Pre-Ordination Gratitude

It’s hard to believe that in just a few short days I will be ordained a transitional deacon in the Episcopal Church (God willing and the people consenting). I’ve thought about this day for awhile now, looking from afar at a goal that at times seemed so far away. Now I find it is too close, somehow—how did November move so fast? Do I have everything I need?

But what has been most surprising, as the event grows closer, is how much I am realizing that this isn’t about me at all. (Perhaps this should be less surprising, but there it is—I remain a selfish creature at heart!).

I mean, the Bishop will lay hands on me, and I will wear the collar and try to live out my vows. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what that specific moment means for me.

But at the same time, I can feel something being constructed that is outside of the me that I have known for 28 years. How to explain it?

I noticed it most acutely this past Sunday, as I sat in the Cathedral, my sponsoring parish. I imagined myself up at the altar as a clergy person, as I will be next Sunday. I imagined all the people who have helped me get to this point, the people who have prayerfully discerned with me, those who have encouraged me and named my call for me. I could feel them joined around that altar, excited for a moment that they too had been waiting for, praying for.

I remembered Reyna in housekeeping, who was one of the first to say “I know that one day you’ll be at the altar—don’t ever give up.” I remembered walking up to Rev. Jan Cope when I didn’t know a soul in the Episcopal Church, and saying “I want to learn more about the Episcopal Church,” and how she kindly met with me countless times over the next few years. I remembered the 20s & 30s group, who were my first adult church community and who loved and laughed with me. I remembered my Cathedral discernment committee, who poured over so many iterations of essays and were somehow still excited about my call by the end of it all. I remembered sitting with Rev. Gina Campbell in Café Deluxe when she asked if I wanted to start officiating Evensong at the Cathedral and when she said she could see God’s call on my life. I remembered all those who trusted me with liturgical responsibilities before I really knew how to ask for them.

Ordination is ontological change, a change of one’s being & existence, but not primarily of myself as an individual. Instead it feels that the ontological change is of the “me” that is seen and known by others; the “me” that is a collection of other people’s perceptions of me, and my role to them. The change is within the community, first and foremost, and then that change is reflected onto me.

The people who look at me as a clergy person ordain me, just as the hands of the Bishop officially ordain me into the Church Universal. The community builds my credentials more than any gestures on my part do. The people of God change when someone is ordained, and because of it, the person who is ordained is opened up to a new path. But I feel so aware at this moment that this path is only open to me because people have believed and continue to believe in me. And for that, I have no words of thanks deep enough to express my gratitude.  There is no ordination without a community, broken and imperfect as we all are, and I thank God for all the communities who love me so imperfectly and beautifully.

To each of you who has been a part of ordaining me, I can only say…Thank you. This Saturday is as much about your faithfulness and prayer as anything. To Wesley Seminary (and the Urban Fellows program in particular), the Cathedral, St. Alban’s, St. Margaret’s, St. Paul’s Rock Creek, Church of the Epiphany, the Diocese of Washington, CIEE-Thailand, Wofford College, Glendale, Northeast Presbyterian Church, and all my wonderful friends (Hannah, you're in this category ok?) and family, Mom and Bob…Thank you. And to those I didn’t name here, but who have been pivotal in my life… Thank you.

And brothers and sisters, please— keep looking. The God we serve is up to all sorts of mischief in our midst. You never know when that clueless person at coffee hour has a call they can’t even see yet. You never know when your words of encouragement to someone change their path forever. Your naming of God’s work in someone’s life may be the pivot point which aligns all God has been preparing for them. Be bold, be loving, and be attentive. Our world is filled with too much beauty, pain, and holiness for us not to show up.

ACNA, disagreement, and grace

During this "in-between" time of unemployment, one of many little gifts is that I have Sunday mornings free. It's been years since I've had the choice of where to worship on Sundays, and this summer I have been trying to take advantage of it and visit churches I would normally never get to.

One denomination that's been on my mind for some time is the Anglican Church in North America. This is the denomination that was formed when the Episcopal Church in the US split over issues of women's ordination and human sexuality. It was a very contentious split, and one which left behind much pain on both sides of the divide. ACNA now has its own bishops, priests, and congregations, including one about 5 min from where I live.

After Pope Francis's visit to the US, I found myself once again considering ACNA. Pope Francis and I also differ on several major issues of great importance to me; however, I sat watching his addresses and homilies with joy swelling in my heart. His message filled me with hope even in this broken world, and I found deep agreement with him as a Christian who strives to follow Christ. (And that Fiat- adorable).

