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Advent Editing

Posted on November 30, 2015 | 1 comment

writingSince signing a contract with eLectio Publishing earlier this week for the publication of my novel, The Fire Trail, to be released May 10, I have been rereading the manuscript, polishing, fine-tuning. Words and phrases are deleted and replaced, sentences are shaved and reshaped, paragraphs and pages and chapters judged as honestly as possible.

It would seem an appropriate work to tackle during Advent, a season of penitence and preparation as we wait for the celebration of Christ’s advent at Christmas. For like the examination of my words, Advent is also a time to examine my heart, to see what should be deleted from my life and replaced, discouraged or encouraged, torn down or shored up, what should be shaved and reshaped, what should be confessed, judged, and absolved. It is a time when we ask that God’s law be written on our hearts.

For Advent is about change, about the editing of our lives.

When I edit a manuscript I measure it against certain standards. I’ve learned and hopefully continue to learn the craft of writing fiction, the structure of the novel, the way words, story, plot, and character weave together. I try to fill my ears and eyes and mind with good writing, to absorb vocabulary and symbols and images, to improve my own attempts to hold my manuscript up to a standard. I listen to language, the rhythm and syntax and flow of dialog and description, attending to the music of words and their dance, be it a minuet or a waltz.

Editing is about choice, choice based on a standard. And for mankind those standards were given to us when God wrote his law on tablets of stone, and Moses carried them down the mountain to God’s chosen ones. That law was fulfilled, filled with fullness, made perfect, when Jesus the Christ was born in a hillside cave outside Bethlehem. That law was fulfilled with his life, his death, and his resurrection from death into life, his shattering of the veil between man and God, his making them at-one, in his Atonement.

In the season of Advent we look to Christmas, to the celebration of the birth of Our Lord. We do this by editing our lives using his standards, his rule of law, his law of love. We want to be ready to receive him into the words and pages of our days, weeks, years, to welcome him to live in our chapters and breathe life into our own stories. To be ready we need to edit ourselves.

Some of us think we have nothing to delete or add to our lives. We are fine the way we are. The problem of sin is for others, not us. It is time then to begin with beginnings: the Ten Commandments. Curiously, they are difficult to keep in today’s culture of distraction. The first four are considered sins against God; the last six are sins against one another. Today we’ll look at the sins against God. These will be challenging enough to suggest a robust humility:

  1. God spake these words: I am the LORD thy God; Thou shalt have none other gods but me.
  1. Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them; for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and show mercy unto thousands in them that love me and keep my commandments.

Do I worship false gods? Do I spend too much time, talent, or treasure on anything that is not to God’s glory, not a part of his plan for me? Has my own selfishness hurt my children, and taught them how to be selfish too, to in turn hurt their children, my grandchildren?

  1. Thou shalt not take the Name of the LORD thy God in vain. 

The everyday use of “OMG” today is astounding. The commandment not to use God’s in vain would seem the easiest of all, and yet saying the name of God frivolously, without meaning or reverence, that is, in vain, is a common transgression. We say it. We hear it. We read it. Bestsellers and mainstream movies use this language liberally without thought to the power of words, whether spoken or written. I can edit my tongue, and edit my reading list, but it is more difficult to edit what I hear. A friend’s solution to this oral pollution was powerful: when someone says “God!” or “Christ!” my friend offers up her own prayer by adding “be praised!” The addition, I’ve found, invites holiness into the moment, making each word spoken precious.

  1. Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day.

For Christians, Sunday is the Sabbath, celebrating Christ’s Resurrection. I must confess I don’t always feel like going to church on Sunday, but I’m always glad I went. I’ve found that regular worship edits my soul, fine-tuning it, regulating its rhythms and guiding its dance. What happens in that simple hour of song and Scripture and sacrament is mystifying, miraculous. I am changed. Words do not fully explain it but I’ll try a few: I enter disordered and leave re-ordered, I enter guilty and leave absolved, I enter sorrowful and leave joyful, I enter depressed and leave enlightened, I enter dying and leave reborn. Keeping Sunday holy by uniting with Christ’s Body is crucial to the editing of the soul.

