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TO THE MINERS IN CHILE
Barbara Budrovich

Gestation / August 2010

They are in her womb
Of black copper
In gestation
For a third of their
Earlier time
With a different mother

Like then, sequestered from
Distractions
Except those that click inside the head
Now fully weighted.

And these they will harness
To dig new worlds.
A galaxy will light this womb.

And that is how they will wait
For time to be divided again by sunrise and sunset.

Invincible is this imagination,
Which built this mine
A mile
Underground.

Birth / October 2010

It is not a
Breeched birth.
Each comes out
Head first,
Out of that
Tight canal
Into the
Same light
They closed
Their eyes against
Years ago,
The same cries
To follow,
The same hands
To cradle
Their men
After birth.

(c) Barbara Budrovich, October, 2010

The seasons changed this weekend, from a long hot summer to suddenly fall and this morning a steely sky blanketed this town in the eastern foothills of the Rockies.

From a corner room in the historic Boulderado Hotel we look out on the corner of Pine and 13th Street, an intersection of stalwart churches dating to the late nineteenth century surrounded by tall shade trees, still in full leaf.  Our red-brick hotel with its tall narrow windows, towers, gables, and bracketed cornices, opened in 1907 and was named by uniting the names Boulder and Colorado.   Today it retains its old world charm with cherry woods and sweeping staircases and the famous glass ceiling overlooking the lobby and balcony that runs along the sides of the fifth floor.

But we came to this university town to visit our son and grandchildren, and our step into the past was a short one but just as dramatic.  Children grow just as seasons change and buildings mature, and we re-entered our family life, having missed some of it.  We forged new bonds and discovered new details about the time passed in separate places, time which molded our grandson, turning eight, and our granddaughter, well into five, into slightly different creatures than when we saw them last.  Time also has weathered our son and his wife, and this family they formed.  They have grown together, meeting the challenges and sufferings of life, and have acquired a patina and depth.

Within those delicately graded changes that the months worked on each of us we could still see the same son and daughter, the same grandchildren, the unique personalities that God had given them.  They had simply ripened.

I noticed these shades in the last few days, marveling at my grandson on the wide field of green grass, chasing the soccer ball, maneuvering it away from others, sliding his body gracefully through the wind like the wind.  Blessed with agility, concentration, and incredible energy, he throws himself into the game so that his features at times reflect a much older person.  And off the field, his manner has matured.  He speaks to me rationally and inquisitively, having left some of his younger ways behind.

Our granddaughter, who I am firmly convinced was sprinkled with faerie dust at some point, has moved from baby to child, that amazing change from four to five, when language and thought become channeled into productive activity.  Her longer attention span allows her greater satisfaction as she plunges into crafts, games, coloring.  She too ran on that field of green on Saturday, a child running for the sheer joy of running, dancing through the grass, clapping her hands.

We worshipped together this morning in the Presbyterian Church, my son next to me.  His grandfather, my father, was a Presbyterian pastor, and while he left the faith eventually, I believe my son’s faith is firm.  It was good to be there, sitting in the shiny wooden pew together, listening to the choir and hearing the sermon.  We were a family, and I gave thanks for this simple pleasure, of being together in church, a place that weaves threads through generations and binds our culture together.  For today, indeed, marriage, family, and church are threatened by a multitude of forces, pulled at, divided.  It is in these moments, in these places, like this morning in this sanctuary where we worshipped God together, that we come home.  And while the service was not my accustomed Anglo-Catholic one, and the Divine Liturgy was replaced by a more casual program of readings and songs and a good deal of talk, it was my familiar childhood church, the church in which I grew up.  Was my father watching from somewhere in eternity?  I wondered.  And here was my son, returning.

I considered why I had left the Presbyterians as I often do in these moments of reflection and reminded myself again of the same list: my loss of faith in my teens; my re-conversion by the writings of the Anglican C.S. Lewis; my falling in love with the ancient liturgy of the Church, how it washed over and through my senses and drew me in; my eventual conviction that Christ was mystically present in the bread and the wine; the journey of forty years of weekly Eucharists and the glorious submission to these life-giving moments in the Mass; my eventual desire and need for them, as one needs food and water to live, air to breathe, and as one desires to be with one’s beloved.

