Friends

I just heard that clergy friends will be moving in January to a St. Louis suburb.  Jon and I started the process for discernment to the priesthood about the same time.  He already had a degree in pastoral counseling so was able to finish quickly after one and half years at General Seminary.  His first call as rector was a hard one, with conflict.  Small town, where he was missing big town amenities, as well. So I am glad that he has found something more for his soul.  Also, he and his family will be 3 hours closer and I may actually be able to take the train down to visit some time.

My call continues to be a challenge, with challenging people who seem to be stuck in the old conflicts and make these conflicts about personalities.  I am now in a clergy consultation group to help deal with parish systems and hope to help the parish get through these difficulties. If they don't the conflicts and personalities will continue to clash and be counterproductive for the life of the parish.  They want to grow; there is much work to do.

As Christmas Eve approaches, I have been preaching on the love that came down in Bethelehem--God's most wonderous and mysterious love through the Christ.  Our being able to accept this love is crucial in responding in a way that continues the love of Christ in our world.

How can I help my parish move beyond its conflicts, the wounds so old I would have thought they would have scarred over by now. There are deep longings for new life, but some people get mired in their grieving and their wounds that have not healed.

Like Jon, I want to do good work, but I also need to be fed in my situation, in a way that lets my given talents and creativity come forward in my priesthood.  I don't want to be constantly working with old wounds, I want to help the healing begin and finish or at least be more functional, if healing is to take much more time than I had hoped.

Pray for all congregations who carry wounds of past hurts with them. Pray for individual parishioners who seek to be more peaceful even as they call up old wounds, fears, enmities, and continue to live through them.  Forgiveness seems to be far away from their hearts, but this is the season that teaches us how God forgave so much sinfulness within us.  How can we not respond by forgiving those who have hurt us, how can we not give God a chance as helping us heal?

Nearly Advent, Thanksgiving

Hoping for Advent, getting through too much food and excess of Thanksgiving. Not how it should be maybe.

Am losing sleep with the same old feelings of inadequacy and questioning: Does God really mean me, is God really calling me? And the same answer: Yes. Get over it. (well maybe not the last part--that sounds like me).

At diocesan convention last weekend, I heard about using parishioner spiritual autobiographies as a tool for evangelism. They showed some videos of autobiographies. I rememberd how spiritual autobiographies affected us in EFM. To know someone's spiritual journey is to be allowed into the depths of the person's greatest pain and sorrow as well as their greatest joy. A person's depths are reached by God as they open themselves in vulnerability. Without that vulnerability, we are not reaching our very humanity, our humbleness and humility before God and are not open to God's grace. When one refuses to feel sorrows, griefs and challenges, and feels nothing, one cannot feel grace either. When we touch our very depths, that open space allows mercy to flow into us.

So, hearing a person's autobiographical journey with God helps us know them deeper than before. As they talk about those places of vulnerability where they have met God, we see them as fully human, without the mask of anonymity for the general public, but with the grace of God as a beam of light suffusing their very self before us. What a transformation we have of understanding. Where before we saw a two-dimensional human being, now we see God's created spirit coming through this person whom God loves unconditionally. We want this for ouselves, we want to love this person as God has loved them, and we do because they are now purely themselves.

Before we see the full human being, we have perhaps seen a person who seems perfect. When you don't know a person's story, you only see how they appear at church, at work, in the grocery store--put together for public faces. We begin to "judge our insides by their outsides": we certainly can't feel perfect like that person is perfect. But then we come to really know their struggles. We find out their challenges, the problems of their family and home life, their growing up, their personal demons. We find they are like us in every way, flawed yet loved by God.

Knowing another is to reach into God's spirit a little more. It is to break out of the self-pity, or navel-gazing we may be doing about our own problems, and to see ourselves as part of God's created world and of God's own hand, along with all of humanity. We are special in our unique selves. but our challenges and foibles are not unique--we share them with all the world. When we know this, we join humanity and join with God in seeing the grace of God walking before us. We begin to see the face of Christ in the suffering we all have undergone and to see how loved we are in our struggles.

Tomorrow give thanks.

FALL

The leaves are prematurely falling here in the north. Today is equi-lichtal--equal light (is that a word?). My dad always said that it rains around the equinox and sure enough there is plenty of rain in the air. I like fall, the growing sense of inward journey, of internalness and the beginning of nesting for cooler weather.

Nesting is a particularly happy thing for us introverts, who like navel-gazing in quiet times, writing in our journals, and being contemplative in a noisy way in front of TV. Is fall a gift for good introverts?

