“Opulent Ascension,” an installation by Sean Scully in San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice Biennale, 2019).
Inspired by Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:12), Scully’s stack of colored felt slabs rises more than ten meters toward the luminous dome of San Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio’s splendid Renaissance church in Venice. Amid the subdued grays and whites of the interior, the miraculous colors exude the vitality of spiritual aspiration, like spring flowers refuting winter’s drab.
On this Ascension Day, let me offer another image, a 36-second “video icon” of a cloud disappearing into the blue. Consider it a brief meditation on Luke’s text, “As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).
The Ascension of Christ takes us into an ineffable realm, far above the literalism of earthly life. What are we to make of such a strange story? The following video of an Ascension Day homily was streamed during the pandemic a few years ago, when we were not able to gather in person to celebrate the mystery. Fittingly, it was recorded mostly outside, under the open sky.
In the Garden, an icon by the hand of the artist, Angelica Sotiriou, 2009.
I’m writing this on Maundy Thursday, the night of Jesus’ tender farewell supper with his friends—and the night he was handed over to malevolent powers. The beautiful icon from the hand of California sacred artist Angelica Soteriou [i] captures the wrenching moment between the solidarity of his loving community and the fatal desolation of his Passion. He is alone. Neither friends nor enemies share his existential space. He’s kneeling in prayer, arms stretched out, beseeching his Father for whatever is needed to make it through the night. But his hands remain open, receptive to a will not his own. Not my will, but thine. And though an annihilating blackness surrounds him, his body is held safely within the warm color of the mountain of God. Even when we feel alone, even abandoned, we are still enfolded within divine love and mercy. Our divine milieu is not an exemption from trouble, but an assurance against trouble’s finality.
On this holy Thursday, many churches, including mine, do the eucharist in the context of an actual shared meal. It is is our custom to eat in silence, which monastics know is a profound way to be together. Our silence is punctuated by a series of meditative readings from the Farewell Discourses, the words of encouragement, comfort and challenge which, in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks to his friends on the night before his execution. It’s not a reenactment of a past event. Those words are spoken directly to us, in our own fraught time.
Tonight, however, we added a word from one of Jesus’ more recent friends, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was facing his own Gethsemane in a German prison. At Christmastide, 1944, a few months before he would be executed by the Nazis, he wrote a poem which was smuggled out of prison in a letter to his mother. Its expression of confidence and hope in the midst of an evil time not only echoes the spirit of Jesus’ Farewell Discourses, but it speaks strongly to our own latter days, when so many things are in peril.
Here is the versified translation of Bonhoeffer’s poem by the British hymn writer Fred Pratt Green:
By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered, and confidently waiting come what may, we know that God is with us night and morning, and never fails to greet us each new day.
Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented; still evil days bring burdens hard to bear; O give our frightened souls the sure salvation for which, O Lord, you taught us to prepare.
And when this cup you give is filled to brimming with bitter suffering, hard to understand, we take it thankfully and without trembling, out of so good and so beloved a hand.
Yet when again in this same world you give us the joy we had, the brightness of your Sun, we shall remember all the days we lived through, and our whole life shall then be yours alone.[ii]
Yes, we too are living through “evil days” which weigh down “our frightened souls” with “burdens hard to bear.” But our brother Dietrich, like our brother Jesus, reminds us that there is an alternative to fear and despair, if we can find the courage to live into God’s future, come what may, and the Paschal wisdom to walk the Way of the Cross “thankfully and without trembling,” because we know that death doesn’t get the last word.
Now, as we move into Good Friday, listen to what Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, says about the cross:
Jesus crucified is God crucified; so we believe. Jesus is the total and final embodiment in history of God’s loving mercy; and so this cross is a unique, terrible, extreme act of violence—a summary of all sin. It represents the human rejection of love. And not even that can destroy God; with the wounds of the cross still disfiguring his body, he returns out of hell to his disciples and wishes them peace. There is our hope—the infinite resource of God’s love, the relationship with God’s creatures that no sin can finally unmake. God cares what we do because God suffers what we do. God is forever wounded, but forever loving. The possibilities of our relationship to God are indeed ‘new every morning.’” [iii]
In other words, says Williams, “we have a future because of God’s grace.” Bonhoeffer said the same thing, and he said it from death row. That’s what the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising is trying to tell us—not only in the rituals and narratives of Holy Week, but in the kind of lives we live when we fully embody the archetypal pattern of surrender and transformation. The way down is the way up. Lose your life to find it. Let go and let God.
There’s always more to say about this, of course, but it’s almost midnight, and tomorrow is the rigorous journey to the foot of the cross. And beyond that, there’s the Easter Vigil, a night of wonders when heaven and earth are joined and liturgical curators are left exhausted yet exultant in its wake. If you want to read more about the cross, try What Will the Cross Make of Us?, written in 2022 by my less tired self. For more on the Easter Vigil, try Just a Dream?—Reflections on the Easter Vigil.
I’m going to bed now, but let me leave you with a 3-minute trailer for the Triduum, pushing the point that the Triduum is not a la carte, but a 3-part connected sequence that wants to be experienced in full. The three-day Paschal passage from Passion to Resurrection isn’t just bingeing on liturgy. It’s a profound way of knowing that delivers you to a different place. As we say at my church every Holy Week, “The journey is how we know.”
[iii] Rowan Williams, from a sermon excerpted in A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2004), 99.
Fra Angelico, Transfiguration fresco on the wall of a monastic cell, San Marco, Florence (c. 1440).
O voi ch’ avete li ‘ntelletti sani, Marate la dottrina cha s’asconde Sotto ‘l velame de li versi strani.
O you whose minds are sound and full of sense, consider the deeper meaning hidden here behind the veil of these strange verses.
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno IX.61-63
Epiphany is a visual season. The mystery of God among us is shown to the world. And this showing culminates with the visionary experience of the Transfiguration: the veil covering Christ’s divinity is pulled aside, and three of his friends are dazzled by the radiance. The stark clarity of this revelation lasts only a moment. Epiphanies are brief by nature. When Jesus and the disciples descend from the mountaintop, the gospel narrative returns us to a more “normal” reality.
What did the disciples actually see in that moment on the mountain? Gregory of Palamas, a 14th-century theologian, believed that they glimpsed something actual and substantial, which he called the “uncreated light.”
“Christ is transfigured,” he said, “not by putting on some quality he did not possess previously, nor by changing into something he never was before, but by revealing to his disciples what he truly was, in opening their eyes and in giving sight to those who were blind. For while remaining identical to what he had been before, he appeared to the disciples in his splendor; he is indeed the true light, the radiance of glory.” [i]
Whatever we make of Gregory’s metaphysical claims, which were disputed by many of his contemporaries, the spiritual resonance of light is undeniable and universal. It ialways seems to be about something more than physics. It seems inevitably imbued with Spirit.
Where does such light come from? Is it something that happens to our eyes but is not really in the world? Or is it somehow there, within the heart of things, “born of the one light Eden saw play?” Is it not just a simulacrum of divinity, but a direct manifestation? Opinion is divided on this question, but I myself side with the visionaries who say there is more to reality than meets the eye. At the very least, this makes for a more interesting—and radiant—universe. Thoreau put the alternative as well as any when he said, “I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things.” [ii]
In the 17th century, when the science of optics was expanding to match developments in the telescope, the microscope, and the camera obscura, Jesuit thinkers took a keen interest in both the science and the theology of light. Observable facts and theological metaphors were for them compatible and complementary ways of knowing reality.
In Ars magna lucis et umbrae (“The great art of light and shadow”), published in 1646, Athanasius Kircher, S.J., described Christ as the Light of the World who contains divine glory and manifests it to the visible realm. “For Kircher, the infinite and eternal light is God the Father, thus the Son is the light from the light. The divine light first became visible as a result of his incarnation.” [iii] It became common for his fellow Jesuits to employ optical phenomena in their devotional literature. The light from above, the light from within, the light which pierces the dark, the light which creates the visible world, and the light which illumines the mind of the receptive perceiver—all have their source in the eternal energies of God.
Theodore Galle, “Speculum urens,” from Jan David, S.J., Duodecim specula (1610).
Last year I had the good fortune to see the exhibition of a lifetime: 28 paintings by Johannes Vermeer at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. It was the largest number of his works ever assembled in one place, an historic event which may never be repeated. To be in the presence of those miracles of brush and pigment was an epiphany of the heart—three precious hours I will never forget.
According to art scholar Gregor J. M. Weber, Vermeer’s art was strongly influenced by the optical theology of the Jesuits. Light itself, simultaneously natural and transcendent, could be seen as the true subject of his pictures. Many of his images feature light pouring into an otherwise shadowy interior from a window on the left edge of the canvas. And even the defining lines of persons and objects, softened and blurred by subtle gradations of color and tone, seem on the verge of dematerializing into pure luminosity.
Johannes Vermeer, Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1662-1664).