We joined together this weekend, pulling time into our circle and vanquishing it.  We dined and played and read together.  This afternoon we drove into the mountains through the charred fire-ravaged hillsides, where black skeleton trees stood drearily against the cold sky with its peeked sun.  Weeks ago the flames had leapt through these majestic forests of the Rocky Mountains, swallowing homes and possessions, memories gone in a burst of heat.  Thankfully no lives were lost, but past lives were, at least the mementos that feed memory, and I wondered what it was like to lose the material of our past, the photos, the letters, the gifts from those we love, the rooms where we lived our dreams, our fears, our minutes strung together.  All lost in an instant.

And now as I look out on the intersection of Pine and 13th and the churches on the corners, a blazing sun has burst suddenly through dark skies.  I realized that nothing is ever lost, that God weaves himself among us, pulling us together with his love, and all of time past, present, and future forms his time.  We may forget, but he will remind us of what is important, especially if we make the effort to sit side by side on the shiny oak pew.  In this way we move through time, together.

It is early October and summer is sliding into autumn with colder temperatures borne on the wind, hinting of winter.

September in my life has been a time of beginnings, the start of the new term, the birth of my son, even the victory of Saint Michael over Lucifer.  The long days of summer have ended, the heat broken with the flapping of angels’ wings, blowing the soon-to-turn leaves.  Indeed, some of the leaves here are already burnt sienna, that crayon color I often selected from the little yellow box on the dining table. And, in church, having flown with angels, we begin October with the curiously homely beggar from Assisi, Francis Bernadone.

I was considering Francis in church this morning and how the God spoke to him through the crucifix in the crumbling chapel of San Damiano outside of Assisi, and how he obeyed.  “Repair my house,” he said, and Francis thought he meant the chapel.  He gathered stones to help the old priest rebuild.  The crucifix in San Damiano spoke to him, and now I looked up to the crucifix in Saint Peter’s.  In a way God spoke through the crucifix every Sunday.

As I received the Host this morning, a friend, rising from the altar rail at the opposite end, tripped. She held a baby, and the two fell gently onto the red carpet.  There was a rustle of sudden movement and a collective gasp and a doctor in the congregation soon helped her up; her pride was hurt more than her bones.  The startled but unhurt baby was passed to comforting arms.  I gazed at the white Host in the palm of my hand, then to the crucifix above the altar, slightly stunned.  I wondered if Saint Francis would suddenly appear and help us out.

Thirteenth-century Francis (1181-1226) is a favorite of today, but his humility and obedience are not celebrated.  True, he cared for the poor and the sick, a model of social charity.  He wandered the paths of Italy, homeless, begging his room and food, an icon of earthy simplicity and celebration of nature, ecology, animals and birds.  But his life was hard, full of sacrificial giving, much like Christ, for Christ wandered the countryside, preaching and healing.

We have many primary sources for the life of Francis, many contemporary accounts, so the tales surrounding him have a certain validity.  But there was nothing sentimental about this rough little man of love.  He kissed a leper.  He spoke to a hungry wolf.  Nearly blind, he underwent eye surgery with no anesthetic.

What seems to be missing in contemporary stories of this saint is his obedience and devotion to the Church.  He sought permission from his superiors, and his local bishop gave him the Porziuncola chapel-hut in the valley below Assisi to use for prayer.  As others joined him in this life of poverty, he petitioned the Pope to make his order official and was rejected.  Finally, after dreaming Francis was literally supporting the Church, keeping it from falling down with outstretched hands, the Pope called him back and created the Order of Friars Minor.

Saint Francis was, to be sure, a correction to the decadent Church of the High Middle Ages.  Success and wealth had corrupted the institution over time, as they often do with man’s endeavors, and Francis became a challenge, a new way. But his humility and obedience to the Church never wavered.  He saw himself as unworthy to become a priest for the priest offered the great sacrifice of the Mass.  Yet he fully lived the sacrament of spirit and flesh, as the love of God worked through his body to heal the hurting, to love the despairing.  Finally, while he would not, could not, celebrate the Eucharist, he asked for the wounds of Christ, the stigmata, in his hands, his feet and his side so that he could love the better.  Christ appeared to him as an angel, in the center of the cross, during this season of Michaelmas, on a mountain in Tuscany outside of Florence called La Verna.  He granted Francis his request.

