Flyin' Shoes

In their book On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler make an observation that is easy to accept in principle: “God gives us a life cycle that includes death.” But when our beloved dies, Kübler-Ross and Kessler write, “We can’t believe what has happened, because we actually can’t believe what has happened.” Denial, which Kübler-Ross made famous, is our psyche’s way of obscuring an unfathomable horror until we recover enough for her next stages: Bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance.

No one chooses to experience such loss – except us Christians, who revisit the birth, life, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ every year between Christmas and Easter.

Most of the time, of course, we’re retelling familiar Bible stories that aren’t especially traumatic, even when they’re sad. Otherwise people wouldn’t read sad novels or go to the movies. In worship, the stories can be so familiar or stylized that they lose their punch. The prayers in our Holy Eucharist liturgy encompass the whole history of God’s people, from creation through our alienation from God to reconciliation through Jesus Christ and his betrayal and Resurrection. The story is swirling, actually cinematic, and yet we’ve heard it in church so often that our attention is sometimes won by our worries and troubles and even grumbling stomachs (been to the new In-N-Out yet?).

Lent is supposed to bring the great epic back into frame and focus. We repent, fast, and prepare. We work harder at reconnecting with God and each other, trying to make more time for reflection and prayer. And we remember that soon we’ll pass from daylight into the gloaming and on to the midnight of Holy Week and humanity’s greatest loss.

When comparing terrible losses, a person mourning a parent, spouse, child, sibling, or friend is likely to feel that Christ has some competition. A comforting aspect of Christian doctrine is that Jesus Christ experienced suffering and death to give meaning to ours, to demonstrate that God had endured and transcended the worst life could offer. Might suffering even be our duty? “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34). The secular mind replies, “Since I don’t want to be your follower, I’d rather not take up my cross.” The secular mind would say that faith is denial – humanity’s way of obscuring the uncomfortable truth that life is loss and pain.

But the mature Christian doesn’t deny loss and pain but meets them head on, accepting humanity’s complicity in Christ’s death and the inevitability of our own. During our Sunday morning Grief and Grieving discussions this Lent, St. John’s members shared moving personal stories of loss and recovery – in Christian terms, death and resurrection. We may be so conscious of Christ’s divinity that we feel reluctant to appropriate his experience, afraid to compare our suffering to his or accept that we have the right and capacity to enjoy resurrection after the searing trauma of loss. But the very purpose of the Incarnation is to bring God close enough to touch, envelop, and comfort us. God indeed gives us a life cycle that includes death, and life’s seasons as well. Among many other things, Lent and Easter are seasons when we practice – literally practice, as in “get ready for and used to” -- both grief and hope.

This Lent, I watched a poignant documentary about a brilliant Texas songwriter, Townes Van Zandt, who died in 1997 at the age of 52. He suffered from alcoholism and bipolar disorder. His story made me think about my father, a talented writer and musician who died too young because of his drinking. It made me think about being in late middle age. It made me think of the imminence of loss and preciousness of life, especially in the St. John’s community. The life of our church and especially the implacable church calendar are great blessings, because I do sometimes deny the swiftly passing seasons. But as Townes wrote and sang:

Days full of rain
Sky’s comin’ down again
I get so tired
Of these same old blues
Same old song
Baby, it won’t be long
‘fore I be tyin’ on
My flyin’ shoes 

This post was first published in the Lent 2013 issue of the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios. 

Holy Twosday

Processional crosses draped for Lent, but not for long

Five Freedoms

During the Sundays in Lent at St. John's, we've considered the healing that comes from acceptance and the resulting freedom from idealization; the healing of faith and the freedom to relinquish control; the healing of revaluing and the freedom of free-flowing grace; the healing of our impatience and the freedom to wait; and finally the healing of death in Christ and the freedom to thrive. If only George Zimmerman had heeded Jesus Christ's teaching in John 12: "Those who love their life lose it." My sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent is here.

Lent At St. John's: Healing And Freedom

The life of St. Patrick (what we know, and what we don't) provided an opportunity to sum up a month's teachings at St. John's on our Lenten themes of healing and freedom. My sermon for March 18, the fourth Sunday in Lent, including a wee bit of singing, is here.

