By Martin Smith

A surprise parcel arrived. A friend had been clearing out drawers and had found a stole I had woven years ago. Would I like to have this memento from the old days? Just smelling the wool brought about a flashback from that time when I was a new immigrant to the States. I’d taken a retreat day in a cabin in the woods, and as night came I found myself utterly awake. A strange feeling came upon me that I must get up again and make up the fire to wait for a visitation—but for what? I found myself pushing the furniture against the walls to clear the floor. And then something strange happened to me. I started to dance, and the dancing took on a life of its own. Or rather, it was my life that was being danced. I realized as the hours wore on that my entire life-story was dancing itself out. It must have been well into the small hours of the morning before I caught up with the present. By the glow of the now sunken fire, I sank exhausted onto the bed and slept the deepest sleep.

It was something of a revelation. A physically awkward intellectual, my experience of dancing was restricted to rare tortuous efforts which ballroom dancing classes at school had only taught me to dread. But apparently my body knew my life story better than my head, and it had to find a way to express itself through dancing.

Since then, I have had a strong sense that movement is more of a royal road to awareness and spiritual transformation than we imagine. I had struck the bedrock of human religious experience. Human beings danced themselves into spiritual awareness long before language emerged. Ritual is primal. Doctrine is a latecomer. I wonder whether as the implications of post-modernity gradually sink in we might realize just how alienated we are from our bodies in the religiosity our very recent ancestors invented. In the modern mutation of Christianity we assume that we think and argue ourselves into change. This Christianity stuck in its head is the one that called down the indictment summed up in the phrase that echoes in the Marabar caves in E.M. Forster’s Passage to India—“Poor talkative Christianity!”

I wonder whether I’ll live to see a really widespread renewal of true ritual movement, in which ordinary Christians discover freedom from the constraints imposed by the wooden cages we call pews. Two of the most primal avenues for creating transformative communities that celebrate the Great Mystery we call God are chanting and ritual movement, and scientists are now discovering the actual neurological mechanisms that explain why both open human beings up to enlarged experience. There are signs that chant is re-emerging, not least due to the widespread influence of the Taize community. And there are pioneering efforts here and there for restoring sacred dance and movement to the whole body of worshippers, such as the fascinating experiments of St Gregory Nyssen Church in San Francisco.

One of the challenges of post-modern spirituality is losing our fear of ancient traditions that are ripe for revival because they embody innate wisdoms that modernity repressed. Sometimes the chances of revival seem far fetched. I remember taking part in 1974 in a very profound retreat based on the Labyrinth. What a rare topic it seemed, and how skeptically we would have greeted any prediction that by 2008, this ritual of meditative movement would have sprung back into life all over the world!

I’ve used a processional dance in worship based on one that has survived in the pilgrimage church in Echternach, Germany. The dance involves taking five steps forward and then three steps back. It’s pointless to explain to people ahead of time the transforming insight that can only emerge from personal experiment. But the congregations’ puzzled, rueful and then delightful smiles eloquently expressed the felt sense that such a dance tells certain truths about our exploration into God and our life stories that the linear progress of regular church processions can’t. Life involves setback after setback, they belong to the sacred rhythm!

Perhaps sometime in the future the church will challenge the disembodied virtual world into which millions are losing themselves with a new sacramental physicality that welcomes people to be more emotionally available to one another and to God in the direct flesh and blood, face to face, arm in arm experience of community. I hope to see a new wave of delight in the gospel of Incarnation to wash away tired doubt. Dance and movement are sure to be at the heart of renewed practices of community. Dear God, we celebrate at Christmas that the Word was made flesh, and we have spent so much effort resisting the mystery by turning holy flesh back into words.

Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.

I wrote this column eight years ago for Beliefnet.com. Daily Episcopalian is taking the weekend off. Happy Thanksgiving. See you on Monday.

By Jim Naughton

A few years ago, while I was on an academic fellowship, my family and I spent Thanksgiving with other fellows and their families. In religious terms, we were a mixed bunch: Christians, Unitarians, Jews, agnostics, and atheists.

A multi-religious dinner table always presents a bit of a problem when it is time to say the grace before meals. But Thanksgiving presents a particularly sticky situation, because it is the one occasion on which even the irreligious feel that some sort of invocation should be made. But who, or what, should we invoke?

After several minutes of communal hemming and hawing, one of the braver of our number delivered a prayer to the earth, thanking it for its bounty and seeking its forgiveness for our environmental sins. In all, it sounded more Green Party than pagan. Having crossed that hastily improvised bridge, we tucked into our feast.

But the moment stayed with me, for it illustrated what a peculiar, not to mention sneaky, holiday we were celebrating.

Thanksgiving is not a purely civic holiday like Memorial Day or Independence Day, although we are, in part, celebrating the fortitude of our Pilgrim forebears. Nor, like Christmas or Passover, does it come freighted with the content of a particular faith. Rather, Thanksgiving straddles these two categories; it is civic and religious. To paraphrase Jesus, Thanksgiving gives both to Caesar and to God.

In doing so, it discomfits believer and unbeliever equally. For giving thanks assumes the existence of one (One?) who deserves our gratitude--anathema to atheists. But giving thanks as a nation assumes that we stand before God as citizens of a country, as well as members of a faith. And that should offend anyone who believes that salvation flows from the church and not from the state.

Thanksgiving, in other words, assumes the existence of something that doesn't exist: an American faith.

On these grounds, I suppose one could argue that this holiday violates the establishment clause of the Constitution. I leave that task for some particularly dogmatic member of Americans for the Separation of Church and State. What interests me is the ubiquity of gratitude, the understanding, even among witnessing atheists, that it is important to be grateful for our good fortune.

For me, the desire to give thanks is evidence, at a minimum, that human beings are innately religious. The theologian Karl Rahner wrote that there is a "God-shaped hole" in every one of us. With Rahner, I believe that it is God who put it there.

You can take that argument or leave it. But if you leave it, help me to understand why we experience this particular species of gratitude. I'm not talking about the kind of gratitude we feel toward someone who has done us a favor. I mean the sort of global gratitude inspired by gifts we could not have known enough to ask for, or the kind we feel when matters beyond our control end well for us.

Who do you thank for your sweetheart's brown eyes; for growing up where it snows (or doesn't); for being alive at the same time as Bruce Springsteen; or for seeing your children born into a country that is prosperous and at peace?

You might argue that there is no one to be thanked. Maybe all our purported blessings are a matter of random chance. Perhaps the desire to extend gratitude beyond the human is an evolutionary glitch--a useful social trait that got too big for its britches.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps we awaken one day and realize that we are not now, and have never been, masters of our own destinies; that our successes were not entirely of our own making; that our souls magnify the Lord, whether we like it or not.

Again, you can take this argument or leave it. It is easier to believe in chance than in grace. Chance requires nothing from us. In fact, if life is a succession of random events, than any response to good fortune is superfluous.

Grace is different. In receiving grace, we are challenged to become channels of grace. This is more than a matter of a few good deeds (although those help); it is an invitation to place one's self in God's hands, and devote one's self toward what we perceive as God's ends.

Thanksgiving, then, is a call to action: a gentle poke to awaken our collective conscience from its postprandial slumber. To whom much is given, etc. etc.

In a county as religiously diverse as ours, we may never be able to express our gratitude in words that are acceptable to everyone. Fortunately, deeds work even better.

Jim Naughton is the editor of Episcopal Café.

