Info about me

Autobiographical Statement-- Joyce Beaulieu


Family background. I am the middle child of five children, an older brother (deceased) and sister, and two younger sisters. We grew up in Lomax, IL, on a farm owned by my grandfather (and his grandfather), which my father farmed. My mother worked in clerical positions and later was a postmaster. My brother and sisters and I were surrounded by family: Five aunts (three of Mom’s and two of Dad’s sisters) and my paternal grandparents all lived in within twelve miles of the farm. My parents were killed in a six-fatality auto crash in 1980, which catalyzed the binding of strong ties among me and my siblings. My primary relationship with my partner Molly sustains me daily with love and support, including the support of my vocation to the priesthood.

Important events and turning points. The most significant event in my life was the death of both my parents, my brother’s 12 year-old son and a favorite aunt in an automobile crash, which occurred a couple of weeks before I started a doctoral program in health policy at the University of Michigan. Our parents’ deaths have drawn my siblings together in meaningful and loving ways. We rely on each other for emotional bolstering in both times of celebration, such as graduations, weddings and retirements, and times of individual or family challenges, such as the diagnosis of breast cancer in our younger sister and the sudden death of our oldest sibling, Ron. I maintain our family farm with my older sister.

After confirmation in the Episcopal church, another very significant moment in my life was my experience of realizing that God made me exactly who I am and loved me just the way I am. “Coming out to God” brought me wholeness of spirit, created deeper integrity in my relationships, and made available to me the overwhelming unconditional love of my parish and my family. I was honored to be asked by my rector, and supported by the bishop of Lexington, to convene an Integrity chapter. Being convernor of Integrity opened my eyes to the prejudice and abuse experienced by many LGBT people, from their families, coworkers and employers, and in some cases, from their churches.

Prior work in the church and community. In the Methodist church I attended until age 18, I was very active in the youth group, taught Vacation Bible School and Sunday school classes, and sang in the youth choir. I have served in two Episcopal parishes as lay leader in both administrative and liturgical roles. I have sung and played guitar with contemporary music choirs. A graduate of Education for Ministry, I have served as an EFM mentor. I completed my Clinical Pastoral Education in hospice.

As a professor in health policy, I was a specialist in rural and long-term care systems, teaching health professionals, and doing research and consulting. I was a member of several state and national health policy organizations, in rural health, gerontology, and public health, working on various committees. I served on the editorial board for the Journal of Rural Health and reviewed scientific papers for many other professional publications. I was the director of the Lexington-Fayette County Indigent Care Task Force, a coalition of public and private organizations that studied the problem of health care for low-income and uninsured individuals. I have two edited books in rural health systems, and numerous publications, encompassing a range of topics, from long-term care system evaluation to public health indicator research.

As a priest in the Diocese of Lexington, I was elected to the Camps and Conference Board, and was a chaplain for girls’ summer camp. Continuing my interest in long-term care, I have served on the board of Faith in Action: Elder Outreach and, briefly, as a volunteer chaplain for AIDS Volunteers of Lexington.

Priestly roles. In my capacity as campus missioner for the Diocese of Lexington, I coordinated activities for young adults in the diocese, including a Theology on Tap program that invited area priests to speak at monthly meetings; worked with students at colleges where there was no Episcopal campus presence; and provided parishes with resources to reach out to campuses in their communities. I was priest-in-charge at St. Alban’s, a small parish with a mission to work with the campus of Morehead State University. During my time with that parish, two students were brought into the church and several adults received the rites of baptism or confirmation.

Personal traits. The gifts I bring from my professional career are writing, teaching, and administration. I am flexible, while maintaining basic ethical and moral tenets. I am extremely well organized and focus on good process for good outcomes. I always strive to keep lines of communication open and to help groups of people to work together even when they may differ in their opinions. I have done some continuing education in family systems theory in the church. I believe that all baptized Christians are leaders, evangelists and pastoral caregivers, and encourage parishioners in their particular gifts for use in furthering the kingdom of God.

