Author Archives: Christine Sunderland

She was young, perhaps early twenties, with dark hair and a familiar face. She appeared to me in my dream-before-waking this morning. As I woke slowly, surfacing into the morning, I thought about the dream, holding the image and trying to recall all that I could. The odd thing about this dream was that I felt partially awake, looking to the foot of my bed where this woman smiled at me. I don’t recall ever having the experience of dreaming where I thought I was awake, lying with the covers pulled up, peering out.

She was part of a line of others who filed past me, right to left, but her face was the only clear one, and in full color. The others were gray tones. She turned to face me with her wide white smile. She was beautiful, in her prime years. And she was happy. Her face was filled with joy.

As we drove to church this morning I thought about the dream and suddenly realized who she was. She was a close relative. I will admit that I have been working on old family pictures the last few days, scanning them for posterity, for my son and his children, my sister and her children. The woman I saw as the sun filled my room with piercing light was an early image of this family member. It was one of the photos.

I could dismiss this as the experience of working with these images the last few days. I could dismiss this as my own mental projection, and I probably would, for I accept that many dreams are a working out of recent experience. But my partial wakefulness fights this interpretation. I literally watched her from the bedcovers. I watched her turn, smile, and move on in line. If she hadn’t been so happy, and somehow her happiness made me happy, I would indeed have been unnerved.

This woman I saw is still living and of advanced and frail age. Today she is not a believer in God, although at the time of this photo she was a born-again Christian. She lost her faith many years ago and when she lost her faith, it was my sense that she lost her joy.

This morning was the Sunday after the great feast of Corpus Christi (Thursday), a feast celebrating the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is an incarnational sacramental day, a day in which we give thanks for God working among us in and through creation. I considered this amazing miracle of the Eucharist that occurs on altars everywhere, Christ becoming present in the bread and wine. And I considered the woman who still hovered in my vision, as I listened to the Gospel reading, Christ’s fearful parable about the rich man and Lazarus. The parable tells how the rich man ignores poor Lazarus who begs at his gate for crumbs. The rich man dies and goes to hell. Lazarus dies and is carried to heaven by angels. The rich man, tormented by flames, begs Abraham to send Lazarus to him with a little water, but Abraham refuses, explaining that the gulf between heaven and hell is too wide and cannot be breached. The rich man begs Abraham to warn his five brothers still living on earth, to warn them about heaven and hell and the terrible breach, the fearful flames. Abraham says Moses and the prophets have already warned them.

This parable is often interpreted as Christ warning the Jews to pay attention to Christ’s life and words. But the story also paints a vivid picture of heaven and hell, a greatly divided heaven and hell (an idea C.S. Lewis explores in The Great Divorce). Christ clearly believed in hell and hell’s great divorce from heaven. A fearful story indeed. But the Epistle answers the fear with Saint John’s wonderful ode to our God of love (I John 4:7+). In this poetic passage, John begins with “let us love one another for love is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God…” And later, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love…”

I thought about my dream. I thought about the Gospel and the Epistle. I thought about the torment of hell and this God of love. I thought about my many unbelieving family members and friends. Then I recalled the words of a priest who told me once that he thought that God evaluated the whole life of a person. God, being out of time, collapses that life into the best of the person, the faithful years of the person.

I have often wondered about the new bodies we will be given in our own resurrections at the end of time, in the Last Judgment. Which body will they be? Young or old? What about babies who die in the womb? It seems to me that it would make sense that our resurrected bodies will be the perfect body of our peak years, the form we were intended to be, without blemish or handicap. Beautiful. Just so, our souls will reflect our best years, our faithful years.

I see now once again the face of the woman in my dream, and again see such beauty. Was she asking something of me? Was she asking me to pray for her? Was she not only the woman still living whom I love, but also the eternal woman she is to become, walking toward heaven? Did eternity meet time this morning in the early dawn at the foot of my bed?

I cannot wrap my mind around these ideas and shall consider them mysteries. But I am glad for God’s mercy. I’m glad for this God of perfect love that casts out fear. I’m glad for Corpus Christi, for since Christ is present in the bread and wine at each Eucharist, all is possible.

And I shall pray for this close relative of mine, seeing her in my mind as she was and ever shall be: beautiful.

