Author Archives: Christine Sunderland

We arrived in a taxi at breakneck speed as though the driver was practicing for Monte Carlo. Within minutes it seemed we were circling the Coliseum, maneuvering through narrow one-way alleys, cutting in and turning and nearly skimming cars alongside, then up the Via Tritone, pass the Barbarini Piazza, and around to our hotel not far from the Borghese Gardens. The driver sported ear-rings, and manically grasped the wheel with tattooed arms. His biceps were scarred, whether from knife wounds or burns I could not tell.  No seat belts in the car.  I tried not to worry, and in any event, we made it, arriving with screeching breaks.  My husband, usually a cautious man, surprisingly said, “He did an excellent job, going the most direct route.” I just looked at him quizzically as he praised our driver and gave him a hefty tip.  The young man grinned and I was relieved.

Rome is a city of contrasts.  Opinions are heated, loves are joyous, hates are intense. Perhaps it is the colors of the sunshiny days, the energy of the city of scooters and artists, of opera singers in small restaurants singing Three Coins in a Fountain to you at your table. Perhaps it is the deeply religious Catholic life of childhood if not of adulthood and the abundantly sensuous life of adulthood if not childhood. Everything is embraced with gusto.

The Americans left their mark here during and after the war, and American Bars are common in this grateful Italy. For our troops swooped up from the south and freed this country of poets and painters and sculptors from a misleading dictatorship of cruelty. We, in the end, won the war which became theirs as well. So Italians for the most part are friendly to Americans visiting their paradise.

I love the churches in Rome. There are nearly five hundred I am told, but I am so enthralled with the main ones I spend my time devising routes to revisit them all. I shall never get through the five hundred.

Tuesday we visited Santa Maria Maggiore, the international Marian church, housing a piece of Christ’s cradle and an incredible Madonna and Child reputed to have been painted by St. Luke. The ceiling is gilded in gold from the new world of America. the church is a setting for my first novel,Pilgrimage, and my novel in progress, The Magdalene Mystery. InPilgrimage, Madeleine says:

Mary Major stands on a vast square on the Esquilino Hill. Legend says it snowed on the site in August of 352, a rare occurrence. When the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius, commanding him to build a church within the boundaries of the snowfall, he obeyed. Since then, every August 5 in the Ceremony of the Snow, white petals shower from one of the cupolas onto the congregation.
We crossed a broad parvis and climbed massive stairs. Opening a heavy door, we paused in the narthex. A long straight nave led to a gleaming altar and glittering apse. Forty marble columns ran up the side aisles marking the two hundred feet to the altar.
I stepped into the nave, leaving the dark entrance and turning toward the light apse and its canopied altar. Circular marble tiles covered the floor, and, at the far end, the apsidal mosaic showed Christ crowning his mother. The entire ceiling was coffered in gold—American gold, I recalled, brought back from the New World. Behind me, Jack checked his guidebook as he studied a row of mosaics high on the side walls. Pilgrims and tourists milled about; some sang hymns, some knelt in prayer.
We reached the end of the nave and descended curving stairs to a shrine in the confessio beneath the high altar. Whose relics lay here? Mary’s body was never claimed; many believe she was taken bodily into heaven, a miraculous event called the Assumption.
“It’s the Christmas crib, the manger cradle,” Jack said.
Inside a glass ark topped by a cherub rested a small piece of wood. Behind us was an oversized statue of a pope kneeling.
“Now I understand,” I said, half to myself, “why this church was first on the list.” Here was the beginning of God’s great act for man, his momentous intersection in man’s time, the birth of his Son, the God-man, in a manger. The child became a man, died and rose from the dead, fulfilling ancient Jewish prophecy. My own loss seemed insignificant in comparison, yet just as real. Maybe I was to take my grief seriously and not to overlook the small, the humble, the seemingly little things of our world. Maybe there were no little things.       Pilgrimage (OakTara, 2007)

So we returned to Maria Maggiore, and all was the same – the stunning nave, the Madonna in the side altar. But alas, the Christmas crib had been removed for restoration. Even so, we stepped through the adoring crowds, some singing, some attending masses in side chapels, praying for our world, our parish, our communities, our families, and our friends. There is always a list, I thought, with some more urgent matters moved to the top, and this was true this first day in Rome.

I gazed upon St. Luke’s Madonna and gave thanks, and in the thanks, began to adore her son in the tabernacle beneath, and within the adoration understood my imperfections and unworthiness. I began to love. For it is only in recognition of our smallness, I suddenly realized, our failures, that we can understand what it is to love. For love comes from an emptying, and then a filling, and then an emptying for the beloved.

We left Maria Maggiore and headed up Via Contra Verdi to Santa Croce, to the Basilica of the Holy Cross.

L’Eglise Saints Gervais-Protais is a soaring Gothic jewel of a church in the heart of Paris.

