Awake in Advent: Living God's Patience and God's Impatience. A sermon for the first Sunday of Advent.

The season of Advent began today, Sunday November 27, in the Western Christian liturgical calendar. Here's a meditation for those of you who observe this season, which marks the beginning of the Christian year.

I preached this sermon at the Parish of St. Paul in Newton Highlands, a small congregation in one of Boston's nearby suburbs. I'm grateful to the Priest-in-Charge, the Rev. Cara Rockhill, and the lay leaders and members of the parish, for their invitation and hospitality. I'm a great believer in offering apologies when they are needed and appropriate, and you will see at the beginning of the sermon an apology for the length of my sermon of a few weeks ago. This is my third or fourth time preaching in this parish, which I serve as a consultant on behalf of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.

The sermon is new, written and spoken for a particular time and place, but some of you will recognize both the title of the sermon and some of its content from retreats and meditations I have offered in the past.

In the name of the One

Who made us 

Who saves us 

and Who walks with us always, 

Amen.

It’s good to be back here with you.

Thank you for your hospitality.

I owe you an apology.

That sermon I preached a few Sundays ago was

Much. Too. Long.

I promise you today’s will not go on and on.

 

Lend me your ear, though,

for a different mood from Sundays past. 

We are entering Advent.

 Do you have an Advent wreath at home?

Do you light Advent candles?

When did you light the first candle?

On the vigil of the first Sunday, last night?

Or do you plan to light it tonight?

Or perhaps, as has happened to me more than once in the past, 

Will you begin your daily lighting of the Advent calendar 

midweek, 

because you haven’t made or bought your Advent wreath before then 

and the dining room table is a mess?

We have an Advent wreath here.

Take a moment (or two) to gaze at the flame of that first candle,
the one we have lit in our communal space
in this sanctuary.
Simply gaze.
Take a long slow breath or two

and look at that one light.

        (Silence.)

* * *

Advent and Christmas are in some ways
the ultimate celebration of space,
the celebration of God entering human space
in the most intimate way possible:
by becoming human.

The celebration of word become flesh,
of word becoming flesh
the discovery that God-the-other
is also God-with-us[1]:
That is the good news of Advent.

We celebrate in Advent
God's invitation
for us to view our space
—our society,
our environment,
our neighbor,
our own flesh—
    as sacred,
    pregnant with justice and hope,
    filled with hidden treasure.

But Advent is also a celebration
of time
and a celebration in time.

God enters
not just our space
but our time:
our history,
our present moment,
our human future.

Advent
challenges
our very relationship to time.

Advent challenges our impatience
and invites us to enter God's patience.

It is the season
of taking the long view,
the view beyond
our own small range of vision.

If we are to hear the good news
that God is
Emmanuel, God-with-us,
we may have to slow down.
        To slow down externally, bodily,
        But also to slow down inside
        —which can be even harder than slowing down with our body
    or slowing down our behavior.
Often God speaks very softly,
in ordinary ways and places,
in the daily events of our lives.

If the good news
is to take root in us,
we need to enter God's time,
God's timetable.

Advent
is not a flashy season.
It takes time for good news to sink in,
for love to grow,
for wisdom to ripen,
for lives to be transformed,
for truth to dawn in us,
for hope to take shape.

So in Advent, season of waiting for Christ,
we take in the good news slowly,
steadily,
lighting candles one at a time,
adding a new insight,
a layer of understanding,
every day
and every week.

(and) Yet

Advent is also a time to enter
God's impatience,
a time of righteous anger,
a time when prophets
challenge our apathy and paralysis
and urge us forward.

It is a season of visions and yearnings,
in which the stories and songs in the scriptures
speak of a God
who longs to transform
our hearts,
our society,
and creation itself –
soon, now, urgently.

***

One of these visions
is in the text from the prophetic book of Isaiah
for this first Sunday of Advent.[2]

Did you notice
how much this reading,
in addition to its images taken from nature,
addresses our life in human community,
including the community of nations?

