Author Archives: Christine Sunderland

My Birthday in Hana

Posted on July 11, 2013 | Leave a comment

We flew into Hana on my sixty-sixth birthday. 

The ten-seater plane lurched and bounced a bit in the winds as it rose over Kahalui, but soon glided smoothly along the coastline of eastern Maui heading south to Hana. I peered through the window of the plane as we flew beneath the volcano Haleakala, the green pastures clothing her flanks, the skies framing her summit in a pale misty blue.

The outskirts of Kahalui were soon left behind as we sped alongside the black rock cliffs, mantled in green, and descended to a single runway that parted the rich rain forests of Hana. 

It is good to be back in Hana, the setting of my novel Hana-lani. It is summer here, the temperatures slightly higher than winter, the humidity weighing softly against my skin. The hotel greeted us with juice and cold cloths and soon we were riding in a cart, bouncing along the winding path through grassy gardens toward the sea. I climbed the stairs of our cottage, entered, crossed to the back veranda fenced with wire and green posts, a nod to the ranch hands’ cottages in the past. Once this hotel had been part of Hana Ranch. Today it is called Hotel Travaasa, owned and given new life by an investment group from Denver.

From the veranda I looked out over the swathe of freshly mowed grass to palms and foliage bordering the shore, and beyond to the crashing sea. The sound of the sea rushing and pounding reflected my heartbeat, as though the sea and I shared the same pulse. The rise and fall of the waves, their gentle rearing to reveal their opalescent underbellies, their bubbling white froth donned like like a lacy lei, their final fall onto the shore, their orchestral movement of sight and sound, mirrored my own ebb and flow, my own movement of body and soul, my own life blood.

It is as though my sixty-six years rolled with the waters, as though I sailed on an ark of time. But even before my sixty-six years, I sailed in my mother’s womb for nine months as my father pastored his first church in Fresno. The heat was suffocating that summer, my mother says, and I believe her. Fresno sits in California’s great agricultural basin, summers are warm, and in 1947 there was no air-conditioning.

My mother was twenty-seven, young and beautiful. Photos show a Queen Elizabeth twin, brunette curls, regular features, broad smile, slim build. She was at the time an enthusiastic Christian, with a Masters in Christian Education from Biblical Seminary in New York. When I was born, and the doctor announced I was a girl, she cried out “Another girl for the mission field!” Some thought she was delirious, since I was the first-born.

My sixty-six years have been, like most folks’ time on this earth, marked with tragedy and triumph, grief and joy, hard times and good times. Through it all, except for a few wayward college years, I have belonged to God and God has belonged to me.

Those college years were, as I look back, difficult ones, dry ones, years of drifting and despair. But finally I returned to the one who makes sense of our lives, our loves, our wrong turns. I am today grateful for that return to belief at the age of twenty, for the grace to believe, thankful to C. S. Lewis for his Mere Christianity, giving me the tools of a reasonable faith.

And so it is also with supreme gratitude to God that my recent novel about the nature of reasonable faith, what is true and what isn’t, what happened that first Easter morning when Mary Magdalene saw the risen Christ, is now published, my characters free to breathe deeply their first breaths, traveling up from each page.

There is a “leap” of faith, I believe, usually made in all belief, but this leap is more of a baby step. It is merely, simply, an openness to God’s grace working inside. Once I took that baby step, once I opened my mind, heart, and soul, redemption was allowed and I could see. And of course, sanctification continues with each minute, hour, day, week, month, year, with each sacrament and prayer…. until we step into the other world that is the real world, our earthly world a merely pale reflection.

We see, as St. Paul says, through a glass darkly. But we see a clearer vision of God in the Jesus of history. 

On my birthday, I am thankful for all of this.

(PS: Posted from the hotel library, the only place to get an Internet signal…)

 

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On Liberty and Equality for All

Posted on July 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

Peggy Noonan writes today in the Wall Street Journal about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and its upcoming 150th anniversary in November. The Gettysburg Address is short, only three paragraphs and two minutes long, given at Gettysburg Cemetery for those who died in the then-ending Civil War, but it is said to be the most famous speech in the history of our country if not the West. Evidently President Lincoln wrote it out, corrected it once, then delivered it with Biblical cadences and phrasing. He was not the main speaker that day and was expected to say little, deferring to the lead orator. History proved otherwise, at least in importance. 

