Greening Team

Magi watch in wonder as the St. John's Altar and Flower Guilds dress the church for the Nativity.

Obispo Y Obispas

As a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, I have three bosses (well, besides Jesus): Our bishop diocesan, Jon Bruno, and our two new bishops suffragan, Diane Jardine Bruce (below left, with other colleagues) and Mary Douglas Glasspool. At our annual convention last December, +Diane became the first woman elected bishop in our diocese, +Mary, a few hours later, the second. +Diane's responsibilities include the churches in the bottom third of our five-county diocese (lucky St. John's), +Mary's all the diocese's schools (double lucky, since St. John's has one of the nation's largest Episcopal day schools). Bishop Bruno visited St. John's last spring and checked in with Headmaster Jim Lusby. Bishop Bruce paid a gracious private visit a couple of weeks ago.

And this week, on Monday (All Saints Day in the liturgical calendar), Bishop Glasspool celebrated Holy Eucharist and preached at a rousing service attended by 750 students, teachers, and administrators as well as a parent or two. Using the opportunity to teach the congregation about the origin of Halloween, she marched in wearing pretty much the scariest monster mask ever worn by a bishop (which fit neatly under her miter). Before the service, she tried it out on her chaplain for the day, 8th grader Christopher Lanham.

Doffing mask and miter, she was soon teaching us a handy mnemonic chant -- Spooks! Saints! Souls! When we dress up on Halloween, it's like the ancient Celts putting on costumes and masks to ward off demons. The next day, All Saints, the Christian church remembers its heroes. Nov. 2, All Souls Day, is reserved for all the precious souls God has made.

That's Bishop Mary below, with the precious young souls who helped with Monday's worship. Headmaster Lusby and Chaplain Patti Peebles are at right.

Photo by Jo Ellen Wilson

St. John's Sky

5:55 p.m.

Allight

The St. John's campus this evening, just before Bible study

St. John's Sky

5:28 p.m.

For All The Relocated Saints

Here's another of those stories about hallowed ground. In May, according to Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), 82-year-old Mary Tan's funeral in Da Nang, Vietnam turned bloody. On Aug. 18, he told the House's human rights commission:

Vietnamese authorities and riot police disrupted that sad and solemn occasion, shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd, beating mourners with batons and electric rods. More than 100 were injured, dozens were arrested, and several remain in custody and have reportedly been severely beaten and tortured. At least two innocent people have been murdered by the Vietnamese police.

Mary's mourners were trying to bury her in the Roman Catholic parish cemetery in Con Dau village, which the communist government has ordered closed. It denies attacking the funeral procession but doesn't deny preventing Mary's family from burying her. According to one report, 59 people were arrested.

I first learned about the incident from the Aug. 20 Viet Nam News, an English-language daily published by the government. (A St. John's friend travels widely in Asia and always brings newspapers home.) It carries the headline "U.S. Congressman's claims of attacks in Viet Nam refuted" and for good measure pummels Rep. Smith with "totally fabricated," "sheer fabrications," and "smear." It adds:

Da Nang City's Religion Board said extremist elements had taken advantage of Tan's funeral to deliberately cause public disorder and attack police...

The article repeats a Vietnam foreign ministry statement at the time of the incident in May that it all had "nothing to do with religion." What's really happening, you see, is that local Roman Catholics refuse to acknowledge the state's superior insights about the best use of prime real estate. Why worry about those resting below when officials have big ideas for those remaining above? The Viet Nam News reveals:

Con Dau Cemetery is to be relocated as part of Da Nang's widely publicized new residential area development scheme. The city is currently providing compensation for the site clearance work to local residents and the cemetery is no longer available for use.

Obviously the mourners had just failed to keep up with news reports.

That's the way an efficiently-run government with a Religion Board handles these disagreements. It also helps to have a populace whose members are humble enough to admit their errors. The News refers to allegations that people were detained but never quite says they weren't. There do seem to have been some heart-to-hearts among officials and those involved, because the state organ also secretes this:

Some...people admitted repentantly later that they had incited the deceased woman's family to attack the police during her funeral....[A woman] was one of those lured to join the extremist group, but is now sorry for getting involved. She said: "I see I had been doing wrong."

My takeaway: Beware when someone says, "This isn't about freedom of religion."

