Update on Gerbils

A very kind blogger, having read about my plight trying to find a decent image of a gerbil spinning around on an exercise wheel, sent me two fabulous photos. So, in the interest of accuracy and with gratitude for this kind soul of the blogosphere, I post two photos that speak louder than words.

The smaller photo is much better because the gerbil is in full stride.
The larger photo looks like a pedigree (if there be such a thing) gerbil running madly.

Amazingly, the bunch of gerbils I had survived our cat. Actually, I think they bored our cat because they were in a tank with a mesh lid. What good are rodents if they're not running freely?

In any event, for those who feel that life is out of control, here are some photos that might speak to you. And thanks, again, to a sister blogger:)

Advent 2C • 10 December 2006

My first year here at Saint Mary’s happened to land during ‘Year C,’ the same lectionary cycle that we are following now. Given that 12 years have happened since now and then, I dare tell this anecdote that some of you may actually remember.
I have must have been tired that morning as I boldly proclaimed the gospel. I launched into the list of names, ‘In the fifteenth yea of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Iturea and…’ I actually said trichonosis and in that split second of realisation of ‘oops,’ heard it and decided to keep on going and pretend that the name of a dread disease had not escaped my lips. You’ll never hear this gospel the same way again, perhaps, but the larger point is, I stumbled on a name that is foreign and my brain substituted a word that was slightly more familiar.

The contextualisation and particularity of Luke’s gospel are what distinguish it from the other gospels. Luke writes this gospel for Theopholis, a lover of God. Luke is a historian. He is interested in writing an orderly account — indeed, if you look at the prologue to the gospel, you will find the following introduction:

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

His narrative reaches back to the beginning of humanity even! There is a strong sense of ‘things fulfilled’— both in the past and present. Luke tells as the one story of God’s fulfilling God’s promises to Israel, both the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the birth and spread of the church. Luke grasps the meaning of Jesus and the church for the world in a single vision, and he tells the story so that what happens with Jesus foreshadows the church’s experience and what happens in the church finds meaning as the continuation of Jesus’ story.

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Into this particular place and time comes John the Baptist. We hear of John every year at this time, so it is hard some times to come up with fresh images of him. It is difficult to stop hearing Handel’s Messiah, ‘Every valley,’ or Godspell’s ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord,’ or even hymn 67, ‘Comfort, comfort ye my people.’ Last year I used the words to a song from El Salvador that talks about Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Oscar Romero:

A hidden prophet in the desert, shone,
traveling the roads, he invited people to conversion:
I baptize with water, but there’s one greater who comes,
he will baptize with the Spirit, prepare your heart.”
And the people recognized in the voice of John the Baptist,
the word of life, the word of God.

Each year, I struggle to come up with some new image of John the Baptist that will speak to where we are, who we are, in the same way that this person did to the writer of Luke.

Somehow, this year, largely because I went to the hiphop event last month at Saint Paul’s, White River Junction, I play with the idea of John the Baptist as a rapper. I think of how the rappers who came to Vermont turned around our understanding of something we have heard many times over and gave us a new perspective on it. They took the gospel message and put it into their context and language (not necessarily ours, but that is OK). They conveyed God’s message of hope, which essentially is the message of John (once you get past the initial language of repentance).

The story of the genesis of the HipHopEMass is remarkable. The Rev’d Timothy (‘Poppa T’) Holder, rector of Trinity Church in the South Bronx created the HipHopEMass in the summer of 2004 after an armed hostage situation at his South Bronx church. [This information largely comes from the article that appeared in the December Mountain Echo.] The incident inspired him to connect with the neighbourhood’s youth. He says, ‘Our church needs the love and the message that the rappers bring.’ The rappers connect and understand scripture and liturgy through the Hip Hop culture and then use these methods to help others incorporate their culture into liturgy and life that speaks to them today.

The birth of Hip Hop was hard — the children of the South Bronx felt abandoned by society on all levels. Through their graffiti, break dancing, and rapping, the children of the South eventually Bronx rose up and said, ‘We are somebody.’ Holder believes that Hip Hop is about liberation, and now is becoming a Hip Hop upholding freedom, justice and peace. Holder states: ‘If we open our hearts, we too can stand up and say enough of the hate. We want to celebrate life.’

The group has published The Trinity Hip Hop Mass: Who Will Speak for the Thugs? and The Hip Hop Prayerbook. The group has been the recipient of several awards, including the ‘Peacemaker Award” by the World Council of Churches, 2004 and 2005, ‘The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Leadership Award’ by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 2005, ‘The First Decade Award’ by the Divinity School, Harvard University, 2005.
Their web site boldly proclaims:

Because God is HopE and God Loves Everybody
Everywhere Excellently, Extravagantly ForEver!
And We’re Celebrating It Like Never Before!

They have brought God’s message of redemption, love and hope to their neighbourhood and now, around the country, even to places like Vermont. They have been John the Baptist in their own right, taking God’s message and translating it into contemporary language.

Maybe hip hop isn’t going to make God’s promise of hope and salvation accessible to everyone. Maybe it’s not your favourite type of music (maybe you don’t even know what it is!). So then the question is:

Who, in your life, has been as John the Baptist, proclaiming to you God’s love?

Who, in your daily routine, has reminded you of God’s ability to write straight on the crooked lines of your life?

Who, in your travels, has cried out in the spiritual wildernesses a message of hope?

For whoever that person has been, they, too, have been a John the Baptist, a bearer of hope.

This Advent it is good to take time to remember those who in God’s name have brought light and hope to our lives: witnesses of what is true, beautiful and just, people who have changed our lives for ever.

