and off she goes to dispatch all the bad guys.

Psalm 40, made rather famous to my generation by U2 in its 1983 rock ballad "40," also talks about the theme of being lifted up, out of dark pits, to be set fast upon a rock. But for years, I had no idea what the song meant or that it even came from, much less was named for, a piece of scripture. It didn't stop me from joining in the chorus long after the band had left the stage, lighter aloft and shining, and singing the haunting refrain of "How long to sing this song," over and over and over again with hundreds of other people, voices resonating through inchoate chambers and punctuated by whistles and roars in an accidental worship.

Throughout those clueless years, I spent a lot of time in the scrap heap. But don't we all find ourselves there at times? Who is going to come rooting through all the mess to find us, put us back together, bring us back to life and fill us with a sense of new purpose? This was a point that I heard a charismatic preacher trying to make to an audience, to mixed receptivity, at a friend's wedding this weekend. But he was trying to get it across in that brimstone manner that I—and many of my peers—find off-putting.

We 30-somethings don't much grok the whole "getting saved" business, and when our more charismatic brothers and sisters in Christ start to tout its virtues, we tend to think we're getting sold, not saved. It's not until we're practically lifeless and emotionally bankrupt that we even can allow ourselves to be touched in that way, if we can, and then, it's not so much a preacher knocking us upside the head with Revelations as it is God, entering quietly through a side door, and, well, revelatin'.

It can happen at any moment. I sometimes think it tends to happen when we're in crisis mode because that's the only time we can be open enough to hear God tapping discreetly at the window. The charismatic preacher says he's always watching, but I don't know about all that. I think God is just always ready—an old friend, ready to pick up the old conversation in a new context.

Helen Thompson, better known among faith bloggers as Gallycat, has written for the Philadelphia City Paper, RevGalBlogPals, Geez magazine and others. Visit her on the web at Gallycat's Lounge.

Ann Fontaine

“But I feel so betrayed” choked out, as Frank told me of the admiration and faith he had felt for his priest and rector, Jess, and the sense of loss from the current revelations about the priest’s activities. This priest had such a formative role in the man’s spiritual journey. Frank had wandered far from his childhood faith as he left home for college, married, and grew his business. His wife and kids went to church but he thought – that’s just for kids and people who are not able to make it in the “real world.” “ I’d rather play golf.”

One day, sorting through his mail, he saw the flyer from the church about a book study led by the rector. It was a book that had intrigued him. He thought, “What the hell, I’ll make Susan happy by doing something church-y. I want to read that book anyway.” That was the first step into a deep relationship with the study group, the rector and God. His faith and life were changed.

Today, Frank wonders, “Was it all a sham? Was I just conned? Did he use me? Or is it a vendetta by those who don’t like him?” The man, who had such influence in Frank’s life of faith, was being accused of things that seemed very contrary to the preaching and teaching Frank had heard from Jess.

Currently, there are news articles about a rector in Colorado and a Bishop in the UK. Allegedly, each has engaged in conduct that has resulted in heartbreak. There have been vigorous denials from supporters, and calls for prosecution by others. These are just the latest in a long history of what is called in the canons “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy.” The dynamic is the same whenever this occurs. The cleric is defended or vilified with very little middle ground.

What is it about humans that we cannot accept complexity in our heroes? Does it have to be all good or all bad? Are the ideas and faith gained in relationship to a person all worthless if the person is deeply flawed? Must we have idols that we then destroy when their clay feet are revealed?

I was talking about this with a friend who had been deeply betrayed. I was asking her how she was able to keep the good and let go of the bad in this person. She believed that the bad does not cancel out the good. Though the incident was terrible, it formed her and gave her understanding. The pain is always there in the midst of the good things about the person, but, for her, it is a reminder of the capacity in all of us to do good and to do evil. The choices we make for our futures are based on learning from all of what happens to us, not on forgetting parts of it. Cutting out the bad only results in pushing it down where it can come out in ugly ways. It takes on its own energy, instead of being robbed of its power in our lives. When we incorporate it, it loses its own energy.

I believe it is important to find the facts of the case and to pursue the case. When proven, it is important to restore the victims to fullness of life and important to restore perpetrators to fullness of life through the consequences and making amends. For each of us who have experienced the fall of someone we admired, we can learn more about our own capacity for good and evil, or we can make idols and scapegoats.

We seem to love making our heroes into idols. They fulfill what we perceive as lacking in ourselves. It is difficult to stay in complexity. It is easier to say that someone is all bad or all good. When we put people on pedestals and idolize them, we make them one-dimensional and often the reflection of our own needs. When they fall, we want to smash them and all that their brokenness represents for us. When we refuse to hear the full story, we go into denial and continue to prop up our version of that person.

In the Bible, the heroes are often very fallen. Jacob, the trickster; Rahab, the innkeeper prostitute; and David, the adulterer who has his friend murdered are just a three of these. It seems God is not one to make idols of people, but calls them beloved and uses their gifts for the furthering of God’s kindom.

For Frank, in this story, this can be the beginning of wholeness and healing, (the root meaning of the word salvation) or he can try to return to the Eden of earlier relationship. The angel with the flaming sword stands at that gate. In the story from Genesis – God makes clothing for the exiles and sends them out to journey in the world. It is hard work after the stroll in the Garden, but Jesus promises to walk the path with us, into fullness of life.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

--------------------------------------------------
Reminder: At Episcopal Café, we hope to establish an ethic of transparency by requiring all contributors and commentators to make submissions under their real names. For more details see our Feedback Policy.

By Jennifer McKenize

A number of turtles are basking on a sizable log in the middle of a pond here. But I notice that there are gaps on that log - open spaces - and I see lots of turtles swimming around in the pond, their heads protruding just above the surface of the water. "So," I wonder, "how many of those turtles could fit on that log?"

Well, that depends I suppose. How many turtles can fit on the log depends upon how much room there is on that log. And, it depends upon how many turtles there are swimming around in this pond to populate that log. I wonder, given a large enough log and a great number of willing turtles in the pond, could you conceivably fill a log with turtles even in a small pond? The answer to this question is only marginally complex with just a couple of considerations.

First of all, it depends on the position of the log relative to the water and the attitude of the turtles already there. If the log is big enough and sitting in the water in such a way that there are many spots on the log that are easy for even a smallish turtle to reach directly from the water, then you can fill a log with turtles. This is not just theoretical. I know you can fill a log with turtles because I have seen it done - on more than one occasion. And from where I was sitting, the turtles even all looked happy to be there. Now the part earlier where I said, "...that depends..on the number of turtles there are in the pond..." was a trick. That was a trick, you see, because there are always way more turtles in the pond than could ever fit on even a huge log all at one time. So, in reality, you could fill a single log over and over again, as long as the turtles who found their spot on the log first are willing to move over and occasionally rotate off to share their precious log space.

The second consideration is this: Because turtles tend to move rather slowly and cautiously, moving over proves tricky and probably scary for most turtles. You see, just getting out of the water onto a log can be difficult for them in the first place, especially if the log is narrow-ish and only part of the log is touching the water in such a way that there is an entry point for them to climb on and find a place to sit. And to further complicate matters, I've noticed that very often a turtle will climb onto the end of the log - the only part touching the water and therefore the only easy access point - and then just sit there. That turtle will stop right where it got on and block the path of potential oncoming turtles. Now, I don't think these turtles are being mean. I think they just don't think - they just don't see that they are preventing other turtles from having a place on the log. "I made it on here just fine," they might muse, "so I don't see why others aren't here with me. What's their problem?"