By R. William Carroll

It’s no secret that these are troubling times. I’ve found myself talking, writing, and preaching a great deal about how we might be faithful in such times by what we do. In an editorial for the Covenant Journal, I found myself urging both political engagement that serves the common good and conscientious stewardship of finances:

If you belong to a congregation like ours, you are probably facing some difficult budget choices as you enter a season dedicated to financial stewardship. As an outsider to your congregations, I would urge those of you who can to consider giving more. There will be anxious people who tighten their fists, and there will be others who need to trim back on charitable giving of all kinds in precisely the hour when it is needed most.

In the congregation I serve, my own stewardship sermon relied heavily on the Convention address of Thomas Breidenthal, the ninth bishop of Southern Ohio, one of the best sermons I have ever heard. You can download a copy of it here. In that sermon, Bishop Tom reminded us that it was at the time of the Great Depression, that Bishop Hobson, the third bishop of our diocese, established the Forward Movement and that he did so as a way for those in the grip of poverty and despair to begin moving forward together, day by day. He also reminded us that it was in the aftermath of the Second World War, with Europe on the brink of starvation, that our diocese helped establish the fund that became the Presiding Bishop’s fund for World Relief, now known as Episcopal Relief and Development. He also used an image that I found quite compelling. He told us that we are called to be like trees at a time of drought: to sink our roots deeper (in prayer) and spread our branches further (in service).

Having already tended to the branches in several different contexts, I would now like to turn to the roots. I do so in precisely the same spirit as my earlier calls to action. For Christians, action is always rooted in prayer. The heart of this prayer, of course, is corporate worship, above all the Eucharist, in which through the Church’s Spirit-graced act of giving thanks, the Lord Jesus gives himself to us anew and draws us ever more deeply into his dying and rising. It is here, above all, that we become rooted in the vine, so that the branches might bear fruit. It is here, above, all that we find strength to expend ourselves for our neighbor, because Jesus, in his Body and Blood, has given himself for us.

But it is also necessary in times like these, to clear space for personal devotion, both in the context of the community’s celebration and in private. We need to ask for God’s help for ourselves and intercede for the needs of others. There is a danger here, however, because this praying can become just another form of action. We also need to sit still and listen for God. We need to empty ourselves of the many thoughts, to let go of the many distractions, and pay attention to the still, small voice of God.

One reason we are so anxious is that the problems we confront are bigger than we are. There is no obvious place to begin. If we thought too much about the challenges that face our country and the world right now, we would find ourselves overwhelmed and unable to act. The problem with prayers of petition and intercession is that they lie far too close to action. When we pray like this, we are in danger of asking God to help us with our priorities rather than asking how we might get in on God’s.

In true prayer, our roots need to go deeper, or we will never find the living water for our desert journey. We will not find the serene joy and power to face the difficulties of the present moment with confidence. Nor will we even know what to ask for. To intercede effectively, we need to do so from a posture of listening for God—of radical availability to the Holy Spirit. We need to break in to the heavenly throne room, in a way that’s only possible if we relax in God’s bosom and discover how deeply and completely we are loved.

Another reason we may be anxious is that the present crisis is unveiling to us the depth of brokenness in so much that we formerly took for granted. Above all, it is revealing our own brokenness, poverty, and finitude. Only in the near presence of God and in the light of God’s countenance can we face the mess we have made of our lives without shame or fear. The contemplative tradition, with its insistence that we listen to God with no expectation for how God will answer, has much to say to us in times like these.

For Christians, contemplation is never an end in itself. It is meant to serve love. Centering prayer, to name one form this tradition takes on the contemporary scene, must never become “self-centering prayer.” But to rush to action, or even to petition, without taking time to hear God’s painful silences and bask in God’s loving presence, is just as dangerous as a contemplation that turns in on itself. In paying attention to our relationship with God our Creator, we receive guidance and renewal for times like these. More than that, however, we also receive the greatest gift of all, quiet confidence that our Being is not in the end our achievement but instead a gift from God’s most generous hands.

Friends and family may let us down. We can lose our job, our home, and even our life. Even our young and gifted president-elect, in whom so many of us have placed our trust and hope (pray for him!), can and will disappoint us. But still the love of God abides.

The Rev. R. William Carroll serves as rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio (Diocese of Southern Ohio). He received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He co-edits The Covenant Journal with Lane Denson, and his sermons appear on his parish blog.

By George Clifford

Benny Hinn, a purported Christian faith healer whose ministry grosses in excess of one hundred million dollars per year, recently held a healing service in Raleigh that thousands attended. Afterwards, the Raleigh newspaper featured a story that did not surprise me. Someone hoping for a healing had attended Hinn’s service but left disappointed. That incident highlights what we already know: prayer is neither as simple nor automatic as a prima facie reading of passages like this one suggest:

Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Indeed, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops at Lambeth, and many Anglicans have spent much time praying for Anglican unity, which remains an ever more elusive goal. Globally, many Christians fervently and frequently pray for war to end, a request that would improve the world and keep us or loved ones out of harm’s way. If only life were that easy!

So, what do those troublesome scriptures about the certainty of prayer really mean?

During seminary studies prior to ordination, I learned the orthodox Christian response to that question. God sometimes chooses not to grant our prayer requests because to do so would require God to abrogate human freedom. Sometimes this makes sense. For example, a drug addict suffers the physical, personal, and social consequences of addiction because he or she chose to abuse an addictive substance. The only way that God could end that suffering requires divorcing the action – misusing drugs – from its consequences. Those consequences are generally essential elements of a successful recovery. The addict must hit bottom, or at least an artificially constructed bottom, before intervention and recovery can succeed in freeing the person from addiction. For the addict, the redemptive power of suffering inherently leads to healing.

Generally, I find the explanation of God not granting our petitions to preserve human freedom unsatisfying. Some suffering exceeds any possible redemptive value or other good. Poignant examples of this include genocides like the Holocaust and incurable, debilitating diseases that inflict a good person, innocent child, or entire third world village. Although some good can arise out of such situations, more often unmitigated, non-redemptive suffering continues in the face of persistent, collective prayer. Why would an all-powerful God allow that to happen?

During further studies, I discovered an alternative explanation of continued suffering in the face of persistent, collective, godly prayer. Some contemporary Christian theologians, disproportionately Anglican, propose that traditional ideas about God's omnipotence are incorrect. Perhaps in creating the cosmos, God lost (or never had) the power to do anything at any time. God must therefore rely upon human cooperation to accomplish God's purposes on earth. God abhors evil and suffering, but both persist, even after we persevere in collective prayer, because you and I fail to act as God's hands, feet, and voice.

Attracted to this new understanding of God, I did some research. Only two Bible verses explicitly speak of God's omnipotence denoting a God for whom nothing was impossible. In Luke 1:37, Mary responds to the angel’s annunciation of her imminent pregnancy by saying, “For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Matthew’s gospel reports Jesus saying, “All things are possible with God” (19:26). Like most Christians, I am very skeptical of placing too much emphasis on just a couple of Bible verses. Perhaps both passages reflect a first century cultural and scientific worldview rather than timeless theological insight. I also found that the widespread practice of addressing God as the Almighty might not be a theological statement. Biblical scholars have concluded that ancient Israelites appropriated the term God Almighty, or in Hebrew El Shaddai, from their Mesopotamian neighbors. The Hebrews seem to have used the term to emphasize their monotheism rather than God's omnipotence.

