Dear People of Christ Church,
St Francis Day Sunday is this week!
St Francis Day Sunday is one of the (perhaps too few) days in the church year we do just for the simple hilarity and joy of it, of blessing our pets. Whether furry or feathered (or in a photograph), we say prayers for gratitude and praise to God for the ways our animals and God’s creation bless our lives. I wrote this space last year about the woodchucks that live in our garden, and now have my own furry dog friend, North (aka Sir Snuggles aka Streudel), and offer thanks even more.
It seems to me that there is something profoundly countercultural about the way we nurture our relationships with creation and with the animals in our lives. Not just “real” animals, either; there is a yellow stuffed teddy in our household who I am sure I would leap through a flames to rescue. Both our “lemon bear” and our actual dog represent love, only love. It is unlikely that your guinea pig will ever earn its keep. It won’t pull itself up by its bootstraps and get organized. It do anything useful or inspirational or brave. It will just be there to look at you and love you, and then love you some more. Maybe then chew the carpet, but afterwards return to love. It won’t ever buy anything or sell anything or need anything other than food, water, and your company.
An animal in itself is an invitation to patience and acceptance, too. This is something we are working on a lot on in our house. Like people, animals can experience trauma—our dog wandered in the woods possibly for weeks before coming to us as a stray into our campsite in a national forest this summer. We have no idea what kind of situation he might have been in before he ended up there; his list of intolerances is long. He can’t deal with loud noises. He can’t deal with the postal service. He is afraid of the waffle maker. Until we started feeding him on a tray, he wouldn’t even eat food out of a bowl (claustrophobia?). That’s just what he’s like. We’ll do what we can to address whatever is underneath it and hope he calms down a bit, but he just might not. We have to accept him for who he is. I mean, God sent this dog to us, right? He’s not trying to change us so we can imagine offering the same grace to him.
So that’s what we do for St Francis Day. St Francis, who preached to the birds and would rather strip naked in the town square than follow wealth the way his family expected him to. Francis who gave everything he had to follow Jesus and “Lady Poverty,” and found joy and peace beyond measure beyond measure beyond measure.
I’ll close with part of Francis’ “Canticle of the Sun,” which we sing on Sunday.
Dear mother earth, who day by day
Unfoldest blessings on our way,
O praise God! Alleluia!
The flowers and fruits that in thee grow,
Let them God’s glory also show.
O praise God! O praise God! Alleluia!! Alleluia!!
Blessings,
Sara+
Showing posts with label blessing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blessing. Show all posts
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Blessing our Created Nature
Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m excited to be planning for an action-packed week ahead, with some very odd juxtapositions. On Sunday we’ll have our annual St Francis Day blessing of the animals at the 10am service—worshippers of all species will be welcomed with a blessing and sign of peace. I think we usually end up with more stuffed animal friends than living ones, but I hope if you’re a pet owner you’ll consider bringing, if not your pet, a picture of them. At my house we are not pet owners—our cat and dog both died within two months of each other 6 years ago, and to be honest we haven’t looked back. Caring for young children has seemed like enough for me. But…
There’s always a “but.” This summer a woodchuck moved into our yard. At first we thought there was just one, but there are distinctly now a fatter one and a thinner one, and with that combination I can only guess that there might be smaller woodchucks on the way. They ate our cucumber plants, but for the most part left the garden alone. The thing I appreciate about them is the sense of surprise they bring—my daughter races to the window at breakfast to see if “Chuckie” is also eating. In the hymn attributed to St Francis, “All Creatures of our God and King,” we sing the praises of creation and God’s blessing and provision for us. Watching for our woodchucks makes me feel part of a wider whole, a creature dwelling beside others. At least as long as the woodchucks continue to behave themselves reasonably well!
If on Sunday we remember the goodness and delight of our created nature, on Monday we remember the tragic dimension our relationships sometimes take, when grace and trust are replaced by control and the desire for power. In our service for hope and healing from domestic violence we’ll sing, pray, and listen to the voices of survivors. Alison (who is returning to her unmarried name of Shea, no longer Lasiewski) will sing, Anna Jones will preach, and MJ from Reach who also spoke last year will be joined by Marisa, also from Reach. The centerpiece of the service will be a time of candle lighting, when people are invited to come forward and light a candle of prayer for themselves or another. This year I’m glad to have as a partner Pastor Angel from Santuario Waltham, a new Spanish-speaking Lutheran congregation beginning in Waltham, based at First Lutheran Church.
