Monthly Archives: November 2012

Thanksgiving weekend seems to me to be a door opening onto Christmas.

It marks the end – or close to the end – of the Church Year. And fittingly, it marks the end by giving thanks, expressing gratitude.

In our national thanksgiving this week we as Americans took part in small and large celebrations of gratitude. We considered those who first gave thanks for their freedoms in this foreign land. Those pilgrims gave thanks to God, a God of grace, and today, many of us still believe in a God to whom we may render thanks. Those not believing in God, I suppose, give thanks to a vague sense of fortune or luck or destiny, carrying the grace of gratitude in their hearts without an object for that gratitude, as though their grateful feelings linger in the air, lost.

Grace, gratitude.  From the Latin root gratia, favor, kindness, esteem. We feel favored, gifted, loved, and we respond with thanksgiving. We say grace at meals, thanking God for our food, and we pray for God’s grace in our lives, asking for his favor.

Christians have long associated action with grace, as though God could fill us and cover us with himself. He could shelter us. He could live inside us. We could be imbued with him.

And so it is fitting, that this door of Thanksgiving weekend opens onto the season of Advent, the preparation for the Incarnation at Christmas, God’s ultimate gift of grace to us.

My bishop often says to me, “All is grace.” These are powerful words. They are hopeful words. These words say that, in the end, God wins. In the end, God will act throughout our world and throughout our history, pulling all of us together.

The Gospel today, the Sunday next before Advent, described the feeding of the five thousand in John 6. Our Lord Jesus multiplies five loaves and two fish to provide enough to feed everyone with some left over. Our preacher commented profoundly on what happens after this miracle. Jesus says to gather up the fragments so that nothing be lost.

These also are powerful words, hopeful words. This gathering is the action of grace – for we as Christians, are imbued with God through Baptism and the sacraments. We are the fragments scattered throughout the world that will be gathered up. And not one of us, in time or space, will be lost. It is God’s economy of love.

There are echoes here of the good shepherd searching for the single lost sheep. The shepherd knows his own and the sheep know him. And the shepherd is the door to the sheepfold.

All is grace.

We enter the season of Advent. We are grateful for grace. At every Eucharist (from the Greek for thanksgiving) we offer our thanksgiving in the great action of the Mass. We offer and we receive back a hundred-fold. We unite with Christ so that one day we will know his voice, and he will gather us together from every corner of the earth.

And we too must gather. We must gather up the lost, bind the wounded, clothe the naked, feed the hungry. We gather and are gathered. We feed upon God and are fed by him. We give thanks as we walk through the door that has now swung open, as we step into the mysterious and marvelous season of Christmas.

Thanksgiving. A time of giving thanks.

We gather together as a family, a family of cultures forming America. We give thanks for our country, its founding, and the diversity of its peoples, a rainbow promising many pots of gold.

We gather together in order to gather up all of our peoples to celebrate this remarkable land – its fields and forests, streams and lakes, seas and bays, cities and towns, large and small. Our peoples are many, and of many colors, of many races, of many generations, of many beliefs.

In a way, our Thanksgiving holiday echoes our Independence Day. But the Fourth of July recalled a pulling away to protect defensively who we thought we might be, an identity we groped to formulate, two hundred years ago. But since that time of our founding fathers, our nation has matured and we have come to know ourselves better. We know how rich and prosperous and talented we are. We appreciate, even honor, our differences. We have learned humility as well in as we mourn our mistakes, our fallen heroes, our false prides.

Our nation has been called a melting pot. And indeed we are – a melting pot in which we still savor each flavor of this aromatic blend, stirred again and again.

If we were born here, we count ourselves fortunate.

If we immigrated here, we count ourselves blessed.

If we desire to come here, we pray for the chance.

But all of us Americans, whether by birth or immigration, must agree to a common rule of law to keep the common peace. We must take seriously our freedoms which demand certain civic responsibilities. We must educate ourselves, learn the native language, read about the issues. We must respect democracy’s demands.

Granted this, we are a great people. And it is for these people, the American people, I am supremely thankful. We came from Europe, fleeing prejudice and tyranny and most of all, religious persecution.

