OUR MISSION Inspired by the love of Jesus, we are building the kingdom of heaven, where differing people live in community, serving God and each other.
FAITH, PERHAPS
by Christie Gardiner
Oh God, the trilingual interpreter: You speak the languages of body, mind, and spirit. Won’t You come again? Why leave me so often, marooned in the liminal?
What would it be to flit across the days, like a butterfly bon vivant? My lot lies in worry; in war. Dissonant soldiers march across my frontal lobe, ready for battle.
But then, You. From somewhere that is everywhere and nowhere, You reach inside the jar of blessings from which You scoop a handful of fireflies to toss onto that patch of grass over there, Flickering munitions for the cause of peace. You are here.
My belly unlatches and Your love takes the front line, unrestrained I praise You, not in prayer, in full-bodied rapture to the popping glow of oxygen and luciferin combining chemically in firefly abdomens. I Am as You are. I Am You. For God cannot be separated. Faith wins the day.
Awe breaks with this thought: What if You are not found in certainty, but in battle? I am at it again. Marching. Marching. Marching. The fireflies have gone dark. Send reinforcements.
“JACOB WAS LEFT ALONE, AND A MAN WRESTLED WITH HIM UNTIL DAYBREAK. WHEN THE MAN SAW THAT HE DID NOT PREVAIL AGAINST JACOB, HE STRUCK HIM ON THE HIP SOCKET, AND JACOB’S HIP WAS PUT OUT OF JOINT AS HE WRESTLED WITH HIM.” ~ GENESIS 32:24-25
DEAR CATHEDRAL,
Jacob was returning to face his brother Esau when he encountered a man, a messenger of God – some say an angel. This strange figure wrestled with Jacob all night until the dawn, and when neither could prevail against the other, the angel wounded Jacob by touching his hip, and also gave him a new name, Israel, which means one who struggles.
Jesus, too, was changed by wrestling, not physically but this time spiritually, with the devil. For forty days, he was tempted by the devil. But Jesus did prevail. This wrestling gave him the clarity and purpose to begin his ministry.
This life involves struggle. There is no way to avoid the struggle. If we are to be faithful followers of Jesus, we will have to learn to wrestle – for to wrestle is to push back on the forces of selfishness, greed, and temptation that are all around us, within and without. Many confuse the gentle and radical generosity of the cross with a lack of action or a passivity, but Jesus was not passive. Jesus wrestled, and he struggled from the beginning of his ministry in the desert to the end at the Garden of Gethsemane.
Jacob was changed by the struggle. He was wounded, but he was also made whole. He became fully himself. Trust that in the struggles of this life, God is forming you and shaping you into the whole person, the image of Christ, that you were called to be.
The struggle is hard, but it is good. It is how we come to find ourselves and to find God.
May God bless you in the struggle.
In Christ’s Love,
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE AFRAID
by Jennifer Phillips
You can choose not to be afraid the way grass grows from the center out after every mowing, in rain after long drought. You, too, re-emerge as from the small green fire in those close cells, even in their lying down under the snow, even under their dying.
Someone will always be handing you their luggage of rage and despair, their glasses with the lenses painted over, their one-way ticket to doubt if you put your hand out for it, if you can’t stand still and set it down.
So sit down at the oak table. Let your dread take the opposite chair. Pour the coffee. Break and share the bread and salt.
Behind the two of you, past the open window light is going about its business raising up the new leaves, rinsing them in its fuel of delight, whether or not you can believe you might be saved or anything be liable to salvage.
If you muster courage, even as much as one small grass-blade in ten thousand brandishing its single drop of dew for the sun’s transmutation, it will be enough. This is how love works. It will bring you through.
AT ETERNITY’S GATE | Vincent van Gogh
HOW WE CARRY WHAT HAS GONE WRONG FOR US IS ESSENTIAL TO BEING AT HOME IN OURSELVES, AND PRESENT TO THE WORLD WITH ALL ITS FAILINGS.
– Krista Tippett –
LA WILDFIRE RESCUE | Facebook
BEE TREE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, SWANNANOA, NC | Fred McCormick
AP PHOTO OF LA WILDFIRES | Nic Coury
HURRICANE HELENE RESCUE | Facebook
IN RECENT YEARS, I’VE BECOME SOMEWHAT OF AN EASTER GRINCH.
by Heidi Haverkamp
When I was 12, I had a conversion experience on Easter Sunday. I was standing on the hill behind my grandparents’ southern Indiana house in my Easter dress, looking out over their incredible view of the Ohio River, when I suddenly had a sense that everything I was seeing was suffused with the presence of God. All in one moment, I knew God was vividly and clearly a part of everything around me, including me. My life changed.