Issues of church and society about which I am concerned. On the issue of sexuality, which so divides the Anglican Communion, I am hopeful. I believe that when we treat people as individuals and not as a “category,” we draw together the body of Christ in ways that are the most healing and loving. I work with LGBT Episcopalians as a priest who happens to be one of their number. I have heard several clergy speak of the problems inherent in the church “being in the marriage business,” and would hope that the issue of same-sex relationships would be encompassed in an overhaul of the church’s role in blessing of committed couples of all sexual orientations.

I continue to be concerned with the devastation of addictions on individuals and families. I believe that faith-based communities have much to offer the spiritually-based 12-step programs, as well as much to learn from these programs, which are transforming the broken lives of many.

On a third issue, I believe the church could be more visible in their work for peace and justice, especially in the area of health care. While peace and justice activity is sometimes not popular politically, we need people of vision and courage to help each of us live out our baptismal covenant to work for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being.

Things are not people

I am listening to Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, a popular book about a professor who gives a last lecture--a program where the professor talks about the wisdom they have accumulated over their career, as if it were the last talk they would ever give. Except in his case, Pausch really does have only a few months to live, so the lecture takes on a much more real urgency.

A chapter of his book talks about what he inherited from his parents. One thing that struck me was the ability to separate the importance of people from the importance of things. He tells a story about a time he has come to take his niece and nephew in a ride in his new convertible. His sister admonishes the kids to be extra careful in the new car, not to get it dirty. When he hears this, Randy does not agree, and expresses his own idea about the convertible being merely a thing by deliberately pouring a soft drink all over his new car's seat in front of the children. In another story, his wife has hit one of their cars with the other car, thereby denting both cars. She is nervous about telling him when he gets home, but after she cooks his favorite dinner, she nervously breaks the news. When he hears about both cars being dented, he reacts very little. He tells his wife that as long as the cars run, there is no reason to fix the minor dents. He believes in the utility of automobiles, is not captured by the general use of cars as status symbols.

Both these stories captured my imagination. I have been tied to the sex appeal of particular cars I have owned, and I am not alone among my siblings in this tendency. I liked Randy's lack of using ownership of things as a means to bolster social class and standing. If more of us were like Randy, the auto manufacturers would have a hard time selling anything more than the basic vehicle to get us from point A to point B with the least amount of gas.

But it cannot be blamed on industry, they are merely tapping into our tendency to use things as social status indicators.

I have no fix for how to counter this tendency to trap ourselves in our stuff. I do know that Benedictine spirituality would help us learn how to live more simply, which seems part of what is needed. More important, teaching our children the importance of people over things, as Randy's parents did, probably is the best way to do it. And as we know, it's not what our parents say but what they do that inculcate the right values into our children.

Girls Camp

Wow, a week with 70 girls who just graduated from 5th and 6th grades. I thought it would be hard, but it was truly a joy.

I heard the laughter and singing of girls coming down a trail from an afternoon hike, their shouts in the pool, their laughter and singing in the meal hall, and in the assembly room after breakfast. The sound of their laughter was like music, the silly songs like joy bubbling over.

One night was set aside for open questions with the priest (me). Who wrote the bible? Who created God? Is God a person? Why do people commit suicide? What should I pray for when someone is sick? What happens when a person dies? Can you still go to heaven even when you do something really bad?

These are the basic questions of living, of being human, and they are being asked by girls who are 11 and 12. They are wrestling with their humanity and the ills of society, the grief and sadness in everyone's lives. I was heartened to hear their questions and tried my best to answer them openly and honestly. It was like theology 101!

It gave me hope that our children are not just stuck in front of TV and video games and the internet, but are questioning life and God and death. They are truly engaged, if they have been thinking about these things.

They liked the open question time very much and so did I. During the questions and answers they were very quiet and I could tell they really wanted to discuss these issues. I was glad I offered a forum for their thoughts, and was honored I could be part of their lives for this week.