Let us recall on Thursday as we feast upon turkey and pie, stuffing and cranberries, to not forget the settlers who came before us and the tribes who first lived in this fair land. Somehow, the pilgrims and the Indians, through war and peace, have merged and melted into the broth, making us a stronger people.

My family has American Indian blood running in its veins. We also have Irish and English, Norwegian and French ancestry, even a touch of German. We share in this multi-ethnic stream, and we are stronger for it. We are more creative for it. We are more interesting, more multi-faceted. We have a more promising future.

America is a country of inter-marriage. Marriage – where two unite sacramentally to produce a third – is something we take for granted. But such an equation stirs the genetic pot. Rather than cloning, reproducing the same, each child is a new uncharted genetic universe, a world of infinite possibility. Each creation is thus a grandiose miracle.

So nations and race do not matter. We came together, indeed, continue to come together, in this land to form a new peaceful union, one in which we may freely practice what we believe, freely travel where we wish, freely buy and sell goods. We continue to grow into who we are meant to be.

This nation is different from all that have come before, and all others today. We celebrate our differences, respecting them, honoring them, encouraging them. We only require one rule – the rule of law, the rule that ensures peace among us.

So, after our recent national elections, we pause to give thanks for our founding fathers. We pause to recall their hardships and challenges. We pause to give thanks for a roof over our heads and a meal set before us. We gather as families and friends around our tables, in halls or homes. We are Americans.

And those of us who believe in a God of providence and grace, we give thanks especially to God, for the grace to believe, for this great land we call America, and for the glory of our freedom.

Deo gratias.

We, the People, have spoken.

In our great national elections this week, we chose more government, less military, more dependency, less self-reliance. We chose not to change things, but to go with the flow, wherever that might lead. We chose image over reality, propaganda over truth. We were lazy. We did not study the issues, but relied on demagogues and vicious sound bites, lies corrected too late to matter. The course of the national debate reached new lows and I fear will motivate future debates. The nastier the blow, the better, we said with our votes. If it was said on TV, we stated, it must be true. There are no rules of civility, our choice proclaimed. Fact-checking doesn’t count, We the People decided.

Perhaps the losing side learned their lessons; perhaps not. Perhaps the losers will fight differently next time, with more attention to image and propaganda, sound bites, slander, vicious blows. Either way, we lose to this lowering of the bar.

After all, our great democratic experiment where the average citizen reads at a fifth-grade level, and mostly newspapers at that, has had a miraculous run for two hundred plus years. There was a time when we voted for national interest above personal, but that is clearly changing. As Alex de Tocqueville observed in the mid-nineteenth century:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.   (italics mine)

Ours is a great country. We have sacrificed much to protect our land, our freedoms, our faiths, and our families, and today, Veterans Day, we recalled the immeasurable debt we owe to those who have fought for America. To veterans and those who have died for this country we pay tribute and give our deepest thanks. We honor you. You sacrificed to keep us safe. And you continue to sacrifice to keep us safe.

Our ninety-three year old deacon wore his army jacket to church today. Another veteran wore a navy cap. I thought of my father who served as a chaplain in the South Pacific under General MacArthur in the Second World War, ministering to the sailors on board the USS Phoenix as kamikaze pilots dove into the waters around them. “The boys I cared for were so young, most of them only eighteen,” he would say, as though his own age of twenty-seven was so very old. But he didn’t say much else about those years, not wanting to relive them. Like many veterans he returned home glad to have protected his country, glad to marry and have children, glad to be alive, glad to be safe.

Some of these men returned whole, some returned maimed in soul and body, some didn’t return. We the People rebuilt our country, and we were not attacked again on our own soil until September 11, 2001. Today this date seems far away, and considering the vote on Tuesday, mostly forgotten.

Indeed, we ordinary folks soldier on here in our own land, as we fight the battle for literacy, for honesty, for law and order. And we must not take our privilege of voting lightly. If we do not have the time or desire or capacity to understand the issues at stake, to examine the candidates, then we must choose carefully those authorities who do, who share our views about life. We have another two years to make such choices, another four to listen to the authorities we have carefully chosen to learn from.

