Tag Archives: peace

Crying for Paris

Posted on November 15, 2015 | 1 comment

Paris MapThe horrific attacks in Paris this week brought home once again the precarious nature of our freedoms. 

And so we cry for France and the rest of Europe, so vulnerable with porous borders, weak military, costly social welfare, and alarming inclusivity. 

As the daughter of England, America looks to France, and all of Europe, with anguish and tears. America was birthed by the English, explored by the French, settled by the Spanish, and later enriched by Germans, Italians, Irish, East Indians, Africans, Asians and many others. America has gloried in inclusivity, insisting this great experiment in democracy will after all succeed. Yet, in the last fifty years it is showing signs of serious failure. 

Since her birth, America has welcomed all who escaped to her sanctuary of sacred space, of liberty and life and the peaceful pursuit of happiness. All who came desired safety and a chance to live a better life in which to raise their children. Some sought life itself. This stream of grateful immigrants continues, legal and illegal, crossing borders, running around and over borders, desperate to get in. 

As America grew in strength and wealth, she defended England and the countries of Europe, as any good son or daughter would defend their family from harm. She became a force for good, sometimes through might, sometimes through love of all humanity, usually well intentioned. 

But as Europe aged she grew complacent about defense, counting on America’s strength. Americans looked across the seas to Europe’s villages and history, her cobbled streets, her quaint ways, her saints, her cathedrals, her vineyards and her civilized way of life. We were wealthy and could afford a military that could defend the free world, protect our Western Civilization. Europe rested, relaxing borders. With American might, Europe could afford generous social welfare programs. She could house, feed, nurse, and school all who crossed into her lands, even those who broke her laws. Giving and giving, Europe self-righteously distributed her benevolence. Americans, those coarse fellows across the sea, could provide troops as necessary. 

But no longer. A little like Robin Hood, America robbed from her defense to protect her domestic welfare. She too wanted to feel self-righteous, to “care” as Europe cared. To pay for these programs, programs that buy votes, the CIA was cut and we were attacked on 9-11-01 in New York. To pay for these programs, the military budget was cut and policies of disengagement and “dialog” with our enemies were preferred over shows of strength. 

Islamic State took notice. And so, the barbarians are no longer at the gates. They are here. Living among us, networking their creeds of jihad. National boundaries no long keep the bad guys out. They keep them in. 

It has been predicted by many that Europe as we know or knew it is over. Demographics prophesy that France will be a Muslim state within the next decade, and a sharia state soon after. Put simply, free French are not having children; sharia French are. The same could be said for England. 

In America we are teaching our surviving children to hate our culture, its history, its freedoms. They will not be a generation interested in protecting us. 

In America we rob our children of religious faith and leave them to wander in a nihilistic desert. They will fill this void and find meaning in a Facebook network of suicide warriors. 

In America we slaughter our unborn and euthanize our aged, blinded in our selfishness, not seeing that we are assisting in America’s own suicide. 

But in spite of all the wars and rumors of wars, all the fear on city streets, all the anguish in the once glorious city of light, we hope and do not despair. Those who can see are seeing for others. Those who can teach our children the truth are teaching them the truth. Those who can pray are praying. 

We prayed for Paris this morning in our little chapel in Berkeley. And I prayed that the eyes of the West have been briefly opened, hopefully long enough to change course, to destroy this cancerous evil spreading through the free world. We need a strong America again, one clear-eyed and courageous, yet humble enough to sacrifice for others. We need to wave the flag and revive old-fashioned patriotism.

We need an America that will defend the streets of Paris, once again showing the world and its tyrants that we will ensure peace through strength.

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Notes from Paris

Posted on May 24, 2015 | Leave a comment

IMG_0697 SMALLWe have settled into a historic Left Bank hotel not far from the Seine’s Pont Neuf, having traveled from London on the Eurostar train, via the Chunnel. 

As we sped underneath the waters of the English Channel (do they call it the French Channel on this side?) I marveled again at such technology and tried not to think of the seas above us. Security had been increased at the London St. Pancras Station, and as we edged step by step in line with too much luggage to drag and hoist onto the belt and the x-ray machines and then maneuver through passport control, I tried not to think of terrorism in crowded public places. 