We visited on Saturday for the midday office, sitting on low wooden stools under pale fan vaulting and jeweled stained-glass in the apse. The Sisters and Brothers of Jerusalem, an order of monks and nuns who take simple vows, work regular jobs in the community, care for this stunning sixteenth-century church near Paris’s Town Hall. They entered the sanctuary one at a time, each having covered their pale blue cottas with long white robes. Each carried a small wooden bench and found a place before the altar, then knelt in prayer.  Soon these other-worldly creatures settled like white clouds descending, their robes falling like tents and softly folding upon the rush matting.

They sang the psalms in French, their voices weaving and soaring through the vaults. They read the lessons, one preached a short homily, and another played an ethereal tune on an alto flute.

We prayed too, standing, touching the floor and making the Sign of the Cross, as though our prayers would be given weight by theirs, that the Body was more than the sum of the individuals.

Madeleine and Elena in my novel Offerings visit St. Gervais:

    They stepped inside the soaring Gothic basilica. Massive columns rose to fan vaulting. Far beyond the high altar, in the apse above the ambulatory, stained glass glimmered. Low wooden stools filled the long narrow nave. Unusual, thought Madeleine, no pews or chairs, but stools. Madeleine and Elena joined the congregation of forty or fifty faithful that waited for the next office to begin. Madeleine focused her eyes on the golden icon of Christ on the altar.
Elena shared with Madeleine an English brochure she had found by the door.

The six-century church on this site was dedicated to the Roman martyrs Gervais and Protais, whose relics were brought to Paris by Saint Germaine. Today’s building is seventeenth century. In the Middle Ages, public trials were held in the square in front of the church.
Today the church is home to the Brothers and Sisters of Jerusalem, a monastic order serving the community, founded in 1975 by Fr. Pierre-Marie Delfieux and Cardinal Francois Marty. Their mission is to bring the contemplative spirituality of the desert into the heart of the city.
The brothers and sisters hold part-time jobs and rent housing. They offer daily mass and sing the morning, noon, and evening offices. They follow rules of love, prayer, work, hospitality, and silence as well as chastity, obedience, and poverty. Lay orders, defined by interest, age, and profession, form the Family of Jerusalem. The order has communities at Vézeley, Blois, Strasbourg, and Magdala.
Services are open to the public daily except Mondays. A shop sells books, crafts, icons, honey, and jams.

Madeleine looked up from the glossy leaflet as young monks and nuns processed silently in, their white robes dusting the stone floor. Their hoods were raised, framing expectant faces. They took their places in the choir and began to sing. The notes soared in four-part harmony through the vaulted stone. They sang with purpose and joy, bowing from the waist and touching the ground during the Gloria Patri, as if dancing. Lessons were read and more prayers sung.
As the young people filed out, Madeleine was thankful, for she had been pulled into their worship; she had soared on the wings of their melodies like a bird riding the wind. For the time she had escaped her prison of worry. So this was their desert in the city; this was their peace in God. She would cultivate her own desert garden with her own flowers of prayer. She would learn to fly too.      Offerings (OakTara 2009)

It was good, this last Saturday in April, to return to St. Gervais, to experience once again the joy of these young men and women, to know they are praying for this great city of Paris. They are a witness, a true flowering in the desert, a light in the dark of this urban world.

One of the nuns had placed a large golden icon of Christ on the altar in front of the tabernacle. The Reserved Sacrament was, I knew, in the apsidal chapel behind the ambulatory in the chevet, where Exposition and Adoration is observed for thirty minutes prior to every service. As I rose to leave I could see the red candle flickering in the far distance between the columns and the warm image of Christ on the altar seemed to be alongside, reassuring. Beauty reflecting truth heals and salves as well as saves.  When we find the two together, the harmonies are exquisite.

We stepped outside into the cold wind and headed for a bowl of soupe de poissons on the Isle Saint-Louis and maybe an ice cream sundae. As we meandered through the thickening Saturday crowds, I could still hear the soaring song in my ears. I could still see the white robes rising and falling to the floor like swans or petals and the golden Christ, so pleased. He was, I considered, also in the faces that passed me as we walked. He was in the wind on my face. He held me so very close here in the heart of this city.

http://jerusalem.cef.fr/jerusalem/en/en_index.html

Friday we visited my favorite icon shop, George Thullier, 10 Place Sulpice, found golden images of St. Paul, Christ the Good Shepherd, and Christ the Tree of Life. The shop is packed with religious art… inexpensive to expensive medals, icons, santons.  Then we continued up the Rue de Sevres to the Chapelle de la Medaille Miraculouse, where Dr. Rachelle DuPres from my novel Offerings is stunned by the light and the remarkable story of Catherine Labouré:

    She picked up a leaflet by the door and sat in the back. The sanctuary was awash with light, a clear, breathable air. A vault of blue mosaic rose over a white marble altar and tabernacle. A life-size Saint Joseph, holding the boy Jesus on his hip, stood in a tall niche to the left, and on the right, Mary, draped in white, held a golden sphere in her hands. A glass sarcophagus rested at her feet.
Rachelle opened her leaflet.