God's righteousness and wisdom
and our human responses to them
are, in the text, directly related
to whether and how humans make peace or war,
whether we make the land into a battleground
or cultivate it.

The "swords into plowshares" passage[3]
is so well known
that we can gloss over it,
or in some way romanticize it.
Or perhaps more likely,
think it is nothing but a vision or a dream.

That metaphor has, however, been used in recent history
to describe something concrete:
what in the late 1970s we began calling "economic conversion"—
—the shifting of industrial, manufacturing, and scientific priorities
from military to civilian.
The movement continued for a couple of decades
and found its way into policy conversations:
there was even a bill
introduced in 1977 by bipartisan sponsors in the Senate
and then in the House of Representatives.
It was called the National Economic Conversion Act
and was repeatedly reintroduced through the years
but never became law.

Nowadays we speak more often
Of another kind of economic and environmental conversion:
Away from over-use of fossil fuels
and over-production of carbon emissions
that threaten us and God’s earth on which we live
with a greater danger than swords
and toward forms of energy
that can keep us and our children
and our companion plants and animals
and soil and water and sky
healthy and full of life.

Swords into plowshares.

It is up to us to take up the vision
and turn it into reality,
wherever we can.

Swords into plowshares.

* * *

So here we are:
smack in the middle
of cosmic,
personal, political,
ecclesial,
social, and economic
issues and upheavals,
all at once.

We are also
in the realm of visions of the messianic age,
which both Jews and Christians cultivate,
though in different ways.

The characteristics of that age,
of that kin-dom,
are the same, though:
peace among humans,
harmony in nature,
and the transformation
—some of it subtle, some of it dramatic—
that makes these possible.

* * *

Meanwhile, Jesus,
as the Gospel of Matthew presents him,
is far from meek and mild.
He warns us, puts us on alert,
shakes us up.

"Keep awake!"

Advent may be the slow and gentle season,
but it is—equally—
also the shake-up season.

God enters time,
but
the end of time is looming.

Jesus
grabs his companions by the collar.

No gentleness in this Gospel.

But no hypervigilance either.
By which I mean no jitters,
no super-speedy-overwrought reflexes.

Rather, we can read the Gospel as an invitation
to be awake and alert in a centered way.
It may be useful to read this Gospel in tandem
with a good dose of Buddhist mindfulness practice:

Can we be alert
but not reactive,
ready for the storm
but not overwhelmed
by its presence?

Can we spend Advent mindfully,
letting go of some of the reactivity
that has characterized so many of our conversations and responses
this election season
and the two preceding election cycles?

Can we spend Advent mindfully,
letting go of the reactivity that rises from us
not just in political conversations
but in many of our circumstances
today?

Can we spend Advent
mindfully, gently,
in the present
despite all the uncertainty and anxiety we are carrying
–in our work lives,
our relationships,
our family lives—
and yes, our church lives?

* * *

One of the challenges of this season
is to readjust our sense of time:
to discern when it is appropriate
to enter into God's patience
and when it is time to enter into God's impatience.

Perhaps it is also, then,
a time to learn mindfulness in a new way.

It is helpful to do this in community.
That's why we have the seasons of the church year.
That's why we have each other.

* * *

Today, on this first Sunday of Advent,
this first day of the new year[4]
and in the next few days,
before you do anything else,
take time.

Rest
in the patience of God.
All else will unfold,
in God's time.

        Amen.

[1] Emmanuel = “God with us” in Hebrew.
[2] The Revised Common Lectionary texts are here.
[3] A similar use of this image exists in chapter 4 of Micah, another prophetic book of the Bible.
[4] The new liturgical year.

Beth Johnson, reliable guide

Many of you have doubtless heard about the brouhaha about Elizabeth Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, whose book Quest for the Living God was criticized, yea even condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine in late March. If you have not heard about the controversy, all the more reason to read the article linked below and links embedded in it.