On the other hand, I've noticed that when turtles are in the water, swimming around, they seem to move with great ease and agility, even rapidity, and they tend to congregate naturally. But when they are on that log, these self-same turtles appear to be afraid to move, afraid to renegotiate their initially assumed and secure position on the log even if by doing so they could make room for other turtles to congregate with them on that sunny log. And yet, as treacherous as they seem to find it to renegotiate their initially assumed position on the log, if something frightens them or upsets them, even a curious stranger from a great distance - they will not hesitate to dive right off of the comfort of their log into the water.

So the fear that turtles have isn't fear of falling into the water. Why should they be afraid of the water? After all, turtles live in the water. But it appears that turtles are afraid of two things: First, they are afraid of curious strangers approaching them from a distance; they feel innately threatened. Second, turtles are afraid of having to make room on the log even for their own kind - of having to renegotiate their position on it, even if the only real consequence is that more of their turtle friends could join them in the congregation of the sunny log in the pond. I find this silly and sad because I think all turtles need a spot on the log. They all - ALL turtles - need to have a space made for them so they can enjoy the healthy effects of the warm sun on their hard shells.

So, how many turtles can fit on a log in a pond? Never enough. What can be done about this problem? Well, that depends. It seems to me that far more turtles could fit on the log if the irrational fear and lack of insight of the turtles already there could be overcome. But in the absence of overcoming the inherent fear and lack of insight problem, the practical issue to address is this: Given the current conditions, there aren't enough spots on the logs in the pond - hell, there aren't enough viable logs in the ponds - for all the turtles who want to gather, to bask in the sun with their turtle friends, and even a turtle stranger or two, surrounded by but temporarily removed from their watery home. Why aren't there more logs? I think there used to be more great logs but many of them have rotted and sunk to the bottom because they became water-logged sitting there in the same position day in and day out for months and months and years and years.

I think it is too bad that so many turtles are stuck with having to think that sticking their necks out a little so that their heads are just staying above water is the best they can ever ask for or imagine. This is a problem that could be solved by looking for spots in the sun that are not on traditional logs in the middle of the pond, yet as far as I could tell, nothing is being done to move in this direction. Maybe there are new logs that will emerge after a storm. Maybe some turtles are keeping their eyes open in case one of the old logs rises to the surface again, fully intact with plenty of room for them. Maybe some turtle could take the lead and find a safe spot in the sunny grass on the edge of the pond. Maybe...but so far I've only seen one turtle that has set foot outside of the pond.

And that is why we are like turtles.

The Rev. Jennifer McKenzie, formerly assistant rector at St. David’s Episcopal Church, Washington, D. C., recently accepted a call to Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Va. She keeps the blog “The Reverend Mother.

By Marshall Scott

Two recent coincidences illustrated a concern that I’ve had for some time. It is a concern about how we might support one of the blessings in the spiritual life of the Episcopal Church.

The Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains (AEHC) coordinates its annual meeting each year with the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC). Among the participants this year, new to both meetings, was an Episcopal sister in her habit. I asked about her habit, and learned she was a sister in a new Episcopal community, one which would shortly be applying for recognition by the House of Bishops. She had come to the APC conference because she was newly Board Certified as a Chaplain. We were delighted that she could join with us in the Episcopal activities there.

When I arrived home, I found the May issue of Episcopal Life. In it was the article, “Ancient monk, modern call” by Ron Beathard. (I’m haven't found it on line, yet.) Ron writes of an old friend who discovered for himself the power and the joy of a life lived following the Rule of St. Benedict. To express that for himself, this friend became an Oblate, a lay member, of St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana. St. Meinrad is one of the more notable Benedictine foundations of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

Now, I think these are good things for these individuals. I feel sure each will find life blessed and enriched in the rules of life to which they are committed. I feel sure the life of the Episcopal Church will be blessed and enriched by a new community.

At the same time, I find myself thinking of a corollary to these decisions with some regret. Part of the richness that I cherish in the Episcopal Church is the variety of existing religious orders and communities that are already a part of our life. The monastic tradition is alive and well in our midst. The web site of the Episcopal Church has links to connect to twenty-three religious orders and twelve communities through (respectively) the Conference of Anglican Religious Orders in the Americas (CAROA) ] and the National Association of Episcopal Christian Communities (NAECC). While many base their lives in the Rule of Saint Benedict, not all do; and each is a unique expression of the life of the Spirit in the Church, with a special charism, a spiritual gift to offer.

Within the Episcopal Church, the terms “Religious Order” and “Christian Community” are technical categories, defined in Canons. The essential distinction between a Religious Order and a Christian Community is that members of an Order live a celibate life in community, while members of a Community do not. Otherwise, they have much in common: lives of obedience to a common Rule, accepted in vows made “for life or a term of years.” In addition to professed members, Orders and Communities may have other categories of membership, usually involving a Rule of Life less rigorous than the Rule of the Order or Community, accepted but not vowed by participants and renewed annually. Such categories may be titled Associates, Companions, or Oblates. Their participants make important contributions to the life of the Order or Community, not least with their prayer and financial support. By the same token, the Order or Community offers to each participant spiritual companionship and direction, and opportunities to participate in the shared life and discipline of the professed Brothers and Sisters.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that this is a very important aspect of life in my own household. I have been an Associate of the Order of the Holy Cross , a Benedictine order for men in the Episcopal Church, going on thirty years. My wife is a professed Sister of the Worker Sisters of the Holy Spirit. Each of us has found a spiritual community within the life of the Church, and a Rule with which to order our spiritual lives, to find spiritual formation and, as St. Benedict wrote, “a school for prayer.”

And so, perhaps it’s not surprising that I might feel some regret that more people don’t discover the opportunities for a Rule of Life within the existing Orders and Communities of the Episcopal Church. For the individuals whose experiences began this column, I can believe that in fact this is how the Holy Spirit has led them, one to participate in forming a new Community and the other to make Oblation to a Roman Benedictine foundation. May each be blessed. Still, I wonder whether they were even aware of the resources of such lives that already existed within the Episcopal Church.

And many Episcopalians are not aware. One of the comments one hears at each General Convention from those attending for the first time is, “Who are those folks in habits? Are they ours? Are they Episcopalians?” It is true that our Orders and Communities are relatively small, and known better locally than nationally. However, that is to some extent the responsibility of us who are clergy. How well have we educated our people to the breadth of spiritual living within the Episcopal Church, including Orders and Communities? It’s all too easy to get caught up in the day-to-dayness, to become literally parochial in the lives in our parishes. One could, I think, argue that many of our troubles in recent years arose precisely because many folks couldn’t imagine that a church different from their own congregation was really Episcopal – or, in ecumenical efforts, how a church different from their own congregation was even Christian. Think how much there is to be gained when we hold up and celebrate the varieties of spiritual living that are found within the Episcopal Church, and within the Body of Christ as a whole.

I often wonder, too whether there is an opportunity here for bishops and Commissions on Ministry. I have watched as some sought the guidance of a diocesan Commission on Ministry. Both the applicants and the Commissions assumed certain limited possibilities: a call to ordained ministry or to lay; and if to ordained ministry, to the diaconate or the priesthood. For those in whom a Commission cannot confirm a call to ordained ministry I have rarely seen any guidance in ministry in lay life. That is often left, of course, to the local congregation and the local ordained leadership.

