Monthly Archives: February 2024

Having finished a first draft of my novel-in-progress, The Music of the Mountain, I find I need a concise description to answer the question, “What’s it about?”

So tentatively, in an attempt to distill sixty thousand words into a phrase or a sentence, I am sallying forth with, “Saving books in order to save Western Civilization” or perhaps, “A philosophy professor, a history teacher, an honest journalist, and a praying priest, secretly save classic history and literature before they are burned by the Social Justice Committee”. Sounds like Fahrenheit 451, and in some respects it is a modern version Bradbury’s dystopian novel, but much more. Set in January 2023, the Emergency Powers of government has decreed classics to be hateful and has erased those portions of the Internet deemed too white. Libraries are closed due to the pandemic, and will unlikely reopen. So my intrepid professor gathers a few booklovers, former students, to help her save civilization, one shelf at a time. Lo and behold, a secret library emerges!

So the novel continues my fascination with words, and with people, and this time with virtues and memory. Language itself is a test of memory, how we write words into our minds, onto our hearts, onto our tongue in speech. Each one of us is a word, an expression of God’s love and will and design. Each one of us is unique, precious, and loved.

I believe also, that each one of us is necessary to the plan of salvation. Each plays their part, if only to link to another who links to another who links to another… until we form a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter of God’s will for mankind. Usually, we have no idea who might be the one who links to us, or who we are linking to. Who reads these words, who hears a sermon, who takes an idea from a book or a person and sends it flying through the stratosphere to someone else. Every person counts in God’s plan, and when one is lost (that lost sheep) another must be found. We are letters in the word, cursive dancing across a page, joined with others to form phrases and sentences, that fill the Earth in life and the Heavens in eternal life. My bishop of blessed memory often consoled me with the words, “Nothing is lost. Everything counts.”

And so we plant the seeds of memorized words and phrases in our hearts this Lenten season, to be ready for rising from the earth triumphantly. “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me, thou knowest my thoughts long before. Thou art about my path and about my bed, and art acquainted with all my ways. For lo, there is not a word on my tongue, but thou, O Lord, knowest it all together. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me. I cannot attain unto it…” (Psalm 139)

Christians believe in a personal God, a God that makes a difference in our lives and in our deaths. He is with us, Emmanuel. The shepherd boy David knew this in his songs in the fields, so that God could mold him to become the origin of the “Line of David” that would send forth the Christ to save the world. No small thing. He was chosen from the Chosen People of Israel and one can see why, “For my reins are thine; thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.”

And so we sing the song of love, the melody of creation, the hymn of praise to God, our creator, our Father, our Lord, our Spirit. The song begins as a solo, then joins in with others, then a great chorus rises from the Earth, a love song to God.

That is what Lent is, singing our song of life here among the living, choosing the good and rejecting the evil, cultivating Christ within us to rise on Easter morning.

And that reminds me – my Music of the Mountain is about virtue, what it is, why we need it, how to sing it in our lives. Faith, hope, and charity. Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice. And, as we heard recently, the greatest of these is charity, love. For without love, we are tinkling cymbals. Without love, we are nothing.

And there is a love story too in my little book, and a past tragedy that needs healing, and heroic visions inspired by those who fought for freedom in the past, and escape stories of the Holocaust, so that we never forget. 

But most of all, it is a collection of words and sentences and paragraphs that run and dance over the white pages, creating love and life and… expressions of who we are and who we are meant to be, a love song to life and the Creator of all life.

Thanks be to God.

Every Lent I choose something to memorize and something to renew that has slipped from my memory. I consider it not only a mental discipline, always good in Lent, but food for my soul. Words are miraculous. If they sit within you long enough, if they travel to your tongue and are set flying into the air, they support an architecture of belief. And so Advent and Lent I consider the passages I will write on my heart.

I am immersed in my novel-in-progress, and when considering a scripture that related to a pro-life sermon preached on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I settled on Psalm 139. It is a psalm I have worked on forever it seems, and never really have it engrafted in my mind, so I often return to it. It is the first sixteen verses that stun me with their beauty and profundity:

O LORD, thou hast searched me out, and known me. * Thou knowest my down-sitting, and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before. Thou art about my path, and about my bed; * and art acquainted with all my ways. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue, * but thou, O LORD, knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, * and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me; * I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? * or whither shall I go then from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; * if I go down to hell, thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, * and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there also shall thy hand lead me, * and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me; * then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day; * the darkness and light to thee are both alike. For my reins are thine; * thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: * marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. My bones are not hid from thee, * though I be made secretly, and fashioned beneath in the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; * and in thy book were all my members written; Which day by day were fashioned, * when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139, BCP 514-515)

That God knows us so well and loves us so well is a glorious thing. In the writing of my novel, The Music of the Mountain, I have been blessed with a sense that our Lord is with me, alongside. He said to the disciples he would be with them always, even unto the ends of the earth. Sometimes we forget this, in all the hustle and bustle of our world, and it is good to be reminded. He is with us to the ends of the earth.

My new memory work is a Eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving, usually said by the celebrant, but in our chapel the people join in. I almost have it down, but phrases keep eluding me so I’ll work on it a bit each evening:

“Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee, for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us who have duly received these holy mysteries… And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou has prepared for us to walk in; thorugh Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end.” Amen. (BCP 83)

Pray for our world. Pray for the unborn. Pray that our nation, under God, be forgiven and healed. Pray that God’s will be done in all things. Say an Our Father morning and night, and with these words, we will bring him among us all.

This week we observe Ash Wednesday, the day when Christians are reminded of their mortality with an ashen cross drawn on their foreheads, as they hear the words, “Remember o man, that dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.”

