Reflections on Matthew 6:25-33
The Lilies of the Field
May 25, 2008
Church of Our Saviour
We worry too much. This is the flip side of the glory of being a human. We can have compassion, we can strive to imagine an infinite holy being, and even strive to imitate her. We have freedoms unimaginable for those natural wonders portrayed in this beautiful passage- the lily of the field and the birds of the air. And yet we worry.
We who worry are referenced in our Old Testament passage as well- we are the prisoners to whom the Lord says, "Come out." We who worry are the ones who are in darkness, to whom the Lord says, "Show yourselves."
But you might say, “Why shouldn’t we worry?” Given the earthquakes, tornadoes, food shortages, global warming, wars and rumors of wars, traffic congestion, heart congestion, the impending split in the Anglican Union, gasoline prices going through the roof, never having anything to wear, and the cruelty of bad hair days?
Well, according to scripture, we shouldn’t worry because we live in an unending state of grace- we just haven’t noticed it yet. We live unendingly in the great love of God, who as Jesus says, loves us ever so much more than a mother loves her nursing child. And even with the disasters looming, we live in an unimaginably beautiful and vast shelter- the shelter of creation- a shelter than literally could not be more glorious, more perfect for our needs.
In our gorgeous Gospel reading of today, Jesus calls to mind two creatures that don’t have very much in common with human beings.
A bird- a hummingbird, for example- is living in the moment to an extent that we can barely fathom. And living in the present moment makes worry impossible, because you have no thought of what is to come. Only, as the Buddhists would have it, this perfect present moment. If the hummingbird stops to think about the incredibly fast buzzing of its wings, it will fall. If it stops to consider the flavor of the nectar it is about to drink, its energy might not hold out.
With the lilies of the field, it seems to me we move into a higher level of consciousness. They don’t even move, at least not perceptibly to us. They just absorb the God-given glory of the sun, the minerals in the earth and spin out their exquisite form for us. And yes, they are clothed more incredibly than any designer fashion. But human beings rarely get to that level.
About the only person I can think of who approaches the serenity (or the beauty) of the lilies of the field, is also a person who has probably suffered more loss and hardship than anyone I know.
When I was 8 months pregnant and I had a two year old, I hired the formidable Laotian mountain woman, Fahm Fou Sae Chow, to help me. I was working at home, doing business coaching over the phone, and I needed someone to allow me quiet to work a few hours a day. When she first took stock of my situation, she looked at me with great pity.
“Just YOU??" she said. " Where is your mother? Your sisters? Your aunties? You are the only woman in your house??” She obliged me by cheerfully, and certainly without worry, by doing the work and supporting me as a mother, a sister and two aunts would have done.
I was very proud of the fact that I was going to have my baby at home. I knew that Fahm Fou had 8 children and so I asked her if she had them all at home. “No, no, none at home,” she said brightly. I was about to ask her what kind of hospital she went to when she finished the thought:
“In the field- very good in the field- no mess.” I then asked her if she had been alone all those times.
“Oh no!” She said. “Sometimes my husband was with me- sometimes.”
"You had all those babies in the field?” I asked.
“All except for Caen. We found him.”
“What?”
“During the Viet Nam war a man had a 2 year old tied to a porch- an orphan. He had food in a bowl like a dog. We asked for that child and he was happy to give it away. I was just 18 and I live with my parents. When we got married, Caen was our firstborn!”
I got to know my babysitter well. She invited my family over to her house in San Pablo many times, and I have rarely seen people live so well, or so worry-free. She had her grown daughters and a married son living with her and they had planted a large garden. All their bountiful, beautifully cooked meals came from that garden, complemented by chicken and pork that would have seemed like a dream in the holding camp in Thailand where she lived with her 8 children before she managed to come to the states.
After Fahm Fou and her eight children managed to get out of Laos, they were housed in this holding camp for 5 years. Times had been very hard in Laos during and after the war. Fahm Fou lost her husband and everything else she had during the war, and one of Fahm Fou’s sons got a high fever from eating spoiled pig- the remnants of a tiger’s kill in the jungle. His name is Caen, and he never fully recovered, and remains a sunny child at the age of 24.
Fahm Fou, without worry, had born seven children in the fields that the lilies and the birds happily shared with her in her beloved Laos. And, in her unworrisome way she somehow found time to embroider the most exquisite flowery creations for herself and her family to wear- the traditional richly ornamented garments of the Hmung mountain people. She lived with me almost daily for 2 years, and during that time she created her glorious embroidered wonders for everyone in my family. We were all dressed like lilies of the field by the time she got through with us.
Fahm Fou was puzzled about many things in our culture- among them the need for strollers. She often carried my infant daughter in a beautifully embroidered traditional Hmung snuggly she had made. In fact she carried my daughter virtually all the time that I was not nursing her. My daughter inherited some of Fahm Fou’s care freeness- some of her lack of worry, maybe from all that wonderful snuggling- that ever-present warmth. Fahm Fou taught me a lot about being a mother, and a lot about life. And in fact, something about God.
It seems to me that Jesus wants us to be like my infant daughter, enfolded in that warmth, held securely even during the dips and turns and ups and downs in the daily activities of the enfolder. God wants us to have that security, that faith.
But a life lacking in worry is so foreign to our culture that it seems almost necessary to plum other cultures, if not other times, to get a glimpse of it. I’d like to end with a poem by a favorite 13th century mystic of mine, Jelaludden Rumi. This is a poem addressed to we who worry in the voice of God. It’s called “You Worry Too Much.”
Oh soul, you worry too much…
Look at yourself,
what you have become.
You are now a field of sugar canes,
why show that sour face to me?
…You say that I keep you warm inside.
Then why this cold sigh?
You have gone to the roof of heavens
of this world of dust, why do you worry?
Oh soul, you worry too much.
Since you met me,
you have become a master singer,
and are now a skilled wrangler,
you can untangle any knot
of life's little leash
why do you worry?
Your arms are heavy
with treasures of all kinds.
About poverty,
why do you worry?
…Oh soul, you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.
You are the security…
why do you worry?
Be silent, like a fish,
and go into that pleasant sea.
You are in deep waters now,
of life's blazing glory.
Why do you worry?
Amen
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
A Whirlwind Tour of the Trinity
Trinity Sunday May 18, 2008
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
In the name of the Triune God, eternally creating, redeeming and sustaining, Amen.
Well here it is Trinity Sunday, and in churches all over the world preachers are trying to explain the unexplainable. What is this thing called the Trinity, and how can you be three but still be one?