Ms. Noonan writes of this because, of course, it is the week of our nation’s birthday when we reflect on our innocent origins and giant ideals. It is a time when we as Americans consider from where we have come, where we are today, and where we are heading. We consider liberty and equality and the health of the Union. In 1863, at the close of the terrible war against slavery that divided our country, brother against brother, equality for all became the rallying cry for the North. Slavery of any kind denies equality and liberty. No one has the right to own another. In the course of the history of man, Caucasians have been enslaved, Asians have been enslaved, Africans have been enslaved, all owned as though they were products, as though they had no unalienable rights, no human dignity. These tragedies cry out to us, from Roman galleys to southern plantations.

So today, we say, there is no slavery. But many disagree, saying the unborn are the slaves of our modern world. Since 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled in essence that a woman owned the child within her, the unborn became slaves. And this ruling continues to be the law of the land, allowing women to own innocent Americans, to have the power of life and death.

Today a civil war rages in the hearts, minds, and bodies of our citizens. The divide is deep and is similar to the nineteenth-century Civil War we recall this autumn of 2013. I do not know what the outcome of today’s civil war will be, but I cry for our country so divided.

And like many others in many other times in history, I pray for an end to this slavery. I pray for every American to be equal under the law, from the moment of conception, for we are meant to be a nation of liberty and equality for all. And as Abraham Lincoln said, such a war is a test “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure… “

Can we long endure? Many have died in this cause, millions aborted each year, mothers shattered by grief, fathers mourning their lost children, grandparents never knowing their grandchildren. The count rises. President Lincoln’s words ring true for us today:

“…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

As an American, on this 237th birthday of Independence, I resolve this too.

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On Freedom

Posted on July 1, 2013 | 1 comment

It is with a reflective pause that I approach this Fourth of July, 2013, for it seems to me we have never before faced so many threats to our freedoms as Christians and to our freedoms as Americans, as part of a culture steeped in a Judeo-Christian ethos.

The encroachments have been small and sliding, one here, one there, hard to trap, painful to face, difficult to define, control, and challenge. The most recent – the Supreme Court’s definition of marriage – has, I believe, harmed the traditional family and thus has harmed the Church, two pillars of our society. The answer perhaps is to change the naming, the wording, and call marriage “traditional marriage” and not simply marriage to separate it from other forms, for polygamy and incest will soon follow (there is no legal argument against either now). Either way, the government has decided to no longer support the traditional family as a vital institution in American society, one to be encouraged for the sake of the country.

Of course the family has been assaulted for many years, at least since the 1960s. The birth control pill divorced sex from procreation, and redefined marriage. We wanted our sexual freedom without responsibility. We wanted to marry and not necessarily have children. These desires naturally led to the right to kill those children in the womb. When we fell out of love, when the bliss settled into everyday reality, we embraced the chance to deny our marriage vows.

I have been divorced, and I know the heartache and trials that preclude, include, and result in divorce. I do not defend easy divorce – we must take stock seriously any act that threatens the family.

Yes, I pause each year and count our freedom-losses as we approach Independence Day. The Founders knew the importance not only of faith and family, but of free speech, and the harnessing of free speech is part of that  freedom-loss count. For language has been vandalized, truth has been put on trial, and in many cases Christians have been muzzled, afraid of offending.

If we deny our Judaic-Christian ethos, what have we as a nation? What rights, what freedoms are left to protect?

I read recently an article by Mary Eberstad, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, that was most encouraging. She believes that when we hit rock bottom and realize that the government cannot possibly afford all it promises, that it cannot replace the family as a social institution of caregivers and educators, passing on the values of our society, that the government will wake up and support the institution of family once again. We pray this will happen sooner than later, at least the realization, and that there will be an America still to protect and an institution of family still to revive.

So this year, I celebrate the freedoms we have left, which are many. Conservatives and Christians – Christian conservatives and conservative Christians – can still speak out. We can still meet in the public square. Our voice can be still be heard, even if faint, often muzzled and, more effectively, ridiculed. There is time, but the clouds gather. The pulpit is threatened, print is threatened, public education is threatened.

As a Christian, I believe what the Church says is true: God wins in the end. But I love my country, I love my culture, I love the freedom and creative energy of Americans. I love that someone like my husband, a “poor boy from East Oakland,” as he has often called himself, could rise in a major corporation through sacrifice and hard work.

But the values of sacrifice and hard work are part of this body of traditional values that is dying. Without marriage and the family this treasure will not be passed on to the next generation. Many of our public schools no longer teach those values or where they came from. They no longer teach American History, World History, the History of Western Civilization, the past that shows us what makes civilization civil. And what does make civilization civil? The Judeo-Christian heritage upon which our Founders founded our nation.

