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We celebrated our twenty-eighth wedding anniversary yesterday, and as I entered Saint Peter’s Church this morning my eyes were drawn to the purple altar hangings of Pre-Lent, that short three-week season in which we begin the journey of penitential sacrifice in preparation for the great festival of Easter.

Marriage too is largely that journey of love, the giving to another, the sacrifice of time and self.  In the journey, of course, much is received as well, and I often think where the two overlap – in that land of giving – bliss abounds.

As I mention in my recent novel, Inheritance, set in Lent/Easter, the ancient season of Pre-lent refers to the three weeks before Ash Wednesday: Quinquagesima (fifty days before Easter), Sexagesima (sixty days before Easter), and Septuagesima (seventy days before Easter). While Quinquagesima is indeed fifty days before Easter, the latter two names are not accurate, since they actually fall on the fifty-seventh and sixty-fourth days before Easter respectively. The reasoning is unknown, but it is thought these Sundays were linked to Quinquagesima in a general way.  Pre-Lent is a time to consider what I might give up and what I might take on for the forty days of my Lenten discipline, forty days reflecting Christ’s forty days in the wilderness, his time of preparation as well.

And why give something up or take something on?  Such a discipline trains us to love, trains us to say yes to God’s life in us, around us, and for us.   We are spiritual athletes in training.  My usual sacrifice is sweets and meats, and I look forward to Sundays when my Lenten rule doesn’t apply, being a resurrection day of celebration.  My Lenten rule is a real sacrifice for me, difficult and never totally successful, so that it leaves me room to grow.

A particularly wonderful rule I have recently discovered is to memorize something from the Psalms or the Prayer Offices in our Book of Common Prayer.  The Venite, the Te Deum, and the Jubilate Deo (Psalm 100) from Morning Prayer have become a beloved part of my daily prayers, and during Lent I return to the Collect for Lent, “Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made…”  Last year I added the touching and lovely Psalm 139, “Thou has searched me out and known me…”.  I shall return to these now familiar words and this year add something else, not sure what, but I think it might be the first few lines of John, “In the beginning was the Word….”  Mystifying, profound, poetic.  Perfect words for my heart and soul, particularly as I go deeper and deeper into my fifth novel, researching the first century documents of Christianity.

I’ve found that these phrases learned by heart, far from becoming rote, enter me, making my conversation with God more vibrant, more living.  The time and effort are repaid a thousand-fold, texturing and enriching each minute.

Indeed, the love we journey into in Lent, even now in Little Lent, trains and purifies us, but also fills and fulfills us, as we travel into the love of God himself, and meet, as St. Paul says, “the unsearchable riches of Christ.”

Today may be Sexagesima, but it is also Super Bowl Sunday, and well trained athletes compete on a field for a grand prize.  We too run the race, test ourselves, train our hearts and minds.  We train to love, and in the training, are loved by Love itself.

We missed church today.

We missed the incense, the singing, the glorious praise of God.  We missed meeting Christ on the altar.  We missed our family of God, the Body of Christ.

Yet God was with us as we gathered with other family members to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday.  He blessed the day, blessed our gathering, and poured His grace into our time together.

We gathered in the afternoon between storms as multi-gray clouds moved across broad skies under Mount Diablo.  We moved outside to take a family picture on the wet lawn, the green hills rolling behind us.  We laughed as we arranged ourselves, cousins with mothers, sisters with aunts, my mother sitting between her two sisters on chairs in the center.  It will be a picture to remember, a day to revisit.  One day these children will explain to their children who we are, why we are there, why we were gathered under the mountain.

It is these moments of celebration, I thought, that pull our disparate family together from time to time, as though pulled by a magnet to a center where we all admit our connectedness.

Is the family disappearing, I wondered.  Many write that it is, that the family and the Church, the two great pillars of our civilization, are cracked and falling, as though Samson stands ready to pull them down.  Without these institutions the State must step in and rule more forcefully, must decree morality, must, in the end, become tyrannical in its power.  The family and the Church for centuries have counterbalanced government and that balance is now threatened with the fragmentation of the family.

