Sitting by the river with a strong breeze moving the water and blowing against one side of my face while the sun warms the other.
I woke up in a warm house, while it was still dark and made coffee. Made a to-go breakfast for my older daughter for her drive to work. I laughed with my younger daughter taking her to school.
Now I am sitting in the sun and the wind by the water praying, reading, writing, listening, smiling.
Behind me is a cemetery where my grandparents, family members, and friends rest peacefully. Memories and love dance between us and connect us.
The books in front of me are titled “Pilgrim” and “Gold.”
Talking to God, Rumi writes:
“Today you arrived beaming with laughter– that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.
You are hope’s beating heart. You are a doorway to the sun. You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me. Beginning and end.
You greet need with generous hands. You flood us with spirit,
ringing from the heart, lifting thought.”
Reading this, he and I say it together. I like to think God smiles in the sunlight.
Across the cove the sun and the wind dress a weeping willow tree. Geese float tucked away from the tide.
When I am fully here, in this moment, with a full heart and an open mind, and time alone with God, what more can I ask for? I am not alone.
Thank you for this view. Thank you for this day. Thank you for this life. Thank you for your love.
Amen.
* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them.This is day #3.
Creator God, thank you for things that grow and change and bloom in their own time.
Thank you for patience so that we can wait with hope on your timing.
Thank you for giving us grateful hearts so that we can appreciate the impermanence, the fleeting moments–nothing remains in bloom and that makes each opening, each unfolding, each blossom special.
Thank you for making us able to grow, able to change, able to seek you, to seek beauty. Thank you for making us new creations in response to the shining of your light, your truth.
God, we thank you for helping us let go when it is time. Lord, I am not always good at this. Letting go hurts. I want to hold on to the blossoms, hold on to the people, hold on to the perfect moments–I want to stay in those wonderful experiences, found and lost in time, captured and forgotten in memory. Like Peter, I want to build dwellings to stay right there.
All around us, you show us that’s not how it works. You show us in your creation that everything has its time, its season. You show us the petals, the leaves dropping off, falling to the ground, coming apart, and going back into the dirt, back to dust.
“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
From dust to dust. From dust to seed. From seed to sprout. From sprout to bud. From bud to flower.
Thank you for the dust we are and the blossoms we can become.
Thank you for your love that helps us grow and bloom.
Thank you for things that grow and change and bloom in their own time.
In your time.
Thank you.
* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them. This quick prayer on Ash Wednesday is the first.
Fall is a time of change, a time of incredible colors, crisp air, clear skies, and fire-pit warmth. My bones know when fall hits. It’s also always been a time of renewal, energy, and new beginnings.
This year, fall is the beginning of year two of seminary through Iona Eastern Shore for seven of us aspirants and postulants. Our studies this year are focused on the history of the Christianity (what happened between the Acts of the Apostles and today) and heavily on homiletics–preaching. I’m especially appreciating lectures, essays, and books by Tom Long, who makes me think that preaching is something that can be taught, even to those of us to whom it doesn’t come naturally.
To borrow a few aspirational sentences from Long’s book “The Witness of Preaching”–
“To have our own lives, our own work, our own words, our own struggles and fears gathered up in some way into that event (preaching) is an occasion of rich and joyful grace… To be a preacher is to be a midwife of the word… we do not establish the time of its arriving; we cannot eliminate the labor pains that surround it; but we serve with gratitude at its coming and exclaim with joy at its birth.”
And:
“Faithful preaching requires such gifts as sensitivity to human need, a discerning eye for the connections between faith and life, an ear attuned to hearing the voice of Scripture, compassion, a growing personal faith, and the courage to tell the truth.”
I have such a long way to go, but I am inspired and encouraged and am becoming a student of the art and event of preaching.
I’ve also been helped along the way this fall by a discernment group who have gathered multiple times to help me discern, distill, and clarify my calling as part of the canonical process toward ordination. The way is each and every step and I am grateful beyond words for the questions, love, and encouragement from these friends.
Romans has given me a particular focus and opportunity for the fall/winter. In the same way that I wrote each week about our small group study of John O’Donohue’s book “Anam Cara,” I’ll be writing about Romans–thoughts from different scholars, snippets from our group discussions, and I am hoping to do some video segments and interviews with folks talking Romans.
I think for many church-goers, Paul’s Letter to the Romans is something experienced piecemeal, here and there, in lectionary readings. People know it’s a big deal, but they never take the time to read it and reckon with it. And that’s understandable–it’s daunting! But it’s also beautiful and potentially transformative. I love this thought by Rev. Jay Sidebotham, in “Conversations with Scripture: Romans,” when he says:
“The expression of trust in God’s grace, a theme of the Letter to the Romans, has the power to change individual lives. It also has the power to change communities, which is why it matters that we enter into this conversation. Such a conversation does not mean that we will like or understand everything in the letter… In the spirit of conversation, a word that suggests companionship on the journey, we hope that faithful attention to this ancient letter may open the door for new insights into the expansiveness of the grace of God.”
Romans has a history of changing lives and communities. Would that our studies might increase our trust in God’s grace.
