Monthly Archives: November 2011

In this time of war and rumors of war, of government intrusion into our lives on so many levels, it was good this week to pause and give thanks for our country, for our freedom of worship and speech.

I gave thanks.  I considered those who fled religious persecution to forge a new nation under God, guaranteeing each of us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The United States of America remains that nation as we struggle to protect life and ensure liberty so that we may indeed pursue happiness.  I gave thanks that I was lucky enough to be born in America.  I gave thanks that I am blessed to still be living, at the gentle age of sixty-four, and living in this exceptional nation.

I thought about liberty and its corollary, responsibility.  And with responsibility, I thought, comes a standard by which we measure our lives, define our duties to God, family, community, country.  With responsibility, comes self-examination.  With self-examination, hopefully, comes penitence and repentance, a turning.

The “I’m okay you’re okay” culture will not support liberty.  “That’s just me, just my thing, just the way I am” will not protect freedoms.  We must, as individuals forming culture, return to an acknowledgement of guilt, make our confessions – if I may be so bold to use the unpopular word – of sin.  Without this examination, we have little hope of ensuring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And so we enter Advent, that marvelous, mysterious, miraculous season of hope.  A four-week preparation for the great intersection of the eternal into the finite, the immortal into the world of the mortal.  The Incarnation.  In the flesh.  Christ-mas.  We recall that two thousand years ago God took on flesh and walked among us.

We celebrate with rich symbols: an evergreen tree laden twinkling with lights and fantastical ornaments, candles aflame, gifts expressing our love for one another, holy-day foods and drinks that sweeten the tongue and warm the heart.  We sing the stories of Christ’s coming so long ago so that we will not forget.  To prepare for his coming we sing calling-hymns, in minor keys, “O come, o come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel….”  The Messiah is coming… the one promised to the prophets!  As we draw nearer to Christmas Day we tell the story in our pageants and Gospel lessons.

Keeping Advent prepares us for Christ’s coming to us again and again in the Eucharist and coming to us in our daily prayers.  We prepare for his bodily Second Coming to earth, when a new world will be formed under his rule.  How do we prepare our hearts?  We clean them out to make room.  We examine our lives and throw out the clutter.

We simplify.  Not easy to do in our commercial culture of noise and bluster and busyness.  But we try.  We increase our daily prayer life; we go to church.  We pause in the stillness to hear him speak to us.

Even in our secular culture the great story of the Incarnation rises from our common consciousness in symbols, rituals, and stories.  Good Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Smyrna, appears to us as Santa Claus.  He drives a sled through the starry heavens full of gifts.  He brings hope and cheer, and a sort of justice, a rustic memory of God the Father.  His steadfast reappearance each year is, I think, for the most part a good thing.  In Santa we honor laughter, love, and sharing, not to mention responsible behavior.  Santa is making a list and checking it twice.  He is keeping a moral scorecard.  Examine and repent, Saint Nicholas reminds us through our children.  Will we listen?  Perhaps we are too grown-up to believe… too grown-up to bear freedom as it must be borne.  Perhaps we are not grown-up enough.

Because I am so very thankful for our freedom, I take this holy season of Advent to examine my heart, to turn to the light and away from the dark, to prepare for the child born in Bethlehem, the child that will save my soul.

O come, o come, Emmanuele.

I just finished Abby Johnson’s astonishing account of her move from being Director of a Planned Parenthood Clinic to a Coalition for Life spokesperson. I treasure so many moments in this book. I heartily recommend Unplanned.

I did not plan on encountering such a sympathetic, understanding portrait of the pro-choice, pro-abortion movement coming from one who had chosen to leave it. Abby clearly knows what it is to love your enemy. Or perhaps that is going too far – for she wouldn’t use the word enemy.

Since she was once on their staff, she can truly empathize, and she does. In this way Unplanned is a different kind of pro-life apologia. And, I think, she is on the right track, just as the prayer vigils outside abortion clinics are a better approach than showing graphic photos of aborted babies and name-calling.

One of the remarkable insights I received from Abby’s book, and there were many such flashes of sudden understanding, is how language is used to promote a viewpoint. As an avid reader and novelist, I have been long attuned to the use of language. But the power of word substitution such asfetus for baby, or termination for abortion, struck me forcibly. When we call that person growing in the womb a fetus and not a baby, a mindset change takes place. When we call the taking of life a medical proceduresolving a disease-like problem, a mindset change takes place.