What might it mean, on the other hand, if the Commission saw its own vocation, and the opportunities for structured life in faith, more broadly? Could a Commission offer to an Applicant, “We cannot confirm in you a vocation for ordained ministry, and yet we hear your sense of vocation to a faith life with greater structure and discipline. Have you considered exploring membership in a Christian Community, or association with an Order of the Church?”

For some, albeit rarely, they might suggest exploration of vocation to an Order; for, after all, the celibate life is a special vocation of its own. That would require much of Commission members, including their own awareness of the Orders and Communities of the Church, and broader consideration of the ministries of the Church. At the same time, I have sometimes observed applicants exploring the diaconate when a Commission felt clear that the person had some vocation, but did not feel clear what the vocation might be. For lack of a clear call to priesthood, and lack of consideration of alternatives besides the life in the pew that is the call of most Christians, and life in ordained ministry, diaconal ministry is suggested by default. To me, this is not really respectful of the distinct ministry of the diaconate, nor of the real breadth of models for ministry of the laity in the Church. Perhaps for some life in a Community (and perhaps an Order), structured by a Rule and nourished by community life and prayer, would be a more appropriate vocation.

In these times, when some seem to work so hard to question and even deny the healthy spirit of the Episcopal Church, we are all called to awareness of the great varieties of ministries among the laity, the first order of ministry in the Church. Certainly, monastic life isn’t where most will find their vocation. At the same time, the Orders and Communities of the Episcopal Church are a wonderful resource for the Church for prayer and spiritual formation, and, for some, appropriate settings for ministry. We can celebrate and give thanks for our Episcopal Orders and Communities, and the rich spiritual tradition that they incarnate in our midst.

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

Friday, July 22, 2011 -- Week of Proper 11, Year One
St. Mary Magdalene
To read about our daily commemorations, go to the Holy Women, Holy Men blog

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Book of Common Prayer)
EITHER the readings for Friday of Proper 11 (p. 976)
Psalms 40, 54 (morning) 51 (evening)
1 Samuel 31:1-13
Acts 15:12-21
Mark 5:21-43

OR the readings for St. Mary Magdalene (p. 998)
Morning Prayer: Psalm 116; Zephaniah 3:14-20; Mark 15:47 - 16:7
Evening Prayer: Psalms 30, 149; Exodus 15:19-21; 2 Corinthians 1:3-7

I chose the readings for St. Mary Magdalene

The women were only doing their duty. It was the humble work of anointing Jesus' body for burial. Earlier there had been no time in the rush before the sabbath. This was unclean work. Religious men would not touch a dead body. It would make them unclean. This was women's work.

There is an interesting detail in Mark's Gospel. "Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid." Are they the only ones who risked staying close enough to the burial to know where the council member Joseph of Arimathea had taken the body? The men are notably absent in Mark's account. After Peter's denials, there is no mention of the other apostles or the male disciples. Only women. Watching the suffering. Women's work.

Maybe it was because Mary Magdalene had been through so much suffering already that she could get up early that Sunday to do this duty. Luke's Gospel says that she had been freed from seven demons by Jesus. She's been through so much, and Jesus has freed her. What despair she must feel now. How hard it is to make one step follow another when things are so dark and hopeless. Yet there she is.

The women proceed toward their bitter task. Although they don't know how they will get the stone moved to access the body, they move ahead in trust. "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" they wonder. A man might not have gone ahead without figuring out ahead how he would get the stone moved. That's a detail that might have frozen me. I don't ask for directions. I don't expect that someone will be around to help me. I assume it's all up to me. The women don't let such details retard them. They move ahead decisively.

When they arrive, the tomb is open, and a young man gives them the news of resurrection. Mark's account leaves them there, amazed and terrified.

"Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!" speaks the prophet Zephaniah on this feast of St. Mary Magdalene.

"The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies."

The prophet goes on to say that we shall fear no more.

God will "deal with all your oppressors..."

"And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise..."

"At that time I will bring you home, at that time when I gather you; ...when I restore your fortunes before you eyes, says the Lord."

These are things I want to see. Resurrection. Rejoicing. Enemies turned away and oppressors dealt with. The lame and outcast secure and respected. Homecoming. Fortune restored.

I want to see this for our nation and for our planet. I want to see the lame saved and the outcast gathered. To see the homeless housed and the unemployed's fortunes restored. I'm tired of the oppressors. I'm tired of the wealthy and powerful, the polluters and abusers, making the rules and getting things their way. I don't want angry, greedy people continuing to make more bad decisions. I want hopeful people. People who are willing to do their duty. People who can face the deadliness of reality. Willing to trust. Willing to anoint dead bodies and to keep on going, in charity and in hope. I want hopeful people who can see resurrection. No more fear. No more manipulation by fear. Love and duty. Perfect love casts out fear. Mary Magdalene knows all about that.

“Whoever loves true prayer and yet becomes angry or resentful is [her] own enemy. [She] is like a [person] who wants to see clearly and yet inflicts damage on [her] own eyes.”

Evagrios Ponticos, “On Prayer,” in The Philokalia, vol. 1 (New York: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 63.

I have a friend who often quotes a saying from Twelve Step Recovery programs, “Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. This sounds like very ancient wisdom, far older than AA. Note, for example, the similar structure of the saying from Evagrios Ponticos quoted above.

Both point to something rather central in the Christian tradition, namely the premium placed on forgiveness. It’s right at the middle of the Our Father, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It’s also at the heart of many of Jesus’ parables and other sayings. It’s even an article of the Creed of our baptism, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” Jesus embodies costly forgiveness when he suffers and dies to give life to the world.

Forgiveness and reconciliation differ, insofar as reconciliation is a two way street. Forgiveness, by contrast, can be unilateral, and we are commanded to forgive whether the other person deserves it or not, whether our forgiveness changes the other person or not. Reconciliation requires reciprocity and aims at justice and the restoration of right relationship.

Not all hurts are alike, and forgiveness is often painfully difficult. For some kinds of wound, it can years of hard work and professional help. But notice something that both the saying from Evagrios and the one from recovery programs have in common. In both cases, the primary benefit of forgiveness accrues to the one who extends it. In the one case, it removes an obstacle to our relationship with God. In the other, it gets rid of something like a poison or cancer that is harming our own soul. I suspect, in fact, that both sayings point to the same underlying reality.

Forgiveness does not mean giving up on the quest for justice. It does mean forswearing revenge and giving up on the attempt to control the outcome. It means letting go of the other person and his or her power over us. It is ultimately for our benefit. Others may benefit, especially if we move past forgiveness to reconciliation. On the other side of forgiveness, we find the grace to let the past be the past, and rediscover our true freedom in God.

Bill Carroll

"Love and hatred are not merely subjective feelings, affecting the inward universe of those who experience them, but they are also objective forces, altering the world outside ourselves. By loving or hating another, I cause the other in some measure to become that which I see in him or her. Not for myself alone, but for the lives of all around me, my love is creative, just as my hatred is destructive. And if this is true of my love, it is true to an incomparably greater extent of Christ's love. The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him. Because in love he has identified himself with me, his victory is my victory. And so Christ's death upon the Cross is truly, as the Liturgy of St. Basil describes it, a 'life-creating death.'"

Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1979), p. 82.

We might, as I myself have on other occasions, offer important cautions about what the suffering love of Jesus does and does not imply for our relationships with each other. It certainly doesn't imply women staying in abusive relationships, to cite one crucial example.