Find those people, remember them, celebrate them and, above all, thank God for them... because we all need a John the Baptist in our lives.

END NOTES
http://www.dioceseofvermont.org/Mountain%20Echo/Mountain%20Echo%2006/Dec06EchoWeb.pdf
http://www.hiphopemass.org/

Profetas, no se pueden callar
Prophets, you can't shut them up

Every year I get stuck trying to come up with something intelligent and pithy to say about John the Baptist (or baptiser, as some will have him). Fact is, he bores me. I don't know why but it's because every year on Advent 2 and 3 the preacher has to talk about this guy about whom relatively little is written.

Tomorrow's sermon, as it stands now, is a real stretch but it's where it has gone — thinking of John the Baptist as a rapper. The jury (mine) is still out on it. I may yet ditch the whole idea and go somewhere else.

Meanwhile, there are the prophets in my life who are real, even if I have never met them.

It is amazing that after two months of writing this blog, I have made no mention of El Salvador or Archbishop Oscar Romero. For those who know me, who have been in the congregation during my 12+ years there, they have probably heard way too much about Romero.

But Romero still is for me a prophet and, like many Salvadorans, I believe that he still lives on in the Salvadoran people. While the Anglican community in El Salvador is not apt to name any chapel or school after him, when I talk with people one-on-one, they have their connections to Romero. Some remember listening to him during the years of repression. And others, including the woman I call my Salvadoran sister, try to carry on his care for the poor, the marginalised and oppressed.

I try to bear in mind Romero's dual message of accountability and hope. He declared: 'Everyone of us can do something,' which is so important when feeling paralysed by all that faces us. He also stated, 'Each one of us is God's microphone.' Each one of us can proclaim God's message of hope.

This portrait of Romero sort of wanders around the way Romero's body has. This photo was taken in the crypt of the cathedral where his second tomb used to be up until the 25th anniversary of his martyrdom. (The painting resides normally at the Jesuit University of Central America, UCA, where in November 1989, six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter were brutally machine-gunned to death.) Despite the powers that be who are working toward Romero's canonisation taking a rather simple and humble tomb and turning it (in my not so humble opinion) into a triumphalistic and inaccessable tomb, people still go to the crypt to pray by Romero and to gain strength from a very real, flesh-and-blood prophet.

I last got to the crypt in August, still lamenting the old tomb (another post, a before and after comparison), but grateful nonetheless to stand in prayer. I understand with each visit there the medieval fascination with relics and visits to the saints' tombs. I always feel fortified to go back into the fray after half an hour in Romero's midst, as it were.

Since I can't pop down to El Salvador nearly as often as I would like, I do the best I can, far away in the north. I pray for my other country, my other church and bishop... and I listen to Salvadoran folkloric and political music (as I am now).

Prayer for Private Devotion (this prayer used to hang on the wall by the former tomb)

Father, God of all men and women, who gave us in your servant Oscar Romero, a faithful and jealous pastor, ferverent lover of your church, and in it, in a special way, a church of the poor and the neediest, grant that we might know how to live according to the Gospel of your Son Jesus. Glorify your servant, Oscar, and grant me through his intercession the favour I ask you.... Así sea… Amen.

Now back to the sermon.

Friday cat blogging

Here's Young Guy on his birthday this summer. He's sitting on a chair that has a wild bedspread I bought in El Salvador to have during my sabbatical down there two years ago (I have a thing about unmade beds). He is on top of a Guatemalan huipil. It's pretty simple and the head hole is so, so small that there is no way I could ever get my head through it. I have since moved the huipil because it was getting faded.

The chair is one that I found at seminary — I went to the General Theological Seminary in NYC and the buildings are connected by underground tunnels. There used to be all manner of cast-off junk and furniture down there (maybe there still is). I walked by the chair for two months and decided that no one was claiming it so I did. It needed some repair but it's as good as new now. I also picked up a barrister's bookcase that way as well as the swivel chair in which I am sitting right now.

It's almost the time of year when the two older cats take over the nest. (It was 8 out this morning and hasn't gone up any.) Sometimes they like to be together and other times when La Doyenne tries to move in, Orange Guy has fits. This cat nest is the one my cat sitter gave my crew because hers didn't like it. Oddly, Young Guy has never tried sleeping in either it or the igloo. I guess the other two have made it clear that the nests are theirs (because the igloo, at least, predates Young Guy).

My sister gave me this funky tablecloth/bedspread of cats (really). Again, I don't leave it out too much because of it getting faded but it is pretty silly and Orange Guy looked so good on it. (If it isn't clear by now, I enjoy materials and such.) Underneath is a reversable bedspread made out of material from Guatemala. The flip side is a patchwork of different scraps. For right now, though I have the sedate red/black pattern right side up.

Prise de Conscience

OK, so last night's post was feeble but it came at the end of a long day.

More seriously... one part of yesterday was presiding at a said eucharist, on the occasion of the Feast of Saint Nicholas. I cribbed freely from, with attribution, Mike Kinman's piece from Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, WWSND? What would Saint Nicholas do? There were only six of us; two came forward for anointing and laying on of hands. I could have used the same myself but it wasn't the time to ask someone to anoint me when I didn't know if the person has ever done it before.

I invited the woman who will serve as transitional deacon at the parish, starting in Epiphany, to serve last night, as a simple debut. I haven't really thought of this as your typical curate position insofar as the person lives over 40 miles away and with gasoline where it is, it is not good stewardship to have her make multiple trips back and forth.

In any event, she did all those deacon things -- proclaim the gospel, introduce the prayers of the people, set the table, do post-communion ablutions and dismiss the congregation. She wore the stole that I would have under the chasuble, because the church doesn't have a matching stole. I figure I can wear the chasuble sans stole (or put on some other unmatching stole) and have her wear the one that goes with it.

