Proper 4 C- May 29, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br.Peter Rostron, OHC
Proper 4 Year C Sunday, May 29, 2016

 Seeing God in the ordinary
(Photo credit  Elizabeth Boe)

At last, we are settling into ordinary time. The past three months have been filled with the intensity of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, followed by the joy of Eastertide with its abundance of alleluias, and, most recently, we’ve had three great, first-class feasts: Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi. Now, we can relax and settle into the comfortable routine of what is commonly referred to in the church calendar as ordinary time. School and church programs will be on hiatus. Maybe you’ll take a vacation to visit friends, or explore interesting museums or historic sites, or just lie on a beach and enjoy beautiful sunsets. Or perhaps you’ll just stay at home, slow down, and sip on cool glasses of iced tea. It will be a relief to simply enjoy the ordinary pleasures of life.

But what about our spiritual lives, our prayer lives? They hopefully will not go on hiatus as well. Ordinary does not mean absent or less important or lacking in intensity. God is still present even though we are in between church seasons and do not have the inspiration and ritual of a major feast in these months. God is not a distant force whom we know only in sacred spaces and through eloquent prayer or festive celebrations. No, God is here with us, everywhere present in all things, in us, at all times. The stuff we are made of is the same stuff that the whole of the universe is made of, and that is God. God dwells in the ordinary, and we experience God through very ordinary prayer and in the everydayness of life. No feast or church or script, or even any words at all, are required.

Ann and Barry Ulanov open their classic work, Primary Speech, by stating: “Everybody prays. People pray whether or not they call it prayer. We pray every time we ask for help, understanding, or strength, in or out of religion. Our movements, our stillness, the expressions on our faces, our tone of voice, our actions, what we dream and daydream, as well as what we actually put into words say who and what we are. To pray is to listen to and hear this self who is speaking.” I would sum it up by saying simply that our very lives are prayer. Prayer is our relationship with God. We are part of God, God is part of us, we are never not in relationship with God. When Paul enjoins us to pray without ceasing, it really is not as difficult as one might think. Mostly, it requires us to be continually attentive and intentional - about who we are, what we are doing, who we are with - all with an awareness of God’s immediate and loving presence within and all around us.

I recently completed a four-week, intensive spiritual direction training program, which not only was relevant for my beginning work as a director, but, even more significantly, for my own formation as a monk. One of the central truths that resonated deep within me in the program was the essential role that God plays in the direction experience. There are three present in the room: the director, the directee, and God. It is prayer. As I considered this, it struck me that this dynamic extends beyond just an intimate conversation with one other person to every kind of situation we might be in, from our homes to our workplaces and to the grocery store, while enjoying a fine meal or taking out the trash, with one person or many or none, in harmony or in conflict, awake or asleep. God is present and prayer is happening always and in everything we do, in every ordinary, routine place, even when and where we may least expect it. Our task is to choose to listen, and respond, to the prayer that God is constantly initiating in us.


In the closing prayers of the spiritual direction program, one of the participants prayed aloud for Donald Trump. Many of us remarked afterward that we found this quite jarring. Why should that be? God is present in Mr. Trump just as God is present in each of us, yet for some reason we felt differently about him. Another time in the program, a participant shared his profound experiences of God while ministering to men in a local prison. He said that some of the greatest expressions of love he has ever witnessed took place among those prisoners. As the people of Galatia are turning away from God, Paul knows that God is still present among them. He addresses them harshly, but he does not turn away from them or give up on them. And in today’s gospel, we see a Roman centurion, one who bears the violent authority of the oppressor, as someone who also is a person of deep humility and love, of whom Jesus says, "not even in Israel have I found such faith." We are called to seek God in everyone, to open our hearts to every person in prayer, no matter their place in life.

Likewise, God desires us to bring all of our selves to prayer as well. There is an abundance of content and emotion that can be brought to prayer. In their book, the Ulanovs carefully explore a variety of facets of prayer, many of which surprised me. They devote a chapter to prayer and fantasy, another to prayer and aggression, another to prayer and sexuality, and another to prayer and fear. The message is that there is nothing that cannot be brought to prayer, no part of us that we need worry about keeping from God. God can take it. He can bear our anger, our pettiness, all of our failings, all of our ordinariness. After all, God already knows everything about us, and still loves us. As the psalmist said, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you...are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.”

