Saturday, May 23, 2009

Memorial Day Tribute

Give rest, O Christ, to your servants with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting. --The Burial of the Dead, Book of Common Prayer

Today I want to remember a particular saint who died yesterday--the Rev. Fa. Paul Wessinger, SSJE. Paul was am Episcopal priest and a professed member of the Anglican order of monks, the Society of St John the Evangelist. He was my spiritual director for over 10 years. He was a spiritual marker and guide for me. He brought me back to my truest self again and again. The self that God had in mind for me to live into when God created me (see Psalm 139).

When someone that we love dies, it takes us time to figure out how to love them when we see them no longer. For Paul and me, we had some practice at this already. For the past few years, Paul has been deaf. He had to give up spiritual direction. When I made retreats at the monastery in Cambridge, we would see one another, but we had trouble communicating. Eventually, Paul moved to a nursing care facility close to the monastery--where he died in the night Friday morning. He was over 90 years old.

In his prime, Paul was Superior of the Order. He brought the Society to a place of deep inclusion--for ordained women, for ordained gay and lesbians, for those for whom the institutional church was less than welcoming. He continued to bring out the best in me--which, in the end, allowed me to be true to my deepest self. He loved the church yet he challenged the church to go further into Gospel living. He was and is a deep inspiration in my ministry for me again and again. On the day Paul died, he was that deep source of comfort and strength yet again.

As it turns out yesterday was also the day that I received some news that caused me--yet again--to wonder why I have been created the way that I am. I heard news--yet again---that being open about supporting social justice causes and living your life in a way that supports actively those causes continues to cause misunderstanding, exclusion and pain. As the Gospel for Sunday points out, following and then living out the Gospel is not such an easy road. In fact, it will lead to suffering again and again. But how can you be true to yourself and not live out the Gospel? As you live your life, there are times when you realize that the choices you have made for the Gospel exclude you from the very living you believe that God is calling you to do. How do you reconcile that?

That's when I bring Paul into my heart. I imagine him sitting across from me in our room of spiritual direction--a candle lit and an icon of Jesus close by. He is in his black cassock. As I recount the latest story of exclusion, he listens. His face radiates gentleness and love. After I finish there is a moment of silence. And then Paul smiles at me. There is a gleam in his eye. Paul replies: "It is so hard. But what else can you do. I believe this is God's work that you are doing. It is important work. It is the way of love." I leave spiritual direction feeling that I am not alone. That I am loved--just as I am and just as I live. There are so many days that I need Paul Wessinger in my life. He is still with me. He will be with me all along.

This Memorial Day weekend....Who is it that loves you as you are? Who is it that confirms your call in God?

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Moving Forward

Sing to the Lord a new song*for he has done marvelous things. Psalm 98:1

When we are trying to find meaning as we move forward from one day to the next, we often spend a good deal of energy in the past. We think of decisions that we wish we had made differently or with more forethought. I'm sure the disciples had a good deal of these kind of thoughts after Jesus' death and resurrection. There is a great song in Jesus Christ Superstar entitled "Could We Start Again Please?" That song could be a mantra for many of us.

For years, when asked about my college experience, I would start off by saying that I attended Davidson College. If the conversation continued, I would then add that my first choice of college had been Williams College. Then I would launch into a discussion about how I had applied to Williams early decision and had not been accepted. I then added that I hadn't taken the application seriously, that I had written it in longhand in cartridge pen. Yada..Yada..Yada.. On and on I would go about how I had made mistakes in my application. I would wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been a college student in the northeast.

Not long into the conversation, my good husband would interject that I would never have met him if I had gone to another college. For a while, I would try to argue that I would have met him eventually. After a while, I gave up that line of argument. My experience at Davidson was a wonderful experience in many ways. Why did I spend a good ten years of my life unable to recognize this fact? Why focus on the road not taken?