To Live Prayerfully
Last weekend, Fr. Bill Ortt preached on Luke 18:1-8, the Parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge. The text starts out by saying, “Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose hope.” This is advice you give people who are going through tough times; people who might reach a point in their lives and their faith where they want to give up.
If we are going to be people for God, who is love, and so people for love, we need to lean in, not give up. We need to live prayerfully. Prayer is not simply asking for things–prayer is our connection to God. Prayer requires listening as much, if not more than talking.
That’s part of the reason why we use Rowan Williams’ book “Being Christian” in our newcomer class. It ends with prayer. And Williams describes three things that are essential for prayer:
First, and most importantly, prayer is God’s work in us… It is the opening of our minds and hearts to the Father…
Second, there is the deep connection… between praying and living justly in the world… Prayer is the life of Jesus coming alive in you, so it is hardly surprising if it is absolutely bound up with a certain way of being human which is about reconciliation, mercy, and freely extending the welcome and the love of God to others.
Third, prayer from our point of view is about fidelity, faithfulness, sticking to it… Just stay there and if in doubt say, ‘O God, make speed to save me.’ Prayer is your promise and pledge to be there for the God who is there for you.
To live a prayerful life is to open our hearts, minds, and lives to God. It’s about praying and living in a way that shows reconciliation, mercy, welcome, and love. And it’s about sticking with it.
It’s a lot to take in. It’s a lot to try. We won’t always get it right. We will stumble and fall. And none of us can do it alone. But with God’s help, and with each other, we can get back up, try again, and keep forward on the way.
I come back to the Thomas Merton Prayer regularly. We prayed it together at the first meeting of our discernment group. And it feels like a good time to offer it here:
Lead in: I am in my second year in seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are in seminary. October 8-9 was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.
Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.
The Gospel reading for October 9 was Luke 17:11-19, where Jesus heals 10 men with a skin disease and only one, a foreigner, comes back in praise and gratitude.
“Faith and Gratitude”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem. Over the past few weeks, we have seen him talking to and teaching his disciples. But today there is a bit of shift.
He’s approached by 10 lepers. What do we know about lepers during this time?
They kept distant from non-lepers.
They formed their own colonies.
They positioned themselves near trafficways so that they could make appeals for charity.
To be let back into society they had to be checked out by a priest, in a kind of certification process.
Leprosy was estrangement from both God and other people. It had a stigma.
When writing his novel, “The Name of the Rose,” Umberto Eco put it like this: “In saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the city.’”
They were the fringe of the fringe.
The lepers are keeping their distance and following protocol and they call out to Jesus. And he SEES them. Seeing is important here.
He tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, which is how they would be able to get back into everyday life, to no longer be outcast or untouchable.
And “as they went,” they were made clean. Their healing was connected to their obedience—they did what Jesus told them to do.
One of the lepers, a foreigner, a Samaritan, SAW that he was healed, and his response was to turn back, praise God with a loud voice, and to lie on the ground in front of Jesus and thank him.
It’s notable that the leper doesn’t just thank Jesus as some great healer on the street, he knows the healing has come from God and he praises God before he thanks Jesus.
Jesus SAW the lepers and the one Samaritan leper saw that God had healed him through Jesus. And he was grateful.
We see a lot of healing stories in the Gospels, but in this case, the story Luke tells is less about the healing and more about the response of the one leper.
The three questions Jesus then asks are not really addressed to the grateful Samaritan but they underscore the point of the story:
Were not 10 made clean?
Where are they?
Were none of them found to return and give praise except this foreigner?
Why the Foreigner?
This is not a knock on the nine who did what they were instructed. They followed orders. They were healed. We don’t know what happened to them after—they may have gone on to spread their own stories and good news for the rest of their lives.
But the foreigner, the stranger was different. Why is that? What was it that made him turn around while the others went on their way?
I like a thought that Fred Craddock shared in his book, “Interpretations: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching—Luke.” In thinking through the stranger in our time, he said:
“It is often the stranger in the church who sings heartily the hymns we have long left to the choir, who expresses gratitude for blessings we had not noticed, who listens attentively to the sermon we think we have already heard, who gets excited about our old Bible, and who becomes actively involved in acts of service to which we send small donations. Must it always be so?”
Fred Craddock
I wonder, do I get complacent? Do we sometimes go about our business doing what was asked of us, but not stopping to give thanks and praise for both remarkable and everyday things that bring us joy? Or those things that connect us to God and to each other?
Reading Scripture: WWJD?
Studying Scripture has so many layers to it, any of which can give us pause, can make us think, can stop us and meet us where we are.
We need to understand the context in which something was written; we need to think about the audience the writer, in this case Luke, was writing for; and we have both God’s Word in the Bible and any number of great commentaries that have been written to help us understand it.
And then we also want to figure out the relevance of something for our lives. What do we do with what we read? Why does it matter? What is the “so what?” of ten lepers getting healed more than 2,000 years ago? Why should we care?
Fr. Bill Ortt often says to think about Scripture as a prism, where you can turn it around to see different facets of it. And if we do that in this story, we’ve got the grateful leper, we’ve got the other nine who were healed, and we’ve got Jesus. We may have a tendency not to put ourselves in Jesus’s place in the story, because, well, he’s Jesus and we’re not.