Happy Gardening

Growing up on a farm in the fertile fields of Illinois, I am not very able to relate to the parable of the seeds today. The idea that there are wimpy growing conditions, with rocks and dry ground and shallow top soil is not in my experience.

Did you have to grow something in elementary school in a paper cup? I grew a corn stalk in a Mason glass jar once. It was scary the way it shot up and the roots immediately filled the jar with their tendrils. I also think of the times I have seen seeds take hold in the cracks in sidewalks, bricks and stone walls and grow entire trees where they were not intended. Kudzu also comes to mind as an out of control growth. So when Jesus talks about seeds hitting poor soil and dying, I have to think hard of somewhere dry and rocky, with shallow topsoil, somewhere not Kentucky for sure.

In fact, agricultural parables probably elude most of us in the 21st century—we are not agricultural people. We may have our gardens and lawns, but very few of us till a field, plant and harvest wheat every year. As agricultural parables go, however, this one is straightforward, and in the Matthew version, comes with its own interpretation. That seeds that die or that only grow a little are like people who do not heed the word of God, or heed it and do not let it sink into their souls. They are not serious about their faith, they do not nurture it: water it, weed it, tend to it in the way that provides growth for their souls and a relationship with the Divine.

If I were writing this parable for today, what images could we use to speak to people of the new millennium? What do we plant but allow to die? How do we not nurture? Is it like a child who asks for a puppy, and when it arrives, plays with it for a while, then loses interest? The parents then end up with its care and feeding. This is a good parable for us. Our parent God reaches out to us, we think we are ready for mature faith so we initially respond enthusiastically. Then it becomes hard—we believe it involves reading and studying scripture, working on relationships with those who bug us, cultivating loving ways of being in the world, and having a right relationship with the earth and its creatures.

Being faithful, which is just responding to God’s love, does take mindfulness and a way of being in our skins that reminds us we are a gift from God, not a gift to God. That we really have to do nothing but respond to God’s love for us. That we have been created and loved just the way we are and don’t need to change the center of our very selves to be the recipient of this love.

But we tend to believe we must earn everything in this world, that we have to be good to be loved,
have to be perfect to receive divine attention,
have to be someone else who we think is more holy and worthy
and that sounds very hard. In truth, it is impossible!

So we try for a while, then learn to ignore God’s love for us, go to play with other toys that take less work. Toys that make us feel we are in charge of the world, not God. We get involved in working long hours for the promotion and job security, to make money, we work hard at being the best parent and having the best children, or being the best volunteer, the best housekeeper, to earn things and praise.
And that way of being is indeed very hard.

To not be in whole relationship with God because we are not accepting of the person God created us to be and just rest in the soil that God planted us in is not what God intended.

Tending to our needs by giving up our egos to God is not the way of the millennium—we feel we are not in control, that there is nothing we can do. But there is.
There is the very depth of prayer, the way we communicate with God and bring God into the decisions, the joy, the sorrows, the challenges of every day life. If our prayer life is strong, our relationship with God is strong.

Just like any other relationship, if we don’t have chances to talk to one another, the relationship will die. If God doesn’t become part of our lives through this communication, our relationship and our faith suffer. Episcopalians have an entire prayer book to help us with this task, but if you are only using it on Sundays, your relationship with God will not be what it could be.

Think about it—in any relationship where you communicate once a week, and then only in broad, general terms, and don’t share your inner most thoughts and feelings, that relationship is not going to be very deep. It’s like seeds sitting on top of the rocks, in very shallow soil, the love cannot grow in a hostile environment.

I am on Facebook, which is a social networking tool on the web, being used by more and more people. A former student of mine recently found me on Facebook and contacted me. It was wonderful to hear from her after 20 years. And I lost contact with the daughter of my good friend Patty after Patty died in 1997. This week I googled her daughter’s name and found where she worked and sent her a letter. It feels really warm and comforting to make connections with people you have lost.

