Category Archives: Episcopal Church

Juneteenth: Recalibrating the Narratives of Race in America

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Enslaved African Americans in Virginia, May 14, 1862 (Library of Congress).

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (I John 1:8).

I went to have my eyes checked this week. In the waiting room, I had a conversation with a man my age whose family has lived in Washington state for six generations. His great-grandfather had come to the Northwest on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s. “He was a Presbyterian minister,” he told me. “Before coming west, he managed the Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s plantation in Tennessee.” 

This man was clearly proud of his family heritage, as though the whole history of America were coursing through his veins. But the thousand-acre Hermitage, the source of Jackson’s wealth, had only grown and prospered through the labor of enslaved people. I wanted to ask this man what he knew about his great-grandfather’s story. How did a minister of the gospel end up in charge of such a brutal and evil enterprise? How could he have justified it? How did his descendants feel about this stain on their family tree? How does the descendant right in front of me feel about it?

I sensed that such questions would not be welcomed. And it was not the best setting to explore them. Before I could frame a response, I was summoned to the examination room, where I would learn that my eyes were fine. But what about America’s eyes? When we look at ourselves and our history, can we see clearly now?

In 1989, African-American poet Lucille Clifton took a tour of Walnut Grove Plantation in South Carolina. She was the only black person on the tour. Throughout the tour, not a word was said about slavery. But when the tour took them to the family burying ground, Clifton noticed some crosses and markers outside its walls—the nameless graves of slaves. So she asked the guide, “Why haven’t you mentioned slaves?” 

The guide said that she hadn’t wanted to “embarrass” her, and Clifton responded, “Well, I’m not a slave, and I don’t know why you think I’d be embarrassed.” So the guide, somewhat chagrined, looked in the plantation inventory and found that there had been ten male slaves there, plus however many uncounted females, who were not considered valuable enough to inventory.

Clifton’s experience became a poem:

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.…

tell me your bashful names
and i will testify.… [1]

After she had read this poem around South Carolina for a while, Ms. Clifton got a letter from the director of the group that has restored the plantation, saying that they had built a model slave cabin and were now telling the story of all the people who lived there. And then, after one of her readings, a woman came up to her and said that her family had once owned Walnut Grove, but she herself had never gone back—she was too ashamed. “The next time I come here,” Clifton told her, “you and I will go together.” [2]

As a white American man, I know that I need to go on such a journey, to the places where the “bashful names” can testify about the racism in our culture and in our selves. I need to get my eyes checked, my ears checked, my heart checked. We all do. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. 

The disturbing eruption of overt racism in recent years has shocked and horrified us—This isn’t who we are!—but perhaps some good may come from its blatant visibility. Issues of race in America are now harder to deny. The need to repent is harder to ignore. A hard diagnosis quickens a healing response. Confession fosters renovation. 

Not everyone in America is willing to do this work.  Right wing cringing over “critical race theory” is reaching ludicrous proportions. Texas politicians are crafting laws to protect fair-skinned children from having their feelings hurt by learning about white folks doing evil things to black folks. A watchdog group in Nevada wants teachers to wear body cams so they will never dare say a bad word about American history. 

But for God’s best friends, the way of fear is the way of death. As Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers puts it, “many of us long to live as beloved community and to reckon with the pain that racism has inflicted – and continues to inflict – in our personal lives, our churches and institutions, and society as a whole.” [3]

Spellers is part of the team that has created Sacred Ground, a powerfully formative church engagement with race and racism in America, using films, readings and dialogue “to call us from our small worlds and small screens and into intentional, sustained circles in which we can pray, watch, share our own stories, reflect, wonder, reckon, heal, and commit to action.” [4]  In small groups on Zoom, my own local parish has been making this journey on sacred ground over the past seven months. The material is rich and the conversations real. Some of our learnings are unsettling, even heartbreaking, but the trajectory of healing and transformation predominates. We move with our eyes on the prize, toward that promised land undimmed by human tears. [5]

To mark the inauguration of Juneteenth, the new federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery in America, journalist Amy Goodman interviewed writer and poet Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Responding to the criticism that the new holiday doesn’t really change anything, Smith argued that “names and symbols and holidays … aren’t just names and symbols and symbolism. What they are are reflective of the stories that people tell. And those stories shape the narratives that societies carry. And those narratives shape public policy. And public policy, that shapes the material conditions of people’s lives. Which is not to say that taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee or making Juneteenth a holiday is going to erase the racial wealth gap. Of course not. But what it is is part of an ecosystem of narratives and stories and ideas that can help us recalibrate our understanding of why certain communities look the way that they do and what needs to be done and invested in those communities to create a new set of opportunities.” [6]

I encourage you to view or read the entire interview, but let me leave you with Smith’s conclusion, when he recited a powerful passage from his new book.

“I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains.

“Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.

“What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?” [7]

Beyond the ordeal: A biblical vision

[1] For the complete text, and a recording of Clifton reading it: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Lucille-Cliftons-at-the-cemetery-walnut-grove-plantation-south-carolina-1989

[2] From Clifton’s 1995 interview with Bill Moyers: https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/criticism/bill-moyers-interview-cemetery-walnut-grove-plantation-south-carolina-1989

[3] The Rev.Canon Stephanie Spellers, https://www.episcopalchurch.org/sacred-ground/message/

[4] Ibid.

[5] For more information on Sacred Ground and how to get it for your community: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/sacred-ground/

[6] For the video interview: https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2021/6/18   For the text of the interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/18/juneteenth_federal_holiday

[7] Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021).  Available at https://www.clintsmithiii.com

Praying the Hours (7): Compline

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St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington (Jim Friedrich)

All of our hearts ask the night this question: Am I safe and am I loved? 

— Brother David Steindl-Rast & Sharon Lebell, Music of Silence

Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; 
that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.

— Compline Antiphon for the Nunc Dimittis

In The Benedictine Gift to Music, Katharine Le Mée links the musical octave to the progressive sequence of canonical hours. Do is the starting point (Lauds). Re and Mi launch us into the energetic activity of the morning (Prime/Terce). Fa, when only a tentative half-step is taken, is a moment of indecision or uncertainty about the meaning and the outcome of our journey (Sext). Sol, “a bright, triumphant note,” signals our recommitment to the day’s work, wherever it may lead (None). La continues onward, but it is more subdued, accepting a sense of loss as we let go of what is behind us (Vespers). Si is charged with an unsustainable tension, resolved only by our surrender to the resting place of Do (Compline).

“The key to the completion of the octave,” says Le Mée, “is our willingness to give up any personal desire to know exactly what should happen and our claim to and control of the results. The last step, therefore, is one of surrender, the point of second awakening, where synthesis and integration take place.”[i]

Before you go to bed tonight, try singing the octave syllables, ascending slowly and deliberately from Do to Do, visualizing the progress of the day in those seven steps. Notice particularly the relaxing of tension as you make the final half-step. Just so does Compline complete[ii] the circle of the hours, inviting us to cease our strivings and rest in the arms of grace. “Entering the fullness of night, we return from song back into the silence.” [iii]

Designed for tired bodies, the Compline rite is short and to the point. It begins with the most succinct of bedtime prayers: The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. The iambic rhythm of its three last words (two pairs of syllables with the stress on the second of each) replicates in sound the sense of an ending: a-per-fect-end. It’s like a gymnast sticking a landing—emphatic and conclusive. And so it should be, since “a perfect end” expresses multiple levels of cessation: the end of the day, the end of life, and the end of time. 

Of course, when Christians say “the end,” we are speaking about more than termination. We are speaking about purpose. What is the purpose of a day, or a life? What is the meaning of time and history?  We don’t always know exactly where a path leads until we reach its end; it is only at the end that the journey’s meaning is fully revealed. Still, we get hints and glimpses of our ultimate future—our “perfect end”—along the way, so that we might, with God’s grace, proceed in hope rather than dread.

The connection between sleep and death is an ancient and enduring one. When someone dies, we pray for “the repose of the soul,” that the deceased may “rest in peace.” The two states share an outward resemblance, and a subjective one as well. When we go to sleep, our eyes close, and the conscious mind becomes “dead to the world.” From the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, a recumbent figure was a common feature on European tombs. When stone sepulchers went out of fashion, the corpse itself was arranged to imitate the sculpted sleepers of the old tombs: lying peacefully on its back, with hands joined or crossed.[iv]

Jacopo Della Quercia, Tomb of Ilaria del Caretto (1406-1408), San Martino cathedral, Lucca, Italy. (Jim Friedrich)

Every sleep is a practice in letting go, a rehearsal for the inevitable dispossession of death. You can’t take it with you. What’s done is done. Surrender control. Plans, projects, worries, hopes—let it all go. Exit the visible world and sink into the abyss of the dark unknown. It’s rather amazing that most of us do this routinely every night. But our mortal bodies don’t really give us a choice. Whether at the end of the day or the end of our life, surrender is how the game is played.

Surrender is best done willingly. If we believe there is something beyond oblivion, we can lie down in peace. Under most circumstances, we all believe in tomorrow morning as a matter of course. We usually do it without thinking. We go to sleep … we wake up … life goes on. But when we meet the hour of our death, can we still trust in the morning after?