A striking example of this is Woman with a Pearl Necklace (c. 1662-1664). Its explicit content employs a common visual trope for worldly vanity. A fashionably dressed woman, clutching a pearl necklace, admires herself in a mirror. Similar images can be found in the engravings of Jesuit devotional books. This illustration from a 1682 Jesuit publication contrasts vanity before a mirror with piety before a crucifix.
Frederick Bouttats, “Different Ways of Life,” from Adriaen Poirters, S.J., Den spieghel van Philagie (1682).
While the mirror and the pearls in Vermeer’s painting were certainly “customary symbols of transience and vanity,” art historian Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., argues that the woman’s priestly posture and the chaste beauty of the visual elements represent self-knowledge and truth. Perhaps. But Weber, making his case for Jesuit influence, focuses on the empty wall behind the preoccupied figure. In his original composition, Vermeer had darkened much of that wall with a large map. But then he painted out the map, leaving that wondrously glowing surface. “One must therefore ask,” writes Weber, “if the strikingly empty but bright white wall in Vermeer’s painting does not refer to God, invisible to the woman, fixated on her vain reflection—a metaphor for someone entangled in worldly things only.” [iv]
God is there all the time, in the form of light, but the woman is oblivious! I find that an attractive reading of the painting, because it educates my own spiritual vision. “Find God in all things,” said Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola—even in a glowing wall. While riding the ferry to Seattle the other day, I did just that when I became absorbed by light reflected from Puget Sound onto the ceiling of the passenger cabin.
LIght on a ferry ceiling, Puget Sound, Washington (Last weekend of Epiphany)
I knew factually that this light had traveled 93 million miles to be deflected upward by rippling water so it could dance upon the white ceiling above me. Still, it seemed charged with significance beyond the basic prose of solar optics: the miracle of light itself, without which nothing would be seen; the miracle of perception, enabling our own inwardness to connect with a reality beyond us; the inescapable sense of gift bestowed by luminosity and warmth; the ineffable poetics of glory, without which there would be neither beauty nor art nor religion.
I’m putting this badly, of course. I don’t have the right words. There may be no right words whatsoever. But as I sat transfixed by the bright pulsations, they felt like a semaphore from a transcendent source, delivering a message for which I simply lacked the code. Was it saying “I am with you always,” or “All shall be well”? For a moment as brief as the Transfiguration, the sense of something shown and something received was at the very least an inner truth, what faith calls the light of God shining in my heart. In a time of so much darkness, that’s no small thing.
Alleluias burned to ashes on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany.
Just three days after beholding the light of Transfiguration on the Last Sunday of Epiphany, we step through the gateway to Lent on Ash Wednesday. It’s quite a shift. For a brief moment, we see the divine light right in front of us—so close we can almost touch it. Then, just like that, we find ourselves back at the bottom of the mountain, where the only way to return to the light is the long and winding road through the desert of unknowing and unmaking.
That’s exactly how Dante’s Divine Comedy begins. Lost in a dark wood, alone and afraid, the pilgrim poet looks up. A steep hill rises before him, and behind its summit a tentative glow suggests an end to the dreadful night. The lively translation by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders conveys the hope awakened in the poet by this glimpse of dawning:
Just when / I was feeling completely lost and was ready to give up, / I looked up and saw a faint light in the distance. / I figured that meant there must be a way out up ahead / somewhere. When I saw that light, I felt better, and the / fear I’d been holding inside me that whole time started / to lift a little bit, because I figured I’d be outta there soon.[v]
So Dante starts to climb toward the saving Light. As Helen Luke put it in her Jungian study of the poem, “He wanted, as we all want, to go the shortest and the quickest way to his goal.” [vi] But his way was suddenly blocked by three fierce beasts—the leopard, the lion, and the wolf—representing all the malformed and misdirected energies and aggressions of the ego.
William Blake, Dante Running from the Three Beasts (1824-1827).
Realizing there could be no easy way out of his darkness, no direct path to the Light, Dante surrenders his ambition to conquer the luminous summit by his own strength. He stops climbing, turns around, and begins the initially downward course along the arduous road of purgation and rebirth. Helen Luke sees in this radical change of itinerary an archetype for every spiritual journey:
“So indeed do we learn, struggling out of the dark wood, that we cannot hope to find wholeness by repressing the shadow sides of ourselves, or by the most heroic efforts of the ego to climb up, to achieve goodness. The leopard, the lion, and the wolf will not allow it, we may thank God. It is when we admit our powerlessness that the guide appears.” [vii]
For Dante, the guide is Virgil, the long-dead poet who has been his greatest literary inspiration. In William Blake’s dramatic illustration, the beasts as well as Dante’s red garment signify turbulent emotion, while the soothing blue of Virgil’s gown suggests the transcendent imagination which nourishes hope and peace even in the abyss.
“I entreat you,” Dante tells his guide, “take me to the places I must go, that I may escape this evil and much worse.” [viii] And so they descend together, into the existential abyss of pain and woundedness, on a journey which will, by God’s grace, lead upward in the end, to the Light that cleaves every darkness.
In the Transfiguration story, the disciples are also looking for a shortcut to wholeness. If only they could stay on the summit, clinging to the vision of Love’s brilliance. But Jesus, their own wise guide, takes them down the slope to resume the Way of the Cross: the long but necessary path of negation and affirmation, losing and finding, dying and rising.
Perhaps we ourselves would rather skip Lent, or at least Holy Week, and go straight to the cheering New Fire of the Easter Vigil. But there are no shortcuts. Still, even in the desert time of trial, the vision on the mountain can be rekindled and sustained by the burning bushes along the way—if only we turn aside to see them!
Icon of Moses before the Burning Bush (early 13th century, Mt. Sinai).
[i] St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, in Richard Harries, Art and the Beauty of God: A Christian Understanding (London: Mowbray, 1993), 85
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us …
The Collect-Prayer for the 3rd Sunday of Advent is one of the most exciting petitions in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. I mean that literally, because the Latin term translated as “stir up” is excita—from which we get our English word excite.
The Latin verb ciere means to cause something or someone to move. This was then given the prefix ex-, which means “out of.” The resulting verb, excitare, means to call or summon something out of its existing dormant state into more energetic mode of being, or to provoke or agitate someone to do something which might otherwise not happen—in other words, to rouse or stir them to action.
In English, the most common sense of excite is to arouse interest or strong emotion—to “stir up.” This can be a good thing, as when we are excited by a stimulating idea, a dramatic movie, or even a stirring sermon; or it can be a bad thing, as when an angry mob—or a weak heart—gets overexcited.
“Excite” has additional, more specific meanings. In biology and medicine, living matter can be excited to produce an increase of activity, as when a defibrillator shocks the heart back into action. In electrical engineering, an “exciter” produces an energizing current to start up a generator or motor. In physics, electrons can be excited into a higher energy state, and in the late Middle English of the 14th and 15th centuries, excite could mean to rouse from sleep or even awaken the dead.
All these different shades of meaning resonate with Advent’s urgent cry to “wake up!” Wake up to the reality of a broken, troubled and violent world. Wake up to our own participation and complicity in a human history that is radically out of sync with divine intention. Wake up to our inability to fix things without God’s help.
But also, wake up to the dawn of salvation. Wake up to the voice that cries in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord who is coming.” Wake up to God’s gift of new possibility.
In the old Latin mass, on 4 of the 5 Sundays before Christmas, the Collect began with the same word: Excita! Stir up.
On the Last Sunday after Pentecost, just before Advent, the people prayed: Excita!—Stir up, we beg you, the wills of your faithful people, that they more readily seek the fruit of divine work …
On the First Sunday of Advent, the people prayed: Excita!Stir up your power, Lord, we implore you, and come, that by your protection we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our sins, and by your deliverance be saved …
On the Second Sunday of Advent, the people prayed: Excita!Stir up our hearts, Lord, to make ready the way of your only-begotten Son, that we may be worthy to serve you with purified minds …
On the Third Sunday of Advent, there was a different opening: Aurem tuam, quaesumus, Domine (Incline your ear to our prayers, O Lord).
But on the Fourth and final Sunday of Advent, it was back to Excita!: Stir up your power, we implore you, Lord, and come. With great power assist us, that by the help of your grace, whatever has been impeded by our sins may be sped forward by your merciful kindness.
In the revision process which produced the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the Fourth Sunday collect migrated to the Third Sunday, and non-Excita collects were adapted or composed for the other Sundays of Advent. The American Episcopal Prayer Book of 1979 did some further tinkering.
I do love our Episcopal Advent collects, which I have been praying for a very long time. But I also find something very compelling about the old sequence of the Excita collects. I love their sense of urgency and their imploring passion. They beg God for what we so desperately need.
There are a couple of things to notice about these collects. Most of the collects of the Christian year are addressed to God, or God the “Father,” but two of the four Excita collects are addressed to Christ, the God who comes. Veni, they say to Christ. Come, Lord. Come now, as you did back then. Come here, as you did at Bethlehem. Come into our world. Come into your Church. Come into our hearts. Maranatha! Lord come! Veni, veni, veni!
