What's Your Episcopal Church like?

 A member of our vestry attended the Congregational Vitality breakout group at Annual Council.  The discussion was in response to sharing these 14 attributes of typical Episcopal parishes and of the The Episcopal Church in general.  View the video as many times as you need to identify the attributes that are active in your appreciation of the church as your church from within your community.  

Adaptation

 Adaptation

I closed last week’s writing with “gratitude can . . . become a way of living.  We practice, evaluate, adjust, and practice some more.”  Instead of “adjust,” I wish I had written “adapt.” 

So, up front . . . I want everyone who can, to read this book,  The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.  Only a few other biologists have so significantly influenced my thinking.  Even fewer have so equipped my biblical interpretations or my assumptions about humans who try to follow the example and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  

To understand the authors we need to consider their description of biological evolution.  In short “survival of the fittest” can be better described as preservation of adaptation.  

Since Charles Darwin, most have understood “survival” as a species “winning a competition” with a rival or especially as it has been used by Social Darwinism’s commentators, “dog eat dog.”  The authors, Chilean academics present preservation of adaptation as a better shorthand because they see evolution less as a contest between rivals and more as a cascade of multiple outcomes when diverse and unpredictable elements and players are involved over time.  

Instead of Neanderthal vs. Cro-Magnon: Match of the Epochs they see ice ages, diseases, droughts, genetic mutations, floods and more; each taking a part in staging an “evolutionary drift” in the adaption of all life.  Those that “survive” are the ones that have a persisting capacity to adapt to a “world of changes” outside their control.  Another shorthand: think of species diversifying like a snow melt running and branching out down a mountainside instead a single “king of the mountain” nearly frozen on a snowy peak.

If you’re still reading, I thank you.  All before is to say that I feel confident in presenting gratitude as including, perhaps depending on our ability and willingness to adapt to a world that is not under our control.  Adaptation is how our species got here in the first place.  It is what will keep our practice of gratitude viable through victories and defeats, good days and bad days and even through those days we forget to pray like deacons.  

Adaptation and gratitude are mutually effective in furthering each other and in staging our roles as recipients and practitioners of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation.  Practicing one helps us to practice the other.   So we wake up in honesty to remember how we have survived and in humility to look ahead in hope that we may adapt with a world being set free to evolve and change.

FrDann

Habituation

 Habituation

A paraphrase of my closing from last week is that “ . . . hindsight begs honesty / trust begs humility.” I was writing about how we can move forward with gratitude and want now to describe how we might avoid slipping into what looks to me to be a kind of self-hypnosis. (I’m remembering the “little engine that could” puffing its mantra “I think I can, I think I can.”) 

The Deacon’s Prayer (DP), “Lord, I thank you for getting me up this morning” is a great way to start the day but it also serves to promote an ease of spirit when we speak it at the end of the day.  In short there’s never a bad time for the Deacon’s Prayer.  

If seen with honesty, our hindsight can admit a whole day’s worth of things hoped for AND things unexpected.  Closing with an acknowledgment of one’s reliance on God continued from the morning sets the frame and makes it possible to include “all sorts and conditions” in one’s accounting of all which God tends for us in love and mercy.

Because our God is a also God of surprises the humility implied in the DP allows us to make room for God’s time and expects us to give God as much credit as possible for all that has transpired or not in our day.  

Hindsight and humility can be partnered to protect us from a kind of magical thinking that would prefer incantation to prayer, superstition to self-examination, control of outcomes to adaptation. Magical thinking abhors surprises, avoids innovation, and slips into the stubborn insanity of repeating the same action while expecting a different outcome.

Gratitude can be expansive for others as well as one’s self.  But like agape — the New Testament name of “self-sacrificing love for the sake of others” — gratitude does not press itself across boundaries, even those made from fear or hatred but it waits, even persists in confidence to be  recognized by its honesty and humility.

