CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL An Episcopal Community in the Heart of Houston, Texas
FEBRUARY 2015 CHRISTCHURCHCATHEDRAL.ORG
AFTER-HOURS EMERGENCY CARE LINE | 713-826-5332
The building of biblical foundations The reality and
the hope of ashes
Sunday School teacher Carleta Sandeen leads a class of four-year-olds using the “Godly Play” curriculum.
We recently chatted with Sunday School teacher Carleta Sandeen to learn more about this vibrant and important ministry. Her responses are excerpted below. When did you first decide to volunteer? When my son, Jackson, was in the fouryear-olds’ class I realized the impact that
the lessons were having on him. I asked his teacher that year, Susan McDaniel, if she could use some help in the classroom. She readily agreed, and so the next fall, we became a teaching team. I have been in the fouryear-olds’ classroom since that fall, with the
TEACHING, page 6
Five noted speakers to explore topic of penitence, forgiveness in Lenten series The “Invitation to a Holy Lent” in the Ash Wednesday service reminds us that “all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.” This year’s Robert C. Stuart Lenten Series seeks to explore this mandate in a program entitled “Restored to Fellowship: Reconciled by Penitence and Forgiveness.” This year’s speakers include:
Pastor Juanita Rasmus (February 25) Juanita Rasmus is a pastor, spiritual director, and contemplative with a passion for outreach to our world’s most impoverished citizens. Rasmus co-pastors St. John’s
United Methodist Church in downtown Houston along with her husband, Rudy. She is a regular contributor to Conversations magazine and the “Alive Now” blog of the United Methodist Church.
Miroslav Volf (March 4) Professor Miroslav Volf is the founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. His books include Allah: A Christian Response and Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, which was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lenten book for
LENTEN, page 8
“O the dragons are gonna fly tonight / They’re circling low and inside tonight / It’s another round in the losing fight / The seasons come and bring no relief / Time is a brutal but a careless thief / Who takes our lot but leaves the grief.” The mournful voice of Emmy Lou Harris VERY REV. keens these words in THEBARKLEY THOMPSON her song, “The Pearl.” The CD on which it is found collects dust on my shelf. I’d not listened to it in years, but Emmy Lou’s words sprung up in my mind effortlessly the first time that I, dressed for the burial office in the glorious white vestments of Resurrection, was handed a heavy, solid, and nondescript black box carrying the ashes of one I had known and to whom I had ministered. When I set the box down, I realized immediately that I had ash on my hands. Sometimes the process of transferring ashes from the crematory to their container leaves a residue. Cremation is, like life, messy. The ash left my hands smudged, and the contrast between the glitter of my vestments and the stark reality of the ashes dredged up Harris’ words: The dragons fly relentlessly, and in the end they leave but ashes. Author Anne Lamott lost her best friend to cancer. She tells the story of how, when she sought to throw her friend’s ashes off the Golden Gate Bridge, the ashes stuck to her hands, clung to her sweater, and blew back into her eyes. Lamott says, “It’s frustrating if you are hoping to have a happy ending, or at least a little closure, a movie moment when you toss them into the air and they flutter and disperse. They don’t. They cling, they
ASHES, page 6