People have explained the Trinity in all kinds of ways. I have heard that the Trinity is simply a symbol of the first and most lastingly divine thing we experience as an infant- the father, the mother and the child. I have read that the Trinity is the first model for the church, in that it is in of itself a sort of wondrous community. Or that in certain church social circles there is so much triangulation that we just naturally worship the Trinity.
But I believe that any exploration into the Trinity has to start with a deep wondering about God the Creator, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Having been out of seminary for 3 years now, I recently had a revelation. Before I went to seminary I was very uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus, but very comfortable with the idea of God. After I enduring 6 years of seminary, I found that I was very comfortable with the idea of Jesus, but uncomfortable with the idea of God.
Before I was educated, I thought of God through the lens of Lakota Sioux spirituality: MITAKUYE OYASIN, which is Sioux for “All My Relations.” In other words, God is truly all-encompassing. All creatures are our relations and are all part of God with us. There really was nowhere that God did not touch, and the where and whyfores of what God did and did not do were a huge mystery. Isaiah later imparted something of this feeling to me speaking the words the words of God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.
Then I read about process theology and I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book ,”Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”
Rabbi Kushner came to a new conclusion about God when his young child died of cancer. He cold not reconcile the God he loved with anyone who would allow such a thing to happen. He described his new philosophy like this:
A 707 crashed into a bridge in Washington DC- that was physics. By when Maury Schmutnick, who had never had a heroic thought in his life, jumped into the river to save a drowning stewardess, that’s God.
These thoughts were bolstered by an incident closer to home, although, thank God, not in my own family. The VERY FIRST 20 minutes of my tenure as a chaplain at SF General hospital was sent to comfort a couple whose 3 year old had run out into the street and gotten struck by a car. She was on life support, and the parents were trying to decide whether or not to disconnect her live-saving systems. After a long and agonized struggle, they had to come to the horrific realization that she could not be saved. I as so undone by this tragedy that I had a memorial service just for the chaplains and nurses and myself. The grieving couple, thank God, had their own church community. But I preached a sermon for that little girl in my homiletics class and I kept her picture by my home altar to pray for her and her parents. You are not supposed to these things as a hospital chaplain.
But as time went on, I realized that Rabbi Kuschner’s idea of God was too easy an answer. I felt it was wrong to put God in a box, that God in fact was the very definition of “Out of the Box.” A phrase I heard somewhere kept coming back to me: “Do you praise God only when the hurricanes do not blow?”
Or do you embrace and say yes to creation in all its wildness? Is that not at least one definition of faith? Around this time one of my greatest influences was a kind of a renegade priest who was at the time serving (for free) as vicar of St. Cuthbert’s in Oakland. He was known as a kind of an “out of the box” thinker. This was right after the great tragedy of the Tsunami title waves in Indonesia, and I posed this question to him:
“How do you reconcile the reality of that scale of devastation with the idea of a loving God?” He said, “God gives the plates of the earth’s crust the freedom to be plates of the earth’s crust. They then do what plates of the earth’s crust do.” He challenged me to imagine a world in which creation did not have this freedom. We would have an utterly ordered world with no death, never any chaos, no wildness- no wilderness.”
In the book of Job God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. He speaks of the glories of creation; the unfathomable complexity and power of that God-made creation, and man’s arrogance in thinking he can comprehend or control it.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
God speaks of the great power of the Leviathan, the sea monster whose creation is noted in our beautiful Genesis reading of today.
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it make a covenant to be your servant forever?
These wonders are a mystery I don’t want to mess with; the great and truly unfathomable whirlwind that is the glory of God.
If we look at the second member of the Trinity, Jesus, the Son, we have a being who seemed to understand this great glorious mystery in a way that encompassed the Jewish awe of its majesty, while also seeing God in an intimate and loving way. Jesus called God “Abba” which in Hebrew means not Father, but “Daddy.”
Jesus had this trusting, intimate relationship with God, but still understood the power and the mystery. As he knelt in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, dreading the way his life was apparently going to end, he prayed that the cup be taken from his lips. But, he said, not mine, but your will be done. We may not even be able to comprehend the love of God the awesome creator, but we know the Son so well that we can and do understand the love of Jesus of Nazareth through the myriad stories of his healing, forging and ultimately redeeming love.
I believe that part of the reason we have been given that glorious reading of Genesis today is that it contains the very first mention in the bible of the Holy Spirit. The “Ruach Elohim”- the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit that swept over the face of the waters. The Holy Spirit, I believe continues to sweep over the face of the waters, and over the face of everything else too. The Holy Spirit, I believe is working all the time. I often note that when things go well for us, we say, “Boy, the Holy Spirit was really working there!” As opposed to all the other times when the Holy Spirit finds itself unemployed! And our gospel reading of today is the only time the Trinity is specifically mentioned. It is mentioned in the context of the Great Commission- commissioning us all to go forth and spread the news of this unexplainable, mysterious, all-encompassing triune love.
We need the wilderness, we need wildness, but the majesty and the glory and the fearful mystery of God is too much for us. I guess that’s why we need the Trinity.
If we truly have a have a triune God, if we have a true Trinity, then we have all the vastness and wildness and unpredictability of God the Creator. But we also, in the same being, have the human compassion, forgiveness and redeeming love of Jesus. And we have the great power and mystery of the Holy Spirit, which can and does cause both the great and wild mystery of God and the human love of Jesus to flow through us like a great river.
Paul ends his Letter to those tempestuous Corinthians with the following beautiful blessing:
The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Whatever happens, whenever the hurricanes blow, still and always we exist in the love of God. That love is unending, that Father will never leave us, that spirit is within us whatever happens, and that son will always grace us with forgiveness.
At a retreat recently we said the following prayer, which, I felt, protected us with the power of the triune God:
Throughout this day, enliven our minds
inspire our conversation, inform our decisions,
and protect those we love.
And should today bring what we neither anticipate or desire,
increase our faith and decrease our pride
until we know that when we face the unexpected,
we do not stand alone.
Amen.
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
In the name of the Triune God, eternally creating, redeeming and sustaining, Amen.
Well here it is Trinity Sunday, and in churches all over the world preachers are trying to explain the unexplainable. What is this thing called the Trinity, and how can you be three but still be one?
People have explained the Trinity in all kinds of ways. I have heard that the Trinity is simply a symbol of the first and most lastingly divine thing we experience as an infant- the father, the mother and the child. I have read that the Trinity is the first model for the church, in that it is in of itself a sort of wondrous community. Or that in certain church social circles there is so much triangulation that we just naturally worship the Trinity.