In their reflections on the canonical hours, David Steindl-Rast and Sharon Lebell express the existential mixture of anxiety and faith faced by the thoughtful soul in the Compline experience:

Night is at once threat and grace: threat, because when night falls, we stand at the edge of chaos – the neat little world that we have created for ourselves throughout the day now threatens to fall back into chaos; but grace also, because the protection, the divine nearness to which we have become accustomed through the chants and prayers throughout the day, will not abandon us.[v]

We should “keep death daily before our eyes,” says the Rule of St. Benedict.[vi] Only so can we maintain clarity and perspective about our existential situation. If you forget death, you won’t know who you are or where you stand. We are creatures who will die; pretending otherwise will give us less life, not more. As Teresa of Avila reminds us, “Don’t be troubled. Everything passes, but God stays. One who has God lacks nothing.” [vii]

Mark Barrett, O.S.B., tells of a fellow monk serving as headmaster of a posh British school. At a gathering of parents and donors, he told them that the school “prepared its students not for Oxbridge, the City or the Guards, but for death.” Barrett doesn’t report the speech’s effect on enrollment. [viii]

In my essay on Vespers, I wrote about practicing the Examen, a prayerful review at the close of day. “From the perspective of the end, we can look back on the story of the day as a whole: How did it go, for good or ill? … Where did God meet us—and did we notice? … When did we remember—or forget—to be our truest selves? … And, most importantly, did we say yes to Love?” The Examen may also be done at Compline (which includes a brief confession), though on the threshold of sleep any interrogation should be brief. The hour is made for letting go, even of the critical work of mending the soul. As Elizabeth Yates puts it in her Book of Hours: 

This is no time to dwell upon the disturbing, the unattained, the imperfect. To do so would be to find sleep elusive … By an act of will, that which may have marred the day must be given over to God to enable thinking to be anchored fast in that which is good. Rest will come then, and with it the restoration that is sleep.[ix]

Lord, it is night. 
The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.
It is night after a long day. 
What has been done has been done; 
What has not been done has not been done;
let it be.

— Night Prayer, A New Zealand Prayer Book

Compline is grounded in deep trust. Entering the darkness, we renounce our fear. The Psalms of Compline tune our awareness to the protective Presence which will carry us through the night: 

O God, make speed to save us.
O Lord, make haste to help us. (70:1)

Keep me as the apple of your eye;
hide me under the shadow of your wings. (17:8)

I lie down in peace; at once I fall asleep;
for only you, Lord, make me dwell in safety. (4:8)

Into your hands I commend my spirit,
for you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth. (31:5)

These are images of profound sweetness, sinking us into the embrace of the Divine Beloved. Every night, including our last, we “fall asleep in Christ.” But the act of complete surrender to the Divine Other is not lightly done. Jesus spent his last breath commending his spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46), so when we ourselves say the same words we are connecting to something far deeper than a good night’s sleep. The sacred words commit us to the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising. What we have been will be exchanged for what we must be. It is a costly Way, but we never walk alone—or entirely in the dark. Come what may, we remain in the protective shelter of God’s love. This is the central meaning of Compline.

Perseid meteor shower, August 11, 2013 (Jim Friedrich)

Our ancient night prayers, composed centuries before electricity, strike matches of faith in the endless black: Be our light in the darkness, O Lord, and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night … protect us through the hours of this night … illumine this night with your celestial brightness … preserve us in peace, and let your blessing be upon us always. 

These are beautiful and consoling prayers on the verge of sleep. However, at the end of any given day, not everyone is having a peaceful night and a perfect end. There are many “who work, or watch, or weep this night.” Our own day is not truly complete until we gather them also into the blessing way. A movingly earnest prayer, attributed to St. Augustine, does this work by putting emphatic stresses on a series of beseeching verbs: 

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen. 

Compline draws to a close with the Nunc Dimittis, Simeon’s valedictory canticle from Luke’s gospel. The long and varied symphony of the canonical hours resolves into a peaceful diminuendo: with this quiet song of surrender, the day’s music fades away into the Great Silence. 

Lord, now let your servant depart in peace
as you have promised, 
for these eyes of mine have seen the Savior …

Old Simeon has waited all his life for the moment when a lifetime of longing would find its perfect end. When he sees the infant Jesus brought to the Temple, he recognizes the child as the salvation of the world, “a Light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of God’s people Israel.” In this revelatory moment, to which all his years have led, he makes his own personal Compline. Now his “day” is over. His story is complete. He does not cling to the moment, for it is gift, not possession. He knows how to walk away and let go.[x]

Since the fourth century, the Song of Simeon has been sung by countless voices at the close of day. Its calm, accepting spirit supplies a perfect end to our daily pilgrimage from Vigils to Compline. The canticle also prepares us for the hour of our death, teaching us to end our days with gratitude and trust, that we may, at the last, depart in peace.

In his deeply informed and formative book on Compline, Prayer as Night Falls,[xi] Kenneth V. Peterson balances the “little death” of Compline and sleep with the divine promise of an ultimate awakening. A longtime member of the celebrated Compline Choir at Seattle’s St. Mark’s Cathedral, Peterson describes a choir pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral in the year 2000. After singing Compline with a congregation in the great medieval church, the choir descended in procession to the crypt. There, in the company of sleeping saints, they sang a text by John Donne, conveying in the gloom a foretaste of resurrection morning:

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven,
To enter that gate and dwell in that house,
Where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, 
But one equal light;
No noise nor silence, but one equal music;
No fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
No ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
In the habitation of thy glory and dominion,
World without end. Amen.

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Donne’s text, from a sermon in 1628, was adapted by Eric Milner-White (1884-1964). The music was composed by Peter Hallock, founder of the Compline Choir, in 1991. You can listen to it here. For more on Compline (including a directory of Compline services in North America, and links to lovely musical examples), visit Kenneth Peterson’s rewarding websites:

Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline
Compline Underground

This concludes my series on the Canonical Hours. I hope you have enjoyed the journey, and been encouraged to deepen your own practice of holy attention to the living of your days.

Here are the links to the rest of the series:

  1. “Reclaiming my time”
  2. Vigils
  3. Lauds & Prime
  4. Terce
  5. Sext & None
  6. Vespers

[i] Katharine Le Mée, The Benedictine Gift to Music (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003), 61-68.

[ii] Compline comes from the Latin for “complete.” The rite completes the day, while at the same time modeling the faithful completion of mortal life. 

[iii] Brother David Steindl-Rast & Sharon Lebell, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day (Brooklyn, NY: Ulysses Press, 2001).

[iv] Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 22-24, 243-247.

[v] Steindl-Rast & Lebell.

[vi] Rule of St. Benedict, 4.47.

[vii] The 16th-century saint, who knew her share of turbulence, said this in a famous poem, “Nada te turbe,” which has been set to a Taize chant in both Spanish and English. Thirty years ago I sang it with 2000 pilgrims in the candlelit Taize church, experiencing deep calm as a lightning storm raged outside. “Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten …”

[viii] Mark Barrett, O.S.B., Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscape of Our Lives (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2002), 106.

[ix] Elizabeth Yates, A Book of Hours (Noroton, CT: Vineyard Books, 1976), 49.

[x] Barrett’s commentary on the Nunc Dimittis cites a poem by Cecil Day Lewis about “his experience as a parent of ‘walking away’ from his son on the boy’s first day of school.” Lewis says, “… selfhood begins with a walking away, / And love is proved in the letting go.” (Crossing, 108)

[xi] Kenneth V. Peterson, Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2013). Peterson’s thoughtful exploration of the history and meaning of Compline is, as Phyllis Tickle has said, “a totally satisfying experience for mind and soul.” And the book’s website, cited above, provides beautiful musical examples. 

Praying the Hours (6): Vespers

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This is the sixth in a series on the canonical hours, the ancient Christian practice for living a mindful day. The first, “Reclaiming My Time,” gives a general introduction, with a list of helpful resources for your own practice of prayer and meditation. This reflection considers Vespers, the transition between day and night.

Vesper Light, Island of Paros, Greece (Jim Friedrich, 2015).

Now the day is over, 
Night is drawing nigh, 
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky. 

— Sabine Baring-Gould [i]

This familiar 19th-century Vespers[ii] hymn was dropped from the Episcopal hymnal in the proposed revision of 1982. A selection committee had deemed the text too sentimental and the tune too simple (5 of its 8 bars are on the same note, a kind of Anglican “om!”). But when the new hymnal came to a vote at the church’s General Convention 38 years ago, a motion was made from the floor to restore this old favorite. I was present for that debate, when one delegate after another stepped to a microphone to declare how much that hymn had meant to them, how formative the singing of it had been for their sense of belonging to a spiritual community with a fondness for dusk. The motion passed easily, and the hymn was rescued from the ecclesiastical dumpster. 

Unlike its Vespers companions in the hymnal, its opening verse makes no mention of Christ or the Creator. It offers no theology of the day as divine gift, sings no praise to the Source of eternal brightness. It simply devotes quiet attention to the sensory data of the twilight hour: shadows lengthen, light fades. As temporal creatures, we have an inborn sensitivity to the vanishing of time. The Vesper drama, the most poignant of all the hours, is performed daily: sun goes … light fades … night falls. Failing to attend would impoverish both consciousness and spirit.

“Absolutely unmixed attention” (Simone Weil’s definition of prayer) is how to keep Vespers as a sacred hour, a time to engage with the sense of an ending and acknowledge our own temporality. Days must end, lives must end, and both passages deserve our profoundest attention.

Winter sunset, Washington coast (Jim Friedrich, 2016).

Fairer through Fading—as the Day
Into the Darkness dips away—
Half Her Complexion of the Sun—
Hindering—Haunting—Perishing—

— Emily Dickinson [iii]

How many Vespers have we missed, shut inside with the lights on or distracted by our screens? And when we do honor the hour with our attention, it is rarely in community. I suspect we could trace the affection for “Now the day is over” to the effect of ritualizing the inevitability of ending in the company of others. Such shared, collective awareness is a powerful thing. When I try now to recall memories of singing that hymn, I don’t see individual faces, but only a group, deeply united in song. It is always dusk, whether at a campfire or in a candlelit church as the windows grow dark. The strength of our voices feels surprising, surpassing their usual reticence, as if a greater power has possessed us in the form of sound.

For those of us not adept at goodbyes, bidding farewell to the day can produce a certain melancholy, but this is more than compensated by the beauty of the vesper light—the saturated sunset tints, the subtle tonalities of twilight.  