And so the manuscripts of Me and You are works-in-progress, to be published in Heaven, on our personal release dates, our new birth-days. There is, for me, much to work on, many areas to refashion and rebuild. The editing is ongoing, with the help of sacrament and song and Scripture, with the advent of Christ in history in Bethlehem, the advent of Christ today in the Eucharist and his Spirit in daily prayer, and the advent of Christ at the end of time.

Lord, have mercy upon us, and write all these thy laws in our hearts, we beseech thee.

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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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A Dry Season

Posted on August 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

hills2It’s a dry season here in the Bay Area. Brown hills holding their gnarly oaks roll east from the Pacific toward the Sierras. “We need rain,” a friend said. “As always,” I said. “Tahoe was down fifteen feet,” someone else told me. “No snow pack I guess,” I lamented.

Man has always battled the natural world, has always been subject to “Mother Nature,” a fickle mother. When we are dry, she doesn’t always give us rain, and we have learned to store water in great basins carved from our mountains and valleys. We do not want to be prodigal with the gift of rain; we must ration it for the future.

And as Joseph instructed the Egyptian pharaoh, we build storehouses for our grain. We use our intellect to breed better crops to feed not just ourselves, but the world. We invent better machinery to deliver food from farm to table. But even so, we can’t control the weather. We still do rain dances; we pray and plan in the full years to be ready for the lean ones. We have savings accounts, or wish we had. We buy insurance or wish we had. “A penny saved is a penny earned.” “See a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

We are little people doing battle with the the great universe. And yet we have these huge egos, believing we can fly close to the sun with waxen wings. We are the boy David facing the cosmic Goliath with a sling and a stone. We are full of hubris, pride that goes before the fall, the Greek nemesis. We want to be our own gods. We do not see our wings melting.

I sometimes wonder how these great contrasts between reality and unreality, between who we are and who we imagine we are, live together in our souls. I suppose such pride can be good, for it propels us forward, encourages us to create as God creates, drives us to better our world and its peoples using a mind that reflects God’s own, made in his image. Somewhere deep inside, beyond politically correct and cool and longing for acceptance, we want to be good and true. There is a kernel of humility in each of us, a mustard seed that we want to water to grow to be fully good.

Christians explain this dynamic between good and evil, humility and pride by pointing to our innate goodness having come from our very creation, being made in God’s image, birthed by his love. We point to our sinfulness – our desire to disobey God – as having come from our fallen nature. Somewhere deep within our human beginnings, deep within the garden we call Eden, so long ago, we made a wrong turn, and that turn led to other wrong turns, which led to others.

The saints are those who try to correct those wrong turns, those who try to re-turn onto the right path. We want to learn from them for they know the way, opening themselves to God through prayer and sacrament. They scour their hearts through confession and repentance, re-turning. They prepare a place for God to live, to dwell within. We tell the stories of the saints to one another and to our children. We tell of saints from the past and the present, yes even some who live among us, so that we might touch the hem of their garment, so that we might learn how to re-turn onto the right path as they have done.

As Christians, we have a way, a path out of the jungle into the light into God himself. When we are thirsty, we have sacramental fountains and scriptural rivers of water and life that make sense of all the dry seasons. We store our water and grain in the heart of the Church, so that we will not thirst or hunger.

We have a way forward as we move among one another, healing and loving as God heals and loves, allowing him to work in and through us. So that the natural world – with its storms or lack of storms, with its heat and its cold, with its lions that devour and bears that maul – is set in perspective. It is a good world, but a not-always-friendly world. Yet its goodness lies at the heart of each seed sprouting to the light. We know this is true. So it is good for us to use our talents as best we can to be good caretakers, producing foods and storing water for a hungry and thirsty world.

We are in the dry season. Fall is coming soon. The leaves will die and turn and drop to the earth in glorious color. We too will die and turn and drop to the earth, our ashen flesh becoming dust, our souls bursting in their own glorious color as they wing to the light. We watch and we pray and we give thanks for it all, for the goodness of even the dry times, for the harvest of God is always plentiful.

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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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Fragile Freedom

Posted on January 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

Sunday SchoolIt is a truth universally acknowledged that we don’t truly appreciate what we have until we lose it or we are threatened with its loss. Why does it take drastic events to urge us to cherish something or someone?

