Dear People of Christ Church,
I’m back in the office now for two weeks between last week’s trip to Central New York to meet people in advance of the Episcopal election there and my family vacation, which we’re taking the second and third weeks of August. I heard good things about your time with the Rev. Thea Keith-Lucas, Episcopal Chaplain at MIT, who will be back again for one Sunday in August. (Norm is taking the other.)
As you may know, my husband Noah is a candidate for bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Central NY. Last week they had the “Walkabout” Meetings where the candidates answered questions from the diocese and we all visited ministries of the diocese. The transition and discernment committees’ hospitality was wonderful, even in the midst of long days. From Wednesday – Saturday, we all got on the bus around 10AM each day and got back to our hotel at 10PM. The diocese spans south to the Pennsylvania border, east to the Adirondacks, West to Ithaca and Elmira, and then north to Lake Ontario and the city of Watertown.
I have said many times that there is blessing on all sides—blessings if Noah is elected and new communities and ministries come into our life—and blessings if we stay in Massachusetts with our communities at Grace Medford and Christ Church. All along in this process it has been an exercise in “yes” to invitations—yes to the invitation for Noah to be nominated, yes to the discernment committee’s retreat, and then yes to joining the slate. Now that journey has come to an end, and it’s up to the people of Central NY. (Quick primer on bishop elections in the Episcopal Church: Each parish has lay voting delegates. Every canonically resident clergy person also votes. The final decision is made when a candidate has been elected in both the lay and clergy orders. They begin voting in the morning, and vote until there’s a clear decision. Church wide, there are 7 other couples of a bishop married to a priest; yes, I could still do parish ministry!)
It’s one thing, though, to believe that either outcome is a blessing (which they both would be) and another thing to stay centered in the midst of the not-knowing. The slate was first released on May 1 (after a months-long process of interviews and retreats for the candidates). Ten days now until the election, it’s even harder to know what either outcome would feel like.
Last week’s Gospel told us to pray: “God in heaven, your will be done.” But then what?
In June I quoted in this space a piece from Carlo Carretto, an Italian desert monastic (1910-1988) who wrote the book Letters from the Desert. Stay or go, be active or contemplative, city or country—the only decision there is to make is to follow the path of love. Reading Carretto in this time of my own uncertainty reminds me of an image of one of the speakers I heard at Wild Goose Festival earlier in July. Gabrielle Stoner talked about how we get attached to stories about ourselves— “I always ___” or “I could never ___”. Rather than be convinced of this insistence on narrow identity, in our spiritual lives we are invited to “widen the aperture”: to look wider than just the current moment or current question to a more transcendent consciousness. Spending time with Carretto’s invitation to focus on love rather than endless obsession on personal circumstance and clever understanding takes me out of the current roller coaster of wondering what will happen on August 6.
Here’s more about what Carretto says about prayer:
“As long as we pray only when and how we want to, our life of prayer is bound to be unreal. It will run in fits and starts. The slightest upset—even a toothache—will be enough to destroy the whole edifice of our prayer-life. ‘You must strip your prayers,’ the novice master told me. You must simplify, deintellectualize. Put yourself in front of Jesus as poor—not with any big ideas, but with living faith. Remain motionless in an act of love…don’t try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach [God] in love; that is possible. (13)
Reach God in love. That is possible.
Blessings,
Sara+
Miss the sermon Sunday 7/24? It’s here!
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Praying for Salvation, Working for Justice
Dear People of Christ Church,
Last week I was out of the office to attend the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering in the mountains of North Carolina my family and I have attended for the last four years. My shorthand description of it is “Progressive Christians in the mud”—speakers come from all over the map from self-titled “recovering evangelicals” to pacifist Roman Catholics to anti-racist suburban mom bloggers. And folk music rock stars Dar Williams and the Indigo Girls!
The workshops I attended were all over the map—I went to one talk by a lay friend of a silent order of Cistercian monks about meditation, one about pilgrimage and laying down your metaphorical and literal baggage, and several talks by the womanist ethicist scholar Emilie Townes (womanism is a politics centered in the experiences of black women). Jim Wallis, founder of the social justice group Sojourners and author of a whole slew of books about American society and Christian faith and politics, was there this year, speaking again about Racism as America’s Original Sin (also his latest book). What I love about Wild Goose is the sense of community that emerges—I can tell our kids to disappear for an hour and they’ll come back jubilant and covered in dirt, along with a new best friend and an invitation for lunch at someone’s campsite. That doesn’t work in metro Boston.
Backgrounded in all of the beauty, of course, was pain—at this moment the pain of racism in this country and the pain that it is a system that we are all enmeshed in, like a spider web that clings to our bodies and won’t let us free. If everybody believed that black lives matter, we wouldn’t have to say it. The “All lives” of contemporary America does not, when the rubber hits the road, actually include “all.” The Black Lives Matter movement is about changing that.