On July 19, 1830, the feast day of Saint Vincent de Paul and six days before the streets of Paris were barricaded by the July Revolution, the Virgin Mary appeared to twenty-four-year-old Catherine Labouré.
Catherine, one of ten children born to a poor farming family in Burgundy, had joined Vincent de Paul’s Daughters of Charity. One night, three months after she arrived at the motherhouse on the Rue du Bac, an angel-child led her to the chapel. There, Mary appeared to her and predicted terrible times for France. She wore a white robe and held a globe representing the world.
She instructed Catherine to have medals made of a certain design with the words O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you. The Blessed Virgin promised graces to those who wore her medals and to those who prayed before her image in the chapel.
Catherine told her confessor and urged him to have the medals cast. The archbishop agreed, seeing no harm. She told no one else about the visions until her deathbed confession in 1876, forty years later. Decades after her death, the body of this “Saint of Silence” was found to be incorrupt, untouched by time.

Rachelle walked to the glass coffin. Through the side panel, she could see Catherine’s body, clothed in black with a white headdress. Her face was coated in a wax-like substance, but the body certainly appeared whole, Rachelle thought. How could this be? By now, over a century after her death, it should be nothing but dust and bones.
Rachelle returned to her pew. The chapel was nearly full, and the standing crowd thickened behind her. All these people were here for a weekday mass.
An elderly nun stepped to the microphone and led a pre-mass rehearsal. She chanted a tune that floated over the people, and wove her hands through the air as though inviting them to join a great work, to give themselves to God. Rachelle looked up to the wide galleries above, now packed as well, where screens broadcast the service to those who could not see into the chancel. What brought all of these pilgrims here? There must be hundreds. Was this another Lourdes? Would the sick be healed?
The crowd was mixed, every race and class, gender and generation; the crippled leaned on canes and slumped in wheelchairs; faces reflected worry, exhaustion, devotion, adoration. A priest began the liturgy and the sisters sang from the front pews. Rachelle followed the songs on the yellow sheets and joined in the Glorias. Another priest preached from the center aisle, bellowing and waving his arms. She wondered what he said and regretted her poor French, but sensed he called his people to action.
Rachelle turned to Mary who gazed over her children. She was a loving mother, a powerful, caring mother. She was a mother who understood all: the beginnings, the middles, the ends; where Rachelle had been, where she was now, and where she was going. Hail Mary, full of grace…guide me, help me. Rachelle studied the faces in the crowd as they listened to the preacher. These were ordinary people seeking the extra-ordinary, searching for miracles of body and soul, wanting more than the everyday reality of their lives, wanting to be filled with something beyond themselves. Could she be filled too? How empty she was of late, except for that moment in Saint-Remi.
As the French prayers danced through the vaults, Rachelle’s eyes were drawn to the crucifix above the altar, then to the white tabernacle, and finally, to the bread and wine of the mass. The celebrant raised the chalice, offering the Agneus Dei, the Lamb of God, and the crowd surged forward, receiving the host on their palms and placing it carefully in their mouths.
Rachelle pulled Anne-Marie’s medal from her pocket. Catherine’s vision of Mary was engraved on one side—it was the Madonna in the chapel with the outstretched hands. Rachelle examined the other side. The M wrapped around the cross, as though enclosing it in mother love, tangible love. Two hearts rested at the base of the M. A sword pierced one heart and thorns pierced the other, uniting love and suffering, love and sacrifice. What did it all mean?            Offerings (OakTara, 2009)

Friday the chapel looked just the same, even more luminous than I recalled, and touching the medal lying on my heart, I entered and knelt before the body of Catherine, praying for my friends and my family, for my church and my country. It was a place where the eternal had intersected time, and while I believe this occurs at every Eucharist, these historic visitations, particularly of the Virgin Mary, in the century of France’s many revolutions, effect me profoundly. Mary’s love is so real, so endearing, so comforting, a mother’s love.

I prayed that Our Lady would watch over us in our travels, in our own journey through time.

We headed back to our hotel, icons safely in hand, the light of the chapel lingering in my mind. In our room I unwrapped the golden images, the two of Christ and the one of the red-robed St. Paul. I set them on the desk to keep me company as I scribble these notes, as I try to illumine what I have seen and known.

http://www.chapellenotredamedelamedaillemiraculeuse.com/EN/a__Welcome.asp

If I hadn’t visited before, I wouldn’t have noticed the Anglo-Catholic church tucked back from the road and hidden between townhouses. A small sign in simple script hung above the sidewalk, reading “Church of St. Mary.” Turning into the wide pathway, we entered through a brick cupola.

Madeleine and Jack visited St. Mary’s in my novel, Inheritance, and the description reflects closely my experience on Sunday. The chapter was based on visits in the nineties, when Father Bill Scott was Vicar, but little has changed since then:

Madeleine took Jack’s hand as the taxi arrived at 30 Bourne Street, set in a quiet Knightsbridge neighborhood off Sloane Square. The red brick church, built in 1874 as a mission for the poor, stood between neat townhouses, about fifty feet back from the street. To the right of the arched entry, an ivy-covered gate led to a rectory and garden.