It is a sobering moment that makes our lives more precious. To face one’s death is to celebrate life more intensely. We live in a materialistic world denying the life of the spirit, the creeds of Christianity, the hope of Eternity. And so this world often cannot face death, for the implications are too painful. Death is denied, ignored, erased. Modern man lives a lie, that he will not die, or that it does not matter.

Of course it matters. And today’s Epistle tells us why we should care about life and death. St. Paul writes what might be his most exquisitely beautiful passage in his letter to the church in Corinth, explaining that the answer to all of our questions lies in love, the love of God our Creator who gives us life: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal…” (I Corinthians 13:1+, BCP 122) And once we see the key is to love God, we then can look around us and see that we must love our neighbor. He writes in this passage as well that we are like children in our mortal lives, but when we die and return to God we are grown up, fully realized: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known…”

And so we shall become perfect in our new lives, on the new Earth, in the New Jerusalem. What must we do in the Earth-time meantime? We must learn to love, for loving others as God loves us teaches us how to grow into what we are meant to be. It can be no other way. Love is the creative force that lives within us and opens the gates of Heaven when our time comes.

For it is the love of God that feeds us. It is his Word that nourishes us, for his love is expressed through his Word, not only in Scripture and Sacrament, but Christ himself in Eucharist and prayer.

So in Lent we clean our house within, exposing the dark shadows to the light, and finding places to feed the love of God. We confess our failures to love God and our neighbor. We confess our failures to be the person God created us to be. We confess we have strayed like lost sheep. We know we need help. We know we cannot do this on our own. Perfection is only realized with the love of God lighting our souls.

The Church helps us by carefully and lovingly setting out a seasonal calendar, ordaining a time for self-examination, a time to consider repentance and a return to the path we are meant to be on. And thus we have Lent, a time to do just that. We can strengthen our minds and hearts with a Lenten discipline so that we will turn away from the bad and embrace the good. We can learn, mark, and inwardly digest the virtues so that we can sweep away the vices. We can in this time, face sin in our lives and banish the dark so that we can see the light.

God’s love for us means we have meaning in our lives today and everyday that we open our hearts to him. Every day we close our hearts we invite despair, for the absence of God in us kills hope. In this same passage we are told by Paul that faith, hope, and charity abide, but the greatest is charity. And yet we must have faith to hope to love.

It is a holy time, a time of penitence and repentance and rebirth. Christ offers himself for us, to us. We need only take his hand and learn to love as he loves us.

In this way we will step toward Eternity, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day until we enter the glory of Paradise.

High winds and steady rain are sweeping the Bay Area today, rattling the trees, unsettling the natural world in which we live. We are in the season of hoping for spring, for Easter, for resurrection. Seeds deep in the dark earth will rise to the light of day and bear fruit. We prepare for that day, that moment, in the season that is called our life in time, our lifetime.

Our lives are trajectories that begin when we are conceived. From that moment we are nurtured by another human being, the mother who gives her lifeblood so that we may grow within her womb, miraculously independent of the mother and yet miraculously connected. I believe the greatest blessing of being a woman is the gift of carrying a child within her body. Her body becomes the manger, and we cradle the infant within us, singing and sighing, wondering and hoping, not knowing the future of this new person, who he will become.

I was blessed with one full term pregnancy in a difficult time in my life, but I never second guessed the magnificence of the experience. Life might be hard, but it was glorious. I remember the movement of my son and the little kicks he made, ensuring me that he was separate from me, and that I was the home in which he lived for a short time. I sensed early on that this child was not my body, and the choices I made as I rode the bus to work would affect a separate individual, for he was not an extension of me. I did not own him. He was not my property.

We strive to understand the miracle of life and yet take it for granted. But all the world revolves around the birth of the next child, and the next, and the next. The stars watch and wait. The moons hover over, looking down. The rain falls onto the seeded earth expressly so that those seeds may ripen and burst into the world of oxygen.

In this season of life and death and life again, Christians celebrate resurrection. And yet the promise is more than rising to new life when our bodies die. For God enters our hearts today, if we let him. Resurrection is now, when our spirits are enlivened by the Holy Spirit through sacraments and prayer.  Eternity is now, as etched on a monk’s gravestone in the Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire, for God the Son is present in the bread and the wine. We sing the songs and pray the prayers with others of Christ’s body, so that our hearts will be open when Christ knocks on the door. Do we recognize the knock? Do we know the person that will live inside us, giving us eternal grace and glory?

Ash Wednesday is next week, a time when we admit our helplessness. Repent, we are told, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Repent. Change. Obey God’s law. The Church helps us do this by feeding us and cradling us. For without the life of the Body of Christ, the Church, we have no life beyond the grave. And so we listen to what is read, what is preached, what is celebrated, what is consecrated. We listen and we take part by partaking. In this family of God, we find the love of the Creator, a love that will recreate each one of us. He will see the ashen cross on our forehead and he will know us by our contrition. We must repent.

We examine our lives and purge those parts that break God’s law. We seek new habits, new ways of living, so that in these forty days of Lent we grow in grace as we are meant to do.

In today’s Gospel reading, Christ told the parable of the sower and the types of soil the seeds fall on. In Lent we look at the soil of our hearts and we create a fertile bed for the Word to implant his spirit within us. We feed that soil with sacrament and scripture and the dance of liturgy, so that when Easter comes, we are reborn into the light of love.

Our Lord is like a rainbow, offering us every color in the prism of life. But we cannot see the rainbow if we are blind. Lent heals our blindness so that we can see the colors, so that we can know love eternal, and life eternal. 

Life is a glorious miracle and mystery. We need only see. We need only open our hearts for love to blossom and allow the rainbow to fill our skies.