As we drove to church this morning I happily looked forward to two of my favorite hymns, the robust hymn by St. Patrick, “I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity…” and “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.” For today is Trinity Sunday in our glorious Church Year.

Summer has come to the Bay Area, but the nights are still cool, the hills green from our late rains. The brilliant blue arching over us seemed to rain sunlight upon the earth, through a glistening shimmering air, brightening the foliage and the flowers. I held my red-and-white roses cut from my garden for the Children’s Chapel, kept moist with dampened paper towels. I thought how beautiful the world could be, smelling the roses and drinking in the sky, gulping the joy of creation. And soon we would sing to the Creator himself.

The Holy Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – is a difficult concept for most of us to fully grasp. Thus we call it a mystery. I have heard it explained in many ways – the love between the three persons of God, the uniqueness of the three persons yet all being of one substance, the eternal reality of these three persons of God. But today as I gazed upon the white-tented tabernacle on the altar, it struck me forcibly that this second person, Jesus Christ, was the God of our created world. He, the Son, became and is one of us, taking on our flesh, and in the Eucharistic elements is again one of us, our flesh, to become one with us, in our flesh, in a consuming co-union. For the Eucharist is indeed the Eternal Supper given to us by Christ in the Last Supper and the days following, days which formed the new Christian Passover, the means of our own journey, the new exodus, to Heaven.

All of the Church Year pointed to this moment of realization.

I’ve been reading Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, in which Brant Pitre effectively makes the case that we must consider the Last Supper, that Maundy Thursday before Good Friday and Easter, from the Jewish perspective. For Christ was Jewish, and only by considering the Jewish context can we understand what he intended when he said, “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood.” Did he intend these words as merely metaphor?  Dr. Pitre’s conclusion, after looking at the Passover rituals, the role of heavenly manna in the Exodus, and the Jewish relationship with blood itself, is that Jesus did indeed intend that this new supper, done in “re-membrance,” to be an actual re-offering of his body and blood, a gift to us of his Real Presence.

And this Real Presence, I thought, was not merely spiritual, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. It was the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ.

We sang “I bind unto myself today…” and the thurifer processed up the red-carpeted aisle swinging incense into the still air of the nave and the sanctuary. Following the clouds of smoke came the torchbearers with their flaming candles, the crucifix raised high by the crucifer. The clergy followed, stepping solemnly to the High Altar to offer the Mass, to consecrate the bread and wine to become Christ’s Real Presence, so that his flesh would become ours.

We sang “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty/Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee/Holy, Holy, Holy! merciful and mighty/God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.” The tune is one of triumph and joy, a true song of worship, and as I sang, other times of singing this beloved hymn sweetly telescoped into my present moment.

As we left the church and stepped into this crystal clear day of mid-June, I recalled it was Father’s Day, a lovely overlay of festivals, a chance of the calendar. I gave thanks for my father, may he rest in peace, for he taught me about our God of love, and for my son, now a father, who teaches his children about our God of love. I gave thanks for the many fathers-in-God, the clergy, who have challenged me with the remarkable mysteries of the Holy Trinity, the three-in-one God, and the amazing power of the Holy Spirit to give life and strength in our passage through time.  And most of all I gave thanks to God the Father for himself, for sending us his son Jesus the Christ, to be the new Passover sacrifice so that death would pass over us, and to be with us again and again on Sunday mornings (and many many other times) in Mass in our local parishes.

Holy, holy, holy… I bind unto myself today…

Our family settled in for a few days along the coast near the quaint seaside town of Carmel, California, named after the holy mountain where God spoke to Elijah in his “still, small voice.”

A low ceiling of gray hovered over the sea and the land, the winds cold, the sun weak. The sky held the earth close, breathing upon it like the Holy Spirit, as pelicans flew in formation, dancing for our pleasure. The world was all grays – gray greens of the cypress dotted gentle hills that rose along the sea, darker shades of gray waters rising and crashing upon the ashen shore, the white foam bordering steely crests, the lighter airier grays of the heavens above that carried the birds and bore the sharp breezes against our cheeks and stung our uncovered ears.

We wrapped our jackets tightly about us, in this unseasonable June chill, and looked out to the sea to Bird Rock where otters and sea lions gathered. My son led his family down the steep dunes along the cliff to the black tide pools to look for crabs and shells and other ocean treasures. I watched from above, as they stood stiff legged for balance, leaning forward and staring into the quiet mini-bays of life, soon returning with pockets full of shells.