Many have fought for these values, many continue to fight around the world. Martyrs die daily for their faith. Soldiers lay down their lives.

We celebrate these men and women, and our Founders and our freedoms. We raise the flag on the Fourth of July. But we also kneel in prayer as never before.

Here’s to thee, America the Beautiful!

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Mary Magdalene and the Search for Truth

Posted on June 23, 2013 | 1 comment

A summer fog rolled in early this morning, blanketing the Bay Area and threatening misty rain to the north. Temperatures plummeted. The gray damp seeps into the skin and the spirit, and, as we entered the Caldecott tunnel on the way to church this morning, the white swirls slipped alongside the highway, creeping on little cat feet as the poet Carl Sandberg once wrote. The sun is hidden up and away – still there, I’m told, but hidden.

There are many things we cannot see from our vantage on the edge of this tumbling planet we call Earth. Yet we wake in the morning and go about our business of life as though we can see, trusting. We trust that gravity will keep us from flying off the edge and into orbit. We trust that if we eat we shall not be hungry. We trust that the vehicle we enter, start, and maneuver, will obey our commands, although we cannot see the engine or predict the oncoming traffic or crazies who lose control of the wheel. We trust without seeing. We trust and act as though we can see. If we didn’t do this we would be paralyzed, would remain under the covers, perhaps under the bed. (And we would starve.) 

In our daily lives we learn to trust greater authorities than ourselves, and we learn to trust the authority of experience. I use both authorities when I act as though gravity will keep me attached to the planet – the authority of science and the authority of experience, for I have never flown into orbit (yet). I trust both authorities with regards to eating and hunger. And also, I trust both authorities when I drive my car. Even when I pass through foggy patches and dark tunnels buried inside a mountain, I trust I will come out on the other side. Tunnel engineers tell me I will. My experience tells me I will.

This is a theme of my newly released novel, The Magdalene Mystery, which I am happy to say is now in print and available at Amazon and the OakTara Store. It is a mystery, a love story, a cliffhanger. But it is also about truth and trust and how we know what is true and whom to trust. It is about choosing which authorities to believe. It is about the manipulation of truth for profit, for power and the devastating effects of such manipulation in art, the media, the world at large.

Since Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a story alleging the marriage of Christ and Mary Magdalene, writers and composers have hopped onto his lucrative money train. Did these authors consider whether the claims were true? Did they see themselves as authorities? Were they New Testament scholars? But audiences believe these claims simply because they are in print, or in a movie or opera. The works are reviewed by media, after all!

The blind lead the blind. We live in a fallen world and much is at stake in this propaganda war. Propaganda is not a word one hears anymore, for twisting the truth to one’s own benefit has become common practice, and propaganda has negative overtones. Truth, propaganda says, is relative. But is it? 

Truth is truth. I for one choose the authority of the Church and two thousand years of debate and prayer and councils and scholarly exegesis. I do not have two thousand years to do this, and I am grateful that this is one wheel I do not need to re-invent. We do have expert authorities, at least as expert and as trustworthy as we will see in this world. There will always be fallen authorities, men and women who veer intentionally or unintentionally from what is real, embracing the false. There is simple incompetency. But we also have that vast consensus of history and tradition, Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead.” 

There has been a trend in the last century to profit from attacking large institutions. Big government and organized religion provide giant antagonists, becoming the new dragons to slay. The underdog rises from oppression; the prisoner throws off his chains. This trend developed naturally from the cult of the anti-hero, the folk hero with no princely powers who slays the dragon. The anti-heroes, ordinary folks like you and I, defeat or laud their ordinariness. They are lovable and inspiring. But when such trends cross into lies about the profound nature of life, death, love, God, and misstate the truth about man – who he is, where he came from, and where he is going – the trends become dangerous.

 “It’s just fiction,” I’m told. “It’s just a book, an opera…”

Ah, art, it’s subtle power! And it’s stretchy, flexible boundaries. And this, too, is a theme in The Magdalene Mystery. Is it okay – in art – to mislead, misrepresent, twist history? To rewrite what  has been said to be true for two millennia? To assume that because some don’t believe the Messiah came that the Messiah didn’t come? These are large leaps in logic, and dangerous ones. 

Like the sun behind the fog, God is not always seen, felt, experienced. Does this mean he is not there? We look to our authorities for belief that he is – philosophers, historians, theologians, our own experience. 

