During the first week of August, the Anglican Order of Preachers — well, the North American Province, plus a beloved Brother from Australia — gathered for its annual Chapter. With the installation of a new Master of the Order, we spent some time with “back to our foundations” discussions. Each day, we began with a reflection of one of the three parts of the Dominican motto: to praise, to bless, to preach. I was asked to reflect on to bless. If you’re interested, my text is below the fold. Otherwise, feel free to move on; it won’t hurt my feelings. 🙂
Tag / blessing
going on walkabout
I know I haven’t been posting a lot here lately. The fact of the matter is, I’m not quite sure what this blog is for me right now. I started it as Practicing Intentional Gratitude, back in early 2007 when my life was filled with suckitude. I needed a place to be intentional about finding the things I was grateful for and expressing that. Gratitude is the antidote to despair, and I didn’t want to land in despair again.
This deepened over time, of course, and I wrote a lot about discerning the next steps in my journey. I spent months proving to myself that I could engage with the scripture appointed in the eucharistic lectionary for each Sunday, that I could engage in some exegesis and present a reflection that could serve as the seed for a sermon. I wrestled with some of The Discernment Questions here.
Meanwhile, I found my physical condition deteriorating. I learned about my chronic condition, wrestled with numerous grief cycles as it affected every part of my life. I’ve railed here about health care in the US, about social justice, and the radical hospitality, inclusiveness, and love that Jesus calls us to.
And right now… there are some major transitions happening in my life, though I don’t yet know what they are and might become. I’ve been exercising a prophetic voice and engaging in some satire at another blog. I’ve joined a brand new group theology blog that makes more sense to me than this blog.
So I’m going on walkabout from this space for a while. I won’t take this blog down, and your comments will still come to me via email. You’re welcome to email me directly (hedwyg AT gmail DOT com) or to find me on a social network. Links in the right-hand sidebar will take you to most of the places I hang out.
Meanwhile, go forth into the world in peace. Be of good courage. Hold fast to that which is good. Render to no one evil for evil. Strengthen the faint-hearted. Support the weak. Honor all persons. Love and serve God. Rejoice in the power of the Spirit. And may the overflowing blessings of our triune God be with you for this day, and for ever.
Wow!
If it weren’t Lent, I’d use the forbidden A-word. Tonight, maplestar and I led a discussion at church. As part of the parish’s Lenten series on spiritual disciplines and prayer practices, I led a discussion on the Taizé community, with an eye to how one might integrate Taizé spiritual practices into one’s personal prayer life. It was about twenty minutes of presentation and discussion, followed by the office of Compline, into which we’d brought three Taizé chants and a beautiful setting of the Nunc Dimittis by someone I know only via the internet. Maplestar led the music from the keyboard while I led the worship. It was wonderful. Compline was beautiful — as Compline already is — and made even more so by integrating the Taizé songs.
But by far, the most wonderful and beautiful part is that for the very first time, I feel like I’m able to live out my spirituality — this most vital and important part of me — with a partner who is committed to his own spirituality. Together, we hold each other up, and we support our parish community, our diocese, and really, all of Christendom, with our prayers and our love and our witness. This is what Christians do, or what we are called to do.
My ex-husband does not understand faith, can not comprehend having faith in anything or anyone but oneself. He cannot trust people, and he certainly does not trust God. Any expression of faith from me would send him into spirals of fear, rage, and depression. I was living an inauthentic life with him. I could not be who God wants me to be. And I came to learn — in very difficult and painful ways — that one who truly loves me is one who wants to help me to be me, to grow into me, to live into the life God wants for me. It is not an act of love to seek to control someone, to make him or her into your image of them. This is an act of fear and dominance, not of love. It was a difficult and terrible decision to leave that marriage behind, even with rage and control and emotional abuse.
But now… now I am blessed to live with a partner, with someone who seeks to share and learn, to grow and to help me grow, to love and be loved, to be more than we ever could be apart. We go to worship together, and we hold each other in prayer. Each night, before we turn out the light to go to sleep, we kiss each other and make the sign of the cross on the other’s forehead and say God bless you.