I was reminded of this truth in recent weeks with the increased threats to our way of life as I learned of the Paris massacres. Suddenly the freedoms we take for granted in the Western world seem so precious, so precarious, so fragile that the wisp of a breeze could blow them away, never to be known again.

I am often reminded of this truth as I age, as time disappears and my future shrinks. Suddenly days, hours, minutes are beautiful, treasured. No two days are alike, no two hours, no two minutes. All time is glorious and beautiful. All time is full of life, God’s life in us, every one of us, regardless of age, race, creed, handicap.

I was reminded of this truth when a friend died. I miss her. Did I appreciate her enough when she was living? And later in the year a young man passed into Heaven, a boy who gave us great joy in church. The texture of the present has changed and become something it wasn’t before; their absence is felt.

So I give thanks more often for time given, friends and family given to me. I give thanks for a great-granddaughter born last spring and for the babies born in our parish this past year.

Freedom of speech and of religion remain precious rights, although precarious ones, and we exercised those freedoms in our church this morning. As I sang with the children “Advent Tells Us Christ is Near,” “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” and “All Things Bright and Beautiful” (all verses!) I cherished the time. Natalie, age five, was eager and adept. She knew how to twirl and how to growl like a beast and how to flap her wings. My thanksgivings turned into true happiness as we embarked on “Jesus Loves Me.” We rounded out our concert with a boisterous “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” By this time I was deep into abundant joy.

In a sense, the taking for granted of these freedoms is part of freedom itself, so that we create a way of life that slips by easily, one we don’t need to think about much. We assume we can elect our officials, choose our laws, select the patterns of life that will enhance our culture and encourage “peace on earth and goodwill among men.” And yet, suddenly, those assumptions are challenged by attacks on our Western world, its very culture of freedom. It appears we may have to fight for these rights if we want our children to grow up in a free society.

My college years landed in the sixties when patriotism was considered plebeian by the academic elite. Since then, civic education has nearly disappeared in our schools. But the beheadings last month, the Paris massacres, the many barbarian attacks on our civilization in the last few years, have prompted reconsideration of patriotism. There is another way to live with one another, a better way than this, we say, and perhaps we had better teach it to our children. Perhaps we had better fly the flag and make value judgments about our culture versus other cultures. Perhaps one purpose of public education is to create an educated electorate, a citizenry that understands how exceptional Western culture, a citizenry that speaks a common language and who flies a common flag, one that encourages uni-culturism over multi-culturism. Perhaps it is time to allow the peoples of our glorious nation to merge so that the melting pot forms a more perfect union.

So as we sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” I prayed for the world God holds in his hands. I prayed for our children and their time on this earth, that they would be ever free to clap, to sing, to speak, to dance. And I prayed that they would value that freedom enough to cherish it, to one day pass it on to the next generation in song and speech. For there will come a time when those of us who were shaken by the Paris killings, who mourned the Pakistani children massacred, who were horrified by the Nigerian kidnappings and the bombings, will one day travel home to God.

There will come a time when the children we are teaching in church and in school will need to remember just how fragile freedom really is, so that they can teach their children our heritage, our way of freedom and peace.

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Joy to the World

Posted on January 4, 2015 | 3 comments


Parish churchFrom time to time news reports announce the closing of churches worldwide. Recently the Wall Street Journal reported that in the Netherlands two-thirds of the 1600 Roman Catholic churches will close in the next decade and in Holland 700 Protestant churches will close in the next four years. When I see these reminders of the state of Christian churches in the world I often reconsider the nature of these sacred buildings.

Many of these churches in Europe are sold and become condos, bars, restaurants, museums, libraries, and hotels. Entering these reclaimed spaces can be, for the Christian, a bit disconcerting. But, after all, the materials were simply that – matter, stone, wood, building blocks. Why should the Christian be troubled?

Catholic and Anglican churches are consecrated when used for holy worship, and when they are put on the market, they are deconsecrated. So, I say to myself, why be sentimental?

Why indeed?

But another voice whispers in my ear. There is the history of prayers here, it says, remember all the sacraments, all the baptisms, confirmations, weddings, communions, funerals. Remember all the celebrations and seasons, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost.