This morning, I started the sermon with a poem by Carl Dennis called "The God Who Loves You." The poem is in his collection called Practical Gods. I won't quote the whole poem here but here are some pertinent lines:

It must be troubling for the god who loves you

To ponder how much happier you'd be today

Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings

Driving home from the office, content with your week---

Three fine houses sold to deserving families--

Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened

Had you gone to your second choice for college,

Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted

Whose ardent opinions on painting and music

Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion

A life thirty points above the life you're living

On any scale of satisfaction.......

The difference between what is

And what could have been will remain alive for him

Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill

Running out in the snow for the morning paper,

Losing eleven years that the god who loves you

Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him

No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend

No closer than the actual friend you made at college,

The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight

And write him about the life you can talk about

With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,

Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

Who is that friend that you actually know that it's time to write? That's a way to move forward into the future.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

The Love of God

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:7-8

One of the greatest truths that I know of is that God is love. And the best way to find God's love is to love one another. This weekend was testament to the love of God at Memorial. On Saturday, we celebrated the life of Judith Mosley, who died a week ago Sunday. It has certainly been an amazing journey of Christian love that brought Judith home to Baltimore from New Mexico. In the short time that she has been back among us, her hospital room was full each day of Memorial visitors. While I was out of town last Sunday, Judith was visited by several folks--one brought communion, one prayed, some talked gently to her, and others sang by her bedside. By then, Judith was non-responsive, but I believe she knew that God's love surrounded her as she made her way home.

On Saturday, the celebration of her life was joyous--with more singing and much festive eating and visiting afterwards. All of Judith's communities came together to remember her and how she brought so many people together that she loved. At Memorial, my Wednesday morning Bible Study has regular attendees that Judith brought to the class. She loved her friends and even though she was frightened at times and had difficult moments, she knew we loved her.

After the funeral, I traveled up to Western Maryland to join some of Memorial's Young Adults on retreat. As we spoke about sabbath and a discipline of prayer, the gathered group realized that they spent their Sabbath together. These busy twenty-somethings spend almost every Sunday meeting up at the 10:30 service and then going to brunch together. Often, they spend the afternoon hanging out while two of the group wait to lead the Memorial youth group on Sunday night. Sometimes they all reconnect for dinner as well. When I asked them what was their Sabbath time--they all said to a person "our Sunday Brunch after church." They went on to add that the Sabbath really does begin with worship and informs the rest of their day. What a lucky group! They find God's love in being together one day a week. Sometimes they let me come along to brunch and it's true---they show what the love of community looks like.

All in all, it was an Eastertide kind of weekend--begun and ended in love. The love of friends in Christ for one another. Alleluia!

Question for the week: What does your Sabbath time look like? Does it involve the love of friends?

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Spirit of God

The Spirit of Nakanawa is with you always. From far away cities to distant shores. But nobody else can find it for you. You have to find it for yourself.

The above text is from a song from my summer camp. For eight summers, I attended Camp Nakanawa, a camp for girls on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. This past weekend, I attended a reunion weekend at camp. As part of the reunion, of course, we sang camp songs. I find it amazing that these songs are blazoned on my heart--I remember ALL the words. As part of the weekend, we ate in the dining hall with all the southern delicacies (grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage). We helped the directors get ready for camp in a few weeks. I weeded gardens and woodburned pine medallions for awards. We hiked on the trail around the lake. In between the rain, I canoed on the lake. There were women in attendance from their early twenties to the late eighties. It was a blast.

As part of the weekend, I was asked to helped plan the church service (so I was still working after a fashion on Sunday morning!). We sang from the old Methodist hymnals that remain all year long in the Wigwam (the gathering hall). Those hymnals still had that familiar musty camp smell. We read Psalm 139--the psalm that is read at Rite 13 service to mark teenagers entering into adulthood. We prayed for all our daughters, the young women who would be coming to camp in a few weeks--biological or not. (We also prayed for the men-husbands and sons as well!) The most moving part of the service was the reflection period. Five former campers from the very eldest to one of the youngest spoke about what camp had meant to them and what they carried from camp into their later lives.

