CharlesLaFond.com

Me and my friend Dennis with the guide Tsingtu, who kept us from getting lost in the jungle

John 15
“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.”

My friend and mentor Chris Corrigan says that when we are born, we all seem to have these three questions on our hearts:
1. “Who is that man?”
2. “Why am I cold?”
3. “Where is my mother?”

And we will spend the rest of our lives asking and re-asking these questions in our search for God and for the life we are to lead. These questions came to mind when I read the gospel passage about friendship from John’s gospel because I am increasingly convinced that two secrets to a happy and balance life are the doorway to contented life. In this crazy society in which we live, reclaiming Sabbath rest and reclaiming real friendship seem to be the only way back to the life God has given to us as gift.

Friendship, seems to me to be God’s answer to all three questions.

Question: “Who is that man?”
Answer: “Keep an eye on him, be gentle as a dove and wise as a serpent with him; but as long as you are surrounded with friends, you will be ok because they have eyes too…they will sense what you need to know and help you to see what you need to see about people who seek to harm you.”

Question: “Why am I cold?”
Answer: “Because you are not fully surrounded by the love of your friends; which is the way I warm you.”

Question: “Where is my mother?”
Answer: “She is God as earth, food, friends, air, water, love: she is everywhere around you – always has been – always will be.”

Friendship, I am increasingly aware, is a key to being able to see the black and whiteness of life turn to Technicolor as it does in the movie The Wizard of Oz.

In spring the days are long and the sun is bright from very early in the morning until late into the evening. The sun, at this time of year is gold – not the blue of winter nor the white of summer. The greens of the grasses and trees are that wonderful light green so infused with the yellow of new plant-life that an early morning walk can produce optimism simply because it is May. It is no wonder that May is a time of love-making. It is a time of potential growth but what of the garden of our souls? What of the garden of our friendships? How are they being prepared? Is there enough dying ion your gardens – that juicy death will feed new plants. Let things die – even some friendships – it will feed and make room for new growth in a new season.

In today’s gospel, Jesus’ death is being portrayed as the ultimate demonstration of love. I love John’s Gospel because it is for the oppressed and confounds oppressors. In John’s gospel, Jesus is friend and friendship means risking everything for friends even if that friend is you. Jesus is linking the act of the cross with the act of the washing of the feet of the disciples. Jesus is weaving these two acts together in what theologians call the “final discourse” – these last words of Christ – the last lecture as it were – Jesus’ last word as the human expression of God as Word.

John’s gospel is complex. It is poetry in both the Hebrew and the Greek but looses much in the English translation. The gospel speaks on three levels and is hard for most people to fully grasp on a quick read making it unpopular in general and impossible for narcissists to understand. But the Gospel of John is my favorite book (alongside the Song of Songs) because it was written by a people who were being attacked and who felt rejected by society for their beliefs and way of life. I feel the same way when I am living a whole, well, centered life and so I get comfort from a Gospel which reminds me that all this – this life we are leading – is about loving each other and risking everything for those we love. I now realize, after six years of thinking, that I entered a monastery because I could not be Amish – a grief from which I may never recover – may never want to recover.

I am just now making the final preparations for my gardens. It is back-breaking work when you live alone and I worked so hard in these past two sunlit days that my newly tested muscles are trembling. In two weeks I will plant vegetables and in four weeks two new sheep will arrive to help keep the grasses low. The chickens are happy and producing more eggs than I can manage to use. But in the end, the gardens of my home on the Blackwater river will not keep me alive. I can always go to the grocery store for Lamb-kabobs and spinach. What keeps me alive is friendship.

What keeps me quite literally alive is friendship. And not just acquaintances but real, loving friendship. I have, on my Ipad, a note page called “The Garden” and on that page are sixty-six names. These people are the people I love and who love me. I call the list of my close friends “The Garden” because that is the garden which sustains my life and within that list is a smaller group called “The Secret Garden” which are the very few people – never more than a dozen- who are my most beloved – the ones you would call if arrested and only were allowed one phone call. It is The Garden and The Secret Garden within The Garden which feeds me and keeps me alive. The people of the first century were struggling to stay alive on food and water. Modern Americans are struggling to stay alive on friendships – and as one looks around – there are a lot of gaunt, emaciated people out there. This Gospel if for Americans and this gospel is for today.

In John’s gospel, the mark of a faithful community is how it loves – love is the only fruit which is born from the Christian life – not handouts, not pledges, not liturgy, not meetings, not titles, not elections. This exercise we call Christianity is about the entwining of love and friendship. And because we are living increasingly busy, over-stimulated lives, the two things we need most be alive in the Christian life are being eroded away: rest and friendship.

I know so many people who spend a lot of time in church and have very fancy titles but the love God gave them for others is being spent on themselves. I know that when I get over-tired and over-worked, my ability to tend the garden of my friendships is eroded and my spiritual life can slip into life-support while lights and alarms go off at the celestial nurses’ station and the Holy Spirit looks at me over her glasses.

The church seems to have slipped into a kind of maintenance-mode-depression but this spiritual sadness I see in congregation after congregation is not so much about the church as it is about lives of congregants and clergy which have been deprived of rest and friendship for too long. Twinkies are not food. Facebook is not friendship.

