Christine Sunderland

How quickly things can change.

It was drizzling, or perhaps a heavy condensation was forming, on the windshield as I drove to church this morning. The famous San Francisco summer fog had crept farther east than usual. It formed over the broad Pacific waters, floated over the city and the bay, slid over the hills and the Caldecott tunnel. It blanketed with a damp chill the usually warm valley I call home.

I turned on the heat in the Nursery and the Sunday School. California summers still surprise me and I was born and raised here. I shivered.

There had been considerable dampness and chill in my life in the last year, many challenges to face. Two cousins died and three friends were diagnosed with cancer. My ninety-two-year-old mother fell, was hospitalized for six weeks, then moved to assisted living. The daughter of another friend died in childbirth, leaving a baby girl motherless (the hospital’s carelessness). What would be next, I thought to myself. Who would be next?

Then there are the tragedies too painful, too confidential to talk about, and are ongoing it would appear. So I can’t speak of them, except to say they involve deep betrayals of trust.

Each event I carried (and continue to carry) to the altar. Each person I placed in the arms of Christ. Each heartbreak I relinquished to his eternal love, his sacred heart, the heart that broke for us.  And still does.

I thought about these things as I listened to the sermon today, one that touched on today’s Gospel, the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In the end, our preacher said with a certain and profound joy, opening his palms to us, the story is all about the Grace of God. It is about God’s immense love in the midst of our wrong turns, in the midst of our suffering, in the midst of our fallen world. It is about the Father’s cloak wrapped around our shoulders, welcoming us into his arms. It is about the ring he puts on our finger telling us to whom we belong. We are his dear and precious children, his family. The parable is about coming home after wandering in the fog.

And so we enter the church as broken, cold and damp, tearful prodigals. We leave healed, full of joy, belonging to God. All within one hour. How quickly it happens.

The sun came out this afternoon, and now the sky is a dome of blue. A breeze ripples the olive tree outside my window and the moistened silvery leaves reach toward the sun.  It all changed so quickly.  And I know it will all change quickly again as we tumble through our time.

Each morning I give thanks for the safe night and pray for the day to come. Each evening I give thanks for the day and pray for a safe and good night’s sleep. “If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take…” is not a bad prayer to pray.

Things change in an instant. And now, thinking again about the father welcoming home his prodigal boy, I realize that while I can try my best to follow God’s commandments, I often fail. Others fail too, and we sometimes fail each other.  We cannot prevent sickness and death, suffering and heartbreak. So as Christians we give them all to God, leaving every pain before the tabernacle on the altar, before the Real Presence of God the Son. And we pray, “Thy will be done,” a good and powerful prayer to pray.

Only on our knees, in full humility, can God transform drizzle into glorious sunshine, in an instant. Only when we empty our hearts can he fill them with his Grace, in an instant. Only then can we hear him say, “Welcome home.”

I look forward each week to Peggy Noonan’s Saturday column in the Wall Street Journal. This week it was titled: “The Dark Night Rises.”

She spoke of the rise in violence in movies, and while admitting that no single movie will trigger a tragedy such the Aurora shootings, she makes the sobering observation that there has been a cumulated effect of increased violence over the last few decades, desensitizing us. We get used to it. Hollywood ups the ante. We get used to it. Hollywood goes a bit further.

I’ve found this in the publishing world as well, that new frontiers must be braved, new ways of kinky, new ways of anguish, new ways of hurt and abuse, often focusing on children. Young teens killing one another in the games of hunger. Vampires sucking blood. Torture, explosions, rape. We become increasingly desensitized to horror, increasingly accepting of it.

It is a frightening assessment of today’s culture. Parents, Ms. Noonan notices, look exhausted from from their constant concern over their children’s exposure to this kind of media. These parents carry a huge burden no longer shared by society. It seems that they alone must shepherd their children. Where the culture helped them do this once, now the culture poisons them.

In the past, what cultural institutions supported the raising of children so that they would become responsible adults, men and women who don’t pick up a gun and shoot into a crowd? Certainly the government, to a certain extent, finds it in their interest to legislate good law and police the populace. But more importantly the institutions of church and family have provided safe havens, which we have often taken for granted. Perhaps because they were taken for granted, we seem to be about to lose them.

Children need safe havens. They need a family with male and female role models. Boys need fathers to emulate; girls need mothers. They need structure, a clear path laid before them. Behavior boundaries provide security. And they provide love. The boundaries say, “I see you and you are important. I care how you behave. I love you.” Children need a home, a loving structured environment. They need security and safety.