But these stories are shared for us to learn from. For us to ponder, to take in. And who is the main character in the New Testament who we want to learn about? Jesus.
And why? Maybe to be more like him. What’s the bumper sticker—what’s the saying that is used over and over again: WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
And how do you know, how can you consider what Jesus would do if you don’t read Scripture to get to know him better?
So in this story, what does Jesus do?
Seeing and Doing
First, Jesus sees the lepers who call out to him. Really sees them and what their problem is. And what he sees is human beings, not lepers. Luke illustrates this point over and over again in his Gospel:
When we meet the demoniac at Gerasene, Luke calls him, “a man from the city who had demons.”
Here, Luke doesn’t say 10 lepers, he says, “10 men with a skin disease.”
In writing his Gospel, Luke doesn’t define people by their afflictions, by their diseases, by what’s wrong with them. Because Jesus doesn’t define people that way. Jesus sees our humanity. And he sees the humanity of these 10 men.
And what does he do once he sees? He acts, he steps in to help, to heal.
If we want to model our lives after Jesus, where does that leave us?
We need to see. Do we take the time to see what is going on around us? We can look nationally and globally—the devastating damage in Florida from Hurricane Ian; the ongoing war in Ukraine; insert your news of struggle and suffering going on in the world.
We can also look closer to home: our family, our friends, our neighbors, and people in our community. We’ve got a lot of people barely holding on around us. Do we see them?
Then, what do we do when we see them? Do we reach out? Do we pray for people? Do we come alongside them when we can and walk with someone who is having a hard time.
Do we do…what we see Jesus doing time and time again in Scripture, and especially in Luke’s Gospel, and in today’s story? See, help, heal.
What do we see?
Do we see the needs, the struggles of others?
And what do we do?
Let’s take some pressure off of ourselves for a minute. Living like Jesus is certainly the goal, but wow, is that tough. Sometimes getting out of bed in the morning and getting through the day without telling someone off seems more attainable.
Gratitude
Let’s look more closely at the Samaritan who was healed and who came back. Let’s walk in his footsteps.
Back to seeing: what does the Samaritan see? He sees that he has been healed. He recognizes that God was at work. And he praises, he humbles himself, and he gives thanks.
We can do that, right? There are times when being grateful is everything. That’s a big part of my story and what has me standing here in front of you.
I caught up with a childhood friend who I haven’t seen in decades. We grew up playing little league baseball together in Oxford and he went on to fly F-16s in the Air Force for 20 years. We had lunch last week and what we both wanted to talk about was faith and spiritual awakenings. And he asked what prompted this calling in me.
My one-word answer was, and is, gratitude.
A little more than seven years ago my younger daughter had a bad seizure caused by brain swelling. She was visiting family outside Pittsburgh and she had to be intubated and flown by helicopter to Children’s Hospital, where she was in pediatric intensive care for 10 days and in the hospital for the next month.
Faith wasn’t a big part of my life then, but as I sat with her in the hospital, as I listened to doctors, as we tried to figure out what was next, people continually reached out to say they were praying and ask how they could help.
And what I could feel, could palpably feel, was a community of prayers changing me. I wouldn’t say I started out where the Grinch was, but my heart grew in significant ways that I am still trying to wrap my head around. And I felt a peace and calm in the midst of so much worry.
When we came home, I was full of capital “G” Gratitude. I didn’t necessarily know where to put it or what to do with it, but a friend invited me to church. That sounded like a good start. And that was the first step on a path that led here, and with gratitude every day it is a walk that is still going.
I saw healing. I felt a change, a kind of healing in me. And giving praise and thanks is my response.
Salvation
Let’s turn our attention back to the grateful leper. Jesus says to him, “Your faith has made you well.” Fred Craddock who I quoted earlier points out that the verb that was used for “made well” is the same word that is often translated, “to be saved.”
Jesus healed 10 people, but only one, the one who came back and was grateful, received something much bigger than physical healing. His faith, as expressed by his gratitude, saved him.
Alan Culpepper in “The New Interpreter’s Bible,” looks at this and says that the story challenges us to regard gratitude as an expression of faith.
That resonates with me. Gratitude feels like a way to express our faith.
Culpepper says further: “If gratitude reveals humility of spirit and a sensitivity to the grace of God in one’s life, then is there any better measure of faith than wonder and thankfulness before what one perceives as unmerited expressions of love and kindness from God and from others?”
Living with a Grateful Heart
What does gratitude look like in our lives? What do we do when we have a grateful heart?
I have one more quick example. When I started working here at Christ Church they gave me the office at the top of the stairs in the Rectory. I end up talking to just about everyone who comes up and down the steps—which aren’t the easiest steps to navigate.
Well, a few times a week, Bruce Richards would come up the steps and go into the bathroom, and when he came out he would stop in and share this amazing smile, and energy, and joy and gratitude.
It turns out at the time that all the Stephen Ministry books, brochures and pins were kept in the bathroom closet, and he would go in to stock up on whatever he needed.
So I had a running joke with Bruce that he had a Clark Kent/Superman phone booth in the bathroom and he would come out as a superhero for pastoral care. Except it wasn’t a joke at all. That’s who Bruce was.
