Grief and the Christian Life
When I was eighteen, my home life and family of origin underwent a sudden change from which it never really recovered. I still remember the lurch of what I thought was permanent and untouchable suddenly shifting under my feet. Like Lewis, I felt afraid. I felt cut off, even when surrounded by people. I felt deaf to the words they were trying to say to make me feel better, and even when their words got through, part of me still wanted their kind words to just go away. Yet I was terrified of being alone. Starting to sound familiar?
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David practices bigamy and Saul gets caught with his britches down (also, Samuel is dead)
We continue our recap of our reading of 1 Samuel from Morning Prayer this week. In this installment, David is in his wilderness years. As Bela Lugosi says in ‘Ed Wood’, “Home? I have no home. Hunted. Despised. Living like an animal!”
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David Enters, Stage Left
We continue our recap of 1 Samuel, which we’ve been reading during Morning Prayer. This week we are introduced to a hick from the sticks, David, son of Jesse. Slayer of lions, slinger of stones, shredder of lyres, and apparently not a chore to look at.
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Introducing Long Tall Saul
Previously in 1 Samuel, chapters 1-9, we were introduced to Samuel, last of the Judges. The people began carping about having a king like all the grown up nations surrounding them, kind of like when I was a wee lad and everyone showed up after Christmas break with a brand new, diecast metal General Lee from ‘The Dukes of Hazard,’ so I started whining to my parents for one. Anyway, this week we continue our exploration of 1 Samuel with chapters 10-15, where we are introduced to Samuel’s pick for the crown, Saul.
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1 Samuel 1-9 (tldr)
Ah, summer… a time of barbeques, sandals, and mosquito bites. For those of us living into the church Kalendar (the ‘K’ makes it extra churchy), it is also the time when we renew our relationship with 1st and 2nd Samuel during the Daily Office of Morning Prayer. Here’s a brief recap of what happened this week.
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The Rash Passion of St. Peter
Last weekend, we celebrated the feast day of St. Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus said, in Matthew 16:18-9, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah … you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Before these prophetic words came true, though, St. Peter had to face Gethsemane.
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Christina Rossetti's Life as a Channel of Charity
We have considered what it means to make our artistic vocations, as Evelyn Underhill puts it, “an oblation from the first.” As we consider how to do this in our own lives, I want to put the example of a specific artist before you.
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What’s the Point of the Artist’s Self-Death?
We’ve considered the necessity of self-death through Christ in the life of the Christian artist. What’s next? What is the point of this self-death? Where does it go? Does my story, my particular identity, matter at all in my artistic practice?
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The Artist as a Channel of God's Charity
Today, I wish to consider the self-death necessary to the vocation of the artist. This is an essential topic for creative people to consider. I suspect an unhealthy self-preoccupation haunts current dialogue around the question of what it means, and why it matters, to be an artist. Many contemporary creatives seem frequently, if not constantly, concerned with using their art to create or define themselves, and often get lauded for this work.
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Joshua's Eulogy for Moses
In our first morning prayer reading with Deuteronomy 34, we mark the end of the life of Moses. As we do every year in the Daily Office, this is a story that began in Lent 12 weeks ago, with Baby Moses, a basket and the Bulrushes in Exodus 2. Except for two breaks, we have followed the story of Moses and the Exodus through the Easter and Trinity seasons. To mark this ending, this morning I offer a eulogy for the great prophet Moses—one as I imagine Joshua might have given upon the death of his mentor and teacher.
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Leave Us Not Comfortless
In the first verses of Isaiah 40, God declares, “Comfort, yes, comfort My people! … Speak comfort to Jerusalem.” These first verses frame the chapter to follow as an extended meditation on comfort as God understands and offers it to his people.
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Touch and See (Mystagogy, Part 5)
One of the great questions in the Church’s understanding of Christ concerns the properties of His resurrected Body. From the time Jesus exits the tomb, there is something evidently different about His embodied life from how it existed prior to His Resurrection. The Evangelists take special care to demonstrate that Jesus continues to have a body, that His body is continuous in some ways with the body the disciples had known before the Passion; yet His body now possesses new properties that begin to reveal and oblige a new relationship that Christ will have with His disciples as He ascends to the Father and the Spirit comes upon them. For the final entry in our series on mystagogy, then, we turn to the sense of ‘touch’ and its place in our worship of the risen Lord.