This quotation about the creative, suffering love of Christ, however, points us to a fundamental truth about our own life in Christ. It captures much of what is valid in so-called moral influence theories of the atonement without denying the objective change that the love of Christ has wrought in the world.

I do wonder how our families, neighborhoods, and congregations would be transformed if we were more open to the subtle, profound power of this "life-creating death." In the power of the Holy Spirit, every celebration of the Eucharist, every work of mercy, and every invocation of the Name of Jesus can open us up to the creative and transformative reality of our Lord's suffering, victorious love.

Bill Carroll

“Once on Pentecost Sunday I received the Holy Spirit in such a manner that I understood all the will of Love in all, and all the modes of this will of the heavens and of heavenly things, and all the perfection of perfect justice, and all the shortcomings of the lost; and with regard to all, I saw the will in which they then were, either of truth or of falsehood. And since then I have felt in the same way the love of all the persons I saw, in whatever degree they then were. And I have understood all the languages that are spoken in seventy-two ways. The multiplicity of all these things was hidden from me and has vanished. But that simple gazing upon him, and the burningness of Love, and the truth of his will, from that time onward have never been extinguished, and have never been silent, and have never been appeased within me.”

Hadewijch, The Complete Works (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press), p. 271.

The report of this vision from a thirteenth century Beguine mystic is at times cryptic, but this much is clear: on the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit touched Hadewijch and conferred on her an understanding of the divine will, described as the will of Love, which touched all persons, saints and sinners alike. The experience left her marked forever, so that “that simple gazing upon him, and the burningness of Love, and the truth of his will, from that time onward have never been extinguished.”

Many Episcopalians may be shy about recounting a spiritual experience like this one, even when they have had one. And yet, we know that in Holy Baptism, we receive the same Spirit that Hadewijch received. For we have been “sealed by the Holy Spirit” and “marked as Christ’s own forever.” The same Pentecostal fire that burned within this holy woman now burns in our hearts, showing us the deep things of God. What do we see there, if not God’s own self, however dimly and obscurely, and the burningness of Love, which impels us, as it did our blessed Lord, to give ourselves—and, if need be, give our lives—for our neighbor.

May the fire of this love, which even now fills the heart of Christ Crucified, consume every malignancy that opposes the will of God, until Love be all in all.

Bill Carroll

"The horos--the standard or definition--of Christian life is 'the imitation of Christ according to the extent [or 'measure'] of His incarnation' (Longer Rules XLIII). Basil comes back repeatedly to this theme: Christ is the servant of all in his earthly life and nothing less is demanded of us. In a short treatise 'On Renouncing the World' (de renuntiatione saeculi 211C), he says quite simply that 'humility is the imitation of Christ'. And this includes a readiness to sacrifice our lives, our whole selves, for righteous and sinners alike, since Christ loves all alike and dies for all alike (Shorter Rules CLXXXVI). Everyone has equal claim on the Christian's unconditional service, because of the unconditional self-offering of Christ to all. Grace is free to everyone, and so must be the love and practical compassion of the believer; we may recall Basil's indefatigable energy and ability as a social reformer, the schools, hospitals, and orphanages which sprang up in such abundance around his episcopal seat." Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1980), p. 100.

We could qualify and blunt the radicality of this monastic vision in a hundred ways. I know that I am tempted to. Those of us with families to care for and jobs to hold down introduce one set of qualifications. Heirs of Paul, Augustine, and/or the sixteenth century Reformations may be concerned about works-righteousness and therefore introduce another set of concerns. As I survey the landscape of contemporary Christianity, I am more worried that we don't hear the demand of Christ with sufficient clarity to know that we have fallen short and need mercy. And I am delighted to see Basil deriving the extent of the demand from the radical self-giving of the Lord.

If Christ, who sets the standard, lived his life and died for all, so ought we to love our neighbor. I wonder what the world would think if it saw us living and dying like that? We might catch a glimpse here and there, but is that our reputation today? The works of mercy once won a world for Christ. They might well do so again, provided that our love hasn't grown cold.

Bill Carroll

God knows infinite things, all things, and heeds them all in particular. We cannot "do two things at once," that is cannot give our full heed and attention to two things at once. God heeds all things at once. He takes more interest in a merchant's business than the merchant, in a vessel's steering than the pilot, in a lover's sweetheart than the lover, in a sick man's pain than the sufferer, in our salvation than we ourselves. The hairs of our heads are numbered before him. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins, Notes for a Sermon on October 25, 1880 in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 278-279.

As they say, God’s eye is on the sparrow. Those of us who fancy ourselves sophisticated might think such small stuff is beneath God’s notice. God certainly has the big picture in view, and is the master of the “long game.” But God is able to see both the forest and the trees—indeed, every branch, root, and leaf in the smallest detail. God is the deepest reality of each and all. In love, God made us all, by that incredibly subtle power of Wisdom, who pervades all things yet transcends them all. When we think about providence, we may be tempted to conceive of God’s will as something over against us, rather than that which establishes us in our very own being, from whom we depart only when we choose a duplicitous cleavage from our own inmost selves. Truly, God is closer to us than we are, more fully aware and attentive to our needs and heart’s true longings. God is ceaselessly at work, seeking our good and pouring out abundant blessings for each of us—each one in particular as a seamless part of an integral whole, a single community of creation. Thus, God takes more interest “in our salvation than we ourselves.”

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. His parish blog is at here.

"I have found and have known, by Your great mercy, that the love of a man's heart that is abandoned and broken and poor is most pleasing to You and attracts the gaze of Your pity, and that it is Your desire and Your consolation, O my Lord, to be very close to those who love You and call upon You as their Father. That You have perhaps no greater 'consolation' (if I may so speak) than to console Your afflicted children and those who came to You poor and empty-handed with nothing by their humanness and their limitations and great trust in Your mercy."

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1958), p. 127.

This gives me a great deal of hope. For Merton, God does not desire us to love God with an angel's love, but with a love proper to human beings. Too often, we are abandoned, broken, and poor. We are empty-handed, with nothing but our humanness and limitations and trust in God's mercy.

As we turn toward God, by the love of the Holy Spirit at work within us, we rediscover God's infinite abundance, become ours by our adoption as children. This is the heritage that was ours in creation, from which we turned by our own fault. All the more abundantly restored by our Creator.

In Christ, God enters the depths of our humanity, showing us God's love and returning love for love as a particular man. He is at once the giver of the covenant (as God) and the keeper of the covenant (as human). And, as such, he is our assurance of divine mercy.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. His parish blog is at here.

Only God our Lord can give the soul consolation without a preceding cause. For it is the prerogative of the Creator alone to enter the soul, depart from it, and cause a motion in it which draws the person wholly into love of his Divine Majesty. By "without cause" I mean without any previous perception or understanding of some object by means of which the consolation just mentioned might have been stimulated, through the intermediate activity of the person's acts of understanding and willing.

Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), pp. 205-206.

This is one of the classic texts for Ignatius' notion of consolation without cause, a notion which is in turn quite central to his treatment of the discernment of spirits. The very next paragraph of the Exercises sets out the alternative, a consolation with cause, which can come from either the good angel or the bad angel. What strikes me about the description of consolation without cause is that "it draws the person wholly into love of [God's] Divine Majesty."