They entered through a vaulted cupola and found themselves in the north aisle near a Lady Chapel radiant with flaming candles. The church was not large, with a single nave and two side aisles running under graceful vaults, but it had the quaint air that time lends to beloved spaces, as generations polish and perfect their worship of God. It was a church layered, Madeleine thought, with the lives of men and women, textured with their joys and their sorrows.

They located seats in the back of the packed nave and knelt. Madeleine prayed her customary thanksgivings for the clergy, the people, and the freedom to worship. As the organ sounded the opening chords and the clergy assembled at the foot of the central aisle, she and Jack stood with the congregation, opened their hymnals, and sang,

“Love divine, all loves excelling, Joy of heav’n, to earth come down,
Fix in us thy humble dwelling, All thy faithful mercies crown.
Jesus, thou art all compassion, Pure, unbounded love thou art;
Visit us with thy salvation, Enter ev’ry trembling heart….”

The procession moved toward the altar. A thurifer swung his thurible of burning incense, a crucifer raised his gilded crucifix into the billowing smoke, and two young torchbearers stepped forward, holding their candles steady. Deacons and priests, the celebrant vested in purple, followed.

Through the liturgy, the rhythm of the past led the dance of the present. A deacon read the Ten Commandments, God’s rules of right and wrong. A choir sang Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy, the ancient chant that admitted man’s helplessness, his failure to meet those standards on his own. It was the beginning of repentance, a preparation for absolution, forgiveness of these failures, these sins.

The deacons read from Holy Scripture, the people recited the Creed, and the preacher spoke from a carved mahogany pulpit rising over the congregation like a ship’s prow. The celebrant, facing the high altar with his back to the people, chanted the ancient Canon of the Mass. As he said the words of Christ that changed the bread into body and the wine into blood, he offered his people, cleansed and redeemed, to God the Father through God the Son.    (Inheritance, Oaktara 2009)

On Sunday, after the candles were snuffed out, and the choir sang its last notes, we joined the crowd in the house next door for drinks. We climbed narrow winding stairs to a second floor landing which opened onto a dining room and living room looking upon the street.  As we waited for the Vicar to arrive, I studied the walls of books and framed photos of former vicars, including the Father Scott upon whom I based a minor character. The room was warm and welcoming, with comfortable seating around a hearth, and I wondered if it was here in this room that they held their evening “theology discussions” mentioned during the service.

I had brought three copies of my novel for the new Vicar, Father Cherry, as a thank you. But a most remarkable event occurred, reminding me of God’s immense and unpredictable grace, if one is simply patient.

Father Cherry was delighted that we had visited and introduced me to a lovely petite woman who, it turns out, knew Father Raymond Raynes, the Superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield.  Inheritance is greatly in debt to the words and themes of Father Raynes’ talks as he gathered folks together in private homes in the countryside of England and shared the vibrant Catholic faith in his own inimitable way. He was a tall man with classic facial features, good-looking I understand, but at the time of these gatherings he was growing ill and increasingly gaunt. He must have carried an air of angelic joy. Many consider him to be an Anglican saint.

So my new friend at St. Mary’s knew Father Raynes! She even had attended these gatherings, which she said they all called “Holy Parties.” She laughed with the memory and I laughed too. “I saw what he had and I wanted it, so I became an Anglo-Catholic.” She grinned.

So here she was!  She went on to say the parties involved a good deal of gin and confession. That made me laugh even more.

She was delighted to accept a copy of my novel, and I forced two copies on Father Cherry with many thanks for this inspiring church.  For St. Mary’s Bourne Street, set in the midst of Knightbridge, close to Belgravia, is truly a faithful and hopeful witness to historic Anglican Christianity in an unbelieving and cynical age.

Now I want to contact Father Scott, who, I understand is Chaplain to the Queen, a member of her Household. This might take a bit of doing. Or a lot more of God’s unpredictable grace. Would Father Scott (perhaps) like a copy of my novel?

Thanks be to God for surprising joys on this cold Sunday in London!
And thanks be to God for St. Mary’s Bourne Street.

Excellent websites: http://www.stmarysbournest.com/; FaceBook,http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-Marys-Bourne-Street/331825049877

Arrived to a cold and wet London, and have settled into a historic hotel in the St. James area, close to Green Park, Piccadilly, and Buckingham Palace.

London is a walking city and on Friday we took advantage of the bits of blue sky appearing between clouds, the hopeful but weak sun blindingly bright if  intermittent. We stepped around puddles, walking between neat facades of red brick and window boxes with pansies, white gabled townhouses alongside steel-and-glass office buildings, looking to the left and to the right before crossing as red double decker buses rumbled past.

We headed to Westminster Cathedral, the setting for a chapter in my third novel, Inheritance.  I recalled it stood on the other side of Buckingham Palace, so we followed the long straight Mall to the Queen’s residence (her flag was flying indicating she was home), stopping to snap photos of the Horse Guards prancing toward us, serious and proud. Only in London, I thought, do you turn a corner and run into the Horse Guard parade.