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Like Eagles
Once, as a day fell into evening on the edge of the Salish Sea, I sat under a cold wind and watched sunlight burn pink over the horizon. A pale haze made the Olympic Range look ghostly. Five minutes into my solitary reflection, I was startled by movement—an enormous bald eagle, who had been resting on the rough asphalt of an old basketball court, stirred. I watched as it stepped a few paces forward and raised its wings, then flew over the field past a friend of mine, who was wending her way back to our camp cabin. The eagle alighted above her on an old barracks roof and proceeded to survey the scene.
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The Ascension as an Icon of the Church
One of my favorite aspects of icons is how they meet and include the viewer. When I look at an icon, I’m always reminded that these saints and stories are real, and that they happened, and of my part and place in the story of the Church. One of the ways icons meet the viewer is through symbols and structure. Let’s unpack an example of how icons meet us by using the image of the Ascension.
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Taste and See (Mystagogy, Part 4)
I remember the first time I received Holy Communion in an Anglican Church. It was after a long season of participation in non-denominational churches, for which communion was infrequent, instrumental to the point of a sermon, and individualized as a private devotional response to the pious atmosphere of the day. This was different from my childhood experience of Sunday mornings in a traditional and conservative Methodist church, at which communion was a regular movement of the liturgy. As I went searching in early adulthood for those Wesleyan roots, I entered a beautiful a-frame church near my college and knew that I had come home.
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A Pleasing Aroma (Mystagogy, Part 3)
During my years of altar service while preparing to receive Holy Orders, one of the roles I fulfilled most often was that of thurifer, the one who carries the thurible in which the incense is burned. I remember getting acquainted with the rituals of lighting the coals, the smell of fresh grains of frankincense, and the intricate metal-work of the chains holding the bowl of the thurible, which would instantly kink up if you even looked at them the wrong way. The thurifer remains near the thurible throughout the service, and so by the end they have been thoroughly coated by its smoke. It is a scent unlike anything else, and it lingers for hours. Long after the service, on a Sunday afternoon, the church still smells of that deep and sweet and spicy smell. When I would arrive home after church, my family or friends would instantly know what I had been doing, and where I had been. I still smelled like church.
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Ears to Hear (Mystagogy, Part 2)
One of the most frequent refrains in the New Testament are the words: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” On the surface, this may sound to us like an unnecessary and obvious command. What else do ears do but hear, after all? We take for granted that our ears hear, but take a moment and listen. Now listen for the sounds that you had previously filtered out, perhaps the sound of an air conditioner or fan, the sound of people or birds outside, the sound of the refrigerator condenser or dishwasher. Did those sounds begin to exist when you heard them, or did you begin to attend to them with your ears? If you had not done so, would your life have been different?
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Offering Tomorrow
There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘anxiety.’ Like all words that get used casually and frequently, there comes a point when we need to redraw some definitions. Anxiety is a word that likely comes from a very old word meaning “to choke.” It describes the sensation of having one’s breath cut off–and the panic that results from the sensation. In more recent use, anxiety refers to a clinical psychological diagnosis referring to a spectrum of nervous conditions arising from a spectrum of causes ranging from heredity to traumatic experience. In popular use, it is often used as a synonym for ‘worry,’ when concern for the uncertain outcome of an event becomes distracting to the point of interrupting our lives.
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What Did You See? (Mystagogy, Part 1)
What did we see? Holy Week knows some of the most visually-engaging and emblematic moments of the Church year. One of the iconic sights of Holy Week comes with the Easter Vigil: the lighting and procession of the Paschal candle. It is right to begin our mystagogy with this sight. As the Psalmist writes, “In Your light will we see light.” It is by this light that we begin to see everything else.
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The Final Christian Battle
It is very easy to view our growth during the season of Lent in the short term. By this point in the Lenten fast we have a good awareness of our own discomfort. Whether or not we chose our disciplines well, at a certain point we very much look forward to the Easter season. As Easter approaches, a healthy way to reflect on this past season is to determine which practices can be carried forward in our spiritual life. We should be evaluating our life of prayer. Have we grown in daily recollection? Are we attending to our life within the community of our parish? Have we prepared to meet the Easter season taking that hope back into our lives? However, although these questions are important, they are primarily focused on short-term growth.
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