Sabbath

It's cold where I have chosen to have some Sabbath time. The coldest July on record, with temperatures yesterday only in the upper 60's. I wear a jacket on the last day of July!

Sometimes Sabbath can be like this--something that is surprisingly different than normal, that jolts us out of the complacency of life and plonks us down in a new place. This Sabbath for me is beginning to be like this.

I have had a challenging spring and early summer. Conflict. Being called names like Liar. My head has swum with the vehemence of it, the utter unbelievability of how something I wanted to be so positive turned so bitter and accusatory of my very intentions. I intended good and it was perceived as evil. What surprising and hurtful results.

I have questioned myself, lost confidence in my skills, been hurt deeply.

Getting through all that to this coldest of July's is perhaps a perfect gauntlet to run through.

I ask prayers for those who hate me, for myself and my hurt, for their hurt.

I have gone fishing here and caught nothing. Catching nothing is the metaphor for God's calling me forward to my own humility and pain, to be real. God is with me, I feel it, calling me. I have answered one large call and must keep answering that call again and again--keep reasserting that I am responding YES to all that God is creating in me.

This Sabbath has not been easy. When I hear the word Sabbath, I imagine rest and low level activity. Yes there has been that, but also a rending of my heart, catching nothing, being here in the surprising cold, hoping for sunshine.

Refiner of Silver

Malachi 3:3 says: 'He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.'
This verse puzzled some women in a Bible study and they wondered what this statement meant about the character and nature of God. One of the women offered to find out the process of refining silver and get back to the group at their next Bible Study.

That week, the woman called a silversmith and made an appointment to watch him at work. She didn't mention anything about the reason for her interest beyond her curiosity about the process of refining Silver.

As she watched the silversmith, he held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up. He explained that in refining silver, one needed to hold the silver in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest as to burn away all the impurities. The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot; then she thought again about the verse that says: 'He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver.'

She asked the silversmith if it was true that he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time. The man answered that yes, he not only had to sit there holding the silver, but he had to keep his eyes on the silver the entire time it was in the fire. If the silver was left a moment too long in the flames, it would be destroyed. The woman was silent for a moment.. Then she asked the silversmith, 'How do you know when the silver is fully refined?' He smiled at her and answered, 'Oh, that's easy -- when I see my image in it.'

This was passed on to me via email from an attorney friend of mine, who got it from her sister. I usually don't engage with this kind of spam, but the story intrigued me and meant a lot to me and my own life and wanted to share it with you.

Faith

Thomas Merton says there are two types of faith. The faith that we bring to church to us, that looks over our shoulder to see if we are conforming to what is going on around us. The second type is the faith that lies deep within us, close to our hearts, and grounds our lives.

Clearing the temple

I believe Christ is asking us all to enter into our grief and loss, whatever dark places are within us and come into a place of unconditional love, so that we can be healed.

When Jesus enters the temple to drive away the money changers and declares that the house of God will not be made a marketplace, he is doing something prophetic. He says he will tear the temple down and raise is again in three days. This is perhaps a scary aspect of the Christ that we want to think is all love.

Christ is telling the authorities that his body is the temple that will die and be raised in three days. To them this is unbelievable. To the disciples, who remembered these words of his, they then understood their meaning after his resurrection.

There may be parts of each of us that are crying out for resurrection. Parts that we have made a marketplace where we look for exchanges to take place, but not for a real relationship with our God. We see signs of resurrection around us—the green shoots beginning to show from the soil, the red wing black birds coming to make their nests, the sun staying with us a little longer each day. These signs give me hope, as does the gospel, that whatever Jesus is here to tear down within us will be built up with resurrecting life and light.

It is scary to enter into the places inside that Jesus wants to come and we are sometimes afraid to let him enter.

Jesus may challenge us to risk being vulnerable, to lose our composure; Jesus may challenge us to be real when we would rather be right, or at least to cover up our insecurities.

The Jesus who would tear down a temple and raise it in three days is one of action,
this is the Christ who destroys what is old and getting in the way of our faith
and also the Christ who is ready to give us life and give it abundantly.

Do we need to be destroyed in order to be given new life? I don’t think so. But sometimes we may need to give up control over some things, to let go, be able to lose something so that something more wonderful can be given to us by God. That is the cycle of death and resurrection—one of letting go of some things so that new things can be born in us.