Other days we visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a remarkable city of glass windows and vast waters and rainbow colored fish of all kinds in their own homes and habitats. We petted turtles and wondered at jelly fish with their filmy parachutes of pale colors floating open, then closing, with the tides. We entered another world of ocean yet pleasantly remained dry, marveling and then marveling again. There were feedings and fights among the fish, as the strong devoured the weak. There were otters on their back tending their babies or cracking shells with stones. There were waterfall canyons where we stood and watched the foam arc over us. We wondered and we watched, moving silently in some kind of awe-some trance, as though we too swam with the fish, we too were surrounded by the oceans of otherworldly miracles.

In this time together, away from our ordinary lives, together once again as family, we visited old friends from my son’s school, friends now parents, with their own children. My son’s generation tended to their next generation, and I watched, removed from the old immediacy of parenthood, living in the world of grandparenthood. Someone once said it was an amazing thing to see your child become a parent, and it is true. I watched my son as he fathered his children. I watched with pride as he listened to them and corrected them, as he loved them and led them. It made me so very glad.

And it made me grateful and thankful for God’s blessing of this time together. The children, eight years and six years now, a boy and a girl, bounced to me with new joys and new discoveries and shared experience, their eyes full of the excitement of childhood innocence. I could see through their eyes this new world unfolding, and I was thankful. We created stories together as we shared lunch at a small restaurant in Pacific Grove, about a lavender seahorse named Lucy who searched for lilacs in an eatery in a town on the shore. We laughed and we created and we loved.

But most of all we spent time together. We shared meals, we walked the shore, we considered the fish and the oceans.

Today is Pentecost, the great festival of the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ’s disciples, and I thought how the Holy Spirit, this third person of the Holy Trinity, the spirit of God upon the earth, had descended upon us in the last few days, had united our family, knitted us back together. We formed a new garment with a tighter weave. We were renewed, as God breathed his spirit of life into us. We would not forget his fire and his love and the wind of the waters upon the land… even under these cold gray skies. Yet tonight, at supper, the sun came out, bathing the ocean with brightness and we shielded our eyes as it set into the sea of silver.

We watch and we marvel at the world about us as God transforms our love to be more like his own. Just like Elijah, God spoke to us. And just like the disciples at Pentecost, we knew the fire of his love.

They descended from the skies, flying in from Colorado on Saturday, my son and his lovely wife and his two children.

We waited and we planned, my husband and I, and prayed too, that their trip was safe and good and that all was well.

It was safe and good and all was well.  They too had looked forward to their getaway, to their time with Mom and Dad, with Grandma and Grandpa.

They took time away from their lives, their routines, to be with us.  They gave us a portion of their world, their days.  We too, pushed away the borders of our doings to open the door and clear a pathway for their coming.   We carved out space where we could meet.

This, I have been thinking, is love.

I wish that we lived close by, and the carving was more often, the lacing together tighter and easier.  I wish that we melded as naturally as minutes moved into hours, hours into days.  But choices and chances and challenges have not allowed this for us in our lives.  So once or twice a year we plan and create islands called vacations.  We board planes and travel to lace one another up again.  We look at each other and note our growing in one way or another, with age, with worry, with happiness.  We take stock.  We listen.  We love.

Sunday was Ascension Sunday and we worshiped together, kneeling in the pew and thanking God for this time granted.  Here in the church where my son was once an acolyte, serving before God’s altar, we knelt on the padded kneelers, he in his late thirties and I in my early sixties, and said the prayers he said as a child.  Later, he took his son, age eight, and his daughter, age 6, to see the places where he once prepared to serve the Holy Mass. On this morning we sang songs of the Ascension of Christ, the moment when all the pain and suffering of the world was redeemed.   For, I knew, Christ would carry me to Heaven when the time came, he would bring me with him in his full humanity.

I considered my child and his children, my flesh and his flesh, my love and his love.  I thought how God had sheltered us but only because we have asked for the sheltering.  God has redeemed us but only because we want to be redeemed.  God has guided us and laced us together only because we desired his will to be done in our lives.  But God has loved us whether or not we wanted his love.