Vespers also prompts what Jesuits call the Examen: a prayerful review of the day. “In the evening we shall be examined on love,” warned St. John of the Cross, comparing day’s end to the Last Judgment. And, adds poet Thomas Centolella, “it won’t be multiple choice … No cheating, / we’ll be told … no more / daily evasions.” [iv]

From the perspective of the end, we can look back on the story of the day as a whole: How did it go, for good or ill? … Where did God meet us—and did we notice? … When did we remember—or forget—to be our truest selves? … And, most importantly, did we say yes to Love?

Few days go perfectly, and neither do we. But the spirit of evening’s Examen is not self-criticism but self-compassion. Whatever the day has brought, let it end not with regret but with gratitude. Vespers calls us home, after all, to the place where we are always welcome just as we are. 

Lord of all kindliness, Lord of all grace,
Your hands swift to welcome, your arms to embrace,
Be there at our homing, and give us, we pray,
Your love in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day. [v]

Kathleen Norris learned “the true purpose of vespers” from her sojourns in monastic community. It is, she writes, “to let my body tell me, at the end of a workday, just how tired I am.” Vespers invites us to “let the day suffice, with all its joys and failings, its little triumphs and defeats.” [vi]

While I love daybreak, so full of possibility and potential energy, I think Vespers is my favorite hour—“sweeter than Matins,” said Emily Dickinson, who herself preferred the mature and mellow ripeness of the completed day to the freshly planted seeds of morning. It is an haven of peace. We put down our work and retire from the fray. We go homeward—and inward—to restore our bodies and nourish our souls. 

St. Anselm’s pastoral counsel from the Middle Ages seems even more necessary today:

“Flee for a while from your tasks, hide yourself for a little space from the turmoil of your thoughts. Come, cast aside your burdensome cares, and put aside your laborious pursuits.… Give your time to God, and rest in him for a little while. Enter into the inner chamber of your mind, shut out all things save God … and having barred the door of your chamber, seek him.” [vii]

Watch the sunset. Savor the fading light.
Look for the evening star. 
Light a candle. Love the silence. Let your heart speak.
Give thanks. 

Vesper moon and evening star at my grandfather’s summer place, Wacouta, MN (Jim Friedrich, 2018).

“Let evening come,” says Jane Kenyon in her lovely Vesper poem. “Let it come, as it will, and don’t / be afraid. God does not leave us / comfortless …” [viii] Yes, let it all come: darkness, ending, even death itself. Don’t be afraid. 

In the meantime, hallow the loveliness of Vespers’ daily gift,
so perfectly described by Breton poet Anjela Duval:[ix]

The day is now over,
The hour’s come I was waiting for.
After labor so material,
How sweet a spiritual hour.

I’m bathed here in tranquility.
I hear no sound around me.
But the sound of the pendulum,
Counting out drops of time.

The hour of prayer, hour of study,
Hour of dreaming, of fantasy,
Hour divine, full of ecstasy.

In this hour there’s so much happiness!
Only one thing’s missing to perfect it:
— In the hearth the singing of a cricket!

 

[i] Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) published “Now the day is over” in 1865. It is in the Episcopal church’s The Hymnal 1982, #42. Baring-Gould was an Anglican priest, writer, and folk-song collector. His other best-known hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” did not survive its deletion from the 1982 hymnal.

[ii] “Vespers” derives its name from Hesperus, the Evening Star (usually the planet Venus, sometimes Mercury) which appears in the West after sunset. Where I live, sunset is at 4:20 p.m. on the Winter Solstice and at 9:11 p.m. on the Summer Solstice, so Vespers can be a very moveable feast. 

[iii] Emily Dickinson’s “Fairer through Fading — as the Day” (938) compares the doomed beauty of twilight with the phenomenon of a dying friend seeming to look better just before dying.

[iv] Thomas Centolella, “In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love,” in Lights and Mysteries (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1995).

[v] Jan Struther (1901-1953), “Lord of all hopefulness,” The Hymnal 1982, #482. This “hours” hymn, with verses for waking, midday, evening and sleeping, is set to Slane, a lovely Irish tune. As a boy, I used to sing it walking home at dusk, after basketball or track practice. I‘ve always loved the way, in just 4 verses, it embeds us prayerfully in the daily round. 

[vi] Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 237-238.

[vii] St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1093-1109), was the most brilliant Western theologian between Augustine and Aquinas. Cited in Elizabeth Yates, A Book of Hours (Norton, CT: Vineyard Books, 1976), 42.

[viii] Jane Kenyon, “Let Evening Come,” Collected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005), 213.

[ix] Anjela Duval (1905-1981) was a peasant farmer in Brittany. She wrote her poems in the evening, after a hard day’s work in the fields. 

The Widow’s Mite

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Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched people as they put money into it. 

–– Mark 12:40

 

How many of you have used a mite box? It’s a little blue cardboard box that’s a sort of Christian piggy bank. You put money into it every day in thanksgiving for the blessings in your life. As you call to mind the gifts you have received, your sense of gratitude is deepened.

When your box is full, you give it to a church mission fund. In the Episcopal Church, this fund is called the United Thank Offering (UTO), an early form of crowdsourcing that turns many small contributions into sums large enough to do something special. The UTO was started by Episcopal women in 1889, and it continues to fund innovative mission and ministry work throughout the Anglican Communion.

When I was growing up in the Diocese of Los Angeles, there was an annual ingathering of our mite boxes. Children from all over the diocese came together in an outdoor amphitheater to sing and pray and listen to a little preaching. And then came the big moment when all us kids got up and carried our mite boxes down a long aisle and up onto a stage, where a large hollow cross stood in the center. Then each of us in turn would place our little blue box inside that cross.

It was something I looked forward to every year. It was exciting to come together with so many other children, to see myself as part of a larger community––the community of Jesus’ youngest friends. Isn’t that one of the reasons we come to church––to see with our own eyes a living image of the communion of saints?

I was a shy child, but the experience of carrying my mite box down the aisle to put it in the cross gave me a sense of agency, a sense that I could make a difference, that my contribution mattered. It was an exercise in self-offering, a tiny imitation of the self-offering performed eternally in the trinitarian heart of God––though I certainly didn’t grasp the depths of that theological mystery at the time! It just felt good to give.

The part of the ingathering I loved best was watching all our little mite boxes, one by one, stack up inside that hollow cross. The stack grew higher and higher, turning the cross bluer and bluer, until it was completely filled in by the color of our collective gratitude.

The term “mite box” isn’t used much anymore. They’re simply called blue boxes now, but the original term is from the King James Version of the gospel story about a widow who puts two “mites”––an old English term for the smallest of coins––into the Temple treasury.

The widow’s action has become a model for sacrificial giving. The text says that the rich put “large sums” into the Temple treasury, but Jesus knows they are just showing off. The wealthy have so much money, their contribution amounts to little more than spare change. The poverty-stricken widow, on the other hand, gives everything she has. Eugene Peterson’s contemporary translation draws this contrast sharply:

“The truth is that this poor widow gave more to the collection than all the others put together. All the others gave what they’ll never miss; she gave extravagantly what she couldn’t afford––she gave her all.” [i]

Those of us who have enough, those of us who do not want––we may feel the sting of this verse. We could all give more. Who does not hold something back when it comes to the collective responsibility of caring for one another, sharing God’s word, serving the needy, and repairing the world? It’s only practical. Times are uncertain, and budgets can be tight. Still, some of us might wonder how our contributions to mission and ministry stack up against our contributions to Starbucks, Comcast, Apple, and Costco.

And so it is that countless preachers have asked: Are we going to be stingy like the scribes or generous like the widow? That’s a very good question, and well worth considering. But many biblical scholars tell us that it is not the question Jesus is asking in this particular story.

There are certainly many places in the gospel when Jesus challenges our priorities, as when he tests the commitment of the rich young man, or warns his friends about the cost of discipleship, demonstrating just how serious he is by giving himself up to death, even death on a cross. The way of Jesus isn’t easy, and when he asks whether we can drink the cup that he must drink, we do tend to stammer.

But this particular moment at the Temple treasury is not a stewardship story. It’s a justice story. You see, the Temple was not just a place of worship in the benign sense we might assume from our own church experience. It was a marketplace, an exploitative economic system which fostered and exacerbated the extreme economic inequality of first-century Palestine. The money collected into its treasury did not go to things like pastoral care or outreach. It funded a bureaucracy of sacrifice which benefitted the few while sucking up the meager portions of the many. As Ched Myers says in his study of Mark’s gospel, “The Temple, like the scribal class, no longer protects the poor, but crushes them.”[ii] Or as Jesus puts it so succinctly, the rich “devour widow’s houses” (Mark 12:40).

Now in Mark’s account, Jesus is teaching in the Temple, saying a lot of critical things about the powers-that-be. The crowd is eating it up. Then Jesus takes a break, and goes to sit down by the treasury, the offering box where people drop off their contributions. And he says to his disciples, “Listen up. I want you just to watch for a while and see what happens.” And so they do. Mostly, it’s one well-dressed person after another strutting up to the treasury, pulling out a handful of money and, with a quick glance to make sure he’s being noticed, dropping it ostentatiously into the box. They didn’t have paper currency back then, so a big offering made a lot of noise as the coins clattered into the box. It was a good way to get everyone’s attention.

But as Jesus points out, all that theatrically lavish giving was not really sacrificial for the rich folks. For them, it was a bit of spare change. I like to think Jesus makes this comment in a stage whisper loud enough to trouble the pride of the prominent givers. And then this widow steps up, very quietly, to drop in her two mites: an insignificant act by an insignificant person, the kind of thing no one usually notices. Such a small, humble gesture by the sort of person who has been virtually invisible in every society––poor, powerless, unimportant, not male.