As I listened to her read the gospel, I had a pang. Later, I stood by her, guiding her on what to do, not interjecting too much my particular manies (manias, in French), but giving her general directions, and watching her take apart the veiled chalice, unfold the corporal, spread it out, set the chalice and paten on it, get enough wafers and then pour enough wine and water, I had another pang. And the last pang came with the post-communion ablutions and dismissal.

I realised that for a season, I won't be doing those things that I have done so naturally and automatically for over 13 years. I realised that I LIKE setting the table, doing it with care, consistently, neatly, and most of all, with love... but for the time that the parish has a deacon, there will be fewer things I do on a Sunday morning. I won't get to stand in the middle of our congregation and hear them sing the last verse to the sequence hymn.

It's selfish, perhaps, but the familiarity of doing these things has grown on me because I am the only clergy person in this congregation and we haven't had a deacon up until this point in time.

At the same time, I think it is so important for the congregation to see on a regular basis the ministry of a deacon.

Now, here's where I am really going to get into troubled waters. I am one of those aardvarks who appreciated her time as a transitional deacon (seven months), who felt that that time informed and continues to influence my life as a priest. I found the first ordination, that of the diaconate, was the crossing of the Rubicon, the time when I began to lose the freedom that a baptised person has. By the time I was ordained priest, I had dealt with the identity change that comes with wearing weird clothing (Barbara Brown Taylor in her Leaving Church, is absolutely obsessed with clericals, it would seem), and assuming an honorific title. (Nowadays, I live in a place where, in the wintertime, my uniform is a turtleneck most of the time but in my former diocese one didn't go out of the house unless dressed in black, and I mean, black clericals.)

I worked with an Anglo Catholic priest who was incredibly generous in sharing with me everything she knew. At the same time, she was clear that my six-seven months qua deacon were that. I was not going to act as a quasi-priest. We did not begin to think about 'practise celebrating' until about two weeks before my ordination. Instead, she had me do what deacons do -- find some outreach (that was easy because I was also working at the Seamen's Church Institute of New York and New Jersey), visit the sick, etc. I loved that time, as difficult as it was, living in a place where I was a total alien class-wise and ethnic background-wise.

I know that vocational deacons and many others want to have direct ordination and when the day comes that the church changes our canons, I will be fine with it. But at least for me, that time as a transitional deacon, was important. For that reason, I will try to do likewise for the woman who will be walking with our congregation for a season.

Totally, totally off track

So I wanted to find a photo of a gerbil running around on its exercise wheel, because that is what sort of a day it has been for me, just running around non-stop frenetically the way gerbils do.

So, I went to good old trustworthy Google and typed in 'gerbil.' (Why gerbil? Because like every other kid in suburbia, growing up I had two gerbils, Sophilia and Garfunkel who, of course, reproduced mightily, chewed greatly, ran for hours in their squeaky wheel, and did all those gerbiline things that gerbils do.)

I got my picture, sort of...

but also ran across this absolutely nutty site: Church of the Gerbil (www.corg.org)

Under their FAQs one reads:

The Church of Gerbil is a little known but widely practiced religion which is superior to all others. We simply believe that God is a gerbil and all the mythology which comes with such a statement is therefore adopted.

Being the extremely intelligent person you obviously are for visiting this wonderful page, there is no need to re-explain the reasoning that the reason the Gerbil is our God is that a Gerbil IS God. But in the realization that you are a highly intelligent example of the human race, and armed with the wonderful ability to question what you are told, I will not insult you by expecting you to "just believe."

Uhuh.

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Having gotten totally detoured from my initial quest — find an illustration to depict what my day has been — I am not sure I have anything worthwhile to add.

My cat must know I am looking at such pornography (gerbils) because he is rrwowing in the hallway.

Need I say... it has been a looooooooooong day. Maybe tomorrow I can explain why it was so long. I think I have hit a low tonight.

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in
and stops my mind from wandering...
where it will go.....

There's a lot of bric-a-bric swirling around in my feeble brain (that is still coming out from under the head cold). My brain feels like this photo of my father's workshop in the cellar of the house where I grew up. Everything is there, neatly organised; you find what you need in the coffee jars, magnetic tape plastic holders, drawers and everything else, but the overall effect is nothing short of overwhelming.

[Lord have mercy on us when we three kids have to clean out the house... my parents have lived there since they built it in 1952 and we are all packrats.]

In any event, as I rowed today for the first time since last Wednesday, the following unrelated assorted thoughts came to mind.

• I enjoy seeing what people have on their MP3 players, so here are the top ten songs in the current 'Party Shuffle':

Maddening Shroud — Frou Frou
Anywhere Is — Enya
Phases of the Three Moons — Andres Vollenweider
On the Run — Pink Floyd
Dame Albris Mano — San Antonio Vocal Ensemble
Arena Caliente — Willie and Lobo
Mare Crisium — Karl Jenkins
El Sol de Llama — Orchestre Baobab de Dakar
Never Be the Same — Christopher Cross
Requiem, Pie Jesu — Faure

• What am I reading?
I am almost through Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold. I am about to start Charles C. Mann's 1491, and I need to read John Allen's biography of Desmond Tutu, Rabble Rouser for Peace, to do a short review of it for our diocesan paper. I finished off recently Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church. I am reading in bits and pieces Riverbend's Baghdad Burning II (though I really need to read Baghdad Burning I, as I have already read a lot of what is in this book on her blog).

