Tag Archives: Christ

Wonderful Words

Posted on January 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

birdIt’s been a week of words, words, words, and more words. 

Some words were heated such as those between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz in the Republican debates. Some words were measured and thoughtful, such as those of Mr. Carson and earlier Ms. Fiorina in those same debates on Thursday. If words had trajectories, the former words were missiles launched; the latter words were birds circling and weaving.

I’ve been thinking about words and their power, particularly this last week of Epiphanytide when the Church celebrates the Word made incarnate in Bethlehem, Christ manifested to us, the world, the Word alight in the darkness. 

Words continue to light the dark, to beam bright epiphanies into despair and loss and confusion. Words comfort and heal and explain and judge. They forgive. They love.

The Bible is called the Word of God, and I’m glad the Gideons still supply hotels with free copies in nightstand drawers. The Gideons, a society of Christian businessman formed in 1899, has distributed over two billion copies of the Bible in two hundred countries in one hundred languages, today printing eighty million copies a year. Lately I’ve noticed the Bibles sitting alongside the Book of Mormon and sometimes the Teaching of Buddha. I wondered about the rarity of the Koran in these rooms but understand there is a concern about disrespect. One imam said that Muslims don’t need a copy of the Koran for they have memorized the first chapter, prayed five times a day.

It is good there are other faiths represented in these nightstands. Inclusivity protects the Bibles from the charge of exclusivity when guests complain of religion in their room. Americans are a freedom-loving people. We believe in freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and conscience. It is why we debate conscientious issues before choosing our president. It is why we fearlessly use heated words, or words launched like missiles across a stage toward our opponent, missiles targeting other words.

I enjoy the politically incorrect Republican debates. They show that America still has a pulse, her arteries are flowing, her heart beating, in her celebration of free expression. Some pundits have complained there are too many candidates in the field, but I laud the number. Let us encourage this multi-faceted discussion and be proud of the raucous, boisterous conversation. Let us appreciate the talented and articulate candidates who give of their time, talent, and treasure, of varying gender and generation, race and ethnicity. This is America at its best. This is how we elect our governors.

And we use words, words, words. Let them fly through the air, circle and weave, and come home to roost in our hearts and minds. Let the words win and lose, as they become forged in debate, fired by truth.

Lots of words. I’ve been sorting our late bishop’s words, his sermons, scrutinizing the yellow lined pages, the brown parched sheets, scraps from hotel stationery scrawled with words, handwritten, prescient ideas pressed onto paper, words written in the purple ink the bishop favored. Staples or  clips join some pages, linking sermons back to 1951, his year of ordination to the priesthood. I’ve come to see an order in the pages, and the words, how they fall naturally into Church Year seasons and feast days within those seasons. There are also speeches given at dedications, ordinations, baptisms, synods, pilgrimages, retreats, and funerals. Dates, places, and occasions are recorded in the pale pencil script of his loving wife. 

Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of words. “He was a mystic,” a friend said recently. But then, all sacramental Christians are mystical by definition, for we believe in the mystical and mysterious action of the Holy Spirit among us in this hard world of matter. We believe in the mystical change in the bread and wine as the Word once again becomes flesh and dwells not only among us but within us in the Eucharist. We believe in the Spirit mystically flowing through the waters of Baptism and the oils of Unction and the words of absolution given by a priest to a penitent in Confession. The Spirit mystically weaves into the vows of bride and groom as they say committing words before a priest who, in the name of the Body of Christ, blesses their marriage, and the Spirit works mystically through the hands of a bishop in Ordination and Confirmation. 

As I study our bishop’s words, his purple script on yellow paper, I pray that God will enter my mind and heart and speak to me just as he entered my bishop’s mind and heart and spoke to him, that I might share these words bridging heaven and earth, spirit and flesh. One day, God willing, the words will flow onto pages bound into a book to be held and read, words that will instill the greater Word.

This last week, before the political words and the sorting of the words on the yellow lined pages, I sent off my review of Michael D. O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem to CatholicFiction.net. In this end-times novel, Bishop Elijah confronts the Antichrist in Jerusalem. Like his namesake, the Prophet Elijah, Bishop Elijah listens for the still small voice of God. I too am listening for it, hoping to hear those huge words spoken by the little voice, whispering in the stillness of heart and soul. I often observed my bishop listening, listening to all of us with our many words and opinions, hopes and fears, but also listening to something else, someone else, trying to catch the quiet voice that wove among us as well. 

With the many threats at home and abroad, threats to freedom and faith, to liberty and law, let us celebrate free and faithful words, expressions of who we are and who we are meant to be, as Americans, as believers in God who became the Word made flesh.

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All the Difference

Posted on January 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

star of bethlehem.jpgThomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution recently wrote about political lies of the last few years: 

“Lies are a wall between us and reality… Reality does not disappear because we don’t see it. It just hits us like a ton of bricks when we least expect it.”

Lies encourage us to deny reality, to “put our heads in the sand” and thus are dangerous. To say the Benghazi terrorist attacks (2012) were a demonstration over an inflammatory video, is a lie told to calm fear. But it invites complacency and so emboldens terrorists, both domestic and international. We have mourned lives lost in subsequent attacks because of this lie. This lie ensured the election of the current president, and a wall rose between our national defense and reality. 

And so too, as individuals, we might choose to believe lies for reasons of comfort. But such lies are dangerous as well, inviting greater suffering and confusion when reality “hits like a ton of bricks.” 

Reality has a way of eventually hitting us, and so too, belief in God and the claims of Christ are worthy of examination as to their truth, their reality. “What difference does it make?” many say, imbibing the lie of our culture that all beliefs are equal, all faiths equally true. While all believers are worthy of respect, how can all faiths be equally true, when one denies the claims of another? Alas, it makes a great deal of difference what a person believes. Living a true life means seeking the truth, embracing reality, sorting fact from fiction and avoiding the ton of bricks. One of the greatest lies of our age is that there is no truth. The truth exists apart from us, whether or not we can grasp it at any particular moment. 

