Sacred Sanity

Posted on February 28, 2016 | Leave a comment

Michelangelo CreationI have been typing and saving selections from our late Bishop Morse’s sermons and writings into Word files to be published soon by the American Church Union. As I type, I can see him saying the words, see his gestures, hear his tone and cadence, his deep and sonorous voice as he preached from the central aisle of churches and chapels.

There are several themes emerging from the lined yellow papers, all spinning around and within the Love of God, but the one that I have found especially true in my own life is the sanity of belief, the ordering of chaos, the means to a meaningful life. Sanity is rooted in the Latin sanitas, health. It has come to mean mental health, the ability to reason within the realm of reality. For the bishop, such sanity led to traces of sanctity.

It does strike me as odd and also tragic, as it did Bishop Morse, that so many don’t see what seems so obvious to many a Christian. It is heartbreaking to see hearts so broken and bleeding in our secular culture today. It is, I suppose, the cost of freedom and love and choice, all intrinsic to the whole cloth of Christian belief. But even so, as I journey into Christ I journey deeper into His tears, weeping for those I love, scattered like lost sheep in the deepening dusk at the end of the day.

There is much in the Gospels about seeing and hearing, watching and waiting, seeking and finding, asking and answering. Because these matters matter so much but are also tightly bound to the world of matter, they are often unseen and half-understood. Christ teaches in parables to help us understand how God has acted to redeem us from our selves, our selfishness. He is expressing the inexpressible, so that we can see and choose Him or not. Poets attempt this realm. I have found in the bishop’s sermons many quotes from Christian writers, from T.S. Eliot and St. Augustine, Boris Pasternak and Fyodor Dostoevsky, words that reflect the great themes of St. Paul who also tried to feed his flock in ways they would understand.

Many do not believe in Christ the Son of God because they think His life and death and resurrection unproven, and belief to be irrational and even insane. To me the Resurrection of Christ has been shown to be reasonably and historically true, certainly as true as the grass is green or the sky is blue. That’s enough for me. That’s enough to set me on my journey of faith and see where it leads. I have not been disappointed.

It leads of course to Christ’s Body on earth, the Church. For the Church, in spite of being composed of imperfect human beings, is the best ark we have. Within this sacred vessel bound for Heaven we feed on Scripture and sacrament, prayer and praise. We have mentors to guide us, brothers and sisters whom we love and who love us, each one finding his own unique God-given identity and purpose. Traveling this Way and with this Truth, I will fully know Life. I will learn love’s demands. With this Family of God, this Body of Christ, I will travel into the heart of God, and He into me. 

We are creatures designed to search for meaning. Without meaning we begin a journey into despair, for the path only stretches forward to life or backwards to death. Deep within we know this, and we search for meaning in little isms, so desperate are we to have a sane reason to continue living. Today there is an array of “meaningful” pursuits that don’t involve belief in God or His manifestation on earth among us. Unbelievers, casting about, create their own religions, whether they be of the earth or of man.

But Love demands freedom to choose. So God gives us choices, and some we make are insane and make no sense and some we make are sane and make complete sense. Some choices allow evil to fester and grow. Some choices distort and maim and kill.

As we try to choose sanely what or whom we believe and how we should order our lives, we should consider whether we desire our short spans to make a difference in this world or the next. Anyone can embrace good works without God (although such efforts are often short-lived and disingenuous), but to say yes to Christ, to ask our Creator to guide our choices, is to allow us to become our true selves, the persons we were made to be. So we ask ourselves, are we traveling in the right direction? Are we knowing joy? Can we say that we we are sane or are we living in a fantasy, phantasmal world of our own creation?

The word fantasy has roots in the Latin phantasia, imagination or appearance, and later phantom from phantazein, to make visible. Phantoms made the invisible visible. Today a fantasy is deemed untrue, imagined.

It is crucial to face what Bishop Morse calls “Reality,” to live a life of sanity and in the end, of sanctity. We are challenged to face the fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth who called himself one with God the Father. We must look with eyes that see regardless of whether current correctness calls such facts fantasy. Have we not eyes and ears? Can we not see and hear? Have we not minds that can reason? And we must be humble enough to seek help from those who have made the journey before us. So much is at stake. We must ignore the phantasmal shapes, beware and be aware of the watering down of history to suit cultural mood and personal need, and steer away from phantasmal ghouls  wailing the sirens’ song.

We must face these truths and choose the path to Heaven. Then and only then can we know sacred sanity and genuine joy, even embrace traces of sanctity. We can, if we choose Love, sculpt our time on earth with magnificent meaning. Life is so short. We don’t want to miss one second on this reason-able pilgrimage into God.

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Listening in the Stillness of Lent

Posted on February 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

prayerThere is a great rushing about these days and I, living in the world, rush too, doing and thinking and writing, packing my hours and days and weeks, overscheduling, overpromising. The younger generations twitter not only in tweets, but chitter and chatter like small birds, speaking at such a pace my untrained (elderly) ear cannot absorb the frenzy and I cannot interpret the bites of sound flung so furiously and I often ask for repeats but to no avail, for they too race ahead around another corner and beyond into the future.

When do we rest? When do we pause and reflect? When do we listen in quiet for the still small voice of God?