So as I knelt at the altar to receive the Eucharist this morning in my parish church, I gazed upon our Christmas creche, set up a few feet away. There was the Lord of Lords in his bed of straw, surrounded by Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men, the animals. The outline of the figures followed the pitched lines of the stable roof, peaked like hands praying. A star hung from the central point.

The nativity scene was, I thought, a church in itself, a little church. The manger was the altar, the Son of God in the center, the Holy Spirit descending in the star and twinkling lights, Mary and Joseph like the clergy preparing and caring for God-with-us, the shepherds and wise men like the congregation, some herders of sheep and some herders of words. The crèche was a mini-church.

Then I looked beyond the stable to the pitched roof of our own sanctuary-stable, the altar with its tabernacle holding God-with-us, the Holy Spirit weaving through our prayers and incense and flaming starlight, the clergy offering God to us and us to God, and we kneeling in pews and at the altar rail in adoration as the shepherds and wise men once did, bringing the gifts of our hearts, minds, and bodies.

And of course, in the end, there is the church of our hearts. Like the inn of Bethlehem, there is not always room for God in our hearts. But some of us try to make room and offer a rough stable where he can live and breathe, where Eternity can take root and make us immortal. In this way each of us, if we so choose, is a crèche cradling God, just like the Christmas crèche and just like the church sanctuary.

It is good to have the crèche to express the story of salvation, and it is good to have the church to enact the sacrament of salvation, to help us enter the mystery itself, making us one with God. Other expressions of our deepest held beliefs live in the physical church – the architecture of domes and aisles and sacred space, the baptismal font, the stories in stained glass, the Lady Altar with its bank of flaming votives. Music, prayer, ritual all give us ways to express who we are as created beings, who we are meant to be, and how we become what we are meant to be in eternity.

Church comes from the word ekklesia, a body of believers called together by Christ. So of course the church is foremost the living church, Christ’s Body. But people need structure, need poetry, need symbol. The physical church provides these things, enables communal worship in a common space and time.

In Europe villages grew up around churches, so the town came to be identified with the parish church, and in many cases took the church’s name. Today, when these communities no longer have this unifying central building, they have indeed lost something valuable, something that brought them together. Hence there is an outcry in Europe today among nonbelievers as well as believers. But closing the church is merely a symptom of an earlier closing, a greater closing, the closing of hearts to God, and this loss of faith has been going on for the last century. The only cure for such a death is a re-opening of those hearts, a resurrection of spirit.

America is younger and her history is less village-focused. Her cultural landscape is seeded with many varieties of belief and building and ekklesia. But here too, churches are sold, parishes consolidated. What is a believer to do?

It is a time for believers to find one another, to share in worship. It is a time to keep candles aflame and incense billowing. It is a time to sing a joyful noise unto the Lord so that the singing bursts through the doors and weaves through our communities, relighting the world with the good news of Christ. It is a time to tell the wondrous story, that God sent his Son to become one of us, one with us, Emmanuel, in a crèche, the first ekklesia.

It is a time to sing together, Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her king… so that the world may become a crèche too.

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Thanksgiving for Hana

Posted on November 30, 2014 | Leave a comment

HANA-LANIThis Thanksgiving weekend we spent giving thanks for Hana, Maui. We arrived in the dusk of Tuesday evening, flying low along the coast from Kahului to Hana. Darkness was descending quickly and a thick fog enshrouded our small nine-seater plane. I knew that Hana Airport had no radar, and if we could not land due to poor visibility we would turn around and return to Kahului Airport, where we would need to rent a car for the two hour winding trip to Hana.

Suspended in the fog, it seemed we were floating. I began to pray. Then I sensed the plane had curved out to sea searching for visibility pockets, but it was actually making a different approach, coming in from the south. Soon we saw the coastline of land and sea, the gentle green shape of Ka’uiki Head reaching out from Hana Bay, with its lighthouse alight and welcoming, and soon we heard the wheels touch the landing strip. We rolled between the lights flaring along the sides of the runway. Safe. With bowed heads we maneuvered through the exit door and climbed down the rope ladder to terra firma.