Stigmata continue to bleed, and Francis died within two years, in his forties.  His friends carried him on a pallet, his hands and feet wrapped.  In a sense, Christ entered his body in a mysterious way, giving all of us on earth another dramatic and cosmic sign of God’s love for us.

We all bleed in a sense, for life is a messy thing, as we bump against one another, reach out to one another, make our troubled way through time.  But as we walk these rocky paths, Francis reminds us that God is with us, suffering with each minute, and celebrating each hour of our life.  He is with us through the Church, Francis tells us, through the Eucharist, through the Body and the Blood of Christ.

He was with us this morning as my friend stumbled and fell, and he was with the child who landed softly.  He was with all of us as we knelt at that rail, partaking of His presence in the bread and the wine.  He wove us together with his love, this unique parish family, his suffering, loving, and glorified body.

Yesterday I wrote the climactic, crisis scene in my novel-in-progress, The Magdalene Mystery.

The scene had been chasing me and I had been dodging it, not sure exactly how to unfold the scene’s key events, how to link and layer themes with setting, the characters’ loves, and, indeed, their sufferings.

Yesterday was the reckoning, I suppose, or else I simply grew tired of running from it.  I blocked the day out to write – to avoid marketing my other books, checking Facebook, or even taking a walk in the suddenly balmy California weather.  So I wrote and wrote and wrote, as fast as my little fingers would go.

I won’t give it all away, but the scene does take place on the top of a mountain in Southern France.  I felt I had been living on top of that mountain for weeks, breathing the air, looking at the panoramic view.  It was as though I was on the border of another country, my feet on the earth, my head in the sky, and that from here I could fly.   But where?

This morning I had the same epiphany, but in the Mass at Saint Peter’s Church.  Probably because I still literally had “my head in the clouds,” on top of that mountain in my novel.  Even so, my knees were firmly planted on the padded kneeler and my senses filled with color, sound, light, and the movement of the liturgy.  I was rooted in the liturgical action, but as I watched and prayed and confessed my sins of the week, I saw other processions and other Masses from other places and countries.  They were churches I recognized, clergy I recognized, each man with his own way of walking and speaking and chanting.  Some were parish churches with small congregations, a strumming guitar.  Some were grand cathedrals with banks of nuns singing the psalms before a soaring mosaic of Christ Pantokrator.   In our travels we have had the remarkable and blessed opportunity to be present at numerous Eucharists, and while each is unique, colored with the parish’s history and the region and the people themselves, they all merged together in my mind, layering in a cosmic dance of union.

And the Epistle reinforced this sense of union:

There is one body, and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. (Ephesians 4:4-6)

This is what Heaven will be like, I thought – liturgical dances and songs of praise from time past and time present and time future merging yet remaining uniquely heard, seen, experienced.  I know that when Christ returns there will be no need for the Church, His Body on earth, for He will be here on earth, but until then we are in a kind of training that will open our hearts and minds and senses to His presence.

At Saint Peter’s this morning I was on the precipice of another world, looking out over a panorama of eternity.

It was so very beautiful.

Deo Gratias

Father Pomroy was away today and Father Paul celebrated the Mass and preached.  It was good to see him at the altar, for he has had numerous health problems last six months.  Father Paul is our eldest priest, and his wisdom and warmth fill his soul to bursting.  His eyes are always alight with good humor, his mouth always curved in a contagious smile, as though the sheer joy of seeing you has made his life complete.

Father Paul reflects God’s love, the way God loves each of us.

It was the second Sunday of our fall Church School program, and after I checked on the children and the newly assembled staff, I entered the red-carpeted nave in time for the reading of the Epistle.  I thanked God for his miracles of the past week – each day given, each minute cherished, and most especially the chance to see old friends at a baby shower on Saturday.