Look, Jesus says. Look at that woman. See her situation, see who she is. Don’t just see what she is doing; see what is being done to her. She is being exploited by the injustice of an economy which takes everything from her and gives nothing back. But do you notice how, instead of acting like a helpless victim, she is taking as much charge over the situation as she can?

Though the system is corrupt, she will not be deterred from the devotional practice of making a sacrificial offering to God. She has the heart of a giver, and she will not let that be taken from her. Nor will she live in fear. Even though she has little and is living on the edge of survival, she refuses to act out of a grasping sense of scarcity. She trusts that the Lord will provide. And perhaps she is even having some fun at the expense of the preening scribes, making an ironic contrast between their stinginess and the breathtaking costliness of her two little mites.

The text doesn’t say any of this, but when Jesus tells me to look at the widow, that’s what I see. So it’s not a stewardship story in the usual sense. Jesus doesn’t end with “Go and do likewise” the way he does when he’s urging exemplary behavior. No, this is a justice story.

And I think what Jesus is telling us here is this: Look! Look closely at what’s happening around you. Start to notice what is too often invisible: the injustice of the way things are, the people who are left out or left behind, the people who are invisible. Look at the way we ourselves participate in that injustice, consciously or unconsciously. Look at the assumptions and blindnesses which allow us to enable or perpetuate the brokenness and harshness of the world with insufficiently troubled consciences.

Let the widow in the Temple be our teacher, inviting us to wonder about who she is and what she does, and about who we are and what we do. Yes, do have the heart of a giver. Fill up the hollow cross with your blue boxes. Yes, refuse the fearful mentality of scarcity, and trust that the gifts you need will continue to show up in your life. And yes, open your eyes to everything that diminishes human flourishing, and discern the actions you can take––and the actions we can take together––to restore justice, repair the world, and welcome the Kingdom of God.

In that small moment, Jesus invites us to see the wrong in our world. But he also encourages us to see the possibility for a life of gratitude and giving, manifesting itself in even the smallest of gestures.

This gospel reading happens to coincide in the Lectionary with the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, known to us now as the First World War. November 11, Veterans Day, used to be called Armistice Day, to commemorate the moment when the guns ceased their terrible thunder on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the moment when a 4-year nightmare came to an end and peace was declared at last.

At the outset of that conflict in 1914, Europe was almost buoyant with anticipation. The poet/soldier Rupert Brooke spoke for many when he romanticized the clash of armies as a way to arouse western civilization from its slumbering decadence:

Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary. . . [iii]

This kind of romantic nonsense made even news reports start to sound like medieval sagas. “Soldiers” were called “warriors,” the “enemy” was the “foe,” to “die” was to “perish,” the battlefield dead were the “fallen,” and the blood of young men became “the red/Sweet wine of youth.” [iv]

It didn’t take long for the grim futility of trench warfare to dispel such illusions. “Never such innocence again,” wrote Philip Larkin, while Robert Graves spoke of the “Extinction of each happy art and faith /. . . The inward scream, the duty to run mad.” A German soldier called the Great War “the suicide of nations.” [v]

When it was over, the old world was finished, and one could argue that we’ve never quite recovered. Certainly the ideology of history as steady progress has been thoroughly discredited. We worry––a lot––about the future, and about our power to shape it wisely. But let me end by dropping a few mites into our common treasury, in the form of words from someone who lived through the Great War with her hope intact.

Vera Brittain was a brilliant young woman studying at Oxford when the war broke out. She left school to volunteer as a nurse, working near the front lines in France to treat the seriously wounded. The man she was in love with, as well the brother she adored, were both slaughtered in muddy battles. As a woman, and as a young person, Brittain was hardly a major player on the stage of history. She had only a few small mites to give for the repair of a world so wounded and shattered.

But for the rest of her life, she did what she could. Her memoir of the war, Testament of Youth, would inspire many over the years. And what she wrote at the end of that book a century ago still speaks to us today:

It did not seem, perhaps, as though we, the War generation, would be able to do all that we once hoped for the actual rebuilding of civilization. I understood now that the results of the War would last longer than ourselves; it was obvious . . . that its consequences were deeply rooted, and farther reaching, than any of us, with our lack of experience, had believed just after it was over. . .

 If the dead could come back, I wondered, what would they say to me? . . . In spite of the War, which destroyed so much hope, so much beauty, so much promise, life is still here to be lived; so long as I am in the world, how can I ignore the obligation to be part of it, cope with its problems . . . ? The surge and swell of its movements, its changes, its tendencies, still mold me and the surviving remnant of my generation whether we wish it or not, and no one now living will ever understand so clearly as ourselves, whose lives have been darkened by the universal breakdown of reason in 1914, how completely the future of civilized humanity depends upon the success of our present halting endeavors to control our political and social passions, and to substitute for our destructive impulses the vitalizing authority of constructive thought. To rescue [hu]mankind from that domination by the irrational which leads to war could surely be a more exultant fight than war itself . . .[vi]

What Brittain called “our present halting endeavors” to repair the world was too soon interrupted and mocked by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and now, in our own day, is under assault again by the shocking resurgence of authoritarianism and tribal hatred in so many countries, including our own. In the face of such immensely discouraging challenges, we feel the poverty of our own capacities. Can our two mites make any difference at all?

Jesus thinks so. When he asks us to look at that widow, he wants us to see her two mites not as an indicator of poverty, but as a sign of strength.

Weakness shall the strong confound, as an old carol reminds us. That woman wasn’t daunted by  how corrupt the system was, or how uncertain tomorrow felt, or how insignificant her actions seemed. No matter what, she was going to continue being who she was: generous, grateful, and trusting.

And that young rabbi, who paid such homage to her in the Temple? It turns out that he is also the Lord of history, calling to us across the ages:

“Look,” he says. “Look: I am making all things new.
And all it’s going to cost you is two mites.”

 

 

 

This homily will be preached on November 11 at Grace Episcopal Church, Lopez Island, WA.

[i]Mark 12:43-44, trans. Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language(Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), 1836.

[ii]Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989).

[iii]Rupert Brooke, “Peace,” in Max Egremont, Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014), 57.

[iv]Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 21-22.

[v]Philip Larkin, “MCMXIV,” in Fussell, 19; Robert Graves, “Recalling War,” in Egremont, 294; German prisoner interviewed by Philip Gibbs after the battle of the Somme, in Fussell, 72.

[vi]Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth(London and New York: Penguin Books, 1933/2004), 645, 655-56.

“You say goodbye, I say hello”: A Requiem Sermon

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Joe and Phyllis Golowka (1940s)

I’ve brushed the dew on Jordan’s banks, the crossing must be near.

– Jefferson Hascall, “Angel Band” (1860)

This winter, my dear friends Joe and Phyllis Golowka died five weeks apart in their 71st year of marriage. I was privileged to preach the sermon today for their Requiem Eucharist at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Cambria, California.

In his younger days, Joe Golowka led teen backpacking trips in California’s Sierra as part of the camping program for the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. I had the joy of being the chaplain on those hikes. At some point time caught up with Joe, and he decided to let a younger generation take over, but not before taking one last big trek. We made it a good one: a 10-day traverse of the Sierra Nevada, ascending the western slope along the Middle Fork of the Kings River, crossing two high passes at the crest of the range, and descending the steep eastern escarpment to the Owens Valley. It was one of those revelatory walks which, as John Muir once put it, open a thousand windows to show us God.

On our sixth day, we stopped around noon to make camp along a stream, Palisades Creek, so we wouldn’t have to make a steep climb to our next lake in the heat of day. Instead, we would get up at 4 the next morning, walk by the light of the full moon and a rosy dawn, and reach the lake at sunrise.

With the rest of the day suddenly free, Joe went fishing. He wandered down the stream until he found a pretty good spot, but after a while he got restless, and went looking for some place better. But the second place also failed to satisfy his longing for that holy grail of fishermen: the perfect fishing hole.

As the fairy tales teach us, the magic is always found in the third place––in this case, a slope of smooth granite where the stream rushed down into a quiet, shaded pool. As Joe approached, he saw golden trout leaping out of the pool into the cascade, only to be swept backward by the swift volume of water. Over and over again, the fish threw themselves against the stream’s powerful flow. But none of them could breach the crest of the cascading whitewater.

As Joe watched this spectacle of fierce desire, so thwarted yet so relentless, he felt the call to intervene on life’s behalf. He cast his barbless hook into the deep blue pool, and almost immediately, a trout tugged on his line. He pulled it out, slipped it unharmed off the hook, and tossed it upstream, beyond the cascade, where it could continue its hero’s journey. Again, Joe cast his line, and the same thing happened. Over and over, a trout would bite almost immediately, surrendering to Joe’s saving presence. It was as if the fish somehow understood that the fatal hook would prove to be the instrument of life, not death.

In the space of forty minutes, Joe caught and released thirty-four golden trout. Overcome by the sheer wonder of it, he finally had to stop. Miracles send a lot of voltage through your body. You need to step away and recover. He returned to camp shaking. When he finally shared his story at the evening campfire, it struck me that he had been privileged, for a moment, to share the work of our Creator and Redeemer–– rescuing the hopeless from the depths, casting living seeds into the future, turning a dead end into a gate of life.

And now, forty years later, Joe himself has gone through that gate, with his beloved Phyllis right behind him. They are in glory now, but what about us? Who will wipe the tears from our eyes?

Joe and Phyllis walked this earth for nearly a century. A presence we always took for granted has suddenly been withdrawn. The empty chair, the empty room, startle us with absence, and trouble us with longing.

There Is a time to be born and a time to die––this is the inescapable human condition––but acknowledging our mortal nature does not lessen our grief. Indeed, grief is the price of love, whenever that time comes when we must take the parting hand.

How we wish it were otherwise. Couldn’t we have had them just a little longer?