Prof. Deirdre Good (who blogs at On Not Being a Sausage) and I have written an essay on Prof. Johnson, her theology, and the controversy. The article just came out today (Easter Monday, April 25) at the Episcopal Café. Have a look here (permanent link, will stay up even when article is no longer on the front page) and please feel welcome to leave a comment at the Café below the article.

Bread

Today I made and baked bread for the first time. Bread made with yeast and kneaded by hand. I have of course made all manner of quick breads: corn bread, muffins, that sort of thing. Not real bread, though. I do have a memory of making little loaves in my mother's oven for some kind of school project, and the funny thing is I don't remember yeast or kneading, but I do remember that the bread rose. Maybe my memory is faulty.

I have two roundish loaves cooling on a rack and of course I could not resist cutting into one and tasting it before it was completely cool. It was good.

These are whole wheat loaves, 100% whole wheat. The recipe is the "Plain and Simple" bread from the Cheese Board's book. I don't own loaf pans, and I don't like pan-shaped bread anyway, so I made rounds (one is actually an oval) and I sprayed the loaves, as they say you should to get more of a crust. It worked, but I need an oven thermometer. I think the oven was too hot. I followed the directions religiously because I wanted to make the basic recipe first and then fiddle with it once I had the hang of it, and the directions said 450 degrees for 5 minutes and then 400. Crust nearly burned. Anyway, I am pleased with myself and with the bread, the house smelled a little like France all of a sudden, and kneading really does get out your aggressions.

I still have writer's block, though. My latest Facebook update says "baking bread and battling writer's block." I need to stay off Facebook. Which mostly I do when I am writing. I am working on a book chapter and now that it is late at night and the bread is out it will probably start "cookin'," but I am trying not to stay up too late, so I'll have to go to bed trusting that the words and more importantly, the sentences will appear in the morning.

Some of this, as I mentioned in the last day or so, is undoubtedly related to the way in which my job drains me of my own writing voice and of much of my energy, but there are other causes too. At any rate, analyzing my writing process is not my purpose here and does not belong here.

The wonderful Fran (formerly of FranIAm blog), who is a dear friend and spiritual sister, now has a blog called There Will Be Bread and there she writes with great fluency and beauty, straight from the heart, and with a good mind, too. I on the other hand am rather dry these days. At least, though, there is bread with crust and crumb, right here, tonight.

Holy One of Blessing, your presence fills creation, bringing forth bread from the earth.*


* Contemporary translation, in inclusive language, of the traditional Jewish ha-motzi, the blessing over the bread.

Photos: Jane Redmont

An Open Letter to Anne Rice

My open letter to Anne Rice, an essay on the church, its flaws, and why you can't be a Jesus-person alone in a corner, is up at the Episcopal Café.

Feel free to circulate prn.

Cross-posted on Facebook.

Keep prayin', please

For the wordy request, see here.

Thank you.

Book sale! Get your cool books! ("Cool" rather than "hot:" it's a steamy summer here in the U.S.)

The writing crawls along. Some days are worse than others.

In other news, my paperback publisher has a sale on my book on prayer at deep discount, so buy it! (Let's hope this doesn't mean trouble, just summer sales. Addendum: Nope, no trouble, just some overstock.) It's less than half the usual price! You know you want it. So does your mother. So do your rector, pastor, best friend, father, sister-in-law, lover, parishioner, and spiritual director. Seriously.

I posted this little announcement on Facebook (woe is me, I returned to Facebook, but only for that announcement - true!) yesterday and several people wrote very nice things about the book in response to that update. Those people includes a prison chaplain, an M.D. pathologist, a counselor-in-training, a vocational deacon who works with people who are down and out, and others. Here endeth the shameless self-promotion. Buy the book. Buy ten of 'em.

Meanwhile, over on one side of the house...

Inside the house, Jane continues to write and edit and pace the floor and +Maya sleeps, plays, and pesters Jane for treats, but only when Jane is in the kitchen.

