And it was evening, and it was morning, the first day

It was just about fifteen years ago today when I had butterflies over the first day of seminary. I was finally crossing a threshold that I'd been longing for for at least eight years, but really since a magical evening when I was five years old. I was letting go of a lot of old stuff and walking toward something I could not even begin to imagine, except that I knew that it was God's voice calling me forward.

I was more anxious and eager than I had ever been on the first day of school. As an adult, I believe I had more of an image of what might come of it and more of a sense of my limitations than when it was first grade or ninth grade or even college. It has been an amazing fifteen years, and I have been blessed more than I was ever able to imagine.

And now here I am on the first day of sabbatical. I've been given the gift of three months and an insanely generous grant to restore my focus and my energies. And I feel a bit like a gerbil whose wheel has been removed from the cage. The patterns of parish life have been my auto-pilot for so long that it is disconcerting not to reach for the black shirt -- they are all laundered and hanging in my closet not to be touched for 90 days -- not to pack a lunch and drive the familiar route to church, not to touch base with people I care about who are hurting or deciding or questioning or rejoicing. I won't know who will show up for church tomorrow or what the guest priest will preach about. I didn't used to think I had control issues, but I am humbled to admit that I do. I think one of the reasons God created sabbath and commanded us to practice periodical rest was precisely to remind us that our sense of control is an illusion. And to have a sense of the immenseness of God's blessings.

And so what did I do today? A lot of hanging out with people I care about. Fairly random errands but with a spaciousness about them that is not my custom. And some creating order out of chaos. That seems appropriate. My study is recently repainted and re-carpeted, which meant that every book -- maybe I'll count them, and you will be shocked -- and every stick of furniture had to be carried downstairs and dealt with. And brought back upstairs and placed with care where it belongs.

As of tonight all the boxes of books have been unpacked and so far there are eight boxes to be given away. I still have papers to deal with. Do I really keep twelve years worth of sermons? Who will ever look at them? I found two short stories and some poems I thought were lost forever. I'm excited about giving my youth minister, who is beginning seminary, a pretty amazing theological library and offering a pile of other books to any seminarian who is willing to pay a quarter apiece for them.

I'm feeling rested and exhausted as this day ends. There is some satisfaction. I'm not under the illusion that I can go cold turkey after fifteen years, but rather I'll ease into a different pace. If I go back to church in December unchanged by the experience I will have failed at it. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm wanting to hear what God has to say that is new and surprising. I'm looking forward to time with children and grandchildren, with friends, with my sister and husband in Italy and alone in Wales and then home again to what is going to feel like a new house -- the kitchen remodel should be finished by then. There are no words for the state of chaos now.

So I'm feeling a bit like Wile-E-Coyote stepping off the edge of the cliff, but I feel peaceful and hopeful and extremely grateful about it. And there is a little bit of me that says just let me got to St. Alban's in the morning and give everybody one more hug. Then I'll let go....

Our work is loving the world...

Our work is loving the world. (from Mary Oliver)

Just look. Just touch. Just taste, just smell, just listen. Close your eyes and breathe and rest in gratitude that you have been given a mind and a heart and all these body-clothes. Rest in attentive silence, and I want you to feel the power of the collective meditation. It is not your meditation or mine. It is ours. Yours, mine, the children’s, the mockingbird’s, the clouds’, and the cicadas’. It is a blessedness of the spirit that we create by giving ourselves to it. This silence is a collaborative work of art.

Now, tell me, and be honest. I want you to hush the voices in your head that all the grown-ups said about how you are supposed to be humble, and extinguish the worse voices that said in no uncertain terms not only are you not so great, but you're damaged goods. Lock all the grown-up voices in the small, dark closet of your fear and leave them there. Don’t you know, in your heart of hearts. that in the fairy tale world you are the princess or the handsome prince who rescues her with a kiss?

In the fairy tale world did you ever cast yourself as anyone other than Cinderella or Prince Charming? Not a one of us ever said, "I think I identify with the second ugly stepsister, or the stringy coachman, or even the fairy godmother." No, we know we are the star. Maybe you were a changeling, the child who must have been switched at birth and you grew up in the wrong family when of course you were the son or daughter of the king and queen, who have been longing for you ever since the day you vanished. Even though we trudge through life, emptying the ashes from the fireplace, battling the endlessly annoying beasts that block our paths, don’t we all know that the loving reunion is just past the turn in the path, just over the horizon or at the far edge of the forest?