How do we know the New Testament claims are true? Did Jesus of Nazareth rise from the dead? If he did not rise from the dead, the Church offers me nothing. If he did rise from the dead, the Church offers me everything. If the Resurrection is true, all falls into place, for all the whys are answered. The fog burns away, the sun comes out. I see it all. I see Mary Magdalene reaching to touch the risen Christ, this Son of God with a resurrected body. I see God. I feel his great love for me.

So I’m celebrating my novel’s birthday. My characters  finally live and breathe, and can speak to you directly, after being cooped up in my brain and in my laptop’s memory. Perhaps they will stop nagging me, trying to escape. Now they join the characters in my other novels, a large family that keeps me sweet company even in the fog. This I know from experience.

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On Fathers

Posted on June 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

Fathers are like shepherds. They find us when we are lost. They protect us from scattering too far. In their love for us, they un-scatter us. They bring us home. 

Mid-June often seems to me a time of summer scattering until the gathering together of fall. It is both an ending and a beginning. 

We graduate, we vacation, we shift into a different tempo. Children move from school’s structured days to summer camps and summer sessions. They continue their lessons, but in one-week or two-week time bursts. I sometimes wonder if any spend their summers as I did in the ‘fifties – biking to the library, reading, climbing trees and building tree-forts, digging with teaspoons to make mud pies to serve alongside imaginary tea from real china cups (yes, my mother knew), selling lemonade from a card table (5 cents), dancing through sprinklers in the heat of July. Frequent games of tag. Lotsa running. Hopscotch and jump-rope. Badminton. Jacks. Playing outside till dusk turned dark.

I don’t recall being bored, but I have to admit, when mid-August arrived I looked forward to school starting in September. My mother bought plaid wool by the yard and sewed new skirts for my sister and me. We looked forward to the yearly shopping trip to Union Square in San Francisco for matching cardigans, winter coats, and saddle shoes, maybe white bucks. We looked forward to our special treat – Coffee Crunch Cake at Blum’s.

For the most part we stayed home or carried home with us on house trailer trips. We did not scatter into classes, sports, structured times that would entertain us, pull us apart. It seems to me, looking back, that my sister and I also saw more of my father during the summer, because of the slower pace and the lack of scattering, but that might be an illusion of the past. 

We honor our fathers this Father’s Day. We honor those who pull us back into our family, un-scatter us, regroup us, reground us. Mothers of course do this too, but fathers have a role unique to their gender, unquantifiable, indescribable, perhaps unlimited in its stunning influence. Mothers give life; they feed and clothe, no small thing. Fathers make it possible for mothers to mother. Fathers shelter and protect; they guard and redeem. They carry their children home like shepherds carrying lost sheep. 

My father’s income as a pastor, shepherd to his Presbyterian flock, was meager and our sole support, for my mother did not work outside the home. We had one car and it seemed adequate from my child’s viewpoint. We lived in a manse. But there were fights over money and spending and pennies saved, heated discussions that flared on the edges of my younger years. Even so, my sister and I were sheltered from the brunt of these storms, and we led an un-scattered childhood, one focused on family, church, school, and gathering together at meals and bath and bedtime. And even though there were few pennies saved, I learned discipline as I worked my way through college. I valued every penny earned. 

I recall a giant fir that shaded our front lawn. How many summers did I spend stretched out on the grass, munching an apple and reading in the cool of that tree? A father is like that tree, offering a place to rest in the heat of the day. My father was like that, and I was happy. I grow happy now as I write this, thinking about those years. And I am so thankful. 

It was a simpler time, they say, and today is different with more distractions. I suppose. Simpler time or not, meager income or not, my father gave me a grounding that I shall never lose, even as I scatter myself and am scattered by the grown-up winds and rain that rage about me, scattered by the structured distractions of this un-simple time. 

My father passed away from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 1981, age sixty-four, thirty-two years ago on May 14. We didn’t have much and that may even have been a good thing, for we were rich in our love for one another. We held each other close, not pushed apart, and my father always found us if we stayed out too long playing on those hot summer nights. He found us and brought us inside for Scrabble, Clue, and bedtime stories. 

He was a shepherd and he cared for his sheep.

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The Magdalene Mystery

Posted on June 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

Thursday I received the proof copy for my novel, The Magdalene Mystery. This is often a moment of surprise, in spite of the fact that I have been watching for the manuscript file to appear in my inbox each day (okay, sometimes three times a day…).  I know when I see and open the attached file, it is time to clear my desk and cancel appointments for the next few days. It is time to do a last read, checking for typos, repetitions, and inconsistencies. I finished the reading and correcting yesterday and sent it back to OakTara. Hopefully we shall see the novel in print within the next month.