So, why bother to pray, one might ask? God may know us, but he wants us to know him, too. When we reveal ourselves to God in prayer - in all of our ordinariness - then we are more fully open to receive God’s grace and God’s love. In the radical act of sending Jesus to us, God demonstrated his ultimate wish for us: that we let go of our selfish, ego-driven desires and turn ourselves over to God’s love and will. But that can only happen through prayer. It is in our own prayer that we discover what God’s particular desire is for each of us, and we discern what God would have us do. It is only through this completely unfettered relationship with God, exposing our whole selves, in all of the ordinariness of our everyday lives, that we can become the person God wants us to be.

There are many examples of this which God has provided in scripture. Along with Primary Speech, another of the excellent books that were part of the spiritual direction program was Inviting the Mystic, Supporting the Prophet, by Katherine Dyckman and Patrick Carroll. Sprinkled throughout the book were references to archetypal experiences of prayer found in scripture that can be relevant and inspirational to our modern lives. There is a tendency, I’m afraid, that, because they are in Holy Scripture, we assign them a kind of elevated, other-worldly status. They’re not applicable to us, they’re beyond our own experience. Yet, all of them involved ordinary people whose prayer and openness to God led them to take a risk, to trust in God, and to be open to transformation. Abraham followed God’s call, trusting that he was being led to a better place, for his and his descendants’ sake. Ruth made and kept a simple vow to stay with her mother-in-law Naomi, which ultimately bore great fruit. Moses resisted and argued and pleaded with God because he did not feel worthy or capable of leading his people to freedom, yet he remained obedient. We can do the same. We can listen and respond to God. We can choose to pay attention to the burning bush that suddenly appears amidst the ordinariness of our lives.

Lord, let this seemingly ordinary time - whose beginning was marked by the descent of the Holy Spirit into the church - be a time of deepening prayer for each of us; a time of allowing the Holy Spirit to work within us; a time of knowing our bodies to be the body of your son Jesus Christ, doing your work in the world; a time of fully realizing your love for us and our constant relationship with you; a time for extra-ordinary things to happen.  

Amen.

TRINITY SUNDAY C- May 22, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Reinaldo Martinez-Cubero, n/OHC
Trinity Sunday  Sunday, May 22, 2016

Icon of the Trinity  

Breaking News   

I regret that I must begin this homily with a very alarming, even distressing… News brief… from Heaven…  

Calling the Holy Trinity "overstaffed and over budget," God announced plans on Friday to downsize the group by slowly phasing out the Holy Ghost. "Given the poor economic climate and the unclear nature of the Holy Ghost's duties, I felt this was a sensible and necessary decision," God said. "The Holy Ghost will be given fewer and fewer responsibilities until His formal resignation from Trinity duty on May 23. Thereafter, the Father and the Son shall be referred to as the Holy Duo."

During the past two weeks or so, it has been an interesting experience for me to tell people that I was preaching on Trinity Sunday. The reactions have gone from: a simple shrug of discomfort and “ugh”, to “Oh, I’m sorry. It must be because you are one of the newest monks.” The truth is, that upon discovering I was to preach on Trinity Sunday, I was delighted. The day is dear to my heart since it is the Feast Day of the parish in Manhattan where I was a parishioner, and where I worked for fifteen years before entering the Order.

What’s interesting is that today, we are celebrating, not a Biblical event, but a doctrine. This doctrine is a description of the human experience of God, as the source of life beyond any limit we can imagine, God coming to us uniquely through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and, God as the ultimate depth of life. According to the more creative biblical scholars of our day, the doctrine was ‘created’ to describe, define, and safeguard an experience. Sadly, in the process of time, the ‘experience’ seems to have been drained out, leaving just a formula to denounce those who imagine things differently. But quantum physics, and cosmology are now helping us look at this Mystery of the Trinity with a new level of understanding. Reality is relational. This Mystery of the Trinity is about relationship, indwelling, and interrelatedness. It is about God within God, mutually depending and dwelling together in a holy unity. And we are invited to be a part of this Mystery through which God relates to us.