We all know that person and we all remember how we felt when we saw them seeing us struggle.  Our breathing changed, became more prayer-like and our pride no longer prevented us from accepting the company and help of another. 

That’s how gratitude can work and become a way of living.  We practice, evaluate, adjust, and practice some more, so that one day we are “habituated.”  We can inhabit gratitude. 

FrDann

Worship from Following

 Worship from Following

I closed last week’s writing with “This season of Lent is going to help us to see Jesus’ journey to the cross as a labor of divine love and we can make our way — one Deacon’s prayer at a time — onto that path to follow him with our gratitude. 

This gratitude “thing” is not only an attitude adjustment begging for discipline and focus but as much a reaction to one of the other standards of this Lenten season.  The lectionary takes us through “days in the life of Jesus” and each of these days has work or some challenge to his unique purpose and ministry.  First the wilderness temptations, then “Nick at night.” This next Sunday we’ll read of how poorly the disciples — echoing Nicodemus’ take — misunderstood his embracing the moment with the woman at the well.  They were astonished Jesus was stooping to speak with her.   

It’s as if in the Fourth Gospel everyone is playing catch-up because Jesus is resolutely striding so far ahead of us all.  So much for the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  

Just like we see God ahead of us in our temperate northern hemisphere springtime bloom-fest, Jesus is begging us to keep pace and to follow him.  Worship as reflective respite will have to wait because he’ll be puzzling the Pharisees and calling Lazarus out of the tomb before we can wrap our heads much less hearts around his saying things like “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. (John 14:24) 

So we can try to keep up with him and trust that our understanding will almost always emerge from our experience. It’s called hindsight and it begs our honesty.  We can also remember that God’s love of us will always outlast all our walking or worship. It’s called trust and it begs our humility.  One day we will celebrate as he again calls us — just like he did Peter who denied him three times — and says to us “Follow me.”(John 21:19)

FrDann

Gratitude as Practice

 Gratitude as a Practice — The Deacon’s Prayer and more

I closed last week’s writing with “ . . .  Let’s let gratitude be its own improvable characteristic, its own practice that we can use Lent to refine, take root, and continue throughout the rest of our lives.  

The changes we are hoping for are gifts from God.  Let’s start with gratitude and then ‘do Lent.’”

So how might we improve our practice of gratitude?  First we could acknowledge that gratitude can be adopted.  We need not wait on some rush of inspiration — although God’s spirit is involved — as if gratitude only happens to us not from us. 

We can discipline ourselves, even set our clocks to remind us when to be grateful.  It will not take very long at all for your focus to shift as you repeat your list and acknowledge those gifts of relationship and circumstance in your life for which you are thankful.

Minus acknowledgment, everything — even someone we love — can shrink and settle into fixtures or obstacles to our preferred intentions.  That’s why “the Deacon’s prayer” is best said as we wake and with these words, “Lord I thank you for getting me up this morning.”  

BTW, if you forget to start the day with gratitude, just be ready to be grateful after you realize you missed the start.  Gratitude begun at noon is still gratitude.

As your practice develops you’ll start to prepare for the moment.  Your “inventory” will grow and change. Soon gratitude will become more than the act of acknowledgement.  It’ll eventually become a lively part of how you meet new people and circumstances.  

I’ll admit that if you put me in a room full of horse manure I’d start looking for a pony.  But you don’t have to be that crazy to be grateful.  Just allow the possibility that something good is waiting to be found.  I’ll bet you’ll find your anxieties decrease and your blood pressure go down, too.

I’ll have more later but to close let me say that my practice is not some post-new-age-meme-based- self-hypnosis. It is an attempt to be faithful to a God who has allowed us freedom for the sake of love.  A God who has all bona fides of which my life enjoys only a fraction and understands first hand what it means to choose and to act for the benefit of others, to see the potential for good in everything and to give thanks for the calling to serve. 