As the years went on, Bruce was slower getting up and down the steps, but his joy, his smile, and his gratitude didn’t change.
We commended Bruce to God on Saturday and I have so many pictures of him on my heart. Bruce carried printed out prayers in his wallet and in his calendar and he sometimes gave me one if he thought I looked like I needed it, or he would tell me to pass it on to someone who did.
Bruce came with us to give Communion to a parishioner in Oxford who had fallen and couldn’t make it to church for a while. For us, it was a special visit, but Bruce did this all the time, in nursing homes, people’s houses, you name it.
And I have a picture of Bruce coming to his door on his 80th birthday, during the height of the pandemic, when a group of us went to sing happy birthday to him with Brenda Wood playing the accordion.
Bruce was a grateful heart personified. He showed us what it looked like to live with gratitude and for him it looked like caring for others, so much so, that he helped begin a new ministry at the church, specifically to care for people going through tough times… by listening to them, praying with them, and walking beside them. And Bruce’s work of 18 years here continues today with all the Stephen Ministers, the care givers and care receivers, who are grateful and helping us create a church community of compassion.
Bruce saw people hurting. He acted, he did something about it, using gifts that he didn’t know he had, always giving thanks with gratitude.
I wish we didn’t have to lose people like Bruce, people in our lives who show us what it is to live with a grateful heart—people we are grateful for. But it makes me even more thankful for the time that we had together and the example he still is for all of us. What a gift to know people like that and to be able to continue their work in love.
Alan Culpepper has a thought here that I’d like to close with, which gets us to the heart of today’s Gospel:
“Faith, like gratitude, is our response to the grace of God as we have experienced it. For those who have become aware of God’s grace, all of life is infused with a sense of gratitude, and each encounter becomes an opportunity to see and respond in the spirit of the grateful leper.”
I think about the movie “Shawshank Redemption” a good bit. In one of the most quotable conversations of the film, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says to Red (Morgan Freeman):
“It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”
And that might be the simplest breakdown, though likely too simple, of the last section of John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara.” The section is called, “Death: The Horizon is the Well.”
Death has a lot to do with life. In our lives, negativity and fear exile us from our own love and warmth, O’Donohue says, and to live life fully we need to transfigure or transform the negativity and fear “by turning it toward the light of your soul.”
“Eventually what you call the negative side of yourself can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity, and growth within you.”
O’Donohue says that part of transforming this negativity and fear happens by us letting go of it.
“Mystics have always recognized that to come deeper into the divine presence within, you need to practice detachment. When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes. False things, which you have desperately held on to, move away very quickly from you. Then what is real, what you love deeply, and what really belongs to you comes deeper into you.”
Like the subject of aging, which was the previous section in “Anam Cara,” we don’t like to think or talk about death. It is an absolute fact of life, but it’s not a place we are comfortable going in conversation. We see death as separate from life, an ending, a horizon that we head towards. O’Donohue points out that it doesn’t really work that way. He quotes Hans Georg Gadamer, who says:
“A horizon is something toward which we journey, but it is also something that journeys along with us.”
Death is something that is always with us, not just at the end. And there are ways that we can get to know it.
“The meeting with your own death in the daily forms of failure, pathos, negativity, fear, or destructiveness are actually opportunities to transfigure your ego. These are invitations to move out of that productive, controlling way of being toward an art of being that allows openness and hospitality.”
What we go through in life can help us live more deeply. When we risk something and fail or fall and learn and get back up and move on, we can learn to release our fear and anxiety about it. This is also true of death.
“When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging.”
Our life and our faith can help us to see death as a release into a completely new divine belonging. We can see examples of the natural life cycle, birth, life, death, rebirth–in the landscape, in nature, and all around us.
In our lives, we can see and feel and know that love goes on beyond death, love is bigger.
If we see death as going into nothingness, O’Donohue points out that “nothingness is the sister of possibility.” There needs to be space, nothingness, in order to create. In the creation story in Genesis, out of a formless void, God uses light and creates space for things to happen.
“Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected… This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch… Death is not the end; it is a rebirth.”
This is all heady stuff. We are dealing with something we have no first-hand experience of, it is not something we can know. But it’s something we come to know in terms of losing people we love. During the six weeks that our study was together, we had multiple people lose dear and close family members as well as bringing in home hospice care to care for a parent. Death is ever present and devastating when it claims those we love.
Some folks in our group found this chapter helpful, some felt it was a subject that was too close to process. The thing about a study like this, or a Bible study, or any small group of people who you meet with and are close to–I think Ram Dass put it beautifully in saying, “We are all walking each other home.” We need to be there for each other in the tender and tough times of loss and pain.
We get a chance to be there for one another. But as for those who have died, O’Donohue says, why grieve them?
“We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home. They are with God from whom they came. They have returned to the nest of their identity within the great circle of God. God is the greatest circle of all, the largest embrace in the universe, which holds visible and invisible, temporal, and eternal, as one.”
There is the good stuff. Those who have passed have gone home. They are contained in the circle of God. They have moved from our temporal world into the eternal.
