Dwight And Josh

Josh and Dwight

Have you ever been at a party, enjoying a conversation with a friend while discovering that you are almost overwhelmingly curious about what two people are talking about just out of your hearing?

 It happened to me one recent Saturday morning at Isaiah House, Catholic Worker’s shelter for homeless women in Santa Ana. For over two years, Josh Bradshaw, one of our high school students, has organized our Isaiah House breakfast and fellowship ministry. It’s now scheduled almost every month on the second Saturday at 9:30 a.m.

I was talking to one of the residents about her plans to move back east to rejoin her family. Over my right shoulder, I could hear Josh having an intense conversation with Dwight Smith, who has operated the ministry for nearly 20 years with his wife, Leia. I was dying to listen in.

As the other members of our St. John’s contingent were leaving, I gave Dwight a blessing (he’s having back surgery in early October) and then sat at his knee for half an hour. Dwight’s an authentic prophet, living out Catholic Worker’s mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Reporters call him to find out what’s really going on around town. City hall officials see him coming and hide. One leaves a conversation with him feeling indicted, reconstructed, and energized.

I also hoped he would give me a flavor of his conversation with Josh, and he did. I’ll leave it to them to tell you in more detail. But it’s no secret that Dwight thinks that people such as Josh who choose to serve the poor face to face occupy a privileged position in the heart and mind of God.

Dwight and Leia work each day in the spirit of pacifist Roman Catholic laywoman Dorothy Day, who

Dorothy Day

cofounded Catholic Worker in New York during the Great Depression. Isaiah House is one of over 200 such communities, mostly in the U.S., that practice hospitality for its own sake. In Orange County, if you’re a woman on the street, and Isaiah House has an opening, you can receive food and shelter indefinitely as long as you follow house rules.

 St. John’s has many historic links to Isaiah House. Our youth leader, Patti Peebles, takes our middle and high school kids regularly. When he was working as an attorney, Andy Guilford provided pro bono legal services. He still volunteers each month. We also make periodic financial contributions. Isaiah House depends on the kindness of its volunteers and donors as well as the faith, energy, and self-sacrifice of its proprietors.

The Smiths (who promised in 1997 that they would give it five years) live upstairs. Leia is a cancer survivor, and Dwight had lost significant mobility because of back problems. Serving the poor every day of their lives, they have foregone most of the luxuries we take for granted. And yet they don’t sentimentalize the poor. Working with people on the street, many of whom are suffering from mental illness, is exhausting and sometimes dangerous. But their hearts compel them to remain in relationship with marginal people from whom most of us are tempted to avert our eyes.

As it turns out, the purpose of Josh’s ministry isn’t to feed the women. If it were, we could take up a collection each month and have someone drop off 35 Big Breakfasts. Instead, Josh takes us there to meet fellow voyagers, sit across the table from them, shake their hands, learn their names, say ours, and ask the questions that always work. Where are you from? What were your parents like? Do you have any brothers and sisters? What do you love the most?

These questions also work at the monthly Rancho Santa Margarita food pantry and anywhere else St. John’s people make personal (the Christian word is incarnational) contact with the poor. (The questions are just as helpful with newcomers at coffee hour.) An exciting new example of such a ministry is Laundry Love, coming together under Mo. Martha’s stewardship. You may have the mistaken impression (I certainly did at first) that the purpose of Laundry Love is to do poor people’s laundry. Its true, divine purpose is to enable new relationships among God’s people. It is from these gracious little miracles, one built on the other, that all good things come.

This post was originally published in the Vaya Con Dios, the parish newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

Counter-Reformation

We think, and rightly so, that we have a lot to teach our young people. But just as often, as our wonderful St. John’s youth leaders will tell you, the wisdom flows the other way around.

