ASHES TO GO

It was Ash Wednesday in Chicagoland. It fell this year on March 9th, so it came as no surprise that it was rainy and cold that morning. We arrived at the Geneva Metra train station at 6:15 AM dressed in black cassocks, white surplices, and rubber boots. We carried sandwich board signs which read "Ash Wednesday Ashes Here."

We didn't know what the response would be. A colleague had cautioned us about "delivering empty symbols" to a disinterested world, but we felt strongly, my colleague and I. Where better to meet people than where they live and work and play? Why wait for them to come into church? A few people walked past, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Most people smiled. Some people stopped and asked for ashes, and so we imposed ashes on their foreheads, and said a short prayer with them, and offered them a small meditation card to take on the train with them. They climbed onto their trains, and some waved as their trains pulled out. Many smiled. There was no contempt that showed. People seemed to like the idea of "church in the marketplace."

The best surprise of all? People on trains called home on their cell phones. They told them to come to the Metra station so their kids could see church people giving out Ash Wednesday ashes. So they came. Curious. Interested. Smiling.
On their way to something else, but they came. Because word got out.

The Word has a way of getting out.

Caeden Grows!

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A Poet's View

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

The Relevancy of Jesus

We aren't called by Jesus Christ to be museum curators.

We are called to be God's hands and feet in the world, bring to reality God's magnificent plan for the world.

Watch this video - it's short - and consider your role in the action.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

What joy there is in those words. Our Lord was resurrected so that we, too, might have opportunity after opportunity to be resurrected ourselves. Resurrected from lives of sin, from our short sightedness, from our self-centeredness. Jesus asked Peter three times, "Simon Peter, Do you love me," not out of some deep-seated Divine Insecurity; Jesus offered the question three times so Peter himself might crawl out from under his own three denials of Jesus. So it is with us. Jesus offering us endless chances to turn our denials into good; endless opportunities to answer God's call to us. That we too might claim the power to effect change in this broken and wonderful world.

God has great plans for us.

All the people of the world are God’s children; all of them. As Christians, we must seek and recognize the face of Christ in each one. “Peter, do you love me?" "Then love them.” Jesus said. Love them.

Let it be so, in the name of the resurrected Christ. Alleluia!

Good Friday Musings

The gospel passage was unbearably long, this time from John's Gospel. We heard, again, of Peter's three denials, and felt his chagrin when that cock crowed -- again. We felt Pilate's frustration as he tried to free Jesus, finding no case against him. We empathized with Jesus as they dressed him in a purple robe and mocked him. And then the brutality of a crucifixion, the sponge full of sour wine. Who wants sour wine to slake thirst?

And then............

"He bowed his head and gave up his spirit."

What if......

What if we followed Christ's example"

What if we bowed our heads and gave up our spirits?

What if we gave up our spirits of acquisitiveness and self congratulation?

What if we gave up our need to control and manipulate?

What if we bowed our heads, and took on, instead, the Spirit of God dwelling within us?

What if?

Tenebrae

Being Episcopalian, it is no wonder that I love the once yearly service of Tenebrae. It is one of those now rare occasions where Episcopal clergy don our black and white cassocks and surplices instead of our white albs. It is a service of contemplation and candlelight; chiaroscuro and completion.

The sanctuary lights are dimmed and the 15 candles on the altar are lit. As the service progresses, the candles are gradually extinguished, one by one. The tension in my "Holy Week shoulders" begins to subside as the lessons are read and the candles are blown out. My heart softens. The Psalms help me cry out to God; they allow me glimmers of insight into my own brokenness. The soft voices of those in the congregation respond to a series of rich antiphons and versicles. My heart softens some more.

Then it comes: Lauds. Antiphon 10:

God did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.

And the congregation responds softly with Psalm 63, intoning:

O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you,

My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,

as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.

And I recognze my own need for living water; my own thirst.

When the Psalm concludes, that antiphon once again:

God did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all.

And I realize, in one flicker of candle light, not only how thirsty I've been, but how delivered I am.

And I am restored.

Color in the desert

An early spring snow. I woke to the cardinal singing; protesting the white landscape after a week of nest building in a greening yard. I rolled over. There he was, a beacon of red. Protesting.