This season of Lent is going to help us to see Jesus’ journey to the cross as a labor of divine love and we can make our way — one Deacon’s pray at a time — onto that path to follow him with our gratitude. FrDann

Gratitude as a Beginning

  Gratitude as a Beginning

Most of us begin our season of Lenten practices with something other than gratitude as a motivation for acts of penitence, spiritual discipline or nearly all of the gains, personal or otherwise we hope will at least accompany our efforts.  Certainly we do not want to presume an outcome prematurely or lose track of that humility we nearly all agree to be an intent of these forty days.

Many of us try to get too quickly to the humility part — or at least think we are — by disliking or even hating ourselves, by finding faults of many kinds or at the very least places for improvement. Think “our weight.” Not all of this is bad but from where will gratitude emerge if we take to any sort of discipline or devotion with this sort of beginning? It’s almost as if we want control more than change, reward more than relationship or status more than duty.

And so I am suggesting this alternative, to begin with gratitude because I believe there is even more to be gained of exactly those lesser categories of self-discipline along with a way to proceed once we pass the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

We are such quaint creatures always looking for a restart, a return to default settings, a second chance, a do-over.  We look as if that is yet to be granted, as if it is waiting on us to earn it or deserve something that God is withholding.  But it is 2023 and we are sharing in a story that already has death and resurrection in it.  

We are quaint but fortunate inhabitants of a time and place that is after that fact.  I remember Bishop Alexander’s preaching this to us on a Trinity Sunday years ago.  He asked us why we — he meant all christians not just Advent-ers — act as if the “jury is still out on the matter?”  Why do we let our particular life’s difficulties out weigh the gift of salvation — we can call it “life” — won for us and shown to us 20+ centuries ago in the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth?

Let’s remember as we turn ourselves toward Calvary’s cross that the kingdom of heaven has been made manifest already!  We just celebrated that fact, that very gift for several Sundays beginning January 6, 2023. And this was not our first trip around the liturgical calendar.  We’ve been here before, as many times as we can count back to our baptisms.  

Yes there is work to do and avoiding pride would at least suggest that we do that work first through our individual lives. And I’m thinking that gratitude — taken on as its own spiritual discipline — might be the better context than reward or self-improvement.  Let’s let gratitude be its own improvable characteristic, its own practice that we can use Lent to refine, take root, and continue throughout the rest of our lives.  

The changes we are hoping for are gifts from God.  Let’s start with gratitude and then “do Lent.” 

FrDann

From Here to There

 The View from There to Here

Two themes have traded the stage on these Sundays after the Epiphany.  The first is the “manifestation” to the world of God’s presence in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  The other is furtherance of that manifestation in the sharing of God’s presence through the Kingdom of Heaven, in Greek βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν or basileia tōn ouranōn.  As Jesus shows himself for who he is, his reach finds us and his realm extends to include us.    

So we read the stories of the Magi and their somber visitation (frankincense and myrrh are burial “perfumes”), John’s dialogue with Jesus ending in his ultimate submission to being the one who baptizes his cousin in the Jordan River and followed finally by the miracle at the wedding in Cana of turning water into wine. 

In each of these moments our focus is increasingly fine tuned and we ultimately wake to him as THE incarnate one.  Scholars have coined a term for us that names this “focus,” as the Word made flesh commits a “scandal of particularity.”  It’s not that Jesus becomes more unique — there are no degrees of uniqueness — but that his “person” increases in intensity and impact. No wonder last Sunday’s gospel had him sounding so “harsh.”

While this ”particularity” is happening in and through him, the kingdom of heaven is also “made manifest.” In the same way that a lamp lights a whole room, or salt flavors all it touches the realm of God reaches and includes us and ultimately all of creation.  

This coming Sunday the gospel lesson tells of a transfiguration of Jesus with Moses and Elijah on a mountain top witnessed by Peter, James, and John. They are enshrouded in a cloud of light that glistens and God can be heard echoing the voice from the bank of the Jordan as Jesus was baptized, “this is my Son!”