The cracks are apparent in the pillar of family, to be sure.  With the acceptance of birth control, particularly the pill, marriage became divorced from procreation, so that children are no longer intrinsically tied to their biological parents.  The effects of birth control were reinforced by fertility treatments and creation of children in laboratories.  It is a short step from these immense social changes to easy divorce, multi marriages, same-sex parents, indeed to polygamy and to incest, although the latter are still taboo in our society, probably not for long.  These are major cracks in the family, and when conservative folk decry gay marriage, it should be considered there are large issues here, issues affecting the foundations of our democratic culture.

So we gladly gathered together this cold day in January. We planned, cooked, decorated.  Balloons bobbed to the ceilings, tied with crepe streamers and foil, and white roses bunched in tall vases alongside white tapers.  I watched the children play inside and outside, the adults swirl in chattering groups, sharing their lives with one another, their mingling a kind of incense weaving through the rooms of my house.  We nibbled on appetizers, sipped bubbly drinks, took our family photo, lunched from the buffet of chili and crab and salads and sandwiches.  We set out the cake and sang Happy Birthday, my mother wondering what to wish for, having forgotten.

We gathered to testify to time, to family, to the miracle of creation, and God’s Spirit wove through us.  Soon each of us will reach the end of our time-journey, at least on this earth, and others will gather and witness to these moments of passage.  We shall journey on, to the light, to the source of all this mingling and incense, laughter and roses.  We shall journey to Love itself, to God.

Entering a church is, as anthropologist Margaret Visser says, “crossing the threshold.”  We move from the secular to the sacred, yet in some mysterious way, in that space, the sacred redeems the secular.  When we leave, the secular has been infused with the sacred.

Today the Gospel lesson united the two worlds, as sacramental action does, in the water that is turned to wine in the wedding feast at Cana.  Thirty-gallon jars, our preacher said, were full of water for the rite of purification before the feast.  Christ changes that water to wine and in the changing he purifies matter.  Just so, our wine of the Eucharist, becomes his blood.  Like those guests at the wedding, we too know the joy of the feast, the great banquet in Heaven, as the sacred infuses the secular, as the divine penetrates the material world.

The union of the Creator with his creation, this ongoing healing of the world, seemed appropriate for this last Sunday in Epiphanytide, this time of manifestation, of vision, of seeing.  Soon we shall approach Lent with the little season of Pre-Lent.  We shall follow Christ as he journeys through his time on earth, his passion, death and resurrection.

We are in mid-winter, with steely skies and icy breezes.  Mount Diablo was dusted with snow this last week, following torrential rains and winds.  But the days lengthen, nights contract, and a few flowers have appeared in my terra cotta pots.  Time beckons us away from the Christmas crib and the astounding revelation of God come to us.  Time pulls us into another year of weaving our lives with God, another year of healing and transformation, another year of discovering who we are meant to be.

During this Epiphany season I have been pondering the nature of truth, how we know what is true and what is false, what is real and what is fantasy.  Is everything I see and experience simply my own dream world, my fantasy, my wishful thinking?

Clearly we live our lives as though scientific truth exists, or we could not function from day to day. We count on scientific theories about invisible realities, evaluate our experience, and trust our authorities. Just so, in the realm of faith, we count on religious theories about invisible realities, evaluate our experience, trust our authorities.

It’s been raining steadily today, and the olive trees, still leafy and full, sway in the wind as they drink in the water from the heavens.  The old oaks have lost their leaves now, their craggy crooked limbs winding into the steely skies.  The wind rises, turning the rain into a storm riding the green hills of the East Bay.

St. Peter’s Oakland was warm and inviting this morning, as we came in from the windy wet to the red carpeted nave and chancel, the sweet Madonna and Child with its bed of flaming votives to the left of the welcoming pulpit, the careful steps leading to the gray-and-white marble altar, the vast red brick apse, the tall flaming candles honoring the Reserved Sacrament in the tabernacle.  We knelt and gave thanks.