Lenten Light

The late John Castelli's Christus Rex cross at St. John's, draped for Lent
Photo by Andrew Guilford

Let The Bare Places Flourish

Verlyn Klinkenborg on Lent -- advice a desert father (and mother) would love:

[W]hat if this were really a season for renunciation, even for non-believers? In the ancestral stories of nearly every culture, wisdom comes from the bare places, from deserts and dry mountains. The season of Lent itself is based on a “wilderness” — the one in which Jesus fasted for 40 days after his baptism.

It’s common to read this story and others like it as though the wilderness were little more than a blank backdrop. I read it a different way. Wisdom comes from the bare places because they force humility upon us. In these Lenten places, where life thrives on almost nothing, we can see clearly how large a shadow modern life and consumption cast upon the earth. In secular terms, Lent seems the opposite of Christmas — “What are you giving up?” versus “What are you getting?” Perhaps it might be a season in which to learn the value of abstention and to consider how to let the bare places flourish, or even simply to exist.

Hat tip to Cindy Drennan

One-Man Health Care Reform

A friend sent me this LA Times editorial this morning. Whom shall we blame for out-of-control health care costs -- insurance companies? health care providers? the uninsured (who drive up costs for everyone else)?:

Defending insurers is a bit like expressing sympathy for the devil, given how their premiums have skyrocketed. Not so long ago, this page blasted Blue Shield of California for proposing three rate hikes in quick succession that threatened to raise some customers' premiums by nearly 60%. Since then, however, the nonprofit has pledged to cap its net income at 2% of its revenue. The cap means that any future increases in premiums will be driven by higher charges from doctors and hospitals, not by increases in Blue Shield's operating margins.

Hospitals costs have risen particularly rapidly, with the average daily fee for a bed in an acute-care ward more than tripling since 2000. UCLA's reimbursements from Blue Shield have almost doubled in the last five years alone, the insurer says. That's partly because the university has been shifting onto Blue Shield some of the expense of treating patients with Medicare, Medi-Cal or no insurance. But it's a trend that even University of California officials acknowledge cannot continue.

One more culprit occurs to me: I and my fellow discretionary overweight insured. I can hold down health care costs and insurance premiums by losing 30 pounds and reducing the chances and expenses of adult-onset diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and stroke. I decided this morning I couldn't wait for Lent. Hold me accountable, reader!

Wrapping Up Lent: "Destiny" And "Death"

What does the enlightened evangelist put in her kit bag for performing Christian witness in a skeptical age? During the first three weeks of Lent at St. John's, we packed a couple of books (the Bible and Book of Common Prayer), reconnected with the ancient mystery of our liturgy, and pondered our thirst and hunger as tools for ministry. Fourth up was honest reflection on the legacies of our parents. Finally, we realized that they minister best who accept the inevitability and powerlessness of death.

St. John's Sermon Recap: Lent So Far

At St. John's Episcopal Church, our Lenten walk began two weeks before the sacred season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as we examined our missionary vocations as "steward's of God's mysteries" and lights of God's kingdom. During the five Sundays in Lent, we're discussing five tools of our evangelical ministry: The resources of the Word, as students of the Bible bound together by The Book of Common Prayer; our liturgical worship as a faith bridge between things seen and things unseen; and an honest understanding of our thirst, our inmost desires, whether for acceptance, achievement, or wholeness. Tune in the next two weeks for destiny and death!

Too Bad I'm Giving Up 25 Pounds For Lent

St. Patrick's cupcakes in the St. John's School staff lunchroom today

The Color Purple

The cross behind the altar at St. John's Episcopal Church, draped in purple for Lent

"Lent Is Excised"

Charles Moore, editor of the British "Spectator," is one Anglican who pays attention to the words of the hymns in church, recognizing that they are expressions of prayer and praise to God:

At the beginning of Lent, the hymn ‘Forty days and forty nights’ is sung. Singing it this Sunday, I noticed that the words were different. In the original, the third and fourth stanzas go:

‘Shall not we thy sorrows share/ And from earthly joys abstain,/ Fasting with unceasing prayer/ Glad with thee to suffer pain?