And then O’Donohue does something cool. He talks about how he sees eternal time:
“In eternal time all is now; time is presence. I believe that is what eternal life means: it is a life where all that we seek–goodness, unity, beauty, truth, and love–are no longer distant from us but are now completely present with us.”
Completely present. Complete presence. There is something wonderful, whole, and beautiful to that. In the deepest sense, that is home.
What do we do with all that? How should that inform our lives? Well, if death is a release, a homecoming, a rebirth, then it isn’t something to be feared or ignored. Being at peace with what happens at the end of our lives, we should focus on how we live our lives.
We should transfigure the small deaths–the failures, the fears, the setbacks–and try to grow in presence with others in love, grace, hospitality. We should look for and try to experience eternal presence in our temporal lives (we go back to chronos and kairos again).
O’Donohue reminds us:
“It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.”
If I think back to Shawshank Redemption, and “get busy living or get busy dying,” I can think of living as taking advantage of the miracle of being here. And I can think of get busy dying is forgetting that privilege, of allowing fear and negativity to control how we live, which would be not living to the fullest.
So Andy Dufresne may still be on to something.
We closed our last class this past Monday with part of a prayer from “A New Zealand Prayer Book,” in their Daily Devotions, excerpting from the Monday prayer. Since it is Monday as I write, we will close here with it as well:
From “A New Zealand Prayer Book”
From Monday Evening
There is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths – nothing in all creation which can separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Love never comes to an end.
Holy One, holy and eternal, awesome, exciting and delightful in your holiness; make us pure in heart to see you; make us merciful to receive your kindness, and to share our love with all your human family; then will your name be hallowed on earth as in heaven.
Support us, Lord, all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work done; then Lord, in your mercy, give us safe lodging, a holy rest and peace at the last.
“When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging.”
John O’Donohue, “Anam Cara”
Loneliness and solitude are not the same. When we feel alone, we feel cut off, isolated, disconnected. Solitude gives us a chance to go beneath the surface noise of our lives and spend time getting to know our souls. Solitude can help us feel connected.
This week I was talking to a friend who is reading “Anam Cara” alongside our study at Christ Church Easton, though his schedule doesn’t allow him to make the classes. Our brief conversation meandered all over the place and as we went our separate ways I said that I hoped he was enjoying and getting something out of the book.
“You know what it gives me: music for my soul.”
Amen. May we all find music for our souls each day, and for those reading “Anam Cara,” may it add soul music to your days.
Section 3, “Solitude is Luminous,” is the halfway point in our study. John O’Donohue has contemplated the mystery of friendship (Section 1), and pointed out the infinity of our interiority and how our senses are our gateways to the world around us and to each other (Section 2). And now he shows us the need for us to go inside, to embrace solitude so that we can know our true selves, our gifts, what makes us who we are, so that we can be of benefit to others and to the world.
If all we do is follow the world and go wherever the figurative wind blows us, and we never get to know our passions, desires, gifts–our best selves, who God created us to be–what can we really offer anyone else in friendship?
“It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that brought you here. When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive. Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity.”
I am going to string a series of connected quotes here, one leading to another, because O’Donohue makes his points beautifully:
“When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure, and wonder.”
Spending time in solitude is not some navel gazing, narcissistic indulgence, it actually helps us be better friends, partners, parents, better people.
“There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you can learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find.”
This is such an important thing to get across: how we look at things determines what we see. The lens, the eyes we use to look at the world shape/color what we see. And the same goes with how we look at ourselves. We are here in this life for the time that we have, treating ourselves gently and creatively and getting to know our souls and what we bring to the table is so important to what we make of our lives.
If you follow the idea that loving our neighbors as ourselves should be one of the top priorities of our lives, then it matters how we relate to ourselves. If we are miserable people who don’t know ourselves, where does that leave us with our neighbors?
O’Donohue goes on to warn us of the danger of “the unlived life.” He says, “We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.”
If you come to “Anam Cara” with a lens to Scripture, you might hear echoes of the Gospel of John:
“The thief comes to kill and destroy, I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.”
John 10:10 (NIV)
If we live our lives to the full, we help others to do the same. That’s what God wants for us, for humanity, for all of Creation. That’s what we should be working towards, hoping for, searching for, praying for.
This week, Rev. Susie Leight shared the following photo and connected reflection from O’Donohue:
I arise today
In the name of Silence Womb of the Word, In the name of Stillness Home of Belonging, In the name of the Solitude Of the Soul and the Earth.
I arise today
From Matins, by John O’Donohue
As we rise today, as we arise, may we look inside so that we can be the best versions of ourselves for those we encounter.
As we go through our days, may we find and appreciate music for our souls, and may we help provide and encourage soul music in others.
Through the noise and stress and worry of the world going on around us, may we make time to look deeper and see that “there is something beautiful, good, and eternal happening.”
Beginning today with the “Blessing of Solitude” with which O’Donohue closes his chapter, may we recognize, realize, and learn to see ourselves like this.
Driving Trappe backroads I had to stop the car on a small bridge, mid-conversation, just to take in the scene. To recognize and capture the moment: the mist on the river, the slick calm surface of the water, the way the sun froze everything in time, just for a second.
“… After the kingfisher’s wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.”