In this post-Christian era, the Church must bravely and honestly admit points at which traditional conceptions of its faith no longer make sense. We do exactly what the Bible seems to tell us to do. We pray. We pray with one another. We pray according to the mind of Christ. Yet God does not always grant our requests. Not squarely acknowledging these difficulties leads us down the path of Benny Hinn, not of Christ Jesus. Too often, I have heard well-meaning but ignorant Christians tell those who grieve that God did not or will not heal a loved one because God respects human freedom. These words hurt rather than comfort. Dishonest or disingenuous answers to faith’s difficulties only push true seekers further from God.

A power exists that changes lives, a power that turns bread and wine into an encounter with absolute love incarnated in human community, a power that transforms despair into hope, defeat into victory, weakness into strength. When our puny human minds believe that we have successfully packaged that power into a well-conceptualized God, such as the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God of Christian orthodoxy, we invariably even if unintentionally imagine an idol. The controversy currently convulsing the Anglican Communion is the living God shattering one such idol as God's people discover that God does not respect gender orientation any more than God respects race, nationality, or gender.

God's continuing activity in the world, and God's open invitation for us to partner with God in that continuing activity, represents the realistic promise of a better future. Prayer makes a difference. The dynamics of prayer may not be as simplistic or automatic as the gospel reading seems to suggest. However, this does not mean that we should cease to pray or abandon our faith. Holocaust survivor Wiesel wrote in his essay, “Why Pray”:

God does not need our prayers. We need them. We need to be able to pray in sincerity and beauty. And the prayer should not be against somebody but always for somebody. That is a true prayer, when it is for some one else, not for yourself.

The Rev. George Clifford, a retired priest in the Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years. He blogs at Ethical Musings.

By Martin L. Smith

I’ve been traveling around Turkey, in slow trains and buses that give leisure for musing. Ancient sites passed by and triggered old memories from reading the spiritual classics. I peered through the window at Nevsehir on the way through Cappadocia, which was the see city of the bishop, mystic and theologian Gregory of Nyssa. Later, as I walked through canyons riddled with ancient monasteries and settlements, I got to thinking about what the ancient fathers of the Church can still teach us. We think of theology as the profession of academics, but this wasn’t true in Christianity’s springtime. At first the word theology referred not to a field of study, but first hand spiritual knowledge gained from contemplation. “If you are a theologian, you pray in truth. If you pray in truth, you are a theologian,” wrote Evagrius, one of the pioneers of Christian spirituality.

Today the word ‘theology’ is so embarrassingly degraded that TV pundits often use the term as a scathing reference to abstruse theorizing unmoored in reality. And the word ‘orthodoxy’ has had a similar fate. These days, orthodoxy is almost a synonym for rigid dogmatism and moralism, hidebound ecclesiastical formulas in which changeless truth is supposed to be set in stone. But originally orthodoxy meant the lived experience of being on the right track (orthos) in giving glory (that’s what doxa means) to God, in worshipping and adoring God, in community. And what these pioneers of Christian orthodoxy insisted on, with all the eloquence at their disposal, was the utter impossibility of capturing God in words and images, or grasping God in even the most sublime spiritual experience. God surpasses anything we can possibly say or imagine, and all our experiences of God are merely touching the hem of his garment. God is without rival and nothing is really like God, therefore all language, all symbolism, all our metaphors can only point into further unexplored depths. Christian orthodoxy was—dear God, what has become of it?—a passionate commitment to the mystical core of the Gospel. As such, orthodoxy is the polar opposite of what we call fundamentalism.

As our trains rumbled through the endless valleys of Anatolia, I was running over in my mind some of the meditations that Gregory has left us. He wrote a marvelous commentary on the life of Moses, using it as an allegory of the journey of faith. He comes to that strange vision that Moses has from the cleft in the rock, when he is allowed a fleeting glimpse of God’s backside. This odd detail in the legend Gregory takes as a symbol of the truth that we can only follow God. God is always ahead of us, leading us out of ourselves further into the unexplored territory of his glory. We can only see God’s back, because he is carrying us on his back into mystery. And Gregory taught that even in eternity we will always be on the move as explorers into God, since God is infinite and inexhaustible. There will always be more God to know.

The Church Fathers surprise us. Later I stayed in Sanliurfa, ancient Edessa, a city which embraced Christianity in the second century. I thought about Saint Ephrem who lived and worked here at a time when the city was ringing with a cacophony of rival versions of Christianity (not so unlike modern America.) How did he bear witness as a voice for the orthodox teaching about the Incarnation and the Trinity?

Not through argument, lectures, propaganda, classes. He bore witness through passionate song, writing hundreds of lyrical, fabulously imaginative hymns which were sung in the public squares by a dedicated choir of women. For him, the incandescent truth of the Christian message was best suited to poetry, in the exaltation of music, not prosaic argument. And this is the strange, paradoxical dynamic of the theology of the ancient fathers. At one and the same time they are passionate about the absolutely mysterious character of God, the utter impossibility of defining him, and yet they feel authorized and inspired to use a vast array of imaginative, even outrageous symbols and metaphors, to point to the mystery. Orthodoxy is the paradoxical state of being both blinded by the dazzling darkness of God’s unknowability and of being thrilled by God’s encouragement and permission, through the Incarnation, to deploy every kind of metaphor and poetic symbol to kindle the heart’s awareness of the attractiveness of God’s beauty and power and love. Ephrem’s poetry, like Dante’s, is ablaze with the erotic audacity of lovesong. We pray for God to send laborers into his harvest. Are we praying for spiritual poets, prophets and visionaries, who will help us set our speech about God on fire again today? Or will we as Episcopalians succumb to the fate of becoming—you know—the bland leading the bland?

Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.

By Martin L. Smith

Recently, I had a visit from an old friend who had been at seminary with me in the late 60s, and as always our reminiscences caused us rueful laughter, especially about how far off target our training had sometimes been. We recalled how a visiting lecturer in religious sociology, full of the latest academic ‘futurology,’ earnestly warned us that we would be responsible for guiding people through a tremendous cultural revolution—the onset of an era of leisure! Cybernetics, the replacement of human labor with robots, and a host of new technological developments were bound to bring about within a few decades, we were told, the halving of the work week and widespread earlier retirement. Our challenge would be to guide people spiritually to deal with all this newfound time, as technology released us for creativity and play and community building, or for ennui and frustration.

No such development occurred. What an irony that the much vaunted technology of American society is dictating a harried pace of life where work has made deeper inroads into people’s lives, reducing vacations, fostering 24/7 work availability. Priests are hardly in demand as resources for interpreting the meaning of leisure! They feel just as pressured as the rest of us to keep up the pace, cram the schedule, put in the hours. Who has time to pray these days? Most of us have really good excuses for not praying. To find time for it seems so unrealistic that we can safely leave it unexplored. We complain, but our sincerity is questionable. Addictions and patterns of conformity are effective means of fending off challenges that intimidate us, challenges that would demand time if were to meet them.

To have a prayer life at all now is usually a symptom of considerable courage, the chutzpah to swim against the tide. And perhaps that is how it should be, since Jesus’ teaching, is about learning to swim against the tide of conformity. And prayer itself is a paradoxical activity. It requires leisure to be opened up by unplugging from the pressures of everyday demands. But it isn’t itself leisurely; it isn’t a pious version of stress management that temporarily recharges the batteries for a return to the fray. It is itself a kind of inner work.