If this is true for us humans, how much more so is it with God. When you make connections with God, through prayer and communicating with God in your daily life, how much more so does God rejoice that you have been found. That your relationship is healthy and growing. And that by your reaching out to touch the God who has been reaching out to you all along, you make yourself more available to the divine in all your relationships. You begin to see the blessedness of all those you come in contact with. The love in your life blossoms in the deep soil of God’s love and attention.

Your seeds are spread when you are born, and what kind of soil you give them is up to you. You can provide good loam or you can ignore them altogether and let them die. The seeds of God’s love for you will not totally perish however. They are there waiting for your attention, for you to respond to the lovingkindness of God. To bring God into your daily life, your work, your home, your family and all your relationships. Who doesn’t need more love?

Rest for your souls

Proper 9 A

I had the opportunity to spend January term with a family in Germany to satisfy my language requirement in college, but could not pony up the cash to do it. My brother offered to lend me the money, and even so, I could not get my head around how I would ever be able to pay him back, given that I had no job prospects looming after graduation and wanted to go to graduate school. Now whenever I look back at that lost opportunity to live with a family from another culture, I kick myself. It was a wonderful chance to learn, to live in another country and make international friends that would have been fun and enlightening and expanded my world greatly. In my farm background no one in my family had ever done anything like that, so I know my lack of vision was a little based in lack of experience. I know better now, and during the years when I was a professor, then campus minister, I used to encourage young adults to take risks that I knew would expand their horizons.

Making connections with other people takes time. Getting to know others of a different culture is sometimes scary. I know that for me, I have lived in three different states, apart from my native Illinois and each time, I encountered different ways of speaking, different ethnic groups, different foods. In Rochester NY, I was a farm girl in the big city, surrounded by people of Italian descent and I met and became friends with my first Jewish friends. I learned to love chopped liver and had my first real bagels. In Ann Arbor, I went to Greek town and had wonderful middle Eastern foods, one of my professors brought baklava to our doctoral seminars, and I heard music from around the world at the University of Michigan. Here in Kentucky, I encountered more southern culture--cheese grits and barbecue. And until I could get the hang of the local accent, I once went to the car wash, not understanding what the man with a thick Eastern Kentucky accent was asking of me, I finally just agreed and ended up with musk scent in the car.

When we lived in the Chicago area, we also had access to wonderful food and music, including Mississippi Delta blues, of course Chicago style pizza, and many cultures who have immigrated there, including Mexican people and the biggest population of Polish people outside of Poland. Riding on the El there, you could hear a myriad different languages being spoken.

We hear Jesus say that his generation is like children in the marketplace who complain to each other--we played the flute for you and you would not dance, we wailed and you would not mourn. Trying to be connected, to have vision and take opportunities where they are given to be in relationships with others, to hear their flute and mourn with their grief, is a challenge that we don’t always live up to. But there is some good news too—after the attacks of September 11, 2001, many people have taken the opportunity to dialogue with Arab and Muslim people in interfaith listening. Unfortunately it took something very drastic to wake us up to the fact that as Americans we can become very insular in our cultural ideas. Even so, we have taken this opportunity to listen to the flute of another religious group and try to learn its melodies. We also began to understand the wailing of Muslin extremists who do these suicide missions, and how people in extreme poverty may view the richness of our country.

Right now my family is in the middle of the Mississippi floods—they can only get to work by going out of their way several miles to another bridge to Iowa, some have been laid off until the waters recede. Some have lost whole farms and this year’s crops. There is much suffering when floods arrive. The Episcopal church is listening to their grief, and has mobilized assistance—the bishop of Iowa has a video on Episcopal News Service that you can watch to see the devastation and learn how you can make connections with the people’s grief, hear their flute and dance in sympathy with them.