Another thing to notice is that Advent is not a spectator sport. We ourselves are participants in the coming of God’s future. Two of the Excita collects pray that God’s power and might be stirred into action. But the other two pray that our wills and our hearts be stirred as well, excited into a higher energy state. It’s spiritual physics, isn’t it? The energies of God trigger an excited state within us and among us. Would that it be so!
There’s a story about a fancy Episcopal church in New York City where a visitor sitting in one of the front pews started crying out “Praise the Lord!” at various points in the liturgy. This made the regular congregation a little nervous, and before long one of the ushers made his way discreetly up the aisle to slip into her pew. The next time she repeated her acclamation, “Praise the Lord!,” the usher whispered, “Not in the Episcopal Church, madam.”
Not everyone wants to be excited to a higher energy state. Not everyone wants to wake up. A dormant state seems a lot easier, at least until a repressed reality comes calling with a vengeance.
Look how scared some people get about the word “woke.” Sleepers, don’t wake! That’s what the broken world tries to tell us. Keep things the way they are. Don’t risk anything so new and challenging as the Kingdom of God.
But Advent people are not sleepers. Advent people want to be stirred up by a God who is eternally woke. It’s a risky business, of course.
Who shall abide the day of God’s coming? And who shall remain standing when God appears? (Malachi 3:2)
We all have some stake in the status quo. We are all mired in the inertia of history. We all have things to answer for. We are all apprehensive about what we might lose.
But like Mary before the angel of Annunciation, we are the people who say Yes! to God’s coming. Come what may.
Of course, as Annie Dillard warns us, “When we go to church we should be issued crash helmets, and be lashed to our pews, for the sleeping God may wake.” Neil Young said the same thing in his own vivid way. He was speaking to an earthly lover, but he could just as well have been talking to the God who always stirs up:
You are like a hurricane: there’s calm in your eye And I’m getting blown away … I want to love you, but I’m getting blown away.
Do we find this a little scary? God’s hurricane? Sure we do!. But that’s what makes it fun. At least that’s what the saints and mystics tell us. Risking life in God is, in the end, a rapturous destiny.
Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, “How long?” and soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song.
–– Samuel John Stone
Of all the seasons, Advent is the one I love the best. Its flavors are so richly complex: prophetic shouts and angelic whispers, deepest dark and magical light, wintry cold and warming hearts, the end of the world and the birth of the new. And its symphonic progression, from the eschatological thunder of its opening movement to the midnight hush in the shepherds’ field, sounds the profoundest depths of the cosmos and the soul.
I fell in love with Advent as a child, when I knew no distinction between sacred and profane. The glow of colored lights on almost every house, our family prayers around the Advent wreath, the search for the perfect tree, the interminable wait for presents to be opened, the smell of baking cookies shaped like stars and Santas, the glorious texts of Isaiah and Luke on Sunday mornings, and hearty renditions of “O come, O come, Emmanuel” and “Come, thou long-expected Jesus”––they were all about the same thing: the wonder of a world where magic is afoot and Love’s gifts are never exhausted.
Over the years, as I have grown more acquainted with the sorrow, pain and injustice of mortal life and human history, the meanings of Advent have only deepened. And in today’s evil times, the practice of hope is more necessary than ever.
I have written more posts about Advent than any other season, and I gather all the links together here. Wander through them as you will. Try the practices. Share whatever you like. And may your own Advent bring you blessing, joy, and the nearness of holy Presence.
Practices
Ten Ways to Keep a Holy Advent –– This has been my most popular Advent post, with simple practices to deepen our experience of the season. “In a month that is already far too busy and rushed, these are not offered as one more to-do list to work through, but as ways to slow down, take a breath, pay attention, and make room in our lives for the birth of the Holy.” The 10 ways are: Interrupting, Silencing, Waiting, Listening, Watching, Praying, Reflecting, Loving, Giving, Receiving. (Dec. 6, 2014)
Praying the O Antiphons –– These sublime antiphons (best known in the hymn, “O come, O come, Emmanuel”) are a beautiful way to pray during Advent. This post includes my contemporary variations on the ancient texts. On each of the seven days before Christmas, put the appropriate antiphon on your mirror or refrigerator, and pray without ceasing. (Dec. 17, 2014)
The O Antiphons: Drenched in the Speech of God –– Further reflections on what the antiphons have to tell us. “God is not a hypothesis to be tested or a puzzle to be solved by detached observers, but an experience to be encountered by receptive participants, those who know how to say ‘O!’” (Dec. 17, 2015)
Dancing with Time: An Advent Prelude –– A meditation on time, a major preoccupation of the season. As W. H. Auden said, “Time is our choice of How to love and Why.” (Dec. 1, 2017)
The World’s End (An Advent Manifesto) –– Worlds end all the time. Neither personal worlds nor public worlds last forever. That may bring sadness, but it is also the foundation of hope’s possiblities. “Yes, all the inadequate, incomplete versions of world will come to an end (some of them kicking and screaming!), but creation as it was intended will be restored, not discarded. Like a poet who creates a new language out of old words, Love will remake the ruins and recover the lost. And the Holy One who is the mystery of the world will be its light and its life forever.” (Nov. 25, 2016)
Blinded by the Light: An Advent Meditation — The mystery we call God is always beyond us. Beyond our grasp, beyond our language, beyond our sight. The mystics and great spiritual teachers sometime use the word darkness to convey their experience in close encounters with the divine. But what they call the darkness of God is not so much a matter of cognitive deprivation, where divinity simply hides its incommunicable essence from finite minds and hearts unprepared to receive it. No, they say, the darkness of God is not deprivation, but saturation. It is not an absence of light, but an excess of glory, that makes our eyes become so dim to divine presence. (Dec. 2, 2019)
“Hopes that pointed to the clouds”: A Sermon for Advent 1 — How do we sustain hope in apocalyptic times, when the “signs of ending” are all around us and we are discouraged by failed expectations? Jesus and the poets—William Wordsworth, W. H. Auden, and Anne Sexton—help us to take heart in challenging times. (Nov. 28, 2020)
“God Isn’t Fixing This” –– For an Advent liturgy, I constructed an enormous wall, made of newspapers with distressing headlines, and set it as a veil between the congregation and the beauty of the sanctuary. In the course of the liturgy, the wall was torn down, symbolizing God’s grace breaking into our troubled history. As I wrote in this post (after yet another American gun massacre): “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.” (Dec. 15, 2015)
“God is alive, surprising us everywhere” –– “God is alive, surprising us everywhere. The message of a dream, intimating something more real than language. But what? Not an idea in my mind. A feeling in my body. I tried briefly to give it words. Nearness. Urgency. Strength. Presence. Then I let the words go, and rested in whatever it was. In times so dark and dangerous, it felt––consoling. Heaven and earth may pass away, but this Presence will not. We are not alone. Perhaps, even loved.” In the deep gloom after the presidential election, I was given the grace of three small revelations. One came during a concert, one in a dream, and one from the mouth of a homeless woman. (Dec. 13, 2016)
I Say Rejoice: A Homily for Advent 3 (Year C) —People of faith abide in a different story, a story where death does not have the last word, a story where Love wins. To say that God will save us is to belong to that story, and to live accordingly. And what are the fruits of faith’s life-shaping story?––trust, confidence, hope, and the kind of invincible joy which St. Paul proclaims with such passion. “Rejoice! Again I say, rejoice!” (Dec. 15, 2018)
Gaudete! — The Advent Dance of Honesty and Hope — The 3rd Sunday of Advent sounds a note of rejoicing to dispute the wintry gloom. It doesn’t deny the darkness, but it also refuses to accept the black hole of unredeemed history as an inescapable fate. “Stir up your power,” we pray, “and with great might come among us.” God’s power will never compel us to rejoice, or to hope, or to love, but it will always seek to persuade us, until the end of time. (Dec. 10, 2022)
Say Yes: A Homily for Advent 4 (Year C) — When Mary said “Yes” to the angel of the Annunciation, it was neither the first nor the last time she would do so. Her whole life up to that point had been a series of consents that would prepare her to receive the Holy One into herself. And in the years that followed, she never renounced her acceptance of the story that would one day take her weeping to the foot of the cross. It is no light thing to say Yes to such a story. (Dec. 18, 2021)
Worship
Advent Adventures in Worship (Part 1: The Electric Eschaton) –– “As the liturgical season when the old is judged and found wanting and the new is never quite what anyone expects, Advent seems particularly suited to a disruption of routine and the intrusion of novelty into the worship experience.” In the apocalyptic year of 1968, I curated a multi-media Advent mash-up of sounds and images from films, rock and roll, poetry, political documentaries and other diverse sources to evoke two Advent themes: “Break on through to the other side” and “Please don’t be long.” This post includes an unusual 20-minute audio collage which, 49 years later, remains a unique artifact in the history of preaching. Wear headphones and turn it up! (Dec. 13, 2014)
Advent Adventures in Worship (Part 2: Homecoming) –– In a pioneering example of a worship “installation,” people journeyed in small groups through a series of multi-sensory experiences. “The journey was a dying (baptismal figure, narrowing of space, sounds and images of a yearning world, an unknown way, darkness) and a rising (emergence into an open, “transcendent” space, and being gathered into the community of the eucharist). It was a losing (leaving the original assembly and the main space) and a finding (rediscovering the community and the original space).” (Dec. 20, 2014)
Unsilent Night: An Advent Revelation –– In an annual December art experience by musician Phil Kline in cities across America, participants collectively create a river of sound moving through the streets––a striking instance of Advent surprise and wonder. “If God is more of a situation than an object, then the community, relationality, mystery, beauty, wonder, delight, and communion produced by the event seemed apt expressions of divinity taking ‘place,’ or ‘being here now.’ You didn’t have to name it to live it.” (Dec. 21, 2015)
The Presentation of Christ ( Luttrell Psalter, 14c) links the gospel story to the candle rituals of February 2.
