Monthly Archives: September 2010

Yesterday I wrote the climactic, crisis scene in my novel-in-progress, The Magdalene Mystery.

The scene had been chasing me and I had been dodging it, not sure exactly how to unfold the scene’s key events, how to link and layer themes with setting, the characters’ loves, and, indeed, their sufferings.

Yesterday was the reckoning, I suppose, or else I simply grew tired of running from it.  I blocked the day out to write – to avoid marketing my other books, checking Facebook, or even taking a walk in the suddenly balmy California weather.  So I wrote and wrote and wrote, as fast as my little fingers would go.

I won’t give it all away, but the scene does take place on the top of a mountain in Southern France.  I felt I had been living on top of that mountain for weeks, breathing the air, looking at the panoramic view.  It was as though I was on the border of another country, my feet on the earth, my head in the sky, and that from here I could fly.   But where?

This morning I had the same epiphany, but in the Mass at Saint Peter’s Church.  Probably because I still literally had “my head in the clouds,” on top of that mountain in my novel.  Even so, my knees were firmly planted on the padded kneeler and my senses filled with color, sound, light, and the movement of the liturgy.  I was rooted in the liturgical action, but as I watched and prayed and confessed my sins of the week, I saw other processions and other Masses from other places and countries.  They were churches I recognized, clergy I recognized, each man with his own way of walking and speaking and chanting.  Some were parish churches with small congregations, a strumming guitar.  Some were grand cathedrals with banks of nuns singing the psalms before a soaring mosaic of Christ Pantokrator.   In our travels we have had the remarkable and blessed opportunity to be present at numerous Eucharists, and while each is unique, colored with the parish’s history and the region and the people themselves, they all merged together in my mind, layering in a cosmic dance of union.

And the Epistle reinforced this sense of union:

There is one body, and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. (Ephesians 4:4-6)

This is what Heaven will be like, I thought – liturgical dances and songs of praise from time past and time present and time future merging yet remaining uniquely heard, seen, experienced.  I know that when Christ returns there will be no need for the Church, His Body on earth, for He will be here on earth, but until then we are in a kind of training that will open our hearts and minds and senses to His presence.

At Saint Peter’s this morning I was on the precipice of another world, looking out over a panorama of eternity.

It was so very beautiful.

Deo Gratias

Father Pomroy was away today and Father Paul celebrated the Mass and preached.  It was good to see him at the altar, for he has had numerous health problems last six months.  Father Paul is our eldest priest, and his wisdom and warmth fill his soul to bursting.  His eyes are always alight with good humor, his mouth always curved in a contagious smile, as though the sheer joy of seeing you has made his life complete.

Father Paul reflects God’s love, the way God loves each of us.

It was the second Sunday of our fall Church School program, and after I checked on the children and the newly assembled staff, I entered the red-carpeted nave in time for the reading of the Epistle.  I thanked God for his miracles of the past week – each day given, each minute cherished, and most especially the chance to see old friends at a baby shower on Saturday.

Soon Father Paul rose to the pulpit to preach, and just as happens in every sermon, I learned something new, was touched by God. He spoke of the village of Nain where Christ raises a widow’s son to life, the Gospel story today.  The folks in Nain recognized the implications of this remarkable act and cried out that a great prophet had risen up, that God had visited his people.  Why, Father Paul asked, did they say this?  Other miracles do not receive this response in the Gospels.  It turns out that in Nain, centuries earlier, the prophet Elijah had raised a widow’s son from death to life.  The village had kept the story alive.  They remembered their history and saw the significance of their present.

The link between the two raisings of the dead in Nain so many years apart startled me.  I gazed at Father Paul at the altar and thought of baby Natalie, nine months, back in the nursery, the two many generations apart.  We are so blessed at Saint Peter’s to have among us the very old and the very young, as though time is pulled together into a single heartbeat under our roof.  Each person from nine months to ninety is precious and we celebrate that preciousness.  And with the celebration of life, we also celebrate two thousand years of story, the miracles and signs given to us through the Church, the Body of Christ, to help in our understanding and our making sense of this life.