I knew the way for I had visited often in the past. We wove through dense crowds peering through palace gates and around to Birdcage Walk and Buckingham Gate Road and past the old school house and the historic pub, then turned right on Victoria Street, heading toward the cathedral, its imposing Victorian brick façade looming above the square. The tall shade trees are green with spring now, and I could see through the leaves the frieze of Christ the King enthroned.  I stepped under the frieze, through the doors and entered the marble Romanesque interior.

Each time I visit Westminster Cathedral I am torn between regret that the interior was never finished and thanksgiving for the church’s witness. The massive and colorful painted crucifix hangs above the transept as though in welcome and I moved up the central aisle slowly, passing under it as though being blessed. The nave was in shadow for we were between services, and I paused in the first row to pray before the glimmering high altar, pray for the embattled Church in our world today, for the light to banish the darkness.

In the north transept we found the Blessed Sacrament chapel, where many folks knelt before the tented tabernacle this cold Friday, this second week of Eastertide. I reflected how wonderful it all was, the Real Presence of Christ in such an enormous church personalizing the marble and gold and the soaring space, as though the Lord of a great manor had invited you to take off your heavy coat, pass through the imposing foyer, and to sit with him in the library by the warm fireside. I prayed an intimate prayer here, standing in the back, for a young woman, the daughter of friends, who has just been diagnosed with a brain tumor. It’s operable they say, but the agony of the news, for herself and for her family, still reels through my mind and heart. She is at the top of my intercessory prayer list now, nearly constantly being prayed for. And her family. Another friend, a sweet girl and talented writer, is facing serious pancreatic surgery, and she is next in my prayers. How frail we are, I thought, as I gazed upon the tabernacle. And how loving God is to love us through these times so that we may find ourselves on the other side, where the light is, where despair is replaced by hope.

I rose and moved down the north aisle, past John Southworth’s chapel, past the English Martyrs’ chapel, past St. Joseph’s chapel, to the gift shop where I found several icons of Christ the Good Shepherd. I had given away my last one at home, and these would replenish the supply.  Before we left, I looked back up the nave to the painted crucifix before turning for the doors, thinking of my character Brother Cristoforo, the street urchin Nadia, and their adventures in the pages of my mind.

Next door, in the large Pauline store crammed with books and art, I found a painted icon of St. George and the Dragon, a fitting one to bring home from England. We needed today to slay many dragons.

With my newly acquired treasures carefully stowed in my bag, we headed for Westminster Abbey but didn’t visit – they charge a substantial sum and there are long lines, alas. The contrast to the free cathedral was obvious, and as an Anglican I was saddened, that such a historic church had become home to the money-changers, that one could not enter this Gothic royal church to pray.  It had become a museum, and worth a visit (we have in the past), but today it was beginning to rain. We headed back for lunch.

It wasn’t until I gazed at my calendar in the room with a view to the next week’s saints that I realized that Sunday was Good Shepherd Sunday and Monday the Feast of St. George. I smiled, and somehow I knew my angels were smiling too.

Packing for London, Paris, Rome, trying to squeeze my life into Samsonite, containers to roll alongside as we maneuver the airports, line up for the scanners, set out the gray tubs on the conveyor belt where the laptop, jacket, shoes, handbag are stuffed.

I’m leaving behind an other self in California. My home routines will be invaded, attacked, and removed. New ones will take their place and my mind will occasionally short circuit as I stare into space trying to rewire it with this newness, as I recreate myself.

I find this transition painful, as though going to the gym after an absence and feeling the pain in my lax muscles, or fasting on the first day of Lent and grimacing at hunger contractions. With this journey away from my home country, my eyes are being refocused, trained to see in new ways. My world is turned upside down as I find myself in another culture.

Along the way, there will be a great deal of scurrying and motion and noise. Jet engines throbbing and pulsing through the night of flying over the sea hugging the earth, sending vibrations through my flesh and bone. Announcements  on loudspeakers. Then later, in hotels, sirens in the deep of the city, trucks unloading at daybreak, tires screeching, airbrakes whistling, slamming doors, the shout of someone in the distance, echoing. We are going to cities, after all, and will be in the center, feeling the heartbeat and the fast-moving arteries.

I will not sleep too well for a number of days, sometimes longer, for morning is evening and evening is morning, and the architecture of my mind will have to be redrawn, rebuilt, so that I may live in this new environment and sleep again. They call this jet lag, words that don’t seem to do the experience justice.

I think of these things as I layer the tee shirts, slacks, skirts and sweaters into the way too tiny box called luggage, trying to stuff in one more item, trying once again to pull the zipper along its track. I am sure I have been severe in my choices, have rejected many things, but still there are way too many shirts, slacks, skirts and sweaters. I return some to my closet with a sigh. My old world is shrinking already.