[On Candlemas] we keep the feast of Mary, mother of the King, because she on that day brought Christ, the Ruler’s child, to the temple. Then after five nights winter is carried out of the dwellings.
The first day of February is Candlemas Eve, and the second is Candlemas Day. As the fortieth day after the Nativity, Candlemas marks the final event in the Infancy narratives, when, in accordance with Jewish custom, Mary and Joseph presented the baby Jesus to be blessed in the Jerusalem temple. You can find a reflection on that gospel story in my 2019 post, “Consumed by Love: The Flames of Candlemas.”
In medieval Europe, people would bring a candle to the church to be blessed on Candlemas. Then they would make a communal candlelight procession in honor of the Christ, whom Simeon, in the Presentation narrative, called “a light to enlighten the nations” (Luke 2:32). A Candlemas prayer beseeches the Light of the world “to pour into the hearts of your faithful people the brilliance of your eternal splendor, that we, who by these kindling flames light up this temple to your glory, may have the darkness of our souls dispelled.”
In the northern hemisphere, this celebration of light coincides with the lengthening of days. We’ve all begun to rejoice that the days are starting a little earlier, lasting a little longer. Sceptics who dismiss Christian festivals as hostile takeovers of pagan celebrations miss the point. The truth of the Incarnate Logos as the deep structure of creation does not compete with the patterns and rhythms of nature; it completes them. In Old English, sunne(“sun”) and sunu (“son”) are nearly identical, allowing a perfect theological pun: Christ is both sodfaesta sunnan leoma (“radiance of the true sun”) and sunu soþan fæder (“Son of the true Father”).
An early Anglo-Saxon poem on the winter solstice, beautifully translated by medieval scholar Eleanor Parker, celebrates the return of the light as Christological:
As you, God born of God long ago, Son of the true Father, eternally existed without beginning in the glory of heaven, so your own creation cries with confidence to you now for their needs, that you send that bright sun to us, and come yourself to lighten those who long have lived surrounded by shadows and darkness, here in everlasting night, who, shrouded by sins, have had to endure death’s dark shadow. [2]
Winter’s cold and dark are not quickly undone. Poised midway between winter solstice and vernal equinox, Candlemas is a transitional feast—the last of winter, the first of spring. It will take time for spring to come: now still contends with not yet. “How long the winter has lasted,” lamented New England poet Jane Kenyon, “—like a Mahler / symphony, or an hour in the dentist’s chair.”[3] My friends in Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska echo this seasonal weariness in their Facebook posts. But for those who are faithful and alert, Candlemas marks the turning point, reawakening the hope that spring is on its way.
Long-term weather forecasts in early February have been going on for centuries, but they always hedge their bets. A sunny Candlemas is but a brief glimpse of future glory, more of a promise than a gift in hand. If the groundhog or the bear emerges from its burrow and sees its shadow, back it goes into hibernation, for spring is still six weeks away. Hope’s object will not be rushed, as traditional wisdom reminds us:
If Candlemas Day is fair and clear, There’ll be two winters in one year. (Scotland)
If Candlemas Day be sunny and warm, Ye may mend yer auld mittens and look for a storm. (Cumbria)[4]
In other words, as T. S. Eliot put it, “wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”[5] But for Ukrainians shivering in the shadow of war; for the homeless huddled in our frigid cities; for the abused and the outcast suffering storms of violence; for African-Americans terrorized by a nation that walks in darkness—Spring can never come soon enough.
Let us keep the feast: Light a candle; Trust the radiance; Become the Spring.
[1]The Menologium, translated from Old English by Eleanor Parker in her fascinating and poetic book, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2022), 88-89. The “five nights” refers to the Anglo-Saxon reckoning of February 6 as the last day of winter before it is “carried out” to make room for spring.
[3] Jane Kenyon, “Walking Alone in Late Winter,” in Collected Poems (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005), 77. Personally, I will take Mahler over the dentist every time.
[4] Charles Kightly, The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain: An Encyclopedia of Living Traditions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 66.
[5] T.S. Eliot, “East Coker, III” in Four Quartets (1943). The poet goes on to say, “Wait without thought, for you are not yet ready for thought: / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” Until it fully arrives, God’s future exceeds adequate description and cannot be grasped. The reader will note that this essay’s title is a positive reversal of the opening line of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.”
To the Name that brings Salvation Honour, worship, laud we pay.
— John Mason Neale
Aelfric of Eynsham, an Anglo-Saxon monk around the turn of the first millennium, thought January 1 a poor choice for New Year’s Day because it lacked the inherent significance worthy of time’s annual renewal. The birthday of Jesus on December 25, or late March, when the land starts to wake from Winter’s sleep, seemed more propitious, and were each widely observed in the Middle Ages as the year’s true beginning. In the Church calendar, the year began in late autumn, on the First Sunday of Advent. In Britain, the First of January did not become the officially accepted New Year’s Day until 1752.
As Eleanor Parker explains in Winters in the World, her charming study of early English understandings of the seasons, monastic writers like Aelfric “wanted to read and interpret the natural world, to learn to recognize the meaning God had planted in it. They saw time and the seasons, from the very first day of the world, as carefully arranged by God with method and purpose—so they believed it should be possible to organize the calendar not according to the randomness of custom and inherited tradition, but in a way that reflected that divine plan.” [i]
But January 1 did mark a singular event in the life of Jesus. As the octave, or eighth day of Christmas, it was the date of the Christ Child’s circumcision, based on Luke’s description of the timing (“When the eighth day came …”— Luke 2:21). The Feast of the Circumcision was celebrated in Spain and Gaul as early as the 6thcentury, but Rome, reluctant to associate with the chaotic excess of popular New Year celebrations, waited until the 11th century to adopt the feast. While modernity has found the circumcision of Jesus a peculiar choice for liturgical celebration (it was finally suppressed in the Roman Catholic calendar revisions of 1969), the Middle Ages saw significance in the first shedding of the Savior’s sacred blood. It not only proved his fully vulnerable humanity; it also foreshadowed the sacrificial offering of Calvary.
St. Paul’s spiritualization of the physical ritual, making it an interior, metaphorical image of severing ourselves from the old body of death (“circumcision of the heart”—Romans 2:29), helped perpetuate the liturgical observance beyond the Middle Ages, but our own era has found more profitable meaning in the other thing that happened on the octave of the Nativity: Jesus got his name.
When the eighth day had come and the child was to be circumcised, they gave him the name Jesus, the name the angel had given him before his conception (Luke 2:21).
The Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus is celebrated on various dates in early January, but the Episcopal calendar, following Luke’s account, puts it properly on New Year’s Day. And while many of us usually spend January 1 watching the Rose Parade and bowl games instead of keeping the sacred feast, whenever the year begins on a Sunday, the secular traditions are transferred to January 2, leaving Episcopalians free to gather on January 1 to observe Holy Name.
Although the Hebrew name “Yeshua” (“Iesus” in the 4th-century Latin Bible, becoming “Jesus” in the 17th-century Geneva Bible) was fairly common in 1st-century Palestine, it was given special weight by divine authority (both Mary and Joseph were told by God’s messenger, “You must name him Jesus.”) And its literal meaning, “Yahweh is salvation,” became fully embodied and expressed in the life, death and resurrection of the son of Mary. Jesus is the one who saves.