Today’s gospel is about abundant growth so that there is abundant food – nourishment – garden produce. Jesus is asking us to bear fruit – fruit that will last. He is speaking to farmers- even today – but the garden we now tend is the garden of our friendships. Some of us have lush, full, productive friendship gardens in which the love to which we are being called is flowing like milk and honey. And others among us have arid wastelands of friendship in which the people we call friends barely know us, never hear from us and would not know much about our lives if interviewed about us. And most are in-between with friendship gardens sparsely populated with some good plants but overgrown with the weeds of over-work, exhaustion, over-stimulation, television watching, internet surfing and a myriad of other self-anesthetizing undiagnosed addictions.

If you want to tend to your spiritual life, do not spend your time getting good at going to church. Spend your time getting good at friendship. Because that practice will make this Eucharistic event at church come to life. Church without the hard work of love-relationships – and loving friends in our society is very hard work indeed – back-breaking at times – the church without the hard work of love-relationships is just a series of gestures:

Walk in to church, sit, stand, sing, sit, stand, sing, sit stand sing, confess, hug, shake hands, sit, walk, take, eat, walk, sit, stand, sing, walk, shake, walk, brunch. Wait six days. Repeat.

And we wonder why our churches are not appealing to younger generations…. lol

But we are Easter people. We were made to love each other. There is another way. When was the last time you invited close friends over for a long dinner throughout which the candles burned out? When was the last time you held a person’s hand (other than your partner’s) and simply walked and talked deeply about your lives – allowing secrets to be told, accountability to be held, intimacy to flourish without sexuality being the goal? One of the things I so loved about the Haitian culture when I was living in Cap Haitien, Haiti was that grown men and women – entirely heterosexual, would walk hand in hand when they talked to each other. From my room overlooking the Boulevard along the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea they would walk in the evening, holding hands. When I asked why there were hundreds of gay people walking by the sea my friend Meg laughed till she cried. “Haitians are not like us Charles. They are not afraid to touch each other. They hold hands to be connected – to remember – literally – to re-member as they talk about their lives ” I wish I lived in a culture unafraid to touch each other- their hands like Haitians do or their feet like Jesus did. Would the cauldron of sexual tensions which press on our insides like volcanic fissures, spurned on by attention-getting media and cultural repression – would that internal stress lessen if we could gently, kindly, appropriately touch each other. Satan’s plan is simply to exhaust and separate us – creating the fire-wall he seeks to infect our relationship with God. And it is working. And it has no paper trail. A perfect plan.

So don’t just take out your Bible and your prayer-book. Take out your address book. Discern The Garden of your friendships. Do the weeding from time to time– it will be hard and painful but it will also make space for good, fruitful growth. Do the planting – new plants look small but will grow over time. Fertilize and water your friendship garden with calls, notes, small gifts, dinners, walks in the woods. You say I have no time? From where, over the past 10 years did you find the time for the internet? You have the time, but it is not “found,” it is “made.” Make time for friends – rich time over a long, candle-lit meal. Stare into their eyes and love them and be loved by them. For it is there, at a dinner table or on on a walk in woods, as much as here in a church, that you will see Jesus lovingly staring back at you from within human eyes. And that stare will answer all your questions. Forever.

making soup for conversations with nominees for Bishop of New Hampshire

The walk-a-bouts being done in the Diocese of New Hampshire to engage the three nominees for Bishop with the good people of our diocese are underway. They are going smoothly. There is no politicking, no posturing, and neither manipulation nor cloaked “guidance” (the term the church often uses when it wants to sterilize manipulation and then dip it in chocolate for consumption.) This process is so clean and bright and honest partly because we are a good place with good people – a place and a people, as the Bible says “with no guile.” And partly this is going well because less planning went into the Battle of Normandy than went into this process. Planning warms my heart.

And even though I know and love the people of this diocese in whom there truly is no guile (on most days) I still paused yesterday before going to my first walk-about. This decision we make will have a huge impact on my life, personally. There are no two ways around it. It will. No matter who is elected. So while I was throwing two-pounder bowls for my friend Kate, I slowed the wheel down and, looking at the clock, saw that it was time to go to the walk-about and hesitated. Briefly. Just paused. Not afraid and not anxious and not worried – just paused.

On reflecting on this pause I noticed something. It occurred to me that the best thing about the pause was that I noticed it. My sabbatical changed my life. It literally changed my life. I went to Thailand and lived there with sets of friends generous enough to join me there, each of whom God sent to me as angels of healing and teaching. I learned mindfulness (attentiveness we call it in Christianity) and employ that skill now, when I am balanced. It runs within me as a new spiritual antivirus protection program.

But within that mindfulness and the mindfulness of the mindfulness….was another knowing. The pause reminded me of one in scripture.

In the Book of Genesis, in the first chapter, God is creating the planet. God speaks creation into being. God says poetry to speak existence and to speak creation. I guess that is why Jesus comes to us as the Word and not just as the idea. In creation, God says things like “let there be a dome, let the waters under the sky be gathered, the the earth put forth vegetation, let there be lights in the dome, let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, let the earth bring forth living creatures.” God goes into this repetitive mantra, this sing-songy chorus of let us… let us… let us… let us… and ends that work with calling it good.

