Monthly Archives: September 2014

Singing with Angels

Posted on September 28, 2014 | 2 comments

330px-Guido_Reni_031Today is the eve of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, or “Michaelmas.” Michaelmas marks the end of harvest, the beginning of fall and the shortening of days.

I believe in angels. They have fluttered through my life, ordering and arranging, guarding and nudging, strengthening and leading. And so today in church I was especially pleased to rediscover this marvelous hymn, #122, sung to a traditional Irish melody:

Angels and ministers, spirits of grace,
Friends of the children, beholding God’s face,
Moving like thought to us through the beyond,
Moulded in beauty, and free from our bond!
 
Messengers clad in the swiftness of light,
Subtle as flame, as creative in might,
Helmed with the truth and with charity shod,
Wielding the wind of the purpose of God!
 
Earth’s myriad creatures live after their kind,
Dumb, in the life of the body confined;
You are pure spirit, but we here below,
Linked in both orders, are tossed to and fro.
 
You do God’s bidding unshaken and strong;
We are distraught ‘twixt the right and the wrong;
Yet would we soar as the bird from the mesh,
Freed from the weakness and wonder of flesh.
 

Percy Dearmer, 1867-1936

Angels are “free from our bond… free from the weakness and wonder of flesh.” We, however, are “Dumb, in the life of the body confined… Linked in both orders… tossed to and fro.” We are made for another country, to be sure. We are alien creatures on this earth, sensing another home, a home calling us. Each time we respond to goodness, beauty, truth, and love we are touched by this heavenly world. We are pulled. Each time we pray, each time we make the Sign of the Cross, each time we receive the Holy Eucharist, we reach and touch heaven. We are both body and spirit, unlike angels, who are only spirit. We have a foot in each world; we straddle two countries or perhaps toggle between.

And it is true, as Father Dearmer says, that our flesh is both weak and wondrous. Today, as cultural forces seek to merge the male and the female, to create androgyny and deny gender, I see this wonder disappearing. Men and women were created to be delightfully complementary to one another; they are uniquely different and yet when joined together they produce new life. So within the sacred union of marriage, God works these miracles, transforms our fleshly weakness into creative strength. He unites heaven and earth through our flesh.

Michael the Archangel is described in Scripture as the great warrior-angel who defeated the rebel angel Lucifer in the war in heaven.  And of course there are choirs of angels, angels appearing to comfort and guide as well as protect, messenger angels bridging heaven and earth. There are many accounts of people seeing angels, often testimony of children whose vision is unguarded.

Angels are “unshaken and strong,” but we are torn between “right and wrong.” And yet, angels help us to choose when we are torn and strengthen us in our good choices. For angels wield “the wind of the purpose of God.”

I pray for such a wind daily, especially as I work my way through the first draft of my novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail. I know that I cannot write it alone. I need help and, as I reach for help, angels lift up my hands to the heavens, leaving my feet firmly planted on earth. I can feel the stretch of my soul, my mind, my heart, and sometimes it hurts.

I pray for such a wind for our nation and those of the Western world, as we fight to defend our boundaries, both of liberty and land, as we build a wide fire trail to keep out those who will burn to ash our way of life, our freedom.

I pray for the angels all around us to open our eyes that we may see the truth. And I thank God for Father Dearmer and his dear portrait of our ministering heavenly friends.

As the Mass ended this morning, we sang another powerful hymn, #600, and my husband turned to me to whisper, “My favorite.” The organ thundered and as the crucifer and torchbearers recessed triumphantly down the aisle, followed by the clergy in their gleaming white robes, we sang, “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…”

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On Tax Collectors and Free Speech

Posted on September 21, 2014 | Leave a comment

Matthew.EvangelistToday is the Feast of St. Matthew, Apostle. Matthew, also called Levi in Scripture, was a Jewish tax collector. He was one of those who, like most of us, live and work in the secular world. Some compromise their beliefs to do this, or maybe don’t examine too closely their Sunday creed versus the world’s weekday creed. How else could they survive? Some simply turn a blind eye to the world around them, or the world of their temple or church.