What will God show me in London, Paris, Rome? What is his plan?  I shall watch and listen and say my prayers, following the lead of the angels that travel with me. I shall kneel before many altars and ask, show me, Lord.

I will be forced to change, to see the world a bit differently. Sometimes when this happens God has a chance to work his way into my heart, for I depend on him, especially in the transition time. He rewires me, re-creates me.

Scripture tells us we shall receive new bodies in the Resurrection. I believe it, for I have seen my own old one change so over the years. Just as my heart and mind and soul are continually remade by God, continually fed by him in the Mass, continually remolded in prayer, so it is easy to believe he can do something with my 135 pounds of flesh and bone, flesh and bone growing thin and brittle and saggy and pinched. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

We’ve been listening to Handel’s Messiah at home, a Christmas and Easter tradition in our house, and the Scriptural phrases sing over and over in my mind, We shall be changed. In the twinkling of an eye… the last trumpet shall sound… and we shall be changed.

Life does this to all of us, as we pass through our time, but I’m so very thankful to have God help in the changing, in the remolding as I do my little repenting. I long to be changed … to become what I am meant to become.  Someday to have the longing fulfilled.

For now, I must pack my old self in the suitcase (ha, an old word that one) and unpack my new self when I arrive. I guess it will be a bit of a rehearsal for the last great change, my resurrection. I shall watch and listen and be patient for the small voice in my ear, the flutter of wings touching my soul. The angels are all around me, guiding me, leading me.

As the plane takes off with all its proud rumble and the massive wheels retract into the steel body with a definite lurch, I shall think of these things again. The earth will retreat as I soar high, high, higher, and I shall arrive in London, already slightly changed, slightly closer to my resurrection.

I said to a friend recently, “It all depends on the resurrection of Christ from the dead.”

I’ve thought of that often since, as though the truth has become more real each day. It is as though that moment in history, circa 30 AD, is the fulcrum, the pivotal point, the loadstone, from which all else falls away and is reborn.

Or perhaps that moment in time is like the source of light, a burning candle, torch, flashlight, in the way that light, and thus vision, streams from it.

Some folks do not believe He rose. Some do. Some don’t see what difference it makes. But it makes all the difference, and it is important to choose. Life and death and life again.

There are implications to what one believes. As Raymond Raynes, the late Superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, England, said, there are two questions to be asked:  “What think ye of Christ? Whose Son was He?” and  “What shall I do then with Jesus who was called the Christ?”

It all depends on the Resurrection, and the Resurrection answers the first question.

Life and death and life again. This last week – Holy Week in the Christian calendar – was full of these things. The borders of this world and the next one seemed hazy, as though in the liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Day we slipped back and forth with a company of angels. There were the saints too, surrounding us, those from the past, particularly from our own parish, this glorious cloud of witnesses, a communion of saints. There were the words of the great passion story, told by each evangelist, parallel accounts reflecting their own perspectives – Mathew and Luke drawing on Mark and therefore similar; John urgently profound and intimate, that other disciple whom Jesus loved, who understood more deeply the meaning of it all.  Life and death and life again: we were steeped in these passages so that our joy would be complete.

I love John’s account of Easter morning:

The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre. Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him. Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre. So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in. Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed. For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead. Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.  (KJV John 20:1-10)

I always smile at the little race he includes, with the clear point that he, John, “the other disciple,” won. The detail makes him seem young.

And Mary Magdalene. Perhaps because I have been writing about her in my latest novel, the scene especially touched my heart.  The disciples leave Mary at the tomb, weeping:

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.  (John 20:11-16)

When he speaks, she does not recognize him. But when he calls her name, she knows him.  He is Love.

We listened to this Gospel read on Easter morning in church. The high altar was ablaze with white lilies. The purple drapes were gone, the sacred images bathed in light, the Paschal candle aflame. The children entered, stepping up the red-carpeted aisle carrying their baskets of flowers, and soon the thick white Easter cross was covered in blooms. We sang and we gave thanks and we received that which we were promised – resurrection. We no longer weep when death confronts us in the midst of life. We have been given hope, no longer groping in the darkness. We see clearly.

Later that day my family gathered around my linen-covered dining table. The youngest grandchild had asked about a photo of my father, then a young Navy chaplain in World War II. He ministered to the terrified boys serving on his cruiser in the South Pacific where kamikaze pilots dove into the seas on either side. My father didn’t want to talk about it much. As we toasted to family and resurrection and eternal life, I thought of him and his sharing God’s love with those boys.

Life and death and life again.

I returned to church today for Easter Monday Mass. I knew it would be a quiet moment to gather and recollect this most holy season, the greatest in the Church Year, the fulcrum, the apex. I was glad I came.  As I entered through the wide-open door, I was surrounded with the fragrance of lilies, and I inhaled deeply.  The few gathered held the moment like a great jewel of joy, borne on angel wings. A simple gift.

Once again, resurrected.

Today Christ entered the gates of Jerusalem and last night my son Tom arrived safely home.

