Tag Archives: United States

Thanksgiving for Families

Posted on November 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

It has been said that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. We don’t always get along with our siblings, our parents, our children. But we know they will always be our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Family bonds, however fragile, bear stress better than other bonds, but even these can break when hearts are broken.

Just so, we speak of our parish family, using similar words. Here too, the bonds are stronger than friendship, or perhaps different than friendship, more like family bonds. Common beliefs run deep like underground rivers, not always seen, but necessary to the watering of roots. As sacramental Christians, we believe that when we partake of God at his altar, he unites us with one another, past and future. God joins us, and he enjoins us to love one another in a special way. He enjoins us to invite all and everyone into this holy family. All are invited to his table; we are siblings, with one God the Father and one Mother the Church.

And like biological families, we do not always get along. Sometimes I think that because the belief and altar bonds are so deep we trespass on kindness, we assume assent and approval. We might push one another too far, for we sense things will all sort themselves out in time. I hear many such stories of other parishes, and witness such events in our own parish life. Because we love one another, we are close, and because we are close we have more to gain and more to lose, just like a natural family. Our hearts and souls are exposed for all to see.

We are all in training for Heaven, to sing with the family of God and the angels, the white-robed martyrs and the great prophets and apostles, with our ordinary, extraordinary brothers and sisters who have made the journey ahead of us. Our time on earth is a testing time, a time of trial and formation, of growth, of sanctification.

Ideally, within the natural family we learn discipline and delayed gratification. We learn to look out for one another. We learn work habits – beginnings, middles, and finishings. We learn to pass the potatoes and share a meal with one another. We learn to converse, to lace words into phrases so that we can touch the person alongside, to bring our minds and hearts together for a brief moment, like dancing. We learn the liturgy of the family, the morning rising and breakfasting and heading out for work and school, the coming together in the evening, lighting a supper candle, holding hands and saying grace, the washing up, the struggling through homework, the shared moments of recreation in the time left, the evening prayers, the slipping into sleep. It is a dance in which we never lose touch never let go of one another, as we follow the notes and the rhythm of family life. We learn to love by learning the law of love – the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not murder, lie, steal, covet; thou shalt honor God, honor parents, honor husband and wife. The law of love is straightforward, simple. The law of love is crucial, the center of the Cross.

In this daily dance we may not always get along, but the rituals pull us through anger and frustration, through selfishness, greed, envy, and other mishaps of our souls. We might fight with one another, spar, test, lash out or “vent” as is said today (as though we were machines), but with God’s grace, we apologize, we make amends by amending ourselves in humility, by repenting and reforming, by turning around. The family, hopefully, teaches us how to do this, or tries to, and in this daily hymn of life, we school our children to be part of larger families: the community, the town, the nation, the world. 

So we give thanks this Thanksgiving not only for families but for our national family, for the United States of America. We give thanks for this incredible experiment in democracy. Earlier this month we gave thanks for those who fought for our country to preserve her freedoms. Now we give thanks for those who founded her, who birthed her. 

Will America need to be re-found, re-born? Will she survive these challenging times? Will she crumble as the family crumbles under the weight of easy divorce, easy sex, easy abortion, easy love? Without the school of the family, this remarkable training ground in the law of love, will we find ourselves in a wilderness, a wild-ness, a human jungle in which an elderly woman is punched out by a heartless teen or a tourist is shot for the fun of it, a jungle in which girls and boys die from binge drinking, drugs, and Internet bullying, in which babies are slaughtered, thrown out, before they breathe their first breath?

As Americans, our beliefs in freedom run deep like a river, unseen, assumed and unquestioned. Do we take these freedoms for granted? Do we exercise our rights without considering the accompanying responsibilities that support those rights? Are our American roots in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, roots that tap the deep waters of freedom of speech and religion – are these roots shriveling underground and unseen? Are we paying attention to their dying?

This Thanksgiving week, as we gather together the fragments of of our families, those from near and far, those members whom we like and those whom we don’t, we give thanks for this a-gathering, in church and at home, before altars and hearths. We give thanks for our freedom to gather in the squares and legislatures of our land. We give thanks for law and order, such as it is. We give thanks for family life that trains us for participation in a greater American life. 

And we pray that we, a nation founded under God, will preserve and protect those institutions that water liberty and a love for one another: the family and the church.

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On Liberty and Equality for All

Posted on July 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

Peggy Noonan writes today in the Wall Street Journal about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and its upcoming 150th anniversary in November. The Gettysburg Address is short, only three paragraphs and two minutes long, given at Gettysburg Cemetery for those who died in the then-ending Civil War, but it is said to be the most famous speech in the history of our country if not the West. Evidently President Lincoln wrote it out, corrected it once, then delivered it with Biblical cadences and phrasing. He was not the main speaker that day and was expected to say little, deferring to the lead orator. History proved otherwise, at least in importance. 