Prayer Posse, this one is for you, with my thanks

My friend Paul the BB is much more faithful than I in posting prayer concerns and requests in his "heart threads" and "Oremus" posts, but I am making bold to join him with a few requests for you intercessors out there.

First there's Kirstin, who is undergoing chemotherapy in an experimental protocol for a nasty recurrence of cancer. She is surrounded by love and very good care and has a strong will to live and live well, but this is one of those cases where the potential cure is very tough on body and soul. Please keep her in your hearts. Pray also (or offer merit or chants -- whatever your tradition is, we welcome it) for her best friend Andee, who has been faithful and compassionate in her attention and care. And for the medical people, of course.

Then there's Joel, beloved spouse of Margaret and informally-adoptive parent of Juan Manuel. Joel has had a bad attack of myasthenia gravis and they almost lost him a few nights ago. He is doing better, "guarded," as they say, and has a host of praying and caring folks in his life, not least of them our Margaret. Please pray for Joel, for Margaret, for Juan Manuel, and of course for the physicians and nurses and other caregivers.

And Fran of Smallbania, dear friend of mine and of many of us both irl ("in real life") and in the blogosphere, has had to forgo a vacation abroad with her spouse and daughter because of a most unpleasant episode in the hospital involving a gall bladder (now gone, bye-bye gall bladder) and several related complications. Fran is at home resting up and improving every day, but she could use some more prayers. She continues to be her thoughtful self and is black to blogging, a sure sign she is on the mend.

Here's a link to the Taizé chant "Bleibet hier" (literally "stay here" and known and sung in English as "Stay with me, remain with me, watch and pray").

Please pray also in happy thanksgiving for Nathan, a young man I've prayed with and mentored a bit, who was baptized yesterday at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Greensboro. Nathan had been baptized as a child but in the tradition of his family, the Jehovah's Witnesses, who do not baptize in the name of the Holy Trinity. So, after becoming quite involved in the Episcopal Church, he asked to be baptized with the ancient Trinitarian formula which is that of most Christian traditions including the Anglican one. Nathan is a member of St. Andrew's but is also involved at St. Mary's House, where he has been co-convening the Centering Prayer and Taizé Prayer with me. (We are on break for July-August but will resume our hour of contemplation -- half Centering Prayer, which is a Christian form of silent meditation, and half Taizé prayer, with chants from the Taizé community, readings, silence and simple prayers -- in the fall semester.) He also helped start a local chapter of Integrity. He is a wonderful young man with much enthusiasm and feels blessed to have found a welcoming and inclusive church with a strong and long historical tradition.


Finally I ask your prayers for me, Jane. I am in hermit mode, chugging to the finish on a very large and long theological project known to the general public as The Big Tome. I have burrowed deeper into solitude and struggle in order to get it done and it is very intense work, even when I am not working consciously. I am well and healthy, I get good nutrition and enough sleep, enjoy the solitude much of the time, and have the wonderful company of Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire. She is very good at sleeping, napping, being playful, and keeping me company at the keyboard. She usually sleeps all afternoon but in the evening she tends to be in supervisory mode and hang out here in the study. I have no idea what she does in the morning, since I am keeping odd hours and am asleep much of the a.m. +Maya does come and visit after the alarm clock rings and usually settles on my chest for a while. She is a very civilized cat and does not wake me at 6 a.m. as some other cats are wont to do to their human companions.

I need and welcome your prayers, good vibrations, chants, meditations, and other holy expressions of support. Thank you! Come, Holy Spirit.*

*That's a link to the Taizé chant "Veni lumen" -- "Come, light" in Latin. "Come, Holy Spirit, light of our hearts," etc.

It is beastly hot here in Greensboro as in much of the Eastern part of the U.S. but I do have an air conditioning unit in the study and another in the kitchen/dining room, so I am managing, though the air conditioning is noisy and it is odd to be spending 90 to 95% of my time indoors in the summer. The phlox are blooming outdoors and surviving nicely. The humans, however, are wilting.