St. Paul defined Christians as “those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Cor. 1:2). The whole New Testament attributed great power to the name of Jesus. The first Christians prayed in his name (John 14:14), baptized in his name (Romans 6:3), and healed in his name (Acts 3:6). The Prologue to the Fourth Gospel declares that “to all that received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12). And in Paul’s famous tribute in Philippians, no other name can compare:
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2: 9-11),
Medieval theologians sang exuberant praises of the Holy Name. St. Bernard wrote: “The name Jesus is food. Are you not strengthened every time you recall it? What else builds up the spirit of the one pondering it as this name does? What so refreshed the tired heart, strengthens the virtues, fosters chaste loves?” Richard of St. Victor said that “Jesus is a sweet name, a name of delight, a name that comforts the sinner, a name of blessed hope. Therefore Jesus, be to me Jesus!” And Peter of Ravenna equated the name with the effects of salvation: “You shall call his name Jesus—the name that gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, walking to the lame, speech to the mute, life to the dead; and the power of this name drove all the might of the devil from the bodies of the possessed.” [ii]
Eastern Christianity developed a repetitive recitation of the Holy Name into the transformative practice of centering prayer.[iii] And countless hymn writers have hailed “the power of Jesus’ name.”
John Newton (1725-1807), author of “Amazing Grace,” celebrated the Holy Name’s healing power:
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds In a believer’s ear! It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, And drives away his fear.[iv]
Even at our end, he believed, “the music of thy name” will “refresh my soul in death.” An expanded list of the Name’s effects was given by John Mason Neale (1818-1866):
Name of gladness, Name of pleasure, By the tongue ineffable, Name of sweetness passing measure, To the ear delectable.
‘Tis our safeguard and our treasure, ‘Tis our help ‘gainst sin and hell. ‘Tis the Name for adoration, ‘Tis the Name of victory;
‘Tis the Name for meditation In the vale of misery: ‘Tis the Name for veneration By the Citizens on high.
‘Tis the Name that whoso preaches Finds its music in his ear: ‘Tis the Name that whoso teaches Finds more sweet than honey’s cheer …[v]
Such praises of the Holy Name do not mistake its invocation as a magic charm detached from any concrete meaning. When we say “Jesus” with prayerful, sacred attention, we call up a vast array of transformative forces, from the salvific events of the gospels to the abiding energies of divine presence. As a young Palestinian woman put it to me once, in her imperfect but brilliantly accurate English:
“Jesus is a big word. You can never come to the end of it.”
Episcopal theologian William Porcher Dubose (1836-1918) made the same point this way:
“Jesus Christ is to me, not a name, or a memory or tradition, nor an idea or sentiment, nor a personification, but a living and personal reality, presence, and power. He is God for me, to me, in me, and myself in God … And ‘in His name’ means ‘in Him,’ and ‘in Him’ means ‘in his death and resurrection.’” [vi]
The attempt to grasp the reality represented by the Holy Name is vividly imagined by Charles Wesley (1707-1788) in the figure of Jacob wrestling with the Divine stranger whose name he struggles to know:
Come, O thou Traveller unknown, Whom still I hold, but cannot see! …
I need not tell thee who I am, My misery or sin declare; Thyself hast called me by my name, Look on thy hands, and read it there.
But who, I ask thee, who art thou? Tell me thy name, and tell me now.…
Art thou the Man that died for me? The secret of thy love unfold: Wrestling, I will not let thee go Till I thy name, thy nature know.…
The wrestling with the nameless Transcendent continues, and even though its ungraspable essence departs with the dawn, there is a personal, relatable presence that remains, and can be named.
I know thee, Savior, who thou art— Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend. Nor wilt thou with the night depart, But stay, and love me to the end …
And in this abiding, enfolding presence, the poet discovers yet another name behind (within?) the name of Jesus. It is the Holy Name above all others:
[i] Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 76.
[ii] The quotations are cited in the 13th-century collection by Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, Volume 1, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 73.
[iii] The “Jesus Prayer” (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me) is often synchronized in its repetitions with a pattern of slow, deep breathing.
[vi] Wiliam Porcher Dubose, The Reason of Life (London 1911), cited in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, eds. Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, & Rowan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 493.
[vii] Charles Wesley, “Wrestling Jacob.” The original biblical story is in Genesis 32:24-33.
Our Lady of the Angels (Robert Graham, Los Angeles cathedral, 2002)
Gaudete! Gaudete! Christus est natus Ex Maria Virgine. Gaudete!
Rejoice! Rejoice! Christ is born of the Virgin Mary. Rejoice!
So goes the joyful refrain of a late medieval carol, and even though the celebration of the Divine Birth is still two weeks away, the note of rejoicing (Gaudete! Gaudete!) is already beginning to dispute the wintry gloom in our Scripture readings, our hymns, and our expectant hearts.
For many centuries, the Third Sunday of Advent has been called Gaudete Sunday—Rejoice Sunday. In the Advent wreath, the somber blue is replaced by a brighter, warmer shade of rose. Churches lucky enough to have rose vestments will be using them today. And in the Common Lectionary cycle of readings, the word “rejoice” turns up in each of the three years.
In Year C, the prophet Zephaniah exhorts his disheartened people, “Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem” (Zephaniah 3:14). And St. Paul, overflowing with the Spirit, urges the first Christians to make joy a constant spiritual practice: “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he said. “Again I will say, Rejoice (Philippians 4:4)
In Year B, Isaiah tells us, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my whole being shall exult in my God; for God has clothed me with the garments of salvation” (Isaiah 61:10), while Mary’s heart pours out the Magnificat’s ode to joy: “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior (Luke 1:47).
And now, in Year A, Isaiah promises that even the most barren and forsaken places will become a paradise in God’s future: “The desert shall rejoice and blossom,” he assures us. “God’s ransomed exiles shall return …Gladness and joy shall come upon them, while sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).
Such hopeful refrains lift up our hearts and light a bright candle in the dark. But we also heed the voice of St. James, who curbs our enthusiasm with his “Not so fast! The Kingdom doesn’t come all at once. We’ve got to be patient” (James 5:7).
And we know he’s right. We still abide in a severely damaged history which seems to repeat itself rather than make real progress toward the horizon of God’s future. We have been shocked in recent years to see such seemingly outdated sins as overt racism and anti-Semitism come roaring back, like the alarming return of “conquered” diseases like polio and measles.
The French thinker Jean Baudrillard wrote about the myth of human progress just before the Millennium, critiquing the optimistic talk of a New World Order by reminding us that humanity continues to have a serious waste disposal problem (theologians would call this Original Sin, the persistent flaw that burdens and bedevils every human endeavor).
As Baudrillard put it, “The problem becomes one of waste. It is not just material substances, including nuclear ones, which pose a waste problem but also the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas which continue to pollute our mental space. Historical and intellectual refuse pose an even more serious problem than industrial waste. Who will rid us of the sediment of centuries of stupidity?” [i]
I ask that question every day when I see the news! But the genius of Advent is its ability to perform the difficult dance of honesty and hope. It doesn’t deny the darkness, but it also refuses to accept the black hole of unredeemed history as an inescapable fate. “Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness,” we pray, “and put on the armor of light”—not just in some distant utopian future, but “now, in the time of this mortal life.”
Now, now, now. But also not yet. Gaudete, but also Kyrie eleison. Rowan Williams, borrowing an image from Diadochus, a fifth-century bishop, describes Advent spirituality as the practice of “looking east in winter.”
“Looking east in winter we feel the warmth of the sun on our faces, while still sensing an icy chill at our backs. Our divided and distorted awareness of the world is not healed instantly. But we are not looking at the phenomenon from a distance: we do truly sense the sun on our faces; and we have good reason to think that the climate and landscape of our humanity can indeed be warmed and transfigured.” [ii]
The next time there is a sunny morning, go stand somewhere on our island’s eastern shore. Feel the chill at your back, and the warming sunlight on your face. Do it without words. Let those contrary sensations of cold and warmth be your Advent prayer.
Not every morning brings a bright sun, of course. Sometimes the warmth of hope is a matter of faith, not immediate experience. Yet even when we can’t feel it, God is redeeming the time and preparing the dawn. And when we pray, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us,” the Holy One is listening.
“Stir up your power” is such a striking prayer, a bold cry of the heart to the One who saves. [iii] And because it is always the Collect-prayer for this day, Gaudete Sunday is also known as “Stir up” Sunday. But what do we mean when we call upon divine power? What does the power of God look like in the world we inhabit?
Well, it looks a lot like what happened when Jesus arrived: “The blind see, the lame dance, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor receive good news” (Matthew 11:5). It’s not a violent head-on clash with the powers of this world—meeting them on their own bloody terms—but the liberation of the faithful into a new form of being, enabling the friends of God to “plant the seeds of resurrection amid the blind sufferings of history.” [iv]
In Roberto Rossellini’s film, Europe ‘51 (1952), Ingrid Bergman plays a wealthy woman who gives up all her privilege to serve the poor and vulnerable. Rossellini, who had made a joyful film about St. Francis two years earlier, wanted to explore what would happen if someone behaved like St. Francis in the contemporary world. As it turns out in Europe ‘51, Irene (Bergman’s character) is judged to be insane by her husband, her social class, her doctors, and her Church, and the film ends with her locked away in an asylum. The powers-that-be have decided that there is no place in the world for the impracticality of unconditional love.