While the home protects, it also molds character so that when the child grows into adulthood, he or she doesn’t act out to get attention. For there has been plenty of attention at home and he or she can always go home for more unconditional love.

And where do families meet other families to encourage one another? Where do they go for support in the huge effort of living a good life, raising children as to be good citizens, to be caring and responsible individuals? The Church provides such support through community: We worship together, we share meals together, we work together giving of ourselves to one another and the neighborhood. We learn to give; we are called to sacrifice. We learn to love those outside our family.

After reading Peggy Noonan yesterday, I smiled when I listened to the Epistle and Gospel appointed for today in our local parish. St. Paul writes to the church in Rome that we as Christians are adopted by God. We are God’s children, his heirs. But we must live within God the Father’s boundaries, i.e., the Ten Commandments, knowing that these rules are for our benefit. His boundaries say, “I love you. You are important to me.” And in the Gospel of St. Matthew, Christ speaks of knowing people by their fruits – every tree that doesn’t bear good fruit is cast into the fire, that only he who does the Father’s will shall enter the kingdom of heaven.

These are hard words! Yet the Church embraces them for they are God’s words, and true ones. The Church equips us to bear good fruit by explaining the boundaries. It says, “You are important to God, listen to him, obey him.”

So on Sunday mornings, families rightly fearing the chaos and violence of our culture have a place where they can go, a shelter from the storms. Within each church God works among its members, teaching them his love, his ways, his rules, rules that say, “I love you.”

If we can encourage these institutions of family and faith, we can keep the dark night from rising. We still have time to wake to the light of day and feel the sunshine pour in, for “Darkness is  no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day….” (Psalm 139:11)

Sometimes growth is painful.

I was watching our little Luisa in the church nursery this morning. Luisa is eight months old and has two new front teeth, tiny white miracles protruding delicately from her lower gum. There seems to be a new one coming in, a painful process. So little Luisa, whom every woman in the church wants to hold and cuddle, suffers the aching jabs of this new enamel breaking through her skin.

Since the Fall of Adam mankind feels pain, and it is curious that it is often through suffering that we grow, change, reshape our interior selves. We become molded in some way by the experience, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. Our souls push, break, into new territory.

Our parish is going through a growing experience as we work through a time without a rector, someone to lead us, to pull us together. We all pitch in, to be sure, with extra tithe, time, and talent. And we all feel the pain of this transition-searching season as we seek God’s will for our church family.

The seeds the children planted in the classroom last week have sprouted. I followed Natalie, age two and a half, to the row of terra cotta pots under the tall window that filtered the sun. Tiny shoots had emerged from their dark beds of soil. Green fronds, so delicate, reached for the light. We tilted the watering can carefully and gave the newborns a drink. Natalie concentrated on the task, fully absorbed.

We are those seeds, moving from darkness to light with God’s grace. We will one day produce leaves and flowers. We will bear fruit. But the process might be painful.

The Gospel today was one of the feeding miracles. Seven fish become enough for a crowd of four thousand hungry men and women and children. They are all fed, with food left over. And once again I am reminded of Christ’s great love for us, for his miracles are pain-relieving miracles – feeding, healing, exorcising demons, calming storms at sea, bringing the dead to life. He does not pull rabbits out of hats or squeeze into tiny cubicles or wave wands or brew potions. He does not perform magic. He engages in our very real and human pain, and pulls us through it and out. We emerge better men and women. And somehow belief is involved in this process.

In many of the miracles of Our Lord, faith is necessary for healing to occur. It is as though belief becomes the medium in which Our Lord works, so that our movement through the pain will be one of growth toward the light and not one of sinking into the dark. Through faith we are given greater hope, strength, and love. Without faith, we meet despair, weakness, loneliness.

Belief. Pain. Growth. Healing. Light. Love. They are all connected in powerful ways.

And as we gathered for a meal after the Mass today, and welcomed the man who might become our new rector, the hope among us was tangible. We had pulled through a painful time together, and God had bound our wounds. In the binding we have drawn close together as a parish family. This good man who preached this morning and visited with his lovely wife may or may not be the one called by God to shepherd our little flock. But we all knew that God was with us in a bright and joyous way as we shared our meal.