Also, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the global Anglican Communion of which the Episcopal Church is a part, has announced that he will host a meeting of all the primates (heads of church) in the Communion to discuss our deepening divides in January. This meeting will likely be a tense one, as the Episcopal Church in the US is quite far from the global Anglican Churches of Africa and South America (among others), in so many ways. (For more on the global Anglican Communion, here is a recent article in The Atlantic).

So, this morning I felt moved to worship with my local Anglican (ACNA) community. When I arrived, I realized I was more nervous than I had anticipated; I often go to church by myself, but now I was going to a church which had split from the church which was about to ordain me. These were my very close brothers and sisters with whom harsh words had been exchanged, with whom the divide had grown so wide that relationship had to be dissolved, property had to be litigated, and vitriol had erupted on both sides.

Upon entering the church, I was greeted kindly by the ushers and offered a name tag. Everyone was wearing name tags, which allowed each person I met to greet me by name (note to self: remember this for future hospitality). They had even roped off the back 3/4s of the pews in the large sanctuary they're borrowing from the Seventh Day Adventists, forcing everyone to sit in the first 10 or so (also, note taken). More people came in, and all seemed to be excited to see me and made a point to speak to me; I hope I didn't disappoint their hopes of getting a new member too much. :)

The service itself was, for me, a strange mix of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer and the praise music/theology from the church of my childhood, all woven together anew.

The sermon focused on two texts, Genesis 2:4-25 and Matthew 19:3-6. This passage from Genesis tells the story of God creating man and woman, and Matthew deals with the issue of divorce ("what God has joined together, let no one separate"). These are two tough passages, and the Genesis passage in particular has been used to speak against same-sex marriage and relationship, one of the very contentious issues which drove the divide so deep between the ANCA and the Episcopal Church. As soon as I heard them read I thought, "Ok, here we go."

And I was not to be disappointed. Nor surprised, in truth- the priest spoke of marriage, human sexuality, and divorce in all the ways I expected him to as an ACNA priest. What interested me more was my reaction to it; I felt the hardness grow in my chest, as I mentally responded to each statement with "Nope. That's not really it in the Hebrew" or just with a general internal groan. I really couldn't have disagreed with him more, based on my understanding of Scripture, reason, and tradition (our Anglican three-legged stool). All three of them.

I found myself yearning for the table; I thought, let's stop talking and get to the Eucharist. There I know we have one bread, one cup. There's the salvation; there's the common ground. And so as we moved into Holy Communion, I found the hardness and sense of "rightness" within myself relaxing enough for me to look at it more clearly. I reminded myself of something my seminary professor said: "There's a wrong way to be right." And as I confessed my sins, I felt compelled to confess my hardness of heart. My sense of right. My ego-driven need to dissect everything he preached, everything these folks believe just as deeply as I hold my own beliefs.

As we read the Prayers of the People, this line stuck out to me: "Lord, help us to minister thy grace to one another."

In that sanctuary, I was struck by how incredibly difficult it is that we are called to bring God's grace, which has been freely given to us, to one another. And in that congregation of very kind, faithful, and genuine people with whom I deeply disagree I found it was only God's grace which held it all together. It was only God's grace which brought me there, and it was God's grace which kept me there in all my discomfort. It was God's grace which pointed out to me that when I pray for my enemies, I am usually praying for them to agree with me at some future date. That when I pray for Christian unity, I am praying for conformity to my opinion. That I am just as guilty of making God in my own image as my brothers and sisters who I decry for the same offense.

I came forward with the congregation, hands open and outstretched, and received the body of Christ. That body of Christ which is present to us in the sacrament, and which is also real and present to us in the people of God, the people which surrounded me. Their fervent prayers and mine mingled together and were heard by the same God, the same God which appeared to our ancestors and in Jesus Christ.

As we departed, the priest and I shook hands and he asked me what brought me to the church. I explained that I was soon to be ordained as an Episcopal priest, and he asked, "So, was this your flavor of Episcopalian, or not?" "Oh, no. Not at all," I responded with a laugh. He laughed too, and said "Well, thanks for not walking out during the sermon!" I thanked him for having me, and we spoke briefly of grace as our uniting tie in God. He said, "You've been so kind to us!" and I said, "Thank you for being so hospitable; I have a lot to learn from you all!"

We were honest with one another, and laughed at how much we disagreed. There was no resolution of belief, and we'll still probably show up to all the same protests on different sides of the picket line. But we dwelt on grace. We dwelt on communion with one another, because of the God who created us all. It seems that God never intended for us to all get along anyway, if the Scriptures are any indication; we humans have been fighting with each other for as long as our oldest stories can recount. This motley group of humans is what we have to work with, and if there's anything that Genesis text teaches us, it's that God's favorite materials for new creation seem to be chaos and dirt. What a strange and beautiful God we all serve.