As in other times of my life, I have found that with God’s grace I see and experience what he wants for me.  This Ascension Day I looked at my child, now a man and a father and a husband as well as my son, as he knelt before God, and I gave thanks for God’s presence in my life, his lacing us together and to him.  It was a moment of ascension, a pulling toward God, joining our flesh with his in the Eucharist, a foreshadowing the ascending to come.

Today I cut three large pink roses from our bush in our backyard, wrapped them in a wet cloth, and brought them to church.  I filled a glass vase with water and shoved the green stems into the clear liquid, then placed the vase with its fragrant bouquet on the white linen spread on the altar in the Children’s Chapel.  Today is Rogation Sunday, and this was my small offering of thanksgiving for all of creation.

They say God’s timing is perfect, and with each passing year, I believe this to be true within the boundaries of free will, although I know I can see only dimly, hear the passing notes of minutes and days, catch the lingering tune before it fades.

I pray through the Church Year, that great drama of God’s time and timing re-enacted again and again.  And as it is re-told, as this mysterious story of life and death and resurrection is relived, it is re-enacted in my life too.  It is re-enacted in all of our lives, if we can but see, if we can but hear the melody.

I have long loved the sacramental way, the acting out of this story of redemption – the waiting of Advent, the incarnation of God as a baby at Christmas, the Epiphany of joy bursting upon the world.  Then the penitence of Lent, the Way of the Cross, the first Eucharist at the last supper, the Crucifixion of the Son of God, the silence of Holy Saturday, the new light of the flaming candles that evening, the flowered cross on Easter morning.  The time of Christ walking the earth, appearing to many so that we could believe he lived, he truly rose from the dead.  His Ascension into heaven.  Then Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Spirit to comfort, strengthen, inspire.  As the Body of Christ, we live these things, we do them, we re-act them.  We write these moments upon our hearts.

Last summer I prayed for some additions to our church nursery, for the room had grown too quiet.  I prayed that God would send us more babies.  By All Saints we had two, a girl and a boy, age 9 months.  By Christmas we learned another girl was on the way, growing in the womb.  By Easter we learned a fourth child, a girl, would be born in early Advent of this year.  I look back upon these prayers, this year, and I wonder, amazed, as I watch these marvels unfold.

On Rogation Sunday we celebrate the new life of all creation.  Eastertide is closing and we look now to Ascension.  It is fitting to celebrate new life today, and I wondered how this Sunday would weave these things together, engraft them upon my heart.  We are told that the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel assigned for a certain Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer are meant to dovetail, to point to the day’s moment of re-living in the Church Year.

The Collect, the opening prayer assigned for today, asks that we may “think those things that are good, and… may perform the same…”

The Epistle tells us to be doers of the word and not just hearers, to “look into the perfect law of liberty.”  Liberty comes with its law, what we are to do, to perform that which is good, the answer perhaps to the Collect.

In today’s Gospel, Christ says that we may ask for anything in his name and we will receive it.  Such an asking, I believe, is most pleasing to God if it is for the health of his Body, the Church, if it is a prayer for others, not oneself.  If it involves babies in the parish nursery.

And so, as I contemplated these three passages of Scripture this Rogation Sunday, it all came together.  The new life I asked for last August wove into Christ’s Body the Church, as these children and their families were welcomed by our parish through the seasons of Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter.  These were good prayers, and today, Rogation/Creation Sunday, the nursery was indeed full of new life.  Natalie and Alex, now happy toddlers, chased their toys around the room.  Our mother-to-be is due to give birth any minute.  The classroom next door was packed with primaries and juniors listening and asking and even, as I recall, sampling lentil soup.

I look forward to Ascension and its tide, that season that shall wash upon the beaches of my soul. We shall watch as Christ ascends to the Father, knowing we shall one day follow, having seen, known, and done the perfect law of liberty.

Deo Gratias.

We are still in Eastertide in the Church Year.  It is a season of new life, resurrection, and hope, and as I gaze out my window at the blue bird darting among the branches of our olive tree in full leaf and flower, I wonder at the cold temperatures we are experiencing at this time of year.  Nature has a way of surprising us.