It has been said that the Christian’s growth is two-fold.  A Christian grows into Christ and at the same time Christ takes residence within the Christian. “He in us and we in Him” we pray in the Mass. We receive Christ in the Eucharist and with each communion we invite Him to take over more of our lives. As He grows within us in this sacramental action and as we pray the prayer he taught us to pray (Our Father…) He begins to pray within us, so that our prayer becomes His, our deepest desire. And so we journey through this passage of time on earth, preparing for eternity.

It is so very good that there are regular times in the Church Year in which we are pulled out of our busy lives. We are called, especially in Lent, to observe a different way of living. Essentially we are called to simplify, to remove habits of misspent time, habits of gluttony, and care-lessness, and dance to a simpler tune, a slower and quieter one, so that our slow steps will ease our hearts. So that we can rest. We are asked to take this gift of found time carved from Lenten discipline and use it to love, to love others in care-taking, to love God in prayer-making.

Sundays are days of rest throughout the year. Our Creator in his infinite wisdom decreed in the beginning that we should rest on the seventh day. For Christians this day moved to Sunday to honor the Resurrection. Sundays became sacred, set apart to worship God in repentance, renewal, and regeneration. They are weekly holy-days for the faithful, healthy-days for body and soul.

Studies have found that religious people in general live longer than others. I believe it must be true, at least for true believers, those who practice their faith, integrate their belief into their lives to become whole, holy. Christians live under a law of love that provides order, an ordering of importance, a prioritizing of concern. Having answers to crucial questions, having a map to follow, decreases our stress. We know that we will not always live up to this law of love. We may ignore the answers to the crucial questions. We may forget we even have a map. We err and we stray like lost sheep, we follow the desires and devices of our own hearts, and there is often no health in us. But we also know that we have a loving Father. We repent, we confess, and we return to His law of love. We recall the answers and we follow the route on the map that has been so clearly laid out for us.

The ability to release to a loving God all of this stress and worry, to let Him bear the burden on His holy wood, is a relief giving birth to joy. And in our joy we return to the cross to happily help Him carry it, walking with Him through Jerusalem and through our own lifetime.

Lent is a time of renewal through re-creation. We retreat and reflect, we repent and are reborn, we render unto God what is God’s. We move out of the fast lane and into the slower one. We prune, cut back, and feed. We watch for new growth, meeting Christ in Sunday worship, praying our Morning and Evening Prayers, calling on the housebound, giving to the poor in need and in spirit, embracing the forgotten and lonely who sit alone in the corner of the room, knowing we are embracing Christ.

All the while, in the silence of Lent, we listen for the still small voice of God. Soon, we know, in the killing and burial of our rushed time we will hear His voice. Soon, we know, we will join our voice with His, and His with ours, to rise once again in glory.

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Crying for Camelot

Posted on February 14, 2016 | Leave a comment

FLAG-AT-HALF-STAFFHow does our culture move forward without a recognition of our Judeo-Christian roots,  to reclaim Camelot and that misty kingdom of knights and honor?

A generation born in the 1920’s that included many atheists and agnostics is dying. Whether they are surprised or not when greeted by Infinite Love, the God of the Ten Commandments, we believers are glad those unbelievers understood that Western Civilization depended upon the teachings of Christ, if not belief in him. The “greatest generation” recognized, quietly assumed, that Judeo-Christian roots were essential to the rule of law and respect for the individual.

One of those atheists was Sir John Mortimer (1923-2009). In a marvelous article in the January-February issue of Touchstone, Raymond J. Brown writes about the “New Rules of the Game” in “Farewell, Old Chessmate.” Many of us know Mortimer’s work through the BBC films of his books, Rumpole of the Bailey and others. Mr. Brown quotes Mortimer: “It is good to know that both the faithful and the faithless can still be playing from the same chessboard.”

Evidently, the satirical Mortimer was one of those unbelievers who felt comfortable living in the residue of Christian culture, even indebted to the source of the residue. He appreciated the great Christian contributions to the canon of English Literature and his own contemporary Christian writers:

“No one can deny that the Christian belief in the supreme importance of each individual soul was a great advance on the faith which thought of slaves as soulless. The King James Bible is of extraordinary power and beauty…. Much of the literature I’ve valued, the art I’ve most enjoyed, has been produced by unquestioning Christians. Whether I’m a believer or not, I’m a part of Christian civilization.”   (Where There’s a Will)

As Christianity’s influence has ebbed, Christians have seen the danger signs. Father Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) in The Naked Public Square (1984) called for Churches to re-enter the culture, to re-inform the debate in America and the West. With the retreat of Christians from this common conversation, Western culture would revert to pre-Christian chaos: slavery, discrimination, the strong bullying the weak, tyranny to keep the peace. Western freedoms and respect for the individual would be denied in the urgency of efficiency and sameness, soon to be forgotten in the mists of time.

I wonder if Mr. Mortimer considered how future generations would fare when his own generation no longer guarded the gates of Western culture.  As the nihilism of the liberal academic elite polices our public universities man’s natural religious impulse is redirected to saving the earth, saving the whales, saving the purple spotted badger. History of Western Civilization is not required so that an uneducated electorate votes by twittering soundbites and flickering images.