Bernard Lonergan, the great Canadian Jesuit, comments about this as follows, "Being in love with God, as experienced, is being in love in an unrestricted fashion. All love is self-surrender, but being in love with God is being in love without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservations. Just as unrestricted questioning is our capacity for self-transcendence, so being in love in an unrestricted fashion is the proper fulfillment of that capacity. That fulfillment is not the product of our knowledge and choice. On the contrary it dismantles and abolishes the horizon in which our knowing and choosing went on and it sets up a new horizon in which the love of God will transvalue our values and the eyes of love will transform our knowing." Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Lonergan Research Center of Regis College, 1990), pp. 105-106.

This formulation is meant to give voice to the reality of religious experience in a way that is consistent with a thoroughgoing humanism and ordered process of inquiry and interpretation. The heart of the matter, however, is love, which leads to conversion and change in (our limited) horizon. This is the Holy Spirit, the divine love and living grace of God who floods our hearts (Romans 5:5), free, sovereign, and unbidden, and thereby changes everything for us.

And in this lies one of the clearest signs of the Spirit's presence--the mysterious gift that deepens our love for God and neighbor.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. His parish blog is at here

Part of the task concerning evangelism is to recover nerve about our modes of speech in church traditions that have debased our speech, either by conservative reductionism or by liberal embarrassment. The noun "gospel," which means "message," is linked in the Bible to the verb "tell-the-news"...At the center of the act of evangelism is the message announced, a verbal, out-loud assertion of something decisive not known until the moment of utterance. There is no way that anyone, including the embarrassed liberal, can avoid this lean, decisive assertion, which is at the core of evangelism. The act of announcement, however, is not barren and contextless. I argue here that the announcement itself is the middle term of a three-part dramatic sequence. No reductionist conservative can faithfully treat evangelism as though it were only "naming the name." We are required to notice that behind (prior to) the announcement is an "event" of mythic proportion to which we have no direct access. And after the proclamation comes the difficult, demanding work of reordering all of life according to the claim of the proclaimed verdict.

Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Storied Universe (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1993), pp. 14-15.

There's a good deal of truth in this brief quotation from Watler Brueggemann on the nature of the task of evangelism, which comes from a brief, excellent book on the subject.

I do like the stress on overcoming liberal embarrassment. The Church has been called and sent to share the Gospel story, and "lean, decisive assertion" against the contradictory story of Empire is central to the evangelical task today, as it is in every time and place. Brueggemann recently spoke to a gathering of diocesan clergy here in Southern Ohio and made this very point.

At the same time, I wonder how many would be "conservatives" would be shocked to find out that they are reductionists, engaged in a "barren and contextless" announcement. If we are asserting the real Gospel, in all its shocking truth, we are issuing a decisive call to conversion and comprehensive transformation of life. Not just the private sphere. But all of it. As Brueggemann says, "after the proclamation comes the difficult demanding work of reordering all of life according to the claim of the proclaimed verdict."

I do wonder, as we struggle with questions of self-definition and adequate structures to support the Church's mission, whether we are remembering the main thing, i.e. showing forth Christ and the Kingdom in word and deed, in such a way that we are invited to share in his holy and life-giving work. For in hearing and responding to the Good News lies our true freedom, and the hope of the world in the midst of so much suffering and death.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio. His parish blog is at here

Sometimes I am asked: “Do you like (--or know—or trust--) the African?” My answer is always, “No.” I do not like the African: but I love many Africans very dearly. I do not know or trust the African: but I know and trust hundreds of Africans as my closest friends.

You cannot love an abstraction: neither can you trust it: you can only know and love a person.
Fr. Trevor Huddleston, C. R., Naught for Your Comfort (London: Collins, 1956), p. 247.

Words from an English-born Anglican priest who was himself loved and known and trusted by many Africans, including Desmond Tutu. Words that are relevant even today as we think about relations between groups of human beings. Ultimately, it is only in the face-to-face interaction of people who speak for themselves that the work of justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation is possible. This is a most direct corollary of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the doctrine of the human being in the image and likeness of God. Our faith calls us to put love into practice face to face, no matter what the cost. And, it is why the work of building human community, however messy and inefficient it may seem at times, is always worth the time and effort it takes.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

We find in the Christian fathers vigorous denunciations of all keeping of private wealth such as is not needed for the support of the possessor’s own family. Such selfish keeping of wealth from the common fund they call—not lack of generosity only, but injustice or theft. It is not that they deny the necessity of private property. In a world of sin private property must exist, and the law must maintain it. But it is only to be justified when it is reduced to the minimum needed to meet the reasonable requirements of life according to a man’s condition. God gave the earth with its resources for the common good; and the spirit of love and justice must keep it so.
Charles Gore, Christ and Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), pp. 89-90.

If we take Jesus seriously, nothing could be more basic to the Christian Faith than economic justice. Vast inequalities, such as we often take for granted (or even try to justify), simply cannot be reconciled with our heritage as Christian people. For the Church Fathers, they constitute not only a failure of generosity but “injustice or theft.”

Gore may have gone too far when he claims that private property must be reduced to the “minimum.” Surely, we can have more than that, so long as others are not in misery. But so long as others are in misery, as they clearly are, it is a question for careful discernment (and democratic politics) how much we may legitimately possess, even in a “world of sin.” As I’ve said before, I think that a good rule of thumb is the “difference principle” articulated by John Rawls. Social differences are permissible to the extent to which they benefit the least well off. I can see quite a bit of capital accumulation consistent with this standard, but not so much that it subverts democratic institutions, so that those who have much are able to dictate to those who have little or nothing. Nor can we ever justify the kind of hand-over-fist thievery that exists at the top of the economic pyramid in just about every age.

Seeing our property, whether a lot or a little, as held in trust for our neighbors is the solemn duty of all Christian people. Even though they have less to begin with, the poor are often better at this than the wealthy, because they know that they are one crisis away from needing their neighbor’s help themselves. The rich, by contrast, may well be tempted by illusions of self-sufficiency which are an affront to the Creator, who “gave the earth and its resources for the common good.” In light of our never failing capacity for rationalization, whether what we have truly benefits others is a question that calls for careful self-examination. If the Gospel is to be credible in our society, we need to be better at answering this question honestly and changing our lives accordingly.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

Abstract theological reflections on hospitality and welcoming the “other” are presently popular in some academic and pastoral circles. It is crucial that these discussions include making a physical place in our lives, families, churches, and communities for people who might appear to have little to offer. Hospitable attitudes, even a principled commitment to hospitality, do not challenge us our transform our loyalties in the way that actual hospitality to particular strangers does. Hospitality in the abstract lacks the mundane, troublesome, yet rich dimensions of a profound human practice.
Practicing hospitality always involves risk and the possibility of failure, but there is greater risk and loss in neglecting hospitality. Dorothy Day, reflecting on years of work at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, commented “Mistakes there were, there are, there will be…The biggest mistake, sometimes, is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.”
Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 14.

The whole mystery of the Church might be summed up in terms of concrete and local practices of ministry in the Name of Christ with a universal, catholic intent. Because the Church is Catholic, our mission is to “proclaim the whole faith to all people to the end of time.” We do it best through accountability to others, within the diocese and around the world. But the mission only really exists at the level of direct and local inter-personal engagement.

Hospitality, especially, can only be enacted when we make a physical place for others, and this can only happen face to face. The virtues that must be cultivated so that this can happen gracefully begin before the physical place is opened up. A welcoming heart—or at least the desire to have one--is presupposed. But our hearts are also expanded in the process of doing, of sharing, of working together. Because welcoming the stranger is not optional—it is the command of Christ for all of us—we have to begin somewhere. The worst thing that can happen is closing ourselves off, just because we don’t know where to begin.