Peace to you all, and to all sentient beings.

Pledging Allegiance: a reflection on Christian commitment and community on Independence Day weekend

Ann Fontaine of Episcopal Café fame asked on Facebook what we were planning to do for our churches tomorrow when Sunday falls on July 4.

When I was writing lectionary reflections (meditations to help people who are either preaching or reflecting on the readings assigned for the Sunday in question) a few years back for the late lamented magazine The Witness, I wrote this --and later preached a related sermon-- for the feast of All Saints.  

Though this was an All Saints' Day meditation, it may be apt for July 4 with its "Pledging Allegiance" theme and its reminder of the "Where do we place our security?" question of the 1980s religiously based disarmament movement and the question about who, what, is our primary community. 

Not to take away from love of country (for the record, I get misty-eyed at "America the Beautiful" -- and at "This Land Is Your Land" :-)) and struggle for independence -- just to put patriotism in perspective.

Cross-posted on Facebook

In anticipation of Trinity Sunday

Until a month or two ago I had forgotten that I'd written this piece! This is Year C in the lectionary, not Year A as it was when I wrote the essay highlighted in the previous sentence, but perhaps some of you will find this helpful as you prepare sermons for Trinity Sunday or as you prepare to celebrate the feast.

(Cross-posted on Facebook, but without the icon.) 

Silences, part 2

From Tillie Olsen's Silences (New York: Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence, 1978).

In case it is not obvious, italics in black are my words. The words in color are Olsen's.


Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.

What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process, in that time? What are creation's needs for full functioning? Without intention of or pretension to literary scholarship, I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me.

These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.

The great in achievement have known such silences --Thomas Hardy, Melville, Rimbaud, Gerard Manley Hopkins. They tell us little as to why or how the creative working atrophied and died in them--if ever it did.

...

Kin to these years-long silences are the hidden silences; work aborted, deferred, denied --hidden by the work which does come to fruition...

Censorship silences. Deletions, omissions, abandonment of the medium (as with Hardy); paralyzing of capacity (as Dreiser's ten-year stasis on Jennie Gerhardt after the storm against Sister Carrie). Publishers' censorship, refusing subject matter or treatment as "not suitable" or "no market for." Self-censorship. Religious, political censorship --sometimes spurring inventiveness--most often (read Dostoyevsky's letter) a wearing attrition.

The extreme of this: those writers physically silenced by governments. Isaac Babel, the year of imprisonment, what took place in him with what wanted to be written? Or in Oscar Wilde, who was not permitted even a pencil until the last month of his imprisonment?

Other silences. The truly memorable poem, story, or book, then the writer ceasing to be published. Was one work all the writers had in them (life too thin for pressure of material, renewal) and the respect for literature too great to repeat themselves? Was it "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life" at their throat? Were the conditions not present for establishing the habits of creativity (a young Colette who lacked a Willy to lock her in her room each day)? or--as instanced over and over--other claims, other responsibilities so writing could not be first? (The writer of a class, sex, color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to written voice at all against complex odds is exhausting achievement.) It is an eloquent commentary that this one-book silence has been true of most black writers; only eleven in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice. [Olsen backs up her statement with a citation; note that she was speaking in 1962.]

There is a prevalent silence I pass by quickly, the absence of creativity where it once had been; the ceasing to create literature, though the books may keep coming out year after year...

...

Almost unnoted are the foreground silences, before the achievement. [T.O. names writers including George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen]-- all close to, or in their forties before they became published writers; [more names, including Laura Ingalls Wilder] in their sixties. Their capacities evident early in the "being one on whom nothing is lost;" in other writers' qualities. Not all struggling and anguished... ; some needing the immobilization of long illness or loss, or the sudden lifting of responsibility to make writing necessary, make writing possible; others waiting circumstances and encouragement...