Little Luisa cried over her erupting tooth and Natalie played with her balloons (red, yellow, green), pushing them into the air and chasing them, and I knew that we would rise up through the dark loam of our challenges, whether they be family, church, or nation, into the light of day. We need only have faith.

But without faith in Christ, we can do nothing.

The children planted seeds in church today.

At first Natalie, age two, tried to plant her index finger, pushing it into the soft soil. The small clay pot had her name on it and sat on a picture of the flowers that one day would push their way to the surface – white daisies. Natalie drew her finger out and looked at it quizzically, examining the bits of soil clinging to her skin. She looked at me with large brown eyes.

“Soil,” I said. “The soil will feed the seeds. Now let’s put some seeds in the soil and see what happens to them.”

She watched me pick up the miniscule seed and push it into the soil, then cover it lightly. Natalie did the same. Soon all the seeds were in their beds, tucked in, safe.

“Shall we water them?” I asked. “Give them a drink?”

Natalie nodded sagely and I helped her tilt a watering can spout toward the black loam lying in its terra cotta sanctuary. Soon the soil was watered, the seeds drinking in the moisture that would transform them from specks to green and growing plants.

As we sang our Church Year Song and made our magnets to take home with the first verse of the hymn, I thought how this little Sunday School room tucked in the back of the church was like that little pot, a safe place away from the noise and bustle of the world, a place that nurtured and fed us. Here we learned of God, praised him in song, and memorized his words. We were watered and fed, sending our roots deep into eternity.

Later the teachers and children formed a line in the narthex and entered the big church where the grownups knelt in worship. We paused in the back as the priest raised the gleaming white host and cried, “Behold the lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.”

We made the Sign of the Cross, and stepped up the red-carpeted aisle to the altar rail. The tabernacle, draped in Trinity green,  stood welcoming between the tall flaming tapers. The light seemed to move about the sanctuary as I stepped toward it, Natalie’s tiny hand in mine. When I genuflected, she bent her little knee as well. I folded my hands and she folded hers. We knelt at the altar.

She watched with her large eyes as the priest gave me a Host and gave her a blessing, each of us fed by the appropriate food at that moment in our lives.

We are in the green season of the year, the long season of Trinitytide, stretching from Trinity Sunday, usually early June, to Advent, early December. The Gospel lessons are feeding lessons, instruction that helps us to grow in God. It is a quiet time, this time between the great festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Ascension, this lazy summer time leading into fall.

It is a time of planting seeds and watching them grow in the hearts of these children. It is a time to dance and sing, to hear the music of God’s words as they shower upon us, into our hearts and minds. It is a time to be watered and fed so that new shoots may appear above the soil, pushing up toward the light.

It is the green season of Trinitytide, a time of growing.

It’s my birthday tomorrow.

Birthdays are milestones, rites of passage through time. We look back from this moment given, and we look forward from this moment given, to our future deathday.

I have lived nearly sixty-five years, and will embark on my sixty-sixth. I’ve been given a specific portion of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which to breathe, to think, to laugh, to cry, to love. I have been given a body and a mind for which I have been responsible. Have I been a good steward?

I have known joy and sorrow. I have done good and I have done ill. I have succeeded and I have repented. Have I made peace with my past?

I celebrate another year of life, another gift. It has been a year of unusually difficult challenges, and yet with God’s grace, I have survived, depending more on God each day. So I count my blessings.

When I was born my mother cried out, “Another girl for the mission field!” At the time they all thought the statement odd (so I am told), since I was her firstborn. But on reflection I have come to believe that my mother was the first girl for the mission field, for she in her own way had been a missionary. She didn’t go to China or India or Burma or the African jungles, but she led Bible studies and new member gatherings in her living room, their living room, our living room. My father, a Chaplain who served in the South Pacific in the Second World War, upon return became a Presbyterian pastor, and with my mother worked for Intervarsity, a group that evangelized college students. Later, they founded the Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian Church on a hill overlooking a valley east of San Francisco.

I too, in my own way, became that missionary my mother announced sixty-five years ago, for after a few wrong turns in my early life, I found God.

It is difficult for someone who has God in their life not to share him, for he pushes out, he is too big to keep hidden. All of the prayers offered, all of the Eucharists received, all of the words of saintly men and women read. All through this time, my time given, these layers of minutes and hours and days and weeks, all of it as I look back has formed me, filling me with God.

