Sacred Relationships

Relationships SACRED

. THE CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY ,

2023

SPRING

EMAIL. VISIT. FOLLOW. www.jaxcathedral.org @jaxcathedral.org

During this season of Lent, the Cathedral invites you to look at your most important relationships. Who do you love? What relationships define you, inspire you or even drive you mad? How can you learn to nurture these relationships so that they feed you spiritually? Your relationships are so important to you and to God!

Within these pages are some beautiful meditations on the nature and function of relationships. Drink them in. Authors such as James Martin and Catherine Meeks have given us great insights. Local faithful such as Sandi Dunnavant will nurture you and make you think.

These pages are a gift to you. I give thanks for Owene Courtney, Nancy Purcell and the Formation Council for their wisdom in weaving all of this together. In Christ’s love,

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I CORINTHIANS 13:1-13

The Message Bible

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.

If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.

Love cares more for others than for self.

Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.

Love doesn’t strut,

Doesn’t have a swelled head,

Doesn’t force itself on others,

Isn’t always “me first,”

Doesn’t fly off the handle,

Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,

Doesn’t revel when others grovel,

Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,

Puts up with anything,

Trusts God always,

Always looks for the best,

Never looks back, But keeps going to the end.

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Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly.

AND THE BEST OF THE THREE IS LOVE.

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A CALL TO SACRED RELATIONSHIPS

by the Very Rev. Kate Moorehead Carroll

I HAVE BECOME FASCINATED WITH THE FIRST TWO CREATION STORIES. Did you know that there are two of them? Right after one another in the Book of Genesis, they are the first few pages of the Bible. Two totally different accounts of how God made us. But they do have one very important thing in common.

In the second story, God says it rather bluntly, “It is not good for the man to be alone…” (Genesis 2:18). God had made a creature of the earth, called Adam, from the Hebrew word adama which means earth. But this creature was not complete; it was not finished, without another.

Jesus said something similar when he alluded to the fact that when two or three are gathered in his name, he was in the midst of them. Two or three. Not one. Somehow, when we are alone, we are not fully ourselves nor are we able to be in the presence of God’s fullness.

You and I were created to be in relationship with other human beings. And it is this state of connectedness that makes us fully human and “made in the image of God.” Therefore, our relationships are incredibly important. They are part of the essence of who we are.

Think about those closest to you. Do you realize how closely connected you really are? Their sorrows impact you, their joys the same. We are not to become enmeshed or forget our boundaries as individuals, but we must at the same time acknowledge our interdependence. Our relationships make us who we are. We are mother, father, friend, husband, wife, sister, brother…these relationships define us, shape us. And the health of our relationships impacts our overall well-being. The relationships that are closest to us are in fact holy. It is only in the

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reconciling and nurturing of these relationships that we become the fullness of who God has called us to be. To be reconciled with our neighbor is to be closer to God. To love God is to love our neighbor and ourselves. No wonder Jesus commanded us to do all three at once! They are all so connected.

Let us look deeply into the relationships that form and shape us, understanding that these relationships are gifts from God, and they make us who we are.

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ANNUNCIATION

| Ivanka Demchuk, Lviv, Ukraine

. 10 , THOUGHT PATTERNS | Dottie Dorion

BUILDING A BOOKSTORE MINISTRY: FOSTERING SACRED RELATIONSHIPS

by Sandi Dunnavant

“I’M EAGER TO ENCOURAGE YOU IN YOUR FAITH, BUT I ALSO WANT TO BE ENCOURAGED BY YOURS. IN THIS WAY, EACH OF US WILL BE A BLESSING TO THE OTHER”

(ROMANS 1:12 NLT)

God designed us for sacred relationships and loves it when we connect and encourage each other by establishing sacred relationships with church friends. These precious relationships help us with both big and little struggles, and together we can better get through this thing called life.

Across the street from St John’s Cathedral is a two-story Victorian house. The first floor hosts the St John’s Cathedral Bookstore & Giftshop. At first glance, one would think this is just a commercial establishment. Wandering around the rooms, one can see items from all over the world and locally to purchase. However, there is more to this bookstore than just selling products. It is a place that fosters and encourages a culture of sacred relationships.