• What am I avoiding by writing this drivel?
Ah, there is the big question. Getting ready for vestry tomorrow night (budget for 2007, our annual tithe giving, who's going to run for vestry next year), figuring out what to do with the quasi assistant we will have (one of the transitional deacons), writing up minutes from the standing committee of Executive Council of which I am the secretary, gearing up to get a task force going, knowing I have to drive up to the diocesan office tomorrow for a morning meeting, come back, meet with the new deacon, go to youth group, preside at a 6.30 PM HE with anointing and laying on of hands and then have vestry....

... and trying to remember that, as always, I am 2/3 time (pay). That is a whole other posting for another time, another day.

Monday morning grogginess and ordinations

For the first time this season, the ground is ever so lightly covered with a dusting of snow. It's late in the year and discouraging that we haven't had a decent snowstorm yet. The four feet of snow covering the front yard in April 2001 is a very distant memory. Last winter was such a bust; I do hope we will get much more snow than then. If we are going to put up with sunless and cold days in Vermont, we should at least be rewarded with snow.

The cold is now moving into my chest. That is small progress; at least I can breathe again. I haven't been able to row since last Thursday, which is really messing up my ability to crank out 200K by Christmas Eve. If I were to row every day between now and then, I'd have to do 8.5K. It is doable, but given that I feel waterlogged, I am not so sure about rowing today even.

I still don't really have the brains to comment on the ordinations I attended last week but this close up of our laying hands on a woman who was ordained to the priesthood on Saturday sums up a lot of it.

There's a particularity and universality to an ordination. The particularity comes from the ordination taking place in a local context. I had the sense both last Wednesday at the diaconal ordinations in my parish, and then the priesting at the cathedral on Saturday that it was a diocesan event and, since we are a small diocese, an intimate occasion. The people being ordained have connections to the diocese ranging from over 35 to under 10 years. At the same time, the ordinations are universal. Watching the two people kneel before the bishop last Wednesday and then standing next to the woman about to be ordained priest on Saturday, I thought about how we priests/deacons had also knelt before a bishop at some point in time, and how our bishops had done likewise. Apostolic succession becomes very real at that moment. Finally, the invocation of the Holy Spirit and that rich, dripping moment of utter silence before the bishop moves into the prayer of consecration moves across all time and all places.

Particularly when ordained priest, I had the sensation of being passive in an event where all these hands did things to me. Thirty-five, thirty-eight, I no longer remember, priests put their hands on top of the bishop's hands as he ordained me. And then hands put a stole around my neck (one of the Philadelphia 11 and the third woman to be ordained priest in my former diocese -- women's apostolic succession), and more hands put the chasuble over my head, and then the bishop anointed my hands -- probably the most significant piece of it all, something I still remember when I look at the palms of my hands -- and he placed a bible in my hands. It wasn't until I stood up, transformed from without and within that I regained an active state.

Ordinations tend to render me speechless because of how close we beckon the Holy to come -- they are one of those liminal places where we can only be still, because of the sheer weight and enormity of what we are about to do.

Advent IC • 3 December 2006

We have once again turned the corner, finished up one liturgical year and moved onto the next one. This never-ending cycle is made manifest to me by the ever-growing collection of black three-ring binders in which the sermons for a liturgical year reside. There’s less and less free space on the bookshelf as the years add up!

Even though Advent comes at that time of year when we have less and less daylight, the days are cold and (maybe! someday soon) snowy, a time of year that in this part of the world can be challenging for its lack of warmth and light, many people love this short season. Some, including myself, are militant ‘Adventists,’ that is, doing our utmost to linger in this in-between time of waiting, rather than jump into the commercial fray that so many call Christmas. Burlington yesterday was an absolute zoo and even the simple errand I needed to run was overwhelming for the sheer number of people doing their Christmas shopping. I have decided that surely one of Dante’s circles of Purgatory is being stuck for 15 minutes in a hotel/airport van listening to popular renditions of Christmas jingles as I was last month in Chicago. Those of us ‘Adventist’ die-hards have a hard time stemming the inexorable and ever-earlier tide of Christmas. Christmas comes soon enough for me on the 25th of December.

Why do others and I love Advent? There are many reasons. Partly because it is a forward and backward-looking time of year. It looks to the past in the sense that it is a recapitulation of the longing with which women and men of faith living in a bygone era anticipated the coming of God’s Messiah. But Advent also looks to the future in an attitude of expectancy over what God has yet to do in the life of humankind.

Advent’s face toward the past is usually the one we seek. How very wonderful that a gracious God broke in upon the life of humankind through the birth of Jesus, God’s very own Son! But Advent’s face to the future is one that also deserves our attention. The coming of the infant Christ to Bethlehem for all of its miraculous grace is but hint and suggestion of the Second Advent when Jesus, now Risen Saviour, will return to claim the world that is his.

Advent is also a season of paradoxes. The paradox of the exuberant flowers (with those wonderful tropic red flowers and green fronds) in front of the high altar left from the glorious ordinations that took place here on Wednesday, contrasted with the luxurious blues of Advent, serve as a visual reminder of God’s promises of life springing forth in the desert and humankind being made new through the most fragile form, an infant.

Joan Chittister, a Benedictine, points out another paradox of Advent:

Advent is about the spirituality of emptiness, of enough-ness, of stripped-down fullness of soul. Advent points to the essentials of life; commercial Christmas points to its superfluities.

The two great liturgical seasons of the church year, Advent and Lent, are about very different things. Advent is not ‘a little Lent.’ Advent is not a penitential period. Advent comes to trigger consciousness, not to provoke our consciences.

The Talmud teaches that every person should wear a jacket with two pockets. In the one pocket, the rabbis say, there should be a note that reads, ‘I am a worm and not completely human.’ And in the second pocket, the rabbis say, the note must read, ‘For me the universe was made.’