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

In Times of Grief: Lament and Faith
Faith endures; but my address to God is uncomfortably, perplexingly altered. It’s off-target, qualified. I want to ask for Eric back. But I can’t. So I aim around the bull’s-eye. I want to ask that God protect the members of my family, but I asked that for Eric.

Yet in the distance of endurance I join the song: “By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life.”
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s, 1987), pp. 70-71.

I don’t have much to say about Nicholas Wolterstorff’s meditation on Psalm 42 in light of his son Eric's death in 1983. I do commend his book, as well as Martin Marty’s A Cry of Absence, to anyone experiencing loss. In times of grief, we run the risk of becoming like Job’s comforters. We don’t know what to say, and so much of what we do say tends to be unhelpful. Wolterstorff and Marty know what to say, because they are speaking of intensely personal losses in the first person. In the end, testimony trumps theodicy. I do think there is something to the alternation between lament and faith that Wolterstorff identifies, at least at the level of lived experience. Perhaps lament is the form that faith takes in times of God’s apparent absence. It takes profound trust to complain to God, who nonetheless remains “the God of my life.”

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

Way back when, my mother offloaded on me a miscellany of family china, because (she said) I was interested in “old things”. Among the dozens of Victorian plates of various sizes (only plates — someone else had the rest of great-great-aunt’s service for 12) there was one curious set: a small highly decorated teapot with matching sugar bowl, milk jug, and cups and saucers. The pattern was mysterious, complex, unusually subtle, with lots of old-gold touches and stylized flowers that looked old but not washed out, in formal rose, blues like pool water, gentle greens.

The set had clearly had a hard life. There were two cups and three saucers, presumably out of an original set of four. The sugar bowl was intact, but the milk jug had a glued-on handle and the teapot itself had suffered greatly: it was a jigsaw puzzle of mended porcelain. The mend was skillfully done, something you couldn’t see from a distance, but the pot was unusable.

There was no way of telling where or when the set had been made; a good antique dealer confessed himself unable to tell if it was pretty trash or something good but obscure. Nor could anyone tell me who it had belonged to, or when it had been acquired. No history.

I thought of that teapot when I read online* about an exhibit in at the Smithsonian in Washington of the Japanese art of kintsugi — “golden joinery” — which mends broken china with seams and fill-ins of golden resin. The results are startlingly beautiful as the gold erupts from the background of formal pattern or rough stoneware, following the lines of breakage, filling in smashed or missing bits. With golden joinery, my little teapot, already mysteriously lovely, would have bloomed into something extraordinary, seamed with beauty.

I thought about other broken things: broken relationships, for starters. Some relationships, while perfectly okay, are as disposable as paper plates: they require hardly any investment, serve a particular purpose for a particular time, and then vanish without regret. Nothing wrong with that. Others, in my experience, are far more valuable, even vitally important, but they too are meant to last their time and no longer. And so on and so forth until we get to the good china, the stuff we really value: the wedding-pattern Spode, a child’s two-handled milk mug with Peter Rabbit on it, the flowered plate on which a loved greataunt used to serve her legendary soft molasses cookies when you went to her house for tea. Break something like that and it’s serious.

Sometimes you can replace a piece (usually not), but you can’t restore it — can’t turn back to that moment before it shattered or undo the foolishness or carelessness that left it in pieces. You can (as someone obviously had) glue the thing back together, but unless it’s archaeological treasure, most pottery loses most of its value when it’s mended. It may or may not be serviceable, but it will never again be fresh and whole.

Same goes for friendships and loveships and other situations in which the object being shattered is your heart or your trust, or both. Time only runs one way, and you can’t get the thing back to where it was before it broke. You can patch it up as best you can — and perhaps that’s in fact the best outcome. If a teapot is worse off for being cracked, a badly set bone may need to be re-broken before it can be properly mended. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” has a corollary: “It may need to be broken before it can be fixed.”

Forgiveness is about giving up all hope for a better past, as Lily Tomlin neatly put it; it’s also about giving up on getting repayment for that broken heart/trust. It’s about seeing the part you played in the breakage: yes, you knocked my precious teapot into the fireplace, but what on earth possessed me to put the thing on the mantlepiece in the first place? Forgiveness is the prerequisite, the necessary first step towards — what?

Reconciliation, we hope: the ability to say “I know you didn’t mean it, and I’m over it; let’s just get on.” I particularly love the expression for forgiveness that I ran into in a novel somewhere — I can’t remember what, except that the scene had an ancient Middle Eastern patina: “It is forgotten.” Not “it never happened” or “it didn’t matter” or “what teapot?” but “my love for you endures, and so the debt is abolished.” The best of all is when we can simply sweep up the pieces, put the dustpan down, and walk away, arm in arm with the one who dropped it.

The end may be an end: you make your goodbyes and set off on your separate journeys. The end may be acceptance: he’s not going to change, but I still love him and I’ll learn to live with him as he is. It may require detachment, preferably with love. The end may be a new and different relationships: we were lovers, then enemies, now good friends. Or it may be a complete parting of the ways without reconciliation because the shards are too sharp to handle until time’s long, slow erosive power makes their edges less dangerous.

Or something else entirely may happen.

If I had to pick an image for the concept of redemption, kintsugi would be it. It’s more than just putting back together what had been whole and is now broken; it’s about using brokenness to create something new and altogether astonishing.

For kintsugi requires brokenness to work. Moreover, it creates at least as much beauty from broken kitchen crockery as it does from fine porcelain, because brokenness may mock refinement and gentility but it gives a simple, powerful elegance to what seemed rough and contemptible before. Which is why, perhaps, Jesus spent so much time with low-lifes.

And perhaps that’s why the resurrection is at the centre of Christian faith. Jesus the man, Mary’s son the rabbi, was broken as my teapot was broken, beyond any conventional mending. But God’s grace is the golden resin that not only puts him, and us, back together, but made him, as it makes us, into something new and radically different.

God in God’s mercy looks at the ways in which we’ve broken our own hearts and others’ trust and says “It is forgotten.” Not that we haven’t sinned — we have, of course, and there are usually consequences, not all of which can be managed with white glue and duct tape. (Repentance sweeps up the pieces, at least.)

But God’s purpose is to bring us into a new beauty, not to break us more than we’ve already broken ourselves. God is more interested in loving us and accepting our love than settling scores.

I packed the broken tea set up and moved it from house to house until I settled here, in reach of the two rivers, and here it did not want to be. So I sold it to someone who wanted it more than I did. We never did figured out a fair price, so we guessed. Who knows what the price should have been?

*Kintsugi exhibit story

Molly Wolf plays hackysack with theology in Gananoque, Ontario, among the Thousand Islands. She lives with her resident offspring Ross and with Magnificat (aka Maggie), a sizable calico with tortitude, whose personality fits her name. She (Molly, not the cat) is the author of four collections of applied meditation and Scrambling towards Zion: A weekly essay on finding Godstuff in real life. (Reposted by permission ~ed.)

A second characteristic of Hooker is a belief in authority mingled with a great distrust of infallibility. He is ready to believe, certainly, in what God has shown and done, but equally ready to shrink from claims for the infallibility of the language in which God’s revelation is at any time expressed. A sentence in Hooker expresses this: “Two things there are that trouble these latter times: one is that the Church of Rome cannot, another is that Geneva will not, err.” This remains an honest Anglican characteristic, and if we want to unravel it, I think we need to probe into religious language and the extent to which its use is inevitable in expressing divine relationship, although not in making a mathematical statement.