We parted after several of my "new friends" desperately tried to get me to coffee hour, and invited me to come back anytime. I am thankful for each of them, who remind me of my own hypocrisy and hardness of heart to those who are different from me, and for our mutual grace towards one another as Anglicans committed to following a Christ who leads us into places of discomfort and hope. And I pray for our upcoming meeting of Anglican primates, that the grace of God may be shared abundantly by all participants.

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is

hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where

there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where

there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where

there is sadness, joy. 

Grant that we may not so much seek to

be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is

in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we

are born to eternal life. Amen.

Prayer attributed to St. Francis

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (from The Atlantic)

Prayer, and the limits of words

When I enter silent prayer, there have been a few times when I have been able to fall slowly back. 

I feel the fall, but not because my stomach is dropping or there is fear in where I will land; rather, it is my true self which is falling, falling away from attachment, from sound, from worry. I gently slide backwards through the whirling chaos until I reach a place of warm darkness, where the only feeling is a holy emptiness. There isn’t attachment, and there isn’t suffering; a smile forms on my face and I can feel a growing fullness in my chest. 

While praying in the Holy Spirit Chapel at the Cathedral a few months ago, I came to understand this fullness, warmth, and peace as being like a loaf of bread, fresh out of the oven and full of good smells and sustenance. This warmth in my chest, this living bread, grows with each breath in and gently dissipates with each breath out; never going away but changing as I change, growing as my chest expands and lessening as I contract. But there is no sadness in the lessening, no sense of loss; it is merely the changing of the moment, the presence which stays with me even as my mind wanders to other subjects. 

I hear footsteps upstairs, and smile to myself that even as my mind goes to matters of this world the warm darkness stays within me, stays centered right in the middle of me. The smell of wet dog, the sound of light snores, enter my senses but the centeredness remains as the outside world and its sentiments gently kiss my face as they keep moving along. 

I have a sense that we are all so small; and yet we are all extensions of this warm darkness, this peace that is like falling, and we are so much bigger than I ever imagined. We are all a cosmos unto ourselves. 

Hooking into it is a matter of paying attention to it, rather than finding it. It is always here, always available; it is I who is too often unavailable. 

It is in this nothingness of the world that love flows unfiltered, in the darkness of freedom from all attachments that presence is pronounced. In this field beyond all others where words lose their meaning, where there is only love and You and I and… then I think, how silly; there is only we. There is only One, after all. How do we find the words for this, this Holy Space?

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.” 

Rumi

Holy Cross revisited

As always, I had a lovely and enriching time at Holy Cross this past weekend. It was a different experience to be on my own instead of with a parish group, but one that brought its own gifts. I was able to get to know the brothers better, and had some excellent spiritual direction from Br. Randy that I'm still processing. As I continue to write about and reflect on my past few weeks, post-CPE and officially into the wilds of job searching, I came across something I wrote after my last retreat at Holy Cross. Even though it was many months ago, I found myself resonating with the experience all over again. It was then that it struck me- I go to the monastery each time to find and re-find God's love. Over and over again.  (Duh. Isn't it silly how obvious revelations can be sometimes?)

My main takeaway from this recent time of retreat, which I am still working on writing about: Wake up! Wake up to your life, your broken and beautiful life! Or, as the poet Mary Oliver so wonderfully put it: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do, with your one wild and precious life?” 

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2015 Lenten Retreat, Holy Cross Monastery

The chapel was ice cold, its white walls and high windows equally cold and barren. The brothers in their two lines sat quietly, one blowing his nose loudly every now and then while the others kept their heads down and pretended not to notice the sound. Far away, a cross with intricate painted scenes from the life of Jesus stood, a splash of color against the bare walls. But even in the bareness, there was something clean about the chapel; cold, clean, and open. A blank slate almost, something to be written on anew by each new person, or an emptiness to be rested in by a wounded soul.

My soul sat in the quietness, worn down and weighed down by the cares of parish life. Worn down in a way that I didn’t even fully understand until I entered into the stillness, until the fast moving tides of the world ceased and I found my muscles fatigued, my mind empty, my joy a barely burning ember.

What was left after the anxiety and exhaustion ebbed away was a sadness. How had I gotten to this place? Hadn’t I read enough books, prayed enough times, led enough conversations about self-care and burn-out to recognize the signs?