The one thing I remember more than anything from my formation classes before being received into the Episcopal Church is the definition for mystery given to us by Mother Johanna-Karen Johannson at Holy Trinity Church, Inwood. Mystery is that which cannot be apprehended by reason, but once apprehended, is not contrary to reason. Mother Johanna assured us that we could not have an authentic experience of God with easy formulas and clichéd explanations. What’s interesting is that, Science, once considered the enemy of religion, is now helping us realize that we are in the midst of awesome Mystery. Astrophysicists are much more comfortable with emptiness, black holes, and living with hypotheses than most Christians.

This Mystery of the relatedness of God’s very being, the multiple-ness of God’s very unity invites us to find peace in the unknowing. It is not an exam question that we must answer correctly before we meet Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates. Rather, as Catherine Mowry LaCugna explains in her book, God For Us, the Trinity is “ultimately a practical doctrine with radical consequences for Christian life . . . [it] is the specifically Christian way of speaking about God, [and] what it means to participate in the life of God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit.”

The Mystery of God as Trinity invites us into a relationship, a participatory experience. In Christianity, it is Jesus who teaches us through his ministry of love and healing, to live our interrelatedness with God, and with one another. His teaching leads us to a God whose very essence is structured around relationship. Jesus talked about his connection with the One he called Abba, and then he promised us the Holy Spirit, who would guide us into all truth. This plurality within unity is depicted in our reading from Proverbs this morning, with Wisdom declaring, “when God marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” The playfulness of the language cannot be overemphasized, Wisdom dancing playfully before God, the creator, and sharing her delight with the human race. God is always relating, within God’s self, and beyond God’s self, a love and joy so unimaginable that it cannot be contained. It is sad that long-faced piety, discomfort, and even condemnation of those who experience things in a different way have overwhelmed the sheer joy of this connectedness.

In his Commencement Address for Oberlin College in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “… all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

Living as related beings means that we seek out the voices in our midst that are not heard. It means we work through all of the barriers that seem to divide us, dismantling power systems based on hatred and domination. It means we treat the Earth, not as a reservoir of food and fuel, but as a dynamic and living organism to treasure and nurture. It means we learn to love the complexity within ourselves, having patience with the parts of ourselves that still need conversion. It means we give thanks for having been created as a part of a web of life and love that pours out of God’s own inner web of connectivity and relatedness.

A poem by Korean poet, activist, and former Zen Buddhist monk, Ko Un goes like this:

One day, I thought it was a visitor

One day, I thought it was the master

Over those years

I dreamed of the smoke

Coming from the chimneys

I still do not know who the poem is

Today we are invited to contemplate the visitor, the master, the smoke, the mystery and wonder of God, with all of creation. In the midst of all manner of brokenness, we join the joyful dance of unknowing, with delight. We still do not know who the poem is, but the Spirit of truth will guide us, and all will be revealed in the fullness of time.          Amen

References:

1.Theonion.com, God Quietly Facing Holy Ghost Out of Trinity (February 26, 2003), My adaption

2.John Shelby Spong, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic (HarperOne, 2013)

3.Richard Rohr, The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity (Center for Action and Contemplation).

4.Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1991)

5.Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being (Maryknoll: Orbis Books)

6.Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution: Commencement Address for Oberlin College (Oberlin, 1965)

7.Ko Un, Korean Poet, from webpage: www.koun.co.kr

Pentecost C - May 15, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC 

Pentecost Year C- Sunday, May 15, 2016

Photo credit LeAnn Gannon

“ Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity, and love.” 

