Seventh Sunday of Easter- Year A- May 28, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Seventh Sunday of Easter– Sunday May 28, 2017

Br.  Robert Sevensky

“Ascensiontide is the most liminal time of the church year. Here you learn the skill of loving God and uniting in community at a time of ambiguity and uncertainty and waiting.” 

So says our Associate and dear friend Suzanne Guthrie on her blog site, At the Edge of the Enclosure

“Ascensiontide is the most liminal time of the church year.” 

And it does seem as if, on so many levels, we are liminal, which is to say, dwelling on the threshold, living in the in between.  

I've come to believe that this is always the case for us, since we mortals all live between birth and death and (we hope) new birth, resurrection, new life. Every single one of us. But within this great in-between, there are other, more focused periods of waiting, of uncertainty, of unknowing. And these days between the Ascension of our Lord that we celebrated this past Thursday and the anticipation of Pentecost next Sunday with its pledge and promise of Holy Spirit fire and transformation perfectly express that universal spiritual and deeply human experience of waiting, with all its attendant ambiguity and incertitude and hope.

On Thursday we heard the Gospel of St. Luke describe the Ascension of our Lord. He concluded with these words:  “And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”(Luke 24:53) It all sounds so triumphant, so settled, so reassuring, doesn't it?

But today we hear another version of the story from the Book of Acts, a passage which overlaps with what we heard on Thursday. The Book of Acts is commonly assumed by both faithful and scholars alike to be written by Luke, the author of the Gospel that bears his name.  But now he is writing a few years later.  And I'm struck by the rather different picture he offers of what happens after our Lord was drawn from the sight and physical presence of his friends and family and followers.  Luke says here, “Then they returned to Jerusalem from the Mount called  Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day's journey away.  When they entered the city, they (the Apostles) went to the room upstairs where they were staying.  All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”

To my ears at least, this sounds a lot less triumphant and certain and reassuring than the Gospel description, and much more tentative, uncertain and...well, liminal, which is to say, in between, here and not yet, known and unknown, yes and no...kind of like life, your life and mine. The thing is, these early friends and followers of Jesus knew the Lord and his promises, but they did not know quite what to expect or when to expect it.  So what do they do?  They hang out together day after day in what sounds like the same, safe upper room where Jesus celebrated his final dinner with his friends, until one day it explodes on them that they and the world have been set on fire: Fire for compassion. Fire for peace. Fire for love. Fire for holiness of life. Fire for conversion and evangelization and a whole New Life in a world turned upside down.  

The Archbishop of Canterbury has for the past two years invited people to join with him and tens of thousands of Christians in prayer during these nine days between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost Sunday, the first and model novena.  He says, “These nine days are a dedicated time to prayerfully wait in the 'in between' time from Ascension to Pentecost.”

He adds: “In it we choose to align ourselves with the love of God, so that those around us may come to know more of Him. May our waiting and our praying make us more open to receiving the Holy Spirit and more capable of showing the grace of God in all that we are and do.”

The suggested themes vary each day:

Between Seeking and Finding
Between Generations
Between Bystander and Game-Changer
Between Chaos and Courage
Between Breaths
Between Sunset and Sunrise
Between Despair and Thanksgiving

But they underscore the deeper truth that all of us stand in between and on the threshold: between dream and reality, between the test and the results, between jobs or boyfriends/girlfriends; between sickness and health, youth and old age;  between fidelity and betrayal; between faith and faithlessness. It's where we live. It's where God lives. 

As many of you know, in two weeks we will have a new Superior in our Order, and my title and my job and role will change. And so I find myself in between, a classic lame duck, having precious little time to accomplish anything new.  And, as is often the case with men or women who retire from one job or role, I find myself rather uncertain of what exactly I will do and, even scarier, who exactly I will be.  I think that just goes with the turf. 

And yet I am also finding a joy and consolation in this unknowing and uncertainty.  I seem to be developing hints of a perspective that sees the bigger picture, realizing that one can only do so much.  It is in truth in God's hands—it always has been—though I shall continue to do what I can.  Being in between, even in the most difficult and anguishing situations, forces us to see that, try as we might—and we must try—we are not God.  God alone is God!  And God's presence is always there, bidden or unbidden, perceived or not, working in us and through us and around us in what sometimes seem like impossible situations.  

Situations perhaps like that of the Apostles who had their friend and master and Lord taken from their sight. Like feeling abandoned. Like feeling like an orphan. Like feeling lost. 