It has been a watery week, the third week of drenching storms in the Bay Area, yet this morning I woke to a dome of blue sky, the clouds whipped away by cold winds. The sun brightened my world and my heart, parched with worry, was warmed.

My son turns forty this year.  Two weeks ago he journeyed to Nepal, leaving his wife and two young children in Boulder, leaving for the time his landscape architecture business.  He traveled with a ten-person mission team from his Presbyterian Church to help the orphans and widows of this war-torn country in the Himalayas. Children have been devastated by civil war that has raged intermittently in this poverty-stricken land. Many have been orphaned, many sold to traffickers. Orphanages have been founded and they gather these children in, providing some kind of safety and sanity. Tom’s team was there to help, to love, to help rebuild. And of course to share God’s immense love. I’m so proud of him.

I suppose, in a sense, in a mother’s eyes, her child never really grows up. Tom will always be my little boy, even though he is well over six feet and a father and husband. But I shall always worry about him, always pray for him, always feel I have never done enough. While Colorado is two states away from California, which in itself is difficult, Nepal is so much farther, and so much farther in culture, not to mention safety.

But my son came home last night, praise God, and as the days unfold I hope to hear more of his time in Nepal. Did Christ pull him close, as I prayed he would? Did Tom learn to love more deeply? Was a veil of this world pulled back, so that he could see God working in and around him? These were my intercessions for my son.

And today as we processed up and down the aisles of the nave waving our palms and singing All glory, laud, and honor, to thee redeemer King… I gave heartfelt thanks. I passed the high altar and tabernacle and crucifix above and gave thanks. I passed the purple-draped Madonna and Child and gave thanks. I processed, following the children who followed the clergy and acolytes with the draped crucifix raised high between two flaming torches, and the congregation followed us. We circled the nave and returned to our pews. Christ entered Jerusalem on a donkey and we welcomed him.

Soon, as we move through this coming Holy Week I know that the welcoming crowd will change to a killing mob: “Crucify him!” Soon our joy will be drowned in the tears of Good Friday. For as mankind we we carry the seed of Adam only redeemed by the wood of the Cross. The children of Nepal know this seed of Adam. They have known suffering; they bear the wounds of the Fall in the Garden.  But with my son’s visit, they may have glimpsed the dawn of Easter where God banishes all fear and darkness from their hearts. This team of faithful folks from this affluent university town in the Rockies have perhaps shared their God of light and love, a God who overflows with goodness and mercy. Hindu gods hold far less power over these children of Nepal, we pray.

I think our Blessed Mother Mary was nearby when her son entered the gates of the Holy City and the hopeful crowds shouted hosanna to the Son of David. She was nearby when he instituted the first Eucharist at his last supper. Outside Pilate’s palace, she watched the crowd turn on her son, winced at the crown of thorns and the lash marks. She was near as he picked up his cross and she felt its weight as he stumbled to Golgotha, the place of the skull. She knew the piercing nails, the thirst, the sword in the side. With all gentleness she helped carry him to the tomb and watched as the stone rolled over the entrance, covering it. She was his mother. Did she know that he would become that Eucharist that he instituted on that first Maundy Thursday? That he was the passover lamb? Did she know that he would rise on the third day, that first Easter, and complete man’s redemption?

My spiritual director often reminds me that to love is to suffer. To love is to sacrifice, by definition, for the beloved. Our God did that; our God does that; we must do that.

I pray the gentle people of Nepal experienced some of this amazing grace, these last two weeks. I’m sure they did. The sick were nursed, the hungry fed, the naked clothed, mourners comforted.  God was praised.

We enter Jerusalem, walking alongside the donkey. Yoked with Christ, with him we die to our old Adams, and with him we rise on Easter Day.

Did I mention that my son came home?
Thanks be to God.

I have to admit the purple drapes took me by surprise, although they shouldn’t have. Every year on Passion Sunday our parish drapes images of Christ, the altar and tabernacle, the tall candlesticks, the Madonna and Child to the left of the chancel, and even the lectern to the right – they are all draped in deep purple cloths that flow gently to the floor. We are beginning the last two weeks of Lent, called Passiontide, in which we draw closer to the Crucifixion, but see beyond, to the Resurrection.

I was late, having duties in the Sunday School, and as I entered the nave I took a deep breath. At the head of the carpeted aisle, the sanctuary glowed with the purple drapes and the red carpet. The candles flamed, reminding us of victory, the  hope of Easter. Even the immense medieval crucifix over the altar, was fully draped, turning a large portion of the red brick to purple. I padded softly up the aisle and  knelt alongside my husband, praying my usual opening prayer of thanksgiving for the clergy, the people, and the freedom to worship, as the last few lines of the processional hymn echoed in my ears, sung to the Pange Lingua.

I had much to be thankful for this morning. There were little things, such as the dry respite from the rain so that I could carry the giant attendance board, taken home to re-glue after having come apart, into the Sunday School without it getting wet. I was thankful for having finally remembered the milk for the parish kitchen and the new toys for the children’s prize box, items which I had forgotten the week before.