But even as Irene suffers this sad fate, we see her continue to be who she is, embodying God’s compassion for her fellow inmates. Like the incarnate God enclosed within the finite space of the Virgin’s womb, she can still practice heaven within the confines of the asylum. As she comforts a despairing woman who has tried to commit suicide, we see Irene, in a close-up reminiscent of an icon, speaking the words of Christ: “You are not alone. Don’t worry. I am with you. I will not leave you.” She becomes, in that moment, what we are all invited to become: an image of Christ for others.
“I am with you,” Irene (Ingrid Bergman) tells a distressed woman in Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51.
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. But God’s idea of “great might” is not the way the world understands it. No lightning bolts. No legions of angels. Just a babe in a manger, a tortured man on a cross, a disciple locked in an asylum. As W. H. Auden said in the Advent portion of his Christmas Oratorio: “The Real is what will strike you as really absurd.” Or as an old carol puts it, “Weakness shall the strong confound.” [v]
In another of his poems, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Auden suggests that poetry operates much like divine power. Poetry “makes nothing happen,” he says. In other words, poetry doesn’t force its will upon the world, but in offering an alternate perspective for engaging reality, it makes the world different nonetheless. Auden describes poetry as if it were a stream, making its own way through the landscape.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
In his analysis of this poem, John Burnside notes that poetry’s work is “to survive—not in some dogged but enfeebled fashion, hanging on, though barely noticed, in an indifferent world, but actively, on its own terms—that is, ‘in the valley of its own making.’” The ‘executives’—the powers-that-be—take no notice. It means nothing to them. But “poetry flows on, through and away from ‘the busy griefs’ and the ‘raw towns that we believe in and die in,’ its business is more fundamental, its true nature more elemental” than the ‘executives’ can imagine.[vi]
And just so does the power of God flow through the world. Not to force anything to happen in a blunt cause-and-effect way, but to exist, like the waters of baptism, as an inviting and life-giving reality: “It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”
We find this same image of the flowing, living water in today’s passage from Isaiah: “For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sands shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water” (Isaiah 35:6-7).
The concluding words of Auden’s stanza, “a mouth,” may strike our ears jarringly after the metaphor of a quietly flowing stream, but both poetry and God are given to speech: In the beginning was the Word.
And in the same way that the “Stir up” prayer beseeches the God who saves, Auden’s poem, written on the eve of World War II, calls upon the poet to speak a word against all the dark sorrows of the world:
In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate …
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice … [vii]
There’s that word again: rejoice. We have prayed for a word of power today, and what we are given is: Gaudete! Rejoice! God’s power will never compel us to rejoice, or to hope, or to love. But it will always seek to persuade us, until the end of time.
Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span sing my favorite version of Gaudete.
[i] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 26
[ii] Rowan Williams, Looking East in Winter:Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), 8.
[iii] The Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent in the Book of Common Prayer: “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.”
[iv] I can’t locate the source of this quote from an old homily, but it may be from either Paul Evdokimov or Olivier Clément.
[v] Auden’s line is from “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (Collected Poems, Random House, 1976, p. 274). The carol line is from Gabriel’s Message (trans. J. M. Neale). Like Gaudete, it is in the famous Piae Cantiones collection of 1582.
[vi] John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 23.
[vii] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Collected Poems, 197-198).
In calling me, the call does not leave me intact; it surges only by opening a space in me to be heard, and therefore by shattering something of what I was before I felt myself to be called.
— Jean-Louis Chrétien
In Mahler’s Third Symphony, the first movement is an eruption of massive orchestral sounds: horns, drums, fanfares and marches, a shaking of the foundations to make way for a new world to appear. And for the next four movements, the music rarely takes a breath. The adagio, the slow, contemplative movement which usually comes in the middle of a symphony, is delayed until the very end. And what an ending it is—23 minutes long!—taking us with unhurried solemnity ever deeper into the mystery of the world. Mahler called it “the higher form in which everything is resolved into quiet being. I could almost call the Third’s finale ‘What God tells me,’” he added, “in the sense that God can only be understood as love.” [i]
Advent is like that symphony, it seems to me. Over the first three Sundays, the prophets roar, the heavens shake, the voices cry. Repent! Make way! Stay awake! Cast away the works of darkness! Put on the armor of light! But on the Fourth Sunday, it’s suddenly quiet. No more cosmic thunder. No more urgent warnings. The Baptist’s big crowds have drifted on home. Advent’s adagio finale is a miniature: two pregnant women in a humble courtyard, having an intimate conversation.
But what a conversation it is! “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” says Elizabeth. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” replies her cousin Mary. Their ecstatic words have been on our lips in worship ever since.[ii]
The cousins had a lot to process. One was carrying the last of the Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist. The other was carrying the founder and pioneer of a transformed humanity. They held creation’s future within them, ever since they had each said “Yes” to a story that was no longer their own. They now belonged to God, come what may. I imagine they both did a lot of laughing and crying that day.
The Rev. Mark Harris, a dear friend I first met in seminary a half-century ago, began last year’s challenging Advent by writing a poem about Mary’s consent. It’s called “Implications of Yes.”
The neighbors talked about it for a while, How the young girl who was beginning to show Came back from meeting her cousin And seemed kind of quiet,
How she was seen leaving her house Early one morning with a small sapling Bundled in rough cloth in one hand, And a shovel in the other.
Later she was seen coming back, No sapling, the shovel over her shoulder, Her hands and dress smeared with dirt, Her eyes red and swollen.
Later, sitting with the others, she spoke Of her longing for a lost simplicity And her preparations for realities that follow from her quiet Yes .
Years from now, she said, There will be need for this tree grown, Just as there is need now for this Child that grows in me.
The tree will bear the body of the Man, As I bear the Child. We will each be ready in our turn To do as the Holy One requires.
We will, with the Holy One we bear, Be broken by the bearing, And will give our lives For the healing of the nations. [iii]
The poet gives us a stunning image here. Mary, pregnant with Jesus, plants the tree that will become his cross! Both mother and tree will, like Jesus, offer all that they have and all that they are for the healing of the nations, the repair of the world. That’s how the story goes in a fallen, broken world, and if you say ”Yes” to this story, it will cost no less than everything.
When Mary said “Yes” to the angel of the Annunciation, it was neither the first nor the last time she would do so. Her whole life up to that point had been a series of consents that would prepare her to receive the Holy One into herself. And in the years that followed, she never renounced her acceptance of the story that would one day take her weeping to the foot of the cross. It is no light thing to say Yes to such a story.
We will each be ready in our turn To do as the Holy One requires.
Mary was ready in her turn. But now it’s our turn.
The Incarnation of the Divine Word was a singular event. Only Jesus could be who he was and do what he did as the unique conjunction of human and divine—God in the flesh. But in another sense, the Incarnation is a continuing event to the degree that we ourselves become open and receptive to the divine that wants to be born in us.
The Russian Saint Seraphim of Sarov (1759-1833) put it this way: The purpose of human life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. In other words, our human destiny is to be filled with Divinity, to dwell in God and let God dwell in us. What did we ask in today’s collect-prayer? May our own souls and bodies become “a mansion prepared for Godself.”[iv]We weren’t kidding around. It’s our most serious Advent prayer, committing ourselves to becoming God-bearers.
The first Christians made some strikingly bold claims for humanity’s potential for “divinization” (becoming like God). The Second Letter of Peter (1:4) says: “God has given you such precious and majestic promises, that you may become partakers of the divine nature.” The First Letter of John (3:2) says, “We know that when God appears, we shall be like God, because we shall see God as God is.” And St. Paul, in Second Corinthians 3:18, insists that “all of us, with faces unveiled, mirroring the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
The two most famous summations of divinization as corollary to incarnation were made by Irenaeus in the second century and Athanasius in the fourth. “In God’s immense love,” said Irenaeus, “God became what we are, that he might make us what he is.” Athanasius was even more explicit: “The Divine Word became human that humans might become God.”
Now many have argued against this whole idea of divinization. There’s too great a gulf between Creator and creature, some say. Who can hope to cross that infinite abyss? Others say that humanity is simply not up to it. Just look at world history over the past century, or the last few years in America. On the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 2021, for example, did anyone see Christ’s glory being reflected from those tormented faces at our nation’s Capitol? [v]
But if we believe that the Divine Word was truly made flesh, and that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, then we must acknowledge the existence of an innate human capacity to receive and embody God. Absent that capacity, Mary could never have conceived our Lord and Savior. There is an integral part of our human makeup which is designed to answer when God calls. In other words, our humanity always contains a mansion prepared for Godself. That receptive capacity to say Yes to God may be buried beneath multiple layers of ego and sin, but it cannot be destroyed. It’s a feature, not a bug.