-Thomas Merton, New Seeds of  Contemplation (1961)

Not an image we normally associate with Pentecost, but perhaps we should. We are more likely to think of wind and fire and especially, language or the gift of tongues. Indeed the readings appointed for this year lead us to consider the chaos and disunity and misunderstanding that comes from the multiplicity of languages on the earth. For according to the Book of Genesis, that very multiplicity is the curse imposed by God at Babel on mortals who were overreaching their creaturely status.  The events described in the Book of Acts as occurring on this Pentecost, 50 days after Passover/Easter, are explicitly designed to counter that confusion: an undoing, a correction or healing of this failure of communication that is our Babel.  Rather, we hear in Acts the story of people of many nations all speaking in other tongues or alternatively, understanding each other, understanding the speech of those of other languages and accents and  cultures and races and customs. It's a heady picture! And like much of the Book of Acts, Luke's continuation of his Gospel, it is an idealized one which paints over differences and difficulties...at least for another chapter or two.  Then the usual suspects reappear in the life of the church:  misunderstanding, ethnic tensions, quarreling and suspicion along with courage, profound faith, extreme hope and the spreading of the story of  Jesus, admittedly as much through those fleeing persecution as through those sent to the mission fields, as it were.

The events of that first Pentecost are many layered and its meaning has been appropriated in so many different ways in different times and by different groups of Christians.

Some say it is the giving of the Spirit to the Church.  Maybe...though might it not be more accurate to say (as Bp. John V. Taylor does) that it is the giving of the Church to the Spirit as fuel to be burnt up for the life of the world.

Some say it is the birthday of the Church. Maybe...though it seems to me that the Church was there from the moment that someone first answered the invitation of Jesus:  Come, follow me.  And maybe even before.  In any event, please spare me the red helium-filled balloons.

And some say it is all about the gift of speaking in tongues. That's a focus that is at the heart of a now worldwide religious revival that began in the greater Los Angeles area in 1906 with the so-called Pentecostal or Charismatic movement marked by the practice, among others, of speaking in unknown languages which may or may not be interpreted or understood by the speaker or the hearer.  I don't know.  I've never experienced this personally, though there are men in our Order who have and who may still practice it as a private prayer language.

But increasingly I find myself going back to the quote from Thomas Merton with which we began.  Pentecost, more than anything, is for me about that wind that blows at every moment of our lives thousands of seeds of  “spiritual vitality” coming to rest imperceptibly in our minds and hearts.  Pentecost is more than a one-time event. It is an ongoing reality.  Always around us, within us, among us, between us is the action of God's life-giving Spirit calling us, coaching us, birthing us to new life...and that not only in times of quiet and peace but even, and perhaps most characteristically, in and with and through the most difficult and even appalling events of our lives.  And alas, most of the time we miss it.  We are not prepared to receive these seeds, they do not fall on that receptive soil of freedom, spontaneity and love that Merton describes as their natural seed bed.  And so they go unnoticed and uncultivated.

The 20th century English priest and writer Alan Eccleston once wrote: 

“It is not so much the gift of tongues that we now need as the gift of ears, not so much the proclamation of our beliefs as the willingness to listen to the ways in which we ourselves are being addressed, not so much the assertion of our knowledge but the silent admission that we are ready to learn.“

What we need in our day and age, this week, today is not so much the gift of tongues, as astonishing as that might be, but the gift of ears.  An ability to here the sound of the wind of the Spirit blowing where it will, learning to listen in reverent silence at those surprising and uncomfortable places where we can be taught. That would be a real Pentecost.

We need, perhaps also the gift of noses to smell the fragrance, the odor of grace in the middle of the stink of violence and war and exploitation and systemic inequality as well as to catch its scent in all the sweet acts of love and honest affection and concern and respect that mark our lives, large and small.  That too would be a real Pentecost. And the gift of eyes that no longer turn away from the evils that surround us but face them and name them and address them and, with God's help, defeat or transform them. That, too, would be Pentecost.

And perhaps most of all, we need the gift of touch to reach out to those who hurt and,  infinitely more difficult, to allow others to reach into and touch the bruised and vulnerable places within each of us, bringing if not healing, at least fellowship in the loneliness of our own woundedness and pain. That would definitely be a new Pentecost.

“ Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.”

May this more-or-less forgotten feast of Pentecost awaken us to a living awareness of those thousands of winged seeds that moment by moment surround us.  May we receive them in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. And may we become ourselves, each of us, seed bearers of the Spirit. 

And who knows...maybe God will give us all glossolalia, the gift of tongues.  

Don't be surprised.  

God does things like that!