I will not leave you orphaned, Jesus promises. I will not leave you comfortless. Wait. Wait.  I'm not finished with you yet.   You will receive power, dynamis, from on high. And you will be my witnesses. 

Meanwhile, as we wait, we would do well to heed the advice the First Letter of Peter offers: “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves. Keep alert.”   

Alert, non-anxious disciples. Not a bad job description, not bad advice for this in between time.  Or for any time.

Amen.

Ascension Day- May 25, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Ascension Day -  Thursday, May 25, 2017

Br. Randy Greve, OHC

It weighs 20 pounds, has 800 pages, is 4 inches think and 11 inches wide by 16 inches tall.  I first encountered it at Mt. Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls when I was there for the Haden Spiritual Direction program.  It lives in the common guest space and during each of the four trips I made there for the program I would look through a few more pages.  I nicknamed it “the pamphlet”.  The actual name of the book is Ars Sacra, sacred art, (the Latin title gives it a little more weight – as if it needed it).  It is more a coffee table than a coffee table book (and is only $85.15 on Amazon).

An ambitious piece of art in itself which sets out to be a photographic record of Christian art all of its forms - icons, buildings, stained glass, and nearly every other way humans have engaged matter to evoke and represent the divine from late antiquity to the mid twentieth century.  Reviews contain words like gorgeous, extraordinary, and mind-blowing and I would concur.  It is humbling to hold in one’s hand, in one place, almost 2000 years of human creativity.  With each turn of a page I wondered what was in the mind of the Byzantine iconographer or the Gothic stonemason or Baroque painter.  Was the creation the search for the transcendent or the record of having already seen heaven?
 
Ascension highlights the transition of Jesus’ particular presence in our physical world to the all-encompassing, omnipresent Jesus mediated through the Holy Spirit in a community of word and sacrament.  But within a few decades Christians are erecting buildings to “house” Jesus, to re-particularize him.  They get more elaborate and more expensive and as beautiful and inspiring as they are, I am not altogether at ease with these human creations. I don’t know how to reconcile the dissonance between proclaiming the Holy Spirit let loose in the world – the entire world – and making certain places and objects “sacred”.  I live in this world yet believe in and look for and hope for the unseen and eternal which we call heaven. Does Ars Sacra elevate my humanity or trivialize it?  Inspire me to want to escape or distract me from the work that needs to be done here and now?

The meaning of the Ascension begins in the incarnation itself.  Jesus takes on, redeems, and elevates our humanity in the incarnation, thus calling our physical and material lives good as God’s idea and gift.  The one who called us to consider the birds and flowers, who told parables about the earth and plants and trees and harvests, the one who ate and drank his way through the gospels certainly delights in the natural, physical world.

Jesus is our model for how to be authentically human in our relationship to the world – to enjoy it, be inspired by it, learn from it, but not to seek to manipulate, possess, or distort it for our own selfish agendas.  Jesus’ way of being human is to be the artist of your life, and have the joy, anger, and sorrow of life with openness, wonder, and gratitude. The earth is a beautiful gift, our lives are precious treasures, but at the same time the earth is groaning, we are sighing and dying, and so our hope is planted in beauty and treasure that is beyond what we can see and touch.

Two phrases from the readings illuminate the nature of our human experience.  In Acts, the two men in white robes say to the astonished apostles who have just witnessed the Ascension, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”  Their conversion (and ours) is to stop looking for Jesus and to start living the presence of Jesus.  Meaning is not “up there”, out of our grasp, but among us and in us.  Spiritual growth does not happen by stretching across what we imagine is the chasm of distance between this world and heaven, but by fully living human life in the here and now with expectant presence.

In the gospel reading, the response of the apostles after the Ascension states that “they were continually in the temple blessing God.”  They move off the mountain and look around.  They go to the place that most dramatically stands for God on earth, the temple, and in that place where heaven touches earth in a particular way, they receive the power of their vocations and let be in them God’s gift of life as they wait for the day of Pentecost.This conversion is what the monastic life is all about for us and its gift to the world.  The great breakthrough of St. Benedict needs to be heard today more than ever.