Generations of students have been raised with few Christian moral boundaries. If it feels good do it. Release your inner child or monster. Where Christianity defends the border between right and wrong by denouncing bad behavior, today’s creed encourages grievance tantrums, narcissistic self-pity, angry riots,  silencing free speech by demanding trigger-safe zones. Today’s creed divides and incites. Achievement is discouraged in order to assure equality and lack of offense. Excellence slips into mediocrity, boredom into depression. We reach for pills and cheap thrills in our books and movies.

With the death of Chief Justice Antonin Scalia, America has moved further along the road of indecent descent to a pre-Christian world. A brilliant scholar (and Catholic) who understood the need to preserve right and discourage wrong, Justice Scalia will be greatly mourned by those who see clearly the vital importance of the Judeo-Christian foundation to democracy. Perhaps his greatest contribution was his desire not to legislate but truly interpret the Constitution, empowering we the people to pass good law through elected representatives.

The faithless and the faithful must play from the same chessboard in order for democracy to be passed on to our children. As Mr. Brown concludes,

“The chessboard will likely not be playable, because the same rules, courtesies, limits, traditions, and possibilities will not be recognized by both players, much less understood. There will be no common ground between the believer and the unbeliever – not because militant atheists will have intentionally sabotaged the match, but because Western Christians will have allowed too much accommodation to the world, the flesh, and the devil.”

One is reminded of liberal Christianity, the dilution of belief in pulpit and pew, the subtle changing of the rules of the game to accommodate all comers. Confession is ridiculed, repentance a threat to self-esteem. Unborn babies are considered the property of their mothers, owned and enslaved. To speak against these things is to invite silencing and persecution.

Tyranny is near. As we move into the Lenten season, we must carry the Cross to Easter’s resurrection. We must pray for our nation, for the survival of Western civilization, for that misty land of Camelot that was only a dream but became a reality in Great Britain and her daughter, America.

We must pray that democracy and freedom will not be lost in the mist.

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Journeying to Jerusalem

Posted on February 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

Ash WednesdayI’ve been thinking about the word passion. My bishop often said that passion was the union of love and suffering, love and sacrifice, and I often wondered about that. The root is passio, Latin for enduring, suffering. In the first century it came to refer to the suffering of Christ on the Cross. It appears that love became part of the word passion only after Christ’s sacrifice, when this particular suffering became united with the love of God.

The word passion is used in Holy Scripture in the Acts of the Apostles, where St. Luke writes in the first chapter: “to whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.”

Over time, passion came to mean extraordinary feeling, a super-human surge of life pulsing through the heart and soul. While for many years it meant emotional romantic love, it also came to mean a strong liking/loving anything – a passion for painting, for food, for music, etc. It is a word that has grown in power. What is your passion? Follow your passion! I admire your passion…

In fact, passion denotes today an enthusiasm that goes to the heart of who we are and who we are meant to be. It is the God-life within us that urges us to be our purest selves, to train our truest talents, to sculpt our souls and senses into the perfection that God intended when He formed us in the womb. We may have left behind the suffering, enduring, or sacrificial meaning of passion, or have we?

When we say someone is passionate about something there is a sense that that person would sacrifice, go to a great length, to work hard, to discipline and deny, to attain or achieve that something. There is an implied focus, the loss of pleasures or lesser passions, to arrive at the goal: long hard practice to kick that ball down the grass to its win; long hard practice to play Beethoven’s concerto; long hard practice to make the perfect soufflé. When we are passionate we desire to achieve the reward. We sacrifice. We suffer.

Love and suffering. Passion. 

It is no coincidence that the Epistle for today, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of our journey into Christ’s Passion, is St. Paul’s glorious thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. Naturally, it is all about love (charity):

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”   KJV

We know only in part what love is, what love demands, what love sacrifices and how it suffers. One day we will see fully. But until then we have Christ’s Passion – His death on the Cross. His resurrection attests to who He is and opens our eyes to the reality, yes, the passion of God’s love. Such love is beyond human understanding, unsearchable in its riches.

And yet we search for love’s riches in the Church, His Body, His Bride. We search and we find, opening the door to His knock, inviting Him in, He who waits on the threshold of our hearts. For He is passionate to be with us and within us, lighting our lives with His brilliance.

When we understand passion, that union of love and suffering, we begin to understand compassion, looking upon the suffering of others with-passion, with the desire to share the suffering, to alleviate it. We begin our own journey of love, into love and its demands, its joy as well as its sacrifice.

And so we approach Ash Wednesday, the beginning of our journey to Jerusalem, our pilgrimage into Lent, into the love of God, into the Passion of Christ, to arrive at Easter and our own resurrections.

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Touching Love

Posted on January 31, 2016 | Leave a comment

Writing2I have been given the remarkable opportunity to look through boxes containing the sermons of the late Archbishop Morse, to possibly be published by the American Church Union. They were written on loose sheets on lined yellow legal pads. Some were jotted on hotel stationery. Some had their own colorful pocket folders, faded and spotted with time, water, and tea, and some were bunched with others by topic. Many were written in purple ink, his favorite, earlier ones in black ballpoint. There were even some typed from his seminary days, with notes in the margins from homiletics professors.