I have long suspected the lie of “closure” in regards to mourning. Stephen J. Forman, a cancer doctor, writes in the Wall Street Journal “how the loss of a loved one is a part of each person’s life forever…. the reality is that closure is a myth.” Grief changes over time, but grief is woven into the weave of our souls, giving us greater compassion, understanding, and empathy. It makes us “wise” or “deep” or simply “good.” Suffering and grief helps us see. To remember at sudden moments, even with tears, those whom we have lost is a good thing, not one to be suppressed: 

“The danger of the idea of closure is that it heightens aloneness, by giving us a false expectation that these experiences should and will at some point end. They won’t… To deny (memories) is to deny precious moments of love, fellowship, gratitude and inspiration… To close the memory does not sustain the healing or help in proceeding with life. Such echoes from the past are voices in the present and are sometimes warmly felt.” 

This can be said of nations as well. To close echoes from the past is to deny who we are, forged by the past in this moment in time. To live only in the present is to force closure on the past, to live a lie, to disavow our nature. Our history is our life story, our identity as Americans. It is a cloak we cannot afford to shed, one our nation must wear in order to survive. 

To find closure after terrorism may for a time ease our national life. We pretend it didn’t happen and we carry on. But it is a lie to say it makes no difference. Of course it makes a difference. Those who died for our country must remind us continually what is real, what is true and what is false in our national narrative, how we face our future and defend our freedoms. 

Children long for boundaries. They beg for limits so that they can see the truth about their world, what is good and what is bad. Good parenting sets limits and teaches the truth, the reality, of forbidden territory. In this way they become responsible adults, for they have learned what is real. They can search for truth and face it. 

And so as we worshiped in church this morning on this First Sunday after Epiphany I gazed at our bishop’s chair, empty. He left us for Heaven, and now, seven months after his parting, his wife has joined him. As I looked upon the chair, I was gifted with a flashing memory of the bishop and his wife, as I knelt on the russet tiles, in the filtered light streaming from clerestory windows, in the singing together the Creed, the Gloria, the Our Father. The bishop and his wife were epiphanies that graced my life and I knew that they would continue to grace my life through the opening of my memory, the refusal of memory’s closure. Their lives were woven into mine, as mine was into theirs, through love, through the grace of God. I consider those memories, even in the depths of loss, to be precious piercings of my heart. These epiphanies, these openings, reweave my heart and soul, adding to the texture. I do not desire or need closure. 

In the Church, the Feast of Epiphany celebrates the coming of the Wise Men from the East who brought the Christ Child gifts. Epiphany means manifestation, the revealing of God in human form in Jesus in Bethlehem. With Epiphany, Christ is now manifested to the world, not just to Israel, not just to God’s chosen ones. The Wise Men follow a star so that the heavens as well take part in this epiphany, this revealing of God. They follow the star to a stable, a hillside cave. The universe shines a beam of light onto a newborn baby in the hay. The Magi, scientists of their time who studied the heavens, kneel before this child. They bring him gold for his kingship, frankincense for his divinity, and myrrh for his burial. After this epiphany in their lives, they will never be the same. 

And we will never be the same. Like the Magi, we kneel before Our Lord in our local church. We gather before his tabernacle, his stable, just as the Magi did two thousand years ago. We pray that we be made worthy to receive him through confession and absolution. As we pray, we are changed by the prayer itself, for we enter moments of epiphany, dwelling in time woven with eternity, knowing that God himself is with us and within us. 

To kneel before the manger or before the altar, experiencing such love, and to say it didn’t happen is to deny reality. It is to lie about the greatest truth of all, the greatest reality of all, God dwelling among us. For if God loves us and lives among us and within us, it makes all the difference to our own lives, and to all the world. We can now look truth in the face, even search for it boldly, knowing that we will be wiser, like the Magi on that holy night two thousand years ago. Our lives will never be about closure, but about opening. We will travel, epiphany by epiphany, into the open heart of God.

 

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A Light in Time

Posted on December 27, 2015 | Leave a comment

Advent St. JIt is a season of renewal, a time when we review the old year and make resolutions for the new one. We judge our time, our spending of time, our use or abuse of the year 2015. Each year is a gift. It is a unique segment of our lives, a year we cannot retrieve and a year that will never be repeated. We are given only one chance with our lives, only one chance with the time given.

And so we look back and consider what habits to discard and what to keep, what to repent and what to repeat, what to affirm and what to deny. Sometimes confusion reigns even in hindsight, and the better path not obvious even from this vista point, perched as we are on the cliff at the end of the year, getting ready to jump into 2016, a new segment of time granted to us, this new year. 

“She had the time of her life.” We say this to emphasize a moment of great exuberance and joy, a peak time amidst the other valleys. But all time is of our lives. All time is holy.

As I look back on my year, I do indeed see confusion and chaos. A good friend and mentor left our earthly time and entered eternity, leaving us behind. Another friend is getting ready to leave, in hospice care. Her bags are nearly packed and she is peacefully waiting the chariot.

In the past year there have been many risings to occasions and putting best feet forward and keeping stiff upper lips. There have been duties and responsibilities not always heartfelt, actions ordered by God’s law of love. There have been dark times in shadowy valleys where answers could not be seen, where the fork in the road had no signpost, or the sign had been lost, thrown into the bushes.

And yet looking back at 2015 I also see clarity and order. My good friend and mentor in Heaven left me many gifts that live on bridging our separation, gifts of wisdom and love, ways to see and believe, the necessity of humility and its fruit, repentance. My friend waiting for her journey to Heaven continues to gift me in her last days, but I can see clearly now that her friendship itself was given to me to make sense of my own time.