What I realized from the reflections (including my own) is that more than any other community, I learned at this camp what God's love looks and feels like in community. Coming from a family that was not good at expressing emotions or giving loving touches, camp was a whole new ballgame for me from the age of 12. This weekend, I remembered that I had to learn what it was to sit close to another person, to link arms, to hug, laugh and cry together. This weekend, I was amazed at how quickly we all fell back into our camp pattern. I noticed that unlike our usual worlds at home, we sat so closely together at meetings that our shoulders touched. We linked arms to sing songs. We held hands to pray. By Sunday, I realized that much of what I do in my vocation as an Episcopal priest flows directly from the community life of my summer camp. My call is to help to make the love of God present in a community day in and day out. I use what I was given and learned at camp to give back that Spirit of God's love to those I meet in my life as a priest. I came to camp a sad and lonely young girl whose mother had died. A young girl that did not know how to express her loss--or even what that loss really was all about. I left a young women who was given the healing and life-giving love of God who could then give and show that love to others. The Spirit of Nakanawa is the Spirit of God for me.

Where do you find the Spirit of God in community? Is it beyond your church community?

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Tell Out My Soul

Tell out, my soul, the glories of his word! Firm is his promise, and his mercy sure. Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord to children's children and forevermore. Stanza 4, Hymn 438, Hymnal 1982

Episcopalians often think theology through hymn texts. When I'm working on a certain theme for a sermon or a teaching session, I do think of certain Bible passages right off the bat. More often, hymns come to mind first. I then have to work my way back to Hooker's famous Anglican three-legged stool (scripture, tradition and reason) in order to get back to the scripture from the tradition (hymnody)!

This morning, I have the demise of our newspaper industry much on my heart. Tuesday and Wednesday, the Baltimore Sun cut its newsroom staff by nearly a third. The reduction hit nearly every type of job in the 205-person newsroom--top editors, copy editors, photographers, critics, columnists, sports reporters, page designers and graphic artists. The cuts have affected Memorialites.

I suppose that I'm a dying breed--but I love the local morning newspaper. Breakfast over the sports page (if I can get to it before Bryan). Lingering over the rest of the paper with my cup of strong Irish breakfast tea. It's a firm morning ritual. I am even old enough to remember when there were two local newspapers. For me, that meant reading the Washington Post in the morning and the Evening Star in the late afternoon. Although I have resorted in the past few years to reading the New York Times in addition to the Sun in order to get important national and international news, I can't imagine how I'd learn about the local goings-on in Baltimore except through the newspaper. Now I'm not completely living under a rock. I do check the weather on the internet as well as watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (and sometimes the Colbert Report). But I am never quite satisfied with the method of finding and then reading the news on the internet.

As it looks as though the Sun will be less and less news and more and more ads in the days to come- a mere vestige of its former self--I wonder: What will happen to those marvelous obituaries that Fred Rasmussen and Jacques Kelly write? How will folks that have not come into the computer age--the elderly--find out about funerals? What about the local neighborhood events around food and gardens that Rob Kasper so eloquently and enthusiastically covers? Of course, what about the extended coverage of the Orioles (as painful as it is right now) and the Ravens? These articles bring pleasure and hope to my life. Given the size of Baltimore, I often read about folks I know in the Sun. How will I know their stories?

Well, I guess that I will have to be on-line more in the days to come. But, truth be told, I don't think I'll ever sidle up to a laptop with my cup of tea to read the news. I'll have to find another way. Times change. But the loss of a local newspaper would be the end of an era. It's the way that I know that a community tells out its soul.

Do you still read the local paper? How do you get your news?

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Better Times

Many are saying, "Oh, that we might see better times!"*Lift up the light of your countenance upon us, O Lord. Psalm 4:6

The local news has been rough these days. Not only is our economic news unsettling, our local news in Baltimore and the surrounding region has been downright disturbing. Adding to the urban violence that has become all-too-commonplace, last week the front pages of the Baltimore Sun told the story of two murder-suicides of families by fathers. Today the front page story was about a pastor who murdered a disabled adult for insurance money. You have to wonder what the world is coming to these days. I join with the psalmist and say "Oh, that we might see better times!" I'd also add another psalm verse: "How long, O Lord?"