But the Church Year is certain with no surprises, the progression from Advent to Christmas, Lent to Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, the long summer and fall of Trinity, the return to Advent.  Through this liturgy of church seasons we sing of God’s love for us, his constant watching and caring.  He pulls us through our own time and into his, through his Body, the Church.  He is constant and steady, an unfailing lover.

Our Diocesan Synod met this week, and it was good to be with fellow Anglicans from other states, other parishes.  It was so good to see old friends and make new ones, to hear how God had worked miracles in their lives.  It was good to share meals, worship together in the Mass, and conduct the business of the Diocese with reports and plans for the future.  We also were nourished in soul by Father Seraphim Hicks from Nazareth House Apostolate, who spoke to us on prayer, our walk with God, our communion with God.  The Anglican Province of Christ the King has been blessed with many Godly clergy and parishioners, and this yearly meeting is a time of encouragement within the Body of Christ.

So in this cold Eastertide, we, like Mary Magdalene in the garden on that Easter morning, reach for the resurrected Christ through his body on earth. We want to touch God, to warm our hearts, and we do so through the greatest prayer of all, the Eucharist.  And it is through the Church that the Eucharist is effected, this mysterious presence of Christ in the bread and the wine.  It is through the Church that we touch Christ in the garden of his tomb.  We become like Mary Magdalene, as we meet Our Lord in the Mass. And in this meeting we know him.

As we worshiped this morning at Saint Peter’s I thought of the many I love who I saw in the last few days at the Synod.  I thought how the Eucharist wove us together, that the supper instituted by Christ on Maundy Thursday so many years ago, today continued to pull us together like those leaves on the branches outside my window.  We flowered together from the same vine, in full green leaf, like my olive tree outside, and the Holy Spirit moved among us just like the bird, encouraging us, urging us with his song.  At the solemn Pontifical Mass on Saturday, thirty robed priests, led by the thurifer, torchbearers and crucifix, processed down the red carpet of Saint Peter’s and we sang as though with one voice, “Alleluia, sing to Jesus…”  Last in line came our Archbishop with his shepherd’s staff.  Through the shepherding, through the prayers, through the action of God through his Church, we were one.

This morning we again touched Christ in the Eucharist, full flower in our sanctuary.  Then we gathered together in the fellowship hall to celebrate a baby soon to join us, a new member of our flock.  Soon there will be a baptism to sing about, and another leaf on our green tree of life growing through time and space, nourished by Christ.

I have not played the piano in many years.

Even when I did play the piano the effort was not terribly successful.  I took lessons as a child and knew the notes and the keys and the finger positions, but making it all come together quickly enough to recognize the tune was a challenge.  I never reached this enviable level of skill, but even so, the miracle of touching those white keys and hearing the notes is something I shall never forget.  I do admire and, I must admit, also envy, those who can really play, those who can play so that others can sing.

So when I entered the Children’s Chapel at church this morning without a plan for the hymn we were singing (I was a substitute teacher) I was a bit lost.  Could I lead a cappella?  Possible but not desirable.  Yet soon, with the help of one of our bright and sympathetic students, I opened the Hymnal to #311, All Things Bright and Beautiful, set the book carefully on the stand before me, and placed my fingers on the keys.  I saw right away that my left hand fingers would be useless with those chords hovering in the base clef.  I lowered my expectations and worked with my right hand fingers on the single melody that, I prayed, would somehow be coerced from the large wooden instrument before me.

The first note was such a delight!  I wanted to pinch myself, I was so triumphant.  Then the second note, the third, and I was moving along fine one note at a time until I hit a sharp, one of those nasty black keys.  I remembered flats and sharps, those bumps in the road you had to watch out for and be prepared to battle.  I tried from the beginning again.  Darn that F-sharp.  Again.  This time I did it, and my fingers tumbled over the keys, including the long black sharp.  We all laughed at my huge success, a laughter that soon turned to hysterics as we tried to pull ourselves together to sing the chorus.  And we did!

As I considered my time this last week and what struck me as the most wonderful, I thought of those moments in the Children’s Chapel.  We sang the chorus and read and prayed the Service of Morning Prayer together, kneeling before the magnificent carved wooden altar with the flaming candles.  We prayed the prayer of the day, the Collect, and then the Lord’s Prayer, then Psalm 100, then said the Apostles’ Creed.