An elderly priest celebrated the Eucharist today, his memory reaching back for each word of the Eucharistic prayers, and as I took part in the ancient liturgy, I thought how ritual helped us with truth, how it ensured the truth was preserved through two thousand years.  Seeming dry and formalized to some, ritual sets boundaries on belief, so that the codifying itself passes on a reliable testimony to what happened in Palestine that first century AD.  Many would try and change the account of who Jesus of Nazareth truly was, but through creed, prayer, and ceremony, the truth was preserved by the believers, the Church, the Body of Christ, year upon year.

Our preacher this morning spoke of the manifestation of Christ in his baptism by John as told in the Gospel lesson today.  Jesus, baptized for and asmankind, allowed all of human nature to participate in His baptism.  We partake individually in Christ in our own baptisms, he said, and now it is our turn to make Him manifest to the world.  For in Christ, we can do all things, as the Epistle tells us today.

The lessons too were part of the ritual, were designated for this Sunday, and in general the preacher preaches on the lessons.  More codifying, discipline, structure.  But in the fifty-two weeks of the year, I know I shall hear all of the major lessons, experience the major epiphanies, the truths, the manifestations of God to Man.  And I am thankful.

I am thankful once again for the Church, the Body of Christ, that has preserved these truths about the Son of God coming among us.  Loving us.  Redeeming us.  Through time two thousand years ago, year by year, to the present, on the altar.

St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Eucharist and Church School, 10 a.m.;
http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/;
http://www.anglicanpck.org/.

I once took piano lessons.  I recall placing my fingers on the white keys, readying myself for the first notes.  Now I place my fingers on the black keys of my keyboard and ready myself for the first letters.   Notes and letters are both signs, symbols that link us, communicate to us, through our hearing, our seeing, our thinking, our feeling.  They are manifestations of something outside ourselves.  They are the tools of art, for they manifest and interpret our world and man’s place in it.

I was thinking this week about truth and what it is and how it is communicated and how one discerns the notes, the letters, the meanings.  History is a compilation of signs, written accounts, oral accounts, often a mystery to be solved.  What actually happened?  Why?  How?  When?

Epiphany is the celebration of Christ’s manifestation to the world, and today, the First Sunday after Epiphany, our Gospel reading was about his manifestation in the Jerusalem temple at age twelve, when he astounded the priests with his wisdom.  Wednesday’s reading, on the actual Festival of Epiphany, told of the Wise Men visiting the Christ Child, bringing him gifts.  They were the scientists of the day, those who studied the universe, the stars, for signs in the heavens.  Heaven reflected earth; the star that appeared in the East was portentous, a sign of a great event.  A king was born.  These magi brought gold for his kingship, frankincense for his Godhead, and myrrh for his burial.  We too honor his royalty and his divinity.  But most of all we are thankful for his death, for his suffering and dying could only occur by taking on our humanity.  God became one of us in human history; he knows the suffering of the flesh; we suffer too in our flesh.  With his resurrection we rise, our own wounds are his.

Epiphanytide includes other manifestations of Christ’s appearance among men: his baptism in the River Jordan by John; the water turned to wine at the wedding in Cana.  The portrait of Christ takes shape as broad strokes reveal him.

Such love to come among us like this.  And not only two thousand years ago in Bethlehem, but today he comes among us as well, suffers with us, heals our wounds.  He lives.

How do we read the signs?  How do we interpret history?  The evidence is plentiful for those who can see, but why do some see and some remain blind?  Why do some hear the music and others remain deaf?  I do not know.  Free will.  The Fall.  The activity of evil in our world, blinding us.

We can only witness to our own lives.  I know that faithfulness brings vision.  Weekly worship and the Eucharist, with all of its marvelous signs and wonders, feeds and strengthens, gives sight and hearing.

