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“While many of us are eager to discover a new normal, we all need to remember that a higher percentage of our neighbors than we have seen in decades are struggling to simply survive the corona “recession”. A higher percentage of our neighbors are struggling everyday to keep their families fed, housed and their children’s educational opportunities secure.”
Today I continue to engage in childhood rites. Throughout my life, I have dared God to love me when I stray. I double-dare him to love me when I do not listen to him. I triple-dog dare him to again show his love in a direct and immediate way. So far, God has accepted all my dares. For me, the salvation story resonates like a dare that ends in victory. A girl charged with a nearly impossible mission could get close to God. All along, it was within reach.
“The symbol of the lion for Mark comes from its Gospel opening, describing John the Baptist as the voice of a messenger preparing the way, ‘the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,’ urgently.”
In the last year, we have been presented with the opportunity to know the Prayer Book more intimately as friend and companion. While we have been, to varying degrees, separated from the Eucharist, the Prayer Book has been there for us offering community in isolation. In a time of great absence, it has served as a sacramental presence, an outward and visible sign of the presence of grace among us. In so doing, it has embodied for us the potential to realize that, despite distance, we are all connected and sustained by the mysterious yet abiding depth of a divine incarnational love.
Inter-generational Collaboration Building requires new thinking and creativity at a time when longer and healthier lives already are upending our notions about what it means to grow old. The skills that older adults can offer are well-suited to the needs of youth. Inter-generational engagement benefits the participants their faith communities.
You believed you would be welcome and safe in a country full of others yearning to breathe free.
You are not welcome by all in this country. You are not safe because of our faces.
Maybe they hate our faces because we remind them of what they used to be and are afraid of becoming again.
So, what do we do right now?
Every once in a while, I sit and think about one of my first ever challenging youth group kids, who, instead of sitting down with and having a hard conversation without relationship, I just continually loved on, showed respect to, and got to watch Jesus change her life instead. We can preach and teach and lecture and “pull aside,” but if we don’t have love, our clanging cymbals will drive someone away from truth. Love draws in.
“I suspect that many of us who are church members are even more eager to find a new normal. I am sure many of us have suffered a tragic loss of loved ones and friends. Many of us know people who have lost their jobs or are in danger of losing their homes. Thankfully, growing numbers of us are getting vaccinated and looking forward to moving from isolation to having people over again.”
She thinks back to Easter in the home country. Were they still conducting open air Easter sunrise services? Mid-April will probably be really hot. She checks the weather for Hyderabad on her smartphone. It is thirty-eight degrees Celsius there, at six-fifteen in the evening. She is glad she is here in B.C. If only they could see an actual sunrise over the mountains.
It is not the intent here in these offerings to damn the institutional Church for its complicity in ageism. As we well know, “isms” are pervasive and finds their expression in mandates, protocols, exclusion. We have heard it said, maybe, who it is who loves the details. But this “ism” for my focus leads, I believe, to images of fragile, incompetent, disabled men and women with “white collars around their necks.
The Episcopal Café seeks to be an independent voice, reporting and reflecting on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican tradition. The Café is not a platform of advocacy, but it does aim to tell the story of the church from the perspective of Progressive Christianity. Our collective sympathy, as the Café, lies with the project of widening the circle of inclusion within the church and empowering all the baptized for the role to which they have been called as followers of Christ.
The opinions expressed at the Café are those of individual contributors, and, unless otherwise noted, should not be interpreted as official statements of a parish, diocese or other organization. The art and articles that appear here remain the property of their creators.
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