Ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est

Where there is charity and love, God is there.

We were married on April 26, 2014 at All Saints Pasadena. Our procession was led by the dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit and peace. Later, after The Rev. Susan Russell accepted our declarations of consent and our rector, The Rev. Ed Bacon, accepted our solemn vows, we were blessed.

Blessed by the church, yes. But also and as importantly, we were blessed by the cloud of witnesses who were present around us, who enfolded us in their love, support, and encouragement. In the congregation were family, friends, and even more people of the cloth, including friends Rev. Wilma Jakobsen and Prof. H Adam Ackley. We were raised high by the Holy Spirit to unite our flames and create more Light to shine around us.

I didn't read Susan's blog post This is the Day the Lord Has Made until the next day. The next day happened to also be the day we held a celebration memorial for Stephen's brother -- my brother-in-law who passed on two weeks exactly before the wedding day. I read her blog that morning and it set my wheels turning.

We celebrate God and each other when love each other, when we give of ourselves. Our church, our friends, and our families gave their blessing to us. On our knees at the altar, we felt the gift of life and strength on our shoulders, in our hands, on our head. When we celebrated Tim's life, we accepted his gift of love, sensitivity, and personal commitment to honesty.

Giving and loving. What a blessing our world is when the Holy Spirit shines bright in all God's children. It makes no sense to restrict this to the few. Grace is there for us and we can't decide who gets it and who doesn't. We can only love. And give.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

Meander and Water Deep

One of my spiritual tools of choice is the labyrinth. Perhaps it's because sitting still has never come easy for me. No doubt, the nuns of my earliest years in elementary school would have agreed. I'm just too fidgety to be physically stationary. To this day, I doodle, tap my fingers, shake my leg, rock back and forth, and play background music in my head to whomever is speaking.

The labyrinth offers an opportunity to walk and pray at the same time. Like my prayer and meditation, I'm urged forward, accepting the twists and turns as I journey forth. Sometimes, I find myself surprised that I've finished my walk and go right back into the labyrinth. Prayer shouldn't have a timer on it, nor should it have an expected outcome. The labyrinth isn't about setting rules on what to think. It just offers in a way bumper guards so that you're guided while you walk, keeping you free to wander without worrying whether you'll fall off an abyss.

The labyrinth is liturgy in motion.

It's been a blessing that All Saints Pasadena has offered the labyrinth every weekday throughout Lent for the past several years. The community gets to walk and pray alone or together. You can even listen to the Taizé service, organ practice, or choir rehearsals while you take your inner journey. And you keep moving.

And while you move in space, you move in your mind. And while you move, you water deep the empty spaces that have been parched and thirsty. A lovely article "The Induced Meandering of the Lenten Season" describes how nature and well-designed landscaping can water gardens when rain comes infrequently. Since moving to Southern California several decades ago, I've learned that the ground here has practically no capacity to absorb water quickly. Despite this, the rain, when it appears, doesn't come down lightly here. It's sunny most of the year or it pours and creates mudslides.

Soil absorbs water because it has spaces in between rocks, dirt particles, roots, and other materials. These gaps can collect the water, if given enough time. Downpours don't allow that, nor do floods. But a river stream has many obstacles that slow water down: rocks, boulders, trees, twists, turns. Nature in a sense creates a way so that water can slow down enough to trickle into those spaces.

Like the labyrinth and prayer.

We slow down, pause, turn every few steps while walking the labyrinth. We breathe in, breathe out to a rhythm that isn't musically consistent, but forces us to accept the winding ways. In doing so, we have an opportunity to find those parched spaces inside and fill them with life-giving water, soothing the thirst, baptizing the recesses with a life made new. A Lent of slow meandering is a Lent of slowly filling.

Let all who are thirsty come. Let all who wish receive the water of life freely. Come.

Remember that you are dust

The phrase I used as I made a sooty cross on dozens of foreheads this morning was "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It's the phrase I'm supposed to use, but I do wish I could change it. I'd rather just say "Remember that you are dust." Full stop. Period. No more.

No need to say "and to dust you shall return." We already are dust. We never left it. One can't return to a condition which they've never left. We still are dust.

But dust, dirt, clay is us through and through. Adam means "earth" or "ground". We come from that ground from the very first book of our Bible. Like clay, we can be molded and shaped in different ways, different forms. That's the diversity that we are assured. God from the first very people made sure we were not clones of each other. We are all different and thrive because of that diversity.