The risings to occasions, the duties and responsibilities not eagerly engaged, rewove my own heart to be of stronger stuff, not so easily thwarted by dismay and danger, informing my soul again with God’s law of love. The dark times through the journey of 2015 led me to the altar of my local church, pushing me to my knees in penitence and prayer, and when I re-entered the world I found myself on the top of a mountain of light with a clear view of the surrounding countryside.

We do indeed live behind the veil of eternity. Some of us glimpse the brilliant color and catch the fragrance and sensory delight on the other side. Some of us hear the music, the choirs of angels and the songs of the saints. Some of us don’t know how to lift the curtain or even believe that it can be lifted or that it is there at all, thinking this world is all there is.

And so as I stepped through the dark days of Advent, those short wintry days, I watched and I prayed and I worshiped God in his Church, calling for Christ’s coming, singing with his people. Slowly, a light shined in the darkness, revealing my place in the world, my place in my moment of time. I observed the rituals and rites of Christmas with their sacramental signs, knowing they would lead me to the light to see again.

I garlanded the evergreen in our bowed window and strung twinkling lights through the branches. Ornaments from the years of my life were resurrected from tissue nests in boxes, where they had lived since last Christmas. The figurines and balls and tassels hanging from bits of wire released memories from the prison of my mind, giving them air, and a stained-glass gathering of family and children and loved ones crowded happily with one another in my heart.

In the days before Christmas – after the parish pageant on Advent IV – I set up our large crèche figures on the hearth and dangled a golden star from the mantel. Fresh white candles found holders in all the rooms so that I would not forget the great light coming soon to the world to banish the dark, the darkness of winter, the darkness of my soul.

So the confusion of life, after all, I learned once again, can be cleared. There is a way to lighten the darkness, as described by St. John whose feast we celebrate today:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not… That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

John 1+, Gospel reading for Christmas Day

And in one of John’s letters to an early church:

“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”             I John 1+

And so, as my good friend in Heaven taught me, one must walk in the light – that is, penitently – in order to see in the darkness. He also gave me the gift of the Church, the Body of Christ, that leads me to the light. For only by entering the doors of Christ’s Body can we experience clarity amidst confusion. Only by walking up the aisle to kneel at the altar can we know the love of God and his forgiveness. Only by observing our time, each day, hour, minute, within the seasons of the life of the Church, can we find our way forward into the New Year that awaits each of us.

I look back upon 2015 and see a map of love through time. I want to follow that path that journeys with Love incarnate. I look forward to 2016, every minute, every hour, every step of the way, lit by the light and love of Christmas, Emmanuel, God with us.

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All Hallows

Posted on November 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

all saintsHallowe’en comes from the contraction of All Hallows Eve. To hallow is to make holy, and October 31 was (and is) the eve before All Hallows Day, or the All the Holy Ones Day, All Saints, honoring Christian saints. The celebration is followed by Allhallowstide, in which all of the Christian dead are remembered. This coming week churches all over world will remember their dead, their loved ones, calling out their names on All Souls Day and, in this ceremony of love, hallowing them. The evening before, Halloween, sees the last of the unfriendly spirits roaming the night, for they are vanquished by the light of Christ in the morning, and fear is vanquished by joy.

Sometimes fear is good. It is an intuitive instinct that signals danger. Gavin de Becker, an expert who evaluates potential threats to famous people, titled his invaluable book on safety, The Gift of Fear. And in this sense, fear is a gift, a survival signal, a warning that lights the dark.

Children are afraid of the dark. And we should be too. Novelist Jake Halpern writes in the Wall Street Journal about fear of the dark:

“Since the dawn of man, night has been a time when we were in danger, when we were vulnerable – to lions, club-toting men and giant chasms into which we could fall… it was evolutionarily advantageous for us to be afraid of the dark. Those of us who feared the night and cowered from its dangers, survived. Those who went for strolls in the dark ended up as snacks for lions.”

Today with electric light we laugh such fears away. Yet we are ambivalent about fear itself, sometimes denying it, sometimes welcoming it. We flirt with it, tease it, to see what happens when it draws near, for we have banished most survival fears from long ago such as hunger, shelter, wild animals. We are curious, enticed by darkness.

A friend of mine once claimed that she liked the feeling of fear, of being on the edge of danger, secondhand fear experienced in a book or movie. There are many words for this feeling of excitement. We shudder and shiver, chilled to the bone. A frisson gives us goosebumps. A ghost walks over our grave. We are on the edge of our seats, waiting to be safe again. What is the lure? Why flirt with the dark, with falling into the abyss? Are we rehearsing our future? Our death?

Halloween has in many ways become a rehearsal as well, as children (and adults) don costumes and pretend to be someone or something else and venture into the dark. For some the choice is innocent role playing, choosing to be princes and princesses, musicians or athletes. Still, others choose to be witches and goblins. Some choose the light and some the dark. Some choose life and some choose death: skeletons, ghosts, and grim reapers, desiring to scare.

Our nation too seems on the edge of darkness, in the dusk of its day, playing dangerous games with life and death, slaughtering generations of unborn innocents. We survivors look away, pass on the other side of the road, just as we do in the world theater of wars and rumors of wars, withdrawing and allowing the dark to swallow the light, whether in Moscow or Tehran or the borderlands of the West.

Light and darkness, life and death. The line between them is not often clear, sometimes smudged into dusk and dawn. And so it is in our hearts, where good sheds light and evil darkens.