Soon Father Paul rose to the pulpit to preach, and just as happens in every sermon, I learned something new, was touched by God. He spoke of the village of Nain where Christ raises a widow’s son to life, the Gospel story today.  The folks in Nain recognized the implications of this remarkable act and cried out that a great prophet had risen up, that God had visited his people.  Why, Father Paul asked, did they say this?  Other miracles do not receive this response in the Gospels.  It turns out that in Nain, centuries earlier, the prophet Elijah had raised a widow’s son from death to life.  The village had kept the story alive.  They remembered their history and saw the significance of their present.

The link between the two raisings of the dead in Nain so many years apart startled me.  I gazed at Father Paul at the altar and thought of baby Natalie, nine months, back in the nursery, the two many generations apart.  We are so blessed at Saint Peter’s to have among us the very old and the very young, as though time is pulled together into a single heartbeat under our roof.  Each person from nine months to ninety is precious and we celebrate that preciousness.  And with the celebration of life, we also celebrate two thousand years of story, the miracles and signs given to us through the Church, the Body of Christ, to help in our understanding and our making sense of this life.

Yesterday, Saturday, the past and present collided, slipped into one, at a baby shower given for a childhood friend of my son who is now grown with a family of his own.  How good it was to see the generations gather and celebrate this life soon to come into our world, to celebrate marriage and family, and to show our communal support for this great event.  I recalled the mother-to-be when she was a little girl and sighed.  I recalled my son as well, and all the ups and downs of growing up, she and he and others in their grade tumbling through the years.

I touched the pink smocking on little Natalie’s dress and followed Father Paul as he offered the great sacrifice at the altar, the Holy Eucharist.  Father was frail but strong, and his Trinity green cope with its red cross emblazoned on his back marked him as one of Our Lord’s own.  He sang the Mass, his voice wavering and thin but full of devotion.

Today my son turns thirty-eight.  I gave thanks for his birth in a hospital in Vancouver, Canada.  I gave thanks for the loving man he has become, a devoted father and husband, a talented landscape architect.  I gave thanks that I had experienced the miracle of birth and motherhood.

And I gave thanks for all the blessings of this life, for this God who loves us so much that he lives with us, in us, pulling us to him in time and place, weaving us into his tapestry of eternity.

I received the Bread of Heaven and returned to my pew, full of happiness, living in the heart of God, complete.

We packed the cars with eighteen helium balloons and sandwich trays and gift bags and headed for Saint Peter’s this morning.  Fortunately others were bringing the tubs of ice cream, the toppings, the drinks.

It was the Opening of Church School and Ice Cream Social and I was looking forward to seeing the children as well as a little hot fudge.  (I also love balloons.)

I set out the bags and tied the multi colored balloons along the hallways to mark a path from the narthex to the classrooms where our teachers awaited the children.  Soon mothers with babies were chatting with the attendants in the nursery, and the Primary/Juniors were working on cool bookmarks and learning about the creation of the world.

As I watched them, I thought how good God was to give us children to teach, to care for, to love with God’s own love.  How good to share the good news of God’s glory, his heaven and his earth.  And soon, those approaching ten to twelve years of age will prepare for Confirmation, prepare to receive Christ himself in the Eucharist, the miraculous union of heaven and earth within us.

Baby Natalie, 9 months, especially loved to poke her finger at the balloons and cry, ba….

As the weeks progress, we shall add to and layer our children’s program with songs and rhymes, contests and pageants.  We shall live out the Church Year, celebrating the coming of God’s Son at Christmas, his life on earth in the months following, his death and resurrection at Easter.  Then we will tell how the Son of God walked the earth for forty days, appearing to many, and his ascension to Heaven.  On the Sunday called Pentecost-Whitsunday we will celebrate the Holy Spirit descending upon the disciples in Jerusalem, an event marking the Birthday of the Church.