In Matthew’s case, he collected more than was owed. The difference was his very living, so he found himself caught in a corrupt system, hated by his own people. Christ pulled him out of this world and into discipleship. When Christ commanded, “Follow me,” he followed. In his case, it meant leaving his other world behind. He didn’t seem to hesitate.

So we too must make this choice in our own lives: how we spend our time, how we vote, what we read, what we say, what we teach our children, what we model to our children. Some of us make radical changes in direction; some continue on the same paths. We compare our lives to lives like Matthew. How do we measure up?

One of the larger issues today is the nature of man and woman. The Judeo-Christian tradition gives clear definitions, and provides models for family life, community life, national life. But with the receding of faith, these definitions have been increasingly challenged, and no where more so than in our institutions of higher learning.

In America, land of the free, we celebrate and enjoy freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, or at least we try to. So we debate these questions openly. We give these questions air to breathe. If we do not, the debate will die and so will our culture.

In researching my current novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, I learned more about The Anscombe Society, a group begun at Princeton in 2005 promoting chastity outside of marriage, offering a sexual ethos for students. The Stanford Anscombe Society, the student group at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, defines its mission as follows:

The Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) is a student group that promotes discussion regarding the roles of the family, marriage, and sexual integrity in the lives of Stanford students both now and after graduation. SAS is neither religiously nor politically affiliated, instead basing our positions on human principles. We hold that the family is the key unit of a stable society, and we define the family as one man and one woman bound together by marriage, along with any children that they might have. SAS defines marriage as a union, until death, between one man and one woman. We promote the idea that sexual integrity is necessary for this family unit to be successful.

This group was denied by the university partial funding for their conference at Stanford last spring. The group was recognized as a student group, but since a “politically correct” minority of students objected, the university bowed to these objections. The Society still had their conference, welcoming all points of view in a civilized, open and respectful debate (see http://www.stanfordanscombe.org/ for videos of speakers and student interviews).

Also, in California, there have been instances where Christian groups have been forced off campus because their leaders were Christian. The court ruling said that all groups on campus must make their membership as well as their leadership be “open to all comers,” i.e. they must allow, for example, an atheist to lead their group. What is wrong with this picture?

The borderlands between the secular and the sacred have always been fraught with danger. But since we do not want to live in a theocracy, nor under a totalitarian regime, we champion freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and open debate. We support communication of belief, or nonbelief, and peaceful assembly.

The fire trail protecting freedom from tyranny is not as wide or protective as it once was. I am so very grateful to The Anscombe Society for speaking out and encouraging open conversation. I am grateful to Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), a British philosopher considered by some to be the greatest in the twentieth century. A professor at Cambridge, she made the case for family values, monogamy, the definition of marriage, arguing and reasoning as a trained philosopher. This is a debate we must not silence; we must not allow irrationality to breach the trail and burn to ash this public conversation.

And I’m grateful for St. Matthew, who, it would appear, did not hesitate to obey his Lord. I am thankful for his Gospel, especially precious at Christmas, for his “good news” is the only account of the wise men bringing their gifts to the Christ Child, a manifestation, or epiphany of the Incarnation to the greater world.

And as I worshiped in my parish church this morning and listened to our own fiery preacher (from a Jewish tradition) describe St. Matthew, I gave thanks once again for my freedom to worship and for our preacher’s freedom to preach. And I once again realized, as I gazed upon the medieval crucifix that hangs over the tabernacle holding the Real Presence of Christ, that all my choices were made easy with the first, the choice to follow the truth, just like that tax collector in Capernaum.

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Secret Stairs in Berkeley

Posted on September 14, 2014 | Leave a comment

secret stairs 1I’ve been studying a map of Berkeley and the secret stairs of the Berkeley Hills produced by the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. The characters in my novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, follow these steps that bridge roads winding into the forests above the university campus, winding up to the Fire Trails.

It is curious how maps organize a broad range of information and yet at the same time help the eye to focus and pinpoint one spot. Maps are like our brains, full of detail, a network of perception of both the past (memory), the present (observation) and the future (plans). Like this shiny unfolded paper that covers my desk, we too are mapped with broad ranges as well as focal points; our brains are miracles of design, epicenters of will and desire.