There were larger things, though, that filled my heart, not least the surprise itself. I thought how the liturgical re-enactment of our faith brought such sudden delight. We told the story, month after month, season after season, the same story of redemption, marking each year in our own span of life. This Lent 2012 was different than last year’s, as it would be different from next year’s Lent. Each day, each hour, each minute were unique moments of choice, moments in which we chose to draw closer to heaven or chose to pull away. The liturgy helps us to face the choosing and to choose.

As I gazed upon the unseen images I reflected, as I often do this time of year, upon a world without Christ, a world in which nothing made any sense. Was American culture drawing closer to such a world? A world of dark rituals and life sacrifice?

The movie Hunger Games, just released, is based on a disturbing premise. Young teen girls fight to the death in a reality TV arena for the entertainment of the public. Surely, this is a world without Christ, without respect for life. I am reminded of cock-fighting, of dog-fighting, of bear-baiting, of Roman gladiators. It is a cruel world of death, of brutalized hearts and souls. And to up the ante, Hunger Games depicts teenage girls, adding a sexual element to the violence.

What has become of us?

But this morning the candles flamed on the purple altar, throwing light on the purple tabernacle. The flaming fire reminds us that Easter dawn draws near, that the sun will rise.

Another movie, October Baby, tells the story of a survivor of abortion, and how valuable her life is, regardless of her handicaps. Curiously the two movies enter our culture at the same moment in time, so that we may compare the dark and light. We may choose.

So the rich and royal purples in the sanctuary pull us into those last days, into the days of Christ the King’s suffering. We are called into reality, into the way things are, and we are told to pay attention.

“Pay attention,” the purples say. So much of what we do in the liturgy demands our attention, calls our hearts and minds to listen, to offer, to love, to enter the story. Bells ring. Sacred words are said over the creatures of bread and wine. Body and blood meet body and blood, and we unite with our creator. We are called by the actions of the liturgy, into the true story. We are called into love itself, into light, into life. We chant, we kneel, we make the Sign of the Cross over our head and hearts. We pay attention.

And occasionally we are caught by surprise, by sudden bursts of purple joy.

Today was a joyous day.

The rain came this week, finally, drenching our parched hills and turning them March green.  It was for the most part a week of steady downpour, sometimes weakening to drizzle, occasionally pushed by gusty and surprising winds.

But this morning the skies brightened, and an icy wind blew, clearing out the rain, at least for a day. We trundled to church pulling our jackets tight about us, reminding ourselves that yes, California is sometimes cold. There was no snow capping Mt. Diablo to the east, but it sure felt like there should be.

Perhaps I imagined that I was in a bit of Ireland, with the cold and the rain and the green hills, and St. Patrick’s Day having been yesterday. So of course today we celebrated St. Patrick, singing the hymn he is said to have written about the Holy Trinity, St. Patrick’s Breastplate: I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity… The tune is a strong one, reminding me of a march, and indeed it was part of a collection used for travelers embarking on a journey.  But the music shifts at the end to the part I have always loved, a lyrical chant: Christ be with me, Christ behind me, Christ before me… Christ in quiet, Christ in danger…  For the great mystery of the Christian God is just this, that he loves us so, that he wants to be with us always, outside and inside, in and around, as Father, Son and Spirit.

The organ showered golden notes over our substantial congregation and we sang with gusto. Soon the children processed up the red carpet for their blessing at the altar, having had their annual sleepover in the parish hall the night before (God bless those teachers). We, the rest of their family of God, stepped to the altar rail, pulled by the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. We received that which he promised. We became His Body, one with him and one with each other.

Sunlight danced through the stained glass, playing with shadows, dappling the nave, and purer sunlight poured through skylights over the altar, illuminating the medieval crucifix. Time was suspended in that hour of worship. I wanted to hold the moment in my palm as I would a precious jewel. I wanted to own it. In a way, I thought, I did, for my life was a necklace of such moments, worn close to my heart. I was baptized. I was confirmed. I was a member of this mysterious Body of Christ, breathed upon by the Holy Spirit, created by God the Father.

We gathered downstairs to feast on Irish corned beef and cabbage and many many other things and cake and brownies and champagne too.  The children landed at their own table, now clubby and grown-up and good friends, having weathered a cold night in sleeping bags, having prayed together, and having sang together in the candlelit chapel.  We women of gentler years held the babies, holding them close, rocking them, watching a child’s enchantment with her world.

In addition to celebrating St. Patrick, we feted our good vicar, Father Mautner, who would be leaving us after Easter. A stirring and poetic preacher and a heartfelt celebrant of the Mass, we shall miss him terribly. But his home parish is in Napa, and alas, he must go home.

I was glad we sang St. Patrick’s Breastplate, this hymn to the Trinity on this day of leave-taking. The Trinity will keep us together, comfort us, guide us, lead us as we too travel into the next hours and days and weeks and months of our life as a parish. We bind unto ourselves, like a breastplate of armor, God himself, no less, a God who waters our parched souls and makes us Irish green.