It’s an ecumenical service—there won’t be communion, and, if you’ll pardon the term, it’s not terribly “Jesusy.” But I will be thinking of the crucifixion and resurrection, about how even in the most terrible places of suffering and pain the love of God finds a way to come through. Even though sharing the sacrament is important to our community, there is something lovely about making space for others to pray together, to set aside “my” practice for something that more people can share.
Blessings on these cooling fall days, and the presence of God in every aspect of our lives.
Peace,
Sara+
This week I’m excited to be planning for an action-packed week ahead, with some very odd juxtapositions. On Sunday we’ll have our annual St Francis Day blessing of the animals at the 10am service—worshippers of all species will be welcomed with a blessing and sign of peace. I think we usually end up with more stuffed animal friends than living ones, but I hope if you’re a pet owner you’ll consider bringing, if not your pet, a picture of them. At my house we are not pet owners—our cat and dog both died within two months of each other 6 years ago, and to be honest we haven’t looked back. Caring for young children has seemed like enough for me. But…
There’s always a “but.” This summer a woodchuck moved into our yard. At first we thought there was just one, but there are distinctly now a fatter one and a thinner one, and with that combination I can only guess that there might be smaller woodchucks on the way. They ate our cucumber plants, but for the most part left the garden alone. The thing I appreciate about them is the sense of surprise they bring—my daughter races to the window at breakfast to see if “Chuckie” is also eating. In the hymn attributed to St Francis, “All Creatures of our God and King,” we sing the praises of creation and God’s blessing and provision for us. Watching for our woodchucks makes me feel part of a wider whole, a creature dwelling beside others. At least as long as the woodchucks continue to behave themselves reasonably well!
If on Sunday we remember the goodness and delight of our created nature, on Monday we remember the tragic dimension our relationships sometimes take, when grace and trust are replaced by control and the desire for power. In our service for hope and healing from domestic violence we’ll sing, pray, and listen to the voices of survivors. Alison (who is returning to her unmarried name of Shea, no longer Lasiewski) will sing, Anna Jones will preach, and MJ from Reach who also spoke last year will be joined by Marisa, also from Reach. The centerpiece of the service will be a time of candle lighting, when people are invited to come forward and light a candle of prayer for themselves or another. This year I’m glad to have as a partner Pastor Angel from Santuario Waltham, a new Spanish-speaking Lutheran congregation beginning in Waltham, based at First Lutheran Church.
It’s an ecumenical service—there won’t be communion, and, if you’ll pardon the term, it’s not terribly “Jesusy.” But I will be thinking of the crucifixion and resurrection, about how even in the most terrible places of suffering and pain the love of God finds a way to come through. Even though sharing the sacrament is important to our community, there is something lovely about making space for others to pray together, to set aside “my” practice for something that more people can share.
Blessings on these cooling fall days, and the presence of God in every aspect of our lives.
Peace,
Sara+
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Blessed by the Things that Surround Us
Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m thinking about stuff, preparing for our blessing of backpacks—and phones, ipads, briefcases, brooms, and whatever else you use to make the magic of your work or school happen. Things surround us—books and papers and clothes and dishes and whatever else. On the one hand, I do my best to try to feel unattached. I remember my time this summer in the stark, empty beauty of the Utah red rock wilderness, “needing” only everything I could carry five miles into the woods. Listening to Scripture—Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.—I try to extend this to clothes and books and whatever else I get distracted by.
On the other hand…there can be a thin line between being anti-materialistic and falling into the trap of our disposable culture. Lose one water bottle? Get another. Computer slowing down? You’ll just need a new one soon, go ahead and get it now. It’s just stuff. I recently read Marie Kondo’s book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and it’s 100% materialistic—but in a very careful way I really appreciated. The author is Japanese, and it’s grounded in kind of a Shinto spirituality that asks where you’ve come from and how you want to live your life. After you figure that out, how do your possessions support you in that? If your sister gave you a sweater that you hate and every time you see it hanging in your closet you remember how she doesn’t really know you, it’s time to let it go. It has fulfilled its purpose of being given, and you can say thank you and goodbye and stop feeling bad every time you see it. The question is whether things spark joy. If not, let them go with gratitude. It goes perhaps without saying that in the face of the rampant disrespect for human beings evinced in the European refugee crisis (and some of the toxic language in the US around immigration) that the question of our materialism is pretty minor.