There’s an Irish song called “The Parting Glass.” They sing it in pubs at closing time. Its minor key and wistful words express the sorrow of ending the evening’s camaraderie as people go their separate ways into the night––a sorrow which feels like a rehearsal for the end of life itself:

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had,
Are sorry for my going away.
And all the loved ones that e’er I had
Would wish me one more day to stay.
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not,
I’ll gently rise and softly call,
“Goodnight, and joy be with you all.”

I love that last line. The singer doesn’t just say farewell and disappear. He pronounces a blessing upon those who remain: “Joy be with you all.” Yes, we honor our dead by the tears we shed. We honor them even more by embracing the joy they wish for us.

The Bible describes the company of heaven as a great cloud of witnesses, cheering us on from above. The novelist George Eliot called the departed “the choir invisible whose music is the gladness of the world.”[i]

Give your sadness all the time it needs, but remember to hold a space in your heart for the ways the departed will return to you––the choir invisible whose music is the gladness of the world.

For the absence of a loved one in a bodily and temporal form
is succeeded by new forms of presence.

I once asked a group of high school students to write their own epitaph, and this is what one seventeen-year-old girl proposed for her imaginary tombstone:

You say goodbye,
I say hello.

The people who matter have a way of sticking around. Although death changes the relationship, it doesn’t end it. The dead continue to occupy our thoughts. They remain present to us in stories, memories, emotions, DNA (in some cases), and whatever else they left us with.

Our beloved Joe and Phyllis are no longer in one particular place. They are in every place we remember them. They are present when their voices echo in our ears, or in those places where we shared special times together. They are present whenever we think of them, or speak of them, or tell the stories that were their lives.

When C.S. Lewis wrote about the grief process after the death of his wife, he said that as the acute sense of loss began to fade, he wondered whether he was starting to forget her by being happy again, or whether he might betray the rich complexity of her being by reducing her to a fixed set of memories.

But once he just stopped worrying about it, he found that, as he put it, he “began to meet her everywhere.” It wasn’t a voice or an apparition, or even a big emotional experience. It was, he said, “a sort of unobstrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.”[ii]

Michael Smith, a folksinger from Chicago, described a similar sense of presence in a song about his late father.

I brought my father with me
I hope that you don’t mind
I couldn’t find it in me
To make him stay behind…

There are some ways I’m just like him
Some ways he was just like me
And sometimes when the mirror’s dim
His face is clear to see
Tonight the winds of heaven
Blow the stars across the sky
I brought my father with me
I couldn’t say goodbye [iii]

We have all  brought Joe and Phyllis with us this morning. And they will remain with each of us in countless ways. I can’t go on a hike without hearing Joe’s voice, telling me to pay attention, to take in the beauty offering itself in every moment. Don’t just stare down at the trail! Look around!

We carry Joe and Phyllis with us. But we also grieve their absence. They’ve been a presence in our lives for so long, It’s hard to believe they are gone. Our hearts go out to their family, especially to their children. Losing one’s parents is one of the hardest things we ever do, no matter how old they were or how old we are. There is great sorrow in that. It is a time to weep.

But it is also a time to dance.
We lament today, but we also praise.

Thank God we had Joe and Phyllis in our lives for so long.
Thank God that Joe was what only Joe could be,
that Phyllis was what only Phyllis could be.
Thank God for what Joe and Phyllis could only be together.
Thank God for what they gave us.
Thank God for the ways they loved and mentored and befriended us.
Thank God for the ways they blessed us.

Joe and Phyllis will live on in memory and story, and we take great comfort and pleasure in that. But we also make a deeper claim here. Joe’s life, and Phyllis’ life, are not just something we remember––because their journey is not over and done. They still have a future––with Christ and in Christ in the company of heaven. God loses no one.

Death is not the last word, the final chapter. It is, rather, the passage into the unimaginable fullness of unending life in God.

Death, be not proud. though some have called thee 
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; 
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow 
Die not . . .
One short sleep past, we wake eternally 
And death shall be no more . . .[iv]

So said John Donne, 17th century Anglican poet and priest, because he knew how the story goes: Love wins and death dies.

This is the story that God’s friends stake their lives on:
God has loved us into existence.
God sustains us every step of our life’s journey.
And even after our bodies give out,
God loves us too much to let us go.

This Requiem eucharist is above all a celebration of resurrection. In our hymns and our prayers we proclaim the God of life who has made death into the gate of heaven.

Everything we sing and pray today comes down to this: We are here to celebrate the entrance of Joe and Phyllis into the land of light and joy.

Some of you know how I love American shape note hymns. They were written at a time when people with shorter life expectancies had to look death in the face every day, and they still managed to proclaim the victory of life. Even at the grave, they made their song:

Why do we mourn departing friends,
Or shake at death’s alarms?
‘Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
to call them to his arms.[v]

Filled with delight, my raptured soul
Would here no longer stay,
Though Jordan’s wave around me roll,
Fearless, I’d launch away.
I am bound for the Promised Land,
I am bound for the Promised Land![vi]

Farewell, my friends, adieu, adieu,
I can no longer stay with you;
My glitt’ring crown appears in view,
All is well, all is well.[vii]

About the same time those hymns were written, Henry David Thoreau was on his deathbed in Concord, Massachusetts. A few days before he died, a family friend said to him, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.”

And Thoreau, who had spent his life carefully observing and describing what he saw in the fields and woods around Walden Pond, replied simply, “One world at a time.”[viii]

However curious we may be about what it’s like across that dark river between the worlds, we can’t see it from here. But I would venture to say that heaven is not so much a place as it is a relationship. We live in God and God lives in us. And that is true on both sides of the river. Whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s possession.

If you want more details, the Scriptures provide so many vivid images of what it means to be in God’s presence:

Isaiah says that wherever the oppressed begin to hear good news, and the prisons go out of business, and the tears of the brokenhearted are replaced by the oil of gladness, heaven is already happening. (Isaiah 61:1-3)

St. Paul assures us that nothing––neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor presidents, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing. Not now, or ever. (Romans 8:38-9)

Today’s Epistle declares: “God will dwell with mortals, and they will be God’s family… Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” (Revelation 21:3-4)

And Jesus our Brother tells us, “It is the will of the One who sent me that I shall lose nothing of all those entrusted to me. . . and I will raise them up on the last day.” (John 6:39-40)

By the way, when I think of the Last Day, I imagine it’s something like the shock of your first morning on a backpack with Joe. You’re in a peaceful sleep, snug in your down bag, content to postpone the shock of the cold mountain air.

Then, as sudden as the angel’s resurrection trumpet, a hand shakes you awake, and a voice shouts, “Rise and shine! Come out of that fluffy cocoon. This is the day which God has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!” Those may not have been Joe’s exact words, but some of you were there on those mornings. You know what I’m talking about. The Day of Resurrection!

In a few minutes, we will collectively perform our central image for life in God:
We will gather around a table where Love bids us welcome,
to be richly nourished by the food of heaven.

There’s a place for everyone at God’s feast.
No one is excluded or banned or forgotten.
As they say at heaven’s gate, “Weary pilgrim, welcome home.”

One last thing.

Joe and Phyllis were both blessed to die at home, in hospice care, with family keeping vigil. My father-in-law, Arthur, did the same at the end of January, and I found a strangely beautiful grace in those last days. The soul’s departure is an awesome and holy thing to witness. It is life’s profoundest mystery.

When the time comes, people seem to know exactly what to do: their body gradually letting go as their attention shifts from this world to the next.

And as they depart from us, this is how we pray for them:
Receive them into the arms of your mercy,
into the blessed rest of everlasting peace,
and into the glorious company of the saints in light.[ix]

The contemplative monk Thomas Merton said that death is not something that just happens to us as passive recipients. It is, rather, something we do, an act of self-offering, what Merton called “the last free perfect act of love which is at once surrender and acceptance.”[x]

In other words, in the act of dying, we let everything go
and give ourselves over completely into the hands of God.
That is what Joe has done; that is what Phyllis has done.
And one day, you and I will do the same.

And God, as promised, will prove to be “mercy clothed in light.”[xi]

O glorious day! O blessed hope!
My soul leaps forward at the thought:
When, on that happy, happy land,
We’ll no more take the parting hand.
But with our blessed holy Lord
We’ll shout and sing with one accord.[xii]

 

Related post: Fathers, we must part

 

 

 

[i] From her poem, “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” q. in All in the End is HarvestL An Anthology for Those Who Grieve, ed. Agnes Whitaker (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1984, 1995), 83

[ii] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, q. in All in the End, 105

[iii] Michael Smith, “I Brought My Father With Me,” on his album Time, 1994

[iv] John Donne, Holy Sonnets X in John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed, C.A Patrides (London: Everyman’s Library, 1991), 440-1

[v] “China” in The Sacred Harp 163b (Bremen, GA: The Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 1991)

[vi] “The Promised Land” in ibid., 128

[vii] “All Is Well” in ibid., 122

[viii] Malcolm Clemens Young, The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009), 8

[ix] Ministration at the Time of Death in The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 465

[x] From posthumous publication, Love and Living (1979, p. 103), q. in The Thomas Merton Encylopedia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 107

[xi] Jane Kenyon’s sublime image is from her poem, “Notes from the Other Side,” in Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005), 267

[xii] “Parting Hand” in The Sacred Harp, 62

Not in Our House: Why the National Cathedral Should Refuse the Inaugural Prayer Service

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St. Ambrose barring Theodosius from Milan Cathedral, Anthony van Dyck (1619-20), National Gallery, London

St. Ambrose barring Theodosius from Milan Cathedral, Anthony van Dyck (1619-20), National Gallery, London

Where once Thy churches prayed and sang
Thy foes profanely rage…

– The Sacred Harp

In the year 390 the populace of Thessalonica rose up in revolt against the local Roman authorities to protest the arrest of a popular charioteer. The Roman emperor Theodosius, known for his thin skin and quick temper, was swift to respond. He sent a letter ordering troops to punish the inhabitants, which they did by means of a terrible ruse. They invited the whole town to attend a special sporting event. Once the stadium was packed, the soldiers locked the exits and slaughtered the entire crowd. The notoriously erratic Theodosius, meanwhile, had cooled off and changed his mind, sending another letter to contradict his original order, but it was too late. Seven thousand Thessalonicans were already dead.