Our modern world has paid a price for its modernity. Village or neighborhood risk has expanded to world-wide risk. We read of tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes far away and we mourn the victims. We follow wars and genocides and beheadings as though they were close by. The world has shrunk to our phone or laptop or TV. 

No wonder some are depressed, angered, and grieved. No wonder the suicide rates rise and euthanasia even considered. We feel for the planet, its peoples. Their sufferings are ours. While it seems at times too much for one person to bear, perhaps it is good to know these things happen and can happen; perhaps it is good that we are forced to look and see, to pull our heads out of the proverbial sand. But history attests that disaster is not new, whether natural or manmade; what is new is that we are aware of such horrors, we watch them unfold, sometimes on live media. 

IMG_0688 SMALLBut then, for Christians, we have our annual festival of Pentecost, the breath of the Holy Spirit breathing upon the disciples in Jerusalem. The disciples are given the wondrous power of language, to speak to those of differing tongues about the wonderful works of God. And such language, such speech, was repeated again and again in sermons and holy suppers that first century of the Church. These words, forming at first an oral tradition, were finally written down, first in St. Paul’s letters and St. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, and then in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Those codices, thought by many to have been the first use of the codex (leafed book) as opposed to scrolls, were again copied and recopied through the centuries down to the present day. 

So not only do we have the horizontal present-day knowledge of events worldwide, but we have vertical timeline knowledge, memory connecting the past to the present, coloring it. This timeline forms a historical highway leading to a crossroads where these two paths of knowledge meet. And of course, the road to the past also travels into the future, and we look ahead to the next minute, hour, day, week, year, and to our final passing into another, better world. We look back to our personal past and forward to our personal future; we look back to humanity’s past and forward to humanity’s future. And all the while we absorb the events of the world in the present day, surrounding us and demanding our constant attention. 

IMG_0685SMALLWe have in a sense eaten of the tree of knowledge, and we suffer for it. I am happy to have modern medicine and hygiene and the comforts of today, central heating and plumbing and running water. But science goes further than basic comforts; it allows us to design babies and kill those left over or unwanted. Such knowledge is godlike and without God’s help, we are lost in a sea of facts, data, with no good way to make sense of the jumble. The tree of knowledge, without God, produces poisonous fruit, deathly fruit. 

And so God gives us that help if we desire it. I love this Pentecost scene in Acts 2, when the disciples receive the power of the Holy Spirit. This breath of God comes upon them as a “rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house… there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire… upon each of them.” They are empowered by God; they have been given the means to express the profound events of the Incarnation and Resurrection that they have witnessed. Until this moment they had hid, timid, afraid, waiting for a promise made at the Ascension. After this moment they knew what to do; they knew what to say; they knew to whom to say it, where to say it, and above all how to say it. And of course, in time they confessed to what they had seen with their lives, as martyrs, with the exception of St. John. 

Pentecost is the union of God and man. It is the filling of man with God. And soon, as the disciples broke bread as Christ instructed them to do, consecrating the bread and wine to become his body and blood, taking and eating, and re-membering (re-forming) him, as they met together for these holy suppers of thanksgiving, eucharists, they became more and more filled with God, through his Spirit and his Son. 

God made sense of the marvelous works he had done on the Cross and in the empty tomb. He had made sense of it all and of all of us and our wars and our disasters. We too can enjoy this making-sense; we too can take and eat and re-member; we too can find answers to the disturbing tumult around us. We need only head for our local church. 

Paris is tumultuous and full of tourists this late in May. But on Sunday mornings it suddenly becomes quiet. The streets are silent, some empty. Families gather for brunch or bask in the parks. Lovers stroll. Cats scrounge for scraps in the open cafes. But the balmy weather is edged with sudden chill and brisk breezes and clouds scuttle over an ever-changing sky. The river rolls under the many bridges, and plane trees, lushly green, are happy with the end of winter. 

IMG_0691SMALLWe stepped through the quiet lanes this morning to say prayers with other faithful at the ancient church of St. Severen (13th C), and we followed the French Messe on the handout as best we could. The church was packed; candles flamed, stained glass glittered over high gothic double ambulatories; children in white capes and headbands with Holy Spirit paper flames, joined the procession. The songs and the singing echoed up and over us, swirling into the vaults. 