The photo shows eight-year-old Sierra Schwarz at a recent meeting of the St. John’s Parish Council, on which her mother, Bishop’s Committee member Erin Schwarz, serves. Sierra just happened to be reading a biography of Elizabeth the Great, founder of the Anglican Church and royal protector of the Book of Common Prayer, which unites Episcopalians to this day.

In a just few years, Sierra will be eligible for youth group – whose middle and high schoolers recently gave me a lesson of their own in Anglican theology.

For a couple of years, I’ve experimented with a deconstructed Holy Eucharist service that puts enormous emphasis on congregational participation. I first used it when Thom’s, Orange County’s so-called emergent community, worshiped at St. John’s. For the 2013-14 year, I adapted it for our monthly Youth Eucharist services.

If you listen carefully to the Eucharistic prayer on Wednesday, Saturday, or Sunday, you’ll hear the whole history of human experience. The wording varies from rite to rite, but the story’s always the same. God’s creation began in unity and love and fell into disunity and sin, to be called back to oneness in Christ.

During my deconstructed service – you might have called it a messy mass -- I closed Elizabeth’s prayer book and invited worshipers to retell the creation story in their own words. They took turns elevating the bread and wine, and we said the prayer of consecration together. By your Holy Spirit, make this bread and wine into your body and blood. (Don’t worry. I had a bishop’s permission!)

I thought that by stepping back from the familiar liturgy and celebrant’s role, I was giving people a renewed sense of ownership and individual involvement in a powerful sacrament that Jesus Christ gave not to the church but to the whole people of God. Hoping to attract a younger generation of skeptical seekers, many churches are experimenting with this kind of liturgical democratization, giving congregations a larger voice in worship, deemphasizing the ordained orders, and setting aside the old prayers and music.

But as it turns out, my experiment wasn’t that popular with the new generation at St. John’s. During their postmortem meeting at the beginning of the summer, our young people said they wanted the old service back.

Don’t get me wrong: Before last year’s experiment, Youth Euch was hardly the drill from Sunday morning. Using music and other means, I did my best each month to vary the first part of the service, the Ministry of the Word, when we hear scripture, share a homily, and pray for our needs and those of others.

But when it comes to the second half, the young people missed the solemnity, piety, and predictability of the prayer book mass, the words we all know and the traditional roles we play. Whatever we’ve experienced in the course of our day, whatever sadness or joy, we come together and bind ourselves to Christ and one another just as we have for 2,000 years. The Lord be with you. And also with you.

Patti Peebles, our chaplain and youth leader, put it best when she gave me the kids’ verdict on my messy mass. “They’re Episcopalians,” she said.

Elizabeth would be proud. And so am I. 

This post first appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

Mrs. Patti's And Al Pacino's Birthday Sky

The heavens over St. John's Church and School this morning as we pray for healing for our bishop and rector, Jon Bruno, who is hospitalized with an infection, and in thanksgiving for the birthday of our chaplain and youth group leader, Patti Peebles

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

Enough Love To Go Around

The youth of St. John's, fresh from their summer occupations and distractions, gathered tonight for their first weekly meeting of the school year under the loving supervision of our chaplain and youth leader, Patti Peebles, and adult volunteers Daphne Berry, Kathleen Driscoll and Eric Sherman, Dina Kubba, and Paul and Paula Reza. (For fear of scaring them off, I'll preserve the anonymity of the wonderful couple we're hoping to recruit to join them.)

Once a month I have the inestimable blessing of presiding at what we call (well, I call) a Yoot Euch -- a service of Holy Eucharist -- using a paten and chalice Patti and the young people made last year during a visit to Color Me Mine. Tonight we talked about the Syrophoenician (or Canaanite or, not to put too fine a point on it, Palestinian) woman, whose plea on behalf of her daughter Jesus first appears to spurn since she's a Gentile rather than a Jew. When she argues that even the dogs under the master's table usually end up cadging some scraps, Jesus relents, impressed not so much by her faith as her irreducible logic. God obviously cares for all his people, does he not? You don't have to ask the St. John's kids twice.