But then, in Genesis there is a pregnant pause.

God seems to pause before proceeding with the last bit of creation.

God steps back from His divine potter’s wheel and waits before making this next creature. In verse 26, God changes the cadence and the word-structure of the speaking of creation; and since God chooses to speak creation into existence rather than making it in utter silence, one notices the shift.

God, before making humanity, pauses.

God says “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” God shifts from “let there be” to “let us.” God, in the life of the Trinity, seems to call a meeting. And it occurs to me that since God has just made the planet and all its creatures in this myth, God includes non-human and para-human creation in this meeting God is calling. God says “let us make” as if making humanity is a matter of, perhaps, some concern. And given what I see on the planet today, I can see why. It seems as if God says “um…the planet is lovely…um….what do we all think about this next “creation?” Before we actually press “send” on the divine keyboard of creation’s email – can we just think on this a minute?. Because, once we do this….

But last night, as I saw three nominees sparkle in their own wonderful ways and as I heard our laypeople ask such excellent, thought-provoking, informed, astute, unencumbered, unmanipulative questions I could see before me that, though I understand the divine pause when I am watching the nightly news, I also see in this diocese and far beyond it why God went ahead and pressed “send” so that humanity could be made – wonderfully made – made not just good, but very good.

The above thoughts occurred me as I made broccoli soup and cornbread for the diocesan staff lunch today which was held after conversations with the nominees for Bishop.

Mississippi Corn Bread

One batch (serves
4 tbsp bacon grease or butter
1 c. flour
1 c. course cornmeal (get the Red Mill Course grind!)
1 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp soda
1 ½ c. butter milk
2 lg or 3 small eggs
preheat oven to 425
melt butter or grease in pans (skillet)
mix dry ingredients and sift
add buttermilk, eggs stir briskly
pour hot grease into batter, stir and immediately pour into skillet (pans)
bake 20 – 25 minutes

Broccoli Soup

Simmer for one hour the following:
2 onions
4 crowns of broccoli, chopped
1 potato, chopped
8 cups of chicken stock
salt
pinch of cayenne pepper

add a heavy pinch of nutmeg and a pint of heavy cream (do not let the soup boil after adding the cream)

serve very hot or ice-cold

The beautiful Shepherd
A sermon based on John 10:11-16
Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Charles LaFond
for the Eucharist of April 28, 2012, Easter
St. David’s, Austin, Texas

The question is this. Why would God leave the comfort of the love dance – that Virginia Reel of love in which the Father, Son and Spirit dance from eternity – why would God leave that to come to be among humanity where God knew he would take the hit of our resentments? Why allow something so beautiful as Jesus to be so roughly marked by punches, whips and nails? Why deface something beautiful? Was this whole Easter enterprise not some public relations thing to show us that the persons in side that Godhead love those of us outside it – down here – on earth. Yes. It was a crazy act of love for God’s flock. It was as crazy, as madcap, as startling an act as – oh, I don’t know – as an upper-middle class church using graffiti to reach out to God’s flock.

Growing up in Montreal, we had a tree farm to which we went on weekends. There was an old, Scottish, stone farmhouse with walls four feet thick and the back property line was the American boarder. My father, a writer by trade, went to the farm to relax and to enjoy tending his sheep. He had 48 sheep and two rams named, of course, Abraham and Isaac and he was never happier than when he was in the fields with his Border Collie, his shepherd’s crook and his beloved sheep. When he died, he only left me one posession – he left me his shepherd’s crook. At the time I was a monk but my Dad wanted me to be a Bishop.

Though I left the monastery to preach and teach, I do not want to be a Bishop. In fact, I would quite prefer to drink battery acid. So when I left the monastery, I purchased a farm in the middle of a forest, and have two sheep arriving next week at my little farm. It’s not 50 sheep; but then my dad was a bit of an over-achiever.

In the parable of the beautiful shepherd, Jesus is portrayed as one with the sheep – so united to the beloved sheep that he knows his sheep, and we know Him. This reality of Jesus’ closeness to humanity can be seen in the great Celtic knots which weave in and out of each other – in the end, it becomes impossible to see where one begins and the other ends.

Key to understanding today’s gospel is looking at it in the richness of its original language.

The Gospel today is speaking of a shepherd who identifies with sheep given to him. We often translate the Greek as ‘Good Shepherd” but an exact translation is “beautiful shepherd.” He differentiates from the “hired hand” who is not the shepherd, as one who does not have the same sense of ownership – the same connection. The hired hand will run away at the sight of danger, but Christ walks into the danger to protect the sheep.

I am often saddened when I hear sermons which point out how stupid or dirty sheep are. God loves us not as soon-to-be Sunday dinner – some leg-of-lamb dinner, but as “beloved.” There is a certain kind of connection, as if boundaries are intentionally blurred. between God and we, God’s beloved ones. Because God in-dwells us the boundaries are blurred. The character of the devil in C.S. Lewis’ famous book The Screwtape Letters is amazed by a God who would love and identify with His creatures. He refers to humans as “hairless bi-peds” and says, in a sort or amazement, that God “actually loves the creatures” an idea he finds repulsive.