Today at St. Peter’s we removed the red poinsettias from the altar. We packed away the crèche figures and the green wreathes and swags.  We have been given Christ in the Festival of Christmas.  Now we must proclaim his signs and wonders in the Festival of Epiphany.

We joined one another afterwards to celebrate two birthdays in our Body of Christ, signs in themselves of life and death, as we mark our passage through time with these happy yearly rituals.  For birthdays are signs of the gift of life and the time given to each of us on this earth.  They are manifestations of the love of God, personal Epiphanies.

As St. Paul writes in the Epistle for today, “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”  Indeed.  We left St. Peter’s transformed, our minds renewed by the many epiphanies of Christ, by the signs of God’s great love.

Valley fog was slipping up the canyon between flanks of green, soon to surround us.  The puffy white mist glistened in the sun and I watched it draw closer, creeping and displacing the colors of the hills with whiteness, dimming the light.  The miracle of weather played out before me, the changing of molecules and temperature, as time slipped too, time moving unstoppable just like the fog.

Today, the tenth day of Christmas 2009, the third of January, 2010.  We enter another year, another decade, and as I stepped into Saint Peter’s Church I felt the presence of time and eternity, as though they collided in this sanctuary. I sensed the greater Church as well – all those worshiping throughout our world, on this good earth, in past, present, and future – as we gathered to offer ourselves to the Baby in Bethlehem, to receive his gift.

For, as our preacher said this morning, the Christ Child is the great gift of Christmas.  God became man that man might become God, participate in the Divine.  God became a child so that we might become children of God.  God gives himself to us so that we might become His children by becoming one with the Babe in the manger.  God acts.  God gives.  We respond.  We receive.

We offer ourselves, this hour, this day, this year, this decade, so that we might partake of eternity with him.  So that time disappears and at yet also, mysteriously becomes more real, more intense, more full of the pulse of life. God gives himself in Bethlehem.  He gives himself on the altar today.

This is the mystery and miracle of Christmas.  This is God with us, incarnate, in us.  Such joy.

St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/;http://www.anglicanpck.org/.

St. Peter’s Anglican Church is a Christmas church.  The center aisle and chancel are carpeted in red.  The altar is white marble.  The apsidal wall is red brick that rises to a peak above the altar.  The side walls are dark wood with stained glass panels.  It is a warm church.

Gone today were the Advent purples; gone the wreath and candles; gone the quiet waiting.  Today we celebrated Christmas!  Red poinsettias banked in a row on the altar, framing the white tented tabernacle.  White roses were arranged at each end of the white draped altar, and candelabra flamed with seven candles on either side.  The altar candles stood tall above, burning brightly.  The crèche on the Epistle side remained, nestled in the greenery, and the Child Jesus lay in the manger.

We were not able to attend Christmas Midnight Eve Mass or the Christmas Day Mass, so as we stepped into the sanctuary today, the blaze of color filled me with a warm thankfulness.  I dropped to my knees, thanking God for this church and the freedom to worship.  I thanked Him for Himself, His coming to us, His revealing, His love.

Our own Christmas Day had been filled with family, aged seven to nearly eighty – gathering around two long tables, sharing turkey and trimmings, pies and chocolate, as we caught up with one another’s lives.  We each brought to the table a year of joys and sorrows, of successes and failures.  I knew many of the private heartaches and many of the public joys – I experienced both in this year of 2009 – and it was good to have a few hours to link hands, tell stories, exchange presents, to encourage, listen, and love.  Somehow in this gathering Christ mingled with us as well, encouraging us, loving us, for it was His birthday we truly celebrated, and we were thankful.

St. Stephen’s Day followed Christmas.  We drove the last guests to the airport and returned to the quiet house, the tree still laden with memories.  Leftovers waited to be heated.  Laundry needed to be done.  Full of voices of loved ones in my head, I moved through the hours, carrying Christmas Day into St. Stephen’s Day, the day we remember the life of the first Christian martyr, the first to pay the price for his belief in the Galilean carpenter.