And so I’m grateful that the dark of All Hallows’ Eve is banished by the light of All Hallows’ Day and the light of Sunday resurrection. This morning I gazed upon six thick white candles on the stone altar of St. Joseph’s Chapel near U.C. Berkeley. The candles flamed brightly, the fiery wicks drinking in the air above, flickering their tips toward heaven. A roughly carved crucifix rose above the tabernacle, beyond the suspended Sanctus light. We stood and turned toward the entry as five student acolytes processed in, carrying torches and crucifix, followed by the white-robed clergy. The organ bellowed through the vaulted domed space and echoed over the russet-tiled floor as we joined in songs of praise to God for his saints.

Halloween would not exist if it were not for All Saints, the holy-day that gives the costumed evening its name. After the night of darkness, a weak sun broke through this morning and bathed our world in light. We sang as one people, giving thanks for those men and women who chose the light and turned away from the dark. Martyred for their choice, and today still being martyred, we honor them. History has known a world without Christ, a world of impenetrable darkness, one rightly feared. We peer through the dusk of our days, keeping our candles lit, sharing the love of God, the light of Christ, looking to the morning of resurrection.

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Birthday Pilgrimage

Posted on July 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

Path to S_ Baume-provence2010In 1947 in the July heat of the Fresno valley I took my first breaths, released from my mother’s watery womb, having been created in the heart of God. Being the firstborn, my parents named me traditionally after my great-grandmothers, Christine (Norwegian) and Gertrude (French-Irish). 

We didn’t have much, but we lived in an America that honored family, faith, and hard work. We were rich in all three. 

Two years before my birth, my father, William Carl Thomas, discharged from the Navy as a chaplain on the USS Phoenix in World War II, had married my mother, Helen Martha Martin, in a church near her home in Inglewood, Los Angeles. They didn’t have photos taken, so they dressed up later for a picture in a garden. That was 1945. 

My journeys in time through my sixty-eight years have known everyday miracles, full of twists and turns, ups and downs, rarely along the road I had chosen, but, by grace, pulled along a better one. As I look back it seems I traveled many paths that wove in and out of one another, forming a cloth of many colors. 

My body traveled with me, naturally, housing my soul, growing, aging in sickness and in health, knowing the pains and pleasures of each day granted. My flesh has changed on this journey as cells have rearranged. Its waywardness has been partially tamed through habit and inconsistent discipline, exercise and diet. Hopefully, my body has grown to know its proper place in my life, subject to my soul and not its dictator. But the two don’t always agree on this; it is a work in progress, a journey ongoing. 

My soul traveled through these years, discovering the rich fullness of Christ at twenty and beginning that bright pilgrimage to God in God, as St. Benedict said. I traveled into the Eucharist, uniquely encountering Christ, and I traveled into his Body, the Church, learning to love and forgive, and most blessedly, being loved and forgiven in return.   

My soul learned in its journey how to wash itself clean with confession. All that I have done wrong and all that I have left undone can thus be seen in the light of Christ, purged by my penitence, my re-penting, changing. Such washing grants me the joy of waking each morning with a clean heart and soul, one open and honest and loving and unafraid. This is Christ’s healing tonic, forgiveness through his Church, His Body. And in this way we set out on the right path, at least for that day. 

I traveled as well into my own little gifts, such as they were and are, that grew tentatively, surprising me like green shoots sprouting from the earth, as experience sculpted memory, hopes, and fears. A student of history, I’ve learned how little I know, and it is humbling. But I’ve grown to know the face of freedom, its nature and its challenges, when it is threatened, and when it is nourished. I can recognize freedom’s enemies, hidden or disguised as friends. I am beginning to understand the difference between liberty and license. 

I also traveled in and through words on the printed page, blessed to grow up surrounded by books and book lovers. We poured over encyclopedias and dictionaries to answer our questions. We carried home stacks from the library. We listened to stories read aloud at bedtime, that borderland between listening and dreaming, wakefulness and sleep, when the heart and mind are open to the imagination and words are savored. This was our entertainment in an age when TV was limited, even (in our home) suspect. But reading aloud made language sing and dance. Meghan Cox Gurdon writes: “To curl up with children and a good book has long been one of the great civilizing practices of domestic life, an almost magical means of cultivating warm fellow feeling…and a common cultural understanding.” Today more than ever reading aloud together is an antidote to reading screens alone. We thus personalize our shared stories, joining the generations and renewing our culture. 

I traveled with others along the way, gathering together, working together, healing and helping: brothers and sisters in the Church, family and friends now scattered. These many and varied people of God are so unique that their differences complement rather than copy one another, forming an infinite rainbow, an eternal spectrum of type and color. There were mothers who mothered and fathers who shepherded. These many stars in a firmament of folks twinkled their way into my heart, lighting my path. I shall see them again one day when we gather at the river that runs by the throne of God. 

I’m still traveling through my time, glad and thankful that my destination is clear, the pathway well marked. I need merely read the signposts found in the forest of sacrament, scripture, and prayer. I began in the mind of God, swam in my mother’s watery womb, breathed my first air in a farming town called Fresno. As I begin my sixty-ninth year, I watch and listen, waiting for the words to see and hear, praying without ceasing, thy will be done within my free will, so that I choose the right path, home to God.  

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Summer Sundays

Posted on July 5, 2015 | 3 comments

Sunday SchoolOur children’s Summer Sundays program in our local parish this year, “I Believe,” revolves around the Apostles’ Creed and the Church Year, those “tides” or seasons that teach us the creeds. We sing “Advent Tells Us Christ is Near,” we read a story about the creed, we plant sunflowers in bright pails, we blow big balloons, we color and we craft. We make fridge magnets with the verses of our hymn to take home. 