Hiatus Uninterruptus

Photo by Pam Seigel

What a blessing to hear from time to time (well, twice) from people who miss reading my blog entries. My Advent hiatus became a Christmas-Epiphany-Lenten hiatus. If anyone (either of you) wonders why, blogging was taking too much time from 1) reading and 2) playing the guitar, which is increasingly coming in handy around St. John's. As I begin my second full year as a full-time priest and pastor at a wonderful Episcopal church and school in south Orange County, California, I find myself somewhat less focused on offering little-read insights on U.S.-Iran relations (though I still think this is the way to go) and more on the virtually infinite richness of ministry. Imagine, for instance, seeing these faces from the altar on Ash Wednesday (or from anywhere, anytime).

I may be back soon. For now, if you're still reading, and if you're on Facebook, friend me. I still expound there, though more briskly. God's blessings.

http://www.facebook.com/people/John-H-Taylor/516168045?

All About The Clothes, Even When It's Not

Instapundit spotted and featured this site, "Bad Vestments," which means that the political color for the moment is libertarian true blue. The site itself features photographs of lavish, odd, or, if I may, ugly liturgical clothing being worn by priests and bishops. The site's recurrent theme is "because Christian worship is not supposed to be about you." As far as I can see, its creator doesn't identify her- or himself, so one can only speculate about the coloration of their theological views. One hint is the persistent references to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, as Mrs. Schori, a commonplace on theologically conservative blogs, where some find her views objectionable and others, her gender, at least insofar as its being fit for the episcopacy is concerned.

No question that the site is a hoot. Yet ridicule is a questionable activity for Christians (mea culpa, he quickly adds), anonymous ridicule* even more so. It's in the paradox of Christ that when we fault others for acting as though it's all about them, it can mean that it's all about us. If the authors of "Bad Vestments" have an idol, it's liturgical exactitude. Like two of the folksingers in "A Mighty Wind," we prayer book-thumping Christians are tempted to worship color -- purple for Lent and the impending season of Advent, white for Christmas and Easter (and weddings and funerals), red for Pentecost (think the tongues of fire as the Holy Spirit descended on the church).

Many of the priests and bishops depicted at "Bad Vestments" are thinking well outside the basic Crayola box. One smiling bishop is arrayed in cathedral stone gray, which doesn't show up on any of the liturgical calendars I've seen. As for ordinary time, or, as some say, "after Pentecost," the long season between Trinity Sunday and Advent, green is called for, but surely not lime green, Holy Father. And yet what's the matter with a little variety within the confines of those all-too-familiar basic color groups? Suggesting it has to be a certain green is akin to arguing that God prefers the King James Version of the Bible.

To be fair, "Bad Vestments" doesn't seem to be making such a restrictive point. Creative is one thing. Hideous is, of course, another. The site's other targets are we pastors whose raiment sometimes screams, "Please look at me, and get ready for a homily about where this bizarre rig came from." As a matter of fact, I have some stoles (the long strips of colored cloth, a vestige of Roman senators' garb, that priests wear around their necks) that people have given me or that are meaningful for some other reason. This especially applies to those I've brought home from two Holy Land pilgrimages. The red stole shown here, a treasured gift from the Altar Guild of the Cathedral Center of St. Paul in the Diocese of Los Angeles, prevented me from being the most inconspicuously dressed new priest in recent history at my ordination in January 2004, for which I'd neglected to order a custom-made chasuble as my beloved colleagues had.

It makes me feel good to wear these items, and sometimes I'm tempted to talk about them during sermons, but I rarely if ever do. I'm not sure why. And then's there's the issue of wearing our own vestments at all. Before almost every service, and especially on Sunday, I remember advice from my mentor, the Rev. Canon Mark Shier, now enjoying the first months of a well-earned retirement as rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. A priest of God for over a third of a century, he had a sacristy drawer full of personal vestments that he wore for weekday services but almost never on Sundays. He told me that that it gives the congregation pleasure and perhaps even some comfort to see their priest wearing a stole from the same set, as the Altar Guild would say, as what they see on the altar and the ambo (the liturgically correct term for lectern).

Yesterday at St. John's, our church was dressed in white to help us remember Christ the King on the last Sunday in Pentecost. We don't get to wear white all that much, so I was tempted to reach for a white and gold stole from the heart of old Jerusalem, the handiwork of Sami Barsom, a Syriac Orthodox tailor I met in 2007. I've worn it often enough on Sundays that it's soaked in the water of a score of baptisms. But just before the first service began this week, for whatever reason I heard my teacher's voice, so I wore the beautiful white St. John's house stole instead. Yep. I matched. Even when it's not about the clothes, it is.

*Mea maxima culpa, because each post, I now see, is signed by Christopher Johnson. Sorry about that, brother.

