Author Archives: Christine Sunderland

It is Christmas time and I’ve traveled into the mountains to see my son, no longer a child but a man, a husband and father, with a son and daughter of his own and a dear wife. It is Christmas, or  nearing Christmas, this fourth Sunday in Advent, and I am grateful for this mysterious reunion.

While it is said we do not choose our family, even so it might also be said that our family is chosen for us – that God in his infinite mercy balances our waywardness with other personalities, temperaments, and habits that become part of our family. In the crucible of family we forge who we are, who we are meant to be. We learn to love, and in the process we learn love’s definition. We learn to be forgiven and to forgive.

Sometimes family is biological, sometimes not. Family are the folks to whom we are bound, whether it be genes, faith, proximity. Family are those folks who God places in our path in each and every moment.

And so we approach the moment of Christ’s birth, that child in Bethlehem…In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh… and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

I find myself this fourth Sunday in Advent, the Year of Our Lord 2012, in Boulder, Colorado. It is dry, but today cold winds rose, sweeping the streets and battering the walls and windows and biting our cheeks as we walked the two blocks to church. We attended a Presbyterian Church, the denomination of my childhood, the church of my pastor-father. The large brick edifice encompassed the full block, it seemed, growing from a historic chapel to meet the needs of a growing community searching for God. We entered the lobby – large and high with a giant decorated fir in the center. Crowds mingled, lingering or arriving, dropping off children in classrooms upstairs and pulling identification tags from computer screens. We stepped into the sanctuary (nave as the Catholics say), a theater that surrounded a stage. Soon the area was packed with worshipers, many like myself, coming from afar – either coming home or visiting family in their homes. There were twinkling wreathes along the walls. The dais was covered with thick candles flaming. Stage left three purple candles and one pink formed a circle high upon a brass pedestal. Three burned brightly. The fourth waited for the ceremonial moment of lighting.

The service began – O, Come All Ye Faithful… Hark: The Herald Angels Sing… we affirmed the Creed, sang the Gloria, all familiar to this Anglo-Catholic. The remaining purple candle was lit. The preacher stood in the center of the stage and preached on the first verses of John, In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…

There were no kneelers on which to kneel in prayer. We sat, heads bowed, hands clasped. There was no Holy Eucharist celebrated. But even so I knew that I worshiped the same God of Abraham, the God of all Christians, the God of these Presbyterians, the God of my own Anglicans. We shared the glorious belief that the Word – the Second Person of the Trinity – had always been in existence, but in time he became flesh and dwelt among us, this Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, who healed and cast out demons and walked on water. This God who humbled himself to be born in the hay among the animals in a cave outside the village of Bethlehem.

Why did he have to come to us like this? the preacher asked. To lead us, he answered. But he could have added that he came to take us with him. He came to join our flesh with his, to, in a sense, reverse the incarnation, to pull us into him, into him and up and to heaven, to sing with the angels and worship the Father. For of course, the Incarnation is the beginning of the great redemption realized in the Resurrection, a resurrection made real from that moment in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb to the hour of each of our own deaths and resurrections. For, those who believe in him will be resurrected with him. That is why he came to us.

Just so, we forge words, sentences, love letters with our families and and all those we find in our path through life. We are given each of them so that we may learn what love is.

My family is like most families, I think. Some get along better than others. There are moments of frustration, impatience, and there are moments of wonder and delight. There are moments of simple exhaustion and sometimes selfishness. So it was good to worship together today, sitting side by side in the pew and giving this time to one another and to God. We formed a bonding triangle with God, and as we move through the next few days to the great Festival of Christmas, this love will mold us to be better than we are now. We sang together, we prayed together, we stated our belief together as we stood side by side in the pew. We listened to the preacher speak of the remarkable Word made flesh, dwelling among us, full of grace and truth.

The Word made flesh, dwelling among us.  He came to down, he pulls us together, he brings us back up with him.

And so we look forward to Christmas Day, when we shall have great and glorious reason to make merry!