Very close to this last grouping are the silences where the lives never came to writing. Among these, the mute inglorious Millions: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women. Their silences the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for most of humanity. Traces of their making, of course, in folk song, lullaby, language itself, jokes, maxims, superstitions--but we know nothing of the creators or how it was with them...


Olsen then quotes Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, as one expects. I think of Alice Walker's title essay in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens about the creative gifts of Black women. Olsen also quotes Rebecca Harding Davis, who writes of the illiterate ironworker in Life in the Iron Mills who sculptured great shapes in the slag: "his fierce thirst for beautiy, to know it, to create it, to be something other than he is--a passion of pain."

....

..."Without duties, without almost without external communication," Rilke specifies, "unconfined solitude which takes every day like a life, a spaciousness which puts no limit to vision and in the midst of which infinities surround. "

Unconfined solitude as Joseph Conrad experienced it:
***"For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation... mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day... a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection."

I'll bet that was a woman. Who was silent and watchful, that is, and made the food, and provided affection.

...

But what if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self? What if the writers, as in some of these silences, must work regularly at something besides their own work--as do nearly all in the arts in the United Sates today.

I know the theory (kin to "starving in the garret makes great art") that it is this very circumstance which feeds creativity. .... But the actuality testifies: substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences. (Desperation which accounts for the mountains of applications to the foundations for grants--undivided time-- in the strange bread-line system we have worked out for our artists.)

Twenty years went by on the writing of Ship of Fools, while Katherine Anne Porter, who needed only two, was "trying to get to that table, to that typewriter, away from my jobs of teaching and trooping this country and of keeping house: "Your subconscious needed that time to grow the layers of pearl," she was told. Perhaps, perhaps, but I doubt it. Subterranean forces can make you wait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. "We hold up our desire as one places a magnet over a composite dust from which the particle of iron will suddenly jump up," says Paul Valéry. A receptive waiting, that means, not demands which prevent "an undistracted center of being." And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangered -- for only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for future work. ...

There is a life in which all this is documented: Franz Kafka's. For every one entry from his diaries here, there are fifty others than testify as unbearably to the driven stratagems for time, the work lost (to us), the damage to the creative powers (and the body) of having to deny, interrupt, postpone, put aside, let work die.

... [Excerpts from Kafka's diaries follow. Also comments on Rilke, who neglected and moved away from his wife and child to protect his poetry writing, and on marriage and childbearing and how rare, till recently, most women writers did not marry, or if they did, did not have children. Or if they did, they had household help.]

The power and the need to create, over and beyond reproduction, is native in both women and men. Where the gift among women (and men) have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation.

Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self. But women are traditionally trained to place others' needs first, to feel these needs as their own...; their sphere, their satifaction to be in making it possible for others to use their abilities...

...

...[W]e are in a time of more and more hidden and foreground silences, women and men. Denied full writing life, more may try to "nurse through night" (that part-time, part-self night) "the ethereal spark," but it seems to me there would almost have had to be "flame on flame" first; and time as needed, afterwards; and enough of the self, the capacities, undamaged for the rebeginnings on the frightful task. I would like to believe this for what has not yet been written into literature. But it cannot reconcile for what is lost by unnatural silences.

*******Originally an unwritten talk, spoken from notes at the Radcliffe Institute in 1962, transcribed and edited, and published in this version in Harper's Magazine, October 1965.

Quoted in The Tablet

The Tablet, whose articles you can't read online unless you subscribe, is probably the best Catholic periodical on the planet, or one of the best. It is certainly one of the most respected in the Northern Hemisphere and perhaps beyond. Published in England, weekly, thoughtful, thorough, independent.

Like all periodicals I'm sure they are struggling to stay afloat, so that may be the reason for the Web gatekeeping. Either that or the spammers and trolls.