Other Christians have formed my life as well, in miraculous ways. We are like a garden of many shoots, thorny roses and wild daisies, pungent rosemary and poignant lavender, all growing together in the same soil, watered by the Church, the sacraments, the Word of God. Some are mighty trees and some creeping ivy. We brush against one another as we turn our leaves to the sun and drink in the rain.

Today was the first day of our Children’s Summer Program at church. We are learning about the colorful Church Year. I made a Church Year wheel from tag board, gluing the pieces on thick white foam board. The pie triangles all pointed to the center where I placed a simple cross. Most of the year was Trinity green – June through November – then slices of Advent purple, Christmas white, Epiphany green, Pre-Lent and Lent purple, Easter white, Ascension white, Pentecost/Whitsunday red, and back to Trinity green. It was an orderly division of time, but also rich with meaning, as the year revealed the enormous events in the life of Christ and God’s redemption of man.

In our class we are singing Hymn 235, “Advent Tells Us Christ is Near,” which follows that wheel through the verses. And as we consider each of the nine seasons, or “tides,” we shall also consider the words of the Apostles’ Creed. We shall learn what we believe about God and man.

As I looked at the colorful Church Year wheel, I knew that those seasons, year after year, had woven into my life an indescribable richness. Each Sunday, season after season, I lived out through liturgy and ritual, rich with symbol and song, God’s love for me and all my sisters and brothers in the pews, the Body of Christ. God wove us together to make a fine cloth, a colorful tapestry.

So as I consider my sixty-five years, I see a rough muslin life that slowly became multi-textured, multi-colored, like Joseph’s coat, like my Church Year wheel, like the garden of flowers and herbs, full of sweet aromas. And I am incredibly, or credibly perhaps, thankful.

What will the next year hold, the next month, the next week, the next day, should I be given more time to breathe, think, and love?  Be given more Eucharists, more conversations with God? More time for him to ready me for my deathday and my passage to eternal life in heaven?

I pray that God continue his weaving me, his painting me, his molding me, his watering me. It is so good to be loved by God, so good to be nourished by him.

I pray on my birthday the words of Clare of Assisi on her deathbed: “Thank you, God, for having made me.”

It was a busy week with many demands from distant corners of my life. Time at times seemed to implode, then scatter my psyche into a thousand pieces.

So Church today was an especially great blessing, pulling me out of the week of flurry, lists, appointments, schedules, and welcoming me inside to beauty, chant, color, peace. It was a window on Heaven, and I glimpsed through the glass another world, a glorious world.

We had many reasons to celebrate today in our parish church.

A baby girl arrived six weeks ago, from Heaven of course, and she came to church today, fitting perfectly into the cleft of the thick arm of her proud father. His strong fingers held her gently and we marveled at the delicate features of this tiny child, her perfect fingers, her curly hair.

One of the boys in Sunday School (nearly ten) graduated to Acolyte today, and for the first time we watched as he processed with the clergy and other acolytes, carrying his flaming candle, up the red-carpeted aisle. He took his place in the sanctuary, following the instructions of the older boys, his face serious and proud.

We sang boisterous hymns today, celebrating our nation and our freedoms, in anticipation of the Fourth of July, and it was good to hear our many voices joined together, the booming organ leading us, as the fiery stained glass of Pentecost glowed over the choir loft. The nave was warm and the sanctuary glowed on this cool foggy first day of July in the Bay Area, and we rode together in the ark of the Church, rolling on the undulating tide of our culture, protected from the drowning undertows.

I wondered about the recent events in our nation that threatened ships such as ours, knocking holes in the hull and allowing the sea to pour in.

Our nation was founded on religious freedom, freedom now threatened. As we approach July 4, our National Independence Day, I think about these freedoms, often taken for granted. The desire for religious freedom brought pilgrims and dissenters and believers of all sorts to our shores, escaping persecution in Europe. We had the right, they said, to worship as as we pleased, to follow our conscience. The government had no right to dictate our conscience. I prayed these protections would not be lost.

So today we celebrated our freedom of religion in this great country, and we also celebrated our parish’s patronal festival, St. Peter’s Parish’ ninety-ninth birthday here in Rockridge, North Oakland, California. Our Anglo-Catholic parish has sailed through the years, at times battered by the currents, at times joyously hoisting its flag into the blue heavens.  St. Peter was a fisherman who knew the currents and the seas.  He too was persecuted, but he set and reset his course in the first years of the Early Church, creating a course for this Body of Christ on earth.

