Ash Wednesday, 2010

Shrove Tuesday pancakes
and with real maple syrup—
before lenten fare.

Sometime early last December I began writing haiku poetry, something that I hadn’t done in a long time. I was preparing for a retreat talk and was looking for ideas for an activity that would engage people in the biblical text we were using. Haiku are short poems, no longer than 17 syllables written in three lines of five, seven and five syllables. In their brevity, haiku capture a thought and feeling about a fleeting moment, something that intrigues the poet’s heart. Haiku are wonderful for capturing the essence, the pearls of wisdom that we read in Holy Scripture.

This haiku I wrote as I was thinking about pancakes for supper on Shrove Tuesday and the delight of having real maple syrup, a treat before the simpler lenten fare which begins with Ash Wednesday. You know the saying, “absence makes the heart grow fonder”? Well, fasting from things, a common practice in Lent, is to make the enjoyment of them ever sweeter when you take them up once more.

Shortly after I began writing haiku again I found a book called Haiku – The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines, by Margaret D. McGee [see excerpts here], which I eagerly read. In it was a challenge to write a haiku a day for 100 days. As of today I am at #33 with the haiku on Shrove Tuesday. It is a challenge and a discipline. It puts me in mind of the season of Lent we are approaching and of the various ways people will mark this season.

Some people will mark the season of Lent by giving up things such as chocolate or coffee or wine. The Church generally abstains from using Alleluias during lent. The Rev. Margaret Guenther, Anglican priest, renowned author, speaker and spiritual director, once suggested that people might fast from the media for a while. Imagine giving up television during Lent or the internet. Rather than letting go of things, other people will intentionally take on spiritual practices during Lent such as practising patience, kindness, gentleness, and making donations — what we used to call almsgiving.

Both ways, giving up and taking on, get at the essence of the spiritual reasons behind why we do these things. Any spiritual discipline we take on is to help us put on the mind and heart of Christ in our daily lives in an intentional way. Practising the discipline for 40 days will help make it a habit. Or you might take on something like the 100 day haiku challenge instead. May you have a blessed and holy Lent.

Sr. Elizabeth Ann, SSJD

Christmas Eve at BC House - A Reflection

House of Bread 

Luke 2: 1-20 [ text » ]

“When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem, and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

And so the shepherds came to Bethlehem, to the town whose Hebrew name, Beth-lechem, means “House of Bread.” There was no glorious sight for them to see, no mind-boggling spectacle. No. Hidden away in that House of Bread they saw a baby, a baby less than ordinary, cradled in a poor stable. But, with eyes of faith opened by the word of God made known to them, and with hearts trusting in the God who will redeem his people, they saw, in that baby less than ordinary, the Saviour of the world, come to dwell among them.

And now it us our turn to come to Bethlehem, to come to our Bethlehem, our House of Bread, here, at the Lord’s table. Here again is no glorious sight for us to see, no mind-boggling spectacle. Here is only bread, bread less than ordinary, cradled in our poor hands. But, with eyes of faith opened by the word of God made known to us, and with hearts trusting that God does indeed come and dwell with us, we see, in this bread less than ordinary, the Saviour of the world, come to dwell in us.

Such is God’s love, to give us “heaven in ordinarie,” God the Word-made-flesh made bread for us, to nourish our souls, to inebriate our spirits, to make us alive with God, to build his House of Bread in us, that, as he dwells in us, we might dwell in him. Let us then come to Bethlehem, to God’s House of Bread, and taste and see how gracious the Lord is.

- Fr. Bill Morrison

A Reflection on Christmas Eve, 2009

Still to this day the midnight Christmas Eve service holds a special magic for me. The service has a different feel to it than the earlier ones. Maybe it is because there are fewer people and there seems to be a silent hush over the church. Or that there it seems to be a cold chill in the air with perhaps a dusting of snow outside. Things seem to be clearer, shinier and more beautiful. This time of night seems to really embody that ancient antiphon, for while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half gone, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven.

This is the night that the all powerful word leapt from heaven and came to live among us. Tonight is the night that Mary held that shiny and beautiful baby that came to turn the world upside down, to bring fourth a new way of being, a way of shinier, clearer and beautiful living.

To night is the night that reminds us of our common vocation, our vocation given to us by the birth of this child. To live each day with the awe and wonder that Mary must have felt when she held Jesus in her arms. To bring forth the love, warmth and joy that Joseph must have felt standing beside the Manger. To be willing to share, make room and welcome the stranger as the animals did in the stable. To be willing to follow our own stars and be able to see and hear with fresh eyes and hearts like the shepherds who followed the star and saw the greatest gift of all.