See, is the message of the Bible all that different from fairy tales? We are God’s own beloved. Our resemblance is obvious once we see the family pictures. And there is no question about it. Our place is set at the table. The sheets are turned down on our beds. Our crowns and robes are waiting for us and the king stands on the porch all night every night scanning the horizon for our arrival. I know I've said it before, but I believe all the gospel is contained in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Even if we've been hanging out with the pigs and haven't had time to change our clothes or shower, there is nothing we can do that makes us anything less than the crown prince or princess. Nothing that will keep our loving parent from wrapping her arms around us. The kingdom is ours and the Lord wants us to delight in it.

Obviously, I am talking about all of us, so that means that the kingdom is the ultimate work of art that we create together, all of us, with the Creator of all. We are sensible enough to know we can't do much on our own. Even the most self-sufficient of us knows that we rely on others for much of what sustains us. We are all parts of the 'luminous web' of creation, and our individual gifts are like the fragments of glass that tumble and are rearranged when a kaleidoscope is turned. What we have to bring to this art is bright and fragmented and necessary for the composition of the whole.

How you are exploring yourself and your world and discovering that the boundary between them is porous.  It is astonishing to admit that we can never ever see our own faces except in reflection. I can see myself only in two-dimensional form in a mirror or photograph and know that that is not how others see me. I can't be myself except in relation to those who know me, and of course it is God alone who knows us truly. I imagine you'll soon see the presence of others, the other authors of our lives, who may be unaware that they are shaping our narratives as we participate in shaping theirs.

We are all collaborators, then, consciously or not, and of course it is raising our awareness that awakens us to make choices with design and foresight. To collaborate in art and in life may be as graceful as a dance. We bring our energy and presence and move in harmony with the other.

We guide and are guided. We are careful not to step on each other's toes. We become ever more sensitive to what our partner has to share, and that in turn fills the well of what we have to offer.

I remember being at the great cathedral of Chartres, a monument to collaboration, built in the 12th and 13th centuries. Even the name of the architect is unknown, let alone the stonemasons or glaziers of the most incredible windows in the world. It was a gray October Sunday afternoon and the bells were pealing and the guard at the entrance told us we could not go inside because it was time for worship. We immediately transformed ourselves from tourists into pilgrims and were admitted to what turned out to be the ordination of a priest. For three long hours we worshiped. The procession was 200 bishops, priests, and deacons long, and the litany of the saints was ecstatically interminable, and the great vaults were filled with music and incense and prayer.

And it was all about this one man, but it wasn't. It was about all of us. It was about all holiness that is encased in flesh and breath and life. It was about the laborer who put that triangle of blue glass in Mary's dress, the one who carved the lamb in David's arms, the Englishman who has been giving tours every morning at eleven o'clock for fifty years now, and the clueless tourists who just show up not knowing what to expect.

And it is about going with Plan B. Working with the variables of the world, our visions are not always feasible. What we see or hear in our minds and hearts may be beyond the craft of our hands, or our partner may have two left feet or possibly two left wings.

We come, ready to give what we have to give, but -- and it is a lesson we learn over and over -- we are not in charge, none of us, and yet God invites us to this dance. God accepts our gifts and our initiatives. It is about us and it is not about us and it is about us. As William Butler Yeats writes in "Among School Children,"

Labor is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Summer Sundays

8-3-12

This is the first church in which I felt God's presence.


To this day I can smell the fragrance of the balsam, the dried needles we collected from the forest floor and sewed into calico cushions to take home with us for the winter.
I can hear the rustle of the birch leaves and the calls of the birds that woke us in the mornings and the owls and loons that sang us to sleep. And the bugles that told us the time of day and signaled to us the presence of the boys camp across the lake.

My mother took my brother and sister and me to St. Paul's on most Sundays, but the thing that made the biggest impression on me was the General Confession in which we claimed that we were miserable offenders and that there was no health in us. Sunday School was OK, but I didn't love church.

But at camp on Sunday mornings we began with special breakfast...pancakes or waffles or blueberry muffins served in the open-sided dining hall as the mist rose off the lake, where we'd free swim later in the day, and later, dressed in our crisp green shorts and white blouses, we'd go to the Quarry, where older campers and counselors would lead us in worship. What must it have sounded like to hear all those little girls' voices singing 'Oh, master let me walk with thee,' and 'This is my father's world'?

Camp, unlike home and school, was not a place of shoulds and oughts and reminders of all the ways in which I fell short, whether it was my hair being unruly (which it was) or my room being messy (which it was) or there being something wrong with me because I was not an extravert like my mother. Camp was a place of acceptance, where I learned I could sing and was given the role of YumYum in The Mikado. It was a place of wonder, each day beginning with a question to be explored in the nature hut. It was a place of possibilities, where I could weave a basket and paddle a canoe and hike to a granite quarry and read to my heart's content during rest time.