Yesterday, Saturday, the past and present collided, slipped into one, at a baby shower given for a childhood friend of my son who is now grown with a family of his own.  How good it was to see the generations gather and celebrate this life soon to come into our world, to celebrate marriage and family, and to show our communal support for this great event.  I recalled the mother-to-be when she was a little girl and sighed.  I recalled my son as well, and all the ups and downs of growing up, she and he and others in their grade tumbling through the years.

I touched the pink smocking on little Natalie’s dress and followed Father Paul as he offered the great sacrifice at the altar, the Holy Eucharist.  Father was frail but strong, and his Trinity green cope with its red cross emblazoned on his back marked him as one of Our Lord’s own.  He sang the Mass, his voice wavering and thin but full of devotion.

Today my son turns thirty-eight.  I gave thanks for his birth in a hospital in Vancouver, Canada.  I gave thanks for the loving man he has become, a devoted father and husband, a talented landscape architect.  I gave thanks that I had experienced the miracle of birth and motherhood.

And I gave thanks for all the blessings of this life, for this God who loves us so much that he lives with us, in us, pulling us to him in time and place, weaving us into his tapestry of eternity.

I received the Bread of Heaven and returned to my pew, full of happiness, living in the heart of God, complete.

We packed the cars with eighteen helium balloons and sandwich trays and gift bags and headed for Saint Peter’s this morning.  Fortunately others were bringing the tubs of ice cream, the toppings, the drinks.

It was the Opening of Church School and Ice Cream Social and I was looking forward to seeing the children as well as a little hot fudge.  (I also love balloons.)

I set out the bags and tied the multi colored balloons along the hallways to mark a path from the narthex to the classrooms where our teachers awaited the children.  Soon mothers with babies were chatting with the attendants in the nursery, and the Primary/Juniors were working on cool bookmarks and learning about the creation of the world.

As I watched them, I thought how good God was to give us children to teach, to care for, to love with God’s own love.  How good to share the good news of God’s glory, his heaven and his earth.  And soon, those approaching ten to twelve years of age will prepare for Confirmation, prepare to receive Christ himself in the Eucharist, the miraculous union of heaven and earth within us.

Baby Natalie, 9 months, especially loved to poke her finger at the balloons and cry, ba….

As the weeks progress, we shall add to and layer our children’s program with songs and rhymes, contests and pageants.  We shall live out the Church Year, celebrating the coming of God’s Son at Christmas, his life on earth in the months following, his death and resurrection at Easter.  Then we will tell how the Son of God walked the earth for forty days, appearing to many, and his ascension to Heaven.  On the Sunday called Pentecost-Whitsunday we will celebrate the Holy Spirit descending upon the disciples in Jerusalem, an event marking the Birthday of the Church.

And it is this Holy Spirit that wove through us this morning, as old and young gathered together to tell these stories.  Unsentimental stories they are, for they are about life and death, who we are, who we are meant to be, the stories of mankind.  And we will live in these stories in the months to come.  We will dramatize them, tell them again and again, how God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life…

And as we teach and dance through the seasons of the Church Year with our children, Christ will take root in our hearts in a new and wonderful way, for he sanctifies us as we glorify him.  Just as those balloons would soar we will rise to meet Christ in the Eucharist, but with our feet planted firmly on the earth.  This is the miracle and joy of being a sacramental Christian, that we weave our senses into God’s glory, for this is what God does with us – he weaves his glory into our senses.  Meeting God is not merely “spiritual.”  When we meet God we see our world anew for he is its Creator.  Light is lighter, shadows deeper, colors more intense, aromas and tastes richer, a friend’s touch more tender.  Or as Gerald Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit poet, wrote in 1918,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness…
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Ah!  Bright wings.  Gratia Deo for our children who bring us closer to those bright wings.