But I believe that any exploration into the Trinity has to start with a deep wondering about God the Creator, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Having been out of seminary for 3 years now, I recently had a revelation. Before I went to seminary I was very uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus, but very comfortable with the idea of God. After I enduring 6 years of seminary, I found that I was very comfortable with the idea of Jesus, but uncomfortable with the idea of God.
Before I was educated, I thought of God through the lens of Lakota Sioux spirituality: MITAKUYE OYASIN, which is Sioux for “All My Relations.” In other words, God is truly all-encompassing. All creatures are our relations and are all part of God with us. There really was nowhere that God did not touch, and the where and whyfores of what God did and did not do were a huge mystery. Isaiah later imparted something of this feeling to me speaking the words the words of God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.
Then I read about process theology and I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book ,”Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”
Rabbi Kushner came to a new conclusion about God when his young child died of cancer. He cold not reconcile the God he loved with anyone who would allow such a thing to happen. He described his new philosophy like this:
A 707 crashed into a bridge in Washington DC- that was physics. By when Maury Schmutnick, who had never had a heroic thought in his life, jumped into the river to save a drowning stewardess, that’s God.
These thoughts were bolstered by an incident closer to home, although, thank God, not in my own family. The VERY FIRST 20 minutes of my tenure as a chaplain at SF General hospital was sent to comfort a couple whose 3 year old had run out into the street and gotten struck by a car. She was on life support, and the parents were trying to decide whether or not to disconnect her live-saving systems. After a long and agonized struggle, they had to come to the horrific realization that she could not be saved. I as so undone by this tragedy that I had a memorial service just for the chaplains and nurses and myself. The grieving couple, thank God, had their own church community. But I preached a sermon for that little girl in my homiletics class and I kept her picture by my home altar to pray for her and her parents. You are not supposed to these things as a hospital chaplain.
But as time went on, I realized that Rabbi Kuschner’s idea of God was too easy an answer. I felt it was wrong to put God in a box, that God in fact was the very definition of “Out of the Box.” A phrase I heard somewhere kept coming back to me: “Do you praise God only when the hurricanes do not blow?”
Or do you embrace and say yes to creation in all its wildness? Is that not at least one definition of faith? Around this time one of my greatest influences was a kind of a renegade priest who was at the time serving (for free) as vicar of St. Cuthbert’s in Oakland. He was known as a kind of an “out of the box” thinker. This was right after the great tragedy of the Tsunami title waves in Indonesia, and I posed this question to him:
“How do you reconcile the reality of that scale of devastation with the idea of a loving God?” He said, “God gives the plates of the earth’s crust the freedom to be plates of the earth’s crust. They then do what plates of the earth’s crust do.” He challenged me to imagine a world in which creation did not have this freedom. We would have an utterly ordered world with no death, never any chaos, no wildness- no wilderness.”
In the book of Job God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. He speaks of the glories of creation; the unfathomable complexity and power of that God-made creation, and man’s arrogance in thinking he can comprehend or control it.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
God speaks of the great power of the Leviathan, the sea monster whose creation is noted in our beautiful Genesis reading of today.
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it make a covenant to be your servant forever?
These wonders are a mystery I don’t want to mess with; the great and truly unfathomable whirlwind that is the glory of God.
If we look at the second member of the Trinity, Jesus, the Son, we have a being who seemed to understand this great glorious mystery in a way that encompassed the Jewish awe of its majesty, while also seeing God in an intimate and loving way. Jesus called God “Abba” which in Hebrew means not Father, but “Daddy.”
Jesus had this trusting, intimate relationship with God, but still understood the power and the mystery. As he knelt in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, dreading the way his life was apparently going to end, he prayed that the cup be taken from his lips. But, he said, not mine, but your will be done. We may not even be able to comprehend the love of God the awesome creator, but we know the Son so well that we can and do understand the love of Jesus of Nazareth through the myriad stories of his healing, forging and ultimately redeeming love.
I believe that part of the reason we have been given that glorious reading of Genesis today is that it contains the very first mention in the bible of the Holy Spirit. The “Ruach Elohim”- the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit that swept over the face of the waters. The Holy Spirit, I believe continues to sweep over the face of the waters, and over the face of everything else too. The Holy Spirit, I believe is working all the time. I often note that when things go well for us, we say, “Boy, the Holy Spirit was really working there!” As opposed to all the other times when the Holy Spirit finds itself unemployed! And our gospel reading of today is the only time the Trinity is specifically mentioned. It is mentioned in the context of the Great Commission- commissioning us all to go forth and spread the news of this unexplainable, mysterious, all-encompassing triune love.
We need the wilderness, we need wildness, but the majesty and the glory and the fearful mystery of God is too much for us. I guess that’s why we need the Trinity.
If we truly have a have a triune God, if we have a true Trinity, then we have all the vastness and wildness and unpredictability of God the Creator. But we also, in the same being, have the human compassion, forgiveness and redeeming love of Jesus. And we have the great power and mystery of the Holy Spirit, which can and does cause both the great and wild mystery of God and the human love of Jesus to flow through us like a great river.
Paul ends his Letter to those tempestuous Corinthians with the following beautiful blessing:
The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Whatever happens, whenever the hurricanes blow, still and always we exist in the love of God. That love is unending, that Father will never leave us, that spirit is within us whatever happens, and that son will always grace us with forgiveness.
At a retreat recently we said the following prayer, which, I felt, protected us with the power of the triune God:
Throughout this day, enliven our minds
inspire our conversation, inform our decisions,
and protect those we love.
And should today bring what we neither anticipate or desire,
increase our faith and decrease our pride
until we know that when we face the unexpected,
we do not stand alone.
Amen.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Mother's Day
Well I have been thinking of the fate of my people. My people being middle-aged women who are mothers in this high speed, perfectionistic, media-driven cyberborg society. In my mother’s generation the mothers for the most part DID NOT work outside the home, so their houses were looked after by them, the children pretty much looked after by them, and no one expected them to have fresh ground coffee beans, fresh store-boughten flowers, or children who would got a 4.8 grade point average. AND they either had servants if they were well off (THEIR mothers might have had SLAVES if they were well off) OR if they were not well off, they would have extended family- THEIR mothers, sisters, sisters-in-laws, etc.
I had a Laotian babysitter for my youngest child. She looked after my infant while I did a coaching job on the phone. She could not believe that I did not live with my mother, my sister, my aunt. With great pity in her voice she asked me, “Just YOU?? You are the only woman in your house??” She obliged me by doing the work and supporting me as a mother, a sister and two aunts would have done.