Jesus’ teaching about prayer often appears to be simple, but in fact he gave people the outlines of a practice that is very searching. Take the seemingly simplistic injunction, “Ask, seek, knock.”

Think what we would be doing if we actually took that seriously. These three verbs goad us to explore three areas of vulnerability to which most of us can get access only by what we properly call soul-searching. To do what Jesus commends means to explore three areas of desire. What do I lack that I really want? What am I searching for that I haven’t yet found? What do I feel shut out from that I want to be let into? If most of us don’t in fact pray much, it might be because we are in some way appalled at the prospect of opening up these cans of worms. If we did we would be face to face with the reality that deep down there is a lot that is missing from our lives, that there is some experience we haven’t yet attained, and that we feel excluded from some kind of belonging we can hardly name.

Now our busyness provides us with daily alibis for not praying. But if we ceased to be busy, we would probably try to bring other avoidance mechanisms into play to let ourselves off the hook so that we wouldn’t have to open up these very sensitive areas. Jesus’ words, though, are literally en-couraging. Apparently, the secret of God’s reign lies in the paradox that it is precisely by leaning into our feelings of lack, lost-ness, and exclusion that we can begin to connect with God’s overflowing fullness. By learning (laboriously at first) to spell out what we desire, what we want to find, how we want to be welcomed, we open ourselves up to first-hand experience of God, (as opposed to religious chatter about God or second-hand ideas about God).

Overwork and stress inhibit desire. Period. (Picking up hints, one gets the impression that the sex-lives of conformist over-workers are being as damped down as our prayer-lives.) We might even start to pray again if we realized that God in fact wants to kindle our heart’s desiring, not repress it. The church should be a school of de-repression, which trains us to be men and women who reclaim these currents of desire for themselves, with freedom to use passionate words like longing, yearning, desiring, thirsting, hungering, seeking, knocking…

Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.

By Luiz Coelho

A few months ago, after Evensong, I decided to do one of my “favorite” Sunday night activities – grocery shopping. There I was in one of Midtown Atlanta’s supermarkets strolling my buggy, drinking my latte and trying to get everything I needed as fast as I could. Until, at a certain moment, my eyes were attracted to a cute little girl, with a big smile and curly hair, who was fascinated with a basket full of multicolored tie-dye balls in front of her.

As I contemplated in awe the beauty of innocence, a horrifying thought suddenly came to my mind: “where are this girl's parents?” I was not the only one to wonder where they were; within seconds the little child also realized that she was alone in the midst of strangers. Immediately her smile was erased from her face, and my heart started aching as I heard her begin to yell desperately, “Mommy, Mommy!”

Thankfully, within seconds a young woman came from behind a pile of products and hugged the frightened girl. Everything was alright; Mommy was there. My heart settled in peace as that same wide smile that had first caught my attention came back to the child's face as she was embraced by the one who has loved her for her whole life. Since that Sunday night, I have not been able to erase that scene from my mind; and, the reason, I believe, is because through it God has been speaking to me.

That scene speaks a prophetic message to me and to all of us ‘adults’ that even when we pretend to believe we are strong and self-sufficient, we know deep down that we are as lonely, frighened, and vulnerable as that little lost girl. There are moments when we walk away from God and think we can live our lives apart from God; yet, even in those moments when we think we are capable of controling our own lives, our hearts are crying and we too are yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, where are you?”

It happened to me; I can still remember it vividly. I was serving in the Brazilain Army and was on a flight from Manaus, in the Amazon, to Brasília, in order to take part in a “War Games” symposium. I boarded the plane, confident in the power of humankind, knowing that it would arrive to its destination safely, since it was a safe aircraft and the weather was wonderful. That's not what happened, though. As the plane flew through the Amazon forest, it found itself being sucked by an unpredictable low-pressure zone, and went deeply into freefall. Passengers screamed; dishes, bags and even a baby were flying around us. A woman on my right side held my arm so tightly that it hurt. I knew that there was no way of surviving. Even if we landed in the forest, it would still be in the middle of nowhere and our chances of surviving in the wild were nearly impossible. At that moment, I knew that nothing that human beings had ever developed or created would be able to save me. All of the things in which I had placed my trust were powerless to help me. I was defenseless and scared.

And then I decided to pray. It was nothing more than a simple sentence: “God, into your hands I commend my life.” It was my first prayer in years, as I had given up on “church” and walked away from God. But, I can say those words were probably the deepest and truest ones my mouth had ever said. Only God knows why, but the plane shook hard, and found its track back on course. Everybody was safe again. Even the baby who was flying over our heads was rescued and restored to his mother. My life (and probably the other passengers' lives too) would never be the same, though.
I think most of us have been through similar situations. An accident, a disease, the death of a loved one – each of these moments, and other tragic moments like them, remind us that we are nothing but children running around carelessly, until we find ourselves apparently lost, and begin to scream for our parents. The pain of human impotence and the realization that we human beings are powerless towards such situations bring us the scariest, deepest fears. Even our Lord Jesus in the fulness of his human nature, felt the fear and pain of his abandonment and loneliness on the cross and he too screamed to God in agony.

The good news, however, is that it does not end there. We are not left in our despair, and neither was Our Lord Jesus. As we go through Eastertide, let us not forget that the greatest rescue took place in Jesus Christ's Resurrection. God did not forsake the forsaken One on the cross; God heard the cries of agony, and raised Jesus Christ on the third day. Christ is risen indeed, and the power of sin and death is no longer upon us. We, who were lost, are now found; as the mother was at there in the supermarket to rescue her child, so God is always present to rescue us to new life.

After that moment in the airplane, I knew there was someone who really cared about me. Soon, I began to view all of those Christian beliefs and Biblical stories that I had been taught in my youth and had cast aside as a set of irrational children's tales in a new light. I began to relaize that they meant something; and I rediscovered truths that I will never forget.
Throughout my life, I have seen the Risen Christ with his message of hope even in the midst of despair. He has been there through the prayers of friends, through the tears in the eyes of my family, through the intercession of his Blessed Mother, though hymns, icons and scripture verses... and in my heart, always giving me a reason to live and have hope that in the end, all will be well. I can not say my life is perfect, but I know, now, that I have a “mother in Heaven” who will always come to me with a healing embrace when I cry out in moments of despair.

Our highest Father, God Almighty, who is ‘Being’, has always known us and loved us: because of this knowledge, through his marvellous and deep charity and with the unanimous consent of the Blessed Trinity, He wanted the Second Person to become our Mother, our Brother, our Saviour.

And all this we shall see it in God eternally.

Blessed Julian of Norwich

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

By Ann Fontaine

Every so often someone will ask for prayers and a common response is “prayers ascending.” My questioning mind thinks – hmmm, ascending? Going up? Where? How? Since the photos of earth came back from the astronauts in space, I have had the question that the Russian cosmonauts were asking, "Where is your God? We've never seen Him out there in space. We circled the globe again and again, and He wasn't out there!" If God is not out there and there really is no “up” in realms of outer space where do I locate God when I pray? Where and how do I think about God when I pray? I suppose that there is no need for location when it comes to God and prayer but it helps my praying to think of a direction.

Much of our religious language speaks of an “up there” – words that have now become an anachronism. Can the metaphor hold our religious imagination? Without location is there a place where God dwells and where we can direct our prayers?

We believe that God is not an object found in creation but the creator of all – as Genesis declares in the creed-like statements of the first chapter, it is all good but it is not God. Our faith uses objects and nature as pointers to God, but God is not in the objects themselves. Icons and other symbolic objects can be paths for prayer but like the natural world are just pointers to that greater reality of the Holy and not stopping places.