I find it surprising that many people find Lent "a downer". What chorister hasn't lamented "I miss the Alleluias at this time of year"? I admit, the preponderance of minor keys in Western music during Lent can be a maddening, but the season itself can be amazingly fresh.

Like the dirt we come from, Lent should be a fertile bed where we grow new ideas, become strong anew, and rise towards the sun with color. We should be taking the lessons that we learn during this time of
introspection and build a better life, a giving life, a shared bounty as we are charged in the Gospels.

It was the first time I actually placed dust on anyone's forehead in the sign of the cross. I knew it was messy, but had no idea how much dust was going to get splattered around. I even got some bonus ashes on some noses and low hanging bangs and felt awkwardness from the mess. It got on my vestments and I, for a moment, was embarrassed and self-conscious.

Thank goodness.

When I realized that I had become self-conscious during the service, it dawned on me that this was why I was here, on Ash Wednesday, serving at the Eucharist. We are dust and dust is messy. Life isn't meant to be easy and comfortable. We'll always be challenged as mortals to face a world that isn't under our control. Control, like cleanliness, is an illusion. We can't dive deep into Lent without understanding that we aren't in control.

I'll be walking around all day with a sign of this mess, this dust, that I am. And my journey to Easter, though just beginning, will certainly have other mistakes and errors. But from those times of dirt and mess, insights arise. Justice grows. And life abundant springs forth with joy and caring.

We are blessed because we are dust and it's something worth remembering.

Advent: A Season of Renewing or a Season of Recalculating

Advent offers us a season of both hopeful waiting and penitential renewal. We shop, share, celebrate, and we also take stock of where we've been this past year and what we resolve to do during the next year.

Scholar, author, and theologian Marcus Borg has recently blogged about the unfortunate emphasis on that penitence, that we should instead be focusing on the coming joy over the enduring sin. It caused me to nod in some agreement, but I couldn't get totally comfortable with his suggestion. Part of the Advent season to me is about retrospection, with a review of the past year, with prayers of a better year. It's hard to hope for future joy, justice, and peace without grasping all that isn't joyful, just, and peaceful today.

Then, a recent sermon by All Saints Pasadena priest Reverend +Janine Schenone was posted on her blog. It gave me something to hang my hat on, a way to see Advent in a way that's more comfortable with both the current way of looking at it and Borg's proposed viewpoint.

For penitence to me -- Advent, Lent, or otherwise --  isn't so much about guilt and sin as an opportunity for renewal. I gave up guilt decades ago during one Lent and have generally been good at recognizing and ducking it ever since. Guilt is backwards-focused. Renewal is backwards-informed and future-focused.

Let me be the first person in the room to say that I actually don't find the word "renewal" satisfying. It's awfully tough to make something new once again. Have you ever bought a refurbished car or eBay item? Not exactly accurate if they were trying to make it "new" once more. A renewal subscription isn't entirely accurate either. I want them to "extend" my subscription, recognizing my commitment to the service or product - for good points and bad - worthy of sticking with it for more time. I want my faith, like my subscriptions, to be extended with commitment, not just renewed.

Maybe I'm picky about the term, maybe I'm just a word connoisseur. In any case, renewal leaves me unsatisfied when talking about penitential seasons.

So instead, to a techie like myself, it seems more fitting to think of Advent as a time to recalculate like a GPS or phone app giving directions. I know where I am, and it's not where I want to be; I know that I should be in a different place. Recalculate that GPS, and we find our journey making a little more sense. Recalculating rather than renewing guides me away from the problems and that I've found myself in and towards my desired destinations, the places I want to go.

Reverend Schenone views Advent as:

...an opportunity to examine our relationships with others and with God–a time to ask, “Can we start over?” Advent doesn't require us to bathe ourselves in guilt. It doesn't require us to eliminate all the sin or bad things in our lives. That just isn't possible. Even Jesus did not eliminate all the evil in the world or heal all of the sick during his years of ministry. But while we are waiting for the birth of this Prince of Peace, we can accept the responsibility to be peacemakers–to be sources of reconciliation, even if in very small ways, in our lives.

We also can accept responsibility for our relationship with God. A sense of awe and wonder and humility around the coming appearance of the Infant Jesus does not require us to fear the judgment of an angry God. In response to those who oppose the idea of Advent as a season of penitence, David Bartlett writes about Advent, “Perhaps the church can give up judgment, but we cannot give up responsibility."