I considered how we all lie to ourselves, how we all avoid some of the hard truths of life. We avoid thinking about our own deaths, for we might need to examine our own lives. We avoid examining our own lives, for we might need to admit fault, an admission that suggests, even demands, change. We avoid God, sliding away from proofs for his existence, for we might need to obey his commandments, beginning with regular Sunday worship. We slip and we slide, many times without being aware of it. And often our culture encourages the sliding.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said. While I would argue that every life is worth living, I see his point. Man needs meaning and direction, and such meaningful direction comes from an examined life. We become whole when we understand where we are going and why. We experience joy when we come to know the author of that path. Without God, we wander and we wonder. Eventually, we despair.

The Church’s season of Advent approaches, the four weeks that prepare us for the coming of Christ, Christmas. Some call it a “mini-Lent,” although our culture discourages such observance, particularly in the December frenzy of shopping and parties. Even so, it is a time to examine one’s life. It is a time to return to God, to seek order and meaning in our choices each and every day. It is a time to go back to church to find him.

I find that Advent and Lent pull me into reality, return sanity to my life, particularly if my time on earth has not been recently examined. They are seasons of preparation for the great acts of God among us – the Incarnation in a cave outside Bethlehem, the Crucifixion and Resurrection on a hill outside Jerusalem. Advent is a time to examine my life, hold it up to God’s standards and repent of the slips and slides that I may not have recognized during the year.

As I read Abby Johnson’s powerful and sympathetic first-person account, I gave thanks to God for his working among us. I was reminded that each of us can be manipulated by words, propaganda, and societal pressure. Do we want to be blown about by others? I think not. Only God can give us the strength and wisdom to live a true life, an examined life, a life-welcoming life, a life planned by God, if perhaps unplanned by us.

Thank you, Abby Johnson.

It has been a stunning week and in many respects I am catching my breath, before breathing normally again.

We have returned to the Big Island of Hawaii for a few days to read and write and rest.  Here, along the Kohala coast, the sea rustles the shore, and moist air kisses our aging skin.  It is a gentle world to all appearances, and one might think it was indeed the first paradise, the Garden of Eden.  Sights and sounds and scents and flavors and soft breezes cosset us in a sweet cocoon and for the time being we can hide from the real world, the world we have left.

Appearances can be deceiving, I fully know.  The sea can pull out and under, the sun can burn and devour, the rain and wind can flood and destroy.

Just so, I thought, appearances are often deceiving in the world we left – the world of wars and rumors of wars, of lawsuits, of greed, of lying, of fraud and breach of trust, of misuse and mismanagement, mis-this and mis-that, the twisting of truths.  The media strikingly knows this full well as it colors stories to their liking.  Right and wrong.  Truth and falsity.  Where is the line dividing them?  Is the gray country in between so difficult to navigate?

Today’s Epistle was Paul’s wonderful passage about putting on the full armor of God:

My brethren, be strong in the Lord in the power of his might.  Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield offaith, where with ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of theSpirit, which is the word of God… (italics mine) Ephesians 6:10+

So the full armor is truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God.  I try to recall these things as I maneuver through the confusing world about us, making my own small choices, thinking how could they possibly matter.

But they do matter.  These choices protect us from the world’s discord and anarchy, from, indeed, death.  How we chose to live our lives counts.

My stunning moment from last week came as a response from from one of my final draft readers in New Zealand.  He is a language scholar and lay theologian for whom I have immense admiration and respect, and God has blessed me with his wisdom and excellent editorial eye, his suggestions after reading the first and sixth drafts of my novel-in-progress, The Magdalene Mystery.   He sent me his most recent comments and included a stunning quotation for the book jacket.  I am overwhelmed, and of course, deeply thankful.

My novel is about truth – how we know it, how we use it in our perception of the world, how it influences our choices in life.  In a word, or rather phrase, how truth governs our lives.

As our world discards the idea of truth and embraces relativity, personal taste, subjectivism, each of us must take on the armor of God.  Each of us must question our own choices, set them against standards of right and wrong, of righteousness.  But whose standard?  Whose authority?  For Christians, the answer is simple: God’s.  But how do we know his will?  St. Paul gives us guidelines to help us discern.  We learn how to love (the gospel of peace), we keep the faith (in Christ), and we absorb Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Church through which the Holy Spirit weaves.  In this way we are protected from falsehood and the “wiles of the devil.”  We are saved.