And it is this Holy Spirit that wove through us this morning, as old and young gathered together to tell these stories.  Unsentimental stories they are, for they are about life and death, who we are, who we are meant to be, the stories of mankind.  And we will live in these stories in the months to come.  We will dramatize them, tell them again and again, how God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life…

And as we teach and dance through the seasons of the Church Year with our children, Christ will take root in our hearts in a new and wonderful way, for he sanctifies us as we glorify him.  Just as those balloons would soar we will rise to meet Christ in the Eucharist, but with our feet planted firmly on the earth.  This is the miracle and joy of being a sacramental Christian, that we weave our senses into God’s glory, for this is what God does with us – he weaves his glory into our senses.  Meeting God is not merely “spiritual.”  When we meet God we see our world anew for he is its Creator.  Light is lighter, shadows deeper, colors more intense, aromas and tastes richer, a friend’s touch more tender.  Or as Gerald Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit poet, wrote in 1918,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness…
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Ah!  Bright wings.  Gratia Deo for our children who bring us closer to those bright wings.

Sundays are often a time of reflection upon the week past, and on this Labor Day weekend, the roles of work and worship wove together in my thoughts.  Someone said to me this last week that going to Mass was experiencing the meeting of Heaven and Earth, and nothing less.  If young people understood this, my friend said, if they fully understood the implications of the stupendous action occurring on the altars of the world, they might be more interested in participating in the liturgy, Greek for the work of the people.

In many ways the experience of the Eucharist is that simple and that profound, that exciting and that adventurous.  It is encountering the burning bush of Moses, the cleansing coals of Isaiah, the super-reality of C.S. Lewis in the sharp-bladed grass of The Great Divorce, a reality that T.S. Eliot described in Four Quartets with the words, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  One should approach God’s glory with some fear and trembling, as the Psalmists repeatedly warn, yet in the certainty of God’s boundless love.

American culture has largely sentimentalized worship and in doing so has also removed the exhilaration, satisfaction, and fulfillment that comes from being part of a great celestial and redemptive work.

We are a permissive post-war culture, and we have become addicted to pleasure, as standards of living rise, cushioning our lives and increasing our expectations.  Still we never have enough, always demanding more, sooner, complaining it isn’t enough.  The play ethic has replaced the work ethic, and if we work it is to play more and better.

Gone, or at least unpopular, is commitment.  Commitment to work, spouse, children, parents, grandparents, God, the Church, the Body of Christ. We want to be free to flee, to flit, to hover, to escape, to feel good.  We want immediate gratification, immediate purchase, we want the now, and we will mortgage our children’s future to obtain it.

Gone, or at least marginalized, is belief in the judgment of God, or indeed, our fellow man.  Gone are standards of objective right and wrong.  We are our own gods and we evaluate our own righteousness.  We flee from other arbiters, from imposed morality, from the Church and its moral imperatives.  Another friend commented this last week that he didn’t need to attend church on Sundays since he led a Christian life, meaning, I believe, he was a good person, righteous.  What happened to worship?  to thanksgiving?  to meeting God?  to the intersection of Earth with Heaven?  God wants more than goodness.  He wants us.  He burns with fire for us.  He comes to us and calls us by name.

Gone is the search for truth, for truth might curtail freedom to flee judgment.

Some of us look for the right church “fit,” feeling a lack, a nagging sense of loss, looking for something greater, something numinous.  We church-shop, wanting to feel good now and have our own goodness validated.  We don’t want demands.  We don’t want ten commandments and we don’t want seven deadly sins.  We don’t want to be told not to kill our unborn children or wed our sisters.

We don’t want to meet God in the burning bush where he reveals himself.  We don’t want to be cleansed with fiery coal.  We don’t want to admit our sins and be washed in the blood of the lamb.

And yet, when we do this, when we are washed clean by confession and absolution, when we truly meet God in the Eucharist, we soar into Heaven from Earth.  We sing, as we did this Sunday morning,

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates;
Behold the King of glory waits!
The King of kings is drawing near;
The Saviour of the world is here.

Fling wide the portals of your heart;
Make it a temple, set apart
From earthly use for heav’n’s employ,
Adorned with prayer and love and joy.

Redeemer, come! I open wide
My heart to thee: here, Lord, abide!
Let me thy inner presence feel;
Thy grace and love in me reveal.

So come, my Sov’reign; enter in!
Let new and nobler life begin;
Thy Holy Spirit guide us on,
Until the glorious crown be won.   (Hymn #484, George Weissel, 1642, based on Psalm 24)

The walls of my office are covered with icons and shelves crammed with books.  Jewel-toned images against gold leaf, the icons are figures surrounded by glory, the earthy animated by the heavenly.  We are like them, creatures of two worlds united by body and soul.