Ms. Noonan writes of this because, of course, it is the week of our nation’s birthday when we reflect on our innocent origins and giant ideals. It is a time when we as Americans consider from where we have come, where we are today, and where we are heading. We consider liberty and equality and the health of the Union. In 1863, at the close of the terrible war against slavery that divided our country, brother against brother, equality for all became the rallying cry for the North. Slavery of any kind denies equality and liberty. No one has the right to own another. In the course of the history of man, Caucasians have been enslaved, Asians have been enslaved, Africans have been enslaved, all owned as though they were products, as though they had no unalienable rights, no human dignity. These tragedies cry out to us, from Roman galleys to southern plantations.

So today, we say, there is no slavery. But many disagree, saying the unborn are the slaves of our modern world. Since 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled in essence that a woman owned the child within her, the unborn became slaves. And this ruling continues to be the law of the land, allowing women to own innocent Americans, to have the power of life and death.

Today a civil war rages in the hearts, minds, and bodies of our citizens. The divide is deep and is similar to the nineteenth-century Civil War we recall this autumn of 2013. I do not know what the outcome of today’s civil war will be, but I cry for our country so divided.

And like many others in many other times in history, I pray for an end to this slavery. I pray for every American to be equal under the law, from the moment of conception, for we are meant to be a nation of liberty and equality for all. And as Abraham Lincoln said, such a war is a test “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure… “

Can we long endure? Many have died in this cause, millions aborted each year, mothers shattered by grief, fathers mourning their lost children, grandparents never knowing their grandchildren. The count rises. President Lincoln’s words ring true for us today:

“…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

As an American, on this 237th birthday of Independence, I resolve this too.

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On Freedom

Posted on July 1, 2013 | 1 comment

It is with a reflective pause that I approach this Fourth of July, 2013, for it seems to me we have never before faced so many threats to our freedoms as Christians and to our freedoms as Americans, as part of a culture steeped in a Judeo-Christian ethos.

The encroachments have been small and sliding, one here, one there, hard to trap, painful to face, difficult to define, control, and challenge. The most recent – the Supreme Court’s definition of marriage – has, I believe, harmed the traditional family and thus has harmed the Church, two pillars of our society. The answer perhaps is to change the naming, the wording, and call marriage “traditional marriage” and not simply marriage to separate it from other forms, for polygamy and incest will soon follow (there is no legal argument against either now). Either way, the government has decided to no longer support the traditional family as a vital institution in American society, one to be encouraged for the sake of the country.

Of course the family has been assaulted for many years, at least since the 1960s. The birth control pill divorced sex from procreation, and redefined marriage. We wanted our sexual freedom without responsibility. We wanted to marry and not necessarily have children. These desires naturally led to the right to kill those children in the womb. When we fell out of love, when the bliss settled into everyday reality, we embraced the chance to deny our marriage vows.

I have been divorced, and I know the heartache and trials that preclude, include, and result in divorce. I do not defend easy divorce – we must take stock seriously any act that threatens the family.

Yes, I pause each year and count our freedom-losses as we approach Independence Day. The Founders knew the importance not only of faith and family, but of free speech, and the harnessing of free speech is part of that  freedom-loss count. For language has been vandalized, truth has been put on trial, and in many cases Christians have been muzzled, afraid of offending.

If we deny our Judaic-Christian ethos, what have we as a nation? What rights, what freedoms are left to protect?

I read recently an article by Mary Eberstad, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, that was most encouraging. She believes that when we hit rock bottom and realize that the government cannot possibly afford all it promises, that it cannot replace the family as a social institution of caregivers and educators, passing on the values of our society, that the government will wake up and support the institution of family once again. We pray this will happen sooner than later, at least the realization, and that there will be an America still to protect and an institution of family still to revive.

So this year, I celebrate the freedoms we have left, which are many. Conservatives and Christians – Christian conservatives and conservative Christians – can still speak out. We can still meet in the public square. Our voice can be still be heard, even if faint, often muzzled and, more effectively, ridiculed. There is time, but the clouds gather. The pulpit is threatened, print is threatened, public education is threatened.

As a Christian, I believe what the Church says is true: God wins in the end. But I love my country, I love my culture, I love the freedom and creative energy of Americans. I love that someone like my husband, a “poor boy from East Oakland,” as he has often called himself, could rise in a major corporation through sacrifice and hard work.