I feel more “armored” simply having read the Epistle, more ready to re-enter the real world of twists and turns that lie ahead.  I shall be prepared to choose.

Yesterday, Saturday, was cold, the temperatures dropping, surprising me.  Damp seeped over the hills, sliding into our home through windows and doors, an invisible chill.  I grabbed my winter jacket and headed for our parish’s annual Holiday Boutique.

Red-draped tables were piled high with goodies and gifts – soup mixes, cookies, cakes; country crafts, colorful cottons to hold shoes, paisleys to cosset jewelry, floral prints to keep bread warm with a tiny pocket of rice to microwave and return to the neat little pocket (so clever!).  The hall was full of imagination and color, and I meandered along the aisles, caught in a garden of dreams turned into handiwork that had been loved with each stitch and with each knit and purl.  There were tiny booties and toasty slippers in blues and pinks and colorful jumbled weaves, little caps and big caps for the snow and rain, for the little people and the big people, scarves looping and softly flowing, shawls to drape over chilling shoulders.  The men of the parish had made signs for the busy street corner and had climbed ladders to loop streamers between green wreathes in the hall.  Holiday music swung from note to note, getting us all in the mood.  There were raffle tickets for bottles of wine and gift baskets and even a set of my little books.

My little books looked rather dull next to all of this.  Nevertheless, I set them out and signed and chatted with folks as they dropped by.

This last week was one of my favorites in the Church Year.  The world was silly on Halloween Monday – pretending to be what it was not, wishing for more sugar (who doesn’t?), being someone else for a few hours, someone good, evil, famous, clever, silly, serious.  Goblins and witches roamed neighborhoods and folks gathered to sip mulled wine and answer  doorbells and fill pillow cases with mini candy bars.  Trick-or-treat!  Halloween.  All Hallows Eve.  The night before All Saints Day.  The night when the spirits of the dead roamed the earth, that is, before the belief was vanquished by the Church.  Perhaps those spirits too were unhappy with who they were.

There was a time, before the West was Christianized, when the end of summer was celebrated on October 31.  It was believed that the spirits of ancestors roamed the earth this night, and folks would light bonfires to frighten them away.  They also left food out to appease their terrible tempers.  Christianity dispelled those fears, or should have, for Christians do not believe that the dead roam the earth, but rather that they are with God in Heaven.  We no longer fear the dead or our own death.  The Church, as it did with many of its festivals explaining this wonderful resurrection faith, transformed a pagan festival of fear into a Christian festival of love, All Saints, honoring these men and women of God.

And so on All Saints Tuesday we gathered to offer our thanksgivings for the saints, past, present, and to come, those living among us, loving us, sacrificing for us.  We met in the great nave and before the white tented tabernacle and offered this Mass of thanksgiving for those who knew fully who they were, who in their life on earth grew more and more full of God.  As they journeyed in time, God molded them into their true selves.

Many of us returned on Wednesday for All Souls day, that day of thanks and remembrance for the rest of those who have died and have passed into eternal glory.  As Christians we know these souls do not roam the earth.  We live with the certainty they are happy and that we shall join them one day.  At the Mass for All Souls our priest read the names of those members and friends of the parish who have traveled to Heaven, and I listened to the list tolled in the cool air of the sanctuary, as light streamed through skylights upon the crucifix.  I knew many of them.  Among them there were Willa and Louise and Jeanine and Kay and Vi and Elizabeth and Dot, women who had mothered me in my single parent days, women who had cuddled my four-year-old son who at the time had no father in his life.  There were the men too – Hugh and George and John and Jim.  And many more.  These are the saints I think of often, the souls in heaven who made such a difference on earth, who knew all about love.

So it was with a heart full of those who had gone before me, those who had once stood in this hall and sold handicrafts crafted with love so many years ago, that I browsed our parish Holiday Boutique.  I gave thanks for the men and women who had gone ahead and as I lifted my eyes to one of the ladies selling a calico memo holder with magnets for the fridge, I was overwhelmed by love.

I left the church laden with goodies, and impatiently awaiting the chance to try the freshly made pecan pralines.  I also carried in my bursting bag a jar of soup mixings, the same savory minestrone we had with our tea-lunch (excellent) and while I am not much of a cook, this has given me a goal.  We shall have soup over the holidays, paired with a nice crusty loaf of whole wheat.

It was raining lightly as I made my way to my car.  I pulled my jacket tighter about me and popped open my umbrella, ready to journey a bit farther in my span of time, full of the life and love of God manifested in his people.