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The Feast of Pentecost, the celebration of he descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem, is one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament, and while I have always been astounded at the Gospel and Epistle for this Sunday, today I considered one phrase our preacher said.

He said the Holy Spirit was the fountain of life. Creation. Baptism. The Spirit upon the waters… stirring us up (like the Advent Collect, yes).

In Baptism we are given new life in Christ, becoming one with the Bride of Christ, the Church. We are given new life through water and Spirit.

And May is the month of life, of birth, for we celebrate mothers and the life they welcome, or we mourn the life they reject. We look to Mary in May, the month of our lovely and loving Queen of Heaven, who shows us how to say yes to the Father, say yes to the Son, and welcome the Spirit into our hearts and lives and families. For the Holy Spirit descended upon her, the power of the Highest overshadowed her, and she conceived in her womb the Son of God.

And, as she was commanded, she named him Jesus, this Holy Spirit child, this quickening of Our Lord in Mary. She said yes, be it unto me according to thy will. (Luke 1)

Just so, we say yes to the Holy Spirit descending upon you and me. In this way, we take part in creation, the creation only you and I can create. For each one of us is unique; each one of us has a singular gift, a creation for mankind, one that will light the dark for others to see. We must offer this gift, for no-one else can offer our gift in our own unique way.

I love meeting people. For each person is a sacred story, with stories within the story. I look at a new face and wonder in awe at this unique person, for as the Psalmist says, “I will give thanks to thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.” (139) Each person is marvel-ous, awe-full, full of mystery, miracle, and majesty.

And so when I heard the Epistle this morning I could hear the rushing mighty wind, could see the tongues like fire touch each disciple, filling them with the Holy Ghost. I heard them speak in tongues, different languages, so that they could witness to the diverse travelers to Jerusalem, “of every nation under heaven.” How could these Galileans speak in all these languages? I too was amazed at the dramatic scene. (Acts 2)

The Spirit gave them the words, reversing the story of the Tower of Babel, uniting, not dividing, loving, not hating. With words.

You and I are words, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s creative act. We say yes to such miraculous powers of creation, for in the Gospel today, I was enlivened, reassured, by Christ, for he says that the Spirit will teach us all things. We must not let our hearts be troubled or fearful, for the Spirit gives us the peace of Christ. He descends upon us to dwell within us. (John 14:15+)

Tongues of fire. The metaphor reminds us of the glory we have been given, all in a simple answer to what we are called to be, to do, with our lives. All we have to do is say yes. Just like Mary, our dear mother, and like the millions (billions) of faithful throughout the world.

We too will be given what we need to speak the language of Christ to the world. We too will witness to what we have seen and heard. In our own unique, diverse, marvelous way. With our own words, witnessing to the Word made flesh who dwelt among us.

And we behold his glory.

Today is the last Sunday in Eastertide, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and with his conquering death, we too are resurrected, now and when our bodies die, releasing our souls to fly heavenward.

Thursday is the Feast of the Ascension, the celebration of Christ’s new body, his resurrected body, ascending to Heaven after his time on Earth, giving witness to his resurrection.

I have found it is true, as others have noted, that the gospel accounts read as historical witness to what these writers saw and heard. They lived in Christ’s time and place and gave witness with their testimonies, passed on orally in the first century, then written down. They are like depositions in time, reaching to us two thousand plus years later, and setting an example for us to reach others in our own time and in the future, should our words be preserved.

The great seasons of the Church Year give witness as well, as the Church devises over time a crystalline channel of memory through story and song, poetry and prayer. These celebrations do not need to be read or written down, for they are living, breathing, enactments of the gospel testimonies.

And should we be confused as to the meaning of these events, we look to the Early Church and the letters of Paul and others who trained these baby Christians to become adults in Christ.

What is the meaning for mankind in these revelatory actions of God the Son on Earth? 

The intersection of Time with Eternity seen in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the Son of God, effected a revolution of thought and action, continuing to be of huge consequence to the world. This revolution came to be known as the Judeo-Christian tradition, the mores and morality of what we call Western Civilization. Never before were men and women treated with sacred dignity, being made in the image of God. Never before were we held to a such a standard of behavior, to such a judgment, to such consequences for our unlove, our selfishness. Never before did we have a blueprint showing the way to happiness, even joy, an instruction manual, the Holy Bible.

And as the Bride of Christ, the Church becomes the means to share these miraculous and mysterious truths with one another. 