We must have gone to Easter services afterward, but I don’t remember it. It was standing on that hill where God became real for me. It wasn’t exactly like Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the garden, but in some way, that morning I too heard God call my name and say, “I’m alive.”
However, in recent years, Easter Sunday has become a day I struggle to feel God’s presence. You might say I have become an Easter Grinch. Or maybe it’s just that I’m an introvert with a growing oversensitivity to noise and crowds. Easter morning is a cacophony of joy, colors, and alleluias. The pews are packed with people, the fragrance of lilies and hyacinths fills the air, the music—sometimes with trumpets and strings—is booming and full. I am grateful so many others find it wonderful, but for me, it has become too much.
HOLY WEEK HAS OFTEN MADE MORE SENSE TO ME AND MY CHRISTIAN JOURNEY—THE SHARING OF A MEAL, THE EARNEST AWKWARDNESS OF FOOT WASHING, SITTING TOGETHER AS THE LIGHTS ARE TURNED OUT, THE SOMBER QUIET, THE TERRIBLE STORY OF WHAT HUMANS CAN DO TO ONE ANOTHER, THE LOVE AND CALM OF JESUS PERSISTING THROUGH IT ALL.
Many churches offer the quiet of a sunrise service. In my tradition, many churches hold an Easter Vigil on Saturday night. As the sun goes down, the Easter fire is lit, and a deacon carries the paschal candle through the dark, singing and proclaiming,
“The light of Christ!” three times. Light slowly fills the darkened church as the people in the pews each light tapers from the light of the one paschal candle.
Then there is a long service of readings, music, and sometimes baptisms and confirmations. Then all the lights come on with the story of the empty tomb, and we sing alleluia hymns, even as it’s still dark outside. I have attended three Easter Vigils outdoors since the pandemic, which adds another glorious layer of cosmic mystery—a full hemisphere of sky at dusk above, no barrier between the top of your head and the infinity of the universe.
I first met God in the bright sunlight of Easter morning, but decades later, as my own sense of unknowing of who or what God is grows, I find myself drawn to the predawn darkness at the tomb. The hazy confusion, a stillness in a lonely place, the disorienting realization that something unexpected has happened. The longer I live, the less I know how to approach this unscientific but irrepressible story of resurrection. I feel less like a confident preacher in a pulpit and more like someone who is faithful but has gotten a little lost, bumping into things, still seeking the living God but with a sense that a living faith is less about being certain and more about keeping my eyes open.
I take heart, though, because I see myself in good company in the story of God’s people. Over and over, this confused and bumbling state is described in scripture. Both Mary Magdalene and Peter go to the tomb before dawn, probably sleepdeprived, foggy, and distraught, and have no idea how to understand what they are seeing. Peter runs away, and Mary Magdalene thinks she is talking to the gardener. Nicodemus seeks out Jesus in the middle of the night and is totally flummoxed by Jesus’ words to him.
Jacob wrestles with an angel in the middle of the night, all alone by the river. The angel asks for his name but will not tell Jacob their own. The Israelites wander in the desert for 40 years, wondering why or what for, and probably feel more lost than chosen. Moses has to enter the cloud of unknowing on Mt. Sinai before he can receive God’s word. Even afterward, the idolatry, constant doubt, fatigue, and haranguing of the Israelites is perhaps not the whole and perfect fulfillment of the journey he might have imagined.
This Easter, I will seek out another Vigil service where I can sit in the dark with my candle and be like Mary Magdalene, waiting at the empty tomb and listening for Jesus to call my name and say again: “I am alive!”
OURS IS NOT THE STRUGGLE OF ONE DAY, ONE WEEK, OR ONE YEAR. OURS IS NOT THE STRUGGLE OF ONE JUDICIAL APPOINTMENT OR PRESIDENTIAL TERM. OURS IS THE STRUGGLE OF A LIFETIME, OR MAYBE EVEN MANY LIFETIMES, AND EACH ONE OF US IN EVERY GENERATION MUST DO OUR PART.
– John Lewis –
FOUR (OF 30) PANELS FROM STRUGGLE | Jacob Lawrence
CALLING THINGS WHAT THEY ARE
by Ada Limón
I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.
THE VEILED CHRIST | Guiseppi Sanmartino
CLOSING SERMON FROM 81ST EPISCOPAL GENERAL CONVENTION 2024
by Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe
It’s a great day in the Kingdom.
Now you have to imagine this scene. It’s not quite 25 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The early church is struggling. The Apostle Paul is undertaking his third missionary journey to spread the Gospel across the world. He lands in Ephesus, one of the most important cities in all of the Mediterranean, and then he proceeds to harangue the congregation for three months.