The liturgy danced, and soon we as the People of God once again completed the offering and sacrifice of the Mass on this Sunday, July 1, in the year 2012. Once again we received God into our bodies and souls. The angels would record this event in the book of Heaven. It all counted, I was sure. Nothing was lost.

The last notes of the organ thundered from beneath the flaming stained glass and our young acolyte in his red cassock and white cotta, gripping his torch, recessed down the aisle with the other clergy.

Downstairs in the parish hall there would be a barbecue. There would be champagne and margaritas. There would be Sunday School Awards. And we would shower our new tiny member of the Body of Christ with little pink sleepers and ballerina shoes and diapers and hand-knit blankets and booties. She would be passed from grandmother to grandmother, her new adopted family. When is the baptism? we all cried, grinning hopefully for another opportunity to buy baby gifts.

Later, as we headed to our cars to return to our weekday lives with their often frenzied pace, I gave thanks for each window on Heaven, for I glimpsed again God’s burning love for us, in His Body, the Church. The thousand pieces of my scattered mind had been reunited. I was once again made whole.

Today is the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.

The last few months have been as though a hurricane was ripping through my life. The winds keep pounding. I keep trudging on, asking for direction in my daily prayers. Occasionally I pause and wonder, where am I going? Did I make a wrong turn? So it was a great comfort to consider John the Baptist’s life today in church.

John the Baptizer prepared the world for the coming of Christ. Like baptism itself, his life opened mankind to a new conversation with God.

When John was born and his mother Elizabeth announced that the boy’s name would be John, his father Zachariah, having been muted by an angel for nine months because of his unbelief, was given his speech back. His words rang through the air:

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,
And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;
As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began:
That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us;
To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;
The oath which he sware to our father Abraham,
That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear,
In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.
And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;
To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,
Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.  (Luke 1:68-79)

We as Anglicans have incorporated this prayer of praise, theBenedictus, into our Morning Prayer Office, and today, as I listened to our preacher speak of John the Baptist I thought how John was always the one going before, preparing the way, tilling the soil so that the seed would fall on good ground. He plays a supporting role, and a brief one at that.

Did he know how it would all turn out… his part in this drama of salvation? Probably not, but from birth he was open to what God would do in his life. He followed the promptings of a prayerful heart; he felt the winds of the Holy Spirit directing him.

He lived in the desert on locusts and honey, wore animal skins, and baptized people in the River Jordan. Did he keep a watch for the promised Messiah?

John must have looked wild as he screamed his fierce warnings. He called for repentance, a turning from the dark to the light. He called for men to love one another, to care for one another. He warned of a coming judgment.  Turn back! Repent! Change! Make your paths straight!

He waited and watched in the desert. Then the promised Messiah appeared.

As John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit descended as a dove and God the Father spoke from the heavens saying, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”

John’s birth and life had led to this moment, and as Jesus walked away, John told his own disciples, “Behold the lamb of God…follow him.” And they did.

I could see the scene vividly this morning as I listened to our preacher. It was a stunning moment in man’s history and it struck me that I didn’t have to see the whole plan either. I knew, as I left the quiet, safe, sweet-smelling sanctuary to re-enter the windy world, that all I had to worry about was my daily prayers and being open to the winds of the Holy Spirit to direct me.

I doubt that John knew the outcome of his life in the desert, but I’m sure he had moments of encouragement, moments in his solitary life of fasting and burning sun when God spoke to him from the parting heavens. I too have had had such moments, even in the midst of my hurricanes.

In fact, I received an email on Friday from a British lord whose writing I greatly admire and to whom I owe a huge debt. What a surprise and a delight for me to receive a thank you note from him.

I could not have written my third novel, Inheritance, without the writings of this man over fifty years ago. He wrote the biography of Raymond Raynes, an Anglican monk, former Superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, England. Some consider Father Raynes a saint. This biography, along with other works, formed the link that would bring Father Raynes into the present day. It only took one man to do it, and he did it. He was prompted and chosen by God.

Lord R loved my novel, Inheritance, which I had sent to him as a thank you for his work. He was complimentary and encouraging, saying it happily brought him back to those days.

So on Friday morning, in the middle of my tempestuous life,  the heavens opened up. I knew once again that God was guiding me, and all I needed to do was be faithful, say my daily prayers, and worship God.

Just like John the Baptist.