A sense of mystery and of the mysteriousness of divine truth is something Hooker felt very strongly indeed. Again and again we find him pausing and saying, “Do not ask me to define it, do not define it yourself, it really is truly mysterious.” And he combined that sense of mystery with a real certainty about what God has given through Christ and in the church. Here again, unraveling the implications of Hooker’s sense of mystery still leaves a lot of probing to be done.

Michael Ramsey, The Anglican Spirit (New York: Seabury Classics, 2004), p. 9.

This statement from one of the greatest Archbishops of Canterbury captures the spirit of Richard Hooker and of Anglicanism itself quite well. We dare not lose either the sense of humility and fallibility and consequent openness to divergent voices, nor the sense of “real certainty about what God has given through Christ and in the church.”

For my part, I am convinced that there is an entire spirituality bound up with Anglican views of Catholicity as comprehensiveness. It is not the simple minded, “lazy pluralism” of much postmoderninism and multiculturalism. Nor is it the facile accommodation with well-heeled “cultured despisers” that underlies the popular stereotype of Catholic-light. Rather, it is a “mere Christianity,” at once deeply conservative and deeply radical, because it gathers a community of “all sorts and conditions” around the life changing mystery of “what God has shown and done.”

It would be a profound mistake to insist that Anglican Christians have no certainty or grand narrative. To the contrary, we have the deeply unsettling story of the Babe in the manger and the Savior on the cross. Christianity’s deep enemy is not certainty per se, but the misplaced certainty of idolatry. Every statement about God involves mystery, because GOD is unfathomable mystery. And yet the Gospel is true—really true—and the mystery is really given to be touched, tasted, and handled. (See 1John 1:1-4)

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

Religious fundamentalists who insist that politics must be theocratic or Theodosian—equating a particular political order with God’s will or design—often find democracy the work of the devil. Perhaps, in response to these charges, a concrete example of the delicate balancing act that I endorse is necessary. I rely on reports of John Paul II’s visit to the Baltic States in September 1993 for this story. The situation in Lithuania was particularly delicate for John Paul because “Polish nationalists for their part have tried to exploit the alleged mistreatment of the 300,000 strong Polish minority in Lithuania.” Thus, being not only pope but also a Pole associated with Polish aspirations to self-determination, John Paul “had to be very careful not to offend Lithuanian sensibilities.”

Much of current Lithuania, remember, was once part of Poland. The Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, is Poland’s “Wilno,” dear to the hearts of Poles everywhere, in part because it is the home of Adam Mickiewicz, the greatest Polish poet. But John Paul, while acknowledging the love Poles have for that particular place, used the Lithuanian name Vilnius throughout his pastoral visit, including the one time he spoke Polish—when he delivered [sic] mass in the Polish-language church in that city. For the rest of his visit, “the Pope spoke…Lithuanian which he had learned for the occasion” and this “made a tremendously positive impression on the Lithuanians.” The Poles “were not so pleased, but coming from the Pope they had to accept it. The Pope exhorted the Poles to identify fully with Lithuania, and not to dwell on the past—by which he meant not to endlessly recall the time when Vilnius was part of Poland.
~Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 111-112.

I share this story about Pope John Paul II, as told by Jean Bethke Elshtain, because we are in a political season, and various candidates and parties will vie for our allegiance, and because we are called as Christian people to be engaged with the needs and concerns of our society. John Paul’s example of diplomacy and symbolic bringing together of different sides with their tensions and contrary historical narratives might be of use to us as we think about our own engagement in deeply divided America. How might the Church promote civility and reasoned discourse in the winner-take-all struggle that our system seems to promote. How might we seek the common good by gracious accommodation without sacrificing the personal stake that each one of us has in the outcome?

The Rev. Bill Carroll serves as rector of Emmanuel Parish, Shawnee in the Diocese of Oklahoma. His new parish blog is Emmanuel Shawnee Blog

All is still green, but the days are shortening and cooler than they were three weeks ago. Some days are still gorgeous, and on those days I bring my embroidery out to the verandah and set myself up, listening to an audiobook as my practiced fingers work the needle front and back, front and back.

The current embroidery is a counted-thread cross-stitch Celtic cross, a fairly demanding piece that I have properly mounted on a scroll frame to keep it stretched taut. The scroll frame in turn sits atop a stand that my neighbour John and I cobbled together (he had the band saw and the drilling experience) on this very verandah a few weeks ago.

As I sat at work the other day, a fairly elderly car drove slowly past my house, faltered, and came to an illegal stop (no parking this side of the street). An equally fairly elderly man got out, opened his trunk, and began to rummage among the contents, glancing over his shoulder at me as he did so. I sighed, pulled off my earphones, and prepared to be neighbourly.

“Wanna show you something. Need some help wi’ it,” he opened, and I went to look at what he held: a frame, perhaps 12 by 14 inches, enclosing an embroidery of a duck. “‘S a wood duck,” he told me. “I love them wood ducks.” Frame and embroidery had seen outdoor time, going by the superficial grot. Tenderly he brushed some plant matter from the canvas. “What is it?” he asked. “You were doing this embroidery stuff; I thought you’d likely know.”

I knew at once. Crewel embroidery, I told him: wool on what looked almost certainly like linen. One bit of a reed at the side hadn’t been finished (not enough yarn, perhaps) and I could see the pattern underneath: stamped, not drawn, so the duck had likely been a kit, linen with stamped design, lengths of crewel yarn pre-cut, and stitching instructions, long gone now. Kits like these are common start-out projects.

Now, I have been doing embroidery for a very long time. I first learned from the elderly neighbour who served as stand-in grandmother, when I was perhaps 7; I got serious about embroidery in my late teens and worked piece after piece of crewel for almost 30 years and then, for no good reason, simply stopped. The impulse to thread colour through needle and make patterns on cloth has only just re-seized me, years later, but all the old skills and craft-knowledge were there all along.

It was those skills and that knowledge that informed me with calm certainty that this duck was a truly crappy piece of embroidery. It was crude, uneven stitchery; the edges of the design segments failed to meet neatly, leaving gaps of exposed linen, and the back, if I could see it, was probably a mess. A neat back, free of starter knots, is the traditional hallmark of good-quality work.

But I didn’t say any of this. You don’t critique refrigerator art either. This was a piece that had absorbed a number of (probably struggling) hours by some unknown, but unpracticed, hand. “It looks just like a real wood duck,” the man said wonderingly. “I’m gonna clean it up, reframe it, hang it in my TV room.”

So instead of being snide about the thing, I made some gentle suggestions that involved dry cleaning, told him what the materials were (he made notes) so the dry cleaner would know what to do, and handed it back to him. He went back to his car without (thank God!) asking to see what I was working on myself.

I got back to tracking my tiny cross-stitches on the printed chart. It’s work that requires your undivided attention while leaving your soul free to wander away and poke around, which is why I love it. My brain tends to get terribly underfoot, so giving it some absorbing toy to play with is generally a good idea, spiritually speaking.

Yes, the wood duck was a mere shmatte, embroidery-wise. I know good work; this was not it. I don’t do work of the highest standard either, and it was probably the gap between my best skills and the best skills of the best embroiderers that had caused me to put my needle down, years ago. I cannot do fine white-work or cut-work or needle-made lace, the embroiderer’s equivalent of Olympic figure skating. I’m just not all that good with a needle. The fact that my own stuff — not made from kits but my own designs — is really quite good wasn’t quite good enough for my own anxious perfectionism. And the wood duck said something important about that very problem.