Soon, soon, another work of the people, another liturgy, another Mass, will call me to this gilded glory, this work of heaven and earth..

It was a simple melody in a major key and it reminded me of rolling green hills, the smell of earth, grass, growing things, the moment taken to smell a rose.  The words as well were simple and direct, but carried a more serious plea, for they asked God’s help in giving us a conscience quick to feel.

I was also reminded of the Quaker song, written by Elder Joseph Brackett Jr. in 1848:

‘Tis the gift to be simple,
’tis the gift to be free,
’tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
‘Til by turning, turning we come round right.

It is this simplicity I find in Hymn 499, sung to “St. Petersburg” with simple dignity as the note reads at the top of the page.  And the words, like those above, call for a turning: Let the fierce fires which burn and try, Our inmost spirits purify: Consume the ill; purge out the shame; O god, be with us in the flame; A newborn people may we rise, More pure, more true, more nobly wise.

It’s simple stuff, but unpopular today, this talk of sin.  Such talk lowers self-esteem, doesn’t it?  Such talk might make me love myself less?  How can I be assertive, empowered, a true modern woman?  Yet I find it is the admission of wrong turns that places me back on the right path.  It is confession of sin and absolution that produces assertiveness, empowerment. When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.  To grow and change in the right way means to bow and to bend, to come down where we ought to be.

I find in the Mass that I have left the furious and frenetic world behind and entered a simpler and truer reality.  I pass through the narthex into the nave, walking toward the sanctuary, the tabernacle, the throne of God.  The journey is more than my feet padding on the red-carpeted aisle and more than taking a seat in the shiny oak pew, more than kneeling on the padded kneelers.  It is a journey of preparation, both in time and in eternity, with songs sung, prayers petitioned, consciences cleared of the detritus of the week.  I travel through the liturgy, both a simple participant and simple recipient in glory itself, receiving the lessons and sermon into my mind and heart.  With my fellow worshipers I sing Holy Holy Holy, Lord God Almighty and we offer ourselves to God.  Soon, the priest, in the name of Christ, pronounces absolution of our sins.  Now we are ready.  We are ready to enter the Canon of the Mass, the holiest part of the Sacred Liturgy, and we pray Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus… , Lord God of Hosts…..  The bread and wine are consecrated and we join one another to unite today with the past and future, with the saints and angels, with the living and the dead, to become one with God in the Eucharist.

And what is most fascinating to me as a sacramental Christian, is that God cleanses and feeds me, then turns me around once again to go back outside to the furious and frenetic world that he has, after all, created but has indeed made some wrong turns.  But I have been changed.  I am a new creature, reborn, and re-sent, re-turned.  I am far more simple.  I have been touched by God.

There have been numerous books published recently on happiness and how to find it.  We are told we have the right to its pursuit.  How does one pursue it?  And when found, how is it retained?

I believe happiness is being close to God.  Not just any God but  the one true God, the God of Abraham, the God of Peter and Paul and the Apostles, the God of you and me.

And to retain happiness, I must give it away, share it, for God is love.  I must knock down the wall between God and me, the wall created when I sin, when I disobey His law, His will for me.

And what is His will?  I search, seeing clues all around me… Scriptures, the Sacraments of the Church, Prayer, other Christians through whom He speaks.  How do I spend the time given to me?  Do I love enough?  Do I obey His law?

“Love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself,” Christ said to the rich young man.  He says to follow the Ten Commandments: worship the one Lord God, do not worship images, do not swear, keep Sunday holy, honor your parents, do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not covet.

And if I don’t keep these commandments, I will not be happy, I will have separated myself from God.  I was meditating on this separation as I knelt in church this morning.  I knew that as I journeyed into and through the sacred liturgy, I would be washed clean of my sins, and I would once again draw near and be united with God.  I knew I would know happiness.

Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians this morning spoke of the the “sufficiency” of God, that He is enough for each of us.  God teaches us His will, how to love, what is wrong and what is right.  But we must desire to be taught, and we must learn from Him in Scripture, prayer, and liturgy.  If we do this, He will meet us, it will be enough, sufficient, and we will be happy.