As we dropped seeds into the dark soil, pushing each one deeper into its loamy home, to one day shoot into the bright light and flower, I thought about belief and faith and the Apostles’ Creed, our statement of belief. Would these children be allowed to practice their beliefs? Would the state intervene and silence them, force them underground? 

american-flag-2a2Some say believers are already underground, for belief in Christianity is not fashionable, even considered radical and strange. We are called bigots, narrow minded, living in a fantasyland, stuck in the past. And yet, for many of us, there is ample historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ and his divinity and the authority of Holy Scripture. We have known the Almighty God through prayer and met him in the Eucharist. We have seen his Holy Spirit working through others, nudging and guiding. We have opened our hearts and experienced the glory of God’s grace. These are no small things. This is good news, worthy to be published and proclaimed and protected, news to give hope to our world, news to tell our children, unafraid, with thanksgiving. This good news, gospel, deserves proclamation – and defense – in the public square. 

And yet such proclamations are increasingly discouraged. To be faithful to traditional marriage and family, clear Scriptural mandates, is considered unfeeling of those who view marriage differently. Rational debate, healthy debate, is pressured into silence.

The recent Supreme Court decision redefining marriage cites the “right to dignity,” a right not found in the Constitution. The judiciary has legislated law, a prerogative of Congress, the people’s representatives. And if we object to this massive assumption of power by five appointed lawyers from elite schools we are branded “bigots” and deemed “intolerant.” And yet, who are the new intolerant? 

The decision itself is based on dubious logic, seemingly seeded in emotion and a desire to restructure society according to personal agenda. Since the argument claims the “right to dignity” of gay and lesbian partners, one must conclude that polygamous unions and incestuous partners also have such a right. Bestiality as well. If the definition of marriage is not limited as it has been since the world began – a committed union of a man and a woman, producers of the next generation, and thus of interest to the state – then any relationship could be deemed marriage as long as it consensual. After all every relationship has “the right to dignity.”

I believe in freedom of religion, and that our nation still believes in this fragile and threatened freedom. We were founded on this principle; it is who we are. I have no desire to impose my beliefs on others, but I have a sincere desire, even a mandate, to live according to those beliefs, and to teach my children those beliefs. Our stars and stripes and our fireworks, our hot dogs and chips and beer, our parades and our picnics every Fourth of July proclaim our diversity of race and religion. Our flags wave proudly reminding us that we are a peaceful people who debate our differences with respect for one another’s beliefs.

And so, this fifth of July I pray for peace within our diverse peoples. I pray that this Supreme Court decision does not give license to the silencing of our conversation. I pray that we may worship in our local churches and temples without fear, that we may keep God’s law, writing it on our hearts and in our deeds. I pray that we will be respected and not slandered for our witness to the truth of God and man and woman.

The Court decision has divided us, not unified us. It has harmed us. It has encouraged a sudden silence across our exceptional land, and lining that silence is fear. 

starThe Bethlehem Star returned last week, not seen since 2-3 A.D. This conjunction of Venus and Jupiter occurred within the constellation Leo and its king star, Regulus, creating the Bethlehem Star. What does this mean? Is Christ returning soon to judge the living and the dead? The appearance in the night sky of this “star” is curious and wondrous. We watch and wait, ever vigilant over our own hearts, ready for Christ’s second coming. And as we watch and wait, we sing with the children about the first Star of Bethlehem. The children twirl, raising their arms in praise. They remind me of the joy of being a Christian and living out the Church Year with other faithful: 

Advent tells us Christ is near: Christmas tells us Christ is here./In Epiphany we trace/All the glory of His grace.

Then three Sundays will prepare/For the time of fast and prayer,/That, with hearts made penitent,/We may keep a faithful Lent.

Holy Week and Easter, then,/Tell who died and rose again:/ O that happy Easter day! “Christ is risen indeed,” we say.

Yes, and Christ ascended, too,/ To prepare a place for you;/ So we give him special praise,/ After those great forty days.

Then he sent the Holy Ghost, /On the day of Pentecost,/ With us ever to abide:/Well may we keep Whitsuntide.

Last of all, we humbly sing/ Glory to our God and king,/ Glory to the One in three,/ On the Feast of Trinity.

(Hymn #235, The Hymnal, 1940. Words by Katherine Hankey,1888, for the Sunday School of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, London)

Next week in Sunday School life will sprout through the dark soil in the bright pails. We will learn about God the Father and how he created the heavens and earth, the trillions of stars he named, how he made you and me, mothers and fathers and children. 

And God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good.

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Gathering at the River

Posted on May 17, 2015 | Leave a comment

gathering at the riverMy good friend, wise counselor, and sacrificial priest, is dying of terminal cancer. He is ninety-one. He will be leaving us soon. 

I owe him my life, at least my reborn life, after returning from Canada to the Bay Area where I grew up. I was twenty-nine, wounded from a disintegrating marriage. On the third Sunday of January 1977, I climbed the broad steps of St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Oakland, holding firmly the hand of my towheaded, bouncing, four-year-old son. 

I was already an Anglo-Catholic, having come from Vancouver’s St. James, so I had high expectations as I entered the hushed nave, but my expectations were surpassed on that Sunday morning. The beauty of the liturgy with its fragrant incense, flaming candles, chanting responses, poetically profound hymns, pulled me into the heart of God. The sixteenth-century language – Shakespearean and Elizabethan words and phrasing – restored my soul and renewed my heart. I had come home to beauty, truth, and goodness, to the family of God, the Body of Christ. I had entered Love incarnate. 

The rector, a simple priest of large frame and thick hair, who preached earnestly about the love of God from the central aisle, welcomed us. The families of the parish adopted us. Over the years I traveled in the faith, learning its language, the necessary art and parts of prayer. I began to glimpse heaven, in the daily faithfulness of an Our Father and Glory Be, and in the increased faithfulness of Morning and Evening Prayer, in the joy of receiving the Eucharist into my body and soul, in the “parting of the veil” at the altar. 