It is customary today to speak of a flock of sheep, but the Greek in today’s gospel refers to a sheep-herd; a herd of sheep. The Greek for sheep herd is “poimne” and the Greek for shepherd is “poimen”. So the best translation for the last verse is “There will be one sheep herd, one shepherd.” Can you see that the original text was a playful use of words. The poetry was designed by the writer to blur the lines between God and we humans by using two words which sound almost exactly alike.

This gospel is about unity. The Father’s unity with the Son. The Son’s unity with the Father. The Son’s unity with the people God calls his “beloved.” The shepherd’s unity with his sheep. In the death and resurrection, that which was divided is being brought back together. The whole universe is being gathered back by God and all of redemption is taking what is broken apart and uniting it back to one-ness.

Poimne, poimen. Sheep herd, shepherd. Even the words betray a certain lack of boundaries – a certain similarity – a certain unity. What God loves in us and in creation is that part of God which all life bears. God loves that which comes from God like a mother loving her child in her womb because they are one and yet, also two. “One sheep herd” becomes entwined with “one shepherd.”

One of the most beautiful things about St. David’s church here in Austin is that you are doing precisely what God has asked you to do. You are tending deeply to your spiritual lives but you seem to be doing that SO THAT you can turn outward to a world in need of the love you have found in your shepherd. I get lots of invitations to visit churches and politely decline most. One thing I learned growing up in the south is how to be pathologically polite. But I accepted this invitation because you write graffiti on your church walls. You are not a club of the like-minded, smugly self-satisfied about your beautiful buildings and talented staff. You instead deface your building with art in order reach out to the rest of God’s sheep-herd – God’s beloved “poimne” – the “other sheep not of this fold” The one flock is not the episcopal church. The one flock is the entirety of the planet.

a cold martini - $15 - the perfect light - priceless

three beloved friends in baroque

la vie est belle...so dance and live it! lESSEZ LES BON TEMPS ROULEZ

Jeff and Bryan...the glasses make the men, the last bite of meat pie makes the festival

music from the river

mojitos, mint, friends and conversations about fasting

the tortured artist writes a short story about southern sadnesses

joy, connection and relaxation

new friends

mojito

Jeff's chilled beat salad

brussel sprouts with a balsamic glaze and bacon....

grief

a pile of fresh, fried seafood (with oysters the size of avocados) and Barbara Brown Taylor's latest truth-telling - the perfect day

My friends Jeff and Bryan, with whom I am spending my vacation, are to me in my life as Mary was to Jesus – that is to say, reliable. That is her charism. She just was present to Jesus when needed. She never said it would be ok or even easy but she was not overly impressed with Jesus either. Savior-of-the-world or not, when your child’s butt explodes in his diaper, you become attached to his physicality and his reality. Mary did not romanticize Jesus but she loved him and was always there when needed – there on the way to the cross, there at the cross, there at the tomb…she was reliable.

Sometimes I think I want my friends to be funny. Sometimes I think I want them to be available. Sometimes I think I want them to be adoring of me or impressed by me, or my champion, or my nurse or my shaman or my fixer or my partner or my lover or my companion or my agent. And some of these are ok and some need to be left on the cutting room floor. But I define hell as “getting what you thought you wanted” and so I have come to realize that my friends will sometimes be very gifted at friendship and sometimes suck at it. My friends will sometimes be very attentive and sometimes be A.W.A.L. But in the end, I can always tell my real friends for one very special attribute which makes all other failures null and void. I know my closest friends by their reliability and I work hard to try to be reliable to my closest friends.

Jeff and Bryan were there for me when life brought me to my lowest moment. It was odd that it was them – we barely new each other at the time. But when life made my legs go weak and my mind go blank with grief – a time which happens to all of us – they were there and they carried me until I could walk again. Is the friendship mystical? I do not know. Do strange cosmos-aligning things happen when we are together? Always.

I believe that there are two kinds of friends. Some are “made” friends. These are the people we connect with along the road and with whom we do the good gardening of friendship – trimming, weeding, feeding the friendship so that it can grow. But the second level of friends are “found” friends. With these few, there is a mystical bond which has always been there. You had been designed to meet and be friends. You are simply connecting after a life-long separation. Nothing, no distance, could separate you.

Praise God for our friends. Praise God for what our ex-friends taught us about ourselves. Praise God for our made friends.

Praise God for our found friends. They are a sacrament…what scripture calls “the pearl of great price.”

My God-daughter Ellen (middle) and her partner Charlie (right)

Last night I was able to meet Ellen’s partner Charlie. My godchildren are important to me. I have watched Ellen grow up these last 12 years into the stunning human being she has become. Meeting her partner Charlie was a stunning experience. He is full of light and as gentle as a faun while at the same time powerful and serene. Ellen is as full of joy as a person can be. As the daughter of two of my closest friends, Ellen is part of my family and so too now is Charlie. I have three Charlies in my life – my father, my great-nephew and now my God-daughter’s partner.

Life is full of beginnings and endings, people leave our lives and others come into our lives. People become made new by life’s choices and we all live in the dance. May the God of all humanity bless and keep my sweet Ellen and Charlie, nurture their lives together, engage them with the prayers I make for them and bring as much joy to the world as they did to my life last night over a dinner full to the brim of laughter.