It wasn’t that my week didn’t go well.  It was a good week, a fantastic week, in many ways.  I made great headway on my novel-in-progress, The Magdalene Melody, for I received valuable advice from a Cambridge Magdalene scholar I had queried for help.  He sent me, God bless him, nine pages of suggestions, including help with French expressions, and even Latin translations.  I was in writing heaven as I applied this material to the manuscript.  The week was also full of preparations for our upcoming Diocesan Synod, preparations that seem fragmenting at best for there are so many things to do, but still so very gratifying when accomplished.  Then at the end of the week I learned my fourth novel, Hana-lani, had won an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival.  Such a surprise!  I raced to email my readers.  It was a good week, an incredible week.

Yet the Children’s Chapel trumped it all, and looking back to this morning, I think it was the profound experience of not fully seeing, but still doing and listening.  It was having faith in the unseen, faith in what I knew to be true about that piano.  I knew I needed to push down the white key, but I couldn’t see the hammer hit the cord deep inside.  I knew I had to follow the notes on the page, this language of music.  The note I saw, that little black dot, was the sign for one of the keys, and my brain had to tell my finger which key it was.

The process was not unlike our reach for God.  We reach for and touch God in the Sacraments he has given us.  We cannot see him, but we follow the notes he has given us in his Law, his Creed, his Scriptures, his Church, his Family, the Body of Christ.  We follow, not blindly, for we can see partially.  We can see how it all makes sense – the claims of Christ, his life, death, and resurrection, the immense love of God for each of us.  We follow these love notes he sends us through time, each yesterday, each today, each tomorrow, using our reason and our feelings, our head and our heart.  As we read the notes we learn to live our faith, we learn from experience.  Just as we put our fingers on the keys, we love and worship and say our daily prayers.  We learn to read the notes of God, and we get better each day.  Like any human endeavor, this life of joy gets easier with practice.

I placed my finger on the white ivory bar and heard a sound fill the chapel.  In the same way, each day I place my life in God’s hands, doing what needs doing, praying Thy will be done.  Then I wait and I listen for the music.

The Friday wedding of Kate and William on the Feast of St. Catherine of Siena was historic and grand and full of hopeful portent.

The next few days of that same weekend were even more so, and as I look back on this week of news flashing across my screens with events nearly too significant, almost too sudden, one upon the other, to fully absorb, I became immensely grateful for Good Shepherd Sunday, today, the Second Sunday after Easter.  For today made sense of it all.

Pope John Paul II, a shepherd of his sheep, huge in his love for the world and each person in it, was appropriately beatified on Sunday, May 1, known as Divine Mercy Sunday.  He was, to be sure, full of Christ’s divine mercy, full of God’s love.  Many scenes of his life and work come to mind, but perhaps the most powerful was his meeting in the jail cell with the man who had attempted to martyr him.  The Pope visited this man to forgive him and share with him the divine mercy of God.  John Paul lived on, battling Parkinson’s disease silently and with grace.  He showed the world the face of love.

May is the month of Mary, to whom this pope was devoted, and whose image one sees throughout Rome, frescoed on walls, brought in from the streets to holy altars where the faithful venerate the mother of Christ and receive her comfort.  Of all the many miraculous Madonnas in Rome, the one most revered and most ancient is the Salus Populi Romani (Protector of the Roman People).  The icon is reputed to be painted by St. Luke, is dated to the first century, and hangs high over a gilded altar in the north transept of Maria Maggiore.  The Madonna has led sacred processions through Rome as the people prayed for the ending of plagues, the ending of wars.  On the night of April 30, 2011, a solemn vigil in the Circus Maximus was held.  In the torchlight, the Lukan Madonna was processed to her shrine and venerated, as the faithful prepared for the beatification of John Paul the following day.

John Paul II preached peace and an end to terrorism, which, as many of us believe, may have to be ended through unpeaceful means.  The attack in New York nearly ten years ago changed our world, for it was an attack on the freedom to believe, to speak out, to assemble.  It was an attack on our hopes for peaceful ways and means.  It was an invitation, if not a command, to war.

On the day of the Pope’s beatification the leading terrorist of our world was found and killed.  What does it mean that this man, the symbol of all terror, this architect of horror, was found and killed on this day?  A coincidence some say, and perhaps they are right.  But history has an amazing way of unfolding and sometimes such coincidence seems too difficult to believe.