The bookstore has launched these sacred relationships by connecting people with resources and other people of shared interests. This connection is enriching. It inspires them on their faith journeys. The bookstore is creating an engaged and thoughtful community by providing educational programs, speakers, discussion groups, fellowship opportunities and outreach programs.

For example, the First Monday Book Club provides a meeting place for book lovers to discuss ideas and enjoy friends each month. Art@Noon

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gives members a chance to learn about great pieces of art, music and dance and then to attend actual sites and events together. Volunteers who man the bookstore are cultivating sacred relationships as well through their volunteer experiences with each other.

By joining and taking part in these groups, members and volunteers are not disconnected from the body of the church. They are forming sacred relationships with one another and those relationships are enhancing the life of the church.

One of my favorite pastors once said that if you’re not connected to the Church, then you’re not going to know the purpose of your life. You’re not going to know your role. You’re not going to know your function. You’re not going to know your value and your meaning.

Your value, your use, your purpose, and your identity become apparent in relationship to the Body of Christ — the Church… and sacred relationships with others can help you know your role, your mission and connect you to the Church.

You can’t be blessed by living an independent, isolated life. We’re better together.

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by e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

Source: Complete Poems: 1904-1962 (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991)

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[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

“... LIKE THE ANGEL WHO WRESTLED WITH JACOB ALL NIGHT LONG, CATHERINE MEEKS CARES TOO MUCH TO LET YOU GO WITHOUT A WOUND THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND A BLESSING TO GO WITH IT...”

~ BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

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MEDITATION 24: REIMAGINING LOVE AND RACIAL HEALING

by Dr. Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing

Excerpt from “The Night is Long but Light Comes in the Morning”

REGARDLESS OF SKIN COLOR OR STATION IN LIFE, we are all challenged to be loving toward one another. But in the case of black people as well as other people of color, the large gap between them and whites has made that seem impossible. One part of the challenge to the development of loving relationships across racial lines lies in the fact that there never has been an opportunity for blacks to enter that process freely. The mandate to act loving and to be forgiving was a precondition for having even the smallest degree of success or acceptance in a racialized society. Blacks had to make sure to be careful not to demonstrate too much dissatisfaction with white behavior, no matter what shape it took.

The most vivid recent demonstration of this was the 2015 massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. As most readers are likely to recall, Dylann Roof entered the Wednesday evening Bible study there with the intention of murdering people, and he killed nine. While the entire country was reeling from the horror and shock of that news, some of the victims’ family members were voicing words about forgiveness, which carried the implication that they were responding in love.

I recall listening to those lovely words proclaiming a readiness to be forgiving and reflecting on how hollow they sounded in the midst of such horror, but blacks have been taught that the best response to all white behavior is to try taking what we like to believe is the high road. While that is a noble notion, it is not a reflection of the way people navigating such horrors will get to forgiveness. The kind of love described in I Corinthians 13 will be the only kind to aid in making forgiveness possible, and it will not be manifested magically, as it might have seemed when listening to the victims’ families at Mother Emanuel.

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An unfortunate historical narrative has fostered the notion that rage, and outrage would have been too much, even as a response to such evil – that black people cannot ever demonstrate that level of disapproval of white behavior. Of course, historically, where blacks were dependent for their livelihood on whites, it made sense to be careful about how we responded to acts of denigration and violence, less those responses generate more violence – as happened in 1912 when the black community of Forsyth County, Georgia, was destroyed by whites responding to the accusation of rape and murder of a white woman by a black man. These acts of terror in response to blacks being willing to tell the truth about their feelings taught them to stop doing it.

Thus, as I listened to the beautiful voices of these family members proclaiming their willingness to forgive Roof the day after the massacre, I had a deep desire to hear them say what they were really feeling. But the shock and horror, the grief and the rage and the sense of helplessness – all of that was pushed down so that the white community could hear what it wanted to hear: blacks being strong, speaking about forgiving, and stepping up to accommodate white violence one more time.