I hadn’t expected to find such treasures since he usually preached without notes.

I soon sorted them into seasons of the Church Year, but many sermons could have been preached anytime anywhere, and often were, as noted by his wife in the top corners in her neatly penciled script: date, feast date, parish. Some were added to, so that a sermon from 1961 lived on in 2006, having journeyed through half a dozen congregations, each time changed slightly according to hearers and season.

I began to type, words of hope, words of mystery and miracle, words of love. There was always a sense of happy wonder at the works of God among men and in his own heart and life.

At St. Thomas Anglican Church in San Francisco on February 18, 1990, Sexagesima Sunday (today’s Sunday in the Church calendar), he preached something like this: 

“We are in that wonderful three-week period of preparation for Lent, defined in the Prayer Book as the Pre-Lenten Season. These three Sundays are a period of reflection, and expectation for the severity of Ash Wednesday, the 40 days of Lent, Passiontide, and Holy Week. They are sort of hinges on the door that swings between the joyful mysteries of the Epiphany and the sorrow and suffering of Lent – the recalling of the passion and the death of Jesus Christ.”

Hinges on the door swinging between seasons. He was a poet. And, it occurs to me as I type his words, and now these words, that we are all poets searching for meaning, reaching for words to describe our human existence, to understand who we are. That is what poetry does, in the end, for it uses intense imagery to evoke sensory perceptions that will help us make sense of life. Christians have found such ways and such words in Sunday worship and so live poetic lives. We pray, and with prayer we use words to meet and touch the infinite, eternity, the source of all love, indeed, Love itself. We pour water in baptism to fill the reborn with God’s Spirit. We consecrate bread and wine to fill us with Christ in the Eucharist. We fill the finite – our own flesh – with the infinite. And we do this through the consecration of matter.

Sacramental Christians do not separate spirit and matter. The union of soul and body is the profound sacrament of Creation. In Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the hand of God touches Adam, filling him with life, the life of His Word, God the Son, the Christ, the Logos. All creation reflects this sacramental action of love.

It is a beautiful day in the Bay Area today, this middle Sunday in Pre-Lent. This creation around us is windswept and cold, the air washed by last week’s rain. Puffy white clouds slip through pale blue skies, winter skies hoping for spring. The green hills reflect the glory of God, for they are indeed his creation, just as we are.

The Church Year reflects the natural year in many ways. The date of Easter follows the vernal (spring) equinox (nearly equal days and nights), for the Jewish Passover was celebrated on the first full moon following the vernal equinox, and it is recorded that the death and resurrection of Christ occurred following Passover. And so our days lengthen, become Lenten, moving toward that date of the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox, March 27, 2016, Easter, Resurrection Day.

The door of the season opens to preparation, penance, and hope. We scour our hearts and invite Almighty God in to dwell. We sing and we dance the liturgies of the Church to unite matter and spirit, time and eternity. Soon we hear the song, feel the rhythm, the poetry of words made flesh.

My calloused fingertips have been hard at work, carrying words and throwing them onto the keyboard, words that scurry across the screen and, I understand, rest in a memory chip or megabyte, to be invited one day to re-appear on screen and paper.

And so the bishop’s purple ink on the yellow papers, water marked and parched and smudged, moves from his fingers to mine, from his heart to yours. This seems right, for the recurring theme I have found so far in these joyful sermons is Love. That God is Love. That is why the Christian life is so love-ly, so full of love, so full of joy, of color, of music, of beauty, and of truth.

Christians, if they are faithful, touch Love itself.

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Americans for Life

Posted on January 24, 2016 | Leave a comment

voteThey marched in freezing temperatures with a blizzard fast approaching. Washington D.C. was closed down – transportation systems crippled. There were fewer valiant witnesses to the Pro-Life plea than in previous years, yet their hearts burned with the love of life and of God. 

And it was perhaps the fire within them that I saw in the photos of the tens of thousands gathered in our nation’s capitol, to march to the steps of the Supreme Court. In the dark of winter they carried their flaming hearts, lighting the way, reminding the world to see what we have done and are doing to our nation. 

It is difficult to see in a storm, and a blizzard is blinding. But these valiant marchers represented the majority of Americans who do not believe abortion on demand should be the law of the land. They represented the forty-three million unborn children murdered, a massive genocide. Their crime, these little ones? Wanting to live. 

I am thankful these protesters gave witness. Abortion is like the elephant in the room, only it is an elephant in our nation, avoided, not spoken of in polite society. Those of us who can see the elephant can no longer turn away and pretend it’s not there. We cannot say that taking innocent human life is a choice, a right, in a civilized world. Recently it seems that our laws protect those who break them, yet do not protect the innocent, the least of us, the most vulnerable, the unborn. 

There will be a judgment one day, a day when each of us will stand before God in His brilliant all-seeing light. We shall answer for our lives. We will be judged, essentially, on how well we have loved one another, on whether we loved life more than death, loved others more than ourselves. God does win in the end, and he is a loving God, desiring us to love, commanding us to love. 