As we drove to church this cold spring morning, I held two parallel sequences in my mind.  One, the planning, arrival, attack, and thirty minute run through the three story house where this terrorist was hiding, then his death.  The other, the singing, the processions, the beatification of a saint, his glory in Christ.  Both sequences were and are historic forces.  One force for hate, one force for love.  One for chains, one for freedom.  One for evil, one for good.  The terrorist met his maker that day – did he meet divine mercy in his judgment?  The saint looked upon us from Heaven as we honored his love for us – did he smile in his tears for each person?

One of the delightful and comforting things about being a Christian is that we don’t have to answer these questions.  We simply watch history unfold.  We watch God act through and in our time.  We wonder, we marvel, and we smile.  We say our prayers and we worship together in our churches as Christ’s body.  We partake of God.  When we do these things, our world makes sense.

And so we sang in church this morning, The King of love my shepherd is, Whose goodness faileth never; I nothing lack if I am his, And he is mine forever…, based on the Twenty-third Psalm, and considered the immense love of God in Christ our Good Shepherd.  As we sang, this entire week – the wedding, the beatification, the death of this evil one – wove together in some kind of answer.  I knew this Good Shepherd would care for his sheep.  I knew he would not let me go.  He would find me, no matter how lost I was, and bring me home, for he is the Shepherd of Divine Mercy.

Shortly after the great festival of Easter 2011, on April 29, the Feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, Katherine Middleton married Prince William.  The world watched, pulled together into truth and beauty.

It is interesting that fourteenth-century Catherine of Siena was such a political saint, advising popes and monarchs, bringing the pope home to Rome from the Avignon exile.  A third order Anchorite, her cell was her bedroom at her home in Siena.  She nursed the victims of plague and sent letters to pontiffs.  Towards the end of her short life she received the stigmata in Pisa, hidden wounds that bled internally.  She died in Rome, and you can see today her rooms in the convent attached to Santa Maria sopra Minerva, an exquisite Christian basilica built over an earlier shrine to Minerva. She was sacrificial.  She saw clearly.

As I watched Katherine Middleton and her father step solemnly up the red-carpeted aisle of Westminster Abbey I wondered how much she considered the other Catherine.  This Katherine, of the Middle-Town, a commoner, would also have a political role to play.  She may one day be Queen of England.  She began her part splendidly as she took part in this national and holy liturgy, as she walked toward the ancient altar with poise and graceful restraint.

Liturgy, ceremony, tradition, is an outward expression of the truth of what and who we are meant to be.  It is the way we act out our belief in our better selves, our ideals, our hopes and dreams as a culture.  In the dance of liturgy we show a graceful restraint, controlling our impulses, as we follow the tune, stepping together, creating otherworldly beauty.  Today in our world we see marriages fail, families fall apart.  We see broken promises.  We see heartache, cynicism, despair.  Sometimes our world seems on the verge of collapsing.

But in this abbey wedding we were renewed and given hope.  In this ceremony a man and a woman made promises to love one another in sickness and in health, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance.  The Church blessed their union.  The country witnessed and were part of this dance in this moment of history.  Because it was large – in pageantry, in beauty, in careful attention, in its worldwide audience – and because it was also intimate through the miracles of television, the wedding of Katherine and William renewed all of our vows.  We said yes, we can be better too, our culture can be better, we can still hold claim to these ideals.

The Bishop of London preached a profound sermon.  He began with the words of the other Catherine, of Siena: “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”  Shakespeare echoed this two hundred years later, but Catherine also spoke of the holy, who God means for us to be.  It is this identity that liturgy provides.  It tells us, reminds us, who we are, calling us to set the world on fire by seeking God’s will for us, who we are meant to be.

The bishop also spoke of generosity and love, the generous love involved in the marriage promises.  Our modern culture tells us not to be generous, to acquire and keep, steal and hide.  It claims that the self comes first, others second, if at all.  Generous love, as the bishop said, demands sacrifice of self, allowing what is best for the other to flower.  He spoke of the great lie that has replaced belief in God, that we can find our happiness in another person.  We make impossible demands and when we fail and do not forgive, we divorce.  These are not popular words today, yet we were reminded, there under the abbey’s soaring wings of stone, that we are called to renew this ideal.  And as we listened the words rang true.