I remarried at St. Peter’s, before that same altar. My son served as an acolyte and was confirmed before that altar. In the course of time, my priest and his wife traveled with me and my husband to Western Europe, to the Christian foundations of Western Civilization in Italy, France, and England. We visited monasteries, memorials, great basilicas and humble hermitages. We journeyed from abbeys to cathedrals to healing waters to shrines of the saints. My priest was a wise mentor, showing me how God worked in and through history. 

My first three novels were born of those travels. They explore our history through the journeys of Madeleine and Jack Seymour, a present-day couple who climb a ladder of Christian challenges – healing of body and soul, penitence and forgiveness, redemption and salvation, sacrificial love versus narcissistic lust. These stories comprise Pilgrimage, Offerings, and Inheritance, set in Italy, France, and England. My priest is the genius behind these stories; where they sing in key they do so because of him; where they sing off-key they do so because of me. They are given depth with his words, his beliefs, his ways of seeing and understanding that settled into my soul. 

The stories in turn gifted me with the joy of writing, and for this gift I must be ever in my friend’s debt. As he lay dying he turned to me with half closed eyes, my novel-in-progress on his mind. “The new book – don’t forget the changes,” he barely breathed. “I won’t,” I said. “They’ve already been made.” It was true, I had rewritten portions as he suggested after his reading an early draft, making The Fire Trail richer and more powerful in its consideration of barbarism and civilization. He won’t be able to read the new version until later, at the river. 

Christians never really say goodbye. They say God be with you (the origin of goodbye) or Till we meet again. My priest says he is leaving us, not that he is dying. He often said that we will “gather at the river.” I asked him one afternoon as he lay dying, “Which river? I need to know where we are gathering when we meet in heaven.” His eyes opened wide and locked on mine. “Why, the one that flows by the throne of God.” I laughed. “Of course,” I said. “Now I know where to gather.” I later looked up the lyrics, and sure enough, the refrain was just as he said: 

Yes, we’ll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.        (Robert Lowry, 1864)

When I left him that day, I kissed his forehead and said, “Till we meet again.” He barely nodded and smiled as he drifted off to sleep. 

We worked together on many projects, my saintly priest and I. I always considered it an honor to do what I could, as best I could, with the time given. I prayed about what to do next, listened to Holy Spirit nudges, trusting that the Holy Spirit, that Breath of God, would breathe me along the right path. When I made wrong turns, I prayed I would return to the crossroads and choose again. 

Sacramental Christianity, the faith taught me by my priest, is woven with these wonderful truths – the turning, the changing, the leading, the following the star. Life is a dance, a sacramental dance between heaven and earth, and through Christ, in Christ, the two – the invisible and the visible, God’s world and man’s world –  waltz with one another. Without the Incarnation, that first dance two thousand years ago, we would not be dancing with the angels. We would not know how. 

All this and much more I learned from my prayerful and penitential priest. I sing with gratitude for his life, so thankful that I could share a small part of it, and now, as he leaves us, he is teaching us how to make a “good death.” For one day I will follow him. I will leave; I will die. The best way, it seems to me, is to have made a “good life.” Then, leave that goodness in the hands of those you love and who love you. For love unites us all – the love of God, the love of Christ, the love of the Holy Spirit binding us together. And my priest loves each one of us, as we love him, binding us together in this God of infinite love.

In my freshman year in college in 1965 one of the final exam questions in my Western Civilization class was: “What is the good life?” It was of course a reference to the classical philosophers, but today I know the true answer. The good life is to know God, to be redeemed by Christ, and to live the life of a sacramental Christian. There is nothing better than that. Such goodness defines everything else.

And I owe the answer to my priest, who, in time, became bishop and then archbishop. At this writing, on Ascension Sunday 2015 celebrating the ascension of Christ to heaven, this earthly shepherd of souls lingers in his love for us, even after last rites. In my ongoing prayers for him, the river is never far from my thoughts, beckoning us, calling us to gather by the throne of God. And I realize now it is the river of life, eternal life and eternal love.

Deo Gratias…  Safe travels, dear friend.

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Easter Flowers

Posted on April 12, 2015 | 2 comments

IMG_0485 (2).3The glories of Easter and Eastertide lift me into familiar joy, one that I expect each year. And yet this joy surprises me with its nuances, colors, and music: the lilies on the altar, the flaming candles, the removal of the purple coverings, the triumphant hymns and processions.

Easter often signals the arrival of spring, and the natural world reflects the supernatural with sunshine. This Easter in the Bay Area a long desired rain descended from the heavens, splattering our dry California soil. It was a too-short rain that came and went quickly, but it peaked Easter morning. Still we were dry inside the ark of the church.

After the Scripture lessons and Creed, and before the sermon, the children flowered the thick white Easter Cross placed at the foot of the altar steps. They shoved bright blossoms into the deep holes, and watched the wood of the cross come alive. Just so, I thought, Mary Magdalene came to the empty tomb and found the living Lord walking in the garden.

The Gospel appointed for Easter Day, the highest holiest day of the Christian Year, details Mary Magdalene’s visit to the empty tomb in a manner found in histories, not myths or legends. These specific details had been passed from one generation to another orally in the early Church, and were recorded decades after the event. So it is not surprising that the accounts vary a bit, but in the essence they are the same: Jesus, their Lord, had risen from the dead.  

The accounts agree on another key fact, that the women, not the men, made the discovery. Had these resurrection stories been invented, those who found the empty tomb would have been men not women. And yet, remarkably, the apostles did not find the tomb first; they didn’t even believe the women when they ran back to their hiding place and told them. It is Mary Magdalene who makes the discovery, and at first she doesn’t understand what has happened either, thinking the body has been stolen, a detail that could not have been invented. 

In John’s account, Peter and John return with her to the tomb and see the linen cloths lying to the side. John understands: he remembers the scripture foretelling his rising from the dead. Peter does not understand and they return home, leaving Mary Magdalene to encounter the “gardener.” 