It is a lifelong task to be aware of how racism works in America and how those of us who are white benefit from that system. We are never finished. We will never have done enough. But it’s not about guilt or innocence, not about being paralyzed by shame or longing for exoneration. It’s a journey. Step by step, thought by thought, day after day paying attention. The way we interact with the racism of contemporary America is a moral and political question. That sounds very “exterior,” but it’s also a spiritual journey. We are called to pay attention to white privilege and racial discrimination because where discrimination happens Jesus is present. Jesus is always present where there is suffering. And white people—we are not suffering in contemporary America in the same way that people of color are suffering. We are not. Jesus is on the other side of that. Always. With Philando Castile and Alton Sterling AND with the Dallas police officers who were murdered. In the same way that the assassin at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando didn’t represent Islam, the shooter in Dallas didn’t represent the Black Lives Matter movement.
Writing about our trip to Wild Goose Festival last year I shared a quote from a talk I attended that year with Paul Fromberg, a priest in San Francisco. He said “I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.” I don’t know if I am making much progress in my own journey around race. Am I doing the best I can? Most of the time. I will pray for salvation, too.
Blessings,
Sara+
PS—Please keep my husband, Noah, and me in your prayers as we travel to Central New York next week for the series of meetings leading up to the bishop election on August 6. I’ll be out of the office from July 19-24. Thanks to the Rev. Thea Keith-Lucas, Episcopal Chaplain at MIT, who will be guest celebrant and preacher on July 24. In case of a pastoral emergency, the clergy from Redeemer Lexington will be on call.
Last week I was out of the office to attend the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering in the mountains of North Carolina my family and I have attended for the last four years. My shorthand description of it is “Progressive Christians in the mud”—speakers come from all over the map from self-titled “recovering evangelicals” to pacifist Roman Catholics to anti-racist suburban mom bloggers. And folk music rock stars Dar Williams and the Indigo Girls!
The workshops I attended were all over the map—I went to one talk by a lay friend of a silent order of Cistercian monks about meditation, one about pilgrimage and laying down your metaphorical and literal baggage, and several talks by the womanist ethicist scholar Emilie Townes (womanism is a politics centered in the experiences of black women). Jim Wallis, founder of the social justice group Sojourners and author of a whole slew of books about American society and Christian faith and politics, was there this year, speaking again about Racism as America’s Original Sin (also his latest book). What I love about Wild Goose is the sense of community that emerges—I can tell our kids to disappear for an hour and they’ll come back jubilant and covered in dirt, along with a new best friend and an invitation for lunch at someone’s campsite. That doesn’t work in metro Boston.
Backgrounded in all of the beauty, of course, was pain—at this moment the pain of racism in this country and the pain that it is a system that we are all enmeshed in, like a spider web that clings to our bodies and won’t let us free. If everybody believed that black lives matter, we wouldn’t have to say it. The “All lives” of contemporary America does not, when the rubber hits the road, actually include “all.” The Black Lives Matter movement is about changing that.
It is a lifelong task to be aware of how racism works in America and how those of us who are white benefit from that system. We are never finished. We will never have done enough. But it’s not about guilt or innocence, not about being paralyzed by shame or longing for exoneration. It’s a journey. Step by step, thought by thought, day after day paying attention. The way we interact with the racism of contemporary America is a moral and political question. That sounds very “exterior,” but it’s also a spiritual journey. We are called to pay attention to white privilege and racial discrimination because where discrimination happens Jesus is present. Jesus is always present where there is suffering. And white people—we are not suffering in contemporary America in the same way that people of color are suffering. We are not. Jesus is on the other side of that. Always. With Philando Castile and Alton Sterling AND with the Dallas police officers who were murdered. In the same way that the assassin at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando didn’t represent Islam, the shooter in Dallas didn’t represent the Black Lives Matter movement.
Writing about our trip to Wild Goose Festival last year I shared a quote from a talk I attended that year with Paul Fromberg, a priest in San Francisco. He said “I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.” I don’t know if I am making much progress in my own journey around race. Am I doing the best I can? Most of the time. I will pray for salvation, too.
Blessings,
Sara+
PS—Please keep my husband, Noah, and me in your prayers as we travel to Central New York next week for the series of meetings leading up to the bishop election on August 6. I’ll be out of the office from July 19-24. Thanks to the Rev. Thea Keith-Lucas, Episcopal Chaplain at MIT, who will be guest celebrant and preacher on July 24. In case of a pastoral emergency, the clergy from Redeemer Lexington will be on call.
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