At peace with the city, with ourselves, and with God, we made our way to the Bateau-Mouches, the riverboats, to see Paris from the Seine. I thought how, at least for a time, everything made perfect sense, this Pentecote Sunday in Paris.

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Law and Order

Posted on May 3, 2015 | 1 comment

If we can’t police ourselves, others will police us. History, that long forgotten study of cultural, social, and national memory, is a clear witness that this is so.

And so I weep when I see Baltimore burn with such division, so inflamed by looters who discredit and dishonor the peaceful protestors of their community. Then, to see the city government allow this to happen, as though sanctioning it. For when law is not ordered, enforced by the state, disorder is seen as lawful.

We live in a democracy, a glorious, messy mix of peoples of all races, classes, ages. We are an experiment, according to European observers, and I often think the experiment is on the brink of collapse at moments like Ferguson and Baltimore. We have grasped a delicate balance between state and individual, between no speech and free speech, between public and private spheres. We are a family of passionate beliefs and ideals, often opposing, thrown together in a whirlwind we call society.

How are we to we get along? How do we express our deeply held opinions and beliefs? How do we protect property and individual freedoms? Provide for our future as a free people? Ensure our defense and care for the poor and innocent, the least among us? We do all of these things through laws, good laws.

Without law, we become slaves, property owned by the strongest among us. Without law to protect us, we allow might to make right. We hide in fear waiting for the looters who will, in the end, rule us.

I am looking forward to reading Os Guinness’s book, The Global Public Square: Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity. As Christianity is marginalized in our culture, so are the Judeo-Christian virtues of tolerance, self-restraint, and brotherly love, among many other values supporting democracy. To be sure, Christians and Jews do not always practice what they preach, but ideals must still be preached, they must still be heard and honored in the public square.

We can differ as Americans, but we can continue to converse. We can respect one another’s right to speak, to believe and live in peace, as long as we keep the peace. One group of color or creed need not dominate; but all must keep the peace.

And so as the looters set fire to their own community in Baltimore, and as others smashed car windows in our neighboring Oakland, I thought back to our inaugural lecture on Sunday night taking place at our new Center for Western Civilization, near UC Berkeley. It was well attended by young and old, from many racial backgrounds, and we were told by one speaker that each of us had lit a candle with our presence, adding to the light of freedom. There were also many words of encouragement at the reception afterwards: “So glad you are doing this,” they said again and again as I recalled the Center’s mission:

“Ignorance is the greatest threat to our civilization. Departments of Liberal Arts are shrinking in our major universities. Courses in the Western Tradition, history, literature, art, poetry, philosophy, and ethics are no longer required. Few students have enough understanding of the origins and principles of Western Civilization to maintain or advance our democratic institutions. The absence of this critical knowledge threatens the future of our personal freedoms. It is our responsibility to support every effort to keep the lights of freedom burning before we descend into darkness.”

The lights of freedom – our flaming candles – must help us see where we have come from in order to know where we are going. Fire is good when tamed and used constructively by man. It warms us when we are cold. It cooks our food and burns our garbage. In even turns our flesh to ash to be buried when we die. It lights the dark of the past, the present, the future. Each of us present on Sunday night on Bancroft in Berkeley was lighting a candle in and for our world; each of us was eager to keep the flame burning if only for another lifetime, another year, another day.

And in the end, each of us is only that, a single voice in a sea of voices and one soul in an ocean of souls. I carry, like my neighbor who sat next to me on the hard folding chair in that YWCA hall, a hope within me that my single voice matters, and that my neighbor’s voice matters too. The Baltimore looters matter, each one of them. All of us form America, and we can all carry a flame – our voice – into the public square of our nation, and of our world.

But the flame must not burn others; it must light their way. It must not destroy; it must give life. But how do we keep our candles lit in this darkness?

We keep them lit by respecting law and order; by enforcing peace in our communities. We keep them lit by understanding who we are – where we have been and where we are going.

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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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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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Secret Stairs in Berkeley

Posted on September 14, 2014 | Leave a comment

secret stairs 1I’ve been studying a map of Berkeley and the secret stairs of the Berkeley Hills produced by the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. The characters in my novel-in-progress, The Fire Trail, follow these steps that bridge roads winding into the forests above the university campus, winding up to the Fire Trails.

