Quiet is a place

When I went into the fifth grade, I went into a new school. My little brothers went into kindergarten and the second grade with me in our new school – a relatively small Christian school in Portland, Oregon – in the fall of 1969. At that school a lot of the teachers were wives of seminarians, in Portland to go to Western Baptist Seminary. In the fall of 1969, Mrs. Dunlap was one of those seminary wives. I wonder now how long she had been married, or how long she had been teaching. However long it had been, she had not lost her sense of fun. She thought school could be really interesting. Fun.

One week that year we had a spelling list comprised of everyone’s first and last names. Brilliant! And we studied the prophet Elijah. We made props and costumes and had a huge play about Elijah after we had studied his story. I worked with Barbara – I remember the black ravens we made together – the ravens that brought the prophet bread by the brook Cherith. And I remember the fight we had. Artistic differences, I think. We were friends all the way through high school, though. Our differences over the ravens didn’t do permanent damage, apparently.

That year is when I first heard about the raising of the widow’s son from the dead, and the oil that never ran out. This is good stuff. High drama, and just about right for a classroom full of fifth graders. A chariot of fire at the end of his life. Teasing the evil prophets of Baal when they couldn’t make their god light their altar on fire – and then praying to the real God until the fire He sent not only burnt the sacrifice but also licked up the wood and the water! What a story!

Peter Paul Rubens, An Angel Gives Bread and Water to Elijah

We also learned about Elijah’s rather volatile reactions to things. (They would probably give him drugs today. He seems to have been a bit manic depressive. Of course, Mrs. Dunlap didn’t teach us that. I figured out that part later.) And Ahab! What a putz! Weak and malicious Ahabs still marry Jezebels to do their dirty work for them. That wicked queen Jezebel hated Elijah so much. She tried over and over to get him killed. But she was too evil. She died, falling and splattering all over the ground, and the dogs ate her body. (Why didn’t someone feed those dogs so they wouldn’t need to do such things?) As I say, good drama. All fifth graders are slightly blood thirsty, and they have a very strong sense of justice. Elijah is a good prophet for fifth graders.

There was one episode in Elijah’s life that has held a deeper and deeper meaning for me since I first heard it back then. The episode happened right after a triumph. He went to a cave. He was utterly exhausted, by the sounds of it. He despaired. He was convinced that there was no one but him who was still faithful. He begged God to let him die. And God came to him in his despair. God always does come to his children in their despair. But God was not in the wind, or in the earthquake, or in the fire. God was in the still small voice.

God is still there. God is in the still small voice.

This is important to me right now because there is a lot of wind, the ground is very unsteady, and the fire burns whenever I read the news, opinions, and shockingly bad catechesis of the many, many people who are noisily involved in the recent offer of Rome to the Anglicans.

It makes me despair. It makes me want to rant and rail and leave comments on blogs – comments carefully designed to cut people to ribbons for their destruction and deceit. I know some of these people personally. I know who they’ve hurt and what they’ve lied about. I have seen Anglicans – especially Anglicans wearing the collars of the sacred Ministry – behaving like wolves, ravening and savaging the people of God. I want to stop them. To hit back. Suddenly I am a fifth grader again, and I can think of very bloody, painful things to do to these people. Their faces float across my mind’s eye when I read the imprecatory Psalms and I am startled at my own violence.

And I want to correct the thousands of catechetical errors I am finding – not to mention the atrocious gaffs, insults, and outright lies when people tell the stories of their own experience, painting things so insanely it’s like looking at a sunset turned all green and sulphorous — and then twisted through a warped lens — and then printed on mouldy paper. I feel ill when I read these things.

And then I notice it. Obvious by its absence, I see it again. Against the background of wind, and fire, and earthquake, where God can stop the violence of storm and quiet the raging waters and stem the tide whenever he wants to, I see it. Where did the exhausted and utterly despairing prophet find God? In the same place I find him.

Elijah found God in the still small voice. And I know – I know because I have seen it for myself – I know that there are Anglicans carrying on with their work, feeding the poor, catechising the children and converts, ministering to the needy, not paying much attention to all the crash and thunder of words and betrayals and block-headed stubbornness. I know those people. I know their names. And their voices are not out there on the web, or in print in newspapers, or opining on talk shows.

When I go to church tomorrow, and kneel down, and try to quiet my mind and pray, the stillness will be there for me. If I will just enter into it, the Quiet is waiting. God is in the still small voice, and not in the battle with flesh and blood – or the noise that battle makes.

Anglicanism is a mess right now. But so is everything else in this world, and I’m not in the fifth grade any more. I think that perhaps the idea of taking refuge under a fig or in a cave, being fed and tended by angels and ravens, and performing miracles of bottomless oil vessels is attractive to the fifth grader because the fifth grader has just begun to find a world of noise and false prophets and fearsome Jezebels and the Ahabs who egg them on.