The Rule of St Benedict dismantles and rejects the artificial and dangerous division of sacred and secular.  He describes a way to particularize the sacred space or object as a way to relate to a holy world and then to see the world differently, not to create two different worlds.  Places and objects consecrated and set aside for liturgical use are meant to remind us of the sacredness of all the earth, all life, not to partition away some and call the rest merely ordinary.  The church, the art, the chalices, the sacrament is not an alternative reality but the unveiling and deepening of life as it actually is.  Authentic life in the spirit does not camp on the esoteric and disembodied mountain top, but is mediated and revealed in the sacred ordinary.

For Benedict, there is no such thing as one’s “spiritual life”, there is life.  And that includes the tedious, irritating, and boring bits as well as those moments and places which are more overtly transcendent.  Our hope is in this body’s, this world’s regeneration, its completion, with the flesh and blood, scarred, glorious, reigning Christ at the center where he is even now.

The mystery which is the Ascension has something to do with the beauty of Christ’s continuing incarnate existence. Books like Ars Sacra and the art that it shows are the hints and glimpses, the foreshadowings and foretastes of the heaven which intersects into our own world even as this art makes our own world more of the beautiful gift it can be. Because we are works of art longing to create even as we are created, the art of our lives is integral to our conversion.  In the ink, paint, earth, photograph, music, prayer, poetry – or whatever form, we are ars sacra. Amen.

Fifth Sunday of Easter - Year A- May 14, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev'd Dr. Deborah Meister
Fifth Sunday of Easter - Sunday, May 14, 2017

The Rev'd Dr. Deborah Meister

And Saul consented to his stoning. (Acts 8:1)

A few years ago, I woke one morning with the conviction that I needed to travel to Spain to hike the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim road that leads from various points in Europe to Santiago de Compostela, the legendary final resting place of the apostle James, son of Zebedee, or James the Greater.

 

I had done no research on the Camino, had no previous experience with long-distance hiking, and didn’t even own gear; nevertheless, I found myself, four weeks later, in the ancient town of St. Jean Pied-de-Port, placing my foot upon a road made holy by the prayers of strangers. As I took those first steps, I had two major concerns: that as a small woman traveling alone, I could be robbed or assaulted, and that I would get lost. Anyone who knows me knows that getting lost was a very likely outcome.

As I came to the first fork in the road, I was surprised to see that someone had painted a yellow arrow pointing the pilgrims on. I followed it until I came to another, then another. All that day, whenever the road branched, there was an arrow, placed there by someone whose face I would never see. But it wasn’t until the second day that the whole truth dawned on me, because the arrows continued to appear: someone — most likely a group of someones — had gone all through Spain with buckets of yellow paint, marking a path for pilgrims to follow, so that, every time we could get lost, we would find the traces of someone’s love.When Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” I think he means he is that kind of way: a way that is marked by acts of love. 

Certainly, those kinds of arrows have been in short supply this week, in which our news cycle has been dominated not by arrows, but by fingers, all pointing at one another. I would like to join in, but there’s this: last year, I fired an employee, and her friends immediately started a social media storm that lasted for months. And so, I know what it feels like to be stoned, and I can’t do it to someone else. But even outside the headlines, this dynamic is becoming prevalent in our culture. What does it say about us that we are so eager to cast stones at one another?

Perhaps my most vivid mental image a stoning comes from the great theologian Monty Python, who imagined ancient Israel as a place where stonings were a form of public entertainment, much as hangings used to be in the early days of our nation. In their satirical take, men rushed to participate, stopping briefly to buy packets of rocks from the stone vendors, while women, who were prohibited, crept in their turn to beard vendors, from whom they could purchase artificial facial hair that would allow them to slip in undetected. It made for a great scene — all those women speaking in their lowest voices — but let’s think about that for a moment: what allowed them to participate in a stoning was concealing their own identity. I would say, not only from others, but from also from themselves.

When I look at my life, the arrows don’t all point in one direction, and they are not all marks of love. My guess is, yours are not either. And if I’m very honest, the rocks and suspicions and hurtful words I’m tempted to toss at another too often point to what we have in common. I condemn when another embodies what I do not love in myself. I do it, in part, so that others will not guess I am no better than my target. And yet, the very act of lashing out reveals my essential weakness, for what Christ asks from us is not anger and accusation, but love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, and self-control. (Gal 5:22)

Those qualities are the matrix through which we are called to embody Christ. Today’s Gospel gives us one of the ringing pronouncements of our faith, but in words that are deeply problematic in our context: I am the Way, the Truth, the Life. The issue, of course, is exclusivity. We all live in a pluralistic context; most of us have friends who practice other faiths, or none: What are we to do with the definite article, with that pesky the which implies that Christ, and only Christ, gives life?

