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We walked along the coastal path toward the Beach House restaurant and back, the sun warm and intermittent, burning through the heavy moisture and humidity.  Some rain, and sporadic wind bursts that carry the aromas of sea and flowers, swirling about us, but it is warm and we don’t mind the wet as we watch the skies change again and again.  We have been walking along this bit of coast for nearly thirty years, a shoreline reshaped by hurricanes, houses toppled and swamped, streets re-aligned.   The Beach House was there in the first days, and I recall the hippie-style restaurant with the cats and the questionable sanitation.  It was rebuilt after the big hurricane (eighties?) and recreated into an open airy sunset-facing restaurant.  Clean now, with a broad promontory of grass that juts into the sea.  Excellent grill as always, but the crowd has changed, faster, louder, and there is the sense it has become a tourist stop.  Time passes, nature has her way with this island, and we reach back and touch those moments of our past, amazed.

We returned to sit on our shady balcony and stare at the pounding surf.  Now the sun is out, and we wonder for how long, but the sea is blue green, laid before a swath of grass spread along the curved half moon of Poipu Beach.  Green cabana lounges face the crashing waters.  The sea roars in my ears and, indeed, we hear it sleeping carried through the window on warm breezes, and waking with all our senses open, and I drink the sound in as though it shall restore some balance, somehow wash my being, a baptism of sound.

Kauai seems to me to be the most dramatic of the Hawaian islands.  Here the winds play with the palms, sliding up and down the fingered stems, tossing them in a dance of air and light and moisture, and the sun glances off the fronds where the always-recent rain has polished and quenched them.

The roar of the sea drowns human chatter and busy-ness, as though greater events continue regardless of our witness and participation, regardless probably of our recycling and conservation efforts.  Here on Kauai we humans are smaller and humbler, bits of life surrounded by the powers of weather.  We glimpse briefly in a moment now, then, later, the grandeur, beauty, and indeed, the terror.  This island is a watered island, where rain forests drink from waterfalls tumbling from cliffs, and hurricanes and floodwaters reshape the land, destroy and rebuild.  The island is nature’s huge canvas, a recreation by elemental forces of water, fire, air, and earth.  Dramatic with giant players, intense colors, rushing movement, the creation of the world again and again.

Here man’s building man has been slow, often thwarted by these forces, and the villages of Kauai reflect these fits and starts.  The crossroads of towns still revolve around the general store, post office, churches and schools.  Shopping centers and hotels rise and fall with the economy, and are appreciated as job providers, catering to the tourists who come to escape their cities, their mainland mania of desire and speed.  Escape they do, for the humidity, the floral air, the sweet sea, the majestic palms dancing in the skies, all work their magic.  Folks sit and stare from lounge chairs, from black lava outcrops, from towels in the sand.  They stare at the tremendous waters rising and swelling as far as the eye can see, out to the slim curving horizon, the whitecaps pushed by the wind, the surf crashing and spilling its foam on the black fingers of reef and rock that stretch from the edges of the cove.  As they stare, holding a bestseller open to the first pages, the roar of the sea slides into them, and they nod slightly, drifting off for a moment of surprising escape.  They have become one with the canvas of greens and blues, of surf soundings, of aromas of hibiscus and plumeria, and a part of a greater life.  They become renewed.

A line from Psalm 95 said in the Office of Daily Morning Prayer (TheVenite) rings in my ears again and again here in this land of sea, sky, earth, air:  The sea is his and he made it and his hands prepared the dry land, O come let us worship and fall down and kneel before the Lord our maker… 

Deo Gratia

They had forecasted rain but our green earth was covered in a dome of startling blue.  It was that piercing blue that winter moisture seems to bring, an indescribable clarity, the haze stripped away.   So as we headed for San Francisco to visit our sister parish of Saint Thomas’ I felt especially blessed, driving up the curved span of Bay Bridge into the sky, descending to the idyllic city, watching the skyline of spires stretched along the water’s edge crystallize in my vision.

Saint Thomas’ church is the size of a Romanesque chapel with white walls, green marble tiles covering the floor, a gentle dome over a slab stone altar and French tabernacle.  The acoustics are remarkable, the choir talented, the organist superb.  Indeed, I believe they have become known for their music.  Through skylights the sun shafts upon the sanctuary brightening the whites and in this light space we sang hymns about the saints, for it is All Hallows Eve, or as is commonly known, Halloween.