Easter 7 C - May 8, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams, n/OHC 
Easter 7 C- Sunday, May 1, 2016

Photo credit John Beddingfield

And Jesus prayed for his disciples, and said. "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word . . . John 17:20

There is a story that has been passed from generation after generation from the mouth of seniors to the ears of juniors. It is a story that was passed down from South East Africa to the shores of the North Atlantic. It is a story that takes place somewhere in the dunes of the South.

The story begins as a people, who had been mislabeled slaves, where toiling in the hot southern sun. They were working so very hard to pick cotton. There was one young woman and beside her was her small boy, he was about maybe six or seven. The woman had such incredible dexterity that she was able to pick cotton with her right hand and caress the forehead of her child with her left hand. But eventually, exhausted by working so hard in the fields, she collapsed from the weight and the pressure of being—in the words of Dubois—“problem and property.”

Her little boy attempted to wake her very quickly, knowing that if the slave drivers were to see his mother the punishment would be swift and brutal.

The little one tried to shake his mother, and as he was trying to shake her, an old man, that the Africans called Preacher and Prophet, and the slave drivers called Old Devil walked over to the little boy. The little one looked up at the old man and said:

“Is it time?” “Is it time?”

The old man smiled and looked at the boy and said, “Yes!” “ Yes!”The old man bent down and whispered into the ear of the boys mother who was now on the ground and says these words: “ mungu, mungu!”

At that moment the woman got up with such incredible dignity. She stood as a queen and looked down at her son with loving eyes, Grasped his hand and look toward heaven.  

And suddenly they began to fly.

The slave drivers rushed over to the area where she had stopped working and seeing this act of human flight and now completely confused, annoyed and not knowing what to do!

And during the slave drivers confusion, the old man rushed around to all the other Africans and began to tell them, “mungu, mungu!”

When the people herd The Word, they all began to fly. Can you imagine?  The dispossessed flying? Can you imagine the disempowered flying? The diseased flying?

And at that moment the slave drivers grab the old man and said: Bring them back!”

The slave drivers beat the old man, and with blood coming down his cheek, he smiled at them. The slave drivers demanded, “Bring them back now!”  “Bring them back now!” Or we will beat you until there's nothing left of you! The old man replied, “I can’t.”

The slave drivers questioned, “Why so ever not?” The old man replied, “Because the word is already in them and since the word is already in them, it cannot be taken from them.”

You see, the old man had the power of a Swahili word, Mungu, a word that means God.

The word had been placed into the heart of these displaced Africans and now they had reclaimed their dignity and they were flying.

Is this not the job of the Church and the Preacher, the faithful disciple? We are not called to make people shout. We are not called to make people dance. We are not called to entertain people. We are not called to use the people to stroke our own ego!

No, we are called to make sure that the people of God fly! Fly from breakdown to break through.  Fly from hurt to healing. Fly from heartache to wholeness. We are called as a people to ensure that those who have been marginalized have a word in their spirit that allows them to fly.

And the question is: are we a part of a church, a movement, a ministry that causes people to fly? But the even more difficult question for us is who are we in the story, now in this season of our life: Are you one of the slave drivers: with a harden heart resisting being transformed and molded by the Holy Spirit? Are you the little child?  Are you one of the people who have heard the message and reclaimed your dignity? Are you the old Preacher spreading the word?

Story adapted from, The People Could Fly, by Virginia Hamilton

Easter 6 C - May 1, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Roy Parker, OHC
Easter 6 C - Sunday, May 1, 2016


Our Br. Roy read this poem as his meditation on today's gospel (John 14:23-29).
 

The Trinity as per A.Rublev

A Prayer To The God Who Fell From Heaven

By John Shea

If you had stayed

tightfisted in the sky

and watched us thrash

with all the patience of a pipe smoker,

I would pray like a golden bullet

aimed at your heart.

But the story says you cried

and so heavy was the tear

you fell with it to earth

where like a baritone in a bar

it is never time to go home.

So you move among us

twisting every straight line into Picasso,

stealing kisses from pinched lips,

holding our hand in the dark.

So now when I pray

I sit and turn my mind like a television knob

till you are there with your large, open hands

spreading my life before me

like a Sunday tablecloth

and pulling up a chair yourself

for by now

the secret is out.

You are home.