Even as others on the retreat had been contemplating their Lenten disciplines, the very clear message I got from God was “Be still. Relax. Just be, and be loved.”

And so as I sat in the chapel, I sat in the new pit of emptiness that I had become aware of within me where the toxicity of life had worn down my being like a slow acid. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t even feel bad; it just felt like a nothingness. I felt acutely aware of the veil between life as we live it and life as it “really” is; the busyness and noise which masks the yawning chasm of silent emptiness, the frenetic actions which mitigate our anxiety and lack of control in a world which is largely beyond our ability to understand. Did anything I worked on really matter? Did all the time spent planning that event really mean anything, or was it just a more dissociated form of self-flagellation?

I suddenly felt something cave in—it was as if what I thought was the basement level of my soul had given way to reveal an even deeper floor, a new subbasement level inhabited by God knows what.

Now I ached; now I felt the tightness in my chest, the pangs of feeling as something fervent and powerful rushed over me, filling in the space which had now become even more expansive. Love poured in, the kind of love that leaves you breathless and sore from the touch of it, aching from the holding of it. Free, undeserved, and even unasked for love now sat in me, reaching deeper than I thought possible.

I thought of my dear friend Hannah who just had a baby; was this a piece of what she had described feeling, when she told me about the painful love she feels for her child?

We finished our prayers, stood and waited on the brothers to file out. They turned, bowed, and left the room. We all walked out too, stepping carefully around one another as we moved silently along.

Love moved with me, love moved around me, and love walked beside me, as the seed of God in me felt itself pulled towards the other God seeds in those around me. But the pull was a yearning, a craving even; I’m not sure if I felt better, but I certainly felt, and felt abundantly.

Lord God, whose grace is given to undeserving people at the most inopportune times, I thank you for the gift of deep love. I thank you for your people, who bring out the best and worst of me so that I may see myself more rightly. I thank you for dear friends, who speak quiet truth and help me to see myself with grace and compassion, and especially for those who love me better than I love myself. I thank you for the woundedness in my soul that allowed me to be filled with your grace in a greater abundance than I had ever imagined possible, and I pray for the guidance to use this power according to your will. I pray for the courage to never stop feeling, especially when it makes me cry all day. Surround me with your Spirit like a hug. Send your angels to tend to me, to encourage me, as I walk through this next wilderness of discernment.

Always with You, always with You my Lord will I abide. Amen.

What about Revelation?

Hello all- I'm back!

After two years of no blogging, I have decided to get the blog back up and going. After two wonderful weeks on vacation with friends and family post-NIH internship, I set off tomorrow for a few days at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY. I plan to blog about some of my experiences there once I return on Sunday.

Until then, I thought I'd dive right in to a topic that several friends have wanted to discuss with me recently. Once we said the requisite hellos and such at a recent reunion with college friends, my dear friend Michael goes "I don't want to overwhelm you since we're having fun, but I want to talk about Revelation at some point. Because that is some crazy [stuff]." (paraphrasing is mine)

Revelation, the last book in the Bible, is indeed some crazy stuff. And what it has inspired in Christian history is even crazier. So why read it? Why is it important? Because I am also trying to pack and get ready to leave, I will answer this with a sermon I gave last year at one of the Cathedral's weekday morning services. More questions? Send them along!

I want this blog to be a place where we can explore the pressing questions of faith that people have- the ones they're too embarrassed to ask, the ones they feel keep them from having faith. So send me questions! Not because I have answers- but because I love questions, and I love exploring faith questions with folks. What's on your mind these days?

First up, the underlying hope of Revelation:

Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, author, and well known preacher, spoke at the Cathedral a few years ago. In her sermon, she started out by saying, “Full disclosure: I do not like the book of Revelation… I do not even like people who like the book of Revelation, since so many of them use it to justify their crazier ideas about God and scare other people with what they think they know.”

As a person who actually did read the Left Behind series during my days as a young conservative evangelical, I get what Barbara Brown Taylor is saying. For example, the blurb on the back of the first Left Behind book says, “An airborne Boeing 747 is headed to London when, without any warning, passengers mysteriously disappear from their seats…. For those who have been left behind, the apocalypse has just begun.”

This series, with its mass marketing and slick covers, nearly ruined the book of Revelation for me. When I rejected the Scriptural literalism that guides its fictional narrative, I also rejected the book of Revelation as too crazy, too far out there. And its violent rhetoric and treatment of women have done little to endear me to it, either.