It is almost two years now since I told my ex-husband that I was moving out, seeking a divorce, ending the marriage for good. He didn’t believe me, because I’d tried three times before. I know it has been a very difficult time for him, and that he’s had to grow in ways that he’d never expected. Truth be told, I have, too. And tonight, well, tonight I am basking in the glow of something that I didn’t think I would ever be able to look forward to. Tonight, I go to bed in the arms of my husband and partner, who prays with me and for me, who comes to church with me and plays the organ and even when it’s completely out of his comfort zone, leads a discussion night for the parish. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so blessed before.
Thanks be to God!
Transfiguration
This coming Wednesday may be my favorite Feast of the church year: the Transfiguration of Jesus. The story is an amazing one, the grandfather of all mountaintop experiences, as Jesus took Peter and James and John to the top of the mountain with him where his appearance and clothing were transfigured in front of them. The lectionary uses the account from the gospel of Luke, which may be the most detailed from the synoptic gospels.
This story tells us that this was about eight days after Jesus foretold his death and resurrection and that Jesus and Moses and Elijah were speaking of his departure. I can only imagine the contrast between this gorgeous, beautiful, powerful mountaintop experience – being up there with Jesus, who you know to be the savior, and Moses, who brought the law to your people, and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets – and then the realization that you do not have much more time with Jesus, that he really is going to die and leave you… and soon. You see the cloud gather, and hear God speak to you and scold you, and then you are left alone with Jesus again, in silence. Every year, I try to imagine the parts of the story that didn’t make it into the gospel – how long did they all sit up there on top of the mountain in silence, before starting back down? What was that trudge back down the mountain like? Was it companionable or awkward? Did they speak and sing, or were their footfalls the only sounds to break the silence? What happened when they rejoined the rest of the disciples? Were there lots of questions? What did they tell their friends, the people they lived and traveled with, after Jesus asked them to remain silent?
Last year, I wrote a story about the walk down the mountain, told from the point of view of young John. In the story, all three disciples were unsure what to think, and they walked in awkward, uncomfortable silence until Jesus broke it with words. And I wrote another story, about a teenaged girl who found her heart transfigured at the top of a mountain. I was full of awe and wonder, imagining the Transfiguration and what it would have looked like, sounded like, felt like. This is a story, I believe, that we are called to engage with, to dive into and try to experience with all our senses. Some of us are able to immerse ourselves into that place of active imagination, and others of us need to be guided along the way. But there are so many revelations waiting for us in scripture, if we allow ourselves to soak in the words, to reflect and contemplate, to practice lectio divina or some other method for engaging with the word.
Today, this Sunday, I almost decided to stay home from church. But it is the last Sunday of maplestar’s visit from Canada, so I went for his sake, knowing how powerful it can be to simply bother to show up when I don’t really feel like it. We had a quick breakfast on the way, and got to the church comfortably before the service began. During the opening hymn, the pain started – I’ve had incredible pain in my entire body since last Monday’s flight to Minnesota; it hasn’t gone below about 7 out of 10 in a week now – and I had to set aside my hymnal because my hands hurt too much to hold it. Sitting down was fine… for a few minutes, and then my hips and ankles and back and hands and neck started spasming and stabbing. Standing up would give relief for a moment, and then the pain would start in again. By the start of the sermon, I was in tears. By the start of the eucharistic prayer, I knew that if I wanted to be able to drive home, I wasn’t going to be able to go up to the rail. The rector glanced up at me a couple times, as if weighing what he should do, but decided to let things be unless he got a request. After the closing hymn, I sat back down to listen to the organ postlude, and whispered into maplestar’s ear a request that he ask the rector if he could please communicate me from the reserved elements. As the crowd thinned out at the rear of the nave, I heard the rector’s voice agreeing happily and wondering how I was doing. He checked in on me first, then gathered the bread and a little wine, communicated me, and then laid his hands on my head to pray for me and bless me. I really needed to take part in the Feast today, with my third – and final, for this series – session of prolotherapy tomorrow morning, and maplestar’s departure scheduled for Wednesday, yes, the Feast of the Transfiguration. Then both men helped me to stand, and I hobbled back out to my car to drive home, where I took my last darvocet and lay down to rest horizontally.