The fog rolled in last night and cocooned our house, soaking the patio with its blanket of water. We draw closer to Christmas, today this third Advent Sunday, almost the shortest day of the year and the longest night, the winter solstice.

I have read that historians calculate that Christ was born in the summertime, since the shepherds were watching their flocks by night and even in the Near East it gets cold in the winter. Had it been winter, the shepherds would have herded their sheep inside, it is reasoned.  But Emperor Constantine in the fourth century chose to sanctify the existing celebration of the solstice with this new celebration of Christmas, and the worship of the Son-God soon replaced the the worship of the Sun-God.

And it is fitting, it seems, to be given this shining star of hope in the midst of the darkest season of the year. In December light is limited both by hours of daylight and by weather – fog, rain, snow, leaden overcast skies. I speak of course of northern California and other northern climates. Where winter is really winter, the light of Christmas is nearly blinding. (I suppose this would not apply to Australia.)

Advent – these four weeks in which we await the advent, the coming, of Christ, his mysterious and miraculous incarnation – is a quiet soul-searching time or perhaps should be. It is a time of reflection, of trying to see through the dense fog of the culture blanketing our souls just as fog drenches the outside of my house. Our eyesight is often dim. We do not always see clearly.

In these four weeks we are given serious topics to consider, to try to see: death, judgment, heaven, hell. The Scriptures assigned are full of dire warnings. Israel is warned to seek righteousness or be conquered, slaughtered, sold into slavery, with many gory details in the text. We are startled by St. John’s visions of the Apocalypse, the future coming of Christ when he will judge the living and the dead. In sum, we have vivid accounts of past judgments and future judgments. Are these words simply fear-mongering?

Some would say so. Yet running through these lessons are also the lessons of good news, the news that Christ is coming, Christ came, Christ is here among us, Christ will come again. For we learn that Christ judges, and we must not forget this lesson. But he is also merciful, and we must embrace this as our greatest hope. Believe, he says, again and again, and be saved. It’s that simple. Believe in heaven, in redemption through him. So today we lit a pink candle in our Advent wreathe, breaking the cycle of penitential purple. We do this because today is Rose Sunday, the day we contemplate heaven. Today is also called Gaudete Sunday, Latin for “Rejoice,” a day in which we sing Paul’s rejoicing and encouraging words to the Philippians (4):

Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.

We need this reminder that the Lord is at hand. We need this reminder to pray. The past six months in America we have seen a great violence in our schools and communities. We have seen young men so captivated by evil they have obeyed its voice. Somehow these young men didn’t hear the voice of our God of love, a voice ringing through the years, days, hours, minutes, singing his love song to us. Somehow there was a void in their hearts, minds, and souls, a void that should have been filled with goodness and mercy, but was left empty and open to evil. Somehow these young men became consumed with anger, an anger encouraged by our culture, and they were given the weapons to express that anger. They did not believe in judgment, heaven, and hell. They believed in death, that death solved the problem of their pain and anger.

Without judgment, can there be justice? Without judgment, can there be mercy? In the end God will sort us out; in the present God will help us sort it out through the incarnation of his Son.  But how? As Paul says, through prayer, through regular supplication to God. Our prayers, as our preacher said so beautifully this morning, are in time but also in eternity, never lost in God’s great landscape of love. And, he said, our prayers are the salve of righteousness that will bind and heal the wounds of our culture. Our prayers, he explained, continue the Incarnation in Bethlehem into our present moment.

In the morning we plant our feet on the floor and we say “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”. In the evening we lay our head on the pillow and say the same prayer of praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, intercession, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” This is the prayer Our Lord taught us to pray and so we pray it again and again, and again and again we bring his healing love to our world to burn away the fog and light up the dark with his life. Simple prayer. Simple love. Simple ways to heaven.

Our preacher asked us in the pews, “If Jesus walked in through the door right now, and said, ‘Come, it is time to go…’, would we be ready?” Have we made amends with our neighbors, forgiven them and asked them for forgiveness? Are there things and people and deeds in our life still surrounded by fog that we don’t want to see? Drenched by fog?

Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. The four last things. Are we ready for the Baby in the manger to come to us? He is coming soon – in Bethlehem in great humility, but later too, in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead.

Come, Lord Jesus, Come.

I am away and not at home. I have left behind shopping, decorating, making lists, writing cards, planning. I have not pulled out the six Christmas boxes that usually get opened in the first weeks of December – the mistletoe, the tree lights, the wreathes, the mini-sleighs and stuffed angels and candles set in greenery. I have even left my Advent candle set at home – the three purple candles and the one rose candle – that I would ordinarily be lighting at mealtimes. I now wonder if we will have a Christmas tree this year.

In a way I have truly retreated to a desert. It is quiet here by the sea, where my room opens onto a lawn which meets the beach which slides under a pounding surf. We have moved from the cliffs of northern Maui to the Kohala Coast on the Big Island of Hawaii, a good place to retreat, to rest, read, and write.

I miss all of the hustle and bustle at home. I miss the decorations and the Advent candles. But a new reality has slowly come over me, immersed as I am in the Book of Common Prayer daily offices, the four daily Scripture readings appointed for Advent, and the first verses of John I have determined to memorize. And also, I am immersed in the quiet of this natural world.

For the most part these assigned daily readings are full of Isaiah’s prophesies, morning and evening, and in my mind I can hear his voice, against the roar of the sea, as I turn out my light at night, his cries into the darkness, his prophetic warnings to Israel… “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near… Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord…” (6,7) and then Isaiah’s glorious words of hope…  “For you shall go out with joy, and be led out with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands…” (12).

The Office of Morning Prayer includes the first chapters of Mark, describing Christ’s early ministry. Our Lord Jesus heals and he casts out demons. Crowds follow him, pressing in. As he preaches in a home in Capernaum, “there was no longer room to receive them, not even near the door.”  Four men who had brought a paralytic to be healed and could not enter, uncovered the roof, broke through, and let him down into the room. Christ forgives his sins because of his faith, then heals his body to show he has the power to forgive. It is one of the most dramatic stories in Scripture. It was one of my favorite as a child, although I didn’t fully understand it at the time.

It was a double healing, one of soul and one of body. This is what Advent teaches us, the miracle of incarnation, our souls wrapped in flesh. In these weeks of waiting we ponder our souls and bodies, knowing they will be separated in death but united once again through the Incarnation: O death were is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory? (I Corinthians 15:55 )

We walked a mile up the coast today. The dusty path was steep and took us through parched, dry land with twisted and gnarled trees. The sun pounded and I could see a thin strip of sea in the distance. As I gazed at my wide-strapped sandals, I thought it was perhaps not unlike walking along the Sea of Galilee. In some ways I felt closer to those times than sitting by a fire at home, the cold creeping to the windows, the sweet piercing fragrance of Douglas firs, the world of a northern Christmas.

Here I am surrounded by a world of sea and sky, of black lava and parched earth, of breathless breezes, hot sun. It is a beautiful yet harsh natural world, a world gone wrong but a world redeemed by a baby in Bethlehem.

And so I wait and wonder, and hold close to my heart this great miracle of Christmas, our Creator coming to us, becoming one of us. I learn his Word by heart, engrafting him onto my mind and soul:

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. (John 1:12-14)

Come, Emmanuel, come.

The surf has been high here on the northern coast of Maui, the skies blue, the temperatures high seventies. We have settled in to a condo walled with windows overlooking black-lava cliffs that rise above a rolling Pacific Ocean.

There is a gathering of the waters, a cresting, a pounding down and foaming onto the shore. The cliffs below my window are high and rugged, rock that once erupted and bubbled down a volcanic mountainside many years ago and cooled as it hissed into the sea, caught in an eerie sculpture. Now the rock has become a landscape from Hades, its craggy pinnacles and disorderly layers standing guard fifty feet above the sea. But the sea is not afraid and mounts its attack against the cliffs like a massive army, spraying, pounding, slowly eroding. As the waves rise eight to twelve feet I can see their glassy undersides running straight along the coast. Then the waters fall in a downward arc to slip into swirling white froth on the shore. I sit on the border between sea and earth, caught in this glorious skirmish.