I recall the first time I voted, around age twenty. I thought I knew all about the Presidential candidates from the opinions of adults around me, teachers, parents, and the occasional news headline. I entered the voting booth and with increasing dismay saw all the other choices I needed to make. I felt sick. I had no idea who the candidates were, let alone what they would do or what they stood for. I didn’t know a bond from a proposition from a measure. I guessed.

I’m not proud of this – but I fear I am not alone. The world is a complicated place and we are largely uneducated voters, nor do we have the time or inclination to become educated.

One of the news columns spoke of how the election was like a game, everyone taking a side and rooting for a winner. A game? (How sports reflect life and certainly not vice-versa is a subject for another day).

This is not a game. This is real. Nine-eleven was real. The last two world wars were terribly real as was Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Iran is terribly real.

We the People will speak again, but perhaps not many more times if de Tocqueville is correct. Many of our thoughts and opinions already have been tranquilized if not euthanized, taken over and redirected by powerful cultural forces of image and propaganda. The next time that we voice our choice we must use an educated voice, one formed by those who know something – the economists, the generals, the clergy.

Perhaps, with God’s grace, we will form a more perfect union, as we announced ebulliently in 1787:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…

Perhaps, with God’s grace, we will after all provide for our future peoples, our Posterity in this remarkable and generous nation, our grandchildren and their children, and the great experiment will no longer be so threatened by how We the People have spoken.

They say it is darkest before the dawn. Perhaps it is the contrasting rays of light that bathe the heavens as our curve of earth turns toward the sun. But we use these words to describe more than planetary events. We use these words to describe ourselves, our lives, our daily struggles trying to see.

We all know the darkness of loss, of fatigue, of illness, of heartbreak. When the lost is found, the tired rested, the sick healed, hearts mended, we sigh with relief, happiness, as light pours into our souls.

This last week the dark night of All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, was lit by the dawn of All Saints. On Thursday in our historic chapel we sang together the stalwart hymn, For all the saints… in which the story of the saints is told by William Walsham How (1864), set to Vaughn Williams’ stalwart marching tune (1906):

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Thou wast their Rock, their Fortress and their Might;
Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well fought fight;
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true Light.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave, again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of glory passes on His way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

These are fighting words. These are words of praise, of joy, of glory, of light. Through the music we catch sainthood, we catch a vision of God, the God who banished the darkness from man’s heart.

Today, the Sunday in the Octave of All Saints, saints’ hymns filled my ears, a joyful part of the Holy Liturgy. We sang the lilting hymn by Lesbia Scott, I sing a song of the saints of God, faithful and brave and true… and the children from the Sunday School processed up the red carpet, each dressed as a saint. Babies and toddlers and grade schoolers, dressed in capes and crowns and armor, stepped solemnly, witnessing to the next generation’s witness, their confession of faith in God’s love pouring over us.

After praying for our country, our church, our families – after scripture, sermon, sacrament – the clergy and acolytes recessed down the red carpet, and we sang one of my favorite hymns of praise, Ye holy angels bright…, tune by John Darwall (1770), words by Richard Baxter (1672) and John Hampden Gurney (1838):

Ye holy angels bright,
Who wait at God’s right hand
Or through the realms of light
Fly at your Lord’s command
Assist our song
For else the theme
Too high doth seem
For mortal tongue….

My soul, bear thou thy part
Triumph in God above
And with a well-tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love
Let all thy days
Till life shall end
Whate’er He send
Be filled with praise.

A well-tuned heart. From darkness to light, as the dawn breaks, we tune our hearts. We teach our children the ways of God, his immense love. We grow together through prayer, scripture, sacrament. Our hearts, like the planet, turn toward the light, to be bathed in the dawn, to listen for the song.

We tune our hearts, our children’s hearts, the hearts of our families, communities and country. We listen for the perfect pitch of the Creator, for the song that will lift us on angels’ wings into the realms of light, flying. In this way light triumphs over dark.

The last song lingers in my ears even now as I write this and I know it shall linger throughout the week, coloring my time. It is a great gift, this music given us, notes and words exploding from the well-tuned hearts of the saints that came before, those men and women who knew how to fly with angels.