The story is clear: The function of Lent is to remind us who we are — and who we are not. The function of Advent, on the other hand, is to remind us who God is and who we are meant to be, as well. Advent is about the riches of emptiness.
The Jesus ‘who did not cling to being God,’ but is like us in all things, models what most of us take the greater part of our lives to learn: how to ‘be ourselves.’ The divinity who comes to us as an infant is the paradigm of what it means to learn from life as we grow into who and what we're meant to be. The God who comes without retinue or riches is the metaphor of a humility that requires us to remember how really small we are in the universe — and to come to the point where that is enough for us.

Advent is about the power of emptiness and the spiritual meaning of smallness.

When we have little to begin with, we have even less to lose. … We become full of possibility.

When we know who we really are, when we present no disguises and parade no pretensions, when we are honest both with ourselves and with others, we fired ourselves free to be ourselves. We have no image to keep up, no lies to gild in a gilded society. We become full of integrity.

When we learn to live with the basics rather than to hoard what does not belong to us, we can never be made bereft by the loss of life’s little baubles because we never depended on them in the first place. We become full of contentment.
When we recognize our own limitations, we need never fear failure. Then we can’t possibly be destroyed by losing because we never anointed ourselves entitled to win. We become full of confidence.

Finally, when Advent seeps into our souls, we come to understand that small is not nothing and empty is not bereft. To be small is to need, to depend on the other. Smallness bonds us to the rest of the human race and frees us from the arrogant isolation that kills both the body and the soul. To be empty is to be available inside to attend to something other than the self. We become full of the blessings of life.

Then, emptied out by the awareness of our own smallness, we may have the heart to identify with those whose emptiness, whose poverty of spirit and paucity of life is involuntary. Then, we may be able to become full human beings ourselves, full of compassion and full of consciousness.

An Advent spent in serious reflection on the power of emptiness and the meaning of smallness puts everything else in perspective. (1)

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I invite you during this oh-too short season of Advent to explore the paradoxes in your life: where things that are small are actually large; where nothingness actually is everything; where weakness is strength; where sorrow is joy; where dying to what was is being born into what may be; what seems right that might need changing.

The prophets often say that if you are content with your world as it is, you will not welcome the One who comes to change it. In Advent we wait for the birth anew of the One who wants to change our lives, the One who dreams of a new creation.

END NOTE
(c) The National Catholic Reporter, 2003

Si poco ánima, so little spirit

I still am really, really dragged out by this head cold, which is affected all mental output. I have slogged through getting a sermon written for tomorrow, the prayers of the people done, assured that the church truly is changed over to Advent.

I want to comment about the two ordination liturgies that I have attended this week but don't have the oomph to do so.

Consider these sheep in the foggy high in the Pyrenees between France and Spain (taken in France, crossing into Spain about 10K later) to be my thoughts caught up in all the gunk that still floods my poor head and nose. My thoughts cry out to me, the way the sheep bââ-ed at me -- I could hear them but it wasn't until I was right up next to them that I could see them.

Time to call it quits and hope I can sleep.

Follow up on Friday cat blogging

I have a nasty head cold that descended upon me Wednesday evening and since then, I haven't really been able to sleep. So, during some of the time last night/this morning that I was unhappily awake, I took this photo of a feline pinwheel. In their sleeping hours the three will get together; in their waking hours, it's usually La Doyenne and Orange Boy. I really liked this shot, though because all their heads are touching.

Young Guy hates sharp noises so he is very jumpy on account of my sneezing.

Friday cat blogging (in between thunderstorms, yes, on the first day of December in Vermont)

Orange Boy nests into a collection of sweaters that I left out on the bed. I love all the Danish/Norwegian/Swedish sweaters one can now get (I have an ancient one I got in Copenhagen in 1971 but hadn't gotten any since then) thanks to Sierra Trading Post and places like that. Orange Boy had gotten to them before I could fold them up to put away. He loves to sleep straight out like that, with his face mushed into whatever material he is in. I don't know how he can breathe some times but he obviously does quite fine.

La Doyenne loves to sleep on pillows that are covered by a towel that I bought years and years ago. It's one of the 'LOVE A CAT.' The towel is pretty picked apart by claws but I do like it.

Little Guy snuggles into a small basket that I brought back from El Salvador. The New Yorker is the one that came out just after 9/11/2001. And Little Guy sleeps on top of an old fliptop desk that I used as a kid. It is amazing that I did all my homework from elementary school through high school on that small desk! Now I have a separate desk for the computer and then the larger desk which tends to get covered with piles of papers, which always makes for slippery feline landings.

Our Church Has AIDS

Holy and life-giving Breath of God, fill our hearts and minds with your love; comfort all those living with HIV/AIDS. Increase our commitment to their needs and forgive our negligence; remove fear, prejudice and hatred from our midst; and fill us to overflowing with the fire that only you possess, that we might respond through the power of your love. All this we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, the healer and reconciler of all.

Receive a blessing for all that might be required of you,
that love may drive out fear,
that you may be more perfectly abandoned to the will of God,
and that peace and contentment may reign in your hearts,
and through you may spread over the face of the earth.
The blessing of God, Giver of Life,
Bearer of Pain, Maker of Love,
Creator and Sustainer,
Liberator and Redeemer,
Healer and Sanctifier,
be with you and all whom you love,
both living and departed, now and for ever. Amen. (Jim Cotter)

From the BBC: Twenty-Five Years of AIDS

Timeline: 25 years of HIV/Aids

On 5 June 1981, the first case study detailing an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases among gay men alerted the world to Aids. Here are some of the key dates in the history of the illness since then.