When I read the collect for the Transfiguration, one line in particular sang out for me:
Mercifully grant that we,
being delivered from the disquietude of this world,
may by faith behold
the King in his beauty.
Our prayer on this day is to help us to set aside the disquietude – to ascend to a quiet place – where we are able to behold Jesus in his white, glistening raiment, and know that we, too, are the Beloved, the Chosen, of God. It can be so difficult to pull away from the disquietude of this world. We have to find those quiet places, and not all of them are so obvious as the summit of an isolated mountain. Some of those quiet places may be libraries or bookstores, may be beautiful parks or forests, may be desert or jungle, may be churches or synagogues or mosques. Some of them may be within ourselves. And it is those places of quiet where we can meet Jesus, arrayed in glory, infused with light, surrounded by the communion of saints.
Then, once we have beheld Christ in this way, it is time to say farewell to that place of quiet, of contemplation, of glory, of holiness, of change, and to return to the physical world again. But on that journey back to the world, on that strange walk down the mountain, we have to move from quiet into speech, from holding secrets to finding the right times to reveal them, from a place of absolute holiness into a flawed and broken world.
Up on the mountain, Jesus learned what was going to happen to him in the next days, about his capture and arrest, his interrogation, his beating and crucifixion, his death and burial. We may learn very difficult things on those mountaintops, when we are delivered from the disquietude of this world, and we need that walk back to this world to begin to take those things in. And once we have, the morning star shall rise in our hearts, and we will become, as Peter says, that lamp shining in a dark place. People who know themselves and the very deepest truths about their lives do indeed shine like a light in the dark.
Today, at church, I was definitely in a place of disquietude, even in the midst of my brothers and sisters at a parish I know to be my home. But once the service ended, in the elements of holy communion, the rector of the parish helped deliver me to one of those quiet places, and I beheld God in his eyes and in maplestar’s. It lasted for a short moment, but I know that it happened. And perhaps, when I’m in the worst of the pain, I can hold on to that memory, that knowledge, and bring the shining light of Jesus – found in the eyes of those who helped me as Jesus helped all he met – back into the forefront, where it can deliver me from the disquietude again.
Beloved friends, I hope that you will find those places of quiet, that you will be able to behold God in God’s beauty. And I wish you a glorious, blessed Feast of the Transfiguration.
Lectionary Post: Zealous Christmas!
The readings appointed for Christmas (Eve) in the the Episcopal Church are:
I am absolutely thrilled this year, because I get to read that passage from Isaiah at our “midnight mass,” and it is one of my all time favorites, ever ever ever. Of course, I do tend to get earwormed by my favorite chorus from Handel‘s Messiah, but that’s okay – it’s CHRISTMAS! 🙂 I’m also excited, because this psalm has one of my favorite passages in the bible – then shall the trees of the wood shout for joy before the Lord. Good stuff, good stuff.
I noticed when I read through these lections that one word sang out for me, as happens most weeks when I sit down to write this reflection. This word, though, wasn’t a happy fuzzy bunny word; it doesn’t feel all warm and snuggly like we expect Christmas to feel. We have our visions of the whole family sitting together in our pew in church, peaceful and loving, all dressed beautifully and smiling at each other as we hold our candles and sing Silent Night. The baby! The rapt mother Mary! The cute little lambykins! It’s all so sweet and warm and comforting.
You know, like undergoing childbirth. With no painkillers. With no nurse to whisk away soiled and bloodied sheets and pads. In a stable. With noisy, smelly animals. With no ice chips or mom to hold your hand. And then the place fills up with noisy, smelly shepherds who want to gawk at you, while you try to rest and catch your breath and feel some relief from the pain, but the baby is crying, and you have never nursed before, and you are only a girl, and why did you ever say yes to that angel anyway?
Yeah. Sweet and warm and comforting. Like that.