It is curious how maps organize a broad range of information and yet at the same time help the eye to focus and pinpoint one spot. Maps are like our brains, full of detail, a network of perception of both the past (memory), the present (observation) and the future (plans). Like this shiny unfolded paper that covers my desk, we too are mapped with broad ranges as well as focal points; our brains are miracles of design, epicenters of will and desire.

Novels are stories that connect the dots, draw the lines between moments of intense focus. These moments are often crises producing turning-points. A main crisis propels the major arc of the novel along, as sub-crises propel the chapters, and sometimes even sub-sub-crises propel the scenes. The process is much like walking through Berkeley, coming upon secret stairs that connect the winding roads; sometimes we rise and sometimes we fall.

History is full of these patterns, and these crises often catalyze action, focusing our attention, the attention of our community, the attention of our country, the attention of the world, upon a single incident. The crisis we remembered this week was the horrific bombing of the World Trade Center thirteen years ago on September 11. Our television screens invaded our homes with the shocking news, and although there had been many smaller crises leading up to this one, it was this one that caught our attention, that became America’s and the Western world’s turning point.

We had not been attacked on our own soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941. Our violence since then had been self-inflicted – shootings, riots, demonstrations. Some of us, in our arrogance, tried to deny it was the work of a foreign enemy. How could anyone do this? Each of us recalls, like the day that President Kennedy was shot, where we were and what we were doing when we found out, when we first saw the plumes rising, heard the rumble of the falling towers. It was as though the jets had sliced a knife into our hearts and minds. Our safe and civilized world crumbled; the map of our culture had been ripped apart and was increasingly incomprehensible. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were threatened; our freedom of speech – in word, deed, and worship – was attacked.

They say that the West experienced a similar shock as it counted its dead in the aftermath of World War I, a war we memorialize this year, begun one hundred years ago. Then too, the fire trail was breached, and the flames of barbarism crossed into our peaceful lands, threatening to destroy all that the West had built, over thousands of years since Abraham (then Abram) was called to leave the pagan world of Ur. World War I was a turning point, a catalyst that produced nihilism and despair, Lenin and Hitler and Mao, Nietzsche’s superman and the cold liberal arrogance of academic elite reigning from their own towers, these of ivory.

Church and temple imploded, divided on the path to take. Many of the once-faithful claimed God to be dead, or at least sleeping. Many delighted in such a claim, worshiping themselves and contributing to the anarchy of self-gratification now so fashionable. And so, darkness descended upon the Western world, lit here and there by communities of traditional believers, those who held onto their map, saw the way forward clearly in Scripture, Sacrament, and Creed, and who lit their candles, calling all to come and worship.

There have been three beheadings in the last month, at the last count, and I suppose now the world is watching and counting. We are finally focused. The many lines, the many roads, the many intersections where we weren’t sure which way to turn, have all converged in a single place on our map. Like the World Trade Center bombings, these violent images have stabbed our hearts and minds.

Through it all, the lights lit in our churches and temples burn brightly, calling us together, to gather as one heart and one mind before God. And as I knelt in the pew this morning in St. Joseph’s Chapel in Berkeley, my minutes and days of the week, however scattered, were gathered together in that single hour of worship. In that hour of song and praise and penitence and communion, all that was past was brought into the present and redeemed. All that would come in the future lay in God’s palm, cradled.

The connecting stairs were no longer secret passageways, but right there in beautiful bold print in my Book of Common Prayer. The paths led sensibly through the dark and into the light between the onionskin pages of my tattered Bible. Sin was forgiven, death destroyed. I could turn again, re-pent, re-form, in this weekly turning point. I could face the days ahead of me, the chaos of the world, the burning of the good and the beautiful and the true. For here was the essence, the distillation of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Here was life, for me and for each of us. Here was love that passeth all understanding, love that made sense of all maps.

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Armistice Day

Posted on November 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

The leaves have turned in our valley. Splotches of russets, golds, burgundies burst from yards and hillsides, lining lanes, dotting the landscape. On a day like today, when the dome of blue seems to shelter our land and the sun is still warm in spite of the crisp air, it nearly seems magical. Days are shorter as darkness falls early, making the time between the later sunrise and the earlier sunset more precious.

So when we drove to church through this autumn world of oranges and yellows and reds, the piercing sun upon the leaves outlining each one in my memory, I was thankful. 

I had a quiet week, forced quiet, once my back went out after reaching for something at an odd angle, once I hobbled home from the chiropractor, once I arranged my ice packs and wound tight my elastic brace. I sat gingerly in an armchair before a blazing fire and read Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve. Also in my stack was Girls on the Edge (Leonard Sax), and Paul Among the People (Sarah Ruden), among others. The first two books were for research purposes, homework for my next novel. From time to time I scanned my Kindle’s collection of poems and prose by Christina Rossetti, for I wish to include her work in my work as well. Sarah Ruden reminds us in her book on St. Paul to read Holy Scripture in the context of the cultural setting, something not often done, especially in the feminist world. 

I cancelled appointments and lived with my pain, hour to hour, pain which subsided gradually. I was given renewed admiration for those who live with pain day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. I was also forced to bracket a few days and create a mini-retreat. It made me more dependent on God. 

We are fragile creatures in a fragile world, yet live as though both (creatures and world) were stable and strong and predictable. Perhaps this delusion is a form of self-protection, for how else could we arrange our human affairs? I believe this overabundance of confidence is also a reflection of the real world to come – God’s eternity – a vision, sometimes hidden, sometimes not, that colors our imagination and longing and deep desire for beauty, truth, goodness, love. 

And so, in church today I was glad to recall Armistice Day which we celebrate officially tomorrow, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the truce was signed on the eleventh hour that ended the First World War, the “war to end all wars,” the “great war.” I was glad to give thanks for the brave men and women who fought then and who defend our country today, who protect its fragility, who shore up the shores of our land. I gave thanks for peace in our time, relative peace, having lived through Vietnam and listened to the tales of my chaplain father who served in the South Pacific in World War II. Those other wars weren’t supposed to happen after the “war to end all wars,” but happen they did. And wars continue to scar the land, the people, the world. 

My father couldn’t talk much about his wartime experiences, but we have large glossy black-and-white photos of his ship, the Phoenix, and he described once the terror of the kamikaze raids, the planes diving into the sea on either side the ship. I have his Bible, signed by General MacArthur, tucked away in my glassed-in portion of my bookcases. 

War continues, for the seed is planted deep in our hearts. Our preacher today spoke of the necessity of prayer to end wars, that only through prayer can hearts be changed, can nations’ hearts be changed, can laws that govern our land be true and just, laws passed by such renewed hearts. So today I prayed especially for humility and penitence and then, perhaps when my own heart is scrubbed clean of all ill feeling, all grudges, all resentments, all, all, all… only then can my heart be filled with wisdom to choose, only then can it be filled with God, only then can I pray for my country and its leaders, and only then pray for the world’s leaders. 

I am so thankful for the men and women who protect our beautiful country and our fragile people, our delicate democracy. I am thankful too for St. Martin of Tours who shares this feast day, November 11. Did the generals who set the date for the armistice choose St. Martin’s on purpose? I think so. They would have had a choice, and in 1918 they would have known this day was St. Martin’s Day, one of the more widely known and celebrated saints days in Europe, one said to be even trans-European. 

Martin (316-397) was a Roman soldier, a Christian, who gave half his cloak to a poor beggar who had none. He then had a dream in which Christ appeared to him saying that when he gave the cloak to the beggar he gave it to Christ himself. When Martin left military service, he took holy orders. He established a Benedictine monastery, traveled the land preaching, and became Bishop of Tours, France. 

His cloak was soon a relic housed by a cappella, a covering for the cape, and from this came our word chapel. Such a cloak came to be worn by clergy in the military, those who ministered on the battlefield and at sea, and these clergy came to be known as chaplains. Our own priest wears a cope when he celebrates the Holy Mass. My father, being a chaplain, was in this sense a descendant of St. Martin. 

The sun is setting now, the dome of blue no longer cloaking our world with its bright beauty. The darkness approaches. But we have memory and we have the saints and we have the brave men and women who protect us today. God provides these shelters, these human chapels, and I am thankful, thankful to be covered by the cloak of his incarnate love.

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