The pilot explained he used GPS (I suppose I should not have worried) but when he said that he missed the “twilight cutoff” by one minute I asked what he meant. “I’m not allowed to land at the Hana Airport after twilight.” “Oh,” I said. One minute? My prayers were needed after all.

The temps have been on the cool side even for this rain forest on the eastern shore of Maui in the middle of winter, but in spite of winds and gray skies, rain has been mostly at night and we have been able to walk a bit. But the loveliness of Hana isn’t just the tropical temperatures, the palms, the roaring surf, the little drinks with umbrellas, but rather the people. Over the years we have come to appreciate this village that nestles under the volcano Haleakala, that is protected by Fagan’s Cross standing like a beacon on one of the green foothills.

And so I wrote Hana-lani, a love story set here, and in the dreaming and the courtship of words and phrases and sentences, as I married language that reflected the many colors, sounds, and fragrances, with the family and faith of Hana, I’ve been blessed by the warm hospitality of the folks that live here. We return to Hana, it is true, to rest, relax, and listen to the surf (and sip a few Mai Tais) but also to enjoy the people.

We are in our gentle years and not quite as active as we once were, but the paths that meander over the lawns of our hotel are kind and beckoning, with views of the sea and the spewing white foam. And from our veranda we can see Ka’uiki Head, the same scene that’s on the cover of my novel. At night, surf pounds and rain rattles the roof. In the day, we read and rest, and I create my next scene in The Fire Trail. And all the while, I say my prayers of thanksgiving as we slip into Advent and the marking of a new Church Year.

St. Mary's Hana compOur time in Hana has been appropriately bracketed by Eucharists celebrated on Thanksgiving and today, Advent I. We climbed the white stairs to St. Mary’s and entered through an arched portal into the airy space where prayers mingle with breezes wafting through open windows. It is a white church, set on a green hillside, Fagan’s Cross higher up, and the volcano behind that, and today the chancel was splashed with purple hangings for Advent. Four Advent candles nested in their greens and the Lady altar had been lovingly decorated with flowers (we joined in a Rosary before Mass). The polished wooden pews have comfortable kneelers, and for this I am grateful, because I like to kneel when I pray.

They say that gratitude is a good cure for depression (and drug-free), forcing one to turn outward and less inward, becoming a bit more selfless and a little less self-centered. I think there is truth in this, and it is also true that it is a good preparation for penitence, a cleaning out of the heart. For when I am thankful for the blessings of each day, beginning with the blessing of waking to the day itself, I am humbled. And in the humbling I see places in my heart that need cleaning out… dark corners where envy, pride, idolatry, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and all their many many relatives, have hidden. It is good to give my soul a good sweeping, to let the fresh air in, just as the breezes blow through the windows of St. Mary’s.

In this holy season I will re-learn the Advent collect in the Book of Common Prayer: 

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

I will re-memorize these words and place them in my newly swept heart. I shall hold them close, so that I may retrieve them at any moment in any place during this holy season. They are words that sum up our hopeful faith and faithful hope, these sixteenth-century phrases of Bishop Cranmer. I would like to have that armor of light. I would like to rise to that life immortal. 

Advent St. JSo we trundled up the stairs to St. Mary’s and worshiped God with the lovely people of Hana. Many ages formed the congregation, and while I was pleased to see so many children, I was equally pleased to see the respect paid to the elderly. No one was left out, and we visitors were greeted with vine leis, a sweet kindness.

Sometimes we sang together in Hawaiian, sometimes in English, as we accomplished the “work of the people,” the Holy Liturgy, joining together in the great action of the Mass, with Scripture, sermon, creed, confession, consecration of the bread and wine, communion. In this huge prayer we took part in a drama enacted throughout the world and throughout time, and we sang with the angels and saints in Heaven. I think God was pleased with the offering of his children in Hana. 

We have entered Advent, the season of the coming of Christ Jesus among us, humbly as a child who donned our flesh and shared our sufferings, so that he could unite with us and carry us to Heaven. We now look to Christ’s coming again, his second advent, in glory to judge the living and the dead. Will we be ready? We are told it could happen now, tomorrow, the next day. So we practice penitence, as we wait for that glorious advent; we cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light.