Whites can help to create space for liberating love by allowing that same love energy to give them the courage to hear whatever black and brown people need to say. “Tell me your truth and I will listen as best I can,” they can say, and that invitation will become a light to illuminate the path toward the mystical love that this section has been exploring. And when that invitation is extended, it is important for it to be accepted. While there are still a lot of possible negative repercussions for blacks who tell their truth whether whites like it or not, it is not as dangerous as it was decades ago.

Black and brown people will have to take the initiative to move this process into a different space, but many of them have concluded that it is a lost cause; they do not see much reason to believe that whites are genuinely interested in developing such relationships. This conclusion is problematic, because it negatively impacts personal healing journeys. But many black and brown people simply are not willing to take the chance that they will be victimized again by racism if they venture into this process of reimagining love.

The invitation to step into the arena where the healing light shines more brightly remains available to everyone, and the hope is that each day will bring all of us closer to having the capacity to say yes. A few steps

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into the path where courage resides will enlarge that capacity, and the personal liberation it brings makes it worth the risk. All racial healing work needs to be designed to help make that path wider and easier for all – black, white, and brown – to traverse.

Praise for Meeks’ book The Night is Long but Light Comes in the Morning:

“There is so much kindness in these pages that you may not notice at first how disruptive they are to your accustomed way of thinking, being, and doing. Once you notice, it is too late to escape. Like the angel who wrestled with Jacob all night long, Catherine Meeks cares too much to let you go without a wound that can change your life and a blessing to go with it. If you want to be well, hang in with her to the very end, because she is a healer, and so is her book.” ~ Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Learning to Walk in the Dark

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THE EMBRACE

“The Embrace” is a bronze sculpture by the artist Hank Willis Thomas. It symbolizes the hug Dr. King and Coretta Scott King shared after Dr. King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. The 19-ton bronze artwork was welded together in Washington state by the Walla Walla Foundry and transported to Boston where it now stands in Boston Common. “The Embrace is a testament to what we can achieve when we come together,” said Thomas. “The sculpture embodies people’s capacity for love, change and hope for the future.”

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FRIENDSHIP AND FREEDOM

by Fr. James Martin

Excerpt from The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

One important insight we can take from the friendships of the early Jesuits has to do with the complex interplay between freedom and love. Friendship is a blessing in any life. For believers it is also one of the ways God communicates God’s own friendship. But for friendship to flourish neither the friendship nor the friend can be seen as an object to be possessed. One of the best gifts to give a friend is freedom.

How many times have you wondered why your friends weren’t better friends? And how many times did being a better friend mean meeting your needs? How often have you wondered why your friends or family members don’t support you more? How often have you worried whether you were being a good friend? These are natural feelings. Most of us also know the heartache of seeing friends move away or change or grow less available to us.

OFTEN I’VE HAD TO REMIND MYSELF THAT MY FRIENDS DO NOT EXIST SIMPLY TO SUPPORT, COMFORT OR NOURISH ME.

A few years ago, one of my best friends told me he was being sent to work in a parish in Ghana in West Africa. Matt was well prepared for this work. Twice during his Jesuit training he spent time in Ghana, living in a remote village with poor fishermen and their families and helping out at a small parish, all the while learning the local language. Later, during graduate studies and theology, when we lived in the same community, Matt tailored some of his courses for his work in West Africa.

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Matt told me how excited he was to be returning to Ghana, now as a priest. Knowing how seriously he had prepared for this work and how much he loved Ghana, I should’ve been happy for him. Instead, selfishly, I was sad for myself, knowing that I wouldn’t see him for a few years. Sadness is natural for anyone saying goodbye; I would’ve been a robot if I hadn’t felt disappointed.

Still it was hard to move away from wanting Matt to remain behind to meet my needs. It was the opposite of the freedom that Ignatius and Francis had shown which valued the good of the other person. It was an example of the possessiveness that can sometimes characterize and, if left unchecked, damaged relationships. Needed was Ignatian freedom and detachment.