I was 8 months pregnant and I had a two year old when I took her on. I was so proud of myself that I was going to have my baby at home. I knew that she had 8 children and so I asked her if she had them all at home. “No, no, none at home,” she said to my great surprise. I was about to ask her what kind of hospital she went to when she finished the thought:
“In the field- very good in the field- no mess.” I then asked her if she had been alone all those times.
“Oh no!” She said. “Sometimes my husband was with me.”
"You had all those babies in the field?” I asked.
“All except for Caen. We found him.”
“What?”
“During Viet Nam war a man had 2 year old tied to a porch. He had food in a bowl like a dog. We took that child. I was just 18 and I live with my parents. My boyfriend too. So sometimes I had Caen with me at my parent’s house, sometimes my boyfriend. When we got married, Caen was our firstborn!”
I got to know my babysitter well. Her name is Fahm Foo. She invited my family over to her house in San Pablo many times, and I have rarely seen people live so well. She had her grown daughters and a married son living with her and they had planted a large garden. All their bountiful, beautifully cooked meals came from the garden, complemented by chicken and pork that would have seemed like a dream in the concentration camp in Thailand where she lived with her 8 children before she managed to come to the states. I saw her beautiful garden and was particularly struck with the large purple poppies.
“We lived from them in Laos,” she said.
“You sold flowers?”
“No- opium, but no more!” she said.
“Opium! You must have made lots of money!”
“Oh yes! Enough for food AND clothes!” she enthused.
I managed to raise my 2 daughters without the help of opium sales, but with the help of my husband and our village-like neighborhood, but now it is college time for the oldest one. It’s just like being required to buy a house for each child as they leave home. And the prep! I remember that the night before my SAT exam I went out to a party, inhaled and woke up very groggy, but managed to get to the test on time. I exhaled sharply at the difficulty of one test question, and I saw smoke come out.
No one suggested that I study for this thing- no one I knew did. And the only college councelling I got was one sentence from my older brother's stoned girlfriend: “Hey, man, the College of Marin is a really groovy school!”
“OK. I said. I’ll go there.” But I never got around to it. In San Francisco in 1968 there were so many other things to do.
I had a Laotian babysitter for my youngest child. She looked after my infant while I did a coaching job on the phone. She could not believe that I did not live with my mother, my sister, my aunt. With great pity in her voice she asked me, “Just YOU?? You are the only woman in your house??” She obliged me by doing the work and supporting me as a mother, a sister and two aunts would have done.
I was 8 months pregnant and I had a two year old when I took her on. I was so proud of myself that I was going to have my baby at home. I knew that she had 8 children and so I asked her if she had them all at home. “No, no, none at home,” she said to my great surprise. I was about to ask her what kind of hospital she went to when she finished the thought:
“In the field- very good in the field- no mess.” I then asked her if she had been alone all those times.
“Oh no!” She said. “Sometimes my husband was with me.”
"You had all those babies in the field?” I asked.
“All except for Caen. We found him.”
“What?”
“During Viet Nam war a man had 2 year old tied to a porch. He had food in a bowl like a dog. We took that child. I was just 18 and I live with my parents. My boyfriend too. So sometimes I had Caen with me at my parent’s house, sometimes my boyfriend. When we got married, Caen was our firstborn!”
I got to know my babysitter well. Her name is Fahm Foo. She invited my family over to her house in San Pablo many times, and I have rarely seen people live so well. She had her grown daughters and a married son living with her and they had planted a large garden. All their bountiful, beautifully cooked meals came from the garden, complemented by chicken and pork that would have seemed like a dream in the concentration camp in Thailand where she lived with her 8 children before she managed to come to the states. I saw her beautiful garden and was particularly struck with the large purple poppies.
“We lived from them in Laos,” she said.
“You sold flowers?”
“No- opium, but no more!” she said.
“Opium! You must have made lots of money!”
“Oh yes! Enough for food AND clothes!” she enthused.
I managed to raise my 2 daughters without the help of opium sales, but with the help of my husband and our village-like neighborhood, but now it is college time for the oldest one. It’s just like being required to buy a house for each child as they leave home. And the prep! I remember that the night before my SAT exam I went out to a party, inhaled and woke up very groggy, but managed to get to the test on time. I exhaled sharply at the difficulty of one test question, and I saw smoke come out.
No one suggested that I study for this thing- no one I knew did. And the only college councelling I got was one sentence from my older brother's stoned girlfriend: “Hey, man, the College of Marin is a really groovy school!”
“OK. I said. I’ll go there.” But I never got around to it. In San Francisco in 1968 there were so many other things to do.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Washed in the Blood of Betty, and The Flight of the Ladybug
Sermon for Easter Day, March 23, 2008
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
Every Easter is like the first day of the rest of your life- the best Easter you have ever had. But I am going to tell you the story of an Easter of mine which, like the Easter story itself, was a scary story with a happy ending.
I was supposed to deliver a children’s sermon that Easter, and the day before, as often happens, I didn’t have any good ideas. So I started to make lunch. I sliced a cabbage open in preparation for making coleslaw, and there, in the very center, miraculously unharmed but unmoving, was a tiny ladybug.
Now that ladybug had been in that cabbage in the refrigerator for three days. But of course it was springtime, being Easter, and the window was open. A ray of sunlight shone on that cabbage, and that ladybug began to move and breath (I guess) and she spread her wings.
And since the window was open, she ascended into heaven.
Now that was the homily I was going to tell, but something happened on that Easter morning that prevented me from telling it. It was Easter Sunday and the church was packed, and a favorite senior of mine, very full of years, was sitting right up front. For reasons unclear to me still, she approached the altar, tripped and fell, glancing her head on the communion rail. And there, on Easter Sunday, directly in front of the cross, in the middle of the church, she lay bleeding from a head wound. I always sat up front, so I was the first to get to her and I held my hand over the wound (which was really bleeding) and tried to calm her.
The priest’s husband is a doctor, and so the priest started shouting, "Jonathan! Jonathan!" Jonathan was downstairs with one of his kids, and the longest five minutes of my life began to tick by. Someone called 911 on their cell phone, and then no one knew what to do, so we did what Episcopalians always do when they don’t know what to do: we started singing. We sang the Taize standard “Stay with Me,” swaying and holding hands and praying. Jonathan finally appeared and told me to run to the kitchen to get some ice, which I did. My hand was literally full of blood, so I first went to the sink to wash it. As I did I thought, “Here it is Easter morning and I’ve been washed in the blood of Betty!”