Of ultimate importance or not, in the Christian tradition, we do have a long legacy of blessing things. It’s not 100% heretical to think that our things can bless us back, that God is able to be present with us as we encounter the world around us. I don’t know what Marie Kondo would think about the special candelabrum to be used on St. Blaise’s Day (February 3), for blessings throats. But the material world is important. Jesus was resurrected in his body, and famously told Thomas to put his hand in his side. Our bodies are holy. The earth is holy. These are material things, and they matter, though as with all things the invitation is to keep perspective, not to confuse the thing that helps point us toward God with the immaterial unsayable true nature of God.
Our material surroundings are part of the story of Christ Church, too. In seminary there was an expression that always came up in our liturgics classes: “The building always wins.” You can try to make the most airy, contemporary and laid back liturgy, but if you’re doing it in a space that has more in common with a cave, it’s just not going to happen. But things still grow and change. The building of Christ Church has been as much a living thing as the congregation over the years—it’s changed and grown. In 2006 we put in the freestanding altar in memory of Bob Hughes Sr, and the cross that hangs over the high altar was a gift from Muriel Nurse in memory of her mother. She told me the story of how she and Father Bill had chosen it out of a catalog and “hoped for the best” waiting for it to be shipped from England. 42 years later, I think it still works.
So our building, and our community, continues to grow and change. See the announcement from vestry below about the Stations of the Cross—another decision, another opportunity to say “yes” to something new or “no, that’s not right for this place.” Please let us know what you think, and don’t forget to bring your backpack or gear for work or school this Sunday!
Blessings,
Sara+
This week I’m thinking about stuff, preparing for our blessing of backpacks—and phones, ipads, briefcases, brooms, and whatever else you use to make the magic of your work or school happen. Things surround us—books and papers and clothes and dishes and whatever else. On the one hand, I do my best to try to feel unattached. I remember my time this summer in the stark, empty beauty of the Utah red rock wilderness, “needing” only everything I could carry five miles into the woods. Listening to Scripture—Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.—I try to extend this to clothes and books and whatever else I get distracted by.
On the other hand…there can be a thin line between being anti-materialistic and falling into the trap of our disposable culture. Lose one water bottle? Get another. Computer slowing down? You’ll just need a new one soon, go ahead and get it now. It’s just stuff. I recently read Marie Kondo’s book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and it’s 100% materialistic—but in a very careful way I really appreciated. The author is Japanese, and it’s grounded in kind of a Shinto spirituality that asks where you’ve come from and how you want to live your life. After you figure that out, how do your possessions support you in that? If your sister gave you a sweater that you hate and every time you see it hanging in your closet you remember how she doesn’t really know you, it’s time to let it go. It has fulfilled its purpose of being given, and you can say thank you and goodbye and stop feeling bad every time you see it. The question is whether things spark joy. If not, let them go with gratitude. It goes perhaps without saying that in the face of the rampant disrespect for human beings evinced in the European refugee crisis (and some of the toxic language in the US around immigration) that the question of our materialism is pretty minor.
Of ultimate importance or not, in the Christian tradition, we do have a long legacy of blessing things. It’s not 100% heretical to think that our things can bless us back, that God is able to be present with us as we encounter the world around us. I don’t know what Marie Kondo would think about the special candelabrum to be used on St. Blaise’s Day (February 3), for blessings throats. But the material world is important. Jesus was resurrected in his body, and famously told Thomas to put his hand in his side. Our bodies are holy. The earth is holy. These are material things, and they matter, though as with all things the invitation is to keep perspective, not to confuse the thing that helps point us toward God with the immaterial unsayable true nature of God.
Our material surroundings are part of the story of Christ Church, too. In seminary there was an expression that always came up in our liturgics classes: “The building always wins.” You can try to make the most airy, contemporary and laid back liturgy, but if you’re doing it in a space that has more in common with a cave, it’s just not going to happen. But things still grow and change. The building of Christ Church has been as much a living thing as the congregation over the years—it’s changed and grown. In 2006 we put in the freestanding altar in memory of Bob Hughes Sr, and the cross that hangs over the high altar was a gift from Muriel Nurse in memory of her mother. She told me the story of how she and Father Bill had chosen it out of a catalog and “hoped for the best” waiting for it to be shipped from England. 42 years later, I think it still works.
So our building, and our community, continues to grow and change. See the announcement from vestry below about the Stations of the Cross—another decision, another opportunity to say “yes” to something new or “no, that’s not right for this place.” Please let us know what you think, and don’t forget to bring your backpack or gear for work or school this Sunday!
Blessings,
Sara+
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)