All of these great gifts God has given mankind, distilled into governments and charities and cultures and societies that embrace Christianity – or Judaism – are under serious threat today. And yet Christians are not afraid, for they know how the story of mankind will end. And in the end is their beginning.

Nevertheless, in the time that is ours, the life we own, we witness to the God of love who created you and me. We witness to life, from the baby in the womb to the last days of our elderly to those suffering early deaths. We witness to the family, the life blood society that trains our children to be truth-tellers too when they come of age. We witness to the delight in being a woman or a man, knowing that we are made in the image of God, Imago Dei.

And so we sing our song of love to the God of love, who befriends us, instructs us, delights in us, and raises us up with him to sing our song in the New Jerusalem along with all those who have gone before us who witnessed in their own lifetimes.

In this month of Mary’s May, we thank Our Mother Mary for saying yes long ago in a village called Nazareth. Her fiat made all the difference to the world, our world. Our fiat makes all the difference too.

And so we say with her, be it unto me according to thy will.

Amen.

It’s a beautiful spring day here in the Bay Area, a time to appreciate the beauty of the natural world as it is reborn each year, giving us a good greening before the dry season turns the grasses brown.

I too feel reborn, as I always do after Easter and Resurrection Day. One of the glorious aspects of the Christian life is that we are always being reborn, as we confess, repent, and are forgiven again and again. We do not carry the weight of our human failings on our fragile shoulders. Christ carries it, his gift to you and me.

My novel in progress is now sitting with my first editor (will have numerous ones this time, I believe!). With many other challenges in my life this month, it took carefully scheduling to finish the draft, but thanks be to God the draft was drafted and winged its way to the East Coast to get to know another writer/editor besides myself. Funny thing about manuscripts – they can be quite demanding. So The Music of the Mountain left home to fly away to finishing school and will have many stories to tell when it/she/he returns, how she became finely finished, perfectly polished, and who knows, actually readable.

It is said that when writers send their manuscripts out into the wide wide world it is like sending a child away to school. At some point, we just say, okay, fly. But don’t forget who created you! Still we think of all the changes and additions we still need to make – create another plot line, another character, another setup and payoff, another scene, another dialog. That’s when I tell myself, breathe, breathe, breathe the name of Jesus.

I suppose God is rather like that (Dorothy Sayers wrote about that in The Mind of the Maker). He made us, gave us free will, and eternally desires that we love him as much as he loves us. He wants to be with each one of us, 24/7, loving, choosing, directing. But we must invite him in. Sometimes I need reminding.

That is what the Church does for us. Reminds us how much God loves us. Reminds us how we are resurrected with him.

We had a lovely annual Church Synod last week, another extended family gathering of the faithful which is one part reunion, one part inspiration, one part meeting and greeting, one part fellowship, and many parts encouragement. We live in a challenging time for the Church – any church – a hostile time in which we must not throw pearls before swine, must choose charitably, desire dutifully, and trust Our Lord completely. We are the music of the mountain (plot spoiler), each note, each hymn, each concerto. We all play our part.

And so I sing today’s Collect, making a chorus of the words, “Grant unto thy people that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise so that… our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.”

And so I sing today’s Epistle, James 1:17+, one of the most exquisitely beautiful verses of Holy Scripture: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down form the Father of lights, which whom i no variableness, neither shadow of turning…”

In our lives, we have momentary visions of God, of Eternity, of beauty we nearly cannot bear, so exquisite is it. So we breathe it in in the name of Jesus, just as Jesus breathed the Spirit upon the disciples. And as we live, and learn to love, the beauty of the world enters our hearts and minds and souls, to remake us, to finish us, to bring us one step closer to Heaven and Eternity.

Thinking about my draft again, and all the stories I didn’t tell, all the loves I wanted to include, all the mysteries and miracles of life that are stacked in folders all around me that didn’t make the cut (there’s still time I tell them). At the end of the day, what I have not packed into these chapters is huge and daunting and waiting to be included. Alas, I tell them, sometimes less is more…?

But then I know these glories of research have sculpted me, made me grow, fed me with Eternity, right here in my little bookroom, the shelves pouring books upon me, sent forth by my cat, Angel.

Did I mention my novel is about books? Lots of them.

Thanks be to God.

Happy Eastertide to all!

I’m pleased to announce American Christian Fiction Writers has published my post, Singing the Song of Life, how Christian storytellers sing life into every page and plot, carving the conscience of our culture. Thank you ACFW!