In addition to all the passages of scripture that speak of God as high above us in the heavens and our popular conception in poems like Robert Browning’s:

The year's at the spring;
The day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven...
All's right with the world!

Or Bette Midler singing: From a distance, I find more reassurance about the location of God and the place for my prayers in places like Psalm 139.

Lord, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

Indeed, there is not a word on my lips,
but you, O LORD, know it altogether.

Where can I go then from your Spirit?
where can I flee from your presence?

If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.

If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there your hand will lead me
and your right hand hold me fast. (BCP p. 794)

or in Romans 8:38-39 (NRSV)

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When I pray for someone I believe my prayers are received by the Love that is God and directed to those who need them. For me God is located in the midst of us. My prayer is often that the person will feel surrounded in and borne up by prayer. I don’t think that my prayers have taken off for outer space or gone to an unknown location. My hope is that the prayers are wrapping any one who needs them in a comforter of prayer. I hope the recipients will feel that prayer is carrying them through their days and they feel that peace that passes understanding as they receive healing or strength in their lives.

Jesus says in Luke 17: “For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

And that is where I put my heart and my prayer. Where do you think your prayers go? Or does it matter to you?

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Derek Olsen

The secular New Year has come and gone—and that means it’s time for resolutions for the year that will be 2008. Like many Americans, I’m making a resolution to do something about my physical health. Now, I could just resolve to “be healthy” but something that vague and general will never translate into actions, something that vague and general will never be formed into habits. And that’s what we’re really talking about, right?—habits, dedicated ways of being.

I’m not just resolving to “be healthy”, I’m resolving some specific things: to buy organic food whenever possible, to buy local food whenever possible, to eat my five servings of fruits and veggies daily, and to exercise at least three times a week.

So far so good, but now—what about my spiritual health? Doesn’t it require just as much nurture as my physical health? And again, what sort of resolution should I make? Let me give you a hint: if “be healthy” didn’t cut it, neither will “be holy”… Just like the physical goals, we need something that we can be accountable for. As a Scripture scholar, I’m always partial to the goal “read more Scripture” but even that’s too vague and general to form a habit.

One option is to select a plan that reads through the whole Bible in a year. Some folks may be wary of such a thing…as if it weren’t properly Anglican or something...but let me assure you, nothing could be farther from the truth! As it turns out, the earliest one-year Bible reading plan that I know is thoroughly catholic. It’s a set of instructions from the 8th century that lays out the cycle of readings for the monastic Night Office. Biblical books were read straight-through in patterns that coincided with the liturgical seasons: for instance Exodus was read in Lent, Isaiah in Advent, Acts and Revelation in Easter, etc. It was a plan with staying power, too—I’ve seen versions with minor edits and tweaks from the 11th century and we can even find references to it in the very first Book of Common Prayer.

In the preface to the 1549 BCP, Archbishop Cranmer (following the work of the Spanish liturgist Cardinal Quiñonez) laments the loss of this yearly reading system and goes on to present a new version of it in the body of the prayer book. No longer restricted to the Night Office for monastics and clergy alone, Cranmer incorporated it into reworking of the monastic liturgies that we know today as the Daily Office—Morning and Evening Prayer. This revised system offered two readings per service for a total of four daily that read sequentially through the Old Testament (except for some bits of Leviticus, Chronicles, and Ezekiel) once every year—and through the New Testament (except for Revelation) three times every year. This system remained in place until sometime after the authorization of the 1662 prayer book. In short, a one-year Bible reading plan is about as Anglican as you can get!

If a one-year plan sounds like a little much, another terrific option to work on your spiritual health is to move to the modern two-year plan. Cranmer’s one-year system eventually gave way to longer versions with shorter readings. The Daily Office lectionary in the back of our current prayer book stands in direct continuity with these. It reads through most of Scripture with three readings a day stretched over two years. Perhaps taking up the discipline of the Daily Office and utilizing this Scripture reading plan might be a good option for you.

While either of these plans appears daunting at first glance, remember that we’re talking about habits here, not one-time—or even one-year—events. If you want to start reading through Scripture or praying the Daily Office, approach it with the same strategies as you would a physical exercise plan. Find some buddies to help out! You don’t have to read or pray together—though it may help—but checking in and being accountable to others is often a great motivator. Also, commit to reading your Bible or doing either Morning or Evening Prayer a certain number of times each week and increase it as you are able. If you pick a sequential plan and you miss a few days or even a week, show yourself a little grace; don’t beat yourself up or even try to make up what you missed—just continue on with your plan. After all, it’s a cycle—you’ll catch it the next time around!

Click here for a copy of Cranmer’s original reading plan and here for online and downloadable resources to help you get started with the Daily Office.

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Martin L. Smith

Serendipity. A peculiar word, from an odd source. An English writer of the late 18th century, Horace Walpole, concocted it from the Arabic name for Sri Lanka after he came across it in an old Persian folk tale! The story dealt with fascinating discoveries we stumble across accidentally while we are looking for something else. Recently, browsing on the internet, I came across—serendipitously!—the intriguing account of the origin of the famous “Prayer of St. Francis,” which is now in our prayer book (p. 833). It is known and loved the world over: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”

The story illustrates how grace works through odd, accidental ways and surfs the waves of human error. Apparently (it feels a bit like telling a child there is no Santa Claus!) the prayer was not written by St. Francis. It is a modern prayer originally composed in French. It first surfaced in 1912 in a devotional newsletter called La Clochette, piously recommended as a “beautiful prayer to recite during Mass.” We can picture devout subscribers cutting it out and using it throughout the devastating war-torn years that followed. But the author remained unknown. It was just one prayer among thousands of devotions like it.

How on earth did it spread across the world? Well, not long after World War I started someone sent it to the Pope and then it was printed in the Vatican newspaper. And then around 1920 a French Franciscan friar decided to print up some holy cards to circulate the prayer, now entitled the Prayer for Peace. He happened to use cards with a picture of St. Francis on the front. One of these cards must have fallen into the hands of an ardent group of Protestant peace activists, because when they started using the prayer in their movement committed to radical non-violence, they gave St. Francis as its author! It was an easy mistake, to assume the famous saint had written the prayer on the reverse. In 1936, an American Disciples of Christ minister called Kirby Page included an English translation in his book Living Courageously, based on the same mistaken assumption that St. Francis was the author. After that it was taken up during World War II as the most favored prayer for peace and spread across the globe, borne along by the reputation of the beloved saint of Assisi, becoming in every sense of the word a living classic of prayer and an ecumenical treasure, loved by people of every tradition.

Is it a let-down to learn the prayer is not by St. Francis? Not for me. The serendipitous discovery reinforces the truth that deep, creative spirituality isn’t confined at all to the saints who achieved fame. The Spirit is like a vast underground aquifer, and while many who have drilled their wells deeply to draw on it became known and loved, there are countless numbers who in their time dug just as deep, while carrying on their lives in the same obscurity as most of us do.

Our own cultural bias in modern North America is so ludicrously geared to celebrity, to notoriety, that we need to compensate for it by learning to rejoice in the mysterious contributions that flow to us from the anonymous and obscure. And surely no one would encourage us more than humble St. Francis, who is presumably more than happy to have played a part in spreading, through a blunder, a prayer which reveals that some unknown author had as deep a gift for prayer as he had!