Elijah didn’t do too badly for himself, after all. He had moments of utter despair and crushing loneliness. He became exhausted. He raged at the darkness and ran from the murderous. He was not serene. And in the end, God took him up into heaven in a fiery chariot. Elijah was who he was, and he found God. And then later – much, much later – after Jezebel and all her cohorts were dust of the earth – Elijah stood on the Mount of Transfiguration with Moses (another somewhat difficult person in difficult times), and they were with the Lord in all his Glory. All is not lost if I despair every once in awhile. God is in the still small voice, and all I have to do is enter in.

It would probably help if I stopped reading Anglican chatter for awhile too.

Raphael:The Transfiguration

For a Husband or Wife

This is another of my private prayers after Communion on Sundays. I posted the second one first (no idea why) – “A Parent’s Prayer” – here. After I return to my pew from the Communion rail, I pray the “Oblation of Self,” I recite St. Teresa’s Bookmark (as many times in a row as it takes for me to stay focused and get completely quiet inside), and then for my husband and marriage, for my children, for the priest(s) at the Altar, for our Bishop, and then “For the Increase of Priests.” This is the one I pray for my husband and marriage.

O Almighty God, who in the beginning didst institute the Sacrament of Marriage, bless with happiness our union, and grant that amid all the changes and chances of this mortal life we may so live together in thy love and fear, that in the end we may meet in thy eternal home. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The repetition of routinized and habitual prayers after communion do a very interesting thing to a Christian on her knees. This is another thing I did not know before my days of Sacrament and Church Year and Communion of the Saints. Just as a wife’s greeting of her husband after a day of work spent apart both comments on and builds her marriage to him, so the habitual response to Jesus in the Sacrament of the Altar both gives me a way to thank and spend time with the Lord, and also teaches me what that time means.

We have our lives given to us; we build our lives. Both things are true. God’s grace is sufficient for everything; we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. Both things are true.  As Screwtape spat out in utter contempt, “Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.” (C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters) We are subjects and princes. Both are true. The Incarnation erased the line between the higher and the lower. Now we live with Jesus, who is both God and Man.

Into the darkness where I can really see

Tomorrow is the first day of November. This will be my fifteenth November as an Anglican – or, I should say, my fifteenth as a conscious Anglican. We spent some years with the Reformed Episcopal Church, where we rested in the continuity and rhythms of a prayerbook, but where we had not yet found the Sacramental context of the faith.

Last Sunday we observed the Feast of Christ the King, just as we did that first year at St. Mark’s. Tomorrow is All Saints Day, on a Sunday this year – it’s not a movable feast. As Christmas always falls on December 25, All Saints Day is always November first, which could be on any day of the week. Fifteen years ago I knew that the service music had changed for a feast day on Christ the King, but then back again to green vestments and the music before Christ the King … and then a few Sundays, and purple vestments and an Advent wreath and different service music again. How odd to find so much reassuring pattern and comforting stability in so much change so quickly. Fifteen years ago, I was amazed at it.

Less than a month since our first Sunday at the parish as a whole family, I was beginning to see the power of the candle in my hands. That’s what it felt like. It felt like being handed a candle of my own, lit from all those other candles, and from the one true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Fifteen years ago, I was beginning to realize that I was not alone.

No longer did I bear the weight of finding God in the Bible all by myself. I did not have to interpret or investigate or deliberate or do endless verse studies trying to find The Will of God for My Life. No longer did I have to wonder if my own conscience was really clear, or my own faith sincere enough. My brave, staunch, determined, readiness to follow, follow on … I was so tired … we both were. The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord – so much to live up to all by ourselves. How can an individual build on that foundation? I wanted to. But I was so very tired.

And then we came in. Right before the winter’s dark, we came in. My husband and me and our children and their uncle – we all came in together. The profound quiet after the storm was not nothing. It was the quiet of the prayers of people on their knees. For months, we could not lift our eyes when we were at the communion rail because the power of such prayers was too much for us. Or, I should say, it was too much for us adults. The children suffered no such sense of overwhelm. The children found rest without weight. Children do – that’s why Jesus rebuked the disciples who wanted to hinder the little ones. It is better to come to Jesus without the weight.

Fifteen years ago, I found Sacrament and peace and the communion of the saints. This year, I go again into the darkness which comes after the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. We take All Saints and All Souls with us. We are in the company of the Advent patrons, like St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and St. Lucia, the patroness of light. We will find the Christ Child in the dark of the winter, and we will worship him with the Magi who followed the light of a star. We will follow, and follow, and we will find the ultimate darkness of the cave where they laid his dead and broken body, and then we will come to spring again.

Fourteen journeys through, and I know that there is light at the end. But I also know something I love better. I am stepping now into the darkness, and this is where I can really see.

The Three Days of Hallowmas

By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints’ Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints’, All Saints’, and All Souls’, were called Hallowmas.

That’s what the History Channel says about Hallowmas. Not a bad synopsis, is what I say. But I have one or two things to add.

It seems xenophobic or unfair or even imperialistic to take the customs and traditions of pagan cultures into Christianity and change them, as the pope is accused of doing, and I can see that point. Also, few things are as terrifyingly horrific as someone committing any act of domination in the Name of God. There lies the path to fundamentalism and the worst kinds of sins against our fellow man.

The answer to it is, of course, that the “baptism” of the pagan cultures is the story of the spread of Christianity. If one is to believe that the coming of God Incarnate in the face of Jesus Christ means that the world can be freed from the tyranny of the fear of false and cruel gods, then one will view this cultural baptism very differently. The mistake is always in the materializing of our battle.

We struggle not against flesh and blood. Where it is done as it should be done, cultural baptisms equate more with the offering of food to starving people than to the forced stuffing of a goose for liver pate. Where the culture is brought into Christianity, the bringing should look more like adopting children into a family than it looks like capturing and forcing children into slavery. It’s rarely done perfectly, but when it’s done right, the result is warmth and food and shelter and life. (There is a reason the Orthodox are loved in Alaska, where their ministry among the native peoples was characterized by love, not domination.)

Christian cultural encroachment is one thing. The Hallowmas season’s scary, mysterious, haunting sounds from a Reality we cannot see is quite another. We in the West hate that stuff. We’ve hated ever since the Enlightenment, and we’re even further removed from the days of superstition now than we were then. We now live in a “sordidly materialistic” world, and the flavor of our populist and common version of Christianity is that it must, at the very least, seem reasonable. Provable. It has to fit on a chart, and look like a logical theorem being proven. If I cannot duplicate it in a lab, it is not to be trusted. Our medical world, and our healing for our souls – they both have to be a matter of science.

But I beg to differ with this. I work with children.

Children readily accept that they cannot see or hear or understand most of Reality. They know that there are things beyond their ken. Children see wrapped packages on their birthdays and they learn that there is something of love in preparing hidden treasure for someone else. They see parents going to work and children learn that life must be earned and worked for. In a child’s world, the conversations that make adult voices raise or sound tense or spew epithets signal forbidden territory – and sometimes mothers cry when they are happy. Children absorb more than we tell them, and they draw their own conclusions.

What conclusion might a child draw from the short season of Hallowmas? If the available grownups can keep their philosophizing, moralizing, teachingteachingteaching to themselves for a minute, if they can allow the children to draw their own conclusions, what might the children see?

That the devil is scary, but that those who die in the Lord need not be afraid. That we might even mock the evil one. We can turn the world upside down for a day, and light the fires and make the sounds of the spirits and play tricks in childish mockery of the deceits and falsehoods of Hell itself, and then the next day we see what happens. The Saints rise victorious, and lead All Souls to God.

That is what the child can see. And coming to all of this “as a child” has been highly recommended.

How I explain it in Sunday School

So, if there’s only one holy catholic and apostolic Church, then why are there divisions? People do wonder about that. Children wonder about it. They ask me about it in Sunday School – especially if they have relatives who aren’t Anglican. Here is what I say.

In our country we have the armed forces, and they all fight on our side. There are the Marines, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, and there is also the National Guard. They are all our soldiers, but they have different bosses, and different rules, and they have different kinds of training. And, in each one of those military branches, there are specialized jobs, and there are only a few of the soldiers who are in charge of everyone else – people like generals and admirals and commanders.

Well, in the Church Militant, here on earth, we have different branches too. There are soldiers who are Eastern Orthodox, and there are Roman Catholic Soldiers, and there are Anglican soldiers. Wherever there are creed, Sacraments, Bishops in Apostolic succession, and the ancient faith’s teachings, there is the Church Militant.

We do not fight each other – or, we shouldn’t, anyway.  We are all on the same side, and we fight against sin inside ourselves, and we fight for the sake of Love. We fight the devil. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” People are not our enemies in the Church Militant.

One of the most important soldiers in our military is the Archangel Michael. Whenever we see pictures of him, he’s fighting, or he has a sword. That is because St. Michael the Archangel has been known to God’s people since the days of the Old Testament as the angel that leads the heavenly army. The guardian angels, too. They watch out for us in all of this.

But we cannot see the real battle with our earthly eyes. We are surrounded all the time by the angels on God’s side and the angels on the side of the devil, and they are fighting. If we stay close to God’s angels, and fight against our own sins and wickedness, confessing, praying, worshiping, loving, forgiving … then we will be safe in the end. All of us will be – no matter which branch of the Church Militant we serve.