This may be one of the most difficult things we humans have to let God do for us. The losses I have felt were able to be given to God in exchange for new life in Christ—new faith, new spiritual friendships that were right there waiting for me, giving me a sense of God’s presence with me and for me. I felt my own resurrection through the love around me.

Going through traumatic experiences is not a piece of cake. But we are never alone. God is giving us Christ, and Christ’s love through spiritual friends. Christ is asking us to trust that his love can enter our dark places and drive away our fear. We are being loved whether we know it or not, or can accept it or not. Christ is near at hand loving us. Christ is near at hand to help us, the love of Christ here to give us resurrection.

Ash Wednesday

“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord your God for God is gracious and merciful.”

Are you looking for a way to return to God? Joel writes that we should rend our hearts.

Rend our hearts—what an image—an opening of our very center. A tearing apart of what beats in us with life, risking losing our life for the sake of eternal life.

Rend our hearts—a kind of tearing open what is most secret and fearful inside us. The things we are keeping deep and dark within, the things that scare us about ourselves. Rend those, take them and give them a little tug to open them up for God’s healing mercy.

Rend our hearts—an emotional upheaval maybe, causing us to listen to the deep urgings inside us to find God, not by fearing that God will really know who we are. God hates nothing God has made, there can be no hate of us, only a wish that we would return to God by giving up what does not belong to us, what is jealous, or mean spirited, what does not belong to God the center of our being.

Rend our hearts—give up what is causing us to want to be the major mover and shaker of our soul and give that job back to God. Return our very self to God’s love and protection and quit trying to make everything something we think we can control.

Can you rend your hearts this Lent? Enter deeper and be ready for the love that will take your broken heart and mend it as it returns to God?

Inviting God's participation in the healing of the world

Asking for the participation of God in healing individual parishioners, in healing our parish system and in healing our communities is the job of all communities of faith. Asking for God’s healing and then being engaged in that healing are our particular callings. Doctors can use medical science and art to heal our bodies, counselors can use psychological techniques to heal emotions and psyches, economists can use principles of finance to heal our communities, but only we of faith can enlist the healing powers of God.

How do we do that?

Prayer--for ourselves and others. Intercession especially for those for whom we have been asked to pray and for the people close to us, and the people we have never met but whose stories have come to us and invite us to closer relationship with them.

Action--donations to social service agencies whose support has decreased while their demand has grown in this economic downturn. Even small donations of food and money are gratefully accepted and needed, but big donations can do a world of good for the people served by food pantries, homeless shelters, job agencies, and other social and medical services.

Direct work with the homeless, the jobless, those who are dealing with hard times--make time to be with homeless people or work with those trying to get their resume in order. Being close to those who can use a leg up helps our spiritual journeys, as we give of our time and talent, and learn to know people intimately and make relationships with them.

Be watchful--for the inbreaking of God's love, wherever you may find it, whether in families, churches, communities, and let it be known that God loves every person God has made.

The Healing Power of Christ

IV Epiphany B

During my doctoral training I met a woman from Iowa, named Patty. We bonded over the next five years while we underwent the rigors of courses, preliminary exams, and dissertation writing, and of the five people who entered our program we were the only ones who graduated with our PhD. She was a somewhat radical activist who worked in women’s health care. She had worked in women’s health centers in Iowa before coming for her degree and did her dissertation on women’s access to prevention, especially the lack of access to care for poor women.

Some years after we both graduated, Patty was working for the federal government doing this same kind of work using the huge national data bases from Medicaid patients. Then one day I got a call from her saying she was diagnosed as having herself, a rare form of cancer in women that in most cases is caught by early prevention and care, which she herself had not received. It was quite ironic.

Well in those days I was in Washington for meetings several times a year, and on my next visit, I went to see her and we talked a lot about the fact that she had refused getting care for her cancer because it would reduce her quality of life and the doctor had given her a low probability of its effectiveness.

She asked me to go with her to the healing service at the National Cathedral in Washington on Sunday night, and I agreed to go with her. I also told her that I would pray for her at my home parish of St. Michaels in Lexington at the weekly healing service we had there.

So the next three months, I prayed every week as I promised, mentioning her name during the prayers for healing and some times going up to be anointed by the priest on her behalf. I think I was believing that if I prayed hard enough, her cancer would be cured and Patty would be with us for a good long time.

Patty’s health continued to deteriorate, and the next time I saw her, she was becoming bedridden. She was being cared for by visiting nurses and hospice and her own daughter, who was a family practice physician in training, had come home to be with her. A few weeks after that visit, I called to talk to her, and her daughter told me she could no longer speak on the phone. And then her daughter called me a few days later to say that Patty had died.