So anyway, the word that sang out for me from these readings today was zeal. It shows up at the very end of the reading from Isaiah – the zeal of the Lord of Hosts will do this – and at the end of the reading from Titus, too – [Jesus will] purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deads. And while the word zeal doesn’t appear in the psalm or the gospel story, the concept certainly does.
The thing about zeal is, it’s not a word that seems particularly attractive to us. We might want to be loyal, but not necessarily zealous. We see passion and excitement as good, but zeal might go just a little too far for comfort. Zeal is a little bit edgy, maybe even dangerous. The people we might describe with the word zeal are not usually people we admire or want to emulate. Think for a moment about someone who strikes you as zealous. I’ll bet you find that person a bit frightening. I know that the people who come to my mind from that word frighten me somewhat; they certainly make me uncomfortable and a bit squirmy.
Well, guess what. God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. God’s job is not to point a magic wand into your life and say, Poof! Now you have every comfort! In fact, God has sent prophets throughout time to disrupt us from our comfort, to make us squirm, to shake us up. In America, we live in a land of great comfort. There are still women all over the world giving birth much as Mary did, two thousand years ago. And I – I don’t know whether I would have made it through either childbirth without a nice epidural, in a big sterile hospital, where there were lots of people to help me be more comfortable.
So Christmas? It’s not about comfort. The message – we finally have our savior after generations of waiting – this is an occasion for joy. But Jesus taught a lot of really hard stuff. And the comfort he gave? It wasn’t for us, here in the land of abundance. It is for the poor, the lame, the blind, the sick. It is for the women who give birth like Mary did, in the year 2007. It is for the children in Africa who have lost their parents to AIDS. It is for those who count a day as a good one when they have had anything to eat that day.
The problem for me is, I don’t see these people. I will confess to being mostly blind to the things that don’t cross in front of my eyes – and even to a great number of the things that do cross in front of my eyes, if they don’t bop me upside the head, too. What can I do for an orphaned child in Africa, or for a desperately poor man in India, or for a pregnant woman in Cambodia with no access to a hospital? It feels so hopeless to me – the problems are too big, too far away – and I feel helpless.
The last statement in the letter to Titus says that Jesus came to redeem us from iniquity. Iniquity. Not equal-ness. And not just being redeemed from that not-equal-ness, but from all not-equal-ness. Jesus came to bring comfort to the orphan, to the hungry, to the suffering. And he came to purify his people – that’s us – so that our zeal for good deeds could bring this about. Jesus will establish his kingdom and bring peace to the nations, to shine light in the darkness, to throw down oppressors – through the zeal of the Lord.
These two statements mirror each other. From Isaiah, it is God’s zeal that brings about this kingdom. And from Titus, it is the zeal that Jesus stirs up inside us that will bring about comfort and peace. It is no mistake that the Third Sunday of Advent is known as “stir up” Sunday, with its collect that begins Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. It is actually a little bit scary to pray this prayer, just as it can be frightening to come into contact with someone who possesses zeal. Because the truth is, when God stirs up God’s power in us, things change. We change. Maybe we change the world around us as a result. When we are stirred up about something, when we are feeling God’s great might, we may, in fact, be described as zealous.
We may do things like sing gloria in excelsis while out in the fields. We may do things like follow a star to a stable to look at a newly born, squalling infant with his exhausted and frightened parents. We may lose our happy snuggly bunny warmth and comfort. We may advocate for the poor, for the sick, for the imprisoned. We may make people uncomfortable. We may even make people upset or angry, in our zeal for good deeds.
So this Christmas, may God bless you and all those you love. May God bless even those you disagree with, those you dislike, those you are angry with, those you have trouble forgiving. May God bless those you do not know, those you do not see, those you do not hear. May God stir us up and bless us all with zeal, with squirms, with discomfort. And as the Franciscan Blessing says,
May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we really CAN make a difference in this world, so that we are able, with God’s grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.
Merry Christmas!