Happy St. Paddy’s Day! And Passion Sunday. And the Fifth Sunday in Lent. We journey together within the Passion of Christ, to Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter, Resurrection Day. My bishop of blessed memory often said that passion is the union of love and suffering. At the age of 76, I think I am beginning to know what he meant.

Our hills are Irish green, the sunlight drenching them in color. By May they will be summer brown and we will hear the weedwhackers shaving the hills, cutting the grass down, for now the grass is weeds.

St. Patrick (372-466) did the opposite, he turned the dry weeds of Ireland into the green grass of faith, much as Our Lord does with each one of us. Before belief we are dry and parched. After belief we are green and growing. As one of my characters says, “My life is now divided in two – before belief and after belief.” And once tasting the joy of believing, there is no turning back.

I am at times overcome with gratitude to God that I have been blessed with belief. Why, I don’t know. Why others don’t follow the same path to joy, I can’t fathom. But then, I tell myself, it’s not my business – it’s God’s business and theirs, and all I can do is witness with my life and my words. Each one of us must decide the path they want to take. It’s called Love; it’s called free will.

St. Patrick was not born in Ireland, but in Britain. He was enslaved as a boy by a trading ship and taken to Ireland. Wikipedia says,

According to Patrick’s autobiographical Confessio, when he was about sixteen, he was captured by Irish pirates from his home in Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland. He writes that he lived there for six years as an animal herder before escaping and returning to his family. After becoming a cleric, he returned to spread Christianity in northern and western Ireland. In later life, he served as a bishop, but little is known about where he worked. By the seventh century, he had already come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland. (Italics mine)

Remarkable, that he returns to the land of his enslavement and preaches the Gospel. In doing so, he forges the link between Classical Civilization and what becomes Western Civilization.

Today, all this is severely threatened, as we head down the road to extinction. Even so, there are quiet links doing their linking, preserving what needs preserving, saying what needs saying, writing what needs writing. There is one here and one there and another one farther afield. Why, there is a network forming underground that none of us can see, but, then again, it is you and it is me.

I often wonder who is pulling the strings, whispering hints, pointing in directions, if anyone, from above. Angels? I play what-if… What if when we enter Heaven we are given one last chance to visit a loved one? Then we journey further to the gates of the city, over the brilliant green hills to the bright light of the walls of gemstones. What if some have a love that is great enough to influence us on earth a little longer? Perhaps the saints who listen to our prayers. Perhaps a mother willing to forgo instant heavenly delight to help a child maneuver further in life? What if love is the medium shows us the goings on on Earth? How much love is in our hearts? Love that we are willing to give away, to suffer for another?

I’ve enjoyed writing a bit about Heaven in my current novel, as I did in Angel Mountain, using theological texts as well as Near Death Experiences. I don’t make things up from whole cloth, but journey into the what-ifs that are presented by other witnesses.

Maybe it’s the Irish in me dancing this jig, telling this tale. While most of my ancestors are either Norwegian or British, I have some Irish (5%) on my paternal grandmother’s side. It appears her grandparents came from Ireland mid 19th Century (potato famine would be a good guess) to Ontario, Canada and settled just above Lake Michigan. They had many children, and several adult grandchildren eventually crossed into the U.S. Somehow my grandmother met my grandfather in a town farther south, Escanaba, where she lived, and he took her to Arkansas where my father was born.

I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died before I was born. I did, however, inherit her first name as my middle, Gertrude.

One way or another, I’m glad St. Patrick returned to Ireland. It made all the difference in our world.

St. Patrick is said to have authored Hymn #268, “I bind unto myself to-day/ The strong Name of the Trinity/ By invocation of the same/ The Three in One, and One in Three. It covers the Faith in five verses that ride a powerful melody of serious commitment, a binding, an oath taking. Then the tune shifts to a light dance calling on Christ to be “with me, within me, behind me, before me, beside me, to win me, to comfort and restore me, beneath me, above me, in quiet, in danger, in hearts of all that love me, in mouth of friend and stranger.” It’s a hymn, an oath, to the Trinity, one of the doctrines developed by the Early Church and debated. It clearly is a teaching hymn as most were and are, full of theology, images, words, all helping us understand who we are and who we are meant to be.  

Thank you St. Patrick, for your life and your love and your gift of Christ to Ireland. You made a difference, a huge difference in our world.

And Grandma Gertrude Lilian Foster Thomas, I love you.

Deo Gratias. 

Many of my ideas come to me while sitting on a folding chair in our Berkeley chapel and singing and praying the Mass. Today an obvious thought landed in my aging brain, that there is a parallel between the story my main characters are acting out and the history of western civilization.