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Giving Thanks

Posted on November 23, 2014 | Leave a comment

prayerToday is the last Sunday of the Church Year and the Sunday before our national Day of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the best antidote to selfishness and the best prescription for selflessness and thus leads naturally to the First Sunday in Advent.

Melanie McDonagh in the November 1 issue of The British Spectator makes the profound observation that the “cult of mindfulness” is largely a cult of self. It may or may not bring peace, alleviate stress, even heal depression, but it is an isolated lonely cult in which the focus is on one’s inner self. She is correct that the idea of living in the moment is pure Buddhism, and like Buddhism, the idea encourages us to escape suffering rather than face it, wrestle with it, and create meaning from it.

I have found that Christianity and Judaism pull the believer out of himself. It is through being self-less not self-ish that we find peace, and indeed, it is an inner peace that we find. How does this strange contradiction work? It works because in prayer we are focusing on the God who made us, and yet who also lives within us. Without belief in this objectively real God, we are merely wallowing in our own selves. Christianity brings the believer into community with all sorts of folks unlike him or her, different in age, gender, race, class, interests. We rub shoulders, we share tea, we are solicitous of one another. Most of all, we worship God (not ourselves) together, sharing this common outward vision, as we act out and re-present the great liturgical drama of church or temple.

And so Christianity and Judaism urge the believer to look around and, yes, smell the roses and live in the minute, for every minute is a precious gift. But these religions do far more. They urge the believer to face and interact with the real world. We call this interaction love, brotherly love. It is the sacrifice of that precious minute given by God, for the minutes are numbered, in order to give that minute to another, a stranger, someone unlike us. We pray for others; we visit the sick, shut-in, and lonely; we support charities that support life in all its facets, joyful and sorrowful. The history of the West is the history of this urge to better our world, to care for our communities.

Within this urge, this still small voice directing us to love, lies judgment. Judgment is not popular today; we are told we must not point fingers. And yet if we do not see clearly the true nature of what is happening around us and within us, we cannot better the world, and we cannot better ourselves.

God has spoken to his creation through his chosen people over many centuries. He has clearly marked the path to glory. The path takes us outside of ourselves so that God can enter those same selves. By shedding “me,” I miraculously find “me.”

One of the ways God has shown us how to do this is through simple thankfulness. The psalms are full of thanksgiving to God. To pray the psalms is to leave no room for depression. To offer oneself up is to know joy. It’s as simple as that. The Lord’s Prayer opens with praise that pulls us heavenward: Our Father, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come… Thanksgiving lives inside every word of praise.

And so this Thanksgiving Day, I look around me at my world, my nation, my community, my own heart. I try to see honestly, and I see generations of children raised in the cult of mindfulness. I see them highly mindful of their self-esteem, prone to take offense, demanding and self-righteous. They have lost themselves in themselves, as though whirling downwards, pulled into a vortex where depression imprisons them.

But on this Sunday before Advent and before Thanksgiving, I also look around me and see churches and temples where true thanksgiving is offered to a very real and loving Creator. I see voices raised together, not always in tune, singing thanksgiving and praise. I see love weaving among these communities of true believers who thank, not the stars, but the living and Almighty God for their very breath. I see islands of faith that show us how to be free from ourselves, not enslaved by ourselves. We do this by giving thanks to God for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Today is called in our Anglican tradition “Stir-up Sunday,” named after Thomas Cranmer’s powerful Collect, the collecting or gathering prayer for this day, written in the sixteenth century:

“Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

This is one of the many prayers that have formed the Western tradition. In this prayer we are called to act, to care for those around us, and through the caring itself we are interiorly rewarded. We will be changed.

And so, we look to the season of Advent, the four weeks that proclaim the advent of God becoming man, the Incarnation, the Christ child born in a stable. How do we prepare ourselves for this great coming? We give thanks, and in the giving thanks we receive God, we know joy. It is his chosen path. The way is clear.

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Crossing the Courtyard

Posted on September 7, 2014 | Leave a comment
St. Peter's, 1913

St. Peter’s, 1913

Our parish church, St. Peter’s Anglican in Oakland, is building a new courtyard. Over the summer we have entered the church through side doors and back doors. We have peered over broken-down walls and into churned-up soil and rock. Along the way we unearthed our original cornerstone, laid in 1913. Somehow it was buried when a new church was built alongside the old in 1957. 