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, “Four Quartets”
That’s how Eliot puts those iridescent moments–they can become the still point of a turning world. If there are a handful of books that we get sent back to over and over again in the course of our lives, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is one of those books for me.
This weekend it was Rowan Williams’ book “Being Disciples,” that sent me either down the chute or up the ladder to the kingfisher’s wing. Williams compared prayer to birdwatching (two things I dig and want to spend more time doing). He said:
“I’ve always loved that image of prayer as birdwatching. You sit very still because something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes of course it means a long day of sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening. I suspect that, for most of us, a lot of our experience is precisely that. But the odd occasions when you do see what T.S. Eliot (in section IV of ‘Burnt Norton’) called ‘the kingfisher’s wing’ flashing ‘light to light’ make it all worthwhile. And I think that living in this sort of expectancy–living in awareness, your eyes sufficiently open and your mind both relaxed and attentive enough to see when it happens–is basic to discipleship.”
And that’s it–having our minds and hearts open and expectant, so that we can catch those moments when they happen. Eliot pointed it out for me years ago, Williams reminded me and sent me back to Eliot, but God presents us with those moments every day.
Running through John Ford Park on a Friday morning after a Thursday night rain, and a magnolia blossom all but audibly called out to be noticed and appreciated. It’s so easy to put my head down and pass those moments by, but thankfully I am easily led when it comes to opportunities to marvel and wonder.
Another one of those books to return to countless times over a lifetime is Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” particularly “Song of Myself.”
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth”
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Have you had those feelings, possibly brought on by those kingfishers’ wing moments that we happen to catch? When you are sitting there, drinking in the day, firehose style, where you know you are missing a lot of what you are trying to take in, and you breathe, and look over and the moment transforms into a feeling and you are in it and it is in you.
Shake a snow globe full of sediment and you’ll have to wait a while for the sediment to settle. Only then can you see through it. Clarity comes from letting the sediment settle. Now think of the sediment as all the demands and distractions in our daily lives–and there is always something or someone shaking our snow globes.
The weekend retreat during The Alpha Course is designed to help us settle, unwind, and unplug so we can plug into something that will recharge us. It’s a time to connect with the Holy Spirit and with each other.
Five years to the weekend after Christ Church Easton‘s first Alpha retreat, we took a group of more than 20 people to Pecometh’s Riverside Retreat Center outside Centreville, MD, for a weekend to reconnect. The weather was in the 70s during the days, the night skies were starry and clear, and the waterfront campus is full of trails, woods, and structures to get you dialed-in to creation.
Saturday morning, we had a group gathered on benches outside by the river for morning prayer. We read from Padraig O’Tuama‘s “Daily Prayers,” in which we pray, in part:
We resolve to live life in its fullness: We will welcome the people who’ll be a part of this day. We will greet God in the ordinary and hidden moments. We will live the life we are living.
We set our intention to be present, open, and to appreciate one another and our lives.
Weekends like this are about moments; they are about relationships; they are about laughter and tears from being overfilled; they are made up of sharing meals, of taking hikes and walks or going skateboarding; they are built around small group discussions and big questions and shared experiences and being vulnerable.
The Alpha Weekend five years ago is the first time I reflected on advice that St. Paul gave in his letter to the Romans where he said:
“Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Romans 12:2 (NIV)
In a world that wants us to conform, we are encouraged to live differently. In a series of videos over the weekend, we meet Jackie Pullinger, a missionary who went from England to Hong Kong more than 50 years ago, who has worked to help prostitutes, gang members, and the poor. She has done amazing work and points out that what we need to spread God’s love in the world are “soft hearts and hard feet.” And she says that maybe the only way our hearts soften is by being broken.
An Alpha Weekend is about relationships and downtime and making memories, including the debut of a non-existent band called “Skater Dads.” It’s skipping stones at sunset and exploring the campus for the camp’s famed outdoor chapel.
The Alpha Weekend is about sitting around a campfire singing songs, roasting marshmallows and hot dogs and being awestruck when someone reaches their hand into the fire to successfully rescue a fallen hot dog and comes out unburned (don’t try this at home or around a youth director) ; it’s about feeling seen simply by someone noticing that you are almost done cooking your hot dog and being asking if you want a bun.
It’s what happens when a group of people gather in a beautiful place for the sacred purpose of being together, worshipping God, and being open to the Holy Spirit.
Sunday morning, the ending of such a powerful and peaceful weekend, the big feelings were about not wanting the weekend to end. A conversation made me think about the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop, this absolutely incredible experience of Jesus, Elijah, and Moses, and Peter’s immediate response is to build tents–“Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings” (Luke 9:33)–he wants to stay in that moment, he wants to keep it going, just like each of us wanted the weekend to keep going. But Jesus knew differently. He knew that as incredible as those experiences are, it is not about building tents and trying to hold the moment–it is about carrying the moment back into the real world, because we have work to do. We have to spread that Holy Spirit experience. I mentioned all this to our collected groups. Which gave Rev. Susie Leight an idea.