Bishop Ambrose of Milan, where the emperor had his official residence, condemned the massacre, refusing to say mass in the presence of Theodosius until he repented his crime. Van Dyck’s painting (above) depicts the bishop barring the emperor from entering the cathedral. It was an unprecedented example of the Church speaking truth to power. The bishop explained his position in writing:

“What could I do? Should I not hear?… Should I remain silent? But then the worst thing would happen as my conscience would be bound and my words taken away. And where would they be then? When a priest does not talk to a sinner, then the sinner will die in his sin, and the priest will be guilty because he failed to correct him.”

Sadly, there will be no bishop to bar the Father of Lies and his minions from the National Cathedral in Washington this Saturday. The inaugural prayer service, a tradition since FDR’s inauguration in 1933, will go on as usual despite fierce protests from the many Episcopalians who regard such normalization of the president-elect to be at best a foolish mistake and at worst a desecration of sacred space.

The diocesan bishop, Mariann Budde, has cited two “spiritual principles” to justify the cathedral’s decision. The first is inclusiveness: Episcopal churches, she says, “welcome all people into our house of prayer.” She is aware that Trump is not a model citizen. “Welcoming does not mean condoning offensive speech or behavior; it does not mean we agree with or seek to legitimize.” But I think she fails to acknowledge the critical difference between opening our doors to notorious sinners and letting them dictate the content and flavor of our worship.

Bishop Budde’s second principle is that “in times of national division, the Episcopal Church is called to be a place where those who disagree can gather for prayer and learning and to work for the good of all.” This reflects the noble Anglican ideal of church as family. We may not always agree or get along, but we don’t stop gathering or trying to love each other anyway. We recognize truth not as the fixed possession of a single faction, but the product of a dialectic exchange, where we each contribute our incomplete perspectives to a process of mutual listening and collective discernment. This process is ongoing and never finished.

But a commitment to communal harmony has its price. At the time of the Civil War, the Episcopal Church maintained its structural unity by declining to make an official condemnation of slavery. As a result, it was spared the North-South splits of other denominations. While many individual preachers, parishes and dioceses spoke out against slavery, the church at a national level remained silent on the gravest moral crisis of the 19th century, lest they endanger the principle of welcoming all people.

The Bishop of Washington hopes that the inaugural prayer service will, at a time of intense national conflict, “offer a few moments of spiritual solace and the healing gift of transcendent beauty.” As a priest, liturgist and artist, I am a great believer in the value and necessity of providing sacred space and time, where sin and strife are hushed and we may encounter the world of God, not only in our minds and hearts but also with our senses. However, that should not mean losing touch with the imperatives of justice and love. Worship isn’t just to soothe and bless. It must also challenge, unsettle and transform.

As I understand it, the inaugural service will do none of these things. Preaching (always a risk) has been forbidden by Trump’s people, who are tightly controlling the whole order of “worship.” Judging from everything the president-elect has said and done over the years, we may expect no prayers of repentance for racism, misogyny, or xenophobia, or petitions that God may frustrate the designs of evil tyrants. Trump is no more submitting to the norms of Christian worship than he is to the norms of our democracy. He is essentially renting the spectacular Gothic edifice to bathe his authoritarian persona in a faux-religious glow. To allow such a charade threatens the integrity of the cathedral’s essential mission while abetting the fascist tendencies of Trumpworld. All glory be to the Leader.

At least one member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has bravely refused to sing at the inauguration. “It would be like throwing roses to Hitler,” she says. The National Cathedral choir, however, has agreed to participate. As the cathedral dean explains, “We do not pray or sing to bless a political ideology or partisan agenda…We sing to honor the nation.” But is it really the church’s business to honor the nation?

Despite our roots in the Church of England, the Episcopal Church is not a state church. It is time to shed all pretensions of being an indispensable cornerstone of civil religion. Our job is not to bless the status quo or national interests, but to proclaim and embody the gospel. Instead of praying for the president as if the soon-to-be-degraded office earns him any special attention, let us pray for everyone in the world who wields power, that they may do no harm and nurture the common good. Let us pray not just for the leaders of the nations and economies of the world, but for the prophets who speak to power and the activists who work for change. Less elitism, more democracy in our prayer life. Less nationalism, more globalism as well. Such an expanded range of attention retains the Anglican commitment to engage public affairs rather than flee them, while rejecting the fiction of American exceptionalism.

Concurrent with the controversy over the inaugural prayer service is a lively debate over prayers for the president at any public worship. Are we praying for the man, the office, or good governance? For those of us who may be his victims, are we praying for an enemy? If so, what is the aim of such prayer? And if we mention him by name, do we risk polluting worship with a rush of negative associations?

All this bears close consideration, but it is not really pertinent to the question of whether the National Cathedral should host the inaugural prayer service, to which the answer should be an unequivocal no. It is one thing to pray for our enemies. It is quite another to let them dictate what happens within our sacred spaces. Bishop Ambrose regrets that he cannot attend on Saturday. Is there anyone who will take his place at the cathedral door?

 

Related posts

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Can This Be Happening? – Donald Trump and the Rise of Authoritarianism

“God isn’t fixing this”

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Advent installation by Jim Friedrich at St. John's Episcopal Church, Los Angeles (1977)

Advent installation by Jim Friedrich at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Los Angeles (1977)

O come, O come Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel.

Once upon a time, worshippers entered their church on the Second Sunday of Advent to find a great wall between themselves and the sanctuary. The beautiful mosaics, the richly colored marble walls, and the magnificent carved Christ above the high altar were all hidden from view by this strange iconostasis, made from front pages of the Los Angeles Times. Instead of the images of holy men and women that adorn a traditional altar screen, there were banner headlines screaming catastrophe and mayhem.

When the assembly was seated, a mime came up the aisle to stand before the wall, searching for some way through it. His movements and gestures indicated perplexity, frustration, and finally discouragement. Then a voice from beyond the wall cried out,

Jerusalem, turn your eyes to the east,
see the joy that is coming to you from God. (Baruch 4:36).

Responding to the voice, the mime tore a small hole in the wall, and peeked through. He seemed entranced by what he saw.

The voice continued:

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of God’s glory. (Baruch 5:1)

The mime began to tear down the wall, encouraging others to join him. One by one, people rose from their pews to rip down the veil “of sorrow and affliction,” until the beauty of God’s sanctuary was finally revealed.

This simple but powerful ritual, the prelude to a eucharist I curated forty years ago at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, comes to mind whenever I hear that passage from Baruch in the December lectionary. It’s what we pray for each Advent from our place on this side of the wall: Good Lord, deliver us. Stir up your power. Tear down the wall between us. Show us your glory.

That wall of headlines reflected my ongoing interest in connecting Advent themes with the news of the world. The WTO protests in Seattle (1999) and the Occupy Movement (2011) both coincided nicely with Advent, mirroring its prophetic themes of judging the present order with the hope and vision of something better.[i] And just last week, the front page of the New York Daily News supplied a marvelous Advent provocation. By noon, it had 11 million Facebook views, and 74,000 shares.

New York Daily News, 12/3/15

New York Daily News, 12/3/15

The headline was a sharp rebuke to the shameless politicians who promise prayers for the victims of gun violence while refusing to do anything about the guns. Calling them “cowards who could truly end gun scourge” but instead “hide behind pious platitudes,” the newspaper offered a blunt theological assertion: “God isn’t fixing this.”[ii]

The daily office Old Testament readings for early Advent, calling the world to account for its evils, say much the same thing. To those who refuse to “renounce the dictates of our own wicked hearts,”[iii] the prophets imagine God declaring, “You made your own bed. Now lie in it.” (Thankfully, the prophets always redeem their rants in the end with comforting decrees of mercy and salvation).

However, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas was not comfortable with the Daily News’ riff on the old biblical idea that God sometimes gets fed up with human folly. His photoshopped revision was posted on Facebook and Twitter.

God hears our prayers

Of course this clueless retort (note the unfortunate juxtaposition of the headline with the red banner above it) did not actually answer the question of whether – or how – God acts in the world to “fix” things. It was just a clumsy attempt by a presumed gun lover to change the subject. Platitudes about prayer in the abstract are safe because they have no consequences, unlike real prayer, which always implicates the petitioner in a process of change and action. If we pray for an end to gun violence, we obligate ourselves to do all in our power to reduce it. Prayer is a call for action; it politicizes what we pray for. Prayer is not simply leaving things up to God. It is an act of volunteering to be part of God’s solution.

But is there such a thing as God’s solution? Does God – can God – fix things? It is not a question with a clear and simple answer. Human freedom has thrown a monkey wrench into the story of the world, while God has surrendered absolute control of the narrative. If we make a mess of things, God is not an indulgent parent rushing in to cover for us. We don’t get to multiply our weapons and then wonder why God allows so much violence.

So where does that leave us? In the Advent section of his Christmas Oratorio,[iv] W. H. Auden describes a closed-in, godless world where hope is absent.

Alone, alone about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind …
The Pilgrim Way has led to the abyss.

But what if we are not alone? What if there is a God who can make the abyss into a way? What if an unexpected future is breaking through the walls of our self-made prison? The Advent message is to embrace this hope, as we take off the garments of sorrow and affliction to welcome the God of joy into our midst.

Whatever the “solution” (salvation) may be in the tangled histories of the world and the soul, it is a long-term, sometimes excruciating, process, requiring honest engagement with the consequences of human sin in acts of confession, repentance, reconciliation, justice, healing, sacrifice, and transformation. And I submit that these are not simply things we do with God, as though God were only a helper from the outside. They are things we do in God, or God does in us, as our own intentions and actions become the embodiment – the incarnation – of divine purpose.