There has been much discussion, weighing in, rethinking this and deciding on that, in the process of executing the architect’s vision for our courtyard. Are the colors compatible with the existing buildings? Should there be a lych-gate or just a gate? How high will the brick walls be exactly? Did we really have to remove the palm tree? When will it be finished? In time for our organ concert? When will the elevators for the handicapped be done?

There has been much sighing and wringing of hands and raising of brows, then chuckling and open palms and leaving it all to God. Somehow we have weathered the great questions and agreed upon sensible answers. God has been good.

Today, finally, we could see how it all might turn out. Planting beds are marked. The brick wall (not too high) is finished, an inviting border. Soon the patio will be laid. Soon the front doors will be opened, their chains broken, and soon we will once again cross the threshold of our church, leave the secular behind and enter the sacred.

The sun came out this morning as we peered over the low brick wall. The heavy fog that settles upon the Bay Area this time of year had burned away. The earth, its gravity holding our church fast on its rim, was turning slowly, away from summer into autumn in this part of the world, away from winter into spring in other parts. For us here, on this part of the planet, daylight shrinks as the dark of night expands.

I’m glad to have a sacred space hugging the edge of the earth so firmly, and I’m glad to have a courtyard that links the secular with the sacred, that points to the light in the darkness.  Crossing such a space is a preparation, a time to quiet the mind and heart before kneeling in a pew to worship God. It is a time to bridge two worlds – that of God and that of man.

In the end, that is what Christians do, or are called to do. Each of us is a kind of courtyard, a linking and a joining of the secular and the sacred, of earth and heaven. We have experienced the transcendent, God become man, God giving himself to man in the Eucharist, God living within man through Eucharist and Spirit. But we are all only partly finished courtyards, I fear, for each of us has a long way to go for our gardens to flower, for our patios to be solid enough to bear much weight.

But we open our gates, and we invite those outside to come inside, to leave the noise and enter the quiet. We say, come, look and see what we have seen! Come, know the peace of God. Come, be healed. We witness to transcendence, here in our earthy world, an increasingly dangerous and barbaric world.

The Gospel for today was the healing of the man who cannot hear and cannot speak. He was deaf and dumb. Christ charges him and the witnesses to tell no one, but they do anyway, “beyond measure astonished, saying, ‘He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.’ ” I too am beyond measure astonished when I enter our holy space and gaze at the altar and its tented tabernacle resting in its garden of fiery tapers. I too want to tell about it, for my ears have been opened and my tongue loosed. I too have been healed of apathy, despair, depression, heartbreak, fear… to name just a few demons. I too have been forgiven my sins. Once, long ago, I was invited to enter through a gate by someone, like me today, grinning and beckoning from a courtyard, calling me to cross the threshold and enter the church. And once I entered, I knew, from the beauty that engulfed me, that I had left the secular and stepped into the sacred. And I was beyond measure astonished.

Soon our courtyard will be finished. Soon it will invite the halt, the lame, and the blind to enter this holy home of God and be healed. Soon it will witness to the world the incarnation of God, to Emmanuel, God with us. For the 1913 church and the 1957 church are now joined by the 2014 garden court, the child of a century of worship, a century of incense, candles, and song, a century of transcendent beauty.

http://www.saintpetersoakland.com

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With a Song

Posted on August 3, 2014 | Leave a comment

035“Once we came before God’s presence with a song; now we come before his absence with a sigh.” So writes Anglican philosopher Roger Scruton in his beautifully written memoir, Gentle Regrets. The first reference is, of course, to Psalm 100, O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands: serve the Lord with gladness, and come before his presence with a song… Dr. Scruton’s second reference, that to sighing, is to the sadness that seems to permeate our culture of unbelief, the most prosperous and “advanced” culture in recorded history.

Psalm 100, also called the Jubilate Deo, is part of our Office of Morning Prayer, in the Book of Common Prayer prayed by Anglicans worldwide for centuries. I wondered, what happens to a person’s attitude toward life if he or she repeats this prayer psalm every morning upon rising? Is there a change in the way he sees the world, or even a gradual restructuring of the soul?