I believe that these connections among peoples, whether they live right here, in a couple states over, or across the hemisphere, are part of Jesus’ words to us to ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’

When we take another person’s burden, we dance with them, we mourn with them, we become light as feathers, our souls have been joined in a way they could not be any other way. When I went with a youth group from Chicago to the Gulf Coast to help with rebuilding two years ago, we worked on the trailer of a young single mother not much older than some in our youth group. She would come after work and help us, with her little four year old girl. Our youth played with her little girl and we got to know her and her hopes and dreams. She cried and we cried with her. We made a real connection and our souls were joined together in this short week we were there. We helped carry her burden for that week, and we became lighter, our souls found rest in the work we were doing. I believe that had we merely worked on houses without meeting people we were helping, it would have been a much emptier week. We would not have known the people we were helping, there would have been no human connection, just some physical labor in hot Mississippi.

To get to know anyone, really know them and understand their life, their sorrows, their joys, is to know their blessedness in God’s eyes.
It is a way to take on the yoke of Christ,
to hear the flute and learn another person’s dance,
and to find rest for your soul.

Back to the Blog

Its been a few weeks. Many things have happened, but the most profound has been the loss of a family member in very rapid decline.

The shock of losing someone is still with me. Just yesterday I was able to write in my journal again, to feel up to a long walk in the sun, to breathe deeply. Grief is not handled well in our society, not given its due. We don't seem to want to acknowledge the emotional toll, we want everyone to buck up and move on.

I was watching a World War II era movie last night about the home front. One of the main characters, the grandson and fiance' of two other characters, dies in the war. The grandfather wears a black arm band in memory of his grandson. Another minor character loses his son and also wears a black arm band.

This was a good idea--the arm band signified that the person was still in the grieving process. Others could be signaled to respect them and to know that they perhaps were not going to "be themselves" during this time. It was helpful, I am sure, to all involved to have this sign of grief given publicly.

I have no black arm band, only dark circles under my eyes. I have no signal to give total strangers of my not being totally myself these past weeks. I have only a far away look, a tear that sneaks up on me unannounced. There are no signs alerting others that I am in a process of intense emotional energy. So, in some ways I feel I owe it to the world to hide my grief from them. Not to bother them with my tears and sadness, with my stares of disbelief, even my rants of anger at the person who didn't take as good care of himself as we, his family, thought he could have: Could he have survived this illness if he had taken precautions?

Some of the family are mad at God. I don't know what God had to do with his death. I ask questions of God, and am mad that our family seems to have had more than its share of death and grief. What is any family's share of death and grief, anyway? I can't answer that. It may not even be a question, it may only be a rant of anger and holds no real meaning. It is real nonetheless.

So, I am back with this blog. I ask your prayers--again. This time for me and my family as we enter this journey of grief and loss, and learn to live without our dear loved one. Not for just a year, but for the rest of our lives, we enter this grief. Every day the loved one is gone, we remember...

In Transition

Not one of my favorite things, transition, but here I am in the middle of one. I just finished my job as campus missioner for the diocese and am now seeking a full-time parish. Some opportunities are there, and I await their fruition.

Waiting is hard. I want to be gainfully employed, even if not remunerated, so I am engaged in several tasks: Working on ideas for health care initiatives for people of faith; writing, especially writing sermons and reflections; reading, especially all the books and journals that piled up during the busy-ness of everyday priestly activities with a parish and several college and other young adults; and finally, discerning the next place God is calling me to be.

That last one is obviously the hardest. Where do my talents belong? Who needs what I can give? How will I know when it is the place and the people with whom I am being called to serve? I think these questions have been the most difficult of my priestly formation. In my previous jobs, there was a job description that was fairly cut and dried and I knew by comparing what I had done and how I had trained whether the job would be a fit and I would enjoy doing that work. It was partly a matter of special academic interests in specific areas of the health care system.

I thought this would be how the deployment of a priest would go too, but alas, not with the same type of visible and discrete discrimination. Or at least not the obviousness with which I had perceived my talents fitting previous jobs in academia and health care.

I don't know why this is particularly--but I suspect there is lots more going on with parishes than they are able to put into a profile that is used to match my talents and their hopes and dreams for their future. If you think of it, you are asking a parish to make concrete what may be foggy to them, or may seem concrete but is layered with multiple hopes, fears, and dreams, some of which may conflict, about their future as a community of faith and the leadership they seek.