An Easter moment at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Hanover, New Hampshire

One day in Thailand with my friends Kurt and Darlene, or perhaps Dennis, or perhaps Steve and Dave…it is hard to keep track of those wonderful days of walking, healing, curry and heat … one day with some of my friends, we went to visit a silk factory. We took motor bikes out of the city and down into a craft mecca – village after village of crafts were made and sold. There was a village which made paper umbrellas and another that made celadon pottery and another of hammered silver and one of carved wood. In this silk factory we were kindly brought through the process. The worms spin their cocoon, their cocoons are boiled to release the woven silks (sadly so too are the worms boiled alive) then a bit of silk is pulled from the boiling pot onto a spool which seems to draw an endless and constant string onto a spool. From there it is boiled in dye and then taken to the loom.

At the loom there is an intricate wooden system of pulleys and racks. With floor pedals, the vertical (longitudinal) strings are taken up and down like the jaws of a shark, as if one were to put one’s palms together and pass the fingers of the hand in an out between each other. Meanwhile as the vertical strings are taken up and down, the horizontal strings (the silk colors) are run back and forth from left to right on wooden things (that is not the technical word…which i think is a “shuttle”) so that weaving occurs. After a time, a rather long time, colors begin to show up. In one Hmong village in the mountains, women use their body to weight the loom and run the wooden things back and forth as below…

a H'mong body loom for weaving silks

I have often since imagined God is I saw this woman -partly because I can imagine God as a weaver and partly because God’s being a man is preposterous.

The reason I find this image of the loom and the weaver coming to mind in Easter week is that it feels like life is very much like being on this loom. Indeed, it is as if God is holding the body loom tied to her waist like the woman in the village in Northern Thailand with whom I sat and had some tea one afternoon – basking in the warmth of the tea and of her smile. My God’s working of the cosmos in which little, tiny me exists; feels like the longitudinal threads on the warp and my own life feels like it is one of the colors of silk (ok, perhaps wool…) on the shuttle running back and forth through the base longitudinal threads to weave the cloth. not so much a narcissist as to believe that my life is the only one with which God seems to be working, I am aware that the various colors God is weaving are like the various humans God is forming. Some colors are dark and some bright as pink while others muted as a rich taupe. Pink and taupe interwoven is stunning…good thing since life feels mostly like those two colors to me.

As I experience Easter over and over again in our Anglican tradition – always falling in spring between white Winter’s Christmas and red Summer’s Pentecost, it feels a bit like these liturgical worship seasons – Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter are a lot like those longitudinal strings on the loom tied to God’s hips. As God takes my life and sends the shuttle called “Charles” back and forth between the long threads of the seasons in this eternity in which God and we exist, the shuttle holding my little “Charles-color” flies across the longitudinal threads; back and forth and back and forth among so many other colors – other people – eight billion of them. And together we all participate in the weaving of a cloth.

Year after year, my “shuttle” is sent whizzing past these many liturgical events, Lent III, Lent IV, Lent V, Palm Sunday, Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, O Nymphios Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Vigil, Easter Day, Easter Monday and on and on…each one a longitudinal base-string on the loom of God’s hips. And each year as I pass past these strings, white, purple, red, black, green – I am aware that they are changing the hues of my colors and my colors are changing their hues and the colors of other people’s lives are changing my color and mine changing theirs. Only God, whose face is away from the loom – the face of an artist of immense capacity for creativity – only the Master Artist is able to see how these colors are being woven into a cloth which will, as eternity unfolds, be laid on God’s shoulders as warmth and vestment both.

At times, usually in moments of intense awareness, I am able to see a flash of the tapestry as if God has taken my fly-shuttle and lifted me away a bit so that I can catch a bit of a view. But for now, mostly, I find I am flying past these threads of Sundays and am content to let the Master Weaver make the color choices. I like to try to be in charge, to form my life, to manipulate my destiny, to build my career as if my role is so important. It is not at all important. But it is beloved and that is enough for this little spindle of silk.

Sometimes, I look down at my life and the colors of my thread has changed hues and sometimes even changed colors entirely. Seasons of my life can go from Hot Pink to Taupe to Gunmetal Grey and then back to Chrysanthemum Yellow. But the good thing is that I am not the Master Weaver and so I can trust that as my colors change in different seasons of my life, I can be sure that the Artist I love with all my heart and soul is taking my color changes into account and sending my shuttle flying across those threads among colors just suited to my new shade …and their new shade. This takes the pressure off of me. It means that no matter what people around me do or say – good or bad – all I need to do is be the color I am and let the Divine Weaver make me a part of this stunning planet of blues and greens and browns, tans and grays.

And at times, as in this blog’s opening photo from St. Thomas in Hanover at the Easter Vigil, I simply need to keep an eye out for the way the Sunlight hits the cross among the altar flowers and be content that I could never have so combined light, brass and yellow. The miracle may not just be that He is Risen. It may also be that we see that rising in our lives and, in turn, give our lives away too.

berries in a pottery bowl of flamed-red oxblood glaze on reduction stoneware

We are about to shift gears. Our liturgies will be in danger of taking something which was very simple and making it into something very complicated. We will be in danger of forgetting that before the silver paten held wafers, a clay bowl held food.