One of the greatest Orthodox theologians of the last century, Sergius Bulgakov, insisted on the indispensable role of humanity in the Incarnation:
Christ did not bring His human nature down from heaven, and He did not create it anew from the earth; rather, He took it from “the most pure flesh and blood of the Virgin Mary”… [T]he Incarnation of Christ is realized not in one Person but in two: in Christ and in the Virgin Mary. The icon of the Mother of God with Infant is therefore the true icon of the Incarnation.[vi]
To become fully human, the only-begotten of God did not destroy human nature, making it something it was not. Rather, Christ fulfilled human nature, manifesting our human potential to dance with God. But we need help to realize our full humanity. It’s not just that our wills are impaired by sin. The fact is that we are not made to function as autonomous beings at all. We are choral beings at heart. We need the full choir, the whole company of heaven and earth, in order to be our truest selves and exist not in isolation but in holy communion.
So let us admit that Mary was capable of divinization. She could contain and give birth to the holy in our midst. But what about the rest of us? Are we capable of embodying divinity? Many Christians have said yes, absolutely! The great hymn writer Charles Wesley put it this way:
Heavenly Adam, life divine, Change my nature into Thine; Move and spread throughout my soul, Actuate and fill the whole; Be it I no longer now Living in the flesh, but Thou.[vii]
That’s a high bar for sure. But it happens. The saints prove that every day. And we ourselves are here because we are engaged in the same transformational project.
Be it I no longer now Living in the flesh, but Thou.
Less me, more God.
Our parish hosted a film series this Advent, and last week’s feature, Of Gods and Men (2010), told the true story of French Trappist monks who served an impoverished Muslim village in Algeria. Their monastery, Our Lady of Atlas, had been there since 1938, but in the decades after the end of French colonial rule in 1962, their community was threatened by civil unrest and a lingering suspicion of Europeans. In the 1990s, returning to France was clearly the safest choice, but the village leaders begged them to stay. They depended on the monks, not only for medical care, but for their stabilizing and loving presence.
On Christmas Eve, 1993, terrorists broke into the monastery and held the monks at gunpoint, making it clear that they were now in mortal danger. The terrorists eventually departed without incident (even apologizing for disturbing the holy feast of Jesus’ birth), and the monks celebrated Midnight Mass with special intensity. But the threat remained.
Two years later (March 1996), that Christmas Eve of both fear and deliverance was still reverberating in their hearts. Dom Christian, the prior, told the brothers in a Lenten reflection:
… through that experience we felt invited to be born again. The life of a man goes forth from birth to birth … In our life there is always a child to be born; the child of God who each of us is … We have to be witnesses of the Emmanuel, that is, of “God with us.” There is a presence of “God among us” which we ourselves must assume.[viii]
A few weeks after Dom Christian wrote these lines about giving birth to God, the monks were taken hostage just before Holy Week. They would be martyred during Eastertide. If they had fled the country when they had the chance, they could have preserved their lives. But the brothers would not abandon the people they served. And their writings and their actions made it clear that they had already surrendered their lives long before, in both their baptismal vows and their monastic vows. They were people who knew what it meant to say yes when Jesus calls, come what may.
Of Gods and Men (2010). The monks say yes to remaining in harm’s way.
If any of you still have doubts about the human capacity to embody divinity, listen to what Dom Christian wrote after that pivotal Christmas Eve, imagining what he would say to his future killer at the hour of his death:
And also you, my friend of the last moment, who will not have known what you are doing: Yes, I want this thank you and this “a-dieu” to be for you, too, because in God’s face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. Amen! In h’allah! [ix]
Who could write such a thing had God not filled him to the brim! Another monk, Fr. Christopher, wrote in his journal during that same Christmastide: “We are in a state of epiclesis.”[x]Epiclesis is a Greek term denoting the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the eucharistic prayer, asking for the sanctification of our lives as well as the holy gifts on the altar.
We are all in a state of epiclesis—the acquisition of Spirit. And indeed, it is God’s desire to give us more spirit, more grace, more love, more humanity and more divinity. All we need to do is say Yes.
[i] Gustav Mahler, letter to Bruno Walter in 1896, the year he composed the Third Symphony.
[ii] Elizabeth’s words are part of the “Hail Mary” prayer used in the Rosary; Mary’s Magnificat (“Song of Mary”) is one of the oldest Christian hymns, and draws upon the Song of Hannah (I Samuel 2:1-10) and other Old Testament texts. This scene of the two cousins only appears in Luke 1:39-55.
[iii] Mark Harris is an Episcopal priest, poet and artist living in Lewes, Delaware. The poem, written December 1, 2020, is used by permission.
[iv] The Collect for Advent 4 in the Book of Common Prayer reads: Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[v] January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the world. It is a bitter irony that that date has now been corrupted by the violence, hate and delusion of the insurrection. A similar irony taints the Feast of the Transfiguration, when the brilliant light of Christ’s divinity must share August 6 with the incinerating explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.
[vi] Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 200, 202.
[vii] Charles Wesley (1707-1788), Since the Son Hath Made Me Free.
[viii] Dom Christian de Chergé, Reflections for Lent (March 8, 1996), in Bernardo Olivera, How Far to Follow: The Martyrs of Atlas (Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1997), 103, 99.
[ix] Testament of Dom Christian, dated Dec. 1, 1993 & Jan. 1, 1994, opened, after his death, on Pentecost Sunday, May 26, 1996, in Olivera, 127.
[x] Fr. Christopher Lebreton (January, 1994), in Olivera 111.
In a 1998 New York Times interview, Gregory Peck reflected on the challenge of playing Ahab in Moby Dick. “I think I should have been more ferocious in pursuit of the whale, more cruel to the crew,” he said, “and I think I’d have a better grasp now of what Melville was talking about. Ahab focused all his energies on avenging himself against the whale, but he was trying to penetrate the mystery of why we are here at all, why there is anything. I wasn’t mad enough, not crazy enough, not obsessive enough. I should have done more.” He paused, took a long breath, and added: “At the time, I didn’t have more in me.” [ii]
When you hear the stories of the saints, do you say, “I mean to be one too!”—or do you feel you’re not quite ready for the part? Maybe you’re not crazy enough, not obsessive enough, not pure enough, not loving enough. You may think, “I don’t have it in me.”
Well, you’re right. You don’t. But that’s the point. The saints don’t have it in them either. Saintliness comes from a source deeper than their own solitary selves. The true hero or heroine of a saint’s life is not the individual person, but the divine intention taking flesh in his or her story. As St. Paul said of his own life’s protagonist, “Not I, but Christ in me” (Gal. 2:20).
As Wendy Wright has written, saints “are people who have had the imagination and audacity to allow themselves to be remade slowly in the image of the living God, people who have so opened their hearts to God that God’s own story is in them once again … retold.” [iii] Every saint’s life is a unique retelling, shaped by the particulars of heredity, personality and environment, but down deep it’s always the same story, over and over again: the story of “love’s endeavor, love’s expense,”[iv] perpetually pouring itself out for the life of the world.
When I graduated from high school, my parents gave me a gilt-edged copy of one the great classics of Christian devotion, Of the Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas à Kempis in the early 15th century. My father wrote in the front, “We hope that this book will bring you closer to the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Love, Mom & Dad.”
Although not all of Thomas’ late medieval spirituality resonates today, much of it still hits home.
Blessed are the ears that catch the pulse of the Divine whisper, and give no heed to the whisperings of this world … Blessed are they that prepare themselves more and more, by daily exercises, for the receiving of heavenly secrets. Blessed are they who are glad to have time to spare for God.[v]
O my friend, lose not thy confidence of making progress toward the things of the Spirit; still thou hast time, the hour is not yet past. Why wilt thou defer thy good purpose from day to day? Arise, and in this very instant begin, and say, Now is the time to be doing, now is the time to be striving, now is the fit time to be amending myself.[vi]
(Mom, Dad, I’m still working on it!)
Every saint’s life is an imitation of Christ. The very structure of Christian sacred biographies reflects this theological point. In the Book of Acts, the martyrdom of Stephen—the first biography of a Christian saint—deliberately mirrors the Passion of Christ. Like Jesus, Stephen is an innocent killed by a world which refuses his message. Like Jesus, Stephen uses his final breaths to forgive his enemies and surrender his spirit to the divine. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” he prays at the end. Perhaps it’s not enough to say that Stephen was imitating Christ in his martyrdom. He was, in truth, repeating Christ, in the Pauline sense of “Christ in me.” We suggest the same sense of return and presence in the Words of Institution at every eucharist: Whenever you perform these actions, I am with you once again.
Eleven centuries after the death of Stephen, St. Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx in the north of England, lay on his deathbed, eyes closed. His friend and fellow monk, Walter Daniel, leaned over to whisper in his ear, “Look on the cross; let your eye be where your heart is.” Aelred opened his eyes for just a moment, and spoke his last words: “In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum” (“Into your hands I commend my spirit.”) Once again, the surrender of spirit by a dying saint echoes the last words of Jesus from the cross in Luke 23:46.