This works for me. For example, in my previous post "Disposable Me - an Advent Reflection" about the older gentleman on the jet, I cannot correct all suffering and I shouldn't feel guilty about everything that I see around me. But I can accept responsibility for my initial thoughts and reactions, for actions and inactions, for focusing on my wants and needs reflexively, without consideration of others. I'm blessed with a fiance who is astonishingly gifted in seeing the world from other people's eyes. A season of penitence isn't merely renewing myself, then, so much as recalculating where I want to be and where I want to go. I want the freedom to be the person I was meant to be.

So our relationship with others and our relationship with God involves not making things new, at least to me. I want to learn from my mistakes and be guided by them. I don't want to repeat my errors. Instead, I want to recalculate and go from there. As Reverend Schenone said, "We can start over with God."

May the meditations of my heart, with the inspiration of the saints who guide me, grow ever more aligned with God this Advent season. I pray that our gracious God moves me to the place where I want to be, to blossom from the person that I was and am into the life-sharing spirit that I am intended to be.

Disposable Me - an Advent reflection

I posted an article on Facebook yesterday about an incident on a jet. It's a little story, but it has affected my Advent meditations.

It was my last flight of the year, which is meaningful since I travel 100,000-150,000 miles every year. This year was remarkably easy, as I only visited three continents, in contrast to six as I have in the past several years. Most of the travel is work, with some of it for growth and vacation.

I mentioned that on this flight, a very old man who didn't speak English was delaying that last flight of my year. He wouldn't sit down and the flight attendants could not lock the door with his wandering. He was dressed ethnically, looked confused and was likely mentally distant and confused. I had seen him taken in a wheelchair to the jet. I was in the third row of this American Airlines flight, so I saw all the interactions with the crew. His caregiver, possibly a friend or grandson, was trying to explain what he needed to do, but he was resistant and confused.

His behavior was angering people who were in a rush to make connecting flights. Quite a number were connecting in Los Angeles to continue to Hawaii for vacations. A few were band members who might have had a gig to attend. I saw soldiers who probably wanted to see their families. And I was tired, eager to enjoy the Advent season at home and my church, All Saints Pasadena.

Sadness overcame me because his dementia was palpable and people didn't seem to notice. He was in the way of our immediate wants. I felt guilty because until I saw his age and his condition, I just wanted him to sit down and listen to the flight attendants. But when I did see, a light sparked in me and I realized that what I wanted wasn't him to sit down.

What I wanted was travel mercies for all on the plane but, more especially, mercy on those like this man who lived a full life but needed just a little more time.

After about 15 minutes of delay, he just was escorted off the plane by his companion. He was disposable. My heart broke for him and the family. He looked dapper with a nice suit and hat, but his eyes were vacant and sad.

I knew the flight attendants had to be firm, but they were empathetic and uncomfortable. His companion was distressed. I felt bad they got off the flight instead of heading on to see family and friends. I prayed that it might be best thing to occur, given his present condition. We left after another 15 minutes delay, as the airline had to take his bags out of checked luggage as required for security.

Which brings to to my reflection on the challenges of so many families, especially during the dark times of winter, in the bleak winter, when songs of cheer often cause melancholy because the world feels broken and unforgiving.

I could not help but imagine that it was me with Mang (phonetically how my siblings and I called our paternal grandmother) struggling in her decline. That personal story is why my research at the University of Southern California was in Alzheimer's disease. It's also why I left the field because I get profoundly tearful by it from an existential level.

Life is full of sadness, challenges, and changes of directions. People who were once mighty and powerful in spirit, mind, and body can be laid low by the punishment of time. I find the difficulties of dementia to be very provocative: who are we really? What is our soul doing when our mind isn't playing kindly? Where's the Holy Spirit when we begin walking down these paths?

I wonder about this older gentleman, my new friend in spirit. Where is he now? Is he scared? Does he know he's loved?

Advent as a season of waiting and repentance is not about waiting for death or choosing something that will fix things for us. It's not about wondering if Santa will make things right with the perfect gift, if I pray just right to Jesus. 

This little story on the jet from Chicago is making me think that, during Advent, we are waiting hopefully for those who around us, for those we touch and influence, and not for ourselves. It's making me reflect on a penitence of living better and not living for the fleeting moment, of loving better and not loving for the temporary smile. We light the candle of hope to bring justice and mercy to all, even if we don't know them personally. I didn't know this man, but I knew a lot about his life. I pray that my Christmas will be all the richer from what he taught me.