So yes, I believe that God is fixing the world, but not in the short run. And not without us.

 

 

 

 

 

[i] I preached on both these events at the time, with mixed results. Some were not so ready to find traces of God in social movements which trouble the powers-that-be. One church subsequently banned me from its pulpit for being too “partisan.” Guilty as charged.

[ii] New York Daily News, December 3, 2015.

[iii] Baruch 2:8

[iv] W. H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 273

Reprise: Ten Ways to Keep a Holy Advent

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image

Here in Puget Sound, the first Sunday of Advent has begun in darkness, fog, and frost. It is for many of us a deeply felt time, the season where we wait expectantly for the dawning of the New. The spiritual practice of waiting is not a state of passivity, but rather the cultivation of attention, lest we miss what is being offered to us in the unfolding of God’s future.

I do not usually do re-runs of old posts, but some readers found last December’s “Ten Ways to Keep a Holy Advent” a useful list, and you can access it here. I hope you will find some blessing in it. And please feel free to share it with your communities.

Sweet miracle of our empty hands

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Young priest in the Chapel of the Transfiguration, Grand Tetons National Park (1976)

Young priest in the Chapel of the Transfiguration, Grand Tetons National Park (1976)

When I preached at my wife Karen’s ordination on All Souls Day, 2010, I reflected on the peculiar vocation of priesthood. Since today, the Feast of Hildegard of Bingen, is the 45th anniversary of my own ordination, it seems fitting to publish it here.

In nineteenth-century Paris, there was a certain priest who was not quite right in the head, and one day he walked into a bakery, made the sign of the cross over the assorted breads, and said Hoc est corpus meum (This is my body) – the Words of Institution from the eucharistic prayer. When the Archbishop of Paris heard what had happened, he bought up every baguette and croissant in the shop, and reverently consumed them.

This story reflects an understanding of priesthood and sacrament which we do not share, but it does raise questions about the power that is conferred in ordination. What will happen to Karen tonight when the Holy Spirit is called down, and the hands of bishop and priests are laid on her head? How will she be different? What is the nature of the gift she will receive?

Priesthood has a certain aura. You wear special vestments, preside over worship in the name of the whole assembly, and stand at altar and pulpit to speak for God and Christ as though you were heaven’s ambassador. You are called and set apart by God and the Church to do holy things.

Eventually, the doers of holy things are sometimes regarded as possessors of an occupational holiness. The distinctiveness of what priests do becomes a distinctiveness in who priests are. The parson is seen as a kind of model person.

At its best, this understanding of a priest as a walking icon of the Christian life has produced some remarkable saints, clergy who have indeed exemplified a godly life, clergy whose words, actions, and faithfulness manage to bring God a little closer. At its worst, this attribution of holiness to the priest has let everyone else off the hook. We don’t have to be faithful or devout. The priest does that for us.

But in our own day, we have been rediscovering, to our joy, the ministry of all the baptized. All of us, clergy and laity, are empowered and called to be ministers of the gospel, to be doers of the Word in all the times and places of our lives.

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable [i] – that’s on every Christian’s agenda. When the saints go marching in, we are all “in that number.”

Our common vocation as ministers was beautifully summarized by Paul Moore, the late bishop of New York. When he retired, his last words to his people were these: “You are messengers clothed in the beauty of God. Take hope, be strong, be brave, be free, be open, be loving, and hold up the vision of the Heavenly City.”

You are all messengers clothed in the beauty of God, and you will be reminded of that again tonight, when you renew your baptismal vows and are sprinkled with water from the baptismal font, in the hope that Isaiah’s cry may ever be on your own lips: Here am I; send me.

But if we are all ministers, then what is so distinctive about the role of priest? If your understanding of priesthood is purely functional, based on what a priest does, the ministry of the baptized creates a crisis of definition as more and more of the priest’s jobs are outsourced to the laity.

Parish administration, pastoral counseling, preaching, teaching, evangelism, social witness and outreach, worship planning and a great deal of worship leading can all be done by laypeople. There are really only three things that a priest can do that a layperson cannot: preside at the eucharist, pronounce God’s forgiveness after confession, and give God’s blessing.

Just these three things. But perhaps they are not such little things.
Bread, forgiveness, blessing.
The things that priests give, in the name of God, in the name of Christ.
Bread, forgiveness, blessing.

It’s actually quite a lot, really, requiring no less than everything – and a lifetime of preparation. Why a lifetime of preparation? Can’t anyone do these things? Speak some words, perform a few actions? Simple, yes. Easy, not so much.

Ritual is like art, requiring natural gifts, extensive training, and a deep grasp of the cluster of conditions that constitute ritual practice: theology, history, the meaning of sign and symbol, the nuances of body language, gesture and gaze, and so forth.

Karen comes to this calling with her own particular identity, her own unique blend of gifts and qualities. Priesthood is always an embodied phenomenon, something only realized in the form of particular persons. In that respect, each priest is different.

But when the Church sets a person apart in ordination, she becomes more than her individual self. Whenever Karen puts on her priestly stole, she will become 2000 years old, a public representative of the cumulative tradition and collective wisdom of the Church.

As priest, she will be a keeper and guardian of our sacred stories, whose task it is to tend the flame of their saving grace. At the same time, she is given the privilege of being entrusted with the stories of her people, helping them to understand that their own lives are also sacred stories.

The priestly role is not for everyone. It requires a delicate balance between self-awareness and transparency to Spirit, the sensitivity to be attuned not only to one’s own self but also to all the other selves in the room, and to the Holy One in whose presence we gather.

At the eucharist, who the presider is, and how the presider is, both have an effect on the assembly’s understanding of what is really going on when we gather to worship.

The performance of ritual doesn’t happen by accident. It is the product of charism, call and holiness of life. It is a full-time, serious business, as Richard Baxter insisted in the seventeenth century when he said to worship leaders:

[A]bove all be much in secret prayer and meditation. There you must fetch the heavenly fire that must kindle your sacrifices. Remember that you cannot decline and neglect your duty to your own hurt alone; many will be losers by it as well as you. For your people’s sake, therefore, look to your hearts… If [your hearts] be then cold, how [are they] likely to warm the hearts of [your] hearers?[ii]

In its essence, priesthood is a concrete and visible expression of belief: belief in the presence of God, and belief in the meaning and destiny of the eucharistic assembly as the body of Christ.

Every time the priest stands at the altar and says the holy words, the whole assembly is alerted to the fact that we all stand on the border between earth and heaven, the visible and the invisible. The border is where worship is conducted: it is where God gives us the bread of life and we offer in return “our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice”[iii] unto God.

The priest’s ritual words and actions make clear to the assembly what is going on at the border. It’s not a place where we escape the world; it’s where we discover just how sacred the world is. Ordinary bread and wine become the food of heaven and the cup of salvation.

As Gordon Lathrop puts it, the eucharistic assembly is “a hole in the fabric of things, through which life-giving power flows into the world.”[iv]

But the priestly work of bread, forgiveness and blessing is something that belongs to the entire body of Christ – not just the priest, not just this particular assembly, but the whole Church of God’s people throughout the world and throughout all time.

You and I are all priests in a cosmic sacrament, standing in the place of Christ, seeing with the eyes of Christ, in order to make visible and tangible the eucharistic nature of all things. As priests, we look at our neighbor with the most sacred attention – and intention – and say, This is my body, that is to say, Christ’s body.

We look at the stranger and say, This is my body.
We look at our enemy and say, This is my body.
We even look at bread and wine,
ordinary matter, the stuff of the universe,
and say, This is my body.

And so, to return to that bakery in Paris, we may assume that the bread was already sacred before the priest ever got there, and that every crumb was already worthy of reverent consumption. But we would never know these things had not Jesus, and every priest since, taken bread, said the blessing, broken it, and passed it around.

When I was preparing to preach this sermon, I emailed some of my ordained friends around the country, asking if they had any words of counsel or encouragement for a priest at the beginning of her journey.

One priest repeated what a Methodist minister told him at his own ordination 30 years ago: “You can’t help anybody in their relationship with God unless you are completely human.”

Another said that “who you are is infinitely more important to God and the world than the words you speak, the lists you complete or the sermons you write.”

A priest ordained for 46 years offered this advice: “Try to see [God’s people] the way God sees them.”

A seminary classmate who went on to become parish priest, cathedral dean, and diocesan bishop said, “Never leave or forget your diaconal calling. Jesus came as one who serves. As a priest, you must first of all be a servant.”

And a priest I’ve known since elementary school simply said, “Give all to God.”

I also asked my friends if they could provide a few words that distilled for them the essence of priesthood. One of the best teachers I’ve ever had – an Old Testament professor, seminary dean, parish rector, and priest for 63 years – described it this way:

living with and for sisters and brothers
being the body of christ
celebrating with brothers and sisters
word and sacrament and pastoral act
christ recalling us reshaping us refreshing us
being christ’s body for the world

A priest and poet who has worked since the 1960’s in parishes, campus ministry, foreign missions, and the national church office, offered this succinct couplet:

Everything we share is broken;
and yet we remember the whole and make it present.

Another longtime priest wrote: “Yours is to walk with people to the Mystery and back.”

 And finally, the canon to the ordinary in a Midwest diocese, a woman ordained five years ago, quoted a 16th century Sufi mystic:

Go where you are sent
Wait until you are shown what to do
Do it with your whole self
Remain until you have done what you were sent to do
Walk away with empty hands

Empty hands. I have loved this image ever since I first encountered it, just before my own ordination, in Robert Bresson’s film of the Georges Bernanos novel, Diary of a Country Priest.