In fact, unlike Stephen’s paraphrase, it was a direct quote. Did Walter, Aelred’s biographer, insert the verse from Luke into his abbot’s mouth as a pious fiction, or had Aelred in fact repeated Christ’s words verbatim? In the genre of sacred biography, we don’t need to know the factual answer. Holy stories are always about more than what a camera or microphone can record. As narratives straddling the mysterious boundary between the human and the divine, their language dives beneath the empirical surface to explore the hidden depths. Hyperbole, metaphor, miracle—these are all rhetorical tools to convey the inherently mysterious nature of religious experience.
As Thomas J. Heffernan points out in his seminal study of sacred biographies,“Walter would argue, and his monastic audience would agree, that Aelred’s death has become more memorable because it is now able to arouse in us the memory of another death, the death of Christ, which is the paradigm for the manner in which all Christian martyrs are meant to surrender to God.” [vii]
When it comes to saints, it is not in the historical particulars of their stories, however interesting, edifying, or inspiring, that the central meaning of their lives is to be found, but rather in the way their stories imitate, or repeat, the Christ event, as divine love takes place anew in the flesh of our human existence. As hymn writer Isaac Watts summarized this process:
“The image of Christ is transcribed upon our natures, we go from one degree of it to another, we are changed from glory into glory, from one degree of glorious holiness to another: thereby the gospel appears to have a fairer, brighter, and a stronger evidence.” [viii] We, having Christ in us, become the evidence for the truth of Christian faith.
In other words, saints are living icons, radiant with the light of heaven—even if they sometimes have messy and complicated lives. Take, for example, Elizaveta Pilenko. Born to a wealthy Russian family in 1891, she was caught up in the revolutionary movement during her late teens. She briefly flirted with a plot to assassinate Trotsky (Russian politics were deadly even then). But at the same time, her Orthodox faith was beginning to deepen. She fled the Stalinist regime for Paris in the 1920s, by which time her second marriage, like her first, had failed, and a daughter had died of influenza.
In her new home, she began a ministry to the poor, and her bishop encouraged her to take vows as a nun. She did so, receiving her religious name, Maria Skobtsova. She was permitted to continue to live and work among the people, and her rented Parisian house had an open door for refugees and lost souls. Her bishop called her faux monastery “the desert of human hearts.”
She wasn’t exactly easy for her sister nuns. She wore odd clothes, and hung out in cafes and bars late into the night, counseling people on the brink of despair. She also missed many liturgies while off scrounging food for her soup kitchens in the markets of Las Halles. She’s been called the Orthodox Dorothy Day.
St. Mary of Paris (Maria Skobtsova).
When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Mother Maria sheltered many Jews, supplying them with baptismal certificates and assisting their escape. Eventually arrested by the Gestapo, she died in the gas chamber at Ravensbrück on Holy Saturday, 1945. She was canonized as St. Mary of Paris in 2004.
Mother Maria was also a writer of poetry and theology. Listen to what she said about the Christian life as a continual self-emptying:
“Renunciation teaches us not only that we not greedily seek advantages for our soul but that we not be stingy, that we always be extravagant in our love, that we achieve a spiritual nakedness, that our soul hold nothing back, that we not hold back anything sacred and valuable which we would not be ready to give up in Christ’s name to those who need it …That which was given away returns. The love which was expended never diminishes the source of that love, because the source of love in our hearts is Love itself, Christ… Here we are speaking about a genuine emptying out, in a partial imitation of how Christ emptied himself by becoming incarnate in humanity. We must likewise empty ourselves out completely, becoming, so to speak, incarnate in another human soul, offering it to the full measure of God’s image which is contained in ourselves.” [ix]
Now when we hear a prescription like that, we may worry, as Gregory Peck did over Melville’s Ahab, about our capacity to perform such a demanding role. What we need to remember is this: the subject of our life is not our individual, autonomous self, but the transcendent, empowering Christ who dwells within us. In a recent podcast, Mark Harris, one of my most eloquent priestly friends, made this point perfectly. “When I look at the heroes I have in terms of justice ministries,” he said, “they are people who live into this to the point of self-emptying. They get out of the way finally. It’s not about their being good; it’s about good being done. So it’s God’s justice that’s done, not them doing justice.” [x]
Heavenly Adam, Life divine Change my nature into Thine; Move and spread throughout my soul; Activate and fill the whole; Be it I no longer now Living in the flesh, but Thou.
— Charles Wesley
Our own holiness practice may not entail the rigors or reach the heights of the greatest saints. Most of us are called to what Thérèse of Lisieux described as “the Little Way.” As a dreamy teenager, Thérèse thought it would be simply thrilling to be a saint:
“I would be a Martyr … I would be a Missionary. I would be flayed like St. Bartholomew, plunged into boiling oil like St. John, or, like St. Ignatius of Antioch, I would be ground by the teeth of wild beasts into bread worthy of God. With St. Agnes and St. Cecilia I would offer my neck to the sword of the executioner, and like St. Joan of Arc I would murmur the name of Jesus at the stake.” [xi]
Thérèse of Lisieux.
However, such heroic drama would be denied her. After a brief and uneventful life hidden within a Carmelite cloister, she died from tuberculosis at 24. But her autobiography, detailing her efforts to respond to the smallest, most ordinary moments with a loving, patient and generous heart, would inspire countless faithful around the world. “I am only a very little soul,” she said, “who can only offer very little things to the Lord.”
Fr. Alban Butler, who in the 18th century compiled the most extensive compendium of saintly lives in the English language, also made the point that sanctity can be a practical, everyday kind of holiness:
“Perfection consists not in raptures and lofty contemplation; nor in austerities, or any extraordinary actions: for thus, it would have been above the reach of many. But God has placed it in what is easy, and in every one’s power. The rich and poor, the learned and unlearned may equally aim at perfection: for it requires only that we perform our daily actions in a spirit of true Christian virtue … we must be holy not by fits, but by habit … it is then our ordinary actions performed in a true spirit of virtue … which must sanctify our lives.” [xii]
We must be holy not by fits, but by habit, performing our ordinary actions in a true spirit of virtue.
Blessed are those who rise and shine. Blessed are those who lend a hand. Blessed are those who listen. Blessed are those who take the time. Blessed are those who speak kindly. Blessed are those who smile at strangers. Blessed are those who plant. Blessed are those who raise children. Blessed are those who teach. Blessed are those who provide our meals. Blessed are those who do the hard things. Blessed are those who look with compassion. Blessed are those who do justice. Blessed are those who wonder. Blessed are those who welcome. Blessed are those who nurture. Blessed are those who care. Blessed are those who struggle with failing bodies. Blessed are those who suffer. Blessed are the broken. Blessed are those who know loss. Blessed are those who persist. Blessed are those who surrender. Blessed are those who remember hope. Blessed are those who practice resurrection.
“To be a saint,” says Frederick Buechner, “is to live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.” [xiii] You see, it’s very simple to be a saint. Just open your hands, and your heart.
Claude Laydu, Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951).
The greatest cinematic depiction of sainthood is Robert Bresson’s Diary of a CountryPriest, based on George Bernanos’ novel of the same name. The unnamed priest is rejected by many in his village, but it is clear to a few—and to the viewer—that Christ is truly in him. The priest experiences what he calls “the miracle of our empty hands!—that we may give what we do not possess!” Claude Laydu, the non-professional who played the part, threw himself into the role, living with working-class priests, adopting an austere diet, studying the novel throughout the shoot, and submitting without question to Bresson’s strict direction. As critic Tony Pipolo writes, “The very qualities this behavior manifests—obedience, obsessive concentration, a combination of fire and composure, and genuine dedication—were exactly those Bresson sought for his curé.”[xiv] But only after viewing the finished film would Laydu recognize the true nature of his role. “I didn’t know I was playing a saint,” he confessed. I think all the saints would say pretty much the same thing.
I’ll give the last word to Buechner, who writes about saints as well as any. In a novel about Brendan of Ireland, his protagonist sums it up beautifully:
“[God] wants each one of us to have a loving heart … When all’s said and done, perhaps that’s the length and breadth of it.” [xv]
[i] Cited in Tony Pipolo, Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 71.
[ii] Gregory Peck New York Times interview in 1988, quoted in William Grimes’ New York Times obituary for Mr. Peck, June 13, 2003.
[iii] Wendy Wright, “For all the saints,” in Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life (Vol. III, No. 5, Sept.-Oct. 1988), 17-18.
[iv] From W. H. Vanstone’s hymn, “Morning glory, starlit sky” (Episcopal Hymnal 1982, #585). The endeavor and expense are spelled out in verse 3: “Love that gives, gives evermore, / gives with zeal, with eager hands, / spares not, keeps not, all outpours, / ventures all, its all expends.”
[xi] Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), cited in Jill Haak Adels, The Wisdom of the Saints: An Anthology (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7.
[xii] Alban Butler (1710-1773), Meditations and Discourses, cited in Mursell, 36.
[xiii] Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (New York: Seabury Press, 1966), 119.
The religious imagineer 