I’ve been thinking about this the last few days, having dipped deeply into Dr. Scruton’s words of wisdom. He rightly values the Prayer Book with its Elizabethan English, so suitable to worship God. We sing the words of these prayers, sometimes in melodies, sometimes in chants, sometimes in our hearts and minds, following the rhythm of the phrases like a dance.

I first crossed the threshold of an Anglican Church (then Episcopalian) in 1966, at the age of 19: St. Matthew’s, Burlingame, California. Raised Presbyterian, turned collegiate agnostic, I was unfamiliar with the ritual, the set prayers, the kneeling, the making of the Sign of the Cross, the processions, the candles, the incense. Yet I felt as though I had entered Heaven. I was sure I had; I was totally smitten. I sat in the back pew and drank in the liturgy like a traveler in the desert. I was thirsty and didn’t know how parched I really was until then, didn’t fully understand what I deeply longed for, but here it was, all around me, the sights, the sounds, the smells of Heaven.  It was as though I was being held in the palm of a loving God, one who had created me in great joy and was so glad I had come home.

I wasn’t instructed and Confirmed until the following year, but in the meantime I entered, knelt, imitated the others. Since many of the prayers were the same each week, and there were Prayer Books in all the pews, I learned the words quickly and was soon part of the miracle happening around me. I learned how to dance with the Church, a universal dance stretching back two thousand years and celebrated all over the world. Since then, I have come to understand the meaning behind the rituals and the prayers, the Scriptures that ordained the words, the actions, the steps in this dance of worship. I came to understand what happened in what was called the great Sacrifice of the Mass, when the wine became blood and the bread became body in the Real Presence of Christ. I understood how the Liturgy of the Word led to this pivotal moment of bell-ringing and happy holiness – the Collects, the Scriptures, the Creed, the Confession and Absolution, the Sermon. And since then, I have traveled deeper and deeper into the mystery of worship and into the heart of God.

So it was with great joy that I discovered this Anglican philosopher who is also in love with the Book of Common Prayer, who “gets it,” as is said today. And he is right when he profoundly observes that our culture, having trouble finding God, has become sad, “morose.” Many no longer sing to the Lord a joyful song with gladness for they have lost him in a kind of slippery sophistry. Instead, they look to one another, and to themselves, to create gods from their own kind, longing for but not finding true worship. The resulting attitude is one of un-thankfulness, of grievance and complaint, of never having enough, of striving, of racing, of consuming, all in hopes of finding. The old adage, “Count your blessings,” is just that, an old adage and rarely practiced. Today curses are counted rather than blessings.

And so it was that this morning when I entered our parish church I was especially thankful for the words of our Prayer Book, the poetry of the prayers and psalms and liturgy, and most of all for the belief that backs and binds it. I addressed some “proofs” for the historicity of the Resurrection in my recent novel, The Magdalene Mystery, arguments of the mind if not the heart. And in the end, if one can argue the Resurrection, the rest falls into place, at least for me. But here, this morning, in my parish church and recently in the words of my new philosopher mentor, I find argument for the heart and soul. Human beings long to sing to God because we know deep down he exists, that he loves us, and that he has provided a path on earth to Heaven, to one day, see him face to face, no longer through a glass darkly. We long to experience what we suspect is waiting for us, true joy.

And as we sang with the children in Sunday School “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” prayed an “Our Father” together, and led them up the central aisle to kneel at the altar rail for their blessing during the Mass, I knew we had taught them well this day. They had experienced the bright and the beautiful, to be sure, when they entered that hushed space, as they padded up the red carpet toward the tabernacle set amid the flaming candles, as the robed clerics drifted by. “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be upon you, Natalie, this day and always” the priest said, touching her head lightly with blessing. We each made the Sign of the Cross, and with folded hands we processed out, back to the Sunday School, where we made more animals from paper plates.

It is good for us to pray, to develop an attitude of thankfulness for what we have been given, beginning with life itself, another day on this earth. I recommend an “Our Father” followed by the “Jubilate Deo” each morning, even if it’s in the rush of the early hours, driving to work, waiting for the bus, readying the children for school. Say it regularly and your life will be filled with joy, the jubilate of God, and far less sighing. I know mine has.

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