Over the centuries, Christians have long struggled to interpret and understand this text. One of our church fathers from the 4^th century, Jerome, remarked that the book of Revelation contains as many mysteries as it contains words.

Which makes it interesting that the passage we heard today is read so often at our most heart-breaking services—funerals.

We use this passage from Revelation at funerals for precisely the same reason we reject it at most other times—because Revelation dares to look past death, past the current world, and into the world to come. Revelation dares us to imagine a world in which

We who suffer will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

A world where the sun will not strike us,    nor any scorching heat;  for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be our shepherd,    and he will guide us to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.’

         Funerals are one of those rare times when we sit with our mortality and face it. Someone who we knew and loved in this life is gone, and whatever euphemisms we may use to mask the event, this person has died. They no longer exist in a way that we can understand.

         The fear, the uncertainty which this arouses in us is primal—death represents the ultimate disruption. Death is the great unknown, when theologies built over a lifetime fall apart, when doubt corrodes our faith like an acid, when loss threatens to isolate us from all we once knew and loved.

         My father passed away when I was ten years old—one day, we were together. The next day, my father’s brown armchair was empty and there was a gaping hole where his comforting presence had once been. My family was thrust into darkness and the unknown, and I remember looking around frantically for something solid to grab onto, something to help us ground ourselves.

         For those of us who have lost loved ones, we know the deep feeling of disorientation and pain which death causes. Suddenly, questions which we could ignore or not worry about become of vital importance—what happens to our loved ones after they die? What will happen to me when I die?

         Our cry, from deep within our souls, begs God to help us, to help us understand at the very least!

         When we consider the book of Revelation from this place of deep human suffering, the image of a God who redeems those who suffer and who wipes the tears from their eyes even in the midst of great violence and upset becomes more than just a piece of a strange vision—it becomes the balm for the soul of the afflicted.

But it is not just the balm for us as individuals. In his book, Can I Get a Witness?, Brian Blount looks at Revelation through the eyes of oppressed communities. He sees the wild and vivid imagery of Revelation, which can be so off-putting to folks, as the dream of the oppressed for salvation from the pains of this life in the life to come. The community which the author of Revelation addresses was one under persecution from a powerful and seemingly invincible Roman Empire. It is less surprising then, that their dreams and visions consisted of the overthrow of this regime and the hope of a new world order.

Blount reads Revelation from the perspective of African Americans, who have long suffered under the yoke of oppression. He makes many parallels between the oppressed early Christians and African American spirituality, particularly the use of code-language and singing, used by both the writer of Revelation and those in slavery. One of the themes which emerges is that, for those who do not see justice in their day to day lives, belief in a God who will one day rectify that injustice is vital for the community’s continued existence.

         As many of us know, dreams are often fantastic, wild, and illogical expressions of our deepest yearnings—as a dream of those who suffer, the book of Revelation is thus the hope of a world to come which is kinder, gentler, and more just than the world in which we now live. In fact, we need not look far to see the violence it describes in our world today, from the sectarian violence which is overtaking Syria and Iraq to the shootings in our own city which take the lives of our young people. Our world is a violent place, with too few safe places for the vulnerable to rest.

         Perhaps the close association of these verses with funerals makes some poetic sense then, when we consider that both are avoided and feared until they become absolutely necessary and inescapable.

         Revelation is a beacon which reminds us that there is a world to come which is far better than the one we see now—it is a signpost on the way to redemption which says, “Yes, it’s hard, and yes life’s often unfair. But God has the final say, and you will be saved even from death. Keep going.”

         It is a reminder that a delicate combination of endurance and hope, even in the face of insurmountable odds, is sometimes the kind of faithfulness to which we are called.

We make a mistake with the text, though, if we only expect it to provide relief from our suffering. Sister Joan Chittister tells the story that, “A distressed person came to a wise man for help. The wise man asked, “Do you really want a cure?” The disciple answered, “If I did not, would I bother to come to you?” “Oh, yes,” the wise man said. “Most people do.” And the disciple said, incredulously, “But what for then?” And the wise man answered, “Well, not for a cure. That’s painful. They come for relief.”

         The incredible visions and images in the book of Revelation promise us not merely relief, but ultimately healing in the arms of God, the God of our ancestors, the God who led the Israelites from slavery into new life, the God who sent his only Son to abide among us. This is the God we follow, and this is the God who will shepherd us, who will guide us to springs of the water of life, who will wipe away every tear from our eyes, the God who comes to us in great majesty and even greater love.

In the words of a later chapter in Revelation:

See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away… And let everyone who is thirsty come. Amen. (Rev 21:3b-4, 22:17b)