So I’m thinking that in this mysterious and powerful event Jesus view is from both there and to here and he sees something new, something different. I think he can see how far this kingdom extends from him and how far he still has to go in his demonstrating an obedience like no other on the cross of Calvary.

For us the view from there, from that mountain top was both particular: about him — and general: about the kingdom. It is a kingdom that is in him already here and by our acceptance still being realized.  That’s why we use the story of the Transfiguration to close this “ordinary time” after our Epiphany triptych.  It reminds us that the kingdom is “already” AND “not yet.”

As we make our way — soon with Lent as our season — the kingdom that is already present in the particular person of Jesus keeps being realized by us in our faithfulness.  And we affirm the already-ness demonstrated by Christ’s transfiguration and turn to acknowledging the not-yet-ness in our striving. 

FrDann

Kingdom Horizons

Kingdom Horizons

Last week we saw the broadening horizon granted to us by God’s presence.  With the Beatitudes, Matthew chapter 5 includes 5 uses of the term ‘kingdom of heaven.” In all of the gospel you can read it being said 33 times.  The Greek is βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν or basileia tōn ouranōn.  

Think less government or its subjects and more a reign or reach.  The kingdom of heaven isn’t so much an address or location but a transcendent or emergent force or affinity from and with God that is embracive such that it reorients everything it touches.  

From Morning Prayer one of the “prayers for mission” says: 

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen. (BCP, p. 101)

In that prayer we recognize that Christ’s “reach,” — born in sacrifice — is a “saving embrace” that reorients us from recipient to participant, from unknown to known, from lost to beloved to lover.  So when we are looking ahead we do so with more than ourselves in mind.  

Even our intended transitions from selling the rectory to securing an interim priest to calling Advent’s next Rector needs to be understood as about more than a “new beginning” or “fresh start” or “change of pace.”  Our work, now caught up in the kingdom of heaven is more movement than result, more becoming than arriving, more emergent than established.  

Everything we do in faithfulness extends our horizon and our work will not accept complacency or settledness.  Jesus understands this and in Matthew’s chapter 11 says:  

28 ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

There are big days ahead for us and even bigger ones, . . . further on. FrDann

Looking Ahead

 Looking Ahead

The phrase “Looking Ahead” means something different to me now that I have made my retirement plans official. It brings transition into the foreground for us both, priest and parish.  We are fortunate that we can include those larger concerns involving restoration and preservation to what could have been a more basic focus on growing back into those “numbers” of people and financial resources we remember from the pre-COVID past.  

The recovery is happening. Our numbers are creeping up.  And we are now including several new faces in these slowly rising numbers.  It helps to relieve some anxiety to know from Canon Lowrey that a slow recovery is the norm in this nearly post-COVID world of “American religion.”

Now “looking ahead” means considering more than one outcome on the horizon for me, for the parish and for us as fellow travelers.  I’m thinking, first how ambition gets to take a turn for us all.  For me it means that I cannot just bide my time until June 30, 2023.  It also means that we must broaden our perspective and understand that: selling the rectory, restoring the church steeple and windows, installing a new roof on the parish house, possibly renovating the PH to provide weekday and Sunday support to ALL ages, etc. while calling a new Rector is not all we have to do.

I’m thinking of what we’ve been reading these Sundays from Matthew’s gospel. Bigger than everything on our 2023 agenda is “the kingdom of heaven.”  Please understand, I am not meaning to add to our list of concerns and duties.  I want to bring them together within the context of what I believe God has in heart and mind for us and for the world that God created, is already loving and will continue to love through us.  

In short, ambition is not our only mandate.  Let’s remember whose we are.  Let’s understand that we are not alone, we are stewards of so much more than this block on Academy St. in Madison, GA.  We are inheritors of a promise much larger than our properties, and history, and aspirations.  Everything we will do in the days ahead is just this part of our response to an eternal calling.  We are so fortunate that God has so much for us to do.

FrDann