What made the piece valuable wasn’t its own merits but the fact that the man loved it — loved it enough to rescue it (as he’d told me) from a pile of discards, brush it off, and try to find someone who could tell him what to do for it. It was ugly. It was shabby. It was in serious need of proper cleaning. It was merely a mass-produced kit of the schlocky persuasion, and the designer had rotten taste in colour choices (trust me on that one). But it was loved and would be lovingly cared for.

Maybe its maker had loved it too, or at least had had hopes for it as her (almost certainly her) fingers struggled with a wool-laden needle. She probably didn’t know about the technique that is, to me, second nature. She had chosen this particular kit, quite likely because she like the man loved wood ducks. It’s so easy for us to mock dreams that aren’t up to our standards or tastes. I don’t much like the sentimental stuff that abounds among my stitching peers, but that doesn’t make their work less loved than mine.

We mock others for their failure to dream while ensuring that their dreams are out of reach, because we also fail to understand their realism and intelligence. We fail in humility and humanity — the great failing of “clear” thinkers like Ayn Rand — because we feel ourselves separate from and superior to (and also victimized by) those Other People, who value stuff we see as sentimental dreck and fail to value (indeed to worship) us and our clear, hard, sharp-edged vision of how the world should be.

The sun felt strong enough to ripen peaches, and my eyes had begun to cross like the stitches on my work, so I put aside the Celtic cross and went inside to retrieve the Fat Cat, who is much less demanding, being worked in big sloppy stitches (!) in fat pearl cotton (!!) of every bright hue I can lay hands on (!!!) on black polyester twill (!!!!!). This one breaks every rule in Mrs. Beeton’s fearsome Book of Needlework. It says “Shmatte? I’ll show you shmatte”. As embroideries go, it’s a slut.

But I love it and therefore it has value. God loves me and therefore I have value. God loves every schlub and schmendrick and man Jack and woman Jill who comes to set feet on God’s earth, even (perhaps even most) those whose needy humanity wraps itself around our ego’s aspirations and brings us, smarting, down to earth.

The Celtic cross I’m working may be a glory-to-God sort of thing, but the Fat Cat probably makes God grin, and I’m sure the crewel wood duck has a special place on the divine refrigerator door.

To see photos of the work click here.

Used by permission.

Molly Wolf plays hackysack with theology in Gananoque, Ontario, among the Thousand Islands. She lives with her resident offspring Ross and with Magnificat (aka Maggie), a sizable calico with tortitude, whose personality fits her name. She (Molly, not the cat) is the author of four collections of applied meditation and Scrambling towards Zion: A weekly essay on finding Godstuff in real life. (Reposted by permission ~ed.)

I was up early yesterday morning after a fairly restless night. The prospect of surgery, pain and the unknown is definitely a combination that kills sleep, even if the boys were, for once, rather calm and quiet. I got most of the chores done that I needed to do before I left for the hospital and finally it was time for my shower.

I got the water running and just as I was about to step in I stopped --- something in my head said to me, "This is the last time you will do this as a whole person." That got my attention. "Whole person"?

I've had teeth removed. That didn't make me less of a person. I've had my gall bladder out and that didn't make me feel less than a whole person either, so why are two pieces of flesh, fat and ductwork making me think I will feel like less of a whole person? That's goofy. I will just be missing a couple of parts I really can live without -- not like i was losing a lung or my liver or something. A 92-year-old friend asked if I were going to have reconstruction and when I said I hadn't made up my mind yet, her response as "Well, why do you need it then? You don't have a husband!" She's right, but I'm not sure I'd have put it in exactly those terms!

Why would I need them? My clothes would fit a little better (given the right foundation) and the darts would do what darts are supposed to do. People look at you sort of funny if you're flatter than a third grader when you're obviously in your sixties or more. My liver now sticks out and makes me look a bit pregnant (and the Immaculate Conception I'm NOT) and I think it is going to take me a long time to get up the courage to wear t-shirts out in public again. The boys don't care. They're just glad Mom's home from wherever she went that she came back smelling so funny.

As for being a "whole person", I now have to think of that in terms of a new reality. I still have my brain, my lungs, my liver and other necessary parts. My eyes still work pretty well and even if I have some false teeth, they manage to do what teeth are supposed to do. So what is this "whole person" bit? Breasts may be gender identifiers and a lot of women are bound up in that identity, but I don't think I have ever really been one of those. I've never been a clothes horse, so having a perfect fit isn't all that important although I do like comfortable clothes that don't make me look like I'm a little kid dressing up in her Mama's dressing gown and fancy slippers (reserved for her hospital stays). Still, I am a whole person, even without a couple of mammary glands that have served their purpose and that I can have prosthetically replaced --- if I really feel like I need them.

But then, I was too shy to burn my bra in the 60s, so maybe now it's time for me to do that. Who knows, being without might be a really nice thing --- no droopy straps, no cutting, binding or riding up, no wondering if they're going to shrink any more and make me go buy a smaller cup size.

You know, this might not be so bad, once I stop feeling like I've been run over by a semi. I may not be a "whole person" with all the parts I was born with, but I've got what I need. That's the important part.

Linda Ryan co-mentors 2 EfM Online groups and keeps the blog Jericho's Daughter

Psalm 131 “O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and for evermore.”

What is the frame out of which my everyday decisions are formed? Sometimes it is the covenant, that I am assured that he is our God and we are his people. Sometimes it is the grace I receive to be forgiven and start over again. Sometimes it is the glimpse I receive of goodness and awe in the midst of the most ordinary thing.

Today, as my bones scrape each other with soreness and my energy level dwindles, it is hope.

It is not hope that I will live a long time or that I will accomplish more things. It is that no matter what happens and how it happens, a future door is ajar that I can enter. It is the door that lets me touch holiness.

As I say my goodbyes to the Native youth with whom I work, I ask what they will remember in our twelve years together that gave hope.

One young man remembers when we went to the ocean during our mission trip. “We were getting knocked down by waves and laughing. Someone yells over the noise to join hands and race into the ocean. About five of us grabbed hands and dared the ocean to knock us down. It did and we laughed even harder. We got up and did it again and again. I don’t care that it knocked us down. We stood together and helped each get up again each time. We didn’t win against the ocean but we never gave up.”

Another young adult recalls our time serving meals to the homeless.” I kept putting eggs on the plates. Some of the homeless talked to me friendly like. Others kept their eyes down and were ashamed of being there. Some complained. After several hundred people had gone by, a child smiles at me and asks me if I am tired. I was so touched. I realized that I was no longer tired and there was no place I rather be. I think that God was in that place, gently breathing hope.”

It amazed me how many of the memories involved either our fun at the ocean or our service to the homeless. Both opened us up to the Holy that is always present.

One of the young men made this confession. “I was scared when you first said you were retiring. I thought of all the great times we had together and I was afraid there would be no more. But then I moved away and kept doing the things we have always done. To my surprise, I keep discovering wondrous things. My eyes are opened.”

So this is the hope in the LORD from this time forth and for evermore. In spite of doubts that emerge, I look forward to new days in the smallest of ways. The sacred is embedded in ordinary things.

Hope abounds.

Kaze Gadway has worked with the emerging leaders of the Episcopal Church within the Native American community of Northern Arizona as a volunteer for twelve years. They are youth of promise from ages twelve to twenty-four. The Spirit Journey Youth is an outreach program of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona with forty young people. She is on Facebook and blogs at infaith's posterous