The story, a retrospective account narrated with passages from a young priest’s journal, turns on a dramatic and transformative pastoral encounter with a parishioner. In one of the great scenes of cinema, fraught with a severe and holy beauty, we witness “a supernatural storm.”[v] And somehow, by what the young and inexperienced priest says to this woman, but even more by who he is, the woman’s hardened heart is broken open, and she is filled with grace and peace.

That night, the priest learns the woman has suddenly died. He hurries to the vigil where her body lies. We see him kneel by her bed to make the sign of the cross over her. At the same time, we hear his voice describe the moment as he would later record it in his journal:

“Be at peace,” I told her.
And she had knelt to
receive this peace.
May she keep it forever.
It will be I that gave it to her.
Oh miracle –
thus to be able to give
what we ourselves do not possess,
sweet miracle of our empty hands.

Sweet miracle of our empty hands. Let us pray that Karen, like every priest before her, may go to the altar of God, the God of her joy, with empty hands:

Hands that offer, and hands that receive,
hands that feed, and hands that heal,
hands that welcome, and hands that bless.

[i] Philippians 4:8

[ii] Christopher Cocksworth and Rosalind Brown, Being a Priest Today: Exploring Priestly Identity (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006), 150

[iii] From Thomas Cranmer’s 16th century eucharistic prayer, retained in Rite I of The Book of Common Prayer (1979), 336

[iv] Gordon Lathrop, q. in Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150

[v] André Bazin, trans. Hugh Gray, What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 137

Three things you should know about the Trinity (Part 2)

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Andrei Rublev, The Holy Trinity (1425)

Andrei Rublev, The Holy Trinity (1425)

Trinitarian doctrine, like other key Christian doctrines, was hammered out, not in sterile study, but rather in the midst of lived spirituality, prayer, and the worship life of the church.[i]

                                                                        – Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

The Trinity has to do with the lives of each of us, our daily experiences, our struggles to follow our conscience, our love and our joy, our bearing the sufferings of the world and the tragedies of human existence; it also has to do with the struggle against social injustice, with efforts at building a more human form of society, with the sacrifices and martyrdom that these endeavors so often bring. If we fail to include the Trinity in our personal and social odyssey, we shall have failed to show the saving mystery …[ii]

– Leonardo Boff

Part 2: You can’t make this stuff up

Early in the twelfth century, a German monk named Rupert of Deutz went into a church where mass was being said by a white-haired bishop. At the offertory procession he experienced a vision of the Holy Trinity:

On the right at the edge of the altar stood three persons of such revered bearing and dignity that no tongue could describe them. Two were quite old, that is, with very white hair; the third was a beautiful youth of royal dignity …[iii]

A century later, Hadewijch of Antwerp, one of those remarkable women mystics who flourished in the late middle ages, also had a vision of the Trinity. But instead of three white males, what she saw was a dark whirlpool, which she described as “divine fruition in its hidden storms.” Hovering over this whirlpool was a spinning disc, on which sat a figure wearing the countenance of God – the face of God – on whose breast were written the words, “The Most Loved of All Beloveds.”

We may find Hadewijch’s vision more congenial: it is genderless, and less crudely specific than Rupert’s. And the tempestuous whirlpool, a flood of energy ceaselessly flowing through the universe, conveys a dynamic image of divinity that resembles the postmodern cosmologies of process theology and quantum physics. It’s probably easier for most of us to believe in a divine whirlpool than in three white guys.

But the crucial difference between Rupert and Hadewijch is not in the relative resonance of their imagery, but rather in what happens next. Rupert remains an observer, one who stands apart and sees God as an object. But Hadewijch does not remain separate from what she sees:

Then I saw myself received in union by the One who sat there in the whirlpool upon the circling disc, and there I became one with him in the certainty of union… In that depth I saw myself swallowed up. Then I received the certainty of being received, in this form, in my Beloved, and my Beloved also in me.

Rupert’s knowledge of God remained conceptual. Hadewijch’s knowledge of God became experiential. She was gathered into the circulating current of divinity. She became part of its flow, and that divine flow became part of her.

The language she uses for this experience is not mathematical or philosophical. Her language is the language of the heart. She describes being “swallowed up… in my Beloved, and my Beloved also in me.”[iv] Love, she discovered, is the way the soul knows. Love is the way the soul sees.

I begin this reflection with a mystic’s personal testimony because Trinitarian theology was not forged by inventive theorists, but by faithful Christians trying to make sense of the concrete, experiential data of salvation, beginning with the biblical narrative and continuing in the ongoing history of believing communities. Based on our collective and personal experience of being “saved” (or, if you prefer: healed, forgiven, reborn, renewed, resurrected, empowered), what can we say about the God who has done this? Trinitarian reflection began within an ancient community deeply grounded in the monotheism of Judaism, which had, over the centuries, found ultimate reality to be not a plurality of disconnected or contradictory energies but a coherent unity. But once the early Christians began to attribute divinity to both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, a simple self-contained oneness was no longer sufficient to describe the Reality.

Without losing the unity of God, how could they account for the divine diversity revealed in the saving activities of Christ and the Spirit? Once they began to call Jesus “Lord” (Kyrios), which happened very early in their worship and their storytelling, traditional monotheism was radically destabilized. The growing perception of the Holy Spirit as a guiding and empowering presence of deity in their communities only compounded the problem.

There were various attempts to solve the problem by downgrading Jesus and Spirit to subordinate, derivative, or semi-divine realities, by no means equal to the eternal and uncreated God. Such “heresies” were popular with those who wanted to keep God simple. But “orthodoxy” was unwilling to deny the fullness of divinity to either Christ or the Spirit. Only God can save us. Christ and Spirit, in the biblical revelation and Christian experience, are integral and essential to salvation. Therefore, they must be equally integral to the Holy One who is the Creator and Redeemer of all things.

The question wasn’t only metaphysical (What is the relation between the one and the many or the finite and the infinite?) or logical (How can One be Three and Three be One?). Trinitarian reflection was also a deep engagement with the question of suffering. If God incarnate in Christ chose to share the human condition, to live and die as one of us, does that mean that vulnerability and suffering have become part of God’s own history? And if these human elements have been added to the divine life through specific temporal events, has time itself disturbed the perfect calm of eternity? If God has been affected and changed by events in time and history, what can we then say about the consistency and transcendence of the divine nature? How can God be decisively linked to the history of the world without losing freedom or transcendence? Can a changeless God weep? Can we be saved by a God without weapons?

In his comprehensive survey of contemporary Trinitarian thought, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen argues that “the assumption of humanity by God, the Son, means that human capacity to suffer is not foreign to the being of God. How else could one speak of God as love? … It is more biblical to think of God as passionate love, the Father who chooses to engage the suffering of the world, than as a Transcendent One whose separation from the world’s suffering guards his freedom.”[v] Robert Jenson, a foremost North American authority on the Trinity, rejects the notion of divine detachment from creation in dramatically succinct terms: “God … is what happens with Jesus… God is what will come of Jesus and us, together.”[vi]

The problems and paradoxes that arise from such far-reaching assertions have been debated and puzzled over throughout Christian history, and the recent profusion of Trinitarian theology has become an incredibly rich conversation. There is, of course, no final version of God awaiting discovery, no definitive outcome to all this reflection, only an endless attentiveness to the Mystery which may consent to dance with language, but always outruns it in the end.

So why presume to talk about the Trinity at all? Why can’t we simply say and think and pray to “God” and leave it at that? We can’t do that because Christians don’t belong to a theoretical God, a reasonable and logical divine construct worked up by professional philosophers. We belong to the self-revealing but complicated God of the Bible who has, in the form and activity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, rescued us from our own folly and gathered us into the communion that is the very life of God. And no matter what diverse strategies of insight and understanding we may employ, what we can actually say about the Trinity is always grounded in experience, both the experience of our ancestors encoded in Scripture and tradition and the contemporary revelations of communal and personal life.

Trinitarian thought isn’t made out of thin air or abstract speculation. It is produced and nourished by the concrete, tangible history of Christian experience. However each day manifests for us “the means of grace” and “the hope of glory,” whatever the myriad ways by which we love and serve and witness, we need the threefold name to account for the diversity of God’s relations with us. Anything less would impoverish our prayer and considerably reduce the scope of our attention.

For most theologians, our experience of God as threefold also reflects a Trinitarian life within God’s own self. Since God’s inner life is beyond our sight, this can only be an assumption. But it is a crucial one. If God is trustworthy and self-revealing, it must be that when we meet God as Trinity, we get the real thing. God isn’t just pretending to be Three for us; God’s own inner life is constituted by relationality and communion.

Finally, how shall we address or invoke this Mystery, which a Japanese theologian intriguingly calls “Three Betweennesses in One Concord?”[vii] The traditional “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” despite its authoritative pedigree, is distractingly masculine for many, and various substitutes have arisen, each with their own impediments. “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier,” for example, is a bit impersonal, and risks reducing the three Persons to job descriptions. Likewise, “Source, Word, Spirit,” “Creator, Liberator, Comforter,” “Parent, Child, Paraclete,” “Mother, Daughter, Spirit,” and “Mother, Lover, Friend” all have their particular assets and liabilities. My own current preference, since I suspect that God is more verb than noun, is “Love who loves us[viii], Word who saves us, Spirit who revives us.”

I leave the last word to 16th century reformer Philip Melanchthon, who said, “We adore the mysteries of the Godhead. That is better than to investigate them.”[ix]

[This is the second of three reflections on the Trinity. The first, on the essential relationality of God, may be found here.]

[i] Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 35

[ii] ibid., xv-xvi

[iii] Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great Through the 12th Century (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994), 330

[iv] ibid., The Flowering of Mysticism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 212-16

[v] Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, 99

[vi] Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 22-3

[vii] Nozumu Miyahira, in Kärkkäinen, 314

[viii] I take this resonant phrase from Terrence Malick’s transcendent film, To the Wonder.

[ix] Kärkkäinen, xvi