Novels are stories that connect the dots, draw the lines between moments of intense focus. These moments are often crises producing turning-points. A main crisis propels the major arc of the novel along, as sub-crises propel the chapters, and sometimes even sub-sub-crises propel the scenes. The process is much like walking through Berkeley, coming upon secret stairs that connect the winding roads; sometimes we rise and sometimes we fall.

History is full of these patterns, and these crises often catalyze action, focusing our attention, the attention of our community, the attention of our country, the attention of the world, upon a single incident. The crisis we remembered this week was the horrific bombing of the World Trade Center thirteen years ago on September 11. Our television screens invaded our homes with the shocking news, and although there had been many smaller crises leading up to this one, it was this one that caught our attention, that became America’s and the Western world’s turning point.

We had not been attacked on our own soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941. Our violence since then had been self-inflicted – shootings, riots, demonstrations. Some of us, in our arrogance, tried to deny it was the work of a foreign enemy. How could anyone do this? Each of us recalls, like the day that President Kennedy was shot, where we were and what we were doing when we found out, when we first saw the plumes rising, heard the rumble of the falling towers. It was as though the jets had sliced a knife into our hearts and minds. Our safe and civilized world crumbled; the map of our culture had been ripped apart and was increasingly incomprehensible. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were threatened; our freedom of speech – in word, deed, and worship – was attacked.

They say that the West experienced a similar shock as it counted its dead in the aftermath of World War I, a war we memorialize this year, begun one hundred years ago. Then too, the fire trail was breached, and the flames of barbarism crossed into our peaceful lands, threatening to destroy all that the West had built, over thousands of years since Abraham (then Abram) was called to leave the pagan world of Ur. World War I was a turning point, a catalyst that produced nihilism and despair, Lenin and Hitler and Mao, Nietzsche’s superman and the cold liberal arrogance of academic elite reigning from their own towers, these of ivory.

Church and temple imploded, divided on the path to take. Many of the once-faithful claimed God to be dead, or at least sleeping. Many delighted in such a claim, worshiping themselves and contributing to the anarchy of self-gratification now so fashionable. And so, darkness descended upon the Western world, lit here and there by communities of traditional believers, those who held onto their map, saw the way forward clearly in Scripture, Sacrament, and Creed, and who lit their candles, calling all to come and worship.

There have been three beheadings in the last month, at the last count, and I suppose now the world is watching and counting. We are finally focused. The many lines, the many roads, the many intersections where we weren’t sure which way to turn, have all converged in a single place on our map. Like the World Trade Center bombings, these violent images have stabbed our hearts and minds.

Through it all, the lights lit in our churches and temples burn brightly, calling us together, to gather as one heart and one mind before God. And as I knelt in the pew this morning in St. Joseph’s Chapel in Berkeley, my minutes and days of the week, however scattered, were gathered together in that single hour of worship. In that hour of song and praise and penitence and communion, all that was past was brought into the present and redeemed. All that would come in the future lay in God’s palm, cradled.

The connecting stairs were no longer secret passageways, but right there in beautiful bold print in my Book of Common Prayer. The paths led sensibly through the dark and into the light between the onionskin pages of my tattered Bible. Sin was forgiven, death destroyed. I could turn again, re-pent, re-form, in this weekly turning point. I could face the days ahead of me, the chaos of the world, the burning of the good and the beautiful and the true. For here was the essence, the distillation of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Here was life, for me and for each of us. Here was love that passeth all understanding, love that made sense of all maps.

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Crossing the Courtyard

Posted on September 7, 2014 | Leave a comment
St. Peter's, 1913

St. Peter’s, 1913

Our parish church, St. Peter’s Anglican in Oakland, is building a new courtyard. Over the summer we have entered the church through side doors and back doors. We have peered over broken-down walls and into churned-up soil and rock. Along the way we unearthed our original cornerstone, laid in 1913. Somehow it was buried when a new church was built alongside the old in 1957. 