I came back and Betty was already feeling a little better. Then, like a flock of rescuing angels, the emergency workers surged down the aisle of the church and took care of Betty. They bandaged her, comforted her, and supported her as they all walked back down the aisle. Betty smiled and waved a queen as everyone applauded.
I later thought of the whole thing as an Easter allegory; when we fall down, even if we are wounded, with a little help from our friends and a lot from the Holy Spirit, we can arise. And maybe, like the ladybug, even find our wings and fly.
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
Every Easter is like the first day of the rest of your life- the best Easter you have ever had. But I am going to tell you the story of an Easter of mine which, like the Easter story itself, was a scary story with a happy ending.
I was supposed to deliver a children’s sermon that Easter, and the day before, as often happens, I didn’t have any good ideas. So I started to make lunch. I sliced a cabbage open in preparation for making coleslaw, and there, in the very center, miraculously unharmed but unmoving, was a tiny ladybug.
Now that ladybug had been in that cabbage in the refrigerator for three days. But of course it was springtime, being Easter, and the window was open. A ray of sunlight shone on that cabbage, and that ladybug began to move and breath (I guess) and she spread her wings.
And since the window was open, she ascended into heaven.
Now that was the homily I was going to tell, but something happened on that Easter morning that prevented me from telling it. It was Easter Sunday and the church was packed, and a favorite senior of mine, very full of years, was sitting right up front. For reasons unclear to me still, she approached the altar, tripped and fell, glancing her head on the communion rail. And there, on Easter Sunday, directly in front of the cross, in the middle of the church, she lay bleeding from a head wound. I always sat up front, so I was the first to get to her and I held my hand over the wound (which was really bleeding) and tried to calm her.
The priest’s husband is a doctor, and so the priest started shouting, "Jonathan! Jonathan!" Jonathan was downstairs with one of his kids, and the longest five minutes of my life began to tick by. Someone called 911 on their cell phone, and then no one knew what to do, so we did what Episcopalians always do when they don’t know what to do: we started singing. We sang the Taize standard “Stay with Me,” swaying and holding hands and praying. Jonathan finally appeared and told me to run to the kitchen to get some ice, which I did. My hand was literally full of blood, so I first went to the sink to wash it. As I did I thought, “Here it is Easter morning and I’ve been washed in the blood of Betty!”
I came back and Betty was already feeling a little better. Then, like a flock of rescuing angels, the emergency workers surged down the aisle of the church and took care of Betty. They bandaged her, comforted her, and supported her as they all walked back down the aisle. Betty smiled and waved a queen as everyone applauded.
I later thought of the whole thing as an Easter allegory; when we fall down, even if we are wounded, with a little help from our friends and a lot from the Holy Spirit, we can arise. And maybe, like the ladybug, even find our wings and fly.
The Passion of Joan
Sermon for Good Friday
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
It was my mother who taught me about Good Friday. She was well acquainted with the story, being the daughter of a preacher. She told me that at 12:00 noon on the first Good Friday, the sky grew dark, and that Jesus hung on the cross for three hours until he died in that darkness. I remember blinking out at the bright Maryland Springtime, wondering how the sky could ever turn black at mid-day. But there did come a time for me when the sky turned black in the middle of the day, and that was the day my mother died. There were lots of stations of her cross, but I was absent for most of them.
The first station would have been the accident, when she was struck by an out of control vehicle after her busy day of work as an executive secretary in Washington D.C. The first station was rendered almost immediately into scripture:
A reading from the Washington Post, Friday, Oct 25, 1974:
A Washington woman was injured yesterday when she was struck by a metro-bus as she was crossing Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th Street North West, Metropolitan police said. The woman was identified as Joan R. Gardner of 520 “N” St. NW, an employee of the Association of Registered Bank Holding Companies. She was taken to Washington Hospital Center where her condition was listed as critical.
Here ends the reading.
Everybody else got out of the way, but she apparently didn’t turn her head to see an on-coming bus. I always wondered: was she so lost in thought that she couldn’t turn her head and look up, even to save her life? Or did she make a sudden dash for eternity for reasons eternally known only to herself?
Station two would have been the arrival of the ambulance, and the rescue workers. They had difficulty identifying her until someone found her purse, which had been thrown some distance away.
Station three was the waiting room where I sat with my dry-eyed siblings and my mother’s best friend who wept non-stop. I hugged her, feeling guilty about my own dry-eyed state. I was however, comforted by my brother when the doctor told me my mother would have no cognitive functions left.
Station four was the hallway where my father and I walked, meaning to see my mother in the ICU. Just outside of the room, at station five, a well-meaning nurse, playing the part of Simon of Cyrene, wrong-headedly offered to carry the cross for me. She had just seen my mother and she said, “Her blood pressure is dropping and her condition is not compatible with life.” I let her carry that cross and I fled, ever after wishing I had stayed and been with my mother at the last station as she died. Instead I have only my brother’s description of my mother’s beautiful face. She was all swathed with white bandages from her head to her toe, he said. So all he could see was white with the exception of her very blue eyes, which were open but unseeing. I have had a recurring dream ever since that she died peacefully in my arms, instead of all alone surrounded by doctors and machines.
I did make it to one more station of the cross for my mother, the station of ashes. No one else in my family wanted my mother’s ashes or knew what to do with them, so I brought them with me in my suitcase to California. I decided to scatter them in the San Francisco Bay, since I knew how much she loved it. I opened the container of ashes in the bright sunlight and I looked in. I saw a glaring bright whiteness- brighter than anything on earth could have bleached them. As devastated as I was I couldn’t help but see how beautiful they were. They looked like the ornaments of any sun-bleached shore- tiny fragments of seashells and delicate shards of the bones of fish and birds nestled in white sand. My mother had been transfigured, had been glorified, had somehow entered into the arms of all creation.
Even with that glimpse of glorification, of resurrection, I spend the next several decades in the tomb. I dwelt with death and with regret at my missed opportunity to be with my mother when she died for a very long time.
Several years ago I heard a wonderful sermon by Bishop William Swing the bishop who ordained me. He talked, among other things about death. He said everyone seems to have something like a little bag of death inside of them, pulled closed with fragile threads of string. He spoke of the death of someone he loved and how the sound of earth thrown on the lid of the coffin loosened those strings for him and let death slowly leak out. The sight of my mother’s ashes, and the memory of them, beautiful as they were, seemed to loosen those strings for me as well.
Then, shortly after I heard that sermon, I learned there was one station more for me to witness. I was asked to preside at the 7:00 AM Ash Wednesday service, which is something I had never done before. A kindly altar guild member warned me about opening the container of ashes too quickly. Be careful, she said. The nice silver container sticks and if you just pull it open, the ashes will fly out all over the altar and all over your face and the mood will be altered in a way that might sort of ruin the effect.