Susie expounded on the theme of leaving, going back to the world, by opening our Sunday morning worship service with a blessing/prayer from Jan Richardson:
Dazzling
A Blessing for Transfiguration Sunday
“Believe me, I know how tempting it is to remain inside this blessing, to linger where everything is dazzling and clear. We could build walls around this blessing, put a roof over it. We could bring in a table, chairs, have the most amazing meals. We could make a home. We could stay. But this blessing is built for leaving. This blessing is made for coming down the mountain. This blessing wants to be in motion, to travel with you as you return to level ground. It will seem strange how quiet this blessing becomes when it returns to earth. It is not shy. It is not afraid. It simply knows how to bide its time, to watch and wait, to discern and pray until the moment comes when it will reveal everything it knows, when it will shine forth with all it has seen, when it will dazzle with the unforgettable light you have carried all this way.”
This weekend was a blessing made for coming down the mountain, back into the world; it was an experience, it was moments, it was deepened relationships. It is a blessing for us to share with those we meet, with those who are a part of our days.
The evening before Christmas Eve, two of us were asked by our Rector if we’d be willing to pinch-hit and lead prayer services and give short sermons on December 25 and 26. The 26th was my day. The Gospel reading for the day, which I needed to discuss was John 1:1-18, “In the beginning was the Word.” Not the one I would have picked for a first-ever sermon, but it was the right one. Part of a continually unfolding story.
An 11th hour, first sermon seems like something worth documenting and sharing, so here it is, with a few edits. And a quick note explaining the top photo: A few years back in a class led by Fr. Bill Ortt, he drew two circles–one with arrows all pointing inward, one with arrows all pointing out. And he asked, which circle looks like love?” The one with the arrows pointing out, away from ourselves to others. And (now) Rev. Barbara Coleman put her hands on her head, fingers out, looking like the circle showing apostolic, outgoing love. And her “apostolic antlers” have been a symbol/sign with a number of us since. Her husband John, pictured on the right, led prayers of the people at the end of the service, and Barbara told him he needed to get a picture of the two of us giving the sign. So there it is 🙂
“Connected to God’s Family” December 26, 2021
Being called to do something is to be invited. It’s always an invitation. Studying Scripture, we learn that there is actually a right answer to being called—“Here I am, Lord.” When you try to make a point to answer, “Here I am,” you find yourself in some situations you aren’t prepared for. Like being asked the night before Christmas Eve services if you would lead morning prayer the day after Christmas. And have something to say about the prologue to John’s Gospel.
And here we are.
So what can we say about the opening of John’s Gospel?
If someone was to make a nativity play out of John’s introduction to the good news, it would not be a hit with families and kids. There are no shepherds, no wise men, no manger. It’s just words. But John is up to something at the beginning of his story that might just give us the most hope in the end.
Each of the four Gospel writers does something different with how they begin their stories.
Matthew gives us Jesus’s family tree, wise men traveling from afar, and does his best to make sure his readers know that this is the guy who is fulfilling prophecy; he is the King of Kings.
Mark skips any kind of birth narrative and gets straight to the story. I like to think of Mark’s storytelling approach as pulling up to the curb, opening the car door and saying, “Get in… Immediately!”
Luke is where we get shepherds and some of Mary’s joyful experience as an expectant mother, and Jesus’s connection to John the Baptist.
John goes back. Way back. To the Beginning. And he does it with incredible poetry. When I first sat down to really study the Gospels, John’s prologue gave me goosebumps. I am a sucker for language, but there is more.
The beginning John takes us back to is Genesis.
When you read Matthew, his genealogy for Jesus goes back to Abraham. Luke traces Jesus’s family tree back to Adam. One of the things John is telling us is that Jesus goes back even further—to the very beginning.
There is a Franciscan friar or monk named Richard Rohr who has written about the “Cosmic Christ.” He points out that Christ is eternal, that he has always been here. And that the incarnational Jesus, when he became human and lived with us in bodily form, happened at a particular time and place. But Christ as part of the Trinity is so much bigger than we can comprehend. And that’s where John takes us.
In our Bible studies, we have found NT Wright to be a wonderful guide for making sense of Scripture. He says this about John:
“that’s the theme of this gospel: if you want to know who the true God is, look long and hard at Jesus… The rest of the passage clusters around this central statement. The one we know as Jesus is identical, it seems, with the Word who was there from the very start, the Word through whom all things were made, the one who contained and contains life and light.”
That’s the goosebumps part of John for me. When I read him, I get that sense of awe, that sense of Jesus as the Word, Jesus as God. And that he has given us that same gift, of knowing God through him.
Do you ever get that sense of being connected to something so much bigger than yourself? There are times when I am watching a sunrise or a sunset; or it could be reading poetry—it actually happens a good bit here at Christ Church, listening to music during a worship service, or finding myself trying to scribble down notes about something Fr. Bill or Fr. Charlie mentions in a sermon. I have a sense, something I know but can’t explain, that I am, that we all are connected to the Divine.
I woke up today and learned that Archbishop Desmond Tutu died yesterday at the age of 90. I have a good friend and mentor that spent part of a semester at sea with Archbishop Tutu and he has such wonderful stories to share from that experience. Desmond Tutu is one of those people who I point to as being a huge inspiration and who has made me look and listen to what a calling in ministry might be. This summer and fall we had an outdoor evening prayer service on Thursdays, one of which fell on Archbishop Tutu’s 90th birthday and we included several of his prayers to honor him.