Picture 089Unique to John’s account is this moving conversation between Jesus and Mary Magdalene: 

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.

         And they say unto her, “Woman, why weepest thou?”

She saith unto them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

         Jesus saith unto her, “Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?”

She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, “Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.”

Jesus saith unto her, “Mary.”

She turned herself, and saith unto him, “Rabboni.” (Master)

Jesus saith unto her, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”

Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her.        (John 11-18, KJV)

The risen Christ makes numerous appearances on earth before his ascension to Heaven, but even with these accounts, many today do not believe in the resurrection of the Son of God. Some of us need help, it seems. I was one of those. 

I was converted by reason, arguments I read when I was twenty, made by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. I made that first step of faith (I didn’t feel I was leaping) and found an Anglican church (Lewis was Anglican) to find out more. Experiencing my first Anglican liturgy in the spring of 1967, I was entranced, overwhelmed by beauty. I began the dance of a lifetime, weaving Heaven into my earthy world. 

I am still dancing, learning new movements and new steps, and enjoying the many other dancers in the Body of Christ, the Church, who dance with me and alongside me, helping and teaching me. 

And so, each Easter as the dead wood of the white cross comes alive with reds and blues, greens and yellows, pinks and purples, flowered by the children of our parish, I am thankful. I am thankful for Mary Magdalene and her faith and her witness to the glorious Resurrection of Christ; I am thankful that I could tell her story in my novel, The Magdalene Mystery, and in the telling understand how truly historical those resurrection accounts really are, deepening the belief I found forty-seven years ago, strengthening Lewis’s reasonable reasoning.

But most of all I am thankful for the Son of God among us, having risen on Easter morning, having walked the earth to appear to many, and with us today in the Eucharistic gifts of bread and wine. I rejoice in God’s great love: to be born among us, to live, die, and rise again, to take us with him into eternity in this world and the next.

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Waving Our Palms

Posted on March 29, 2015 | 1 comment

palmsundayWe sat in the front pew, the children and the teachers, waiting and watching. The purple-draped altar, the purple-draped candlesticks, the purple-draped medieval crucifix all stood solid and royal and richly beautiful.

We have been waiting throughout Lent, waiting for this momentous week, considering our hearts and our lives and our habits of love or un-love. Yet Palm Sunday is the day we end our waiting and begin our acting. As Christ entered the gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, so we enter Jerusalem too, as we take part in the stupendous drama of the Son of God’s last week before his crucifixion, the week that Christians, all over the world, call Holy Week. 

Holy Week marks the days leading to Easter. The last three days, the Tridium, begin with Maundy (commandment) Thursday when we remember the Last Supper and Christ’s commandment to “love one another” as he gave himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. That same evening we strip the altar and turn out the lights, reflecting Christ’s arrest and abandonment in the Garden of Gethsemane. We even create a garden of flaming candles to honor the reserved Sacrament that has been removed, and some of us will “keep the watch” all Thursday night, undoing that desertion in Gethsemane.

On Good Friday, remembering God’s good death that saves us from ourselves, we watch as eternity intersects time and the earth quakes. The Son of God is crucified; the tree of Eden becomes the tree of Calvary, reversing Eden.

Some of us keep the Holy Saturday vigil, entering a darkened church and lighting it with flaming candles as the new day of Easter approaches. Some of us, like Mary Magdalene, will rise on Easter morning to find the tomb empty and to celebrate the risen Christ – and our own resurrections – with colorful flowers on a white cross and lots of happy singing.

But today, Palm Sunday, we waited and we watched in our pew, for soon, soon, we knew we would be given our blessed palms. As the Gospel was read, describing what we were soon going to act out, I entered into the liturgy, this moment of meaning created by time and tradition and creedal belief over two thousand years. I entered the story and walked alongside that colt carrying Our Lord through the gates of Jerusalem. 

So this morning, the children and the teachers stepped to the altar rail and received their palms, then stepped back to their pew. Soon all those in the rows behind us received theirs too. “We’ll follow the cross,” I whispered to the children, and we waited for the clergy and acolytes to step into the nave and begin the procession. The choir sang joyfully the resonant hymn, “All Glory Laud and Honor…” and we followed the cross, leading the congregation, waving our palms and singing too. 

Ritual is an art-form, and art is mankind’s way of expressing the great truths of his existence. Liturgy uses many art-forms: poetry and prose, music and drama, songs and prayers, symbols and settings richly textured with meaning. Ritual is a deeply satisfying way to express who we are, why we are here, where we have been and where we are going. It expresses what God, in his immense love for his creation, has done for us, and continues to do for us. 

The dramas of Holy Week and Easter are part of the greater drama of the entire Church Year found in Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox traditions, and to a lesser degree in other Christian bodies. But Easter is the culmination of that year. Since Advent and our waiting for Christmas, we have been preparing for Easter’s Resurrection. Christmas means nothing without Easter, for it is the Resurrection that marks Christ as the Son of God. It is Easter that makes us sit up and take notice and ask, “If he did rise from the dead, then who did he claim to be, and what did he command? What does he command today? Who exactly is he? Does he really love us that much to die for us?” 

As someone once said, Christianity is all about the Resurrection. If you believe in the resurrection of Christ from the dead – and there is ample historical evidence to support such belief – then the rest follows easily. And the rest is, oh my, a glorious journey, full of color, meaning, certainty, and the love of God singing to you at night. 

But I am ahead of the story and the week opening before us – we are still at the gates of Jerusalem. The children and the teachers followed the cross around the church, and the congregation followed us. Today being a fine sunny morning, we followed the cross outside into the neighborhood and around the front and back to the narthex doors. Our priest pounded on these gates: Jerusalem, oh Jerusalem! The doors opened and we entered the heart of the ark of the church, stepping up the red carpet toward our front pew. 