Red in startling contrast to a monochromatic landscape; a mere sign of dissonance in a snow blanketed morning. Not unlike Jesus: dissonant, overturning tables in a monochromatic world.

Do we notice him? Do we see the red blood? Or are we more comfortable with black and white?

Do I roll over and retreat under the soft down of my comforter and try to grab a few more minutes of sleep? Or do I rise and feed the birds?

Silence

Silence is an endangered commodity. In the middle of the night, my Smartphone groans downstairs on the kitchen counter as an e-mail arrives, or an update becomes available. I hear it -- whispering into the darkness, "Droid," its electronic voice intoning if only to remind me that I am tethered to the electronic world even as I try to sleep. When I creep downstairs before dawn, I put on a ski parka and slippers to go out onto the porch to sniff a new day's air and to capture the silence of a new day. I try to listen to the roots of the trees flexing their toes, getting ready to send out new shoots, but already the train is idling at the station several blocks away -- waiting to transport people to their various daily obligations. It's low hum is comforting. Three squirrels scramble over the still naked branches of the elm tree, scolding each other, and flipping their tails in challenge. Chilled, I go inside, greeted by the coffee maker's grumbles, as it brings forth the morning coffee. The radio goes on upstairs, the shower bursts into action. The noise of a new day, and I rue the fact that I have missed the still small voice of God yet again.

Bullies

I have a parishioner whose daughter is being bullied at school. The child has kind of brushed it off and doesn't want her parents to interfere, lest the bullying escalate. Many kids respond that way. But the thing is, even though bullying has always happened, it seems to have escalated in recent years. I don't remember the details, but I remember a news item several years ago about a mother making up a false e-mail or MySpace account in order to "cyber-bully" one of her own daughter's rivals. The object of her cyber-bullying ultimately committed suicide.

Bullying is about power. The power to take another human being down a notch. Power to convince ourselves (and others) that we are powerful -- especially when we are feeling particularly insecure or power-less. Co-workers can bully. Teachers can bully. Parents can bully. It's tragic when a child comes to us with stories of being bullied, but its almost more egregious when adults bully each other. We should know better. We should have learned.

Have you caught yourself at it? It can be so subtle: Just planting the seed of doubt in another human being's mind. Just that subtle. Or holding your power over a person's grades or paycheck, or tenure, or promotability. Causing another human being to feel insecure or "less than" is a subtle bullying tactic.

Lent is a time to take stock of our own lives. Its a time to look at our own behaviors and attitudes and to examine what might need the cleansing breath of Christ to shine a light on our own motives for doing what we do. Do we really "respect the dignity of every human being" or are there those who we just can't resist "putting in their place?" As we shed ourselves and take on the light of Christ, not only will our own need for power decrease, our confidence will increase in the Lord. We will no longer need to prove our value (or our worth) to the world. Then we will truly be transformed in Christ.

Pray that the peace of Christ, which surpasses all our understanding, will guard our hearts and our minds in the coming days. And bullies? Back off!

Perhaps he has a point?

Theologically, this gave me pause........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HGnTBvLrT8

Authenticity

This Lent, I can't seem to shake what I call a ho-hum attitude. There’s a sense that I’m merely treading water – a sense that the spark has gone out of my prayer. Where's the magic? Where's the perfection I feel when I feel utterly enveloped by God? I like that feeling of perfection. I crave mountaintop prayer -- but it's so elusive. I remember my old CPE supervisor telling me “Sometimes adequate is good enough.” Is “adequate” prayer “good enough?” I'm uncomfortable with this idea, but I'm being drawn into it -- because this "adequate" prayer feels somehow authentic. I don;t feel as though I am striving. I am resting – lying fallow.

There’s a comfort and a familiarity that I am resting in, like old friends catching up. It feels like Jesus and I are back on a first name basis and there's an easiness to us – together – and that feels right. I walked into this meditation whining that my life feels ho-hum and my prayer life no longer feels injected with steroids. Maybe steroidal enthusiasm is not authentic.

Perhaps authenticity is God's gift to me this Lent.