My four friends – Patricia, Fr. Davies, Winston, and Molly – seek to save classic fiction, history, philosophy, and theology in order to save Western Civilization. Their goal is noble but illegal, as the state raids libraries, public and private, to destroy these books that challenge mankind to be better, to confess, to repent, and to follow ideals of beauty, truth, and freedom. They have all been “cancelled” in one way or another and come together with a common loss and common goal.

These characters have indeed become my friends, added to the exclusive cast that populate my stories. They have parts of me in all of them, so in that sense they are my brothers and sisters, my mothers and fathers, my aunts and uncles, and most importantly, my children. It’s quite a lovely phenomenon.

But what occurred to me during the liturgy today was that what they are doing in the pages of The Music of the Mountain is what the monks did in the northern monasteries of Europe in the early medieval world when they copied manuscripts to save the classical/Christian world from disappearing. This is the thesis of the wonderful history by Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, in which he describes how St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, after the fall of Rome. With Christianity he also brought the Judaic and classical world that became the foundation of Western Europe in the centuries to come.

And so we celebrate the Feast of St. Patrick this week. Perhaps it was Patrick who spoke to me this morning in Berkeley, pointing out the obvious parallels, saving civilization from destruction, even if it means centuries of underground protection of the great ideas of the West – freedom, human dignity, love, truth, valor, merit. For each one of us is responsible for our great inheritance, to keep it safe, to pass it on to the next generation or even next century.

I named one of my characters Patricia and have kept it, which I don’t usually do, but now I see who her namesake is. Seems obvious now, but isn’t it crazy how we can’t see what is right in front of us? I also chose “St. Patrick’s Breastplate hymn” to be one another character hears again and again… now I see why. Again, it came to me suddenly (each character has an assigned hymn).

And so as we consider memory and memorizing and remembering. Like my four friends, I am working on my Psalm, and this year I might actually have it down, but the last line keeps eluding me. Still, twice daily I feed on Psalm 139, as we feed on the loaves and fishes multiplied in the Gospel this morning, as we feed on Christ himself in the Eucharist each Sunday, as we travel to Jerusalem and the great events of salvation and resurrection. 

“Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect and in thy book were all my members written; Which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” (139:15-16)

Thanks be to God. Deo Gratias.

O Lord, thou has searched me out and known me…

Storms have battered the Bay Area this weekend, with high winds wailing around our house and temperatures dropping. Mt. Diablo is covered in mist and I wondered about snow but not yet according to local weather data. Still, the drama of the change in weather is never-ending, and although many try and forecast and prophecy the future days, mankind is not in control, although he pretends to be.

The battering of the earth with rain and wind reflects the battering of our souls in Lent. It is a season of regret, of confession, of repentance. It is a time to face the truth about who we are, what we have done, and what we will do. It is a time of turning back or facing a crossroads and reading the signposts. Heaven? Hell? Which way am I headed? Which way do I desire to go?

I’ve found it compelling that Jesus asks the sick and the lame, before he heals them, “Do you want to be healed?” Seems an obvious answer, but he asks. For if there is no desire to be healed, there can be no healing. If there is no desire to love or be loved, there can be no love.

So Lent is a time to ask ourselves, what exactly do we want? From life? From the past, the present, the future? We take stock of our souls.

There is a character in my novel-in-progress that has done a great evil in her past. She wishes today she had not done this, but she handles her regret and guilt and horror too, by denying her past.

This may be the greatest human error of all, to not face up to our failings. I believe that a good number of women who rally and march for “a woman’s right to choose” have made the wrong choice in their past. For them to protect the unborn today would mean they must face what they have done.

This is no easy task, after fifty years of abortion on demand, and fifty years of women making deadly choices, gargantuan choices of life and death. It is a high wall to climb over, a steep and rocky mountain to ascend, to turn around and say I’m sorry, let’s change the law. Let’s protect these innocent lives. But to face the horror of the act is beyond many, even if they were misled by our culture of sexual liberation, and most were, to my thinking. In this sense, these women are victims as well.

It’s almost demonic, for like in today’s Gospel, the demons return in greater numbers than the first one, circling the soul with lies, dividing and felling God’s house, scattering and not gathering. “He that is not with me is against me,” Our Lord says.

And so these words are stirring my will to watch and pray for our country, our people, our families, and our unborn. We must fill our hearts and minds with Christ, nothing less, to protect us from the demonic dividers.