The annual March for Life is held on or near January 22, the day of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade. It is a wintry time, when light is less. But the days are lengthening, and soon we will enter the Lenten Season to prepare our hearts for Easter. Lent means lengthening, a stretching of the light to shrink the dark. And so our nation, in the cold of winter, tries to see a way forward in today’s blizzard of choice. Our nation needs to lengthen the light and shrink the dark.

January 22 borders deep winter and early spring. In the Church we have been celebrating Epiphany, a starry season of light and seeing, of manifestations of God become man, when Eternity intersected Time. Epiphanytide is short this year, two Sundays, so that today we suddenly find ourselves in Pre-Lent, three Sundays before Ash Wednesday. We prepare our hearts for Easter, and in the discipline of fast, prayer, and sacrifice, we shed light on our own lives so that we can repent and move toward the light of God’s love once again, so that we can truly see the resurrected Christ and partake of his resurrection. During Lent we confess our unlove, the selfishness that hardens our own hearts, and that hardens the heart of America. 

Our nation, in this election year, is also called to choose light over darkness, life over death. Our country is called to repent, to change. As we cast our votes we become part of our culture, be it one of life or death, and we become responsible for its law. Each of us will one day account for the vote we cast, the part we played in creating those laws. As a conservative in California, my vote doesn’t seem to make a difference in the electoral system. But I know it does. God counts my vote, and it lessens my culpability in the ongoing genocide of our next generation, a genocide that averages a million babies a year, forty-three million lives in the last forty-three years. 

We hear that women want to “own” their bodies. They want to fulfill their dreams. Such ownership of another person is slavery. Dreams are not fulfilled through such ownership. Such dreams, built on such a lie, are nightmares. President Lincoln and Dr. King knew this. Such nightmares lead to suicide; such lies will kill America.

We must pray for our country, for this lie lives in our law. It is said the tide is turning, that eighty percent of Americans now favor restrictions on abortion; two-thirds of those are “pro-choice.” As we enter this time of choosing our leaders let us choose those who will work to redeem our culture, so that America can once again be a beacon of light to a darkening world. 

As we step into Lent, we must pray for light and life. We must fan the flames of love in order to see our way to Easter.

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Wonderful Words

Posted on January 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

birdIt’s been a week of words, words, words, and more words. 

Some words were heated such as those between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz in the Republican debates. Some words were measured and thoughtful, such as those of Mr. Carson and earlier Ms. Fiorina in those same debates on Thursday. If words had trajectories, the former words were missiles launched; the latter words were birds circling and weaving.

I’ve been thinking about words and their power, particularly this last week of Epiphanytide when the Church celebrates the Word made incarnate in Bethlehem, Christ manifested to us, the world, the Word alight in the darkness. 

Words continue to light the dark, to beam bright epiphanies into despair and loss and confusion. Words comfort and heal and explain and judge. They forgive. They love.

The Bible is called the Word of God, and I’m glad the Gideons still supply hotels with free copies in nightstand drawers. The Gideons, a society of Christian businessman formed in 1899, has distributed over two billion copies of the Bible in two hundred countries in one hundred languages, today printing eighty million copies a year. Lately I’ve noticed the Bibles sitting alongside the Book of Mormon and sometimes the Teaching of Buddha. I wondered about the rarity of the Koran in these rooms but understand there is a concern about disrespect. One imam said that Muslims don’t need a copy of the Koran for they have memorized the first chapter, prayed five times a day.

It is good there are other faiths represented in these nightstands. Inclusivity protects the Bibles from the charge of exclusivity when guests complain of religion in their room. Americans are a freedom-loving people. We believe in freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and conscience. It is why we debate conscientious issues before choosing our president. It is why we fearlessly use heated words, or words launched like missiles across a stage toward our opponent, missiles targeting other words.

I enjoy the politically incorrect Republican debates. They show that America still has a pulse, her arteries are flowing, her heart beating, in her celebration of free expression. Some pundits have complained there are too many candidates in the field, but I laud the number. Let us encourage this multi-faceted discussion and be proud of the raucous, boisterous conversation. Let us appreciate the talented and articulate candidates who give of their time, talent, and treasure, of varying gender and generation, race and ethnicity. This is America at its best. This is how we elect our governors.

And we use words, words, words. Let them fly through the air, circle and weave, and come home to roost in our hearts and minds. Let the words win and lose, as they become forged in debate, fired by truth.

Lots of words. I’ve been sorting our late bishop’s words, his sermons, scrutinizing the yellow lined pages, the brown parched sheets, scraps from hotel stationery scrawled with words, handwritten, prescient ideas pressed onto paper, words written in the purple ink the bishop favored. Staples or  clips join some pages, linking sermons back to 1951, his year of ordination to the priesthood. I’ve come to see an order in the pages, and the words, how they fall naturally into Church Year seasons and feast days within those seasons. There are also speeches given at dedications, ordinations, baptisms, synods, pilgrimages, retreats, and funerals. Dates, places, and occasions are recorded in the pale pencil script of his loving wife. 

Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of words. “He was a mystic,” a friend said recently. But then, all sacramental Christians are mystical by definition, for we believe in the mystical and mysterious action of the Holy Spirit among us in this hard world of matter. We believe in the mystical change in the bread and wine as the Word once again becomes flesh and dwells not only among us but within us in the Eucharist. We believe in the Spirit mystically flowing through the waters of Baptism and the oils of Unction and the words of absolution given by a priest to a penitent in Confession. The Spirit mystically weaves into the vows of bride and groom as they say committing words before a priest who, in the name of the Body of Christ, blesses their marriage, and the Spirit works mystically through the hands of a bishop in Ordination and Confirmation. 