It is into these times that God's resurrection hope beams once again this spring. Boy, do I need the resurrection this spring! As I look through the lectionary Gospel readings for the next few Sundays in Eastertide, the readings are classic portions of John's Gospel. However, after this Sunday, we move away from the resurrection appearances to the images of Jesus as Good Shepherd, the vine, the exemplar of love. What I need right now are those great scenes of Jesus appearing to the disciples in the flesh. With all the news in our world today, I need to touch and be touched by Jesus.

That's why I give thanks for the Eastertide activity that always takes place at Memorial in the spring. While most clergy and church staff feel as though summer should arrive just after Easter only to find at least 6 weeks of busy program yet to come, the time of blessings, baptisms, garden dedications and musical production at Memorial is just what I need. We need opportunities to come together in joyous thanks and celebration for the life that we have. Last night at Opening Night of the Sound of Music was a perfect example.

Last night the house was full. We saw Maria leave the convent and begin her time as governess of the Von Trapps. Yet, just as the thunderstorm brought all the children to Maria's bed, a cry went up from the audience. "House Lights!" One of the cast members' grandfather was ill. Immediately fron the audience, a doctor, a medical student and an EMT ministered to this man. An ambulance was called. The man was transported to the hosptial in good hands. But what happened in those moments while we waited and then after the medical crew left was a resurrection appearance. What happened was this...as we waited, we prayed. As the crew transported the man to the waiting ambulance, we sang Amazing Grace. Children in the cast (there are at least 30) came out to hug their parents. Then, the show went on. The Goatherd scene with all the children dressed and acting as puppets brought smiles to the crowd. Cheers ensued. All was well. An amazing moment in community.

Here's what I felt in that moment of community....when hard things happen to us and those we love and know when we are in community, it feels different from reading about those events in a newspaper, television or the internet. In Memorial Church last night, the community held the love and fear, the joy and sorrow all together. We could hold hands and pray together as teenagers backstage worried about their friend and her grandfather. We could comfort the wife of the ill man at the door as she waited for the ambulance. We could sing the song we all know about overcoming adversity and hardship and pain. We could say God is there and touch one another in assurance that Christ is among us. We could sing and laugh again even in the midst of the fragility of human life. He is risen. It makes all the difference in the world. Alleluia!

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The St John's Bible

As I watched, thrones were set in place, and an Ancient One took his throne, his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne of fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. Daniel 7:9

I have to go back! This morning, the Wednesday morning Bible Study class went on a field trip to the Walters Museum. We went to see the St. John's Bible special exhibit. Little did I know that I was about to be completely amazed.

The St. John's Bible is an extraordinary project begun at St. John's College and Abbey in Minnesota. St. John's Abbey is one of the largest Benedictine communities in North America. To honor the millennium, the abbey decided to take on a great project---an illuminated bible for the 21st century. Collaborating with a master calligrapher and artist from Wales, the Abbey has seen to it that the St. John's Bible is on its way to completion by 2010. The purpose of this modern illuminated manuscript is to present the biblical story with an openness that would invite all faiths and people into the conversation.

At the exhibit, the manuscript pages range from the Gospels to the Apocrypha to the Hebrew Scripture of the Old Testament. The image of the Ancient One in Daniel was a figure that called out to the viewer--a figure that was not a figure of judgment but of compassion. Brilliant blues with gold leaf swirled in his robe and hair. Another favorite of our class was the Woman representing Sophia. Her wise, wrinkled face of silver and purple could have been an elderly woman from any part of the world--from a Native American tribe to a woman from the San of Africa. There were images from the Koran, Hebrew Scripture, Hindu text, and the Hubbell telescope woven into the biblical images. To top it off, the St John manuscripts were placed side by side with the Walters world class medieval manuscript collection. The whole exhibit was only three rooms, but I could have stayed all day.

Easter resurrection comes to us through all mediums--through liturgy, community, chance encounters. Today, Jesus came to me through the pens of calligraphers, artists and scribes from the 1200s through today.

The exhibit continues into mid-May at the Walters. It is only $8. By all means, GO...and see if you find God in a new way.