There has been much discussion, weighing in, rethinking this and deciding on that, in the process of executing the architect’s vision for our courtyard. Are the colors compatible with the existing buildings? Should there be a lych-gate or just a gate? How high will the brick walls be exactly? Did we really have to remove the palm tree? When will it be finished? In time for our organ concert? When will the elevators for the handicapped be done?

There has been much sighing and wringing of hands and raising of brows, then chuckling and open palms and leaving it all to God. Somehow we have weathered the great questions and agreed upon sensible answers. God has been good.

Today, finally, we could see how it all might turn out. Planting beds are marked. The brick wall (not too high) is finished, an inviting border. Soon the patio will be laid. Soon the front doors will be opened, their chains broken, and soon we will once again cross the threshold of our church, leave the secular behind and enter the sacred.

The sun came out this morning as we peered over the low brick wall. The heavy fog that settles upon the Bay Area this time of year had burned away. The earth, its gravity holding our church fast on its rim, was turning slowly, away from summer into autumn in this part of the world, away from winter into spring in other parts. For us here, on this part of the planet, daylight shrinks as the dark of night expands.

I’m glad to have a sacred space hugging the edge of the earth so firmly, and I’m glad to have a courtyard that links the secular with the sacred, that points to the light in the darkness.  Crossing such a space is a preparation, a time to quiet the mind and heart before kneeling in a pew to worship God. It is a time to bridge two worlds – that of God and that of man.

In the end, that is what Christians do, or are called to do. Each of us is a kind of courtyard, a linking and a joining of the secular and the sacred, of earth and heaven. We have experienced the transcendent, God become man, God giving himself to man in the Eucharist, God living within man through Eucharist and Spirit. But we are all only partly finished courtyards, I fear, for each of us has a long way to go for our gardens to flower, for our patios to be solid enough to bear much weight.

But we open our gates, and we invite those outside to come inside, to leave the noise and enter the quiet. We say, come, look and see what we have seen! Come, know the peace of God. Come, be healed. We witness to transcendence, here in our earthy world, an increasingly dangerous and barbaric world.

The Gospel for today was the healing of the man who cannot hear and cannot speak. He was deaf and dumb. Christ charges him and the witnesses to tell no one, but they do anyway, “beyond measure astonished, saying, ‘He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.’ ” I too am beyond measure astonished when I enter our holy space and gaze at the altar and its tented tabernacle resting in its garden of fiery tapers. I too want to tell about it, for my ears have been opened and my tongue loosed. I too have been healed of apathy, despair, depression, heartbreak, fear… to name just a few demons. I too have been forgiven my sins. Once, long ago, I was invited to enter through a gate by someone, like me today, grinning and beckoning from a courtyard, calling me to cross the threshold and enter the church. And once I entered, I knew, from the beauty that engulfed me, that I had left the secular and stepped into the sacred. And I was beyond measure astonished.

Soon our courtyard will be finished. Soon it will invite the halt, the lame, and the blind to enter this holy home of God and be healed. Soon it will witness to the world the incarnation of God, to Emmanuel, God with us. For the 1913 church and the 1957 church are now joined by the 2014 garden court, the child of a century of worship, a century of incense, candles, and song, a century of transcendent beauty.

http://www.saintpetersoakland.com

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Traditions and Arrangements

Posted on September 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

Writing ImageIt is Labor Day, a time to honor work, the working man and woman, those who contribute to our world with their time, talent, and the sweat of their brow. It is appropriately also a time to send our children to school to learn how to do this, how to use their lives productively, how to work and to become responsible for their hours and days. So I turn to one of my many labors, my novel-in-progress, hoping to one day carry it to full term and allow it to breathe.

In creating the back-story for one of my characters, I have revisited the huge topic, Western Civilization: what it is and do we want to preserve it, and if we do, how do we go about it?

I am a saver of cogent words, powerful words in print. I snip bits from newspapers and magazines. I file them, where they sleep until resurrected in a moment like this when I am constructing a novel, drawing the blueprint that will become a huge house of many rooms. I am an architect, I suppose, in the planning stages, building inch by inch, word by word, scribble by scribble. Each room is a character, and they meet from time to time in the house, rub shoulders, touch one another’s minds and hearts and souls with their hopes and fears and regrets. Some rooms are dark, some light, some warm, some cold. They are all under the roof of my little novel, linked by halls and doorways and stairs.