But the values of sacrifice and hard work are part of this body of traditional values that is dying. Without marriage and the family this treasure will not be passed on to the next generation. Many of our public schools no longer teach those values or where they came from. They no longer teach American History, World History, the History of Western Civilization, the past that shows us what makes civilization civil. And what does make civilization civil? The Judeo-Christian heritage upon which our Founders founded our nation.

Many have fought for these values, many continue to fight around the world. Martyrs die daily for their faith. Soldiers lay down their lives.

We celebrate these men and women, and our Founders and our freedoms. We raise the flag on the Fourth of July. But we also kneel in prayer as never before.

Here’s to thee, America the Beautiful!

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On Marriage

Posted on February 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

Much has been said about marriage of late, the right to marry whom we choose regardless of gender, the right to live as man and wife outside of marriage, the right to dissolve a marriage for any reason.

As my husband and I celebrate our thirty-first anniversary, it is difficult not to hear these wailings all around us. But these “rights” dilute my idea of marriage, encourage me to see myself as an isolated individual with no effect upon society.

This is a fallacy, the “isolated individual with no effect on society.” My story, my life, affects those around me;  every person’s life has such an effect. Indeed, as John Donne said, “No man is an island.” We are responsible to and for one another in many, many ways. But probably the most powerful way is how we value marriage.

I have come to see through the years that marriage is both a religious rite and a social rite. The role of Church and Temple have clearly defined marriage before God as a joining of two persons in one flesh, a joining that creates a third person, to form family; marriage is and has been so ordained since Eden and reaffirmed by Christ. Unions outside of marriage are considered outside God’s law, against God’s created order and thus a direct hindrance to happiness.

Let me first admit (full disclosure) that my present marriage is a second one, and that I have not always acted in accordance with God’s law, I have sinned and will sin again, no doubt. We fall, others fall around us, and our world is riddled with the pain and suffering of Adam and Eve. As a Christian, however, I confess and am redeemed; God picks me up and I try once again to live and love as he would have me live and love.

Marriage is, as God knows in his infinite wisdom, a proper concern of government. Marriage is a public matter, one that determines the future of the nation. Children thrive in traditional families, raised by a father and a mother in a committed relationship, publicly declared in the marriage ceremony. The State has an interest in the next generation – their health, their knowledge of right and wrong, their courage to fight for the State against foreign powers, their ability to teach these national needs to their children, the next generation. The State expresses this self-interest in its definition of marriage. It says, we will support and encourage this relationship through tax codes, through various benefits. We will support this definition of family because it will mean less crime on our streets, less welfare, less dependency on our national health systems.

Since the birth control pill became available marriage has been under attack. One could say it has always been under attack, which is true, since marriage requires sacrifice and selflessness, not mankind’s strong suits. But this little pill, produced for us in the ‘sixties, defined recreation, not procreation, as the primary goal of sexual union. If it feels good, do it, a slogan soon repeated in many areas of our culture, like a spreading cancer. Take what you want when you want it.  At first the ramifications of the pill weren’t obvious to many of us, for didn’t we now have control over our bodies? Wasn’t it a good thing that we could plan our families (and careers)? But the slide soon began, the slippery slope of sexual freedom.

Soon followed no-fault divorce, something I will admit I  found useful at the time, but something that weakened marriage further. Now the State stated that marriage was a flimsy thing and not so important after all – if a couple disagrees, they should split. Adultery was understandable, for the demands of “being in love” triumphed over the sacrifice of committed love.

After several generations of children raised with one parent, we find crime increased, school scores historically low, obesity raging and leading to other epidemics that will drown our health care system.

So marriage was in bad shape long before it was challenged by questions of gender. Even so, the government’s redefinition of marriage, passed in numerous states, may be the death blow to a future peaceful society. The question is not, why not two men or two women, but rather, why not three and one, or four and three, or sisters and brothers, or fathers and daughters. Why not, as one of our Hollywood greats said a while back, he and his dog? (He answered his question by saying the only reason why not was the difficulty of determining consent with regards to the dog.)

Thirty-one years ago at St. Peter‘s Anglican Church in Oakland, California, I stepped up the red-carpeted aisle to marry the man I wanted to commit to for the rest of my life. I was thirty-four, a divorced single parent with a nine-year-old son, and I was going to try marriage again. So, before God and country, and before friends and family lining the eighty oak pews, I pledged my troth.

The State had an interest in my marriage. I don’t think I fully understood, in February of 1982, why later I paused in the narthex to sign papers to be filed with the State of California. I knew that my son needed a father and that I loved this man by my side, to whom I had pledged my troth through sickness and health. So I signed my name on the marriage documents that would be filed in Sacramento. But today I understand why those documents were important, why Sacramento was interested.