1982 - Aids, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is first used as a term.
The condition had earlier been known as Grid - Gay Related Immune Deficiency.
The first case of Aids is reported in Africa.

1983 - The US Centers for Disease Control adds female partners to the list of groups at risk.

1984 - HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is isolated by Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Robert Gallo of the US National Cancer Institute.

1985 - Hollywood star Rock Hudson is revealed to have Aids.

1987 - The UK government's "Don't Die of Ignorance" campaign is launched.
Rock Hudson was revealed to have Aids in 1985
Needle exchanges are first piloted in the UK.
The first antiretroviral drug, AZT, is approved in the US.
HIV testing is introduced across the UK.

1988 - First World Aids Day.

1989 - The first HIV awareness materials targeted at gay men are produced by the Health Education Authority.

1990 - The BBC soap opera Eastenders runs a storyline in which Mark Fowler, a major character, is found to be HIV positive, raising awareness of the condition.

1991 - Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, dies of an Aids-related illness.
The Red Ribbon becomes the international symbol of HIV.
The US Food and Drug Administration licences the first rapid HIV test.
Ten million people around the world are HIV positive. Aids kills more men aged 25 to 44 than any other condition.

1995 - There is an outbreak of HIV among injecting drug users in Eastern Europe.
The first combination therapy - HAART, (highly active antiretroviral therapy) is approved for use in the US.

1996 - UNAIDS is established.

1998 - Trials of a vaccine against HIV begin.

2001 - Drug companies abandon their opposition to the generic production of antiretrovirals.

2002 - The Global Fund for the fight against HIV/Aids, malaria and TB is set up.

2003 - Results of the first major HIV vaccine trial - Aids VAX - show promise.

2005 - International leaders commit to universal access to treatment at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles.
About 1.3 million people in developing countries have access to treatment.

2006 - About 38.6m people are estimated to be living with Aids worldwide.

To bed, to bed, jiggidy, jig

Thanks to a whopping head cold that descended upon me yesterday as I was in the flurry of last-minute preparations for the grand ordination, I have run out of steam and am going to call it quits for the day.

There are so many things left undone. In the words of the New Zealand Prayer Book, 'Let it be.'

So I will go to bed and try to sleep off the grungies.

This drawing by the eccentric French artist, Henri Toulouse Lautrec, has long been a favourite. It's sort of how we folk in the north end up on these cold winter nights, when the wood stove burns down and the temperature in the house drops (or, here, when the outside temperature drops and the drafty 1850s house lets you know).

Bonne nuit.

O Sacerdos, quid es tu?
Non est a te, quia de nihilo,
Non es ad te, quia mediator ad Deum,
Non es tibi, quia sponsus ecclesiae,
No es tui, quia servus omnium,
Non es tu, quia Dei minister,
Quid es ergo? Nihil et omnia,
O Sacerdos.

This poem, found early on in Michael Ramsey's classic, The Christian Priest Today, sums up so much of what walking in this vocation means. (It also is simply neat for the progression of prepositions and articles in Latin.)

I think of it, as a thread in the House of Bishops/Deputies list serve grapples with nomenclemature -- 'woman priest,' but not 'male priest;' 'gay priest,' but not 'hetero priest.' It is true, one is a priest without qualifiers. The qualifiers come with the person who inhabits the vocation of priest but they address the esse, not the vocation.

Perhas the wisest thing that someone told me before going to seminary, actually as I was just beginning to think about ordination 22 years ago was, 'Don't ever lose sight of yourself. There will be a time when your priesthood will fail you and if you don't know who you are, you will be even more lost.' Such wise words, coming from one of my early sisters of priesthood... I have marked them well.

And so, I qualify myself as a chocolate-loving, cat-fanatic, iPod-toting, music-loving, voracious reading, walking pilgrim and much more. Priest is just a part of the entirety.

Beneath these thoughts lie the fact that tonight the church will receive two more people en route to the priesthood. We will ordain a man and a woman to the transitional diaconate and we will be all the richer for it.

All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Such characters in colour dim I mark'd
Over a portal's lofty arch inscrib'd:
Whereat I thus: Master, these words import.

A little bit of Dante and Dore to accompany this sad news:

According to the person who answered the phone at the computer store where I left my laptop last week, it is 'beyond all hope.' I am waiting to find out exactly what went wrong but the basic fact remains:

I BOUGHT A LEMON FROM APPLE. I can't believe it. Of course it is way beyond warranty. What irks me is that I barely used the thing, just sank $250 into it to get a new DVD/CD drive and the damn thing broke a week after the drive was put in. So do I save the thing and use it for parts? Try to sell the DVD drive which is BRAND new on ebay? What do I do with a dead laptop that should be OK? And what caused it to die so suddenly? Literally -- I had it up and running before lunch and the next time I tried to boot it up, it started going kaflooey on me. I am still waiting to hear back from the store, but the news sounds dismal.

And where do I come up with $1400 to buy a new one? I am so frustrated with the whole mess that I barely have words. And I am really, really, really disappointed in Apple. I am a diehard Mac user, for 18 years and this is the first time that I have been so shafted. Argh.

'Let things which had grown old be made new....'

Our church has a modest, home-made columbarium in the right hand corner of the building. This columbarium (of whose existence I knew absolutely nothing until three weeks after I had arrived here and a visiting colleague exclaimed, 'Oh look, you've got a columbarium!!!') was made in the mid 1970s and has 60 niches, half of which are now occupied or reserved. I find it is a terrific expression of the Communion of Saints, because the ashes of several 'concelebrate' with me every Sunday morning at the early eucharist.