And if Satan, vexing sore, / Flesh or spirit should assail,/ Thou his vanquisher before,/ Grant we may not faint nor fail.’

The Celebration Hymnal in front of me said:

‘Let us thy endurance share/ And from earthly greed abstain/ With thee watching unto prayer,/With thee strong to suffer pain.

Then if evil on us press/ Flesh or spirit to assail,/Victor in the wilderness,/ Help us not to swerve or fail!’

The changes are an almost perfect example of bowdlerising. Necessary antitheses vanish — ‘Sorrows’ are the opposite of ‘joys’ but ‘endurance’ is not the opposite of ‘greed’ . You are ‘glad’ to suffer pain because that is the opposite of what is normally expected: being ‘strong’ to suffer pain is what one would generally hope to be. ‘Flesh’, being weak, ‘faints’: why would it ‘swerve’? Fasting is removed, as are Satan and the temptation he offers. In short, Lent is excised.

Six Recessions and A Depression

It's a sunny afternoon at St. John's, and the 5th graders await a lesson on Abram and Sarai (When's the change to Abraham and Sarah? Anyone?... Anyone? That's right: In Genesis 17. It's on the test, kids!). As always, a few indecent people are behaving indecently, and yet the vast majority are doing the best they can. On the bread front, housing numbers are encouraging, the Dow's up nearly 2% (as of five minutes ago, at least), and Ben Bernanke is steady in the buggy. On the circuses front, the AIG scandal is better than "Dallas." And now TIME has this chart on job losses, which makes the Bush-Obama recession of '08-'09 look an awful lot like Carter-Reagan's of '80-'82. Still terrible for those who are suffering. But there's hope this week, suddenly, isn't there?, that isn't not like Hoover-FDR's. Hope that it seemed almost reckless to feel just two weeks ago.

There's just something about Lent.

Andrew Sullivan's Lent

Read this!

Lent I And President Bartlett

Tens of millions of Christians in church today, the first Sunday in Lent, heard the story of Noah (in which God is so grieved by his people's vindictiveness and violence that he washes them away) and the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. Among many other things, the contrasting stories help explain our attitude toward the substance that essentially comprises us. As Harold Kushner has written, our relationship with water is primal. We're both drawn to it and frightened that it will reclaim us.

By their baptism in water and the Holy Spirit, Christians are cleansed of their iniquities (as the world was in Noah's story) and bound indissolubly to God and therefore made ultimately, perfectly safe. It's a powerful, almost magical sacrament, hence the arguments among denominations about whom (infants or believers) and how (aspersion, affusion, immersion, or submersion). In a conversation between services at St. John's this morning, we took comfort from the notion that while doctrine is often the work of men and women, Christian baptism, however it's practiced, is the work of God's spirit, which flows where it will.

During our class, I'd wanted to show the classic scene from the West Wing episode "Two Cathedrals," when President Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen), a faithful Roman Catholic who is tempted to forsake running for a second term because he has lied to the American people about his health, experiences a kind of a civic baptism thanks to a tropical storm that has made its way up the eastern seaboard to Washington. Once Bartlett has been drenched and cleansed, you may guess, if you're not a "West Wing" fan, whether he decides to run again.

What makes the sequence pretty much perfect is the choice of the Dire Straits song “Brothers in Arms” as the soundtrack. Mark Knopfler’s silky progressions and finger-plucked guitar runs are hymn-like. Watch how Bartlett’s body man, Charlie (Dule Hill), takes off his raincoat because the President refuses to wear one. Watch when, as Knopfler sings the words “brothers in arms” for the first time, a trinity of Bartlett aides, Josh, Toby, and Sam, is together in the frame. Watch how, as Bartlett prepares to answer a reporter's question about the election, the American flag unfurls -- symbol of his civic faith, just as the Jerusalem Cross in the transcept of National Cathedral, which we also see in this scene, denotes his faith in Christ.

If you’re a Dire Straits or “West Wing” fan, you’ll want to watch this over and over again. If you’re a fan of both, you probably want to be buried with it. Thanks to a persnickety DVD player, I didn't get to show the scene in the class this morning. My thanks to my St. John's brother John Schafer for providing the YouTube link.