The quiet breathless calm as the sea gathers up and swells and gently undulates, is pregnant with impatience in the still-quiet cresting. I wait for the crash, when the sea pounds the packed bed of sand, thundering down, and spews and whooshes its white foam into the salty air. These are the only sounds, here in my retreat from the hustle of the city to the silence of the shore. The breathless calm. The silent gathering. The crashing and pounding. The beat of my heart. The tapping of these keys.

Far beyond this drama of gathering and cresting and falling down, far and away out to the barely curving horizon where the sky embraces the sea, the turquoise waters deepen to a dark blue, the waves dipping sweetly like a child’s finger painting, innocent, pure.

The scene of the sea is part of the greater act, of course, the greater drama of life itself, of my own body and it’s small and large parts, the galaxies of cells of flesh and bone I cannot see, the genetic history I carry into the future from my ancestors, from Adam and Eve. The miracle of it all – this creation of our world in all its facets and notes and history – never escapes me: The intelligence and brilliance and design, the relation of the part to the whole, the whole a part of another whole, and on and on. It is a poem, a song, a perfect painting. It is our deepest longing led to its source. It is something that cannot be expressed in words, only the Word.

And so we who are souls incarnate in human flesh await the Incarnate One. We listen to the prophets call him to our earth. We light candles and create special spaces in our homes to remind us that he is coming, he is near, he is here. We sing him into our hearts, Emmanuel, God with us. He who made the seas and the earth, the Word, takes on our flesh, completes the poem, the song, the painting. He is coming like the great rolling waves that rise outside my wall of glass. He will pound on our souls, knock on our doors, asking to come in. Will we hear his knock, know his voice? Will we welcome him when he comes?

I shall prepare for his coming this Advent of the Year of Our Lord 2012. I shall re-learn the Advent prayer in my worn Book of Common Prayer:

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

I shall read a book that will be a star I can follow to Bethlehem. This year I’m rereading St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation¸ a profound essay written in the fourth century by one of the great church fathers, with a sensible (I love sensible things) introduction by C. S. Lewis. I received this slim volume a few years ago at a silent retreat held in the forested Russian River area of northern California. It will be, hopefully, a window to the crashing roar of creation and its Creator, the Word, the Incarnate One. It will be, with an extra measure of grace, a star to light my way through Advent to Christmas.

I shall try to say the morning and evening prayer offices, and I shall re-memorize the first few verses of John, the gospel assigned for Christmas Day:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

Advent. The coming of God to earth. The same Word that created the world now recreates the world. The Word made flesh. Incarnation. Come, Lord Jesus, come.

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.

As we approach our national election it is appropriate that we who follow the Church Year find ourselves celebrating the Feast of Christ the King today, All Saints’ Day on Thursday, and finally All Souls’ on Friday.  Further ahead, we look forward to the “real” holiday season, in America one bracketed by Thanksgiving and Christmas.

On Wednesday this week we pretend to be someone else, as we don costumes on Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Saints Day. As Christianity took root in the West, the Church transformed druidical and other pagan celebrations into Christian ones. Just so, it is thought that the end of summer was observed on October 31, a long dark night in which it was believed the spirits of the dead roamed the earth. Villagers lit bonfires to frighten the ghosts away or left food out to pacify them. “Trick-or-treating” probably evolved from the poor begging from house to house, lighting the way with a candle in a hollow pumpkin. The Church created All Saints Day to drive away these fears with the love of God witnessed in the saints. It was and is a day of hallowing, making holy, these men and women who taught us how to live, alight with the love of God.