So at 6:30 AM, half awake but conscientiously trying to prepare, I decided to practice opening the container. Just before I did I remembered that container of my mother’s ashes. I wondered in the dim light of the chapel if I would re-experience my mother’s death- if the fragile strings of that little internal bag of death would loosen again. I slowly and carefully opened the container of ashes and was thunderstruck. What was in the container were not the ashes of death but the bread of life. I had switched the two silver containers and was now looking down at the communion wafers I was about to serve to the faithful.
I have had other experiences of resurrection in my life, but never so instant, so head-jerkingly sudden, so mocking of my tragic expectations. Rooted to the spot, I continued to stare into the silver container. I suddenly realized that this instant transformation had taken 32 years. Seeing that bread of life made real for me the answer my best friend had given me when I asked her why my mother had to die. “Este,” she said with great certainty and even joy, “Your mother is not dead.”
As I often have, I felt the presence of my mother there with me in the chapel on that Ash Wednesday morning. And I realized that although I had not been there at the foot of the cross, I was somehow there at the resurrection.
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
It was my mother who taught me about Good Friday. She was well acquainted with the story, being the daughter of a preacher. She told me that at 12:00 noon on the first Good Friday, the sky grew dark, and that Jesus hung on the cross for three hours until he died in that darkness. I remember blinking out at the bright Maryland Springtime, wondering how the sky could ever turn black at mid-day. But there did come a time for me when the sky turned black in the middle of the day, and that was the day my mother died. There were lots of stations of her cross, but I was absent for most of them.
The first station would have been the accident, when she was struck by an out of control vehicle after her busy day of work as an executive secretary in Washington D.C. The first station was rendered almost immediately into scripture:
A reading from the Washington Post, Friday, Oct 25, 1974:
A Washington woman was injured yesterday when she was struck by a metro-bus as she was crossing Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th Street North West, Metropolitan police said. The woman was identified as Joan R. Gardner of 520 “N” St. NW, an employee of the Association of Registered Bank Holding Companies. She was taken to Washington Hospital Center where her condition was listed as critical.
Here ends the reading.
Everybody else got out of the way, but she apparently didn’t turn her head to see an on-coming bus. I always wondered: was she so lost in thought that she couldn’t turn her head and look up, even to save her life? Or did she make a sudden dash for eternity for reasons eternally known only to herself?
Station two would have been the arrival of the ambulance, and the rescue workers. They had difficulty identifying her until someone found her purse, which had been thrown some distance away.
Station three was the waiting room where I sat with my dry-eyed siblings and my mother’s best friend who wept non-stop. I hugged her, feeling guilty about my own dry-eyed state. I was however, comforted by my brother when the doctor told me my mother would have no cognitive functions left.
Station four was the hallway where my father and I walked, meaning to see my mother in the ICU. Just outside of the room, at station five, a well-meaning nurse, playing the part of Simon of Cyrene, wrong-headedly offered to carry the cross for me. She had just seen my mother and she said, “Her blood pressure is dropping and her condition is not compatible with life.” I let her carry that cross and I fled, ever after wishing I had stayed and been with my mother at the last station as she died. Instead I have only my brother’s description of my mother’s beautiful face. She was all swathed with white bandages from her head to her toe, he said. So all he could see was white with the exception of her very blue eyes, which were open but unseeing. I have had a recurring dream ever since that she died peacefully in my arms, instead of all alone surrounded by doctors and machines.
I did make it to one more station of the cross for my mother, the station of ashes. No one else in my family wanted my mother’s ashes or knew what to do with them, so I brought them with me in my suitcase to California. I decided to scatter them in the San Francisco Bay, since I knew how much she loved it. I opened the container of ashes in the bright sunlight and I looked in. I saw a glaring bright whiteness- brighter than anything on earth could have bleached them. As devastated as I was I couldn’t help but see how beautiful they were. They looked like the ornaments of any sun-bleached shore- tiny fragments of seashells and delicate shards of the bones of fish and birds nestled in white sand. My mother had been transfigured, had been glorified, had somehow entered into the arms of all creation.
Even with that glimpse of glorification, of resurrection, I spend the next several decades in the tomb. I dwelt with death and with regret at my missed opportunity to be with my mother when she died for a very long time.
Several years ago I heard a wonderful sermon by Bishop William Swing the bishop who ordained me. He talked, among other things about death. He said everyone seems to have something like a little bag of death inside of them, pulled closed with fragile threads of string. He spoke of the death of someone he loved and how the sound of earth thrown on the lid of the coffin loosened those strings for him and let death slowly leak out. The sight of my mother’s ashes, and the memory of them, beautiful as they were, seemed to loosen those strings for me as well.
Then, shortly after I heard that sermon, I learned there was one station more for me to witness. I was asked to preside at the 7:00 AM Ash Wednesday service, which is something I had never done before. A kindly altar guild member warned me about opening the container of ashes too quickly. Be careful, she said. The nice silver container sticks and if you just pull it open, the ashes will fly out all over the altar and all over your face and the mood will be altered in a way that might sort of ruin the effect.
So at 6:30 AM, half awake but conscientiously trying to prepare, I decided to practice opening the container. Just before I did I remembered that container of my mother’s ashes. I wondered in the dim light of the chapel if I would re-experience my mother’s death- if the fragile strings of that little internal bag of death would loosen again. I slowly and carefully opened the container of ashes and was thunderstruck. What was in the container were not the ashes of death but the bread of life. I had switched the two silver containers and was now looking down at the communion wafers I was about to serve to the faithful.
I have had other experiences of resurrection in my life, but never so instant, so head-jerkingly sudden, so mocking of my tragic expectations. Rooted to the spot, I continued to stare into the silver container. I suddenly realized that this instant transformation had taken 32 years. Seeing that bread of life made real for me the answer my best friend had given me when I asked her why my mother had to die. “Este,” she said with great certainty and even joy, “Your mother is not dead.”
As I often have, I felt the presence of my mother there with me in the chapel on that Ash Wednesday morning. And I realized that although I had not been there at the foot of the cross, I was somehow there at the resurrection.