As I study our bishop’s words, his purple script on yellow paper, I pray that God will enter my mind and heart and speak to me just as he entered my bishop’s mind and heart and spoke to him, that I might share these words bridging heaven and earth, spirit and flesh. One day, God willing, the words will flow onto pages bound into a book to be held and read, words that will instill the greater Word.

This last week, before the political words and the sorting of the words on the yellow lined pages, I sent off my review of Michael D. O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem to CatholicFiction.net. In this end-times novel, Bishop Elijah confronts the Antichrist in Jerusalem. Like his namesake, the Prophet Elijah, Bishop Elijah listens for the still small voice of God. I too am listening for it, hoping to hear those huge words spoken by the little voice, whispering in the stillness of heart and soul. I often observed my bishop listening, listening to all of us with our many words and opinions, hopes and fears, but also listening to something else, someone else, trying to catch the quiet voice that wove among us as well. 

With the many threats at home and abroad, threats to freedom and faith, to liberty and law, let us celebrate free and faithful words, expressions of who we are and who we are meant to be, as Americans, as believers in God who became the Word made flesh.

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All the Difference

Posted on January 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

star of bethlehem.jpgThomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution recently wrote about political lies of the last few years: 

“Lies are a wall between us and reality… Reality does not disappear because we don’t see it. It just hits us like a ton of bricks when we least expect it.”

Lies encourage us to deny reality, to “put our heads in the sand” and thus are dangerous. To say the Benghazi terrorist attacks (2012) were a demonstration over an inflammatory video, is a lie told to calm fear. But it invites complacency and so emboldens terrorists, both domestic and international. We have mourned lives lost in subsequent attacks because of this lie. This lie ensured the election of the current president, and a wall rose between our national defense and reality. 

And so too, as individuals, we might choose to believe lies for reasons of comfort. But such lies are dangerous as well, inviting greater suffering and confusion when reality “hits like a ton of bricks.” 

Reality has a way of eventually hitting us, and so too, belief in God and the claims of Christ are worthy of examination as to their truth, their reality. “What difference does it make?” many say, imbibing the lie of our culture that all beliefs are equal, all faiths equally true. While all believers are worthy of respect, how can all faiths be equally true, when one denies the claims of another? Alas, it makes a great deal of difference what a person believes. Living a true life means seeking the truth, embracing reality, sorting fact from fiction and avoiding the ton of bricks. One of the greatest lies of our age is that there is no truth. The truth exists apart from us, whether or not we can grasp it at any particular moment. 

I have long suspected the lie of “closure” in regards to mourning. Stephen J. Forman, a cancer doctor, writes in the Wall Street Journal “how the loss of a loved one is a part of each person’s life forever…. the reality is that closure is a myth.” Grief changes over time, but grief is woven into the weave of our souls, giving us greater compassion, understanding, and empathy. It makes us “wise” or “deep” or simply “good.” Suffering and grief helps us see. To remember at sudden moments, even with tears, those whom we have lost is a good thing, not one to be suppressed: 

“The danger of the idea of closure is that it heightens aloneness, by giving us a false expectation that these experiences should and will at some point end. They won’t… To deny (memories) is to deny precious moments of love, fellowship, gratitude and inspiration… To close the memory does not sustain the healing or help in proceeding with life. Such echoes from the past are voices in the present and are sometimes warmly felt.” 

This can be said of nations as well. To close echoes from the past is to deny who we are, forged by the past in this moment in time. To live only in the present is to force closure on the past, to live a lie, to disavow our nature. Our history is our life story, our identity as Americans. It is a cloak we cannot afford to shed, one our nation must wear in order to survive. 

To find closure after terrorism may for a time ease our national life. We pretend it didn’t happen and we carry on. But it is a lie to say it makes no difference. Of course it makes a difference. Those who died for our country must remind us continually what is real, what is true and what is false in our national narrative, how we face our future and defend our freedoms. 

Children long for boundaries. They beg for limits so that they can see the truth about their world, what is good and what is bad. Good parenting sets limits and teaches the truth, the reality, of forbidden territory. In this way they become responsible adults, for they have learned what is real. They can search for truth and face it. 

And so as we worshiped in church this morning on this First Sunday after Epiphany I gazed at our bishop’s chair, empty. He left us for Heaven, and now, seven months after his parting, his wife has joined him. As I looked upon the chair, I was gifted with a flashing memory of the bishop and his wife, as I knelt on the russet tiles, in the filtered light streaming from clerestory windows, in the singing together the Creed, the Gloria, the Our Father. The bishop and his wife were epiphanies that graced my life and I knew that they would continue to grace my life through the opening of my memory, the refusal of memory’s closure. Their lives were woven into mine, as mine was into theirs, through love, through the grace of God. I consider those memories, even in the depths of loss, to be precious piercings of my heart. These epiphanies, these openings, reweave my heart and soul, adding to the texture. I do not desire or need closure. 