Tutu spoke to this exact thing, that transcendent feeling of connecting to God in different moments of our lives, if we pay attention. He said:
“We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful… and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.”
These things, these experiences are reminders that we are wired to feel something more than just going through the motions of daily life.
I’ve talked recently about crying at Christ Church—and about how I have cried more in the past five years than maybe any other time. That it’s the kind of crying that comes from your heart being too full, so that something has to come welling up and out. And that welling up comes from being connected—both to God and to each other. That’s part of the package deal about loving God and loving your neighbor.
And that connection is what caring about each other looks like. That caring is love. And that love, that’s what was there in the beginning, that creative force that built and sustains the universe and that built and sustains us.
And that’s what John’s about. And that’s what God’s about. And that’s what we are supposed to be about.
I’ve seen that connecting and caring on full display at this church. We have all seen it in Bruce Richards and the last 18 years—it’s what the (pastoral care) Stephen Ministry is all about. That kind of caring, that kind of loving is what we are here on this earth to do. That’s the gift we are given of this life, the one that goes back to the beginning, goes back to the Word, goes back to Christ.
But it’s not meant to stop inside these walls. It’s meant to go out, apostolically. It’s the work that God has given us to do. And it feels right to end this morning’s message with words from Desmond Tutu to that effect:
“We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God’s family.”
I have two kinds of reading: work/church reading and other/personal reading, though they almost always overlap.
Work/church reading is reading that goes toward discussion groups and Bible studies. Over the past few years, we have done chapter by chapter group studies of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, and Paul’s Letter to the Philippians; shorter survey’s of Mark and Matthew’s Gospels, book studies of two Bob Goff books, one Brene Brown book, Henri Nouwen’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” and a deep-dive into The Lord’s Prayer. We have groups that have become like family, who have been meeting for multiple years now and when one study is done, they ask, “what’s next?” And it’s awesome.
When we could no longer gather together as groups this spring, Zoom meetings became our way of getting together. And for the past several weeks, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we have had folks on screen together, live from their homes in Wittman, Sherwood, outside Cambridge, all around Easton, and it has helped–both with the stir crazy, cooped up feelings, but also staying connected to each other and connected to God.
As we finished our long studies of John’s Gospel and our Lent survey of Matthew’s Gospel, we kicked around some options of what to explore next. The thought of Paul’s prison letters resonated, as we quarantine in place. A reliable, accessible commentary can be hugely illuminating for Bible study, and we have loved N.T. Wright’s New Testament for Everyone books. His “Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters” is what we used for our Philippians study a couple years ago and we are heading back there to start with Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.
From Wright’s introduction:
“This book includes the four short letters Paul wrote from prison: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. His own personal circumstances make these especially poignant, and give us a portrait of a man facing huge difficulties and hardships and coming through with his faith and hope unscathed. But what he has to say to young churches–and in the case of Philemon, to one man facing a hugely difficult moral dilemna–is even more impressive. Already, within 30 years of Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul has worked out a wonderful, many-colored picture of what Jesus achieved, of God’s worldwide plan, and how it all works out in the lives of ordinary people.”
Paul’s letters from prison give us plenty to think, pray, and reflect on, and something to work towards. I always recall the line from Ephesians about putting on the “full armor of God.”
Something has happened in the shift from being able to come together at church, or anywhere, to now being distanced. Maybe we realize how much we need each other, how much we miss each other. And creating content to engage, inspire, and give hope, as well as creating interactive opportunities and experiences is more important than ever. So as we start with Ephesians and go through the prison letters, I want to throw out there for anyone who wants to, to do the same. I’ll be blogging and trying to find some creative writing opportunities with it; I will look to have some video conversations with Fr. Bill Ortt, Fr. Charlie Barton, and others to get their thoughts on issues and chapters that come up; possible podcasts with staff members and others; I will see if I can find some special guest stars to weigh in; and we can open up some Zoom meetings during the week where people can drop in and share and discuss their thoughts. The more the merrier–and has always been the case for our small groups, you don’t have to be a member of the church or any church to be a part of what’s going on. If it sounds interesting, give it a shot. With Zoom, Facebook, Instagram and the like, you can be in Florida, California, Maine, or in a different country.
In January 2017, I had started working at Christ Church Easton part-time in addition to my job as director of the Oxford Community Center. Our rector/pastor, Fr. Bill Ortt, asked me to put together a short (5-6 week) Bible study, whatever I picked to study, find 10 or so people to be a part of it, and he and I would co-lead the group. I had led small groups before, but this would be my first Bible study. I picked Ephesians. Many of the guinea pigs…er… willing participants, have become close friends, and are still both involved in and leading small groups at the church, with one woman finishing up her work to become a deacon. It’s been a wonderful journey together.
I was reminded recently (by Wright, in our John study) of lines from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” which is one of my absolute favorite poems/books ever written. Eliot says:
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot
I feel like that is the case for me with Ephesians. It’s maybe the case with small groups. It’s maybe the case with church and communities, who are having to re-examine what’s important and how to do things.
Fair warning though: it seems the longer you study with and work with someone, the more likely you are to dress alike.