Embracing this as a modern prayer, a prayer emerging at the beginning of the blood-soaked 20th century, a prayer that faces into the staggering challenges posed by human entrapment in the cycle of violent retaliation, jolts us into realism. Perhaps in some quarters the association with St. Francis actually weakens the impact of the prayer by linking it with a nostalgic sentimentality, since he is so often suffused with a pious haze of sweetness and light—the simplistic saint who preached innocently to the little birdies, the patron of pets; charming, but quite impractical.

I’ve decided to learn the prayer by heart in the original French. Sometimes using another language in prayer helps us really attend to its meaning. The original version, at least to my ears, encourages us to point quite specifically at the situations in which we are promising to practice gospel reconciliation. Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l’union. As if to say, there! just here! in that place where I see discord, may I take responsibility to act as a reconciler. It is not a prayer of pious generality but a demanding pledge of commitment to the crucified Messiah to whom we owe our vows as peacemakers.

Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.

By Derek Olsen

In an organization that has structured and arranged its ways of being in and out of weeks and months and years in a succession that passes through decades and crawls through centuries, old ways are covered by new ways, then rediscovered, then forgotten again in tides and waves of memories. Sometimes practices and ways and observances slowly drift to the bottom of the sea of memory and are silted over to be fossilized; at other times they are unexpectedly discovered and brought to the surface, admired for their anachronistic oddity then discarded yet again as obsolete. But sometimes these obscure treasures of time resonate when brought beneath the light of a new sun, revealing a vibrancy to once again be admired and treasured.

This week yields such an observance, or rather a set of them: the Ember Days. The Spirit moves as the Spirit wills and those who live by calendar of the Church come to note, to appreciate, to wonder at coincidences and collisions of observances and events. Indeed—we almost come to expect them. So at this time when the House of Bishops gathers, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and distinguished guests meet in New Orleans, it is no surprise that this week finds us at a time when the calendar itself urges us to pray for growth, for sustenance but above all to pray for the Church.

The Ember Days are of ancient origin. In each season of the year, a Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday are devoted to fasting and prayer. Formerly, they were Roman festivals to beseech the blessings of the gods: one in summer for harvest, one in autumn for the vintage, and one in winter for the planting of seed. By the second century, Christians in Rome had baptized these observances and sometime (probably in the third century) a balancing fourth was added for spring. In fact, in the early days of Christian practice these four markers anchored the church’s year when its calendar was yet in its infancy—no Christmas yet, no Advent, an uncertain and emerging Lent—just Easter, Pentecost, and the Ember Days…

Originally tied to the earth, to the birth and growth of crops, a new meaning was given to them by the fifth century: the Ember Saturdays became the quarterly dates for the ordination of deacons and priests. Thus, the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays became days of fasting and supplication not just for the earth, but for the Church, for its ministers and ministry. They became a time to pray for the Church.

As the centuries circled the contours of our current calendar began to appear—Advent, All Saints, Feast of the Holy Trinity—and the Ember Days receded, their fortunes waxing and waning as liturgical fashion regarded or discarded them until the Roman Church suppressed them at Vatican II. In our own Anglican world they remain little known and little observed but for postulants in the Church: for these are the days when they are required to write letters to check in with their bishops. The current Book of Common prayer locates them among the Days of Optional Observance and, if you flip to the collects you will find none appointed there in course. Nevertheless, if you continue past the seasons of the year, past the Feasts and Holy Days to the numbered group of collects you will find three under number 15, prayers for “For those to be ordained,” “For the choice of fit persons for the ministry,” “For all Christians in their vocation”—one for each day, provided to pray for the Church.

As media hubbub and heightened rhetoric converge on New Orleans, humming and swarming around the House of Bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury like so many gadflies, I invite us to recall and recollect the Ember Days. It is time to pray for seeds, for growth, and for a bountiful harvest. It is time to pray for the faithful, the ordained, and the consecrated. Truly—it is a time to pray for the Church.

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.

by Derek Olsen

At six o’clock on a Friday morning the darkened rooms of our seaside vacation condo were filled with the happy shrieks of our fifteen-month old younger daughter, affectionately known as Lil’ H. Dutifully I rolled out of bed, paused long enough to throw some clean clothes on me and fresh diaper on her, lobbed a bottle of milk somewhere in her direction, and strapped her in the stroller; the goal, of course, was to get her out as quickly as I could before she woke my sleeping in-laws or her sister. (My wife was already awake, but I hoped she could catch a little more precious sleep.) By seven-thirty we had strolled the boardwalk several times, visited the playground twice, and had donuts in hand for a light breakfast. As luck would have it—well, okay, maybe it wasn’t just luck—we found ourselves in front of a small Roman Catholic church with a signboard advertising a 7:30 mass. We ducked inside in time for the pre-mass rosary—and left promptly in the middle of the first lesson. Not content to stay in her stroller, Lil’ H insisted on running around as fast as her little legs could go, offering a running commentary on all around her that made up in volume what it lacked in coherence.

That service we left has been on my mind for the past two months now because of what I saw there. That little church, at 7:30 on a Friday morning, in a resort town, had been packed to the gills. The sanctuary that I had expected to be desolate was almost entirely filled. And not all the hair in the place was white either. Certainly the elderly were in attendance but I saw some folks my age, and some a bit older with teen-agers in tow. Some were in beach-wear, others in work-wear; some were clearly vacationers, others seemed to be permanent residents. I was—I am—jealous. Why couldn’t the innards of my church look like that?

The Episcopal church in town was one street over, but was shuttered up and locked down. To be sure we’d been there on Sunday and had been pleased at the size of the congregation and number of children in attendance that seemed to have improved from the year before—but during the week it sat quiet and empty. I would much rather have had Lil’ H run about, gleefully scattering cake donut crumbs (bad choice in retrospect…) in the midst of an Episcopal Morning Prayer service, but it wasn’t an option for us. And I wonder why not. Oh—certainly I understand that there are reasons—but still I wonder…

One of the glories of the prayer book and of its tradition is the retention of the Daily Office. For centuries before the Reformation the Western Church had regarded the eightfold pattern of daily prayer formulated by our monastic ancestors to be the norm for committed Christians—theoretically meaning everybody but practically meaning monastics and clergy. By Archbishop Cranmer’s day, many religious satisfied the obligation of saying the Office by means of aggregation, that is, combining these eight hours into blocks at the beginning, middle, and end of the day. Cranmer—following in the footsteps of a Spanish reformer—sought to restore ancient intention with two aggregated times of prayer, one in the morning and one in the evening that would read most of the Bible through in a year and the Psalms every month. (Don’t believe me? Check out the preface to the first prayer book on page 866 of our current ’79 BCP…) His intention was not to make life easier for the clergy alone but to realize the goal the Church had long sought—to integrate these times of prayer and readings of Scripture into the life of the people.

The Daily Office is one of the things that drew me into the Episcopal Church. Benedictine in spirit, evangelical in nature, the rhythm of psalmody, the constancy of the Scriptures and the experience of the ebb and flow of the liturgical year guided me into a deeper understanding of the Word of God and the way of the cross revealed therein. I can’t pretend I pray the Office every day and every night—but I know I miss it when I don’t or can’t pray it. It has slowly become a part of me, and a central part of what it means for me to be an Anglican, an Episcopalian. The rhythm of the Office punctuated by the Mass on Sundays and feast-days—this is the pattern of Episcopal life as I know it.