How did I arrive at this place in my life? I often wonder at times like this. Being faithful in prayer and sacrament, waiting on God, I usually reply to myself, simple stuff really. And today, I would add, accepting an invitation many years ago and many many Sundays since.

In today’s Gospel Christ tells the parable of the man who made a great supper and invited many friends. But the many friends had better things to do – one needed to check his property, one his cattle, and one just got married (an odd excuse, maybe it was his honeymoon). So the master of the house invited “the poor, the maimed, the halt, the lame, the blind…” (Luke 14:16+).

This story is traditionally seen as an invitation to the Holy Eucharist, a personal invitation from God to each of us. Like the parable of the sower and the parable of the wedding guest, God wants to plant himself in the soil of my soul, feed me at his table. Do I accept this intimate and loving invitation? Or do I have what I consider more important things to do?

In the spring of 1967, I accepted the invitation. I said yes, not fully understanding what I was doing. It wasn’t an altar call, and it wasn’t a road-to-Damascus conversion, but it was a moment of surprise-by-joy. My reason had been won over by C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and I wanted to experience Lewis’s choice of church, his own Anglican Church, the Episcopal Church in the U.S.  Having been raised in a purposely plain Presbyterian Church, the experience of the Liturgy of Holy Eucharist (incense, bells, candles, processions) with its chanting and kneeling and the receiving of the Son of God at the altar, stunned me. I fell in love. I happily, giddily, said yes to the invitation. Yes, absolutely, I’m coming, sign me up! It was by far too good, too beautiful, too glorious, to be true, I mistakenly worried at the time, but I didn’t want to miss this chance, so I boldly entered through the door, crossed the threshold, and was soon confirmed by the bishop. I was twenty.

The Church nursed me through my infancy as a Catholic Christian, taught me to speak her language, sing her psalms, confess her creeds, pray her prayers. I grew up, hopefully, up and up and up and continue to grow, to mature in this fabulous Faith. I shall never be fully grown, a true adult, I know, until I meet God face to face in heaven, but the journey in the meantime is a joyful one. I have no regrets that I accepted the invitation, accepted, as the evangelicals say, Jesus the Christ as my Lord and Savior, as my one true God.

But without crossing that threshold in 1967 to eat and drink of the Eucharistic banquet I would never have grown out of my infancy. I would not have learned to speak, to sing, to dance. I would not have been fed with and by God in this sacramental way. I would be one of those who had turned down the supper invitation, one who, Christ says at the end of this story, would not be invited again.

So over the last few days, as I read through the words on my screen, the sentences and paragraphs and chapters that form The Magdalene Mystery, I prayed for discernment, for a good eye to spot mistakes. The story is about truth, its telling and its abuse, or its not telling. It’s about media lies and Internet predators. It’s about witnessing to what is real and what is not. It’s about that moment two thousand years ago when a healed woman named Mary from the village of Magdala reached to touch the risen Christ. It’s about our search today for truth and our yearning to touch God. And, also, it’s a literal cliff-hanger…

Mary Magdalene accepted the invitation from the risen Christ to go and tell the others. She said yes and told the news of her Lord’s resurrection. Just so, we can say yes. We can cross the threshold each week and kneel before the altar table. We can tell the truth, the good news, what its like to be fed by God, to touch him.

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Corpus Christi

Posted on June 2, 2013 | 1 comment

The Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated last Thursday, so today, Sunday, we formed a Corpus Christi procession.

In my soon-to-be-released novel, The Magdalene Mystery, my protagonists witness a Corpus Christi procession in Rome. From inside the basilica Santa Maria Maggiore they hear chanting outside. They follow the sounds to the porch steps in the growing dusk. A crowd has gathered. Soon they see clergy, monks, and nuns walking toward them up the Via Merulana from the basilica San Giovanni Laterano. They are singing the Pangue Linqua, St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymn to the Eucharistic Presence, Now my tongue, the mystery telling, of the glorious body sing… Daylight has turned to twilight as the sun drops behind domes silhouetted against a glowing Roman sky, but lanterns held by the processing singers lighten the darkness. The Pope is part of the procession. He kneels in an open van before a monstrance cradling the Blessed Sacrament. When he arrives at Maria Maggiore, he processes with the Blessed Sacrament into the gilded Marian basilica for the liturgy of Benediction and Adoration.

I’ve always loved processions – their beginnings, middles, and ends – for they reflect our own journeys through time, satisfyingly. They are an art form, portraying the People of God as the Body of Christ.