We have been slowly gearing up the motors of our spiritual sensitivities as we have made our way from the pilgrimage of Palm Sunday through the first three days of Holy Week. Now we face a hill and the gears must downshift. We have a way to walk. We have internal work to do. We have eternal work to do. But it is all nothing if we are not about finding love, speaking love, expressing love, coming together for love.

Clergy begin a relentless series of demanding services to host like those medieval country houses which had to manage meal after meal of sumptuousness for the visiting court of royalty on progress through the kingdom. They eat like locusts and take in a kind of frenzy. Pray for the clergy as they host these meals of awareness.

We are about to shift gears. We have been slowly gearing up the motors of our spiritual sensitivities as we have made our way from the pilgrimage of Palm Sunday through the first three days of Holy Week. Now we face a hill and the gears must downshift. We have a way to walk.

Clergy begin a relentless series of demanding services to host like those medieval country houses which had to manage meal after meal of sumptuousness for the visiting court of royalty on progress through the kingdom. They eat like locusts and take in a kind of frenzy. Pray for the clergy as they host these meals of awareness.

We begin what some call “the way of the Cross.” Tenebrae will rumble and resound into the Triduum of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday’s Great Vigil – the crowning glory of the Church’s liturgical year in which we remember our story as Christians and as pilgrims.

But as I see these liturgies set out before me like so many stepping-stones on a glass-like lake I wonder if they are nothing more than a church’s way to ask us to be mindful. We are simply noticing what is true and what is important.

There will be clergy out there who will scold their congregants for liturgical mis-steps, their faces becoming as purple as their vestments in their liturgy-nazi-vigilance to make what was a meal into a golden calf at the expense of kind people doing their best; thereby making the services loud as symbols but lacking in love. There will be other clergy out there who will host gentle and awe-inspiring services in which people are given the time and space to meet God as they need to meet God. And there will be everything in between. God help the congregants whose liturgical atmosphere is perfect but not loving.

Can we remember – as we remember so many stories this week, that the Eucharist was just a meal with friends, and even enemies, sitting – even reclining – around good food, and telling each other their hopes and fears? Can we, as we polish brass and iron lace and press vestments – can we remember that this story was a simple one before the Church’s professionals got their hands on it? Can we remember the faithful people of God who come to church just to be together for a meal in a society which has lost a sense of community and connection and lost the willingness to show each other our wounds? Can we remember that the bowls of the first Eucharist were not sterling silver and filled with round quarter-sized wafers tasting of wheat and bleach but also held berries, olives, oils, and smoky hummus? Can we remember that along with the wine were grapes, figs and lamb kabobs? Can we remember that along with the stories spoken were stories held silently and told only through watery eyes? Can we remember that the story we will be re-telling is not the church’s story but the people’s story?

In a poem based in the Lord’s Prayer and written by Richard Meux Benson, founder of the monastery which formed me, Fr. Benson beautifully links the power of the Eucharist with the vulnerability and drawing together of Christian community. He says” Give us true bread from heaven, even the flesh of thy dear Son, for he is our Spiritual food and sustenance, without which we have no life in us. By participation in this bread, thy faithful people are all made one bread, one body, in union with each other…”

Jesus commands: Drink this cup. Eat this bread. The great monk of early 20th century liturgical reform, Dom Gregory Dix rightly asks “was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and race on earth, this action has been done in every conceivable circumstance, for every human need from before infancy to after extreme old age.”

For a Belgian Nun’s clothing or for a bride and bridegroom in a country church, we eat from the plate. For the wisdom of the government or for an old, sick man afraid to die – we drink from the cup. For children entering exams or for Columbus entering a new world – we eat from the plate. For the famine of a dust bowl or for the soul of a dead brother- we drink from the cup. While lions roared in a nearby amphitheater, on a beach at Dunkirk; by a mother at a christening in her church in Cambridge, England; by a monk on the anniversary of his vows in Cambridge, Massachusetts; carefully, by an exiled Bishop in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously for a new Bishop in a suburb near Milwaukee – one could fill the volumes of a million books – with the reasons we come, hopefully, trembling to one wine and one bread, bearing our suffering, celebrating our joys – taking that cup – drinking deeply. We are the holy, vulnerable, common, beloved people of God. That is what we do. And with each sip, each bite – there is the taste of unity and even eternity.

Holy Tuesday breakfast...

On Palm Sunday, I began a retreat-week which will run through Easter. A retreat week is nothing so holy…just mindfulness, some holy reading (I have chosen Barbara Brown Taylor’s stunning new book about finding altars everywhere – what a black-eye for the Church!!!) and three periods of meditation each day. I take my annual retreat in Holy Week because the clergy are busy and I can get very little accomplished in the office. Most clergy take their annual retreat week in summer or after Christmas or in Easter season. A retreat week is to a priest is as a re-certification is to an air-traffic controller – a professional requirement for integrity and competency. Priests who say they are too busy for an annual retreat make me snicker.

Remembering the adolescence of my faith which, sadly, ran from my teens through my mid-forties, I can remember the vague sensation that this “Holy Week” is a week in which I should be feeling rather more guilt than I usually do. I used to say longer prayers and they had considerably more apologies in them than the run-of-the-mill prayers said in August under sunny skies filled with the fragrance of summer’s blossoms. I would wear black a lot and let my inner puritan run rampant around the playground of my psyche bullying the other little me’s inside my head.