I do wonder, though: why isn’t the Office more widely known and practiced in our congregations? Part of the answer, I suspect, is historical and lies with the obligations of the clergy. In former days and in some places still throughout the Anglican Communion clergy were under obligation to say the Office twice daily. (Indeed, I’m told a certain Canadian bishop is known for asking the clergy she meets on her daily rounds of their opinion of the morning’s readings… Are any of our clergy in danger of similar queries?) In such circumstances the priest might as well open up the church and toll the bell to invite others to pray alongside. But this is no longer our way—and I think it’s a shame. Yes, both clergy and laity can and should read the Office on their own, but we as parish communities make an important statement about our beliefs and our values when we take the time and make the effort to pray it together.

I’m told that the reason why Episcopal churches aren’t open in mornings and evenings for the Daily Office is because modern people don’t have an interest in that kind of thing. Really? Then why was the Roman church I stopped in full? One reason I can think of is because of married clergy: morning and evening logistics are far more complex when school, daycare drop-offs, after-school programs, and family dinners rear their heads. I imagine it’s much easier for an unattached Roman priest to roll out of bed for an early morning mass than for an Episcopal priest with a warm lump beside her—and two or three more just down the hall. Another reason is practical: for those hurrying off to work or school an 8:45 or 9:30 service (both of which I’ve seen at some of the few Episcopal Churches that do offer weekday Morning Prayer) simply won’t do.

I have a fantasy about this matter and my fantasy is this: that there would be at least one Episcopal church in a given area that would offer the Office at times when regular people, yes, people who work and have children and all, could attend. I know it’s possible—I think of that full congregation on an early Friday morning, and I think of evenings I stopped at St. Mary the Virgin in New York on my way home in my City days. It may not be easy—but it’s possible.

What stops us? What’s the gap between your average Episcopal congregation and that early morning Roman Catholic crowd? For one thing, it’s a religious culture that sees such observance as the norm rather than the exception. What would it take for us to cultivate that? A recapturing of the rhythm is in order, a recapturing of what Cranmer intended to feed the whole flock—not just the set-apart few. (Clergy, cover your eyes for a second…) The Office isn’t the special province of the ordained, it belongs to us lay people just as much as it does to the clergy. We need to rediscover it and to make it heard. In our homes, in our churches, in our cathedrals. Unlike masses, there’s no part of the prayer book Office that actually requires a priest. If there is no sound of prayer in our churches and in our cathedrals maybe it’s not really their fault; maybe it’s ours…

For those who would like to learn more about the Daily Office, check out pages 75 and following in your Book of Common Prayer (or, if thou wilt, pages 37 and following) or look online at Mission St Clare

Derek Olsen is completing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He is an adjunct professor at Emory’s Candler School of Theology where he teaches in homiletics, liturgics, and New Testament. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.

Derek has posted links to the morning and evening Offices of the Dead at haligweorc, and that seems an appropriate way to mark this mournful day.

At least 32 are dead and 24 are injured in the deadliest shooting spree in American history, says The Washington Post.

Updated: Episcopal Campus Ministry reaches out.

Happy Easter!

Descending Theology: The Resurrection
By Mary Karr

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in — black ice and squid ink —
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse's core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest's door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now

it's your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.

From Sinners Welcome

Holy Saturday has not inspired an outpouring of excellent poems, but here is a fine one from Denise Levertov called Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell. It begins as so:

"Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn."

Horae Canonicae

The phrase means canonical hours, and Auden has written a poem, set on Good Friday, for each of the seven offices of the monastic day.

An excerpt:

What we know to be not possible,
Though time after time foretold
By wild hermits, by shaman and sybil
Gibbering in their trances,
Or revealed to a child in some chance rhyme
Like will and kill, comes to pass
Before we realize it: we are surprised
At the ease and speed of our deed
And uneasy: It is barely three,
Mid-afternoon, yet the blood
Of our sacrifice is already
Dry on the grass; we are not prepared
For silence so sudden and so soon;
The day is too hot, too bright, too still,
Too ever, the dead remains too nothing.
What shall we do till nightfall?

Just as I was about to post this item I learned that the BBC's Radio 3 is featuring all seven poems at intervals throughout the day today. The poems are introduced by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and read by the actor Tom Durham. You can listen here.

Descending Theology: The Crucifixion
By Mary Karr

To be crucified is first to lie down
on a shaved tree, and then to have oafs stretch you out
on a crossbar as if for flight, then thick spikes
fix you into place.

Once the cross pops up and the pole stob
sinks vertically in an earth hole perhaps
at an awkward list, what then can you blame for hurt
but your own self's burden?

You're not the figurehead on a ship. You're not
flying anywhere, and no one's coming to hug you.
You hang like that, a sack of flesh with the hard
trinity of nails holding you into place.

Thus hung, your ribcage struggles up
to breathe until you suffocate, give up the ghost.
If God permits this, one wonders how
this twirling earth

manages to navigate the gravities and star tugs.
Or if some less than loving watcher
watches us scuttle across the boneyard greens
under which worms

seethe and the front jaws of beetles
eventually clasp toward the flesh of every beloved.
The man on the cross under massed thunderheads feels
his soul leak away,

then surge. Some windy authority lures him higher
till an unseen tear in the sky's membrane is rent,
and he's streaming light, snatched back, drawn close,
so all loneliness ends.

You can listen to it here, (Scroll down to March 7.) and buy Karr's Sinners Welcome here.

I pushed Mary Karr's wonderful book Sinners Welcome on you at Christmas. Allow me to push it once again. This is "Descending Theology: The Garden" from a five-poem cycle on the life of Christ.

Descending Theology: The Garden

We know he was a man because, once doomed,
he begged for reprieve. See him
grieving on his rock under olive trees,
his companions asleep
on the hard ground around him
wrapped in old hides.
Not one stayed awake as he'd asked.
That went through him like a sword.
He wished with all his being to stay
but gave up
bargaining at the sky. He knew
it was all mercy anyhow,
unearned as breath. The Father couldn't intervene,
though that gaze was never
not rapt, a mantle around him. This
was our doing, our death.
The dark prince had poured the vial of poison
into the betrayer's ear,
and it was done. Around the oasis where Jesus wept,
the cracked earth radiated out for miles.
In the green center, Jesus prayed for the pardon
of Judas, who was approaching
with soldiers, glancing up—as Christ was—into
the punctured sky till his neck bones
ached. Here is his tear-riven face come
to press a kiss on his brother.

Mary Karr

I am not sure why I focus on the donkey in today's Gospel. Donkeys pop up in Scripture all of the time. One of them even talks. But it is the donkey that Jesus rides into Jerusalem, the one who is mysteriously waiting at just the right place, that really gets my attention. I have no New Age inclinations, but in a strictly metaphoric way, donkeys strike me as the surest spiritual guides in the animal kingdom. And if you follow this link, Francis Jammes, via Richard Wilbur, will explain why. The poem is called A Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys , and I will bet that at least a few of you will never forget it.

I wrote this column seven or eight years ago for Beliefnet.com. Happy Thanksgiving from the Diocese of Washington.

A few years ago, while I was on an academic fellowship, my family and I spent Thanksgiving with other fellows and their families. In religious terms, we were a mixed bunch: Christians, Unitarians, Jews, agnostics, and atheists.
A multi-religious dinner table always presents a bit of a problem when it is time to say the grace before meals. But Thanksgiving presents a particularly sticky situation, because it is the one occasion on which even the irreligious feel that some sort of invocation should be made. But who, or what, should we invoke?