Last Sunday in our own parish church we stepped outside, leaving the inner safe sanctum of the church, and had processed up Lawton Street as we sang to the Trinity. Today we we stepped out onto the sidewalk, singing to the mystery and miracle of Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist.

Raised a Presbyterian, I had some doubt about the claims of the Eucharistic Presence when I first heard about it. But over the years scripture and tradition have testified powerfully and personally to the reality of the Real Presence. We are told when we receive Christ in the Eucharist we are fed by God in a unique and saving way. We are told Christ’s Presence is one of the three comings of Christ – the first, two thousand years ago, taking on human flesh in Bethlehem; the second, in the daily consecration of bread and wine and the reception by millions of faithful; the third, the Second Coming of Christ in the future in judgment. Our Lord commanded us to receive him in this way the night before his death, at the Last Supper (Maundy Thursday of Holy Week) so it is fitting that Corpus Christi falls at the end of the glorious seasons  of Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost, chasing Trinity Sunday, as though it were an exclamation mark at the end of a beautiful sentence. For we have added a postlude to the Easter season of salvation with this mysterious and miraculous gift of bread and wine. We may now enter into the long season of Trinitytide, when we grow steadily in our faith, quietly, with fewer exclamation points.

It may be the everyday nature of this Eucharistic miracle that has made it less of a mystery, so that it is often taken for granted. It may be we live in a doubting age, an age that isn’t interested in God, or in God’s love for us. But for me, I have always been in awe before the Blessed Sacrament, transfixed and transformed.  I have experienced love, the love of the Creator for the creation, the love of God the Father for his children and personally for me as his own precious child. This is no small thing. It is true nourishment, without which I am smaller, without which I enter my week weaker.

So the Corpus Christi procession, winding through the public squares of our world, stepping into the communities of disbelief and doubt, is a witness to that love of the Father for his children, the  precious prodigals that he so desires to come home, to come to him.

Unlike the Roman procession, it was not dusk as we walked the half block outside the church. A bright morning sun emblazoned the cross raised high by the crucifer. It lit the golden monstrance holding the host.  We held our hymnals, following the words linked to the notes, bar by bar, verse by verse, and occasionally I glanced up to the Corpus Christi, carried with care, with tremendous honor (as he later told me), by our devout deacon. It is an image I shall never forget, this gilded circle with the Real Presence in its center, carried along Lawton Street, rising and falling gently with the stepping of our deacon, in a heartbeat rhythm. We followed the cross and the monstrance; we the Body of Christ followed the Body of Christ. We had received him at the altar, and now we flowed like a river through a neighborhood in the Rockridge community of Oakland.

When I set the first part of my story in Rome, I studied my monthly calendar to choose the most appropriate and meaningful season, month, week, day, hour. When I saw the Feast of Corpus Christi in its Thursday-after-Trinity square, the decision was easy. For in this mystery, the mystery of God and man, the mystery of God touching us and we touching him, beats the heart of our Christian faith. And since my novel’s story was about reasoned belief and dubious doubt, historical truth and media lies, the real Mary Magdalene and the imagined Mary Magdalene, I began to research the Rome procession with the help of a nun at San Giovanni Laterano, the Pope’s cathedral as Bishop of Rome.

It has been a rich, fruity season, this spring in the year 2013, like a burst of cherry in a glimmering Beaujolais. We began the month of May processing, singing to Mary. We ended it processing, singing to the Holy Trinity. And we begin June processing, singing to the Blessed Sacrament, as the door to summer opens.

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Trinity Song

Posted on May 26, 2013 | Leave a comment

I had hoped on the drive to church, as I raised the posy of red and pink roses to my nose, inhaling the sweetness, that we would sing two of my favorite hymns today. For today is Trinity Sunday in our Anglo-Catholic parish and we often include the robust I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity… (St. Patrick’s Breastplate) and the stunning Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, early in the morning our song shall rise to thee….

It was a colorful, crisp day, unseasonably cool, the air brushed clean and clear by the breeze. The sun shone bright upon this gentle portion of earth that we call home. I clipped the five roses from my garden – ripe and full with edges browning. A few petals fluttered off as I hurried out the door, and we headed for church. I rushed downstairs to the parish hall to place them in a vase before a small statue of Our Lady and set them on the refreshment table.