I remember a few of the names of other campers. Clare Morison. Marcia Whitney. Anne Ogden. Pat Latimer. I wonder where they are now. I wonder if they treasure these memories as I do. Whether they do or not, we were very much in that sacred circle together.

Tithing mint and dill and cumin

I frequently shop at a very special grocery store in Austin known as Central Market. I'd never heard of it until JB returned to Shreveport from his first interview at the seminary. It was thanksgiving, and he got off the plane with an entire stalk of Brussels sprouts. He knew that a whole stalk of Brussels sprouts would make my heart beat the way other women would respond to two dozen red roses.

The variety of produce they have is staggering. Right now it is probably eight or ten different kinds of peaches. The meat counter is long and inviting...bison and rabbit and quail in addition to what you'd usually expect. Whole fois gras. Seafood fresh from around the world. For what it is, it is not overpriced, but at Christmas I see people taking home prime standing rib roasts that cost $300. There is a Spanish ham that costs $95 a pound, and I guess somebody buys it, because they have it. My own purchases are typically more modest. A couple of pork chops or marinated chicken breasts, sweet local corn, arugula, organic milk. I like to stop by on my way home from work to see what looks appetizing.

But there is one department that has a whole different feel to it, and that is the bulk spices. There are I'd guess a couple hundred square glass jars with metal lids that contain every herb and spice you can imagine. One day I counted 37 different kinds of chiles and chile powders, but we are talking Texas. They keep metal spoons in jars of rice and small zip loc bags to be filled with an ounce or two or three of what you need. You then place the bag on the scale and tap in the number on the front of the jar. You might have seven cents worth of mustard or sixteen cents wort of tarragon or a whopping thirty cents for smoked Spanish paprika. You have to place these little bags in the top tray of your cart or they'll get lost.

I can never buy bulk spices without thinking of Jesus' remarks about tithing mint and dill and cumin. I don't think I could spend a dollar on all three without buying multiple bags of each. And yet they require a different kind of attention from me than the pork chops or the red carton of milk. They cause me to slow down. They cause me to pay attention. In working with this image and metaphor, I want to turn Jesus' intention on its head. Well, actually maybe not. He was fussing at the Pharisees, and his fussing was a frustrated way of inviting them into authentic generosity. That little bag of feathery green dill is a lens through which to see the incredible bounty of the whole market as an invitation into celebration and gratitude. Laying three tiny zip loc bags onto the check out belt to make sure they don't get covered up, to make sure I pay my thirty-two cents is a crazy way for God to open my heart, in the big scheme of things. Maybe they are a version of the still, small voice. Maybe they are holy.

One of those nights...

Insomnia by Dana Gioia

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you've learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you've worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

from Daily Horoscope
© 1986 Dana Gioia 

 Insomnia
By Billy Collins

 

Even though the house is deeply silent
and the room, with no moon,
is perfectly dark,
even though the body is a sack of exhaustion
inert on the bed,
someone inside me will not
get off his tricycle,
will not stop tracing the same tight circle
on the same green threadbare carpet.
It makes no difference whether I lie
staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.
What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?
Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep—
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.

Play Date

I'm good at nine of the commandments. I'm fully 100% successful so far with murder and adultery. The one at which I am a failure is Sabbath. So I should probably be posting this under "Sabbath," but that is about the rare occasions when I do briefly succeed with Sabbath, and I'm not sure that is what this is about.

It is Sunday afternoon following a strenuous week. Our daughter just boarded the plane back to Memphis and my husband is at the nursing home packing his 90-year-old mom (if you are thinking any sort of diminished intellect or spunk or even the slightest degree of feeble...get over it!) for her move to a new place on Tuesday. I have the house to myself and I am not doing the laundry that needs to be done or packing up our kitchen for the remodel that began on Friday. No, I'm here, listening to the gorgeous music of thunder and meditating on pot holders.

At my church we have an organization of awesome people called the Community of Hope. There are CoH chapters all over this country, and what they do is take on training so they can become lay chaplains. That means that they do the lion's share of pastoral care in the parish. At the end of church on Sundays some of them come forward to be blessed to take communion to our home bound parishioners. And non-parishioners as well, if you want to be technical about it. At one assisted living facility, where they  go every Friday, they have gathered a whole congregation of women who come to receive communion even though they have never set foot in an Episcopal Church.