From the time the columbarium was built until this morning (except in 1996 when we got the entire inside of the church painted), it was covered by a white/blue/white velvet drapery that one of the belles of the parish had made. She was a great sewer; I get to wear an exquisite Advent blue chasuble/stole set she made around that time, too. Before she died in 2004, she used to exclaim that the drapery had gotten old and needed to be replaced. (Her ashes are temporarily in the columbarium, waiting interment at the local cemetery but her 95+ year-old husband just isn't ready to do that yet; hence her niche is the one without a door on it.)

Enter anonymous donor, one of my parking lot, supermarket, outside of the church people with whom I meet regularly. AD, as I have taken to calling this person, thought that springing for the new material would be fabulous. That conversation took place about 18 months ago (!). After two false starts, caused by the major church supplier sending us eight yards of damaged white wool material, and our having to send it back, finally, finally, the local people were able to sew the new drapery and bring it down today to install it.

The installer came and took about two hours, first taking down the old drapery, which we will have dry cleaned and then on some future trip to El Salvador, I will take it with me, knowing that some congregation there can give it new life in the form of a dossal or chasuble or frontal or stoles or burse or veil or whatever they see fit.

The man (whose name I didn't get) first had to install new hooks up top because we were replacing a tacky, cheap-looking curtain rod with something a bit more substantial (which also came from Spain of all places). The hooks stuck out too far IMHO, so he had to redo them.

Then he had to hang the drapery on the rod, untying the new material as he went along. I don't want to get close to it because it is so pristine, so white, so clean. It has a fuller 'hang' to it as well, because we opted to get it lined. The drapery separates on either side of the blue so that there are three panels. That makes access to the niches that much easier in the middle of a liturgy. (We actually have gotten high up enough in the columbarium, that in order for me to put a box in there, I have to stand on a chair. I also unilaterally decided that the lower-most right hand niche would be one for companion animals so we have one dog's ashes in there; one can barely make out the brass plaque in the first photo.)

It only took two hours for the whole process to happen. For the most part, people will not be any the wiser for it. They may notice that it looks brighter but otherwise, the overall effect is just like what was there before... just newer.

Normally the altar stands away from the wall. It is a bit of a squeeze, but I can get back behind there to preside at our 8.00 AM Rite I Holy Eucharist. Usually there is a chair in between the pulpit and the altar. Also, there is a small removable communion rail with needlepoint kneeler that fits right by the rug. I will dig up a photo of the normal set up and post it at a later date.

A small hand-made carving (done by another parishioner who, alas, no longer knows who he is) of Mary looks out over everything and on Sunday mornings we light a small votive by her. The candles in the votive stand are for real and in the course of the week, I can wander into the church (which we keep open 24/7) to find someone's prayer burning. When I came here in 1994, no one even knew where the key was to the front door. For a few years we had to lock up the church because of my coming in one day and finding ground-up cigarette butts on the floor by the side altar, the altar fair linens wadded up under the pulpit and the key to the aumbry missing. But after 9/11/2001, we agreed that we should leave the doors open. We are the only house of worship in town that is always open and people know it and do come in.

After the excitement of the columbarium, then I met with our former choir director, who will be ordained to the transitional diaconate this Wednesday!!! Though he is not the first person from the parish to be ordained, I do believe that in the 155 years of this parish's existence, his will be the first ordination held here (hence the red Guatemalan material qua frontal on the side altar, material I bought in El Salvador, and which has matching material on the high altar). We got together for him to run through how to set the table once he is deacon. What seems so routine after 13 years, setting the table for eucharist, still isn't and still hasn't lost its mystery or wonder.

I behaved myself well today and yesterday: my tears lie just beneath the surface; they are always there when I get close to the Holy. Having him serve one last time as crucifer yesterday and quietly walking through the liturgy this afternoon is enough to get me weeping but I think the tears will wait until later. I have warned the bishop that our congregation is a weeping one; we cry at baptisms, and whenever we find the Holy near. His response: Weep away.

We will, with joy. And the saints whose ashes rest in the columbarium, will shout (and weep) for joy on Wednesday night, too.

Proper 29B

[I tried to find a decent image of Christ to put here and googled 'Christ the King' -- you'd be amazed how many churches there are out there with this name! Instead of a painting, here is a cross from Rwanda.]

Proper 29B • 26 November 2006

The contrast between the end of the Season after Pentecost and the beginning of Advent always takes me by surprise. On the last Sunday of the current season, we always hear an account from the passion story. Next Sunday, we will start a new gospel, a new liturgical year, one that typically begins with portents of the apocalypse and the impending historical earthquake that comes with Jesus’ birth. As we move closer and closer to Christmas, we will regress in the chronology of Jesus’ story, until we arrive at the annunciation and then his birth. As the Christian year always is cyclical, it is fitting, then, to be reminded so close to the nativity of where the story is headed — namely, the cross. We know, of course, that the cross is not the end of the story, the resurrection is, but the cross is certainly is a reminder of what the Incarnation entails. In a nutshell, the Incarnation is about God’s love for humankind, a love so fierce and strong that it gave all.

In the Jesus of the Gospels we find a presence of God who has not come to endorse the way things are but to turn them upside down. The Biblical story of the coming of Jesus, the enfleshed presence of the Holy God, begins with the song of Mary: where the proud are brought down and the meek and lowly are exalted; where those who are satiated with goods are sent away empty, and the hungry are fed.

We find Jesus not as a King ruling over others, but as a person surrendering his life for others, paying the cost of obedience and faithfulness. Jesus, interrogated by the powers that be, is humiliated before all, and eventually crucified. This is our king, the Evangelist John seems to be saying. Not a king with royal forces surrounding and protecting him, but a king who rules with justice, with humility, grace and love, a king who has fought for the cause of the weak and marginalized, the poor and the outcast.