I checked on the children in the Sunday School and realized they were sitting in the main church with their teachers. They were going to join the Trinity Sunday procession. Soon, the organ thundered the commanding notes, “I bind myself…” and we followed the thurifer swinging the sweet clouds of incense, preparing our way, the torchbearers with their flaming candles lighting our path, the crucifer with his crucifix held high, leading us. We took our places behind the celebrant in his golden cope and the deacons. The hymnbook said to sing this hymn “in unison, with energy,” and that we did, as we processed up the red-carpeted aisle to the chancel steps and turned right to the side doors.

We stepped outside to the sidewalk of Lawton Street and continued alongside the church. It felt good to be singing to the Trinity in a public space, traveling through the neighborhood, somehow linking us together. Was God smiling? I think so. It was a short distance – half a block – but it was a huge journey from inside to outside, from inside sacred space to outside secular, from the dark ark of the nave to the open sea of Lawton. We turned into the parish courtyard, following the crucifix above us, the choir booming as we marched, and up the front steps and inside once again. We did indeed bind ourselves as we walked the walk and sang the song. We bound ourselves to the Trinity and to one another. We also invited our neighbors to be a part of our world, to be with us.

We are liturgical sacramental Christians. We love song and we love the dance of liturgy, of parade, of expression through movement. It is difficult for us to remain still for long – we stand to sing, kneel to pray, make the Sign of the Cross over heart and mind. We voice Scripture in our verbal responses, and we pray together learned prayers that grow more dear with each saying. Our actions grow within us. They grow us. They texture us with God.

And so, as I knelt after receiving my Communion, singing with my brothers and sisters Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty…, I thought how the Trinity was like that too – an active love between the Father and the Son, a love we call the Holy Spirit, a spirit weaving us all together as we partook of God the Son and sang to the Three-in-one.

Our preacher mentioned how our Nicene Creed describes the Trinity, paragraph by paragraph. He said to also consider the Te Deum, a prayer that is part of our morning prayer office. It also describes the three natures of God. And lastly, the lovely Gloria which we sing at every Mass (except during Lent, I believe). So through words spoken we engraft this mystery onto, into our souls, to be reborn through memory again and again.

Ah, memory. And it is Memorial Day weekend, a time of memory, of thanksgiving for lives given so that we might worship today as free citizens in America, the land of the free. For without the sacrifices of these brave men and women we would not be free, would not be allowed to worship. Without their lives given we would not be processing up Lawton, singing to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

As we left church for home, I smiled. It was a good Trinity Sunday indeed. Not only two of my favorite hymns, but a glorious procession as well, singing to the Trinity.

And everyone thought the roses were lovely.

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The Miracle of Words

Posted on May 19, 2013 | 2 comments

Words are miraculous. Formed from letters, they grow into sentences and paragraphs. While usually letters alone do not represent thoughts, a single word does. So it is a big jump, a stupendous growth spurt, from letters to words.

Letters make sounds when spoken, spurted into the air, breathing upon the hearer. Letters don’t have to be heard, however, they may be merely seen on a page or screen, but even then they are heard silently in the mind and sometimes even in the heart and memory.

You could say all expression begins in the mind. I have a thought and I desire to share it with you. So I look for words, not letters – the letters are assumed, whole language is so automatic – to string together so that I may express my thought. “Pass the box of chocolates.” In addition to my simple expression of desire, I have learned to soften statements with please and thank you. I have been encouraged, through the social mores that have raised me, to couch arguments in pleasing phrases, perhaps even more cogent phrases. “Please pass the box of chocolates.” or “Could you possibly pass the box of chocolates? Please have one first… I would be ever so grateful… many many thanks…”

Language grows, is supplemented with leaves and tendrils and flowery shoots. Sometimes it is pruned back to brutal stalks. Language changes with social desire. And then, there are many language gardens in our world, each with its own landscape plan, varying beds of flowers and herbs, each with its own history of planting and fertilizing and harvesting.

Today we celebrated Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples:

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind and if filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language…the wonderful works of God. (Acts 2)

I love this passage in Acts, written by St. Luke. The rushing wind. The cloven tongues that looked like flames of fire. The sudden speaking in other languages. The devout in Jerusalem understanding them, learning of the love of God in the ultimate Word made flesh, their Messiah come.

The Holy Spirit, promised by Christ when he ascended to Heaven, gave them the power of miraculous words, of expressing the news of God’s coming among men to those who spoke in other languages. This was a practical gift. As a reversal of the dispersion in Babel centuries earlier, here in Jerusalem, the people are brought together.

How does God bring us together? How do we share, console, encourage, love? Through words. Through action and touch, to be sure, but through words, a divine and miraculous form of action and touch.