When he leaves the synagogue after three months—and you can imagine what that vestry meeting must’ve been like—he takes his followers to a lecture hall where they have daily discussion. We’re told in the Book of Acts that this goes on for two years, so that all the Jews and Greeks in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord, or more likely they just said they did so he would stop talking. I don’t know. Now, one of the remarkable things about this story of the early church in Ephesus is there are a lot of evil spirits and demons in that place. The power of evil seems to be present like it is in the world all the time. It is real. They’re possessing people to become violent. They’re generally wreaking havoc. Practitioners of magic seem to be everywhere in Ephesus. What in the world is going on?
It turns out that the temple of the goddess Artemis was in that place, and Paul’s sermons were really messing with the economy of the place. The people who benefited from this goddess’ temple were very unhappy. They were uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that when Paul was talking, there was a riot in the amphitheater. And instead of leaving, Paul wants to do what Paul likes to do, which is talk some more.
Paul is sort of part beautiful mystic—he really is—and then just pedant. But after encouraging his disciples, he leaves the town because the disciples step in and kind of rescue the day; he leaves town bound for Macedonia. And I’ll bet it was the kind of sigh of relief that everyone breathes when the bishop drives out of the parking lot after the visitation. See you in 18 months. Let us know if you need anything. But
Paul being Paul, just keeps talking, just keeps bringing the Good News, just keeps bringing the word of God even when people are recalcitrant. Thankfully, we don’t know anything about that.
That’s how we get to today’s reading. We can tell from the passage that the magic and the spiritual forces are all very much at play, and they’re all on Paul’s mind. So he wants them to imagine themselves suiting up for battle. He tells them to put on the whole armor of God: breastplates, helmets, shoes, belts, the equipment of might and power in the Roman Empire, which may sound a bit uncomfortably martial to our ears, but you can imagine how it fell on theirs—probably landed on it very differently.
Now, I went to a good evangelical college. I can tell you that this passage has a lot of currency when it comes to individual spiritual warfare, which is real. The powers of evil are real in the world. We are living in a world where these are very much alive. This Scripture was often interpreted as encouragement to individuals to fight against that. And that’s a good thing, and far be it from me to discourage us from fighting against temptation.
But there is another meaning in this passage I think for us now in this time in The Episcopal Church where we are right now. Like the church in Ephesus, we’re small, countercultural. We’re not struggling to survive in the cult of Artemis, but there are other cults in our midst.
We are standing firm in the face of those. We’re holding fast to our promise to uphold the full inclusion of LGBTQI+ persons as children of God. We’re proclaiming and investing in our longing to become a Beloved Community. We’re committing to caring for God’s creation and respecting the dignity of every human being.
AND WE ARE NOT BACKING DOWN IN OUR PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL JUST BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND IT DIFFERENTLY ARE BIGGER OR THINK THEY’RE MORE POWERFUL OR LOUDER OR HAVE A VISION THAT DENIES HUMANITY.
At the beginning of this liturgy, we prayed the collect for the commemoration of the great author and activist James Weldon Johnson. In it, we asked God for the strength to “speak with joy and boldness to banish hatred from your creation.” That was Johnson’s struggle, and it is one of ours.
Johnson understood that the spiritual warfare that was taking place in that day was not an individual one only, but a war that the people of God were fighting against the evil of racism and the legacy of chattel slavery.
“We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered” is not a metaphor, and the battle is not yet won. Friends, to continue that righteous struggle, we must arm ourselves against the forces within us: the way we intellectualize our avoidance of a true reckoning with racism; our internal strife that divides us from one another and depletes our capacity to proclaim the love of God in Christ to the world. What’s up with that? That’s a problem. If we can’t figure it out in here, how are we supposed to carry it out to the world? How about our attachment to the old ways that no longer serve us?
And finally, what about our idolatry of structures and practices that exclude and diminish our witness? We have to get it together. That’s going to mean laying some things down. The struggle ahead will require a tolerance for uncertainty, a willingness to make real sacrifices. We’ll actually need to let go of some of our grievances and hold more lightly our beliefs about how the church should work and who has a voice.
And we must learn to have hard conversations with each other, with love and respect, so that we’re all pulling in the same direction: the transformation of the world by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now, this is a tall order, and yet in the work that lies ahead, we have what we might call an armor of love that will help us withstand whatever comes our way, because, thanks be to God, the church in our day has been given Michael Bruce Curry. His ministry is incomparable.
And through our brother Michael, God has shown us again what the power of love can do to transform the world around us. One of his schoolteachers in an all-boys’ classroom, Mr. Saunders, told him that a gentleman is always ready to speak a word. I think he took that seriously.
He has guided us in a struggle against racism and the wicked forces that divide us and given us the gift of his powerful and prophetic preaching to sustain us. In the words of James Weldon Johnson, he has brought us thus far along the way.