Maximum Andy

In an Orange County Business Journal cover story about our St. John's brother Andy Guilford, a U.S. District Court judge in Orange County, we learn of his continuing campaign to have Maury Wills inducted at Cooperstown, his diligence about keeping his promise never to attend an Angels game again, and a comparison that I, at least, had not heard before, growing out of his presiding in the case of former sheriff Mike Carona:

As a judge, Guilford’s most high-profile case has been the Carona corruption trial. The case had led some to compare Guilford to former federal Judge John Sirica -- who ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes -- because of the role recordings played in Carona's trial.

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

St. John's Birds

4:45 p.m.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

St. John's Sky

6:15 p.m.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

St. John's Sky

2:15 p.m., after the 5th graders' religion test

St. John's Sky

2:50 p.m.

"One Finger": Sermon for 20 Pentecost

As Job learns, and we all know from our own lives, acceptance is the hardest part of suffering, especially if we're dealing with an injustice, an illness, or a broken relationship for which there's no immediate remedy, or no remedy at all. And yet when acceptance comes, so does the capacity for ministry. When I went to see a St. John's member who was losing a ten-year struggle against cancer and told him how sorry I was, Larry raised his weakened arms from the bed, shrugged, and whispered, "What are you going to do?" He quickly added, "So how's it going with you?" Acceptance, then ministry -- just like Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewky. My Sunday sermon is here.

Truckin' Through Genesis

Robert Alter reviews '60s comic artist R. Crumb's illustrated version of Genesis. I can't wait to get my copy from Amazon, though I don't think it will quite work for my 5th grade religion students at St. John's. Like Torah's first book, Crumb's illustrations are rated R. That's Abraham at left, about to sacrifice Isaac.

For The Love Of Children

If you want a shot of energy, sit next to philanthropist and businesswoman Sandy Segerstrom Daniels for lunch, as I did today at Scott's Grill, in the shadow of Costa Mesa, California's mighty South Coast Plaza. We lucky Orange Countians (including my other lunch companion, former County Supervisor Tom Wilson) were serving as judges for "Season of Caring presents the Possible Dream," the annual fundraising drive by the Orange County Register and South Coast Plaza on behalf of the county's charities benefiting children in need.

Sandy launched the Festival of Children Foundation in 2002 and serves as its executive director. As a leading supporter of the Register-South Coast Plaza tie-in (carefully nurtured by my longtime colleague Noah McMahon, a trustee of St. John's School, shown here riding around in circles to finish off last year's drive), Sandy graciously presided over today's working lunch along with the ever-resourceful Jackie Saragueta, who oversees the Register's own annual holiday drive, Season of Caring. It's raised over $6 million for local charities since former Register publisher N. Christian Anderson (my St. John's Church brother) launched it in 1999.

Since we judges gathered this time last year, Daniels' passion for helping non-profits that care for children has gone national. Earlier this year, former Supervisor Wilson, now handling the Festival of Children Foundation's governmental relations, helped Sandy persuade Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina to join with California's Diane Feinstein and their opposite numbers in the House to designate September as National Child Awareness Month to draw further attention to children's charities. The Daniels-Wilson team is now getting to work persuading Orange County's cities to follow suit, and the timing couldn't be better. These charities need and deserve all the attention they can get as kids are whipsawed between crisis unemployment levels and government's dwindling resources.

If children unite us, so does music. Another member of Sandy Daniels' team is Cassady Taylor, Festival of Children's director of marketing and public relations. He's named after Neal Cassady, a seminal Beat Generation figure who appears under another name in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Cassady's father, John Taylor (no relation, except in a larger sense), was an audio technician for the Grateful Dead, which in John's day was known for having the finest sound system every designed for a rock and roll band.

To make all this perfectly clear to any Republican Deadheads who may still be reading, Cassady is not named for the Bob Weir-John Perry Barlow song "Cassidy," which appears on Weir's 1972 album, "Ace" -- though Weir and Barlow are said to have had Neal in mind along with another Cassidy, daughter of a band archivist. And to end up, as we so often do, with politics, Cassady Taylor's stepfather is a son of President Nixon's late friend and former advance man, Jack Drown, and his wife and Mrs. Nixon's best friend, the late Helene Drown.

So like I said: Donate to "Season of Caring Presents the Possible Dream"!

St. John's Sky

6:35 p.m.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

St. John's Sky

5 p.m.

We Know This: They Heard A Reading From Job

The Obamas went to St. John's Episcopal Church today (in Washington, D.C., that is).

St. John's Sky

5:20 p.m.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry