Full Ride Scholarship

It has happened again. Another member of the body has been catechized and warned and taught and instructed … and disillusioned and embittered. Confirmation came and went, and there was no Experience to be had. No thunder clap. No overwhelming certainty. In the word of today’s evangelical, there was no “assurance.” Nothing.

I wonder if there is any way to articulate for the adult catechumen the many parables about counting the cost. I wonder if there is a warning to give that will be heard. I suspect that my wondering is quite close to that of the dead rich man begging God to send messengers to his family to tell them the truth. No matter who says it, and no matter how it’s said, they won’t believe. It won’t make any sense to them at all. They cannot hear it.

With my younger catechumens, though, I think I will adopt another illustration. Being confirmed is a lot like getting a full ride scholarship to a music school. You’ve practiced and learned and practiced and learned, and then you get accepted, and you’re ready to be a member of that place. You go there. They show you your room. You move in. You promise to be a good student. All your life, you’ve wanted to be there, with those musicians. You want to learn to play.

But on the first Monday morning of the school year, you have to go to class, and that’s when your life as a musician can begin. Getting to the school will not give you an experience of musicianship. Practice will. Hanging out with the other students, or attending recitals or concerts given by a Master – that won’t turn you into a musician. Only practice, the humility of discipline, the willingness to be wrong and correct your technique and the determination to learn new ways to hear – only those things will turn you into a musician.

We have a culture in which only the strictures of economics stop us or make things possible for us, and so I think we are easily confused about the Sacred.

This is a matter of discipline. This is a living thing, passed from one human in the body (a bishop in Apostolic succession) to another (the confirmand). It is not merely learning leading to a personal and undeniable inner experience of the Divine; the Christian life has to be lived to be known. It’s hard work, what you’re ready to do once you’ve received the Gifts.

To be confirmed in the Anglican tradition is to be given bed and board in the school. Your scholarship is paid for. The Masters are ready to teach you. But having the experience of the Music … that part is yours to do.

Advent’s Nest

Shortly before a woman gives birth, she is likely to be overcome, overwhelmed, and driven like a boat on the water ahead of a stiff wind. She will not be able to stop herself. She will nest. She must. Her body knows that a baby needs a place prepared, and that she will need a safe and nurturing place for that fourth trimester. It is imperative. Nesting is not cultural, or habitual, or consumerist. It’s nature. A baby is coming. A nest must be built.

The liturgical year is so beautifully, wonderfully, deliciously suited to this idea. Our Baby is coming. The Baby the Church awaits is nearly here. It’s time for us to nest.

I think about the answer of Our Lady to the angel. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” she said. She could not have known that this answer would include a trip to Bethlehem during her nesting time. She could not have known that she would build a nest much more resembling a bird’s nest, with straw and wood and whatever she could find, than a baby’s bed. But go, she did. Nest, she built. And she was ready with the swaddling clothes.

It’s not time to party yet. The noise and bustle of the malls and city streets have become a good representation of the chaos of a distracted and broken world – the one the Baby came to. I visit it a bit. I’m nesting. I need some things. Food stuffs and packaging and a token or two of the season to put aside for the Day of Joy. But I cannot stay out there in the noise.

I’m too raw and expectant. I have learned to go in. Go more deeply in. Quietly hush. Find the things I

need, and then go home and be home and pray. And nest.

A Baby is coming. There is a lot to do.

Federico Barocci ~ The Nativity, 1597

Thank You

Outside my house, I hear the first really heavy rain of the season. There is no wind today. The water falls straight down, and the sound in the forest outside my window is a hushed shushing. The leaves and rocks and grass and gravel of the driveway receive the million little splashes, and together they make the sound of the edge of the ocean’s surf.

Inside my house, there will be candles lit at sundown. Inside my soul, a small warmth of new fire has been lighted.

Jesus among his Students, Rembrandt

The Anglican part of Christendom receives its heritage from both east and west. We share our customs and rites and prayer life with both Rome and Constantinople. I came to my Anglicanism through the western gate, and I have lived here, in this Anglican dwelling, for sixteen years. At last, the teachers from the East have found me.

With my Aves I now entwine the Jesus Prayer, and for balm and oil to my intellectual understanding, I release my certitude and embrace the generative, creativity of paradox. Into every task, the breath begins to pulse. Mary’s prayer and Martha’s work. Ora et labora, both with devotion, each to each may speak. I am so full of gratitude for the warmth and light of it that I fall silent. I have not come now for answers, but only to be here – in this light – where He is.

“Go, sell, give and so become poor. Take up your cross and follow Him into the moment … as leaven into the dough of humanity that it may rise to become bread of Eucharist for the hungry … As leaven, invisible that He might be visible … being flung out to the furthest places by His centrifugal love and at the same time being pulled paradoxically into the center by His centripetal love … as salt, light, leaven and branch to the edges and to the centre of a savorless, dark, flat and barren world … Reveal Jesus, follow Jesus revealed … poor, as Jesus was poor … Pray always.” ~ Fr. Seraphim, OJN

The Beauty of Holiness ~ The Holiness of Beauty

Last night, as a finish to the dinner simmering away in the pan on the stovetop, I squeezed juice from a lemon, drizzling it over the steaming food, letting it drip through my fingers and permeate my hand with the scent of lemon. The oils from the lemon rind make the astringent juices into a softer thing. I toss the depleted rind into the bowl of trimmings, and before I rinse my hands, I rub them together as if with the most expensive hand lotion. Water washes off the excess juice, and all that is left is the heady scent of that lemon. My hands smell like all that is fresh and wonderful in the world. I cup them at my face and inhale deeply, and thank God for making such a world.

A little while before these final dinner preparations, I had been saying Evening Prayer. Before I start the daily prayer offices, morning and evening, I light a pure beeswax candle that I purchased for the purpose. I keep it on the shelf with the icons, under the Coptic cross that was given to us as a wedding present by a friend from Ethiopia. The icons were gifts, as well. The shelf and wall hold the love of friends and the great cloud of witnesses, the communion of the Saints. The softly golden light from the flame and the honey-colored candle spreads out into that place of love, and I go back across the room to my prayerbook, Bible, and beads.

The beads, too, were a gift. Father Seraphim strung them, prayed over each one as it went onto the rope, and (I will have to ask him about this) must have had oily hands while he worked. There is a scent of incense and olive oil on the simple wooden beads, and as I recite a decade of the Jesus Prayer, the beads warm in my hands. I cross myself with them. It seems that I can breathe the scent into my heart as well as into my head and lungs. My palms still smell like my prayer beads, an hour later.

When I have entered the office through the beads, and then prayed the office using the calendar for Psalms and readings, the Rule of Ss. Mary and Martha for additional prayers, the intercessions and thanksgivings, the twice-daily attempt to be better at remaining in the prayer and inclining my heart and mind to God, I extinguish my candle.

The room is infused with the scent of prayer from the candle’s smoke. This is what it smells like in my pew at church. This is the sweet smell, ascending to God, and I can inhale this. God made me so that I can inhale the scent of lemon, the deeply rubbed incense and oil of wooden prayer beads, and the beeswax candle. I see the icons and the ornate, pounded brass cross. I speak and hear my prayers.

This is the glory of the Incarnation. This is the sanctification of time and sense and humanity. This is the sacramental faith. I can hold it in my hands and breathe it.

And the madness of the peoples

This morning, in the Morning Prayer office, this was in the Psalm.

7 Who stilleth the raging of the sea, * and the noise of his waves, and the madness of the peoples.

Remember the story of Jesus in the boat with the disciples? The storm came up and they had to wake him. They were in a panic. They were professionals and skilled at being in boats on the water, and they were terrified of the power of this storm. It was a really bad one.

So Jesus woke up, questioned their faith, and told the wind and waves to cease their noise.

And the storm stopped.

Jesus Calms the Storm: Rembrandt, 1633

Because that is who Jesus is. He is able to still the raging of the sea and stop the noise of the waves because that is who he is.  It’s all well within his power. But the madness of the peoples? Is that in his power?

At this moment in my life, the peoples of the earth seem beyond madness. Or, at least, they seem beyond madness wherever their lives intersect with the lives of my children. Sometimes the madness strays into my life – and I have come face to face with the ways in which I call them in and then stand here, baffled, wondering how on earth this can happen. For me, though, the work is constant, and I am learning to re-enter charity in better ways. I’m willing and ready and determined to do my work.

But good grief! The storms of madness in the lives of my children makes me want not only to wake the sleeping Lord, but to shake him awake! I want to shout in his face and demand that he do something. Can he not hear this noise? Can he not see their terror? (Or mine?) WAKE UP, JESUS!! DO something!!! Master! Carest thou not that they perish?

Something else was in the Morning Prayer office today – something I’ve never seen before, in the whole of my Bible-saturated, memorywork-rich, lesson-learning life. “Seek ye-eee first the-uh Kee-eengdom of God … and Hi-is Riiighteou-uhsness …” — that passage from Matthew’s gospel – set to a sing-songy tune – all my conscious life I’ve had it in my internal mix tape. Follow God, and all these things shall be added unto you. Just follow God, the Bible says, and God will take care of your raiment and your food. Don’t fuss. The stuff will come to you. Follow God. But the story is told with a small twist in Luke’s gospel.

Today I saw it.

²⁹And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind.
³⁰For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.

Eli and Samuel: John Singleton Copley, 1780

Do you see it? God clothes the raven (not the sparrow, in Luke’s rendition) and he makes grass beautiful and he’ll take care of my clothes and food too … okay, I have been practicing with that one for a long, long time. But a “doubtful mind”? The madness of the peoples gives me such a doubtful mind that it almost sends my mind into a thousand doubtful pieces.

Just look at that passage. Just look at it. The nations of the world want temporal power and freedom from doubt. The certainty of being right. That’s what we want – not just clothes and food, but certainty. We want to be free – free to pursue happiness- to chase it – to run ourselves ragged in the pounding search.

Eli and Samuel were in today’s lessons, too. Once Eli figured out what was going on, he knew what Samuel was supposed to do. Go back to bed, Samuel. Lie back down. Wait. And if God calls to you again, just say, “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.”

Samuel was too young to be afraid, I think. He just kept asking Eli what he wanted. He figured he was supposed to do what he was told. He didn’t figure he had to know what was going on.

I wonder what would have happened to the boat on the waves if the disciples had not been afraid.