I’m finding great consolation and inspiration in returning to Psalm 139 to memorize once again. I’ve been working on this one for too many Lents to admit. Morning and night, stirring it into other memorized prayers has helped, and the phrases do come easily to mind from all those past Lents. In this way I have been baptized with the Psalms, the words showering my soul with beauty and hope.

O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me…

This first phrase touches me deeply, his searching me out and his knowing me. It’s the shepherd finding the lost sheep, as David must have done, so that when I am on that precipice looking down into the depths of a dark valley, the storm all around me, I know Christ is with me.

And I have found as I work on my second draft of The Music of the Mountain, that this Psalm wants to live within the story as chapter epigraphs….

Or, as Snoopy typed while sitting atop his dog house, “It was a dark and stormy night…” Indeed. Here’s hoping we see spring soon with all its bright inspiration, beauty, peace, and most of all, resurrection.

Having finished a first draft of my novel-in-progress, The Music of the Mountain, I find I need a concise description to answer the question, “What’s it about?”

So tentatively, in an attempt to distill sixty thousand words into a phrase or a sentence, I am sallying forth with, “Saving books in order to save Western Civilization” or perhaps, “A philosophy professor, a history teacher, an honest journalist, and a praying priest, secretly save classic history and literature before they are burned by the Social Justice Committee”. Sounds like Fahrenheit 451, and in some respects it is a modern version Bradbury’s dystopian novel, but much more. Set in January 2023, the Emergency Powers of government has decreed classics to be hateful and has erased those portions of the Internet deemed too white. Libraries are closed due to the pandemic, and will unlikely reopen. So my intrepid professor gathers a few booklovers, former students, to help her save civilization, one shelf at a time. Lo and behold, a secret library emerges!

So the novel continues my fascination with words, and with people, and this time with virtues and memory. Language itself is a test of memory, how we write words into our minds, onto our hearts, onto our tongue in speech. Each one of us is a word, an expression of God’s love and will and design. Each one of us is unique, precious, and loved.

I believe also, that each one of us is necessary to the plan of salvation. Each plays their part, if only to link to another who links to another who links to another… until we form a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter of God’s will for mankind. Usually, we have no idea who might be the one who links to us, or who we are linking to. Who reads these words, who hears a sermon, who takes an idea from a book or a person and sends it flying through the stratosphere to someone else. Every person counts in God’s plan, and when one is lost (that lost sheep) another must be found. We are letters in the word, cursive dancing across a page, joined with others to form phrases and sentences, that fill the Earth in life and the Heavens in eternal life. My bishop of blessed memory often consoled me with the words, “Nothing is lost. Everything counts.”

And so we plant the seeds of memorized words and phrases in our hearts this Lenten season, to be ready for rising from the earth triumphantly. “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me, thou knowest my thoughts long before. Thou art about my path and about my bed, and art acquainted with all my ways. For lo, there is not a word on my tongue, but thou, O Lord, knowest it all together. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me. I cannot attain unto it…” (Psalm 139)

Christians believe in a personal God, a God that makes a difference in our lives and in our deaths. He is with us, Emmanuel. The shepherd boy David knew this in his songs in the fields, so that God could mold him to become the origin of the “Line of David” that would send forth the Christ to save the world. No small thing. He was chosen from the Chosen People of Israel and one can see why, “For my reins are thine; thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.”

And so we sing the song of love, the melody of creation, the hymn of praise to God, our creator, our Father, our Lord, our Spirit. The song begins as a solo, then joins in with others, then a great chorus rises from the Earth, a love song to God.

That is what Lent is, singing our song of life here among the living, choosing the good and rejecting the evil, cultivating Christ within us to rise on Easter morning.

And that reminds me – my Music of the Mountain is about virtue, what it is, why we need it, how to sing it in our lives. Faith, hope, and charity. Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice. And, as we heard recently, the greatest of these is charity, love. For without love, we are tinkling cymbals. Without love, we are nothing.

And there is a love story too in my little book, and a past tragedy that needs healing, and heroic visions inspired by those who fought for freedom in the past, and escape stories of the Holocaust, so that we never forget. 

But most of all, it is a collection of words and sentences and paragraphs that run and dance over the white pages, creating love and life and… expressions of who we are and who we are meant to be, a love song to life and the Creator of all life.

Thanks be to God.

Every Lent I choose something to memorize and something to renew that has slipped from my memory. I consider it not only a mental discipline, always good in Lent, but food for my soul. Words are miraculous. If they sit within you long enough, if they travel to your tongue and are set flying into the air, they support an architecture of belief. And so Advent and Lent I consider the passages I will write on my heart.