Sundays are often a time of reflection upon the week past, and on this Labor Day weekend, the roles of work and worship wove together in my thoughts.  Someone said to me this last week that going to Mass was experiencing the meeting of Heaven and Earth, and nothing less.  If young people understood this, my friend said, if they fully understood the implications of the stupendous action occurring on the altars of the world, they might be more interested in participating in the liturgy, Greek for the work of the people.

In many ways the experience of the Eucharist is that simple and that profound, that exciting and that adventurous.  It is encountering the burning bush of Moses, the cleansing coals of Isaiah, the super-reality of C.S. Lewis in the sharp-bladed grass of The Great Divorce, a reality that T.S. Eliot described in Four Quartets with the words, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  One should approach God’s glory with some fear and trembling, as the Psalmists repeatedly warn, yet in the certainty of God’s boundless love.

American culture has largely sentimentalized worship and in doing so has also removed the exhilaration, satisfaction, and fulfillment that comes from being part of a great celestial and redemptive work.

We are a permissive post-war culture, and we have become addicted to pleasure, as standards of living rise, cushioning our lives and increasing our expectations.  Still we never have enough, always demanding more, sooner, complaining it isn’t enough.  The play ethic has replaced the work ethic, and if we work it is to play more and better.

Gone, or at least unpopular, is commitment.  Commitment to work, spouse, children, parents, grandparents, God, the Church, the Body of Christ. We want to be free to flee, to flit, to hover, to escape, to feel good.  We want immediate gratification, immediate purchase, we want the now, and we will mortgage our children’s future to obtain it.

Gone, or at least marginalized, is belief in the judgment of God, or indeed, our fellow man.  Gone are standards of objective right and wrong.  We are our own gods and we evaluate our own righteousness.  We flee from other arbiters, from imposed morality, from the Church and its moral imperatives.  Another friend commented this last week that he didn’t need to attend church on Sundays since he led a Christian life, meaning, I believe, he was a good person, righteous.  What happened to worship?  to thanksgiving?  to meeting God?  to the intersection of Earth with Heaven?  God wants more than goodness.  He wants us.  He burns with fire for us.  He comes to us and calls us by name.

Gone is the search for truth, for truth might curtail freedom to flee judgment.

Some of us look for the right church “fit,” feeling a lack, a nagging sense of loss, looking for something greater, something numinous.  We church-shop, wanting to feel good now and have our own goodness validated.  We don’t want demands.  We don’t want ten commandments and we don’t want seven deadly sins.  We don’t want to be told not to kill our unborn children or wed our sisters.

We don’t want to meet God in the burning bush where he reveals himself.  We don’t want to be cleansed with fiery coal.  We don’t want to admit our sins and be washed in the blood of the lamb.

And yet, when we do this, when we are washed clean by confession and absolution, when we truly meet God in the Eucharist, we soar into Heaven from Earth.  We sing, as we did this Sunday morning,

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates;
Behold the King of glory waits!
The King of kings is drawing near;
The Saviour of the world is here.

Fling wide the portals of your heart;
Make it a temple, set apart
From earthly use for heav’n’s employ,
Adorned with prayer and love and joy.

Redeemer, come! I open wide
My heart to thee: here, Lord, abide!
Let me thy inner presence feel;
Thy grace and love in me reveal.

So come, my Sov’reign; enter in!
Let new and nobler life begin;
Thy Holy Spirit guide us on,
Until the glorious crown be won.   (Hymn #484, George Weissel, 1642, based on Psalm 24)

The walls of my office are covered with icons and shelves crammed with books.  Jewel-toned images against gold leaf, the icons are figures surrounded by glory, the earthy animated by the heavenly.  We are like them, creatures of two worlds united by body and soul.

Soon, soon, another work of the people, another liturgy, another Mass, will call me to this gilded glory, this work of heaven and earth..