I eyed the stack of dusty, yellowed books leaning haphazardly against a wall in my mother’s former home. I’ve been cleaning out the rooms, sorting, tagging, imagining earlier days, now that she is settled in an assisted living complex.

The covers were a faded burgundy, textured. I opened one and the musty aroma took me immediately to a green lawn fifty-fifty five years ago. I was ten and it was summer, and I sprawled in the shade of our fir tree in the front yard. My chosen volume was David Copperfield and I was determined to read it all.

The print was tiny, and the tissue-like pages were yellowing even then. But I persevered, at times engrossed, at times plugging through long sentences and longer paragraphs. My first Dickens.

There were other books in those Orinda summers, easier books, girl books, library books, but I recall that slim volume of Dickens with tenderness and concern. It was a mountain challenging me to climb it. And I did.

The books came from a series called the Harvard  Classics, Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books, and they had once lined a glassed-in case in our living room. I don’t recall why I chose that particular book or how I went about pulling it down from the bookcase. Perhaps it caught my eye when my sister and I were building forts in the front room.

My parents must have been pretty obliging, or they didn’t care how we used this set of books. At any rate, these Harvard books in our house (as I recall) were mostly used to build forts in the living room. We stacked them, forming walls, and draped blankets over them, creating hidden, secret rooms. Inside our special space we served imaginary tea to one another, sometimes along with imaginary cakes.

So now I eyed the books in my mother’s former home. Could I fit them into a cherished space in my own home? They represented doors opening in my childhood. They were challenges met and rewards reaped. I learned on those ten-year-old summer afternoons, crunching apples and following the words  ever so slowly across and down the faded page, not only patience and endurance, but the reward of deep and slow reading, hearing the words in my head.  One long chapter at a time I progressed slowly, savoring the pleasure of a complex and richly textured story, discovering the surprise delight of meeting  the remarkable characters who lived there.

Just as I built forts with the books, so I built worlds with the words. Both were imaginary, but both carved cities and countries and universes in my mind, places to which I would return again and again, in both my reading and, much later, my writing life. I also think that I created or imprinted a pattern, a way to work through difficulty, as though the process of reading over time mapped my mental growth, in the same way that exercise might build muscle memory.

I eyed the books, and began to pack them into boxes.  I would find a place for these treasures somewhere.

Would she like it? Would she like her new place?

“And here is the fish tank in the center, kind of as a focal point for each hallway,” our guide said as we shuffled to Mother’s new studio in the assisted living development.

I gazed at the giant glass octagon with the large orange fish flapping through clear water. Four halls radiated out from this central point, rather like the arms of a cross, I thought. My mother, leaning into her walker, paused in her shuffle and nodded.

We turned left and continued down the hall, past colorful art (”Oh, I like those,” Mother said, seeing an oil painting of Tuscany, a red farm house cresting golden hills), past the dining area, tables set for lunch, and to the elevator. On the second floor we emerged and soon opened the door to Mother’s new studio.

Would she like it? She and I had chosen the furniture to be moved here from her former home, before the fall. During the weeks of skilled nursing we looked at photos I had taken of of dressers and beds and desks and lamps and paintings.

“Oh…,” she said, giggling slightly and taking it all in.

I was encouraged by the giggle. It came from somewhere deep, like a surprise burst of quiet pleasure. I almost didn’t hear it.

The bed from her old home was covered in a familiar spread with familiar pillows, and her old French Provincial night tables banked either side, holding painted ceramic lamps from her living room, carefully chosen long ago. Two aqua wing chairs, in which, in her former life, she had curled into to read and watch movies or perhaps the evening news, grouped near a large picture window which looked out on leafy shade trees. My father’s old roll top desk hugged an opposite wall, near two treasured dressers. Photos of their wedding (1945), photos of my sister and me as toddlers, as graduates, photos of earlier generations, photos of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren (who called her “GG” for Great Grandma) hung on the walls. Her TV/DVD player on another familiar night stand, angled toward the two easy chairs.

I watched her as she took it all in, stepping to one of the chairs. “All my old things…”

Relieved by her tone of relief, I absorbed the room.

It was remarkable, I thought, how memory works. In this small space we had condensed her life. We had pulled pieces, carefully chosen, into a few square feet. These objects were like threads woven from memories of other generations, woven to make a new – but familiar – fabric. Each object represented whole worlds of memory and experience. The richness of the room was nearly tangible.