Discernment in this context is coupled with much mist and wavering images. The images seem to change and morph, on what basis I am not sure.

The discernment process calls for others to journey with you, in companionship, certainly, but also in advising, listening, helping you hear. So, I am asking several to accompany me on this journey. If you are kind enough to read this blog, and inclined to prayer, I do ask your prayers for me during this time of discernment.

May God lead me into light and the knowledge of God's will for me and for a parish who is looking for the talents I have been given.

The Power of Community

Yesterday I celebrated at a Eucharist for a group of Episcopal women I am a member of, at the end of a three-day conference on empowering women for social justice work. I asked all the women (about 75 who were present) to come stand up at the altar with me during the prayer of consecration.

As I was praying, I felt like superwoman--a feeling of great power and a kind of empowerment beyond myself. The spirits of all those women ringing the altar were extraordinary. There were more than just my prayers being said at the altar, there were the prayers and power of all those women with me. I felt as if I were floating a little above the floor, that the words of prayer were being sent into God's own mind at that moment.

This is the most powerful and wonderful, and awe-filled moment I have had as a priest. The community surrounding the altar were truly the consecrators of the bread and wine.

I believe this is how Eucharist was meant to be--the community praying together to bring the Holy Spirit in our midst. We all were co-creators with God at that moment, we all made the bread and wine Christ's body and blood to us--we all as an entity, not our separateness, but our oneness, were conduits of the Holy Spirit.

May all of you reading this today be able to have this kind of community where you can go--a place of such love and power, of oneness in Christ.

Christian community

This week our lection from Acts gave us a model of the first Christians living in community.

They broke bread, shared in the apostles' teaching, fellowship and the prayers. They held all things in common. They rejoiced and brought many new members into their fold. The did signs and wonders.

How does this model look next to your community of faith? Where can you take a page from the first Christians' community to learn how to be in communion with your fellow Christians? Does your community of faith look anything like this?

Meeting the Risen Christ

As we continue to meet the risen Christ in our readings during Easter, be mindful of the risen Christ meeting you on the street, in your office, classroom, home. Wherever people are on the margins--the poor, the outcast, the homeless, those in the throes of addictions—all are the face of Christ crying out for the gospel that promises that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This “scandalous gospel of Jesus”, as it is termed by Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes in his latest book of this title, makes us uncomfortable because it challenges our own place at the table. It takes us out of our comfort zone, to reach out to those whom Christ cried for, healed, loved. Love is never diminished when given away, paradoxically, it grows. Jesus’s love for “the least" showed us the way. And his power over death made death nothing to fear, so now we have nothing to fear by giving away our love.

Encounter the risen Christ this week, live the scandalous gospel in your little corner of the world.

Richard of Chichester

On April 3, we commemorate Richard of Chichester, bishop, who died 1253.

You may remember the prayer attributed to him, basis for a song in the rock opera Godspell:

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly,
Day by day.

The Commandment to Love

A priest I knew once said some parishioners told him that their five year old little girl came home after church one Sunday and complained—“All the priest does is say the same thing over and over. Blah blah blah love, blah blah blah love.”
Well Maundy Thursday is the reason that preachers have sermons that harp on a single theme of love—the new commandment of Christ to the disciples, to love others as he has loved them.
To be servants to each other, to wash each others’ feet. To love not as masters but as slaves.
To love as Christ has loved us.
The immensity of Christ’s love for us makes us wonder whether we can even try to attain to such a thing—to make Christ’s model our own way of loving.
For Christ’s love was all verb.
While we want love to be poems, flowers and cards of sympathy, or the whispering of sweet nothings, Christ had no hearts and flowers and sentiment.
Christ’s love was rooted in his body.
His love was making mud on a blind man’s eyes;
Telling a woman at a well about her life;
Weeping with Mary and Martha;
commanding in a shout for Lazarus to live.