Perhaps we should take it as an invitation to humility. It’s dangerous to speculate about the mind of our maker, so I’m going out on a limb here, but I am fairly sure it never occurred to Jesus that any follower of his — any true follower — could use these words in an arrogant way, because arrogance is the opposite of the way of Christ. We cannot use these words to uphold our own righteousness, because Jesus came for the unrighteous. We cannot use these words to exclude our neighbor, because Jesus died to include him or her. The minute we begin to jettison the flesh-and-blood people who disagree with us and argue with us and sometimes drive us crazy in favor of an ideal that is spotless, pure, unblemished, we are rejecting the priorities of Christ.

St. John writes, “If a man says he loves God but hates his brother, he is liar: for if he does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen.” (I John 4:20) For many years, I have thought that was the least true statement in Scripture. It’s much easier to love a God we never have to see than it is to love the person who snores and leaves socks under the bed and fails us when it matters. 

But all this year, listening to the strident contempt of pundits and citizens alike, one question has been in my mind: Is there enough love left to save this country? To save our communities? Because this is about love: love of our country cannot be separated from love of our neighbor. And I have been reminded, forcefully, that humility is integral to any relationship. After all, as Cheryl Strayed reminds us, “We all have a dazzling lack of authority about the inner lives of even the people with whom we are most intimate.”[1] Perhaps, when Jesus proclaims that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, one of the things he means is that we are not. None of us has all the truth of this life.

But the definite article can also signal something different: it can be a sign of commitment. If I ask a my friend about her new love interest, she might reply, “He is someone I could marry.” Or, alternatively, “She is the one I have been looking for.” Both are strong statements of love, but only one is decisive.

What matters to us supremely? It’s whatever we call “the most important thing,” or “the most important person in my life.” We say “my wife” or “the cause”: we don’t say “a wife” or “a cause,” unless we’re talking about someone else’s passion. When we push away Jesus’ claim to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, what we are really pushing away is his claim on our lives. We are seeking space to live with diminished urgency, to make Jesus one among many factors in our existence, rather than our foundation.

There is some real honesty in that. Most of us are conflicted about our ultimate loyalty. We have this tug on our heart from Jesus; we have minds shaped in the academic tradition of critical thinking, which gives us tools to tear apart any belief system we wish to analyze; we live under a constant barrage of media presenting the claims of consumerism or of politics or of other competing belief systems. Each of these possesses a fragment of our heart, until it becomes difficult for us to live in a unified way at all. We feel torn between competing goods, until it feels as if our “center cannot hold.”[2] But a path marked with arrows that point in all directions will not lead us home. And if our hands are pointing toward our neighbors’ faults, they will be too busy to open in acts of mercy. 

My friends, there is a Way, and all people of grace follow it. In the words of Annie Dillard, “Sometimes,...dazzlingly or dimly, God shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear these souls, marveling, know it....He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time...(Having seen, people of varying cultures turn -- for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable -- to aiding and serving the afflicted and the poor.)”[3]

These people, whoever they are, converge on the same path: the path of mercy, kindness, and grace. And they do not follow it with half their hearts: they follow it with their lives. So let us lay aside “all malice, all guile and hypocrisy and envy, and all evil speaking,” and long instead for “the pure spiritual milk, so that by it [we] may grow into salvation.” (1 Peter 2:1-2)

Underneath all our finger-pointing, beneath our accusations of self and of one another, lies a striking lack of gentleness. Many years ago, a woman in a class I was leading commented that we do not hesitate to put upon ourselves condemnations that we would be appalled to heap on one another. And so it is worth remembering, here in this holy place, that when Jesus encountered someone in error, his most frequent response was a disconcerting restraint. He did not pretend that all was well, but he called each person into new life, and then said no more. In so doing, he showed us the way of tenderness, the way of forgiveness, the way of conversion. On that way, each error becomes not a sign of shame, but a mark of love, an arrow pointing us further into Christ.

In the words of a prayer of Soren Kierkegaard:
Hold not our sins up against us
But hold us up against our sins
So that the thought of Thee should not remind us
Of what we have committed,
But of what Thou didst forgive.


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[1] Cheryl Strayed, review of Richard Ford, Between Them, New York Times, May 1, 2017.

[2] Yeats, “The Second Coming.”

[3] Annie Dillard, For the Time Being.