Friday, March 21, 2008
The Valley of Dry Bones and the DMV
Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Church of Our Saviour Mill Valley
Easter Vigil Reflection, March 22, 2008
Just this past week I found myself wandering in my own version of the Valley of the Dry Bones. In this valley, with was actually a long and slow-moving line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, an Old Testament miracle began to unfold. Suddenly the dry bones in front of me began to quicken and move and all at one I surged forward and found myself in the Promised Land- right at the front counter. I smiled into the face of a very beautiful and very large woman with an enormous tattoo on her left bicep. She smiled back and bent to her work, preparing the form I was to fill out. As she did I tried to discreetly read the tattoo, but her sleeve was partly in the way. It said something about “My Girl” in a beautiful and flowery script, and then underneath it read “1952 to 2004.”
“It looks like you lost someone,” I said to her.
“Yes, I lost my mama. I got this tattoo to remember her by. She was just skin and bones when I decided to have it done, and you won’t believe this, but she said she wanted one too. When my niece went to get one last year she about had a fit, but here she was coming with me. So we went into the tattoo parlor and she said, 'I’ll go first in case it hurts.' And she got a tattoo about me.
After she died I always used to hug this tattoo (she wrapped her arms around herself, her hand cupping the tattoo) when I missed her. I still do.”
Misty (that was her name) had experienced the valley of dry bones. Those bones had told her there was no hope. Those bones had made her feel that she was cut off completely. But Misty had transformed those dry bones. She prophesied on her own skin in indelible prose and she breathed spirit into those bones. She had created something that had not only sinew but gloriously abundant flesh. And not only skin that amply covered those bones, but images of fruits and roses in juicy abundance. She created a garden out of desolation. Misty breathed life and spirit into into those dry bones and they lived. .
It is not likely that Misty was familiar with the poet Rumi, but her story and the story of the valley of the dry bones made me think of a poem of his:
Inside each of us there is continual autumn.
Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. A crow sits on the blackened limbs and talks about what is gone.
Then generosity returns: spring, moisture, intelligence, the scent of hyacinth and rose….
There’s a necessary dying and then Jesus is breathes
Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years. Try something different. Try surrender.
Amen.
Church of Our Saviour Mill Valley
Easter Vigil Reflection, March 22, 2008
Just this past week I found myself wandering in my own version of the Valley of the Dry Bones. In this valley, with was actually a long and slow-moving line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, an Old Testament miracle began to unfold. Suddenly the dry bones in front of me began to quicken and move and all at one I surged forward and found myself in the Promised Land- right at the front counter. I smiled into the face of a very beautiful and very large woman with an enormous tattoo on her left bicep. She smiled back and bent to her work, preparing the form I was to fill out. As she did I tried to discreetly read the tattoo, but her sleeve was partly in the way. It said something about “My Girl” in a beautiful and flowery script, and then underneath it read “1952 to 2004.”
“It looks like you lost someone,” I said to her.
“Yes, I lost my mama. I got this tattoo to remember her by. She was just skin and bones when I decided to have it done, and you won’t believe this, but she said she wanted one too. When my niece went to get one last year she about had a fit, but here she was coming with me. So we went into the tattoo parlor and she said, 'I’ll go first in case it hurts.' And she got a tattoo about me.
After she died I always used to hug this tattoo (she wrapped her arms around herself, her hand cupping the tattoo) when I missed her. I still do.”
Misty (that was her name) had experienced the valley of dry bones. Those bones had told her there was no hope. Those bones had made her feel that she was cut off completely. But Misty had transformed those dry bones. She prophesied on her own skin in indelible prose and she breathed spirit into those bones. She had created something that had not only sinew but gloriously abundant flesh. And not only skin that amply covered those bones, but images of fruits and roses in juicy abundance. She created a garden out of desolation. Misty breathed life and spirit into into those dry bones and they lived. .
It is not likely that Misty was familiar with the poet Rumi, but her story and the story of the valley of the dry bones made me think of a poem of his:
Inside each of us there is continual autumn.
Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. A crow sits on the blackened limbs and talks about what is gone.
Then generosity returns: spring, moisture, intelligence, the scent of hyacinth and rose….
There’s a necessary dying and then Jesus is breathes
Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years. Try something different. Try surrender.
Amen.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Palm Sunday and The Sweet Strains of the Spiritual...
Palm Sunday, March 16, 2005
Church of Our Saviour
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
I heard someone recently describing the sound of a spiritual. It is a triumphant sound and a mournful one at the same time. Perhaps that heart-wrenching sound developed because those spirituals came from a population so steeped in pain that it had to aspire to the possibility of grace along with the suffering. Like the possibility of a joyful triumphant entry into a city, followed by an unimaginable loss.
Palm Sunday as we celebrate it today is a mixed up sort of liturgy, which contains thrilling heights and a devastating depth. We inherited a service that encompasses both the story of the passion of Christ and the story of the triumphant entry into Jerusalem.
Before the ancient rites were rediscovered, there was no Holy Week, and the week before Easter was the logical time to delve deeply into the experience of Christ’s passion- that series of events that led to his crucifixion, beginning with the garden of Gethsemane and ending with the sealing of Jesus’ tomb.
But sometime in the late 4th century, a female pilgrim named Egeria took a remarkable pilgrimage and left us a detailed account of what the ancient Holy Week observance was like in Jerusalem.
We have all been experiencing our pilgrimage through Lent, hitting our high points and stumbling into our low points. We have all been journeying toward Jerusalem; so let me tell you a little bit about the pilgrimage of Egeria.
Lucky for us, Egeria recorded her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and also lucky for us, she was a keen observer and fastidious recorder of her remarkable surroundings on this trip to the Holy Land. She was clearly learned and is thought to have been a nun or an Abbess from Northern Spain.
In the first part of her journal she describes the sites of biblical events, where people apparently were certain they took place: The very brook where Moses was found, the exact place where the golden calf was made, and even the very same burning bush that Moses saw, which she describes as “still green and still producing live shoots”.
But the latter part of her amazing journal is what impacts us more, and brought us the treasure of the ancient observance of Holy Week, one that the Eastern Church never forsook. Even today, the Orthodox churches, which have a different day for Easter, only celebrate the midnight Easter vigil, on Easter Eve. Easter itself is just another Sunday!
But Egeria’s journal began to bring the rest of the church back to the ancient ways. Her journal describes the observance of the feast of the Epiphany including a Night Station in Bethlehem, and all of Holy Week and Easter. Palm Sunday was described in detail with its formal procession with palms to the Mount of Olives and a veneration of the cross. It also described the celebration of Whitsunday, or Pentecost. Egeria apparently participated in all these ancient festivals with great concentration and joy, and a great retention of detail.