The bits and pieces snipped and saved, ideas that will flow into these rooms are expressed by many ponderers from the English-speaking world. They voice concern, and rightly so, that without the Judeo-Christian underpinning of Western culture, the free world will collapse. One doesn’t have to be religious to worry about this… one merely has to face the reality of such a loss and how it would affect, at the very least, our ideas of liberty, law, and democracy.

Thomas Jefferson’s words decorate his memorial in Washington, D.C.:

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

Jefferson, a skeptic, is referring to slavery, but these words could have been written today. We all wonder, believers and skeptics, whether our liberties can be secure when we remove the author of the liberties, and when we remove the idea that these freedoms are gifts not rights.

Peggy Noonan writes that there are reasons for traditions and arrangements, some are good, some not so good, ways of doing things learned from experience. These ways have also risen from religious roots. Through the centuries since the birth of Christ, the West, under the influence of the Judeo-Christian social philosophy, has organized life based on the belief that God exists, that he loves and desires us to love, that he made man to be a free, thinking, creative being that would respond to him in turn, freely, thinking, and creatively. Behind the rule of law, behind our institutions of family, church, government, and free press, supporting our right to organize our workers, to gather in peaceful assembly, even behind our table manners and Robert’s Rules of Order, lies the Judeo-Christian definition of man and his purpose. So there are reasons for our traditions and arrangements in the Western world; there are reasons we labor to protect them.

The traditions and arrangements have changed from time to time, tweaked here and there, discarded here and restored there, fought over, around, and within, in word and in deed. Slavery challenges and condemns us, in the Classical world, among African tribes, and on American plantations. Today a child in the womb is seen by some to be owned by the mother, the unborn having no rights. Across the world, children are bought and sold, trafficked for labor, sex, surrogacy. Women are in bondage, jailed, beheaded. Believers are martyred. We see these things, we judge them to be right or wrong, and we labor to change them. So there are times when we need to alter traditions and arrangements to better reflect the Judeo-Christian definition of man and his congress with one another. But without the ideal, the standard by which to judge, how can we decide, act, affect the real world?

It is a conundrum, for our ideals of respect and liberty prevent coerced belief, even if belief may be necessary to uphold that liberty. So folks speak of a public square where we honor these ideals and seek common ground to move forward. They say we must reflect before deserting traditional definitions of marriage and family, that is, a man and a woman raising their own children. These arrangements have held and continue to hold society together. Studies show that the father is more committed, the mother more protected, the child more loved, when this traditional view is encouraged by government representing society. There is less delinquency and fewer single parent households.

I believe in the author of this code of life, this Judeo-Christian God, so it is easy for me to believe in these traditions and arrangements. I believe there will be a judgment (perhaps it’s ongoing) – a reckoning not only I will face but the world as well. We reap what we sow.

But I also pray that those who do not share my belief in that God, consider embracing his traditions and arrangements that have been honed through the centuries. If skeptics value liberty and the rule of law, respect for gender and race, care for the poor and handicapped, the unborn and the aged, if they desire freedom of thought, speech and worship, they would be wise to support the institutions that uphold these Western ideals.

I suppose the world is much like my blueprint for the mansion with the many rooms. Every person is different, unique, but together we have a common humanity. We share the earth and we share a long history. We live under the same roof of suns and moons and stars. We meet in common areas to agree upon traditions and arrangements, but we must build on those of the past, rather than begin anew each time. We nail and we hammer, we add here and pull away there, but we must consider why we do what we do and what we shall lose if we don’t. We must not forget how we arrived at this place, in this time, and why the rooms were decorated and arranged just so, before we tear them down. We must recall, if we are graced with belief, who labored to create this great house, our world, and that he calls us to love one another as he has arranged for us to love.

And it’s good to remember President Jefferson’s words, that our liberties are gifts from God our creator, and be thankful.

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