Anglican Christians, like Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, are sacramental Christians.  That is, we acknowledge that we are made of matter and spirit, and that God, being our creator, meets us through both matter and spirit.  So we adorn our churches with sensory beauty: flaming candles, stained glass, sculptures, incense.  We incorporate the dance of liturgy and the sounds of harmony and song, hymns solemnly reverent or joyfully triumphant, the organ tender or thundering.  We sing with the choirs of angels and kneel with the communion of saints.  Past, present, and future weave into this tapestry of happy holiness, or perhaps holy happiness, and we taste Heaven.  We see, hear, smell, touch, taste.

We are pulled out of ourselves and into God and His delirious love, as we receive the Eucharist.  And I know, as I look to my week ahead, that I shall have other chances to meet Him, and the choice will be mine, to go to Him or not, to be happy or not.  Much will pull me away, many things will distract me, but He will be there, waiting.

Saint Peter’s Anglican Church, 6013 Lawton Ave., Oakland; Sunday Mass, 8 and 10, Wednesday Mass, 11; www.saintpetersoakland.com

The doctine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven is what Anglicans call a matter of “pious opinion” or “pious belief.”  It is the belief that Mary’s body was raised to Heaven, that she did not die.  Christians believe that we are resurrected, but that we will be given new bodies at the Second Coming and the Last Judgment.

I believe that the Assumption, that is the “assuming into Heaven” or the “falling asleep,” was entirely possible and find it interesting to note that no shrine or church or location in the world claims to possess her relics.

Either way, whether she died a natural death or was bodily raised to Heaven, she has been a miraculous blessing to mankind, having said yes to God in Nazareth all those years ago, having assented to the Father’s will.  In this submission, in this assent, she bore within her body God himself.  It is something I am slowly learning as I age, this assent, this submission, and the resulting glory.

Raised a Presbyterian, I was taught to fear devotion to Mary, that it was superstition.  But, as our good Anglo-Catholic preacher said today, we venerate her, do her honor, as the most important of all saints, as theTheotokos, the God-Bearer. We venerate other saints as well, those who submitted and assented to God’s will in their lives.  But perhaps because of my childhood training, my prayers to Our Lady are not as spontaneous as I would wish, and I confess I have never had the patience to recite a rosary, although I have often tried.  Even so, praying a Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, the announcement Gabriel made to the young girl in Nazareth, reminds me of Mary’s love, guidance, and even power and influence.

I have had the great blessing of visiting many churches, abbeys, and cathedrals in Western Europe and most have a Lady Chapel (as do many churches in the U.S. as well).  I enjoy lighting a candle and saying my Gabriel prayer and talking to her, asking for her guidance and blessing.  I have visited Lourdes in the foothills of the French Pyrenees and the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal in Paris where Mary appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous and Catherine Labouré.  I’ve seen Bernadette’s incorrupt body in Nevers and Catherine’s in Paris.   The shrines are packed with pilgrims of every race and color, age and condition, thousands quietly praying, singing, receiving the Eucharist.

I love the feminine aspect Mary gives our faith.  In the long tradition of her veneration in the Church, her influence has been a positive one on Western culture.  For, as our preacher explained this morning, this veneration of the Virgin led to the ideal of chivalry, to the recognition of women’s roles in Church and society, to the ideals of motherhood, family, and the Christian home.  Mary offers a model for women, and today a most welcome one.

It was a red-and-white church this morning, with the broad swathes of red carpet and brick, and the white tented tabernacle, the white linen on the altar.  We sang happy joyous hymns with many alleluias and saints rising in crescendo into the pitched eaves and the stained glass along the aisles.  The organ sounded and we sang and I glanced at the lovely Madonna and Child to the left of the pulpit, with her soft blue robes, thankful.

I have been writing about Mary Magdalene in my novel-in-progress.  I must not forget the other Mary, the Blessed Virgin, our own dear Mother.  Her Lourdes medal rests under my Magdalene medal, close to my heart, and I pray for her guidance, love, and wisdom.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.  Amen.