Her tones are filled with awe as she describes the Palm Sunday procession in Jerusalem about 1600 years ago:
"On the same day, at the ninth hour, they go forth to the Mount of Olives with palm branches; and there they pray and sing psalms until the tenth hour. And after that they go down to Eleona, and the bishop with them, to the church, where hymns and antiphons suitable to the day and to the place are said, and lessons in like manner. And when the ninth hour approaches they go up with hymns to the Imbomon, that is, to the place whence the Lord ascended into heaven, and there they sit down, for all the people are always bidden to sit when the bishop is present; the deacons alone always stand. And as the eleventh hour approaches, the passage from the Gospel is read, where the children, carrying branches and palms, met the Lord, saying; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord,
And the bishop immediately rises, and all the people with him, and they all go on foot from the top of the Mount of Olives, all the people going before him (with hymns and antiphons,) answering one to another: Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord. And all the children in the neighborhood, even those who are too young to walk, are carried by their parents on their shoulders, all of them bearing branches, some of palms and some of olives, and thus the bishop is escorted in the same manner as the Lord was of old. For all, even those of rank, both matrons and men, accompany the bishop all the way on foot.
Egeria’s excitement is apparent from her description of this beautiful re-enactment of the triumphant march into Jerusalem. And once these ancient rites were communicated to the faithful in Rome, you can see why they began to replicate it in their liturgy, as we have continued to do.
But there is a message in our hybrid of services today. We are observing the triumphant march into Jerusalem and the passion of Jesus, two things apparently at opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience. But this is life- this is what we find in our lives at so many junctures, as we attempt to negotiate our way through great suffering and great joy as human beings and as Christians. We find the necessity to hold the cross and the triumphant resurrection at once. The necessity to hold the very best in life along with the very worst- and to recognize that this reality is not irreconcilable- this reality is life.
Perhaps it was only Jesus who knew, in that triumphant but still humble entry, that what followed would be the cross, and the ultimate end would be resurrection. This is what we face in our lives all the time. And the only thing that gets us through is faith. Faith that the cross is not the end of the story. Faith that there is a reason to be triumphant. And faith that like the sweet strains of a spiritual, our hearts can hold these great contradictions without breaking.
Church of Our Saviour
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
I heard someone recently describing the sound of a spiritual. It is a triumphant sound and a mournful one at the same time. Perhaps that heart-wrenching sound developed because those spirituals came from a population so steeped in pain that it had to aspire to the possibility of grace along with the suffering. Like the possibility of a joyful triumphant entry into a city, followed by an unimaginable loss.
Palm Sunday as we celebrate it today is a mixed up sort of liturgy, which contains thrilling heights and a devastating depth. We inherited a service that encompasses both the story of the passion of Christ and the story of the triumphant entry into Jerusalem.
Before the ancient rites were rediscovered, there was no Holy Week, and the week before Easter was the logical time to delve deeply into the experience of Christ’s passion- that series of events that led to his crucifixion, beginning with the garden of Gethsemane and ending with the sealing of Jesus’ tomb.
But sometime in the late 4th century, a female pilgrim named Egeria took a remarkable pilgrimage and left us a detailed account of what the ancient Holy Week observance was like in Jerusalem.
We have all been experiencing our pilgrimage through Lent, hitting our high points and stumbling into our low points. We have all been journeying toward Jerusalem; so let me tell you a little bit about the pilgrimage of Egeria.
Lucky for us, Egeria recorded her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and also lucky for us, she was a keen observer and fastidious recorder of her remarkable surroundings on this trip to the Holy Land. She was clearly learned and is thought to have been a nun or an Abbess from Northern Spain.
In the first part of her journal she describes the sites of biblical events, where people apparently were certain they took place: The very brook where Moses was found, the exact place where the golden calf was made, and even the very same burning bush that Moses saw, which she describes as “still green and still producing live shoots”.
But the latter part of her amazing journal is what impacts us more, and brought us the treasure of the ancient observance of Holy Week, one that the Eastern Church never forsook. Even today, the Orthodox churches, which have a different day for Easter, only celebrate the midnight Easter vigil, on Easter Eve. Easter itself is just another Sunday!
But Egeria’s journal began to bring the rest of the church back to the ancient ways. Her journal describes the observance of the feast of the Epiphany including a Night Station in Bethlehem, and all of Holy Week and Easter. Palm Sunday was described in detail with its formal procession with palms to the Mount of Olives and a veneration of the cross. It also described the celebration of Whitsunday, or Pentecost. Egeria apparently participated in all these ancient festivals with great concentration and joy, and a great retention of detail.
Her tones are filled with awe as she describes the Palm Sunday procession in Jerusalem about 1600 years ago:
"On the same day, at the ninth hour, they go forth to the Mount of Olives with palm branches; and there they pray and sing psalms until the tenth hour. And after that they go down to Eleona, and the bishop with them, to the church, where hymns and antiphons suitable to the day and to the place are said, and lessons in like manner. And when the ninth hour approaches they go up with hymns to the Imbomon, that is, to the place whence the Lord ascended into heaven, and there they sit down, for all the people are always bidden to sit when the bishop is present; the deacons alone always stand. And as the eleventh hour approaches, the passage from the Gospel is read, where the children, carrying branches and palms, met the Lord, saying; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord,
And the bishop immediately rises, and all the people with him, and they all go on foot from the top of the Mount of Olives, all the people going before him (with hymns and antiphons,) answering one to another: Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord. And all the children in the neighborhood, even those who are too young to walk, are carried by their parents on their shoulders, all of them bearing branches, some of palms and some of olives, and thus the bishop is escorted in the same manner as the Lord was of old. For all, even those of rank, both matrons and men, accompany the bishop all the way on foot.
Egeria’s excitement is apparent from her description of this beautiful re-enactment of the triumphant march into Jerusalem. And once these ancient rites were communicated to the faithful in Rome, you can see why they began to replicate it in their liturgy, as we have continued to do.
But there is a message in our hybrid of services today. We are observing the triumphant march into Jerusalem and the passion of Jesus, two things apparently at opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience. But this is life- this is what we find in our lives at so many junctures, as we attempt to negotiate our way through great suffering and great joy as human beings and as Christians. We find the necessity to hold the cross and the triumphant resurrection at once. The necessity to hold the very best in life along with the very worst- and to recognize that this reality is not irreconcilable- this reality is life.
Perhaps it was only Jesus who knew, in that triumphant but still humble entry, that what followed would be the cross, and the ultimate end would be resurrection. This is what we face in our lives all the time. And the only thing that gets us through is faith. Faith that the cross is not the end of the story. Faith that there is a reason to be triumphant. And faith that like the sweet strains of a spiritual, our hearts can hold these great contradictions without breaking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