For Halloween derives from the vigil of All Saints, the great feast that we celebrate tomorrow, the festival of saints, past, present, and future, joined in time.  In pagan cultures, October 31 represented the end of the summer harvest and, with the coming of long nights and short days many believed the spirits of their dead roamed the earth this night.  They left food out for them and lit bonfires to scare them away.  With the rise of Christianity and the promise of heaven, they were no longer afraid of such ghosts.  As the Church did with many other festivals throughout the year, it baptized the pagan with the Christian by making the following day a celebration of all saints, and the day after that, November 2, a celebration of all souls.  It is thought that trick-or-treating evolved from the poor walking from house to house asking for food, carrying a candle in a hollowed-out turnip to light the way.  One can see how costumes were part of the old idea of scaring the ghosts away.

We sang For all the Saints… and the lovely children’s hymn, I sing a song of the saints of God… and Archbishop Provence, standing thoughtfully in the center of the aisle, spoke to us about the costumes we wear to hide our true selves.  Since that fall from grace in Eden, we desire to be what we are not, to hide behind what we think we want to be, should be, are told to be by our culture.  In our confusion, we wear our masks and Christ peels them away, layer by layer, until we truly know ourselves in his love.  How does he do this?  Through the Church, through the sacraments.  Through baptism which grafts us onto his body, the Body of Christ, the Church.  Through confession of sin, the many falling-aways from the rule of love, the rule of God, in the days, hours, minutes, and seconds of our lives, and God’s forgiveness. Through the Eucharist, where we unite with Christ and are nourished in body and soul.

Who are we?  Who am I?  It is a question we ask from the moment of birth, and as we journey through our span of time we struggle to make sense of our world, our lives. With the coming of Christ, we begin to learn the answer.  We are made in the image of God.  But our wrong turns take us away from him, and as we distance ourselves we hide his image within us.  We cover ourselves and try to become something we are not.  Just like Adam.  Just like Eve.

I have found as I move from Sunday Mass to Sunday Mass with occasional weekday ones as well, that the sacred liturgy pulls me into a kind of clarity, a self-knowledge, as though meeting Christ in the Bread and Wine shows me more of who I am meant to be.  It is a delirious feeling, to be loved like that.  So I return again and again, meeting him in this way.  No costume, no mask, just me.  And I pray, thank you, Lord, and thy will be done.  And I begin my list of intercessions for those I love and those I have trouble loving.

Certainly the saints know themselves in this way.  For they are men and women filled with God, and his love runs through them, pouring out to others.  For, as our preacher said this morning, we cannot love God without loving man first.

We left Saint Thomas’ and stepped into the crisp mid-day, the dome of blue arching in its stunning clarity, and I gave thanks for a glimpse of who I am meant to be.  Someday, in heaven, I will be that person.  In the meantime, I give thanks for the saints, and for All Hallows Eve, a reminder of who we are not meant to be, a reminder to peel away our masks, to know God, and thus to know ourselves, to become sanctus, holy.

And tomorrow I shall go to Mass to celebrate the great Festival of All Saints.

The temperatures dropped last night here in the Bay Area, and our Indian summer turned abruptly to a rainy autumn.  The trees and foliage, still full-leafed, are quenching their thirst, open to the skies in thanksgiving.  Soon our golden hills will be rolling greens.

In the Church Year we are still in the Trinity Season, marked by the color green in vestments and altar linens.  The seasons change and time passes.  Each of us ages another day, another month, another year.  What is our accounting?  What have I done right?  What have I done wrong?  How can I make my paths straight?  Or at least straighter?

Saint Peter’s Anglican Church felt warm this morning, a womb-like sanctuary, safe from the cold and wet outside.  The altar was alight with the flames of tall tapers, the tabernacle draped in a soft green, the celebrant in his chasuble of green.  As I watched and waited and said the prayers of the Divine Liturgy with my fellow Christians, my family of God, glimpses of the week past came to mind, sudden, unbidden, like glimmering stained glass.  Our visit to Boulder and my son and his lovely wife sitting in camp chairs on the field of green, the children running its length chasing the black-and-white ball, fast as the wind, flying.  The Rocky Mountains rising from the field to the west, the broad plain stretching out forever to the east.  The crystal blue of the dome of sky.  Sunday worship together in the Presbyterian Church, sitting in the polished pew, praying and singing.  The drive into the bleak scorched forests, the black sooty trunks screeching, mourning, one house standing, another gone, the random jumping of the holocaust. Hiking in to Gold Lake where my son was married thirteen years ago, now returning with his children, with his family.  So I gave thanks here in Saint Peter’s, as I watched our priest move about the altar, the altar where my son once served as acolyte in his greener years.

Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (5:15+) was lovely, full of color and song, “See then that ye walk…as wise, redeeming the time…singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord…” but the Gospel was full of “hard sayings,” those words of Christ that we don’t want to hear, this one taking the shape of a parable.  In this story (Matthew 22:1+) Christ describes how a king prepared a wedding feast for his son and how, when the invitations were turned down, the king sent his servants to gather folks from anywhere and everywhere.  The story portrays an angry king, one who destroys and replaces, one who, at the end of the story, casts out a guest for not honoring the occasion with a proper garment.

We do not want to hear of a God of justice, of moral imperative, of rules and regulations, and certainly not of a God demanding honor and respect.  And yet, this is the Judeo-Christian God.  While loving and healing and redeeming, he also keeps track, just as any parent would do with their children.  For love entails just that, keeping track, keeping us on the right track.  Love involves justice.

Time passes.  Am I redeeming it?  Can I account for it?

Of course the wedding feast for the son is the Eucharist.  God the king provides this feast of his son, the Christ, and I am invited.  What is my response?

The celebrant raised the host.  “Behold the lamb of God, behold him that takes away the sins of the world.”  Indeed, I would come to the feast and be healed.  I would redeem the time.  In so doing I would know how to redeem the hours of the week ahead.  For God is just and God is good.  He loves us.  He redeems us over and over again, showing us the path, the way we are to go.

(I would also wear garments that would honor him.)

We stood for the final blessing, preparing to leave the warm sanctuary and enter the drizzly world.  We opened our hymnals and sang, making melody in our hearts to the Lord.  Indeed, we would redeem the time.

I have recalled again and again this last month the old adage, “Ninety percent of success is just showing up,” or something to that effect.  Faithfulness.  Doing what must be done.  Doing one’s duty.

We modern folk are impatient.  We want results. With decreasing attention spans, we want immediate gratification, immediate connection, immediate response.  I love my email and the many gadgets that allow me to stay in touch with friends and family.  But studies recently are questioning the habits those instant connections foster.  The habit of the now.

Faithfulness.  Duty.  Submission to authority.  Not popular concepts in an age of me, of self.

Athletes understand these things, as they train and discipline their bodies. What we seem to be losing as a culture is the training of the will, of the mind, of the heart.

Saint Peter’s was warm on this cold and rainy Sunday morning.  I checked on the children in the Sunday School and all was well. The Primaries and Juniors were making saints costumes involving a good deal of glitter.  The babies in the nursery were watched and waited on and loved.  I returned to the warm red-carpeted nave and knelt before the tabernacle tented in Trinity green, the altar aflame with tall tapers.  I considered my week, rooting out my sins.

A tragedy struck a friend of mine this week.  Her daughter’s newborn was admitted to hospital for neurosurgery.  I began my prayers as soon as I heard, and emailed friends to pray.  I prayed for the parents, the grandparents, all those involved in the care of this tiny life. We wait and we pray.  We love.  And we trust God that, no matter the outcome, he will pull his grace from the material of our suffering.

For this, I knew, is what he does. Adam and Eve initiated sickness and death with their rebellion in Eden.  They allowed evil into our world.  But God wins in the end.  So I watch and wait and pray with every ounce of my being.

The Epistle today (Ephesians 6:10+) was that wonderful passage about putting on the armor of God to withstand evil.  To prepare for these tragedies of life, this battle with sickness and death, we must train, we must show up, we must be faithful.  Saint Paul lists those pieces of armor necessary to our training: truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, Scripture, watching with perseverance and supplication to the saints.  In this way, Paul insists, we make known the mystery of the Gospel of Christ, the good news of life.

It’s not always easy or exciting to be faithful, faithful to those around us, faithful to God.  But the rewards, the graces poured upon us, are infinite.  At times in the last weeks this juxtaposition of steady going and delirious happiness has made me dizzy with joy.  I recall those moments as I pray for this infant and his family, pulling them into the love of God.

This morning, the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity, I knelt before the tabernacle housing the Real Presence of Christ and quietly, faithfully, said my prayers.

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.