Since her moving in, we have chatted about things to take away that were unneeded, things to add to the room, snacks for the mini fridge, more paintings and more photos. In the next few months she will sort boxes of photos. She will travel in her mind with her sisters once again on the three sisters cruise some years ago. She will revisit Ireland. Alaska, all carefully documented. And farther back, she will see again in her memory the Holy Land with my father, my sister, and me, and perhaps recall the barbed wire bundles running through Jerusalem, the rose tea in a hut in Beirut with the flies buzzing in the heat. There were times at Tahoe swimming and playing tennis. Masquerade parties in the seventies. My father preaching in the early days of his ministry. Breaking the ground with a shovel on the new church property. All a jumble.

With each visit I pass the fish tank with its orange gilled swimmers, the glassy eyes glancing as they race around.

We have condensed Mother’s life, but somehow enriched it with memory. Somehow the enclosed space, the necessary borders, helped us do that.

Man is an intricate creature with infinite depths, for after all he is made in the image of his Creator. Such a marvelous mystery. Such a miracle, this miracle of memory.

I once thought that I would never wear a cross on a chain around my neck. Maybe on Sundays in church, especially today, Trinity Sunday when we sing my favorite hymn, Holy, Holy, Holy….

I love being a Christian. I love the Church and I love God. My life since becoming a Christian (forty-five years ago) has been increasingly joyous and full of meaning (words cannot describe this).  But what if people saw a cross around my neck and judged Christianity by my behavior? What if I wore the cross, and I said something uncharitable, or did something thoughtless, and my behavior turned them against Christianity, turned them against belief, faith in the astounding resurrection of Jesus Christ and all that that implies, demands, promises?  For I knew I would make mistakes, being a daughter of Adam and Eve.  Would I be a poor witness, give a false testimony to what it means to be a Christian?

But since my mother fell (see the last two posts), I have been increasingly humbled by the overwhelming tasks that continue to fill my days. I have been increasingly aware of my dependence upon God, that I cannot meet this challenge on my own.

I read that Pope Benedict asked Christians to wear their crosses, a timely suggestion. So I started wearing my cross, a simple plain one, around my neck, mostly to encourage me as I went through the day.

I wore my cross when visiting my mother in skilled nursing, checking on her bandaged legs, watching her try to walk again at the age of ninety-two.

I wore my cross when I searched for a suitable place for her to live with appropriate care.

I wore my cross sorting and packing her things in her old apartment and moving them in bulging shopping bags and boxes into the new studio, and when interviewing counselors and agents and nurses.

I often forgot it was there and considered later all that I had done and said (a good habit in itself). Had I been a poor witness, I wondered, with wrenching doubt as I examined my day. On the other hand, as I moved through the hours, I would suddenly recall the bit of shaped metal resting on my heart and touch it, and God reminded me He was with me, that His Son was with me, that the Holy Spirit was there to lead me. Wearing the cross allowed God to help. Feather light on my aging skin, the cross spoke for me: God, I want you near. And, amazingly, He was and is.

I said my daily prayers, morning and evening, an Our Father, Psalm 95 (The Venite), The Te Deum Laudamus, Psalm 100 (The Jubilate Deo), “The Collect for Grace,” taken from Morning Prayer in our Anglican Book of Common Prayer, knowing that in adoration my heart would open to God. He would guide me. He would strengthen me. And He gave me a little piece of metal, often called a sacramental, to remind me of this during the day.

But I was surprised at what else happened.

I found that most folks responded favorably to the cross I wore around my neck. I found more and more people smiling as though in recognition, more were eager to help. I found my own vision slowly changing too. I began to see each person with new eyes, loved by God. The twisted limbs in the wheelchairs, the groans from darkened rooms, the brittle bones, the vacant eyes.  Each person was precious.  The cross yoked me to Christ, and at the end of the day I thought what a hopeful day it had been, in spite of everything.

I had feared that my cross would alienate others, but instead it drew them closer. Is there a secret club of Christians afraid to witness publicly to their faith?  Fellow Christians that delight in other Christians wearing their crosses, that want to encourage and support one another?

I think there may be.

I do not know if my mother will walk again. I hope that soon she will move to her new studio next door to her old friend Ginny (see previous post). What I do know, this Trinity Sunday, is that our triune God – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – all of Him, is with me – us – but only if we ask Him. His gift of free will demands that He be invited.

I came to know that the cross of Christ Jesus, the cross of suffering love, was my only way through these hours of challenge. Wearing His cross made, makes, all the difference.