Indeed, three chapters before Jesus’ conversation with Pilate as to whether or not he is a king, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.’

So that is the king of kings whom we celebrate today: the one who reached out to and cared for those who lived on the margins of life, the one who consistently asked his disciples to move out from the centre to the margins so that all of God’s people would be loved, and the one who consistently proclaimed a gospel of inclusivity and love. This king of kings asked that his disciples be servants as he was. And he asked them to love one another and in that loving, they might find God and by finding God, they might find joy.

So if you still wonder what it is that we observe today when we talk about Christ the King, it is not that Christ rules by power but that Christ lives in us by love. Let us love one another as Christ has loved us. That is the great commandment that Christ left us, a commandment that surpasses time and season and one that will bear fruit throughout all ages.

What sort of a king, then, is this whom we remember today? Certainly not a triumphant king, but a self-giving king. This king on the cross represents the core of Christian faith — the self-emptying Christ. In the cross, we find the two fundamentals of our Christian theology: the Incarnation and kenosis. The Incarnation — God choosing to enter human flesh, live and die as one of us. Kenosis — the act of self-emptying, giving over of all power, all beauty and all glory that Jesus demonstrates in the passion.

Jean Vanier, founder of the international l’Arche communities, writes of the kenotic, self-emptying king this way:

When Jesus performed the miracle
of the multiplication of bread and fish,
the crowd wanted to make him king,
but he fled from them.
Jesus did not come to exercise a temporal and social power.
He came to reveal the truth of the God of love
and the Love of God.
It is only now, when he is bound in ropes,
that he accepts the title of king.
He is an imprisoned king, a vulnerable king,
a king with no earthly power.
He is the king of love
who wants to communicate his love
in and through his weakness and vulnerability.
He is a king yearning for the communion of hearts.
This is the truth he has come to proclaim.
Not power for the sake of power, but to build of world of love
at the service of the communion of hearts,
the power of love and compassion that heals, liberates and gives life,
that calls people to live in love with him.
We are all called to live a deep friendship with this vulnerable king.
That is why Jesus came to be with us. [cite to be added later]

It is to that self-giving, kenotic, king of love that Anglican poet George Herbert wrote the words that we find in hymn 382:

King of glory, King of peace, I will love thee;
and that love may never cease, I will move thee.
Thou hast granted my request, thou hast heard me;
thou didst note my working breast, thou hast spared me.

It is to that incarnate gentle one that his soul, and ours, exclaim:

Seven whole days, not one in seven, I will praise thee;
in my heart, though not in heaven, I can raise thee;
Small as it is in this poor sort to enroll thee;
e’en eternity’s too short to extol thee.

Rame, rameur, rameur, ramez (bis)

So it's time again for the sixth annual challenge that Concept 2 (www.concept2.com) sets out to all the world's happy rowers: can you row either 100K or 200K between Thanksgiving and Christmas? This year we have a few more days to get the distance in since Thanksgiving is so early.

Last year I accomplished over 200K (I think it was 220) and two years ago I did the 100K row. This year I am hoping once again to crank out 200K. I haven't rowed really seriously since April (it is hard to think about doing that in the summer when I have mountains to hike) so the challenge always is a good way to get me back on the erg. I have only been doing 5000m segments, but in another few days will crank it up to 10K. That translates into about 48 minutes (a slow time for me).

While I row, I look at a cross from Rwanda, a purchase from CHABHA (www.chabha.org), a Vermont-based non-profit that works with orphans from AIDS, a cross from El Salvador, a Metropolitan Museum of Art's photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge and assorted crosses and two of my pilgrim shells. I also gaze at the notebooks that hold a dozen years of sermons. But most of the time I look out the window to my right elbow because from there, I can see the comings and goings of main street while I row.

The erg itself is ancient, bought in 1992. But it still functions just fine and since I don't have a PC, I can't use the little computer programs Concept 2 has made. I just listen to my iPod and row away (albeit too slowly right now). (Ay, talk about product placement... inevitable in this day and age, no?)

Two weeks of 'Friday Cat Blogging'!

I have been away enough that I have missed two Fridays of putting up pictures of the cats, aka, the cards.

This is Young Guy last year on a day that the furnace quit. He has the most amazing way of scrunching up really tightly so that his head goes right into his body. I think I have said before that the pictures behind him are of his predecessors, a grey tabby and orange tabby, who wrote my dissertation, General Ordination Examinations and saw me get ordained to the diaconate, then priesthood and then become rector. They covered respectively 11 and 13 years of my life with a lot of transitions.

The honking big thurible needed a bit of surgery so Compa worked on it. I have been outnumbered and forced to take the bells off the side... for the time being. I may put them back on again, despite people's snide remarks. Anyway, Orange Guy decided he would try to go for the chains as Compa held the top of the thurible in the air. He did not succeed in snagging them.

Then Orange Guy went and hid under the kitchen table and watched Compa swing the thurible. He was utterly entranced (can't you tell by the bug eyes?). She contemplated doing a figure eight but I said 'no' because the thurible would whack the ceiling and leave a hole.

Lastly, La Doyenne is on top of one of the speakers to my hifi system. It and she sit on top of the record cabinet my father made. Notice how I have kept the records protected. Behind her is a neat etching of Le Pont des Arts, Paris, that my high school French teacher, now friend, gave me one year. I was surprised in 2005 to find the bridge actually open; when I lived in Paris in 1977-78 the bridge had been taken down and my last time in Paris, prior to 2005, in 1984, the bridge was still off-limits because it was under construction. Now it is open and a great place for people to picnic on a summer's eve.