The death of my friend Patty was a hard time for me and God. I thought that if I prayed long and hard enough, she would be healed. I mentioned this to friends who were parishioners at St Michaels. They helped me realize that Patty’s healing may have come in many different forms: spiritual healing, emotional healing, or mental healing, if not the healing of her body from this particular disease.

I was glad to hear that, and it comforted me to know that I had prayed for Patty’s healing, even if I had expected a different outcome. That God had perhaps another outcome in mind—-one between Patty and God that I was not privy to.

When I later was a chaplain at the hospice, I was able to use this new understanding of healing with patients who asked why they were not being healed in a way they were praying for. One man in particular was very focused on passages in the bible that said if you had faith enough, God could do anything for you. He worried a lot that his faith was not strong enough, because he was now dying.

So he and I talked about the inscrutability of God’s ways, and the different ways we can be healed. I tried to help him see where God might be giving him healing in his life. I anointed him for healing every visit I made to him. We talked about God’s gift of life and how it was a gift to me to have met him. We shared a lot of love during our visits.

That we are given the gift of life is a miracle. That we are given people around us who love us and with whom we can share a caring relationship is a gift of God’s great love for us. But at times of suffering and death, we may have questions—why is this happening? Why my loved one, or why me?

To ask these questions of God is not lack of faith, it is wanting to know God better. It is honest that we ask God hard questions, and as you know from all your relationships, honesty is a key to building trust and a deeper understanding of each other. God wants the same relationship you would have with any friend with whom you can share all your secrets. Every Sunday we pray to God for "whom all hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid." If we have questions, God knows them, and it is best not to try to be someone who denies that they do not question God when we are confronted by hard times and loss.

In our gospel today, we see the healing love of Christ. His first two ministries in the gospel of Mark are healing ministries. These healings involve his touch. We know how important touch is in healing. There are studies done of primates who are deprived of their mother and given a wooden substitute with a milk bottle attached. These primates suffer terrible deprivation and are never really able to recover from not having been touched as babies.

We see the healing properties of massage and healing baths. There are many studies showing that people in nursing homes who are touched do better.

Healing comes in all kinds of ways. Jesus’s words were healing—he called Lazarus out of the grave and he lived. One of my favorite national leaders who was known for his healing words in Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday we celebrate this week. His words especially at Gettysburg and at his second inauguration helped to heal a nation whose wounds of war ran deep. He believed that forgiveness was a key to healing a nation that had just pitted brother against brother in battles that had sustained terrible numbers of casualties. “With malice towards none, with charity for all," he asked the nation to finish the work of freeing a people in slavery and binding the nation back together.

Words and touch are the ways Jesus has taught us that heal. They heal not only our bodies but our very souls. When Patty and I went to the healing service that night, I watched as she was prayed over and touched. I know the healing words I have received in times that have challenged me, and the balm of being touched by loving hands. I have also questioned God when I was hurting, or saw a loved one in suffering and pain, wondering where the healing was. God’s power of healing is beyond us many times, but it is always there. God will always be present in our loss, our grief, our depression, whatever challenges us, whether in the words of healing or the touch of someone who loves us. And we too can be the means of healing for those around us.

Jesus begins his ministry in the world to begin the healing of the world. Let him speak to you. Let him touch you.

February Reflection

This month marks the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. I have had the great pleasure to be born in one state and live in another where Lincoln has ties--Illinois and Kentucky. The more I know about Lincoln, the more I admire his leadership skills, especially his ability to be a "nonanxious presence" in the midst of great upheaval in our country.

While Lincoln was not great church-goer, he, as many in his generation did, learned to read using the Bible as his textbook, and nearly all of his major speeches reference God's guiding hand in human affairs. His act of manumission of slaves in January, 1863 was not entirely popular, even in some northern states, but he stood behind his decision, not wavering in the face of much negative feedback.

The juxtaposition in 2009 of Dr. Martin Luther King's 80th birthday, the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth and the inauguration of our first black president cannot go unnoticed for the convergence of the forward movement of our country toward justice and peace for all people. What Lincoln started, King gave his life for, and Obama has continued, shows God's hand in giving us leaders who are not afraid to do the right thing, even when their very existence is at risk.

May God continue to give us leaders who are rooted in the waters of justice that wash over us, to bring to reality the dignity of every human being.

God's peace,