Today, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, we recalled at St. Peter’s this eloquent writer of the Gospel that opens with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  Our charming Father Hauge climbed slowly to the pulpit and explained that John’s Gospel was meant to be more of a commentary on the other three Gospels, and for this reason John does not include the Nativity story.  John was interested in who this Jesus Christ really was, and his Gospel does indeed portray Christ as God, part of the Trinity, part of the Creation of the world itself, having always lived, outside of time.  It is in John’s words that we find the answers to our more profound questions.  It is in John’s testimony that we clearly see the meaning of the Eucharistic celebration, as it was in the first century of secret house-church ceremonies.  These first Christians believed that the bread did indeed become the Body; the wine did indeed become the Blood.  We receive Christ into ourselves, John explained.

So just as Christ mingled through the rooms of our house on Christmas Day, pulling us together with love, he mingled today in the creatures of bread and wine.  He found his way into our hearts, our minds, our bodies.

I gazed at the bank of red poinsettias, the flaming candles surrounding the white tabernacle.  My eyes rose to the twelfth-century crucifix hanging against the red brick wall.  I received Christ in the Bread and Wine.

And once again, I gave thanks for Christmas!

St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/;http://www.anglicanpck.org/.

Four candles burned warmly above the evergreens wreathed on a stand to the left of the altar, the Gospel side.  On the Epistle side, below the lectern, nestled the nativity scene in a bed of pine cones and fir branches.  There, the shepherds waited with their sheep, Mary and Joseph waited in the manger, and the cows and oxen waited.

We draw close now, closer each day to the miraculous, stupendous, festival of Christmas, when Christ came among us in his great humility, almighty God becoming a baby.  Words cannot say what this means for us, for He is the Word itself.  Let Him speak to our hearts of this incredible mystery, this fathomless love.

During Advent St. Peter’s has slowly layered the story of Christmas with candles, color, crèche.  Even the nave seems to have grown rich with warmth and presence as the weeks have passed.  We do not want to rush this – we want to get it right – for we do not want to miss one second of joy, one minute of memory, one hour of holiness.  We want what God is offering, Himself.

We draw close now.  We watch and wait and listen.

Good Father Pomroy preached about the momentous themes of Advent: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell.  We like to hear about Heaven, not so much death, judgment, and Hell.  Yet, he said, death is inescapable, and, I thought, gives great meaning to life.  Judgment, he explained, is the formalizing of the choices we have made.  When Christ judges us, as He will one day, He sees where we have chosen to go.  And, of course, those choices are clear: Heaven with God or Hell without God.  We face our judgment with a final choice, to be sorry for those times we chose wrong, to accept Christ’s saving acts on the Cross for those moments of darkness.

And our choices define who we are.  As children of God we are grafted onto the Body of Christ, and it is in this Body we discover our true selves.  In fact, as we give ourselves to God, he gives us back a thousand-fold, and we learn who we are meant to be.  He molds and forms us; He sanctifies us.  But we must choose Him, and choose the way of his Body, the Church.

I gazed upon the purple draped altar now being sweetly censed by the celebrant swinging the thurible in circles about the holy table, above and below, around the sides, preparing the space with billowing clouds for the great offering of the Mass.

And with the offering of the Mass, I knew I would once again offer myself.  I would choose this offering, with His help and grace.

We draw close.  We choose to travel to Bethlehem.  And we see our true selves in the Holy Child in the manger.

Merry Christmas!

Deo gratias.

St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/;http://www.anglicanpck.org/.

It was raining steadily when we entered the church, crossing the threshold, moving from the secular to the sacred, from the cold outside to the warm inside.

Today, Rose Sunday, is a Sunday of color and light.  We light the third candle on our Advent wreathe, a rose one, and we move from a penitential mood towards one of rejoicing.  We are closer now to Christmas, to the brighter colors of Christmas.  The altar is still draped in purple, but there have been roses added on either side of the violet tented tabernacle.  We announce to the world the joy of the coming of our Redeemer.