And so now we step into Holy Week, prayerfully, awe-fully, watching, waiting, and acting out this grand drama of the love of God, as once again, eternity intersects time.

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Time Turning and Returning

Posted on March 22, 2015 | Leave a comment

PassiontideThe altar was draped this morning in purple – purple covered everything, it seemed – the tabernacle, the giant candlesticks, the huge medieval crucifix, the Lady Altar, the lecterns. We were drowning in purple. And so I considered my purple, penitent past, one which I revisited recently. 

I returned to a place I had not visited in thirty years, a city in which I had lived in the 1970’s, for the funeral of an old friend gone to Heaven. He was a devout Christian; he knew where he was going and he knew the way. He was eight-two, my son’s godfather. We had been in touch by phone and through Christmas cards, but not much else. 

So my son (42) and I (67) flew north to Vancouver, Canada. And as we flew above the clouds, I traveled back in time to a younger version of myself. The younger version, a girl in her twenties, peered over my shoulder that day of the funeral as though watching and taking stock of who she would become one day. 

I considered from time to time, as we prayed the prayers over the ashes in the Anglican Church, sitting with old friends in the pews, the unique journeys we each had made to this place and this day in this year 2015. I learned more about journeys, those stories, later over coffee and sandwiches. My friends had suffered death, illness, and loss. But we were joyful in spite of it. Children had grown to be parents, just like my son, and I marveled at these children now in their forties who once played together and flew kites on the green lawns of Stanley Park. Our children had grown up. And of course I noticed other graduations: retirement, gray hair, silvery beards. 

IMG_0437 (2)My son’s godfather, Frits Jacobsen, whose ashes we placed reverently in the square space in the cemetery grass, was a rare creature, a Christian bohemian. Born in 1933, he emigrated from Holland to Toronto with his young family after the war. Many years later he resettled in Vancouver and made a humble living as a book illustrator. He devoted countless hours to his church, his community, and the poor. He was self-supporting with his pen-and-ink drawings. He might have been confused with the hippies, a generation later, but he was far nobler. He lived in a garret in Shanghai Alley, Chinatown, in old Vancouver. Today the building is adjacent to the newly redeveloped Olympics and World’s Fair district, but back in the 1970’s it was a poor, albeit quaint, neighborhood, with soup kitchens and lines of homeless. 

IMG_0425My son, with the help of his miraculous IPhone, found the address. I recognized the door, with the 522 painted over it. We took photos from all angles. It was when we headed back to the car, time telling us it was time to leave for the funeral, that a lovely young lady came through 522. We asked what floor she lived on. The top, she said, curious. Could we come up? we asked. My son explained our connection with the former inhabitant (Frits had moved with the area’s redevelopment). When she learned that an artist had lived there, she was delighted to invite us in. And once again, as I climbed the familiar stairs to Frits’ studio and smelled the same musty stairway smells, that other girl I was, so many years ago, smiled from behind my shoulder. I pinched myself as I watched my grown son climb the stairs ahead of me, for I could see the four-year-old blond towhead clambering up behind him to visit his Uncle Frits. 

Frits, opining in his heavy Dutch accent, with his beret and his trim beard, was both gregariously joyful and astutely serious. He brooked no compromise with his Christian beliefs and would follow those who pledged the same. He was sure the Apocalypse was imminent. He judged his culture and he judged rightly, I believe, although he was a bit too harsh, to my way of thinking, on other denominations within the Body of Christ. Frits had his opinions and wasn’t shy about voicing them. And we loved him for it. He was a breath of fresh air. 

After the graveside service last week we gathered again to recall Frits and how he would love our gathering. We looked at his artwork, shared plates of fruit and salad. We laughed a good deal, and we knew Frits would have liked that. We remembered how we had found one another at church, our glorious Anglo-Catholic St. James, and how we had formed friendships including singles, couples, and young families. We didn’t have much, but we liked to talk about faith, about Lewis and Tolkien, about books, about theology, and we would gather together over wine and cheese and pineapple upside-down-cake. We picnicked at Stanley Park and dreamed where our lives would take us. For we were young then, and our future spread before us. We were fearless, undaunted. We embraced living. 

And so as I revisited my earlier life, more battle weary but also more wise, I guessed my friends felt the same. We looked different and yet the same, and we wove together the years we were apart in our conversations, asking, remembering, wondering why this and how that and where was so and so and what happened then. Each of us carried a universe within us; we had lived most of the universe already, and the stories, like planets, revolved around one another once again. 

I realize now as I write this, how rich we all are to have lived so long, to have so many stories texturing us and coloring our lives. Some are painful tales to be sure, but some are joyful. The threads of the weaving are both dark and light, drab and colorful. 

And also, as I now think back on this morning, Passion Sunday, when we enter the heart of Christ’s story – who he was, who he is, how he saved us from death to be with him – I understand a bit more than I did last year at this time. For my own passio – my story of moving through time, suffering the wounds of life and celebrating the healings – is fuller than it was even then, one year ago. For each of us, as Christians, are not only a part of God’s great creative project for his creation, but are also part of God’s great creative project for each of us individually, if we say yes, if we say, “be it unto me according to thy word.”

And so as we enter Passiontide, we look to Palm Sunday and Holy Week. We consider what it all means, our lives and the lives of those we love, weaving them together in our prayers and offering our new coat of many colors to God. We look to Palm Sunday and Our Lord’s entrance through the gates of Jerusalem. As the children waved the palms, just so we wave our lives woven by each minute, hour, day. We lay down this fabric of our lives before the Son of God who rides on a donkey through the holy gates. We lay them down alongside the children’s palms.

And we look forward to the glories of Easter.

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