Light blogging week
Just so you know, this will probably be a light blogging week for me. I just drove from southeastern Virginia to my company’s headquarters in Herndon, and am getting ready for a four-hour P&L meeting with our geographical managers on the project. I’ve been fielding questions for the last several workdays (and the weekend as well) about revenues this month, and why they increased or decreased, and why they are lower or higher than budgeted, and what we expect to see next month. Tomorrow is the dry run for the monthly Program Management Review, which takes place on Thursday. So: three full days of management meetings. I’m in heaven!
Not. 🙂
In the meantime, I wish you blessings and peace. May you know and experience God’s overwhelming, awesome love for you. May you pour out this love upon yourself and upon everybody you encounter. I wish you joy and contentment and gratitude. I hope you find – or give! – hugs and smiles this week. May the wind of the Spirit blow upon you and refresh you. May the light of Jesus shine on your path. And may you rest confident in the knowledge that you are extravagantly and intimately loved by the Almighty: Father and Mother.
Hospitality
Today brings quite a moving post at the always excellent Waiter Rant. The post is about people in pain, who usually treat those around them poorly. A sample:
I go back into the dining room. The old man’s staring off into space. His watery blue eyes remind me of a fearful child scanning the horizon, wondering who’s going to be the next person to hurt him. He looks like the world broke him like a dollar bill and didn’t give him back any change. The world’s full of people like him, hurting folk who, for whatever reason, are profoundly cut off from the human race. Unable to form or maintain relationships, but craving social contact nonetheless, they hang around the periphery of normal human activity. You see them all the time, walking around the mall, eating alone in diners, hanging out in Starbucks – surviving off the residual energy of other people’s lives. Relationships for these people are superficial encounters with waiters and cops, doormen and librarians, pretty girls who, trying to feel better about themselves, toss them two minutes of conversation while waiting in line for caramel lattes. Every restaurant has at least one customer fitting this description. Maybe it’s an old widower who sits at the same table and orders the same thing every week. Maybe it’s the uptight Yuppie guy hiding behind a book or the daytime spinster drowning nightly dreams of Mr. Right under a sea of Cosmopolitans. I can tell this old man isn’t coming here just for Zuppa di Pesce. He’s trying to satisfy a hunger no amount of food will sate.
Possibly the most moving part for me was Waiter’s conclusion:
As I walk back to my newspaper I listen to the sound my footfalls make as they echo off the tiled floor. There were people like this old man at The Bistro and there’s sure to be more people like him here. I’m suddenly reminded of that line from the Gospels, “The poor will always be with you.”Scriptural reflection aside, I’m happy to leave the old man to his soup. I’m not in the mood for hurting folk today.
I can hear Waiter’s compassion and care, and I can also see his sense of boundaries and proportion… and the pain at not being able to make everything better for everybody everywhere.
This is why I make an effort to be gracious to the people I encounter in hospitality professions. I know I don’t always succeed, but they are doing important work – ministry, in fact, though they may not think of it that way – and they encounter all sorts of folks every day.
I still remember the big family dinner we took part in, shortly after my husband’s grandmother passed away. We had all gotten together in Connecticut for the funeral, about fifteen of us, and we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant that night. We had a great time together, and really enjoyed our dinner. At the end of the meal, one of the waiters who had helped us said, “Congratulations on your family reunion.” My husband said, “Actually, it was a funeral.” And the waiter was momentarily speechless. I know it was strange that we could gather and have such a good time together, when the context of our gathering was death, but the waiter took it in stride and offered his condolences. The hospitality we enjoyed at that restaurant had been impeccable, and it had allowed us that interval of togetherness and cheer on a dark day.
When I remember, which I’ll admit isn’t as often as I would like, I will offer a prayer for the people who work at the restaurant or hotel or wherever I am. I will thank God for their work in hospitality, which plays such a big part in all of the bible, including the gospels. And I will ask a blessing on them. Of course, I try to always remember to thank them in person, too, and to thank them with my tip as well. They say the devil is in the details, but God is in the details, too. And sometimes, a little detail like a smile and a thank you can make such a huge difference for someone who is overworked, stressed by dealing with this wide variety of mostly-crazy humans, and maybe not in the mood for hurting folk today.
an inquiring and discerning heart 