I had drunk the cool-aide. I had believed what my Dutch Reformed teachers at school said to me about sin, Anglicans and the evil woven into us like black-gold on a royal tapestry of Satan’s panties. I believed the vague coolness of my Bretheren friends who loved me in that patronizing love that a peticoated princess loves a lost puppy covered in mud and brought in from the gutters of Anglican heresy. In those days I believed I was sinful; and in the hands of an angry God. And in those days I believed that Holy Week was God’s version of college pledge-week- a time of relentless hazing. Humanity is forced to crawl on hands and knees through the legs of a row of angels there to smack behinds and scream “Naughty! Naughty!” to all the evil-doers.

I would come up with ingenious fasts in which I would give up things and then, in my piety, I would reek of holiness like a bathroom doused with bleach so that eyes burn with the cleanliness. I would read the works of dusty Anglican Bishops whose pen wrote sonnets of God’s love and prayers of God’s kindness with the very same pen used minutes before to sign warrants for the arrest and torture of those whose beliefs differed from their eminence’s. I would pray prayers written by wizened, celibate clergy whose mistresses were pouring them more wine in order to loosen the words onto the page. One more book, one more book’s revenues, one more country house.

But recently, I was shaken out of those holier-than-thou annual Lenten rituals by an awareness that God is much bigger than a vow not to eat chocolate and much kinder than a sanctimonious Christian who’s chocolate-free Lent has made them every bit as holy as mean, bitchy and cranky.

My friends Chris and Mari (oh, how my soul aches when I think of how much I love them…how much I love so many of my friends…friendship is a sacrament unacknowledged by the rituals of the church and yet its molten core…but I digress…) Chris and Mari always ask me what I have given up for Lent. They ask because they know that my answer is always the same…”I have given up the rare and beautiful Balajaro Harara Red Hot Pepper – grown only under one bush in the mountains of Peru during the leap year and under a full moon– very rare – very delicious…but my piety demands that I make sacrifices…” They laugh on cue. So do I.

It is with Mari and Chris that on my first pastoral visit to their home as a curate, I decided we should cut into the butter-cream cake with raspberry filling which I had in my car. I expect it was even Lent. I had bought it for some church function. But Mari was serving tea and Chris said he had missed lunch and I LOVE LOVE LOVE butter-cream cake with raspberry filling (one can only buy a good one from Chandler’s bakery in Charlottesville!) We ate a piece after I had gone off to my car like the Grinch on green-slippered pointy tippy toes – a plunk of a violin string sounding on each step. We ate that cake and laughed about eating butter-cream cake in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday and we became life-long friends. I was the Godfather of their first child. Baby Elizabeth died while I was a monk and the monks would not let me go to the funeral. My friend Harold told me that at the funeral, he was wearing my old alb – the one I left behind in my office closet when I went to the monastery. He wore my old alb when he did the funeral for little Elizabeth. Everyone was sobbing in the church hall before the service until they noticed something on Harold’s alb cuff … it was butter-cream icing from a Chandler’s cake served at my good-bye party when I entered the monastery. When Harold mentioned this little memento on his liturgical cuff, Mari’s wailing turned, ever so briefly, from agony to hilarity, bending her double in laughter.

There is so much to mourn in our world, but most of it is not of God’s doing. Most of it is of our doing. And I wonder if God is so enamored of our bowing and scraping, our fasting and our confessions. I wonder if God is less inclined to be pleased by a stomach growing on Holy Tuesday from fasting and more inclined to wink at us, and in our agony of life’s sadnesses, slide a big, huge piece of butter-cream cake with raspberry filling across the altar of our lives on a paten with two forks. And little baby-Elizabeth, bouncing on God’s knees, waiting to be reunited with me and Mari and Chris in whatever creative, wonderful way God has so devised; also, I suspect, has a bit of butter-cream and red-raspberry filling on the corner of her little, laughing mouth. And with closer inspection the angels have alb-cuffs similarly smudged with red jam and white icing.

So no longer do I fast during my Holy Week retreat. Rather, with an old friend at the table, I tuck into my favorite breakfast – some good strong ginger tea, seven-grain bread with cheese and a boiled egg which went, just minutes ago, directly from the warmth of a chicken’s under-belly to the warmth of a pot of boiling water so that the yolk is as orange as the robe of a newly minted Buddhist monk.

the cheese course - simple, evident, soft, sweet, tart

Having recently exchanged my television cable package for netflix, I have dropped my monthly bill from $80 to $8. The change came from some mindfulness that too much of my time during tired evenings was being spent mindlessly surfing channels, trying to find something to watch for an hour or so before bed. As I age and approach my 50′s, my body begins to tire after a long day. I enjoy half a glass of box wine, some nuts, a roaring fire and an hour of television.

I found that the television I was watching was neither entertaining nor of any value. It did not instruct me nor did it inspire me nor did it encourage me to think about life, death or the world around me. I began to feel that the television was baby-sitting me the way a mother dangles a sparkly thing in front of a cranky child. I felt minded by a screen. Kai, from the chair across the living room, just stares at me as if I am a silly little thing in a hole and unable to climb out. Which I sometimes am.