We all need to look up to someone, to admire, to emulate. Every culture has their saints of sorts – those who inspire, who set an example, who chart the course. Sports, movie stars, rock stars, artists, leaders, builders, become role models, both good and bad. We call them stars because they rise above us, bright and twinkling in the dark of night. They light our way or at least the circuitry of our minds. Some stars are more obvious than others, some bright, some dim. Some sneak inside our souls through advertising and subtle fashions, harmless at first, dangerous later. We all want saints in our lives. We all want kings.

In our country we do not have a king because we have seen bad kings. We do not have noblemen. We do not have lords and ladies, barons and baronesses, princes and princesses. We make up for monarchy and aristocracy by creating our own sort of kings, hopefully a meritocracy – our congressmen, our judges, our presidents, vice-presidents, military leaders. In this way we raise our own royalty onto pedestals so that we can see them better, so that we can emulate them. We want to tell our sons and daughters, you can be President, you can be great, if you act like this man.

I looked up noble, which comes from the same root as knowledge. To be noble, to act nobly, is to have knowledge as to what is right and what is wrong.

But where does that knowledge come from? Where does nobility or kingship come from?

God’s People of Israel had no king for many generations, from Abraham to Moses to Samuel. But after a series of judges, they demanded a king. Others had kings – they wanted a king too. God gave them Saul, and Samuel, God’s prophet, anointed Saul with God’s wisdom to do right. From that time, Western kings have been anointed by the Church in some fashion, an admission of their dependence on God’s authority.

Of course, King Saul, being a descendant of Adam, didn’t always do right, and all kings and those in authority can never be perfect, never live up to God’s law. The Old Testament is largely the story of this doing right, then doing wrong, of listening to God, then not listening, of obeying, then not obeying, with resulting blessings and curses.

So finally when God became incarnate, took flesh upon him, a true star shone over a true king come to earth in Bethlehem. Here was a king who would be perfect, who would be an absolute standard of right and wrong, who would embody ultimate love and its defining sacrifice, one who would guide, defend, heal. One who, through the Cross, would give life eternal to the children of Adam and Eve. Here was the Christ, the King, the anointed one, the long awaited messiah. And as king, he would demand obedience to his law of love.

Rightful and saintly kings are gladly obeyed. The feudal contract in old Europe was (and I simplify with abandon) protection in battle (knights, lords, kings) in exchange for a portion of the bounty pulled from the earth (serfs). Lords acted as judges as well, keeping the peace, and serfs were expected to obey the laws of the kingdom.

Just so, we the people create and recreate a government of laws to be obeyed, and in exchange for our obedience, the government protects us from invasion and ensures the peace at home. But because the government is made up of sons and daughters of Adam, leaders and laws, like kings, will never be perfect. How then are we to choose those leaders who will make those laws?

Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian morality, looking to the authority of God to set the course. But today, as we drift from our founding, we drift from our authorities as well. We drift from God; we drift from Christ the King. We have become, in many ways, becalmed, waiting for the next wave to engulf, the next riot to destroy, the next massacre to horrify, the next nine/eleven or Benghazi to be etched on our national memory.

As we approach November 6 and the election of our President, we must ask the question, even in this democracy, which candidate is the more noble? More kingly? Who has the greater knowledge of right and wrong? Who, in the end, has the character to lead us, to articulate the course for us, to pull together the threads of history into the present moment of choices? Who has the experience that ratifies that knowledge, that directs judgment? Like the days of lords and serfs, who can protect us in battle? Who can protect us in our towns, in our public squares, theaters, offices, homes?  Who can protect our individual freedoms to life, liberty, worship, and the pursuit of happiness?

We the People will gladly support such a man, a kingly and noble-man, perhaps even a saint. We will gladly point to such a man when he strides onto the dais and we say to our children, “That’s our President. A great man. Be like him, be noble-knowing. Be wise and learn to make the right choices. Be strong. Be brave. Be kind, loving, sacrificial.”

We will gladly anoint such a man. Indeed, we long to.

I recently asked a friend why folks don’t like to use the word “sin.” They are comfortable saying “mistake.” But in common conversation it is awkward to say “I sinned.”

My friend answered with a profound statement. “It’s too big a word.”