William Barry, the Jesuit spiritual writer, is also a trained psychologist. Recently I asked him about this tendency to possessiveness in friendship, “You need close friends, but you don’t want to cling to them out of a desire to keep them around you,” he said. “But this would be true for anyone, not simply for Jesuits.”

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A Ukrainian family who fled the Russian invasion and a woman who agreed to house them.

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FAMILY OF ORIGIN

by Luci Shaw

Our parents keep circulating in the rooms of our lives. Mine are long gone, but if it would satisfy them I would take my heart out of its cage and gift-wrap it for their anniversary.

I glimpse them often, Dad reading a book over my shoulder, now and again offering words of advice that might have made sense fifty years ago. The words form clots in my memory, cells bright as blood, a private language unlike any other.

My mother demanded mountains of me. I managed to supply foothills. They were lovely foothills, but failure would hang in the air. We still seem to meet in the heart of an odd argument, words hanging unresolved, glittering sparks in the dark air.

Sometimes, when I feel most wrong about how to remember them, I am most right, seeing them as they settled into the grooves of my own memory.

I am my own narrative arc, yet I arrange the candles and flowers on my mantelpiece the way my mother would have done it.

And for my father I still write small poems, like the ones he carried in his briefcase to show his friends when I was very young.

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I AM BECAUSE YOU ARE

by Malcolm Doney and Martin Wroe

Excerpt from Lifelines: Notes on Life & Love,

Faith & Doubt

To be is to do. (Socrates)

To do is to be. (Sartre)

Do Be Do Be Do (Sinatra)

This was how novelist Kurt Vonnegut summed up our existential quest to answer the biggest questions. The 17th century French philosopher René Descartes came up with his own pithy aphorism to explain who and why we are: “I think therefore I am.” He didn’t make the cut in the Vonnegut joke, but René found himself in another one, in which he walks into a bar and is asked if he’d like a beer. “I think not,” he replies and promptly disappears.

Do we live in our heads? Or in our daily actions? Come to think of it how do we even know we’re here? Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes were not just big on reason but also on individualism and influence that shapes our 21st-century world of capitalism, commerce and consumption. A world captured in another soundbite: “I shop therefore I am.”

Individualism also informs what we talk about when we talk about God. How do I get to heaven? Why do I feel bad about myself? How do I become a better person? But in southern Africa, a Bantu word Ubuntu suggests an alternative way of answering the big questions. Ubuntu can best be translated as “I am because you are.” It’s a word that signals how each of us finds our best self only in relationship to others. How life is not to be understood to be good as a solitary individual pursuit, but as something we share. That we understand ourselves better when we live in company not alone. “Ubuntu speaks about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation,” says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself. We think of ourselves frequently as just individuals separated from one another, whereas we are connected and what we do affects the whole world.

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This is counterintuitive in a culture where our goals often center on personal fulfillment in family or career, in spirituality and religion. But many of our deepest questions can’t be answered in isolation only in friendship. Many of them ask, “why is there so much suffering?” and can barely be answered at all. We have to live with these questions. But living with them with others sometimes means we become the answers ourselves.

Those others might be a lonely neighbor, an annoying relative, a sick child or an estranged partner. Or they might be losing hope in Syria, locked up in Guantánamo, forgotten in Gaza. They might be the people we meet when we hesitatingly volunteer at a homeless shelter or step over the threshold of a local synagogue, mosque or church.

Religion is not a solitary business, it’s a communal one. Do it on your own and you’ll probably give up watching all these strange beliefs and practices slipping through your fingers like sand. But one of the virtues in being part of the faith community is that all of the days when you are mainly full of doubt, someone else can do the believing on your behalf. And there might even be that day when you find you’re the one with enough faith for two, a day when someone else has none. It’s not about you. It’s about us. To be is to be together. I am because you are.

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CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY EDITORIAL BOARD

Owene Courtney

The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera

Nancy Purcell, Managing Editor

ADVISOR

The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead Carroll

jaxcathedral.org

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“THE RIVER THAT FLOWS IN YOU ALSO FLOWS IN ME.”

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~KABIR DAS

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