His love was dirty and defiled by disease, distemper, death. His love was measured in the number of dusty, dirty feet gently put under water. His love was eating and drinking with people we wouldn’t want to bring home to dinner.
His love is leaving our safe places behind.
I believe that our loving must be startled out of our reverie, away from our safe places and made clear to the world. Because, when we pay attention to all the ways the world is crying out for the acts of love shone to us in Christ, we begin to want to love our world as Christ loved it.
Coming out of complacency that nothing can be done, or that the world needs so much more love than we can give, we begin to see that unless we start where we are, the world will die without love.
Our nooks and crannies are our stating places, just like Jesus’s world of lepers and the lame and women coming to wells was his world. Jesus did not heal all people in his world but he made it possible that everywhere his followers went, love would be spread in a geometric progression. Each person loving in the small corners they inhabit, multiplied, become all the world receiving the love of Christ.
The arithmetic of Christ’s love is bigger than any one of us. It starts with small steps, with awareness of how to love in the minute I find myself, the place I find myself, with the people with whom I find myself.
The spread of divine love is not safe, it is risky. It is stepping into someone’s grief and loss, or away from the computer in face to face encounter. It can be as mundane as a beer with a young adult, or as exotic as a mission trip to a place that may give us malaria.
This kind of loving is always personal, as Christ was personal.
This kind of loving is imbued with divine power, as Christ was imbued with divine power.
This kind of loving is not a choice. Jesus did not say, maybe you will love if you want to be my follower, but you must love as I have loved you.
This kind of loving is the mark of Christians. By this they will know you are my disciples.
As we ponder the commandment to love as Christ has loved us, we know that we would not be given this work to do without God’s power behind it. We know we can love, because Christ loved us. We know we can start today because we are loved today. We know we can take our love to dark and lonely places because we have been loved in our own dark and lonely places. We know that all the people we are asked to love are merely our own selves, who have already been loved.
This knowledge of the love of Christ is what propels us to love the world. Christ so loved us that we can do no other than love in his holy name.
Living the love that Christ asked us to live.
Doing the loving that Christ lived.

We know we are living love like a verb when our lives are not just talk. When we are not just blah, blah, blah love, but doing love, love, love, love.

The Passion

A few words meditating on the passion—

The passion—central defining action of Jesus of Nazareth—his trial as an innocent man. His trial for our own humanness, where his divinity waits to show the glory of God. Was his suffering because of us? Are we the Jews who put him on trial? Are we Pilate who wash our hands of his death?

The terrible suffering and death of Jesus was the culmination of all his acts of love for us. He time and again has risked his life by healing on the Sabbath, questioning the leaders of the Jews in their temples, and raising Lazarus from the dead in a way that incites them against him. He is taken like a thief. He is treated like a criminal. Is this for all our thieving ways? For our criminal behavior toward each other?

Jesus’ death is for us. Jesus’ death is more than the snuffing of one life. His death stands for the death of sinfulness and the power of death over us. His death snuffs out death, not life. His death is our own death if we let it be. The death of mean-spiritness, the death of jealousy and greed. The death of working so much we don’t have time to love. The death of trying to control all our world out of anxiety.

Jesus did not die without purpose.Jesus did not suffer without first loving all the world and calling each of us to him in love. Love conquers jealousy and greed, and anxiety, if we accept this gift from Jesus.

The terribleness of this death that Jesus died carries the weight of the world with it so that love may have the last say.

Nearing Holy Week

Closing in on Passion Sunday and Holy Week, the last week of this season of Lent, we pause for a moment and remember what we have been through.

The woman at the well is told by Jesus that she is one of the kingdom. A man born blind can now see, while the leaders of the Jews are still blind. Lazarus, who has been grieved four days in the tomb, is called forth and lives.

Jesus gives us a love that is personal, one on one. A love that know no boundaries of country, of sin, or death. Jesus brings a love that has power over death and the things that kill us, and brings us living water to slake our thirst for true relationship.

In this last week of Lent, look around you. Where is Jesus calling you to love as he has loved you? Where in your life has the love of Christ manifest itself in personal, one on one relationship that gives life?