So now I watch Netflix when I need some down-time. I can choose things which delight me or teach me or encourage me, rather than just things that dull me into distraction. I can be intentional about what my eyes see so that what I am allowing into my head is not too violent, not too mean-spirted, not too stupid (although this last rule of life is often slackened so that I can watch fun things which make me laugh..laughter is essential in life!).

These past few days I have been watching the final episodes of the television show “The Tudors” and today, Palm Sunday, have seen the end of Henry’s life- the end of season four. I am aware of the creative license which the television screen play-writers have taken. I am aware that in order to carve a story down into episodes and in order to make it entertaining to a secular audience, the writers changed things, omitted things, inserted things, re-ordered things.

From what I have read, the team working on the show were rather young and were much like most un-churched and de-churched television viewers, so I was interested in what our culture thinks of the church by how it portrays the church in secular television. As I watch a television show about the people and events which founded and began much of what we Anglicans consider church nit is interesting to me to see how Henry the Eighth and his Archbishop of Canterbury are portrayed. It is interesting that his evil Archbishop is portrayed exactly as he was – a sneaky narcissist seeking fame and money and burning anyone in his way at the stake. Ever been burned alive?..not fun or so it seems. They say your lower half can roast for a long time before your body dies. But I guess the church does what it must…

Of course, our theology was being formed by reformers before Henry decided to trade in his first wife for his second. But what we know about people is that their childhood forms them. It in interesting for me to see what our society thinks of our founding church story. Whether the story is accurate is less important than how it is told by those who see the church from the outside. These TV writers were aware of what would please their target audience and what would SEEM true – young baby boomers, Gen X and some Gen Y – people under 40. They were playing to their audience – giving them what they want. People under 40 and over 15 are watching this television show. They love it! It has royal splendor, sex, intrigue, adventure, mystery and beauty. And like so many other shows such as Pillars of the Earth and the Borgias, the evil characters, the shifty ones, the maniacal ones, the thieving ones are priests and Bishops. It is interesting that in these shows, seen and loved by the culture, the church and her clergy are seen as the antagonists and the layity are the protagonists seeking reform.

It is, in short, a great story, The Tudors is. A king gives wealth and power to his nobles who, in order to keep their wealth and power, do as the king bids them to do. Over and over again, if the king wants a new wife, they simply all nod and agree that his old one was whatever he said she was – heretic, adulterer, fornicator, incestuous, dull, ugly. What the show reminded me is that his royal court was made up of nobles and many of these nobles were clergy.

It was a time in which the reformation was beginning to bubble up and the people were less and less inclined to believe the “hocus pocus” of the church and her power-mongering. I am reminded that our modern term “hocus pocus” which we like to think of as the spell cast by witches over cauldrons was actually from the church’s Latin liturgy and was from the phrase “Hoc est enim corpus meum” which came from the Eucharist when the priest says “This is my body” and was developed one hundred years after Henry VIII to mock the church’s clergy and their belief that although the bread looked like bread after the Eucharistic prayers, it was actually the physical flesh of Christ and only appeared to look like bread. Over time, after Henry’s rule-by-narcissism and Mary’s rule-by-burnings-and-tortures, Elizabeth’s long rule gave her the needed opportunity to help the Anglican church to find a middle way so that not only did we leave Roman magic-making but we did not throw “the baby out with the bath water” by so embracing protestantism that we were defined by what it hated.

Today is Palm Sunday and so begins Holy Week. I am aware that our focus this week is on the way of Christ to the Cross for our sins and, again, for the 40th year in a row, I will do so as best I can.

But I can’t help look back over these 40 years and how my faith has changed, shifted, been lost at times, been en-flamed at times and been modified by the holy, good people around me. Slowly I have come to see God not as angry, lurking around in black cassocks seeking heretics and sinners to roast – but rather joyful and dancing around seeking dance-partners to love. I have come to find that we are, after all, not basically evil and streaked with good; but rather, we are basically good and streaked with evil. I have come to see what makes me a better human and what makes me a worse one. I have, as the Buddhists say, learned that watering and caring for seeds in me of envy, pride, arrogance and lust only grows vines which choke out good flowers in my life’s garden. Come to think of it, we Christians have a similar saying.

I have come to a point in life in which my Holy Week is not so focused on the sins of the heathen but on the sins of the church. The burnings in the name of God. The torturing in the name of conversion. The manipulations in the name of church power and authority. The murders in the name of “orthodoxy.” The sham-trials in the name of doctrine. I think of the millions and millions whom leaders in the church have burned, tortured, raped, pillaged and I can see why modern atheists and agnostics say they are not interested in the church as the body of Christ if that is what the body does.

I have some friends in Webster who are non-churched. They are under 35 years of age and they are mostly farmers. They nod politely to my priestly vocation but equally politely decline interest in joining me at church, preferring to have bread and wine with me at a dinner table – long dinners of conversation about living a good life together on this planet – broken bread, sipped wine but lacking creeds and doctrines. When I ask them about the show “The Tudors” they say they love the show! When I ask them why they think the most evil and despicable characters in the show they love are Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran clergy, they look at their plates, smile a bit and ask for wine and cheese. And with a little more wine and a few laughs … we all forget that I asked such a question. or at least we forget for a while.

God bless us this Holy Week. God bless the church too. May she be healed of her dis-eases.