The Christian knows we can only find our happiness in God. Thus God through the Church blesses marriage, sanctifying the union with the power of the Holy Spirit, encouraging true love, true sacrifice, true forgiveness.  Through marriage and family these ideals renew our culture, generation by generation.

Katherine and William made their promises before the high altar of this historic eleventh-century abbey.  Founded by Edward the Confessor, an English King sainted for his humility and charity, the abbey has long cradled the graves of the great through the centuries – poets, statesmen, kings and queens.  I smiled as I saw the couple process to the south ambulatory where they signed their wedding papers over the tomb of Edward the Confessor.  They seemed to understand the importance of these public moments.

The words of the service came from the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer.  The hymns were hymns sung for centuries in parish churches and grand cathedrals throughout England. This wedding wove the past into the present, and in doing so allowed all of us to feel part of something greater, to see our better selves, to see the good in Western civilization.  We saw that what was true yesterday was true today and, with this ceremony that bound us together, would be true tomorrow.

We celebrate with William and Katherine, with England, with all Christian cultures, these ideals of love and sacrifice, of God’s sacramental care for his creation through marriage and family.  We celebrate honor and truth and beauty and giving to one another.  Through liturgy, through pageantry, through ceremony and tradition, through these public dances of faith and love, we reach for God.

Easter Sunday is the holiest day of the Christian Year.  Everything leads to it and everything comes from it. It is a day of reliving our story of salvation and in doing so being resurrected anew.

Here in the Bay Area the cold gray skies do not encourage us to think of spring, but today in the late afternoon the sun burst forth as though in a final victory.  Winter is indeed passing, going home to its dark days.  The rich green hills, the flowering plum trees, the light lingering longer into the early evening, all give us signs of this transformation.

Just so we slipped from the darkness of Lent and entered the light of Easter’s Resurrection Sunday.  This past Holy Week we walked Christ’s way of the cross in Jerusalem.  Thursday we celebrated the Lord’s Supper and the great gift of his presence in the Eucharist, then watched breathlessly as the altar and chancel were stripped of their furnishings, the Blessed Sacrament removed as well, the church left silent, dark.  We prayed with Christ in the garden, keeping watch before the Altar of Repose with its flaming candles.  We faced his trial and his suffering as he carried his cross to Golgotha, the place of the skull.  We stood with Mary, his mother, the young steadfast John, and the devoted Magdalene, at the foot of his cross.  We heard his words of forgiveness and saw him breathe his last.

This is the catholic way, to live the story of our salvation.  So that three days after that Good Friday, with him we rise from the dead.  We cry Alleluia, Christ our Lord is risen today!  Our triumpant holy day!  And with him, we know, we will rise too.

This morning I checked on the children in the Sunday School where they gathered, placing cut flowers in baskets brought from home and gardens, then I returned to the hushed nave of the church.  The sanctuary was all whites, the altar covered in lilies.  Candles burned brightly and light streamed from the high windows, bathing the chancel.  Soon the thick white Easter Cross with its deeply bored holes was carried to the head of the central aisle.  The children processed up the red-carpeted aisle, carrying their flowers, as the people sang.  When they reached the white cross they shoved the stems into the deep holes.  Soon the white beams were covered in reds and yellows and greens and pinks and blues, a floral rainbow. The dark deep holes were no more, only beds for those bursting blossoms of color.

And so, I thought later, as I moved through my day of family gathering, our humanity is realized once again.  The story of who we are, children of God, now redeemed, is told.  Again and again, we emerge from the dark, we correct our wrong turns, we are sorry, we repent.  Again and again, we embrace the light and set out anew.  We walk our own way of the cross, know our own sufferings as we journey through life.  I studied each face at my dinner table this afternoon, each etched with a past and each looking to his or her future.  I knew that we could still choose that future, choose the mapping, as we came to each crossroads of choice, each moment of each hour of each day of each week.  We may not choose wisely or selflessly.  We may not be brave or kind.  We may not simply love enough.

But with the help of God we will recognize the darkness and we will turn toward the light.  We will emerge from our tombs and be reborn, again and again, until finally, we find ourselves in Paradise.  Until finally, we find ourselves truly resurrected.

Deo Gratias. Alleluia.