From The Forehead To The Frontal Lobe

Ashes ready for young foreheads at St. John's School

Some Christian denominations crease their unobscured brows at the mention of the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, pointing to a passage in Matthew's gospel in which Jesus cautions his friends against "practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them" (6:1). We read that verse in the Bible, these faithful skeptics ask us, and nonetheless walk around one winter's day with a big black cross on our foreheads?

Deepening the paradox is that most ash-imposing Christians will hear that very passage in church today. Each year a different solution to the puzzle comes to mind. It seems to me that the cross on the forehead should be an outward symbol of Lenten resolves which we commit to keep in the forefront of our hearts and minds. In addition to the carbon scoring on the forehead, do we have something new cooking in our frontal lobes?

My first Lenten resolve (as my family mourns the death yesterday of my stepfather, Dr. Richard J. Lescoe, after a long struggle against Parkinson's Disease) is to be especially mindful and less fearful of the cycle of death, life, and rebirth (and also of fear and peace, sadness and joy, love and alienation) we experience in our lives and our Christian walk.

Second, did you see the way official Washington couldn't keep its hands off the President last night as he made his way down the aisle before the SOTU? The man was poked and stroked, grasped and grabbed. Lousy with pride and ambition, fear and anxiety though our politics may be, they're fundamentally rooted in relationships. Christians would say politics are incarnational. Our religion should be as well. Off the e-mail and text-messaging, people of God, and back to Starbucks and, at the very least, the telephone. May our wonderful St. John's preschoolers, shown learning about Ash Wednesday from chaplain Patti Peebles, be masters of the modern communications at their disposal rather than their slaves, as we too often seem to be. Intertwined digits are better than digital any day.

In moments of anxiety and emotional chaos, in transition and illness, in mourning, or in anger over the way loved ones are being treated, our relationship with God often comes in second. Leaving one job and immersing myself full time in another, which proved more complicated than I'd expected, I noticed I was talking to myself more than Jesus. So my third Lenten resolve is to pray more. At St. John's, in the corner of the Chrysostom Chapel, we've just installed votive candles. I'll be spending plenty of time there this sacred season. I promise the Altar Guild not to get ashes onto the purple fabric of the beautiful prie-deu today, but I do look forward to the day that it looks a little less new and a lot more prayed-with.

No Short Shrift Tonight

If you shrive me, you listen to my testimony or confession, and you reassure me of God's grace as expressed by his forgiveness and boundless love. If you begrudge me this kindness, if you refuse to be a minister to me, you give me short shrift.

And if you come out for a pancake supper on the evening before Ash Wednesday, you're participating in Shrove Tuesday (or if you're in New Orleans during Mardis Gras, Fat Tuesday). Anglicans and Episcopalians sometimes call it Pancake Tuesday. People used to cook up all the fatty foods and eggs in the larder, since they didn't eat them during Lent.

These days, while we're less concerned with denying ourselves during Lent, we definitely still go for the pancakes. At St. John's, the men's group makes plenty of the blueberry and chocolate chip variety, while Chef Gene Guazzo of the St. John's School kitchen cooks up a mess of succulent sausage and bacon. Before supper, Nancy Constable, on behalf of the Altar Guild, burned last year's Palm Sunday crosses for use during imposition of ashes at four services tomorrow. Remember that you are dust, the minister intones, and to dust you shall return. Christians have been doing it since the 10th century, going out into the proud, death-denying world with a rough, cross-shaped smudge on their foreheads denoting repentance and proclaiming their mortality.

But that's tomorrow. Today Bob Hayden, Tom Woodruff (shown in his red apron), and others in the men's group set the tables, cooked, and cleaned up afterward. Choir members offered two rousing folk numbers, we said some ancient evening prayers, and the children marched into the church and hit the "Alleluia" (since our liturgies won't include that Resurrection word until the Great Vigil of Easter on Holy Saturday). As we conducted our joyful business, the southern California sky glowed like a Lenten purple banner behind the mountains that hug the neighborhood around our church.