Thirty-one years later, my husband and I, now both gray and worn, stood in our oak pew in the same parish church and stepped out to the red-carpeted aisle. We walked toward the altar, meeting the priest at the chancel steps, under the flaming sanctus lamp. There, before our parish family, our new rector, representing the Church, blessed us, praying words of unifying strength, a re-affirmation of the importance of our marriage, ’til death do us part.

When I gather with my extended family at Christmas and Easter, I see a mini society. Our children are adults with children of their own, and some of those grandchildren now adults as well. I have come to appreciate what God’s law means to our world. For state-sanctioned traditional marriage ensures that we teach his law to future generations, that we ensure our children’s children’s children will know peace in their country, peace coming from the stability of the union of a man and a woman in Holy Matrimony.

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A Potent Time

Posted on January 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

It is a potent time.

The edge of Epiphany, along the border of Christmas, hovers over the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade and the Presidential inauguration. A potent few days, as we reflect on the light of Christ coming to the world of the gentiles, the horror of forty years of legalized infanticide, and the celebration of a duly elected president sworn in to office, sworn to uphold the laws of the land. And then there’s football to divert us.

As for children lost to abortion, I pray the light of Epiphany might fill those dedicated saints who are marching to save future generations, holding banners in the freezing temperatures of our towns and cities across this great land. And I pray that the light of Epiphany may enlighten our president as he continues his term of governance, that it may enlighten all of our elected men and women who represent you and I in Congress.

We are a nation of elections, a democracy. And thus each of us must be informed voters, ready to make all the difference in the future of our culture and society. Each one of us must decide the future of our people; we cannot avoid this responsibility. Each one of us must turn away from the siren songs of the media and search out the truth. Each one of us, in a democracy, are accountable members of this body politic.

These are heavy matters, especially today in the cold dark of winter, and so we like to watch football. We are a fragile nation but a good one, one that continues to enlighten – and defend – other nations. America beckons everyone. All the world seeks to come here. Yet we have been chastened of late. We have been pruned. Will America fall? some ask. Will it survive without its Judeo-Christian roots? Will it flower once again?

My rose bushes have been pruned. I am told they must be cut back so that they will grow new blossoms. It is hard to believe this as I gaze at the butchered stalks in the pale light outside my window. But as I wait for spring, I think how blessed I am to be nourished by Sunday church. This morning my senses were warmed by the red-carpeted nave leading to the high altar and tented tabernacle. I was nourished by the experience of God, by holy worship, where robed priests and acolytes step softly and reverently as though each movement mattered, and my prayers and songs danced with them through the liturgy of the Eucharist.

Eucharist, I understand, means thanksgiving. And we have much to be thankful for. In the Eucharist, the Mass, we empty ourselves so that we may be filled up. We arrive wintry souls, barren stalks, and as we prune ourselves of the sins of pride and passion that have owned our hours this last week, as we empty ourselves, clean out our souls, we ready ourselves for God’s light to enter. And enter He does, gently, fully, lovingly. By the end of this precious hour of procession, song, prayer, word, and sacrament we are filled up with God, filled by God. We give thanks, we praise, we become small in the presence of glory, in the beauty of holiness. Then, filled with God, we can hear his voice. We can hear what we are to do, how we are to evaluate and judge, why we are to love and suffer in the coming week.

God’s spirit descends upon us just as His spirit descended upon Jesus when baptized by John. Our preacher explained this morning that Jesus is the very same Word breathed by God the Father over the waters, when our world was birthed. In the Eucharist, we take in that Word and are recreated, re-generated.

Regenerated. I have found that if I am given God’s direction, His light in this way – kneeling in a warm church on a cold Sunday – that the past week and the future week make sense. I enter the doors empty and leave full. I know as I descend the stairs to our parish hall for coffee and sandwiches that I have been made new. And I have been given hope that my will might possibly merge with God’s, the only true path to happiness.

Without this light, I slip into self, into darkness. I become full with other things and God cannot find room. My days fall into chaos, confusion, sadness.

But with regular worship, I can see and understand. The world makes sense: the sacrament of time – Epiphany merging into Lent; the fitting and happy celebration of a democratic election accomplished in (for the most part) a law-abiding land, a quilt of many cultures and skins and points of view. Even the horror of this forty-year memorial, mourning the innocents slaughtered, I know, one day, will be redeemed.

For the light of God, indeed God himself, wins in the end. He shines in the dark even if the darkness comprehends it not. And He shines for us, should we desire Him, especially in church.

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