From May 2: Writing as a Sacramental Gift

Dear People of Christ Church,

This Sunday, we welcome Bishop Gayle Harris, so we'll have just one service at 10am to greet her. After the service, she'll stay for a short congregational meeting, so please bring your questions. Finally, before departing for her next visit (at Good Shepherd, Watertown), she'll meet with the vestry. Bishop Gayle has visited several times over the near-eight years I've been at Christ Church, notably at the blessing of our front altar, installed in 2006 in memory of Robert Hughes, Sr.

Later this Sunday afternoon (at 3), I hope you'll join me at Bethany House of Prayer in Arlington for a poetry reading. Alex at Back Pages Books here in Waltham helped me publish the work I did on sabbatical (with our own Kristin Harvey's cover design), and I'm part of Bethany's "Spring Celebration of Poetry and Art." I will read with another poet, Sandy Stott, who works with the Thoreau Farm and chairs the English Department at Concord Academy. Art by Rev. Judith Clark will also be on view.

I'm excited, and nervous-I picked up my books from the printer this morning (Ashes/What Remains will be for sale for $10.00, first at the opening and later at Back Pages and online). Seeing everything out in black and white makes it seem so real. I know I wrote the poems-I stared down blank pages and an empty computer screen all fall. But something about poetry more than prose, seems so vulnerable-it's all me on the page, my joy and my anxiety, my sense of blessing and my sense of lack. I can't take it back. "Ordinary" writing feels much safer; one wrong word out of 500 is less risky than one wrong choice out of 40. And, of course, poetry isn't for everyone. It's ok not to "get it"-just slow down long enough to see if you can get something. The title, "Ashes/What remains" is an allusion to the idea that the life of faith involves a certain stripping away, trying to get at what's most important. Sabbatical time is Sabbath time: abstaining from traditional work, you can't hide from yourself anymore with all of those crucial tasks. Staring down into not-doing can feel awfully close to staring down into not-being, which is terrifying, and certainly the reason so many of us are so busy all the time.

What came up for me at the center are my deeper vocations-of being a priest and a parent. I recently got my kids' names tattooed in a half-sleeve of my upper right arm (along with some birds and flowers, as children are wont to do it took up more space than I'd planned), which I jokingly called my "mommy tattoo"-some of these are definitely mommy poems. And they are all priest poems. Writing as a sacramental gift; when we celebrate the Eucharist, we take very ordinary things and ask God to come into them, to make Christ alive and to feed us with his body. In my poems, I feel something similar; I'm taking very ordinary things-a sibling squabble, a bird staring at a pond-and asking them to translate God's presence in the world. I see the heron; she lets me recognize my instability, inviting me to be quiet and still. I see my kids complaining at each other; they show me all the traps of self-absorption and scapegoating we never seem to grow out of. A fair number of "first world problems" are catalogued in there, too. Packing school lunches is a drag, but it beats no lunch at all.

So come! And buy the book...though a few of the poems are already on my blog, and you can see them there for free.

Blessings,

Sara+