After several minutes of communal hemming and hawing, one of the braver of our number delivered a prayer to the earth, thanking it for its bounty and seeking its forgiveness for our environmental sins. In all, it sounded more Green Party than pagan. Having crossed that hastily improvised bridge, we tucked into our feast.

But the moment stayed with me, for it illustrated what a peculiar, not to mention sneaky, holiday we were celebrating.

Thanksgiving is not a purely civic holiday like Memorial Day or Independence Day, although we are, in part, celebrating the fortitude of our Pilgrim forebears. Nor, like Christmas or Passover, does it come freighted with the content of a particular faith. Rather, Thanksgiving straddles these two categories; it is civic and religious. To paraphrase Jesus, Thanksgiving gives both to Caesar and to God.

In doing so, it discomfits believer and unbeliever equally. For giving thanks assumes the existence of one (One?) who deserves our gratitude--anathema to atheists. But giving thanks as a nation assumes that we stand before God as citizens of a country, as well as members of a faith. And that should offend anyone who believes that salvation flows from the church and not from the state.

Thanksgiving, in other words, assumes the existence of something that doesn't exist: an American faith.

On these grounds, I suppose one could argue that this holiday violates the establishment clause of the Constitution. I leave that task for some particularly dogmatic member of Americans for the Separation of Church and State. What interests me is the ubiquity of gratitude, the understanding, even among witnessing atheists, that it is important to be grateful for our good fortune.

For me, the desire to give thanks is evidence, at a minimum, that human beings are innately religious. The theologian Karl Rahner wrote that there is a "God-shaped hole" in every one of us. With Rahner, I believe that it is God who put it there.

You can take that argument or leave it. But if you leave it, help me to understand why we experience this particular species of gratitude. I'm not talking about the kind of gratitude we feel toward someone who has done us a favor. I mean the sort of global gratitude inspired by gifts we could not have known enough to ask for, or the kind we feel when matters beyond our control end well for us.

Who do you thank for your sweetheart's brown eyes; for growing up where it snows (or doesn't); for being alive at the same time as Bruce Springsteen; or for seeing your children born into a country that is prosperous and at peace?

You might argue that there is no one to be thanked. Maybe all our purported blessings are a matter of random chance. Perhaps the desire to extend gratitude beyond the human is an evolutionary glitch--a useful social trait that got too big for its britches.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps we awaken one day and realize that we are not now, and have never been, masters of our own destinies; that our successes were not entirely of our own making; that our souls magnify the Lord, whether we like it or not.

Again, you can take this argument or leave it. It is easier to believe in chance than in grace. Chance requires nothing from us. In fact, if life is a succession of random events, than any response to good fortune is superfluous.

Grace is different. In receiving grace, we are challenged to become channels of grace. This is more than a matter of a few good deeds (although those help); it is an invitation to place one's self in God's hands, and devote one's self toward what we perceive as God's ends.

Thanksgiving, then, is a call to action: a gentle poke to awaken our collective conscience from its postprandial slumber. To whom much is given, etc. etc.

In a county as religiously diverse as ours, we may never be able to express our gratitude in words that are acceptable to everyone. Fortunately, deeds work even better.

Almighty God, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
From The Book of Common Prayer

Not long ago, a friend who edits a neurology magazine asked me to write a profile of a soldier who had returned from Iraq with a traumatic brain injury. Such injuries, typically caused by roadside explosive devices, have become the signature wound of this war.(USA Today is on the case here, Stars and Stripes here and you can listen to an NPR piece here.) It is as if nobody just gets shot anymore, someone at Walter Reed Hospital told me in a moment of balck humor.

These injuries are particuarly challenging to treat because many of the symptoms are behavioral as opposed to "physical" in the traditional sense of that word, although obviously the symptoms are rooted in physical damage to the brain and nervous system.

The public relations people at Walter Reed, paired me up with Brian Radke, a native of the Pacific Coast who had moved to Arizon shortly before enlisting. The article I wrote hasn't appeared yet, so I can't excerpt it here, but Dean Baker, of Brian's old hometown newspaper The Columbian has been following his story pretty closely, and has written excellent pieces available here and here. There's another sweet piece about him by a Columbian columnist here.

Brian was a pleasure to meet and to talk to, very honest about the difficulties he was facing in recovering rom his multiple injuries, and able to laugh at some of his new infirmities in a disarming way. Working on the story about Brian, and reflecting on the service, of the Rev. Stuart Kenworthy of Christ Church, Georgetown, (read a letter he wrote when he was in Iraq here, reminds me that working with warriors is grace-filled work, whatever one thinks of the war they are involved in.

Please remember Brian, his wife, Nova, and his parents Dave and Lynn in your prayers today.

As regular visitors to the blog know, I frequently invite people to have a look at our diocese's spirituality site. We feature daily meditations, chosen from spiritual writings. Today's meditation is from the works of Jean Vanier and closes with this verse:

Blessed are you because you have allowed
your own conscience to develop;
you have not been swayed by what people might say about you
and you have acted as a free individual;
you have accepted persecution;
you have not been afraid to proclaim the truth.

The site also has flash meditations on scripture. I mention that because one of them is called "Candlemas" which Episcopalians, Catholics and the Orthodox churches (anybody else?) celebrate tomorrow, Feb. 2. It is referred to by some as the feast of The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple, and by others as the feast of The Purification of the Virgin, but both titles refer to the event which inspired the scriptural passage that those who say the Liturgy of Hours know as the Nunc Dimits :

"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou has prepared before the face of all people, To be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel."

If you are intereted in the Liturgy of the Hours, also referred to as the Daily Office, visit the meditations and readings page of the spirituality site and click on the daily office link of the appropriate day.

Update on Sunday night: turns out they skipped this episode to advance the plot and get to the episode regarding Jimmy's death before the Olympics.

Here are two questions prompted by the the episode of "Daniel" that will air this Friday night: Do you have experiences of prayer from which you feel that God is absent? If so, what do you do about it?

Some of the great mystics, I am thinking particularly of St. John of the Cross, have described the experience of losing the consolation that was once present in their prayer lives. If I am remembering right, that is what he was talking about when he first used the phrase "Dark night of the soul." John and others portray this feeling of absence as a phase in a person's spiritual growth, rather than a punishment. But it doesn't feel that way when you are mired in the middle of it.

Anybody care to share their experience? I talked a bit about mine in a column I wrote when I used to work for Beliefnet.

Recently, on the blog and in personal correspondence, I've noticed people tossing around the phrase, "I will pray for you," in a way that gives me pause. There are, of course, all kinds of good reasons to pray for someone, and, come to think of it, who needs a reason? But suppose all you are praying for is that a people will abandon what they believe and embrace what you believe? What if you are praying that somehow someone can be induced to do something that that someone really doesn't think is right?

Is this sort of prayer an end run around another person's conscience? Does it presume that the individual being prayed for has not prayed about the issue himself or herself? Or, supposing that he or she has prayed over the issue, does it assume that your prayer is superior to theirs?

It can be argued that all someone who says "I'll pray for you," in the heat of an argument is saying is, "I hope God will guide you." But it can also be argued that people who say "I'll pray for you," in the ways I've discussed is trying to enlist God's help in shaping other people not in God's image, but in their own.

(And if you don't think I'm right abuot this, don't worry, I'll pray for you.)