The Man Born Blind Teaches us About Faith

from yesterday’s gospel

There is a study of people born blind who gain their sight for the first time. When people gain sight they never had before, it is terrifying. Their world was built on a darkness that had become comfortable; all of a sudden their whole way of perceiving the world has changed.

When you have known nothing else but blindness, you don’t know what it is like to have sight.

The man born blind may have been unsettled by Jesus healing him, but we are not told that in this story. He may have been scared of this new world, but we don’t know. He could have cursed Jesus for changing his whole way of life. Here he was sitting with what he knew, his blindness. It may not have been the most comfortable world, but he was used to it.

His response to the encounter with Jesus is to not worry about who Jesus is, only to focus on the fact that he is now able to see and that Jesus is the man who healed him. He did not analyze how it happened; he did not try to argue with the Pharisees; he didn’t gripe that his life was no longer comfortable, he only told the truth about his encounter.

This story of the man born blind says to me that our faith is not based on what parts of the Nicene Creed we utterly believe, but how we encounter Jesus. Our faith is not about our understanding about what happens to the bread and wine in Eucharist, but how Jesus comes to us whenever we approach the altar. Our faith is not about how healthy we think we are in our relationships and everyday dealings in the world, but about how open we are to the healing power of Jesus in our lives.

Our faith is built on our openness for Jesus to enter and give sight to those blind spots, to shake up our comfortable life, to put light where there was darkness and cause us to see ourselves and our world with the eyes of Jesus.

Whenever Jesus heals, Jesus gives us access to the divine in ourselves. Jesus heals to give us part of his own divinity, to pour out the love of God. When we are filled with God’s love, it’s easier to see. It’s easier to put away the darkness and look honestly at our lives and how we can love those around us.

Thirsty?

The Gospel of John pericope about the Samaritan woman at the well is about thirst. A woman’s thirst for authentic relationship and love. She had been “through the wringer” of marriage, having had five husbands and now living with a boyfriend. We are not brought into a story of condemnation of her situation, but of her encounter with living water at the well, with Jesus. He offers her water that will quench her thirst, for eternity. He tells her about her life, without judgment, but with insight into her soul, and a piercing knowledge of her needs.


The metaphor of water speaks to a desert community in first century Palestine. It speaks to us also in the Southeast, who so recently were in drought conditions.


Lent is a time of entering into drought, coming face to face with our thirst for something more real, lasting, deeply satisfying. A taste of the water that does not require us to keep returning to the well to quench our desire.


Thirst is a natural, inborn response of our bodies to the lack of hydration. I have heard it said that by the time we actually feel thirsty, we may already be entering dehydration. We are encouraged to drink water throughout the day, to improve our health.


Are you drinking enough living water?

Our hiding place

Yesterday we read from Psalm 32:
You are my hiding place;
You preserve me from trouble;
You surround me with shouts of deliverance.

God is indeed our hiding place, where we go for Sabbath time of quiet, contemplation, and forgiveness. Lent is a time that is especially appropriate for finding the hiding place that God has prepared for you. Like the wilderness Jesus encountered, it may be a place where God supports you in the tests challenging you. It may be a place where regrets are offered up to the compassionate love of Christ. It may be a place where God alone attends your thoughts and offers the peace that passes understanding, to "preserve you from trouble".


Wherever your hiding place with God is, come to that place in Lent. Know the shouts of deliverance upholding you.

T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"

Excerpt from Ash Wednesday by Thomas Stearns Eliot

VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Coming Into Lent, Coming into Our True Selves

A paraphrase from the Ash Wednesday prayer:
O God, you hate nothing that you have made.

We don't think about Lent as a time where we find the beauty of our souls, but that is what happens when we contemplate our created selves, enter into God's presence and find the soul that God has created within us. We each are unique persons, we each radiate a beauty that is our true self. The self that is not what others want us to be, what we think we should be, or what we strive so hard to become because we think we are sinful by nature and must be perfect.

This Lent, I challenge myself to become more the "me" that I was meant to be. A challenge that only God can help me meet.