At any rate, a dear friend wrote me yesterday morning with the news that I had achieved fame: The Tablet quoted me! More precisely, it quoted a passage from When in Doubt, Sing. Even more amazingly, the passage in question was in the good company of the Psalmist, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Dorsey!

Ad majorem Dei gloriam!

(But good for the ego too during a hard week.)

Oh - it was in last week's issue.

(A new issue is just out with comment and analysis on the latest Catholic/Anglican brouhaha.)


Here are the quotes as they appeared:

The living Spirit [name of the feature / column]

[and an image of a dove which I can't seem to transfer here]

Both perfectionism and self-forgiveness bear a direct relation to our understanding of God. The first step of prayer is telling the truth about who and where we are. It is also, at the same time, learning the truth about who and where God is. We are the ones who tend to place limits on the mercy of God. Prayer involves a capacity to stretch our imagination, to imagine and therefore to begin knowing a God who is not a projection of our own self-condemnation … The idea that prayer is somehow a production (in the economic or in the theatrical sense – both are destructive) will take us away from prayer.

Jane Redmont
When in Doubt, Sing
(Sorin, 2008)


Our steps are
made firm by the Lord,
when he delights in our way;
though we stumble, we
shall not fall headlong,
for the Lord holds us by the hand.

Psalm 37: 23-24


If you have failings, then ask God frequently in prayer if it may not be to his honour and pleasure to take them from you, for you can do nothing without his help. He gives to each according to what is best for them and most suitable. If we are to make new clothes for someone, then we must make them according to their dimensions, and those which fit one will not fit another. We measure everyone to see what fits them. So too God gives everyone the best thing of all according to his knowledge of what is most suitable for them. Indeed, whoever trusts him entirely in this, receives and possesses in the least of things as much as they do in the greatest.

Meister Eckhart: selected writings
(Penguin Classics, 1994)


When the darkness appears and the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river I stand,
Guide my feet,
hold my hand;
Take my hand, Precious Lord,
Lead me home.

Thomas Andrew Dorsey
(1899-1993)

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A day at home writing after an intense half-week of teaching.

Thus lots of opportunity to procrastinate (or take comforting breaks, depending on your spin) on Facebook. Posted a lot of updates. They are a bit like haiku, just longer. This may be the day with the most updates since I started Facebooking. (Is that a verb? If not, it will be soon.)

I still dislike Facebook's changes of this summer with the change in the update formula. Silly. But like lemmings, we have all started talking about ourselves in the 3d person. Mostly.

Jane R. Link

Jane R. Today, the Right Reverend and Right Honourable Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire, is my supervisor.

Jane R. Sometimes it's good to take some time simply to breathe and observe.Even, or especially, in the midst of urgent concerns, policy discussion, and activism. Link.

I posted these next two to the blog way back; revisited the music to listen and shared them on FB today as I listened.

Jane R. Link.

Jane R. And a live version... J.S. Bach never gets old. All hail to the best of his ancient and recent interpreters. Link.

Jane R. has now hidden from her news feed Vampire Wars, Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Farmtown, Funky Flowers, Pirates, (Lil') Green Patch, 101 Eggs, YoVille, and Pillow Fights. I'll keep hiding these sorts of apps as they keep appearing. I do like reading your personal and news updates, though, all y'all.

Jane R. Thanks to Vince Masi for pointing out this article. And hey, that's my old friend Edward, the Exec. Director whom the article quotes! Link.

Jane R. was attacked by a thorny branch while mowing the lawn and has the scratches to show for it.

Jane R. wants to keep looking at the recently arrived photos of her 6-year-old great-nephew instead of working on the Big Tome... But we do our theology for our children, don't we? If it doesn't make the world better for them, it's not worth the time. Another picture to post above the desk. What a cutie. And I'm not biased or anything.


Jane R. is remembering her beloved friend David, now deceased (brain tumor, summer 2002), who rushed downtown (he worked midtown and lived on the Upper West Side) on September 11, 2001, to see if he could find his nephew, and who miraculously ran into him, alive.