I’ve been thinking about that. We use the term “freighted” sometimes when speaking of words that have huge connotations. I suppose “sin” and it’s cousin “forgive” are freighted with implied judgment, God’s judgment. And yet we all admit judging ourselves and others by some kind of standard. Wouldn’t God’s judgment be more reliable than yours or mine? He was after all author of the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes and a few other refinements on basic behavior. But such authority is no doubt part of the bigness, part of the freighted baggage that modernity wishes to throw off the train. But where does that leave us? Without bigness and only smallness.

We sin against God and against one another. When we do this we actually are sinning against ourselves, according to Raymond Raynes, late Superior of the Community of the Resurrection in England. Father Raynes argued that since God is our Creator and has set up the system of natural laws that govern his creation, when we break those laws we actually break ourselves. Sin destroys. Sin pays wages we may not want – including death.

A baby was baptized in church today. She was washed clean of the sin inherent in our broken human nature, sin passed through generations from Adam and Eve to the present. And she was given a means to deal with future sins, future times of brokenness, by being grafted onto Christ’s Body the Church in baptism. Through water and spirit she has been made new, renewed, made whole. It was a miracle and we were a part of it.

We honored this miracle with a special hymn as the Sunday School children gathered around the font and sang, “Dearest Jesus, We Are Here,” and as the Bach tune lilted through the air we prayed for our little Ka’alayah in her long white gown. We prayed as the priest poured the holy water over her tiny head and said her Christian name, Christening her.

She has been Christened. She has been made a part of Christ’s Body. These too are large words, big words. We still speak of a person’s “Christian” name, the individual name given at baptism. It is a unique name for a unique person created by a loving God, a God desiring to heal our brokenness again and again.

The priest marked her forehead with a cross as he said:

We receive this Child into the congregation of Christ’s flock; and do sign her with the sign of the Cross, in token that hereafter she shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner, against sin, the world, and the devil; and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end. Amen.

Words. Not ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified… We have banished big holy words from our discourse because we are ashamed. We are Peter as he denied knowing his Lord in the courtyard that dark Maundy Thursday night, or perhaps the early graying dawn of Good Friday. We don’t want to be different from others in our culture; we want acceptance. We are ashamed of the Cross, the naked bloody way he died, publicly, humiliated, for us. We have tried to sanitize the Cross through the centuries, removing the corpus, forging it in gold, but it returns and reminds us, nudging us. We are ashamed to confess Christ crucified.

Words. It seems okay to say God, but not Jesus. It’s okay to say church, but not Christ. (Unless cursing.) It’s okay to speak of going to church but not what we believe, as though church were some kind of hobby one chooses or not. We make church small, for the word is too big if it is really the Body of Christ. We dance around the big words. They are fiery and dangerous, embarrassing and offensive.

We don’t want to offend. But in the process of banishing big meaningful words, big beautiful powerful, exciting and adventurous words that speak of the meaning of life and death, love, marriage, and family, why we rise in the morning and how we spend our short span on earth, how we care for one another, how we organize the pivotal relationships of society and social intercourse – in the process of banishing these words – we step into a dangerous universe. In this dancing around and covering up the bigness we enter a void of meaning, we drug our language, make our speech comatose.

I don’t want to live in the shadow-lands, somewhere between reality and fantasy. As I embrace these big words, I am thankful that some sixty-five years ago, I was, like little Ka’alaya, reborn with water and spirit, and since that time have been nurtured with the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, being regenerated and made whole again and again. I have learned hopefully to recognize sin when I see it in myself so that I am able to confess it. Once seen and admitted, I repent these thoughts, words and deeds. I can then turn once again toward the light.

Father Raynes says the beginning of eternity is now. We follow our Creator’s plan and desire to grow in him, to grow into our resurrection bodies.

So we are baptized with water and Spirit, we are given the sacraments, and we are given his son to nourish us along the way. Through this lifelong  process of renew-ness, we step toward heaven, another huge word and one of which I am not ashamed to confess.