It is interesting that it is the devout in Jerusalem who come together and understand the disciples when they speak. It is those men and women who listen for God’s voice who hear and understand. It is those men and women faithful in prayer and synagogue, who have tried to keep the law as given to Moses, who hear God. True today as well.

Words. From the mind and through the lips, ideas birthed to breathe the air, breezing if not rushing into the ears of the listener, into the heart and mind. I have read that there is a listening component in the effort to hear. There must be a degree of attention paid, of mental effort. Growing deaf and not trying to hear causes a person to slip in the mind as well as hearing. The deaf often retreat into their own worlds. So words, like the seeds in the parable of the sower, must fall on listening ears, ears hearing, minds minding. Those devout men and women in Jerusalem were listening. They were mindful.

The Spirit descends and rushes upon us like a mighty wind. It reforms our minds with new words, new expressions, new ways of seeing the world and God the Father. And yet they are the old words, the old expressions, the old ways, rebirthed uniquely in each of us in the Church where this Spirit lives. Rebirthed in those who listen, who have ears to hear, who pay attention to words on a page.

After Mass we gathered to share coffee and snacks and words. A new family from Nigeria has joined our parish and I asked them how they pronounced their names, hoping beyond hope that the g in Igbonagwam was silent. And, praise God, it was! But still the sounds were foreign to my American ear. The sounds were foreign but so  beautiful, like the deep blue of the sea and the rich green of grass. Like a coral sunset. Like a melody in a major key, lilting, dancing. I asked about another name, Ikeme. My new friends explained how the e sounded like an a, and the i sounded like an e. From their culture into their minds through their lips to my listening ears, into my mind. Then, miraculously, I exhaled the names through my lips into the air, not creating a mighty rushing wind, but definitely a sweet breeze.

A miracle indeed. Come, Holy Spirit, come.

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On Mothers and the Mysterious Miracle of Life

Posted on May 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

The mystery of life is just that, I suppose, a great mystery.

We are conceived from the union of man and woman. We are not cloned, at least not meant to be. We are created completely new creatures, one formed from two, a unique genetic collection, a unique soul, different from any before and any coming after. This mystery we take for granted as part of life, as life itself, but it is still a mysterious miracle.

Women are the physical means of this mystery made real. A woman carries this unique person within her, feeding the child with her own life blood. In this sense women are part of the creating act. Flesh stretches thin to make room for the baby in the womb. Energy pours from mother to child, into this new life so that the baby may grow fat with flesh and bones, hair and eyes, organs, heart and lungs, fingers and toes, to be born into light and air and oxygen, to breathe those first breaths of life.

Just so, God became incarnate (in-the-flesh) in the young Mary of Nazareth. Just so, Mary said yes, chose to allow the Son of God to grow within her, to stretch her flesh and receive her energy, to be born of human flesh in Bethlehem of Judaea two thousand years ago.

Last Sunday in London my husband and I honored Our Lady in a festive procession winding outside through the doors of St. Mary’s Bourne Street Church and into a neat neighborhood of brick townhouses. We sang to Mary, asking for her prayers. We honored the Mother of God, the Theotokos. We gave thanks that she chose life, that she said yes, so that the divine could be made manifest, made incarnate in our world of flesh.

And so today, we honor all mothers, for it is indeed Mothers’ Day. But it is also Ascension Sunday. The ascension of Christ to Heaven, it seems to me, is another great mystery of flesh and spirit. For having risen from the dead, Christ’s body is no longer the same as ours, his flesh not quite our flesh. Yet he carries us with him, for he was born of us. He conquered death to become the way. And we too, when our flesh dies, will be given new bodies, perfect bodies, bodies without pain, flesh without wounds. We too will be resurrected.

Our human nature – our humanity – is born in that moment of conception, that union of man and woman. Such flesh is corruptible, will die. It will grow to adulthood, will age, and will live for a time on this earth. But such flesh is also spirit-filled, making us Sons and Daughters of God, should we choose to belong to God. And if we do choose not to belong to him, we will not ascend, for we will have rejected the only way to heaven, Christ Jesus, the incarnate one, the resurrected and ascended one.

Today we honor all mothers, for they have chosen life. They have birthed the next generation of our world. This birthing is an astounding thing, one not to be taken for granted. And we honor those too who mother without birthing, those who care for children in schools, churches, families. For these women – grandmothers, aunts, friends – give their spirit, give themselves to our young as they journey from birth, traveling through their span of time.

And we continue to honor, in this Mary Month of May, the Mother of Our Lord, the one who said yes to the divine life so that we might live too.

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