Indeed, the Gospel for today is the passage about John the Baptist when he asks his followers to go to Jesus, ask him who He really is.  Jesus answers the question with the deeds he will do publicly, actions that will proclaim him as the Messiah, will fulfill the prophecies of old.  He will heal the blind, the deaf, the lame, the lepers.  He will preach good news to the poor.  He will proclaim publicly who He is.

And just so we proclaim publicly each Sunday who He is, as we portray the season in song and litany, in prayer and liturgy, in the great actions of the Mass.  Now, in Advent, we act out the coming of God among us, Emmanuel.  We sing together,

Visit then this soul of mine! Pierce the gloom of sin and grief!
Fill me, radiancy divine; Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more thyself display, Shining to the perfect day.

Just so, more and more of God is displayed.

And we proclaim in the secular world too, outside the threshold of the holy, in the many practices of Christmas: the tree of lights and sparkle, holding memory in each ornament; the carols of Christmases past, a liturgy in their own right; the cards we send to friends and family, pulling folks together with love; the presents we give from the heart and perhaps from habit as well.  We might attend a concert, as I was fortunate enough to do this Rose Sunday afternoon, where an assortment of songs and singers gathered around trumpets, piano, guitar, and flute, the space full of warmth and melody, of sharing the joy of music, of anticipation.  We might tell tales of Santa Claus, stories of Saint Nicholas, the giver of gifts to children, who flies through the night on a magical sleigh, with graceful reindeer.  Mystery.  Miracles.  Not far from the truth of Bethlehem.

We wait for His coming in the dark of winter, in the rain and snow, in these shortened days.  We wait for the light, and on this Rose Sunday, as we see glimmers and flashes of the brightness, we begin to rejoice in His nearness.

Our good Father Pomroy preached quietly today, thoughtfully. As we wait, he said, we draw toward Christ, learning more about Him, knowing Him better, understanding the answer to the John’s question.  We ponder these truths of Christmas, of Advent, of the great mystery of the Incarnation.  As our understanding increases, He loves in us, we love in Him, and we know joy.  A joy that transcends time, uniting past, present, and future on the altar.

We wait for and in “the perfect day,” as time collapses into joy in the Bread and the Wine.

St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/;http://www.anglicanpck.org/.

Sun streamed through the stained glass, lighting on the Madonna and Child, splashing the pews, warming the cold winter morning at Saint Peter’s Anglican Church.

The Litany in Procession moved up the red carpeted center aisle – the thurifer swinging the sweet incense into the air, the torchbearers carrying the flaming candles, the crucifer raising the crucifix high over us, the celebrant in his purple cope, the clergy following solemnly.  We sang together, Good Lord, deliver us, and We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord, as the prayers were chanted.  The procession moved around the nave and up the center again to the high altar.  As we prayed for ourselves and the world I sensed the darkness of winter, the waiting for spring, as the dancing patches of sun gave us hope.

In Advent we wait and we pray for our redemption in the manger in Bethlehem, and our redemption when each one of us dies.  We pray for our redemption today, this minute, this hour.  Death to life, dawn to day.

And our Deacon preached on time.  God outside time, giving us the gift of time.  Fascinated by the mystery of time, I thought how when we love, we lose ourselves in another and time disappears.  When we give of ourselves, literally give ourselves away, we lose sense of time as well.  Yet time continues to pass, marked by digital numbers changing silently, by clocks ticking, by bells tolling, by the setting and rising of the sun, night into day.

In Advent we wait in the deepest dark before dawn, the dawn of Bethlehem.  We approach the end of man’s calendar year, yet begin God’s calendar year.  The overlap of time intrigued me, as though our ends overlap our beginnings.  We move through this life and into the next seamlessly, in Christ.

The Child in Bethlehem bridges death and life, night and day.  The Christ Child is our dawn.

St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/