Now Michael’s Curry’s legacy of love and the love of God in Jesus Christ—this legacy is ours. And to steward and share it, we must hammer out the dents in the armor; refasten the belt of truth; make our dioceses and congregations stronger; collaborate for the sake of the Gospel; counter division and injustice in our communities, all with the witness to the risen Christ.
Let us go forth from here in the name of Christ, with thanksgiving for the witness of Michael Curry, the power of God working in Him and us, his example, and the love of Jesus Christ our savior. Sustain us on our journey.
Amen.
COMING OF AGE
by Anonymous
I imagine in the old days, the devil had larger horns because these days everyone looks like everyone even though they tell me I’m supposed to hate and not be with anyone different
Or maybe there aren’t any horns and people simply think they aren’t the devil when really anybody is and everybody can be, and the devil is in all of us sometimes
But really the man down the street outside the grocery smiles at me more brightly than my mom does with his smudgy face and torn shoe and tremors and I smile back even though she doesn’t
So I think that grief and loss and anger and shame drip from all of us the same like rain and for some reason we drown ourselves instead of drying others
And anyway I learned in Sunday school that Jesus wept and I imagine if he could see us now he might never stop.
Excerpt from
NOTHING SPECIAL
by Charlotte Joko Beck
In working with those who are dying or severely troubled, Stephen Levine observes that true healing happens when we go into our own pain so deeply that we see it is not just our pain, but everyone’s pain. It’s immensely moving and supportive to discover that my pain is not private to me. Practice helps us to see that the whole universe is in pain.
A similar point can be made about relationships. We tend to think of relationships as discrete in time: they begin, they last for a time, and they end. Yet we are always in relationship, always connected to one another, At a certain point in time, a relationship may manifest itself in a particular way, but before that manifestation, it already existed, and after it “ends,” it continues. We continue in some form of relationship even with those who have died. Former friends, former lovers, former relatives continue on in our lives and are part of who we are. It may be necessary for the visible manifestation to end, but the actual relationship never ends.
WE ARE NOT TRULY SEPARATE FROM ONE ANOTHER. OUR LIVES ARE JOINED; THERE IS JUST ONE PAIN, JUST ONE JOY, AND IT IS OURS. ONCE WE FACE OUR PAIN AND ARE WILLING TO EXPERIENCE IT, INSTEAD OF COVERING IT UP, AVOIDING IT, OR RATIONALIZING IT, A SHIFT OCCURS IN OUR VIEWS OF OTHERS AND OF OUR LIFE.
Sometimes it’s helpful to accentuate the anxiety, to reach a point where we just can’t stand it. Then, we may be willing to back up and take another look at what’s going on. Instead of endlessly concerning ourselves with what’s wrong out there—with our partner, with our job, or whatever—we may begin to shift our relationship to what is. We
learn to be what we are at this moment in this relationship or in a tedious aspect of our job. We begin to see the connection between ourselves and others. We see that our pain is also their pain, and their pain is also our pain. For example, a doctor who makes no connection between herself and her patients will see patients simply as one problem after another, to be forgotten when they walk out the door. A doctor who sees that her own discomfort and annoyance are her patients’ discomfort and annoyance will be sustained by this sense of connection and will work more precisely and effectively.
The everyday tedium of our lives is the desert we wander, looking for the Promised Land. Our relationships, our work, and all the little necessary tasks we don’t want to do are all the gift. We have to brush our teeth, we have to buy groceries, we have to do the laundry, we have to balance our checkbook.
This tedium—this wandering in the desert—is in fact the face of God. Our struggles, the partner who drives us crazy, the report we don’t want to write—these are the Promised Land.
UNTITLED
| Mark Rothko
Excerpt from
ANGELS IN AMERICA
by Tony Kushner
HARPER: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
MORMON MOTHER: Well, it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out, and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled, and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.
HARPER: And then get up. And walk around.
MORMON MOTHER: Just mangled guts pretending.
HARPER: That’s how people change.
KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
WHEN EVIL DARKENS OUR WORLD, GIVE US LIGHT.
WHEN DESPAIR NUMBS OUR SOULS, GIVE US HOPE.
WHEN WE STUMBLE AND FALL, LIFT US UP.
WHEN DOUBTS ASSAIL US, GIVE US FAITH.
WHEN NOTHING SEEMS SURE, GIVE US TRUST.
WHEN IDEALS FADE, GIVE US VISION.
WHEN WE LOSE OUR WAY, BE OUR GUIDE!
THAT WE MAY FIND SERENITY IN YOUR PRESENCE, AND PURPOSE IN DOING YOUR WILL.
– John D. Rayner –
CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY EDITORIAL BOARD
Owene Courtney
Laura Jane Pittman
The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera
ADVISOR
The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead Carroll
jaxcathedral.org