In the Church, the Feast of Epiphany celebrates the coming of the Wise Men from the East who brought the Christ Child gifts. Epiphany means manifestation, the revealing of God in human form in Jesus in Bethlehem. With Epiphany, Christ is now manifested to the world, not just to Israel, not just to God’s chosen ones. The Wise Men follow a star so that the heavens as well take part in this epiphany, this revealing of God. They follow the star to a stable, a hillside cave. The universe shines a beam of light onto a newborn baby in the hay. The Magi, scientists of their time who studied the heavens, kneel before this child. They bring him gold for his kingship, frankincense for his divinity, and myrrh for his burial. After this epiphany in their lives, they will never be the same. 

And we will never be the same. Like the Magi, we kneel before Our Lord in our local church. We gather before his tabernacle, his stable, just as the Magi did two thousand years ago. We pray that we be made worthy to receive him through confession and absolution. As we pray, we are changed by the prayer itself, for we enter moments of epiphany, dwelling in time woven with eternity, knowing that God himself is with us and within us. 

To kneel before the manger or before the altar, experiencing such love, and to say it didn’t happen is to deny reality. It is to lie about the greatest truth of all, the greatest reality of all, God dwelling among us. For if God loves us and lives among us and within us, it makes all the difference to our own lives, and to all the world. We can now look truth in the face, even search for it boldly, knowing that we will be wiser, like the Magi on that holy night two thousand years ago. Our lives will never be about closure, but about opening. We will travel, epiphany by epiphany, into the open heart of God.

 

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Word Made Flesh

Posted on January 3, 2016 | Leave a comment

Writing ImageI am polishing The Fire Trail for final submission to my publisher. It is an appropriate effort to take on in the holy seasons of Advent and Christmas, seasons in which the Word, the expression of God in human flesh, is anticipated and fulfilled.

Our own words, our bits and scraps of language we sew together to somehow make sense of our lives, express our own selves as well, words spoken and words written. Our words are an extension of who we are.

As a kind of preface to the story of Christmas, Scripture relates the story of Elizabeth and Zachariah. She is old and barren, but the Angel Gabriel announces to her husband Zachariah, a priest in the temple, that she will bear a son and his name will be called John. Zachariah doubts the angel and is struck dumb for nine months, until the birth of John the Baptist.

Zachariah has lost his ability to express himself. And so the first infancy narrative – the story of Elizabeth and Zachariah and the Angel Gabriel – is a story of wordlessness. Incapacity to express. Silence. Much like our world today, as Christianity’s public expression is silenced.

But this silence and wordlessness in early Advent is slowly filled with words during the days and weeks to come, as we wait for the birth of the Word, the light shining in the darkness, returning our speech. We hear prophecy of the coming, prophecy that will be fulfilled. We hear words of hope, of healing, of penitence, of forgiveness, of joy, of love, of glory to come. Words ride on the melodies of carols as we tell the story of the birth of the Son of God, the Word, in song and praise.

Words find home in symbol and sacrament as we live inside the rituals of Christmas – the Advent wreathe and candles, the evergreen tree alight with decorations holding symbols of the Word made flesh, the crèche figures worshiping a baby in a manger, stars and angels and heavenly hosts praising God. It is a rich season in which all of these expressions of the inexpressible – God become man, his great love for us – jostle for our attention. Bells jingle and carolers sing the Good News, Our Lord has come, Emmanuel, God with us. The words of the prophets are fulfilled! Ring the bells! It came upon a midnight clear… Away in the manger… Hark the herald angels sing… Joy to the world… Silent night…  

All art serves this story of the Word among us. Paintings, sculpture, drama, every means of man’s expression tells the story. Even the commercialization of Christ’s birth urges us to give not only of our treasure but of our time and our love. We are prompted to think of others – how can we share Christmas with them? What would they like to be given? We make gift lists, expressions of our desire to love one another better.

And children make their own lists. Saint Nicholas in his many forms is still red and jolly and bearded and all-knowing. He is, in, many respects, a child’s early vision of God the Father, a loving powerful being who gives gifts. When a child hands Santa his list, she is practicing a prayer of petition, a precursor to intercessory prayer, confession, and praise. While there seems to be some debate about store windows and the words Merry Christmas, children still wait in line to meet Saint Nicholas, who listens and notes their petitions. And as children lose their faith in Santa, they are given faith in their Father in Heaven, the greatest gift of all. Santa Claus is real.

And so with my little novel I add my own words to the many already on paper and screen, my attempt to express the deepest desires of mankind, how we are meant to live and love, how our broken hearts may be healed. In today’s Epistle for the Second Sunday after Christmas, Isaiah prophesizes the coming of the Word made flesh:

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted… to comfort all that mourn… to give unto them the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.”

For indeed, hearts are broken and we mourn our dead throughout the world. We desperately need good tidings for all peoples. We cannot afford today, like Zachariah, to be silenced by doubt. We must express the Good News, use our words to tell the good tidings, without fear. My characters, in different degrees and ways, search for those good tidings. They have been hurt and desire healing. They search for truth, beauty, and goodness, and they crave their heart’s desire.