Every summer our CoH group celebrates the feast day of St. Benedict because their training is based on Benedictine spirituality. This year my friend Janice and I led them in a playdate, leisure being one of the elements of the Benedictine life of balance. Yes, you could call it Sabbath.

Our worship was creation-oriented, light-hearted, and high-spirited. Remember "My God" (to the tune of "My Girl") from Sister Act? Yes, there were fifty of us and we rocked the church. Then we came to the parish hall and started in on story telling, more singing, and crafts. Oh, and food. We were there from 9:30 until 3:00 and they were served four (4!) meals. But let's get to the crafts. The likes of which most of these folks hadn't done since they were in day camp, which let's say was more than a couple of decades ago.

They had wooden crosses that they decorated with glitter and gold and rhinestones. They had gimp out of which to make lanyards. (See earlier post for Billy Collins' poem "The Lanyard," which was basis for theological reflection.) They made a torn-paper collage about creation, which is now a lovely mural on the wall of the Assembly Room. The doodled and made outlandish creatures out of pipe cleaners with googly eyes. But the hit of the day was the pot holders.

I haven't made one since I was maybe ten, which was more than a couple of decades ago. We only had six looms, so they had to share. They share well. But almost everybody made one, and they were all beautiful and all unique. They reminded me of Joseph's coat of many colors, as hands knotted with arthritis stretched the loops on frames and then wove carefully plotted patterns or randomly chosen hodge-podges to make pot holders.

Not a single person arrived in the morning thinking that they needed a new pot holder, but they knew they did by the time they left. It is telling that a couple of crosses got left behind, but not a single pot holder. Some will be gifts. Others will be put right to use at home. But each one, no matter how it gets used, carries a story with it.

It is a story of time taken apart from the chores of our lives, time spent with friends old and new. We'll remember the stories people told of camp days when one night dinner was simply all the corn on the cob you could eat, or of getting up before dawn and watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan. Of being homesick and then not wanting to leave when camp was over. Of lightning bugs and chiggers and loons crying over northern lakes. Of horses and archery and canoe paddles dipping into water still fogged with morning mist. There wasn't a whole lot of Jesus talk in this part of the day, but it was holy, holy, holy. It was rich with gratitude and wonder.

And so it's just a pot holder and it's a lot more than a pot holder. And I'm going to make one this week, when I probably ought to be getting some work done. And I'm not going to apologize for it. Au contraire. I'm going to celebrate it.

What I sent to the Wall Street Journal

I cannot believe I did this! I've never written a letter to the editor. But Jay Asakie's op-ed in the WSJ is just sooooo wrong! I really didn't mean to hit the send button, but I did.

In response to the diatribe by Jay Akasie:

The great church historian Jarislov Pelikan wrote:   “Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.” Mr. Akasie's vitriol betrays him as a traditionalist, one who is able to view the world only through the lens in which life is a continuing struggle for power, for which he is afraid. One of the most-oft spoken phrases of the Gospel is "do not fear."

It is notable that nowhere in his essay does Mr. Akasie mention Jesus Christ or the message of the gospel, which has been a threat to the power structures of the world for two thousand years now. I am proud and humble to serve as a priest in this church. The vast majority of clergy, whom he seems to perceive as a privileged and elitist bunch with an agenda to increase their power at the expense of the laity, are extremely overworked and underpaid. Burnout is a very real threat. We see ourselves not as somehow above our flock but as their servants. Whom else would you feel free to call on their day off, their vacation, or at five o'clock in the morning? More often than not your pastor will drop anything to be at your side.

In our Baptismal Covenant, which we repeat on many occasions, we promise to respect the dignity of every human being. That includes Mr. Akasie and our sisters and brothers who do not agree with us on the issues presented at General Convention. It includes those who have chosen to leave the Episcopal Church. We take this covenant seriously.

But what it means to be church is not our infrastructure. It is how we serve the world in the name of Christ, who commanded his disciples to love each other as he loved them and to take that love and his gospel to the world. To my little parish, which is twelve miles south of Austin, Texas and worships only about 150 people a week, that means filling the shelves of food pantries, adopting four refugee families in the last two years, adopting an underfunded elementary school, driving for Meals on Wheels, teaching literacy in our local prison and taking care of each other and pretty much anybody who shows up on our doorstep with a broken heart. Jesus cares about that. He doesn't give one hoot what kind of cross Bishop Katharine carries. Nor does he care about the address of the building from which we do the business that must be done.

The Rev. Margaret Waters
Rector, St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Austin, TX