I am immersed in my novel-in-progress, and when considering a scripture that related to a pro-life sermon preached on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I settled on Psalm 139. It is a psalm I have worked on forever it seems, and never really have it engrafted in my mind, so I often return to it. It is the first sixteen verses that stun me with their beauty and profundity:

O LORD, thou hast searched me out, and known me. * Thou knowest my down-sitting, and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before. Thou art about my path, and about my bed; * and art acquainted with all my ways. For lo, there is not a word in my tongue, * but thou, O LORD, knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, * and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me; * I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? * or whither shall I go then from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; * if I go down to hell, thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning, * and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there also shall thy hand lead me, * and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me; * then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day; * the darkness and light to thee are both alike. For my reins are thine; * thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: * marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. My bones are not hid from thee, * though I be made secretly, and fashioned beneath in the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; * and in thy book were all my members written; Which day by day were fashioned, * when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139, BCP 514-515)

That God knows us so well and loves us so well is a glorious thing. In the writing of my novel, The Music of the Mountain, I have been blessed with a sense that our Lord is with me, alongside. He said to the disciples he would be with them always, even unto the ends of the earth. Sometimes we forget this, in all the hustle and bustle of our world, and it is good to be reminded. He is with us to the ends of the earth.

My new memory work is a Eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving, usually said by the celebrant, but in our chapel the people join in. I almost have it down, but phrases keep eluding me so I’ll work on it a bit each evening:

“Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee, for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us who have duly received these holy mysteries… And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou has prepared for us to walk in; thorugh Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end.” Amen. (BCP 83)

Pray for our world. Pray for the unborn. Pray that our nation, under God, be forgiven and healed. Pray that God’s will be done in all things. Say an Our Father morning and night, and with these words, we will bring him among us all.

This week we observe Ash Wednesday, the day when Christians are reminded of their mortality with an ashen cross drawn on their foreheads, as they hear the words, “Remember o man, that dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.”

It is a sobering moment that makes our lives more precious. To face one’s death is to celebrate life more intensely. We live in a materialistic world denying the life of the spirit, the creeds of Christianity, the hope of Eternity. And so this world often cannot face death, for the implications are too painful. Death is denied, ignored, erased. Modern man lives a lie, that he will not die, or that it does not matter.

Of course it matters. And today’s Epistle tells us why we should care about life and death. St. Paul writes what might be his most exquisitely beautiful passage in his letter to the church in Corinth, explaining that the answer to all of our questions lies in love, the love of God our Creator who gives us life: “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…” (I Corinthians 13:1+, BCP 122) And once we see the key is to love God, we then can look around us and see that we must love our neighbor. He writes in this passage as well that we are like children in our mortal lives, but when we die and return to God we are grown up, fully realized: “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 so we shall become perfect in our new lives, on the new Earth, in the New Jerusalem. What must we do in the Earth-time meantime? We must learn to love, for loving others as God loves us teaches us how to grow into what we are meant to be. It can be no other way. Love is the creative force that lives within us and opens the gates of Heaven when our time comes.

For it is the love of God that feeds us. It is his Word that nourishes us, for his love is expressed through his Word, not only in Scripture and Sacrament, but Christ himself in Eucharist and prayer.

So in Lent we clean our house within, exposing the dark shadows to the light, and finding places to feed the love of God. We confess our failures to love God and our neighbor. We confess our failures to be the person God created us to be. We confess we have strayed like lost sheep. We know we need help. We know we cannot do this on our own. Perfection is only realized with the love of God lighting our souls.

The Church helps us by carefully and lovingly setting out a seasonal calendar, ordaining a time for self-examination, a time to consider repentance and a return to the path we are meant to be on. And thus we have Lent, a time to do just that. We can strengthen our minds and hearts with a Lenten discipline so that we will turn away from the bad and embrace the good. We can learn, mark, and inwardly digest the virtues so that we can sweep away the vices. We can in this time, face sin in our lives and banish the dark so that we can see the light.

God’s love for us means we have meaning in our lives today and everyday that we open our hearts to him. Every day we close our hearts we invite despair, for the absence of God in us kills hope. In this same passage we are told by Paul that faith, hope, and charity abide, but the greatest is charity. And yet we must have faith to hope to love.

It is a holy time, a time of penitence and repentance and rebirth. Christ offers himself for us, to us. We need only take his hand and learn to love as he loves us.

In this way we will step toward Eternity, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day until we enter the glory of Paradise.