Each year Christian culture celebrates Christmas, the birth of Christ, the Son of God, and in the very celebration we find the Word living. In our words Our Lord lives, for he is the first Word blown over the waters of creation, separating the heavens and the earth. He is the logos, and he lives within each of us, prompting us to love as he loves. He is the expression of life sent from Heaven to Earth on a miraculous night two thousand years ago.

It is satisfying to read in Scripture that an old man named Simeon and an old lady named Anna have their prayers answered, their hearts’ desires fulfilled when they see the baby Jesus, their messiah. In our Office of Evening Prayer, we repeat Simeon’s words in the Nunc Dimittis: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation…” The story of Christmas has been bracketed by Zachariah’s silence and Simeon’s speech still spoken today.

And today’s Collect, the opening prayer for the Second Sunday after Christmas reflects the joy of this holy season:

“Almighty God, who hast poured upon us the new light of thine incarnate Word; Grant that the same light enkindled in our hearts may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Amen.

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A Light in Time

Posted on December 27, 2015 | Leave a comment

Advent St. JIt is a season of renewal, a time when we review the old year and make resolutions for the new one. We judge our time, our spending of time, our use or abuse of the year 2015. Each year is a gift. It is a unique segment of our lives, a year we cannot retrieve and a year that will never be repeated. We are given only one chance with our lives, only one chance with the time given.

And so we look back and consider what habits to discard and what to keep, what to repent and what to repeat, what to affirm and what to deny. Sometimes confusion reigns even in hindsight, and the better path not obvious even from this vista point, perched as we are on the cliff at the end of the year, getting ready to jump into 2016, a new segment of time granted to us, this new year. 

“She had the time of her life.” We say this to emphasize a moment of great exuberance and joy, a peak time amidst the other valleys. But all time is of our lives. All time is holy.

As I look back on my year, I do indeed see confusion and chaos. A good friend and mentor left our earthly time and entered eternity, leaving us behind. Another friend is getting ready to leave, in hospice care. Her bags are nearly packed and she is peacefully waiting the chariot.

In the past year there have been many risings to occasions and putting best feet forward and keeping stiff upper lips. There have been duties and responsibilities not always heartfelt, actions ordered by God’s law of love. There have been dark times in shadowy valleys where answers could not be seen, where the fork in the road had no signpost, or the sign had been lost, thrown into the bushes.

And yet looking back at 2015 I also see clarity and order. My good friend and mentor in Heaven left me many gifts that live on bridging our separation, gifts of wisdom and love, ways to see and believe, the necessity of humility and its fruit, repentance. My friend waiting for her journey to Heaven continues to gift me in her last days, but I can see clearly now that her friendship itself was given to me to make sense of my own time.

The risings to occasions, the duties and responsibilities not eagerly engaged, rewove my own heart to be of stronger stuff, not so easily thwarted by dismay and danger, informing my soul again with God’s law of love. The dark times through the journey of 2015 led me to the altar of my local church, pushing me to my knees in penitence and prayer, and when I re-entered the world I found myself on the top of a mountain of light with a clear view of the surrounding countryside.

We do indeed live behind the veil of eternity. Some of us glimpse the brilliant color and catch the fragrance and sensory delight on the other side. Some of us hear the music, the choirs of angels and the songs of the saints. Some of us don’t know how to lift the curtain or even believe that it can be lifted or that it is there at all, thinking this world is all there is.

And so as I stepped through the dark days of Advent, those short wintry days, I watched and I prayed and I worshiped God in his Church, calling for Christ’s coming, singing with his people. Slowly, a light shined in the darkness, revealing my place in the world, my place in my moment of time. I observed the rituals and rites of Christmas with their sacramental signs, knowing they would lead me to the light to see again.

I garlanded the evergreen in our bowed window and strung twinkling lights through the branches. Ornaments from the years of my life were resurrected from tissue nests in boxes, where they had lived since last Christmas. The figurines and balls and tassels hanging from bits of wire released memories from the prison of my mind, giving them air, and a stained-glass gathering of family and children and loved ones crowded happily with one another in my heart.

In the days before Christmas – after the parish pageant on Advent IV – I set up our large crèche figures on the hearth and dangled a golden star from the mantel. Fresh white candles found holders in all the rooms so that I would not forget the great light coming soon to the world to banish the dark, the darkness of winter, the darkness of my soul.

So the confusion of life, after all, I learned once again, can be cleared. There is a way to lighten the darkness, as described by St. John whose feast we celebrate today:

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

John 1+, Gospel reading for Christmas Day

And in one of John’s letters to an early church:

“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”             I John 1+

And so, as my good friend in Heaven taught me, one must walk in the light – that is, penitently – in order to see in the darkness. He also gave me the gift of the Church, the Body of Christ, that leads me to the light. For only by entering the doors of Christ’s Body can we experience clarity amidst confusion. Only by walking up the aisle to kneel at the altar can we know the love of God and his forgiveness. Only by observing our time, each day, hour, minute, within the seasons of the life of the Church, can we find our way forward into the New Year that awaits each of us.

I look back upon 2015 and see a map of love through time. I want to follow that path that journeys with Love incarnate. I look forward to 2016, every minute, every hour, every step of the way, lit by the light and love of Christmas, Emmanuel, God with us.

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