Sr. Amy, SSJD

Lenten Musings: The Fourth Sunday in Lent, 2009

Readings of the day

• Numbers 21.4-9 - text »
• Ephesians 2.4-10 - text »
• John 3.14-21 - text »

Today’s gospel contains perhaps the most famous of all verses in the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (v. 16). In the Methodist Sunday school in which I grew up, we used to memorize scripture verses, and I’m sure that this was the very first one I learned.

In my young adulthood I left the church and went on pilgrimage looking for God. During that time, John 3.16 was the one verse I always remembered and could quote exactly. It crept in and out of my conscious mind during those somewhat arid years when my intellectual life was blossoming and my spiritual life was languishing.

During that time, I also remember vividly the musical setting of “God so loved the world” from Stainer’s Crucifixion, which our Methodist choir sang every year on Good Friday. I could remember almost exactly the style in which we were taught to sing it. I knew all the crescendos and decrescendos, the changes in tempo, the attention to the words. I could sing the whole thing for you right now, even though I haven’t heard Stainer’s music in years. It haunted me, it pulled at my heartstrings. God so loved the world – God loved the world so much – it was like an unconscious mantra that kept me connected at some subliminal level, to the Good News I had grown up with.

But I didn’t understand it. Why would God’s love for us cause God to send his son to die?

I found an answer to that question not through studying theology but through reading poetry – especially that of George Herbert, the 17th century Angican priest and poet. In poems like “Love bade me welcome,” Herbert’s passionate love for God touched me deeply, and I began to grasp the depth of that divine love – a love which would go so far as to die for the world.

Another experience affected me deeply while I was still a seeker. As a young woman living in Minneapolis, I joined the choir of St. Mark’s Cathedral, where the choirmaster believed passionately that the function of music and liturgy was to lead people to God. It was hard not to get hooked. And one Sunday, I heard something quite remarkable in a sermon. The preacher said that seekers of God outside the church were like people who try to appreciate stained glass art from the back side. One can see the beauty of stained glass, he said, only from inside the church, when the light is streaming through it. Likewise, one can understand the church only by being welcomed into the fellowship of the body of Christ.

That was the point of conversion for me – conversion in terms of turning around. I started looking for the stained glass from inside. And I began to see that the central message of the Christian faith is about love and passion – the love of God and the passion of Christ, yes – but it is also about the love and passion of our response to that good news.

All through scripture we see examples of this generosity of God, in response to human sin. Time after time, human beings wander away from God, and God intervenes. One example is mentioned at the beginning of the gospel for the fourth Sunday in Lent:

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

The reference is to the incident from the book of Numbers when the Israelites get sick of eating manna in the desert, and are ready to go back to Egypt. God sends poisonous snakes to punish them for their complaining, and then instructs Moses to make an antidote to the poison – a bronze snake on a pole. When the Israelites look on the bronze snake, they are healed. Now this practice is condemned elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures as idolatry. Here, however, it can be seen as a kind of homeopathic medicine, where the disease is cured by the very thing that caused the illness. With a difference, however. The serpents, who crawled on the ground, were the punishment, the result of Israel’s turning away from God. The cure was to look up rather than down to the ground, to see the bronze serpent as a sign of God’s healing – and so they found life in the very source of death.

The Greek word translated “lifted up” means both to physically raise, and also to exalt, reminding us that Jesus’ crucifixion is also the climax of his earthly kingship. The passage from Ephesians underlines this double meaning when it refers to us being raised with Jesus.

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him.

In comparing Jesus to this image of a bronze serpent, John also underlines his absolute conviction that Jesus is in fact God, whose self-giving love led to the crucifixion and beyond it to the resurrection and ascension – the final “lifting up.” As in the homeopathic principle, Jesus’ death destroyed death forever.

So the reason for Jesus’ passion and death is to bring us to life and to health. And what is the motive? Why does God go to all this pain and trouble? The motive is, of course, love: “God so loved the world . . .” It is pure grace, pure gift, as Paul tells us. God created the world in love; the risen Christ among us calls each of us into a relationship of love, with each other and especially with God; and in that love Christ sends us into the world as his body, to minister to his brothers and sisters – our brothers and sisters.

But the tragedy is that Christ’s body, his church, sometimes acts as if God sent the son to the church and not to the world. And then we, the church, forget that we are saved by the pure grace of God, the pure gift of God’s self-giving love in the passion of Christ. When that happens, the church (that is, we) can undermine the pure gift of God’s love.

We try to set boundaries, to judge, and to insist that people fulfill our expectations and agree with our theology and our standards in order to be welcomed into the body of Christ. And we expend a lot more energy on dealing with our internal conflicts than we do on the mission which God calls us to on behalf of the world.

But Paul says, “by grace you are saved.” Not by meeting the standards of a particular church or group within the church, but by accepting the saving love of Christ.

And how do we accept it? By experiencing, it of course, and for most people, the strongest experience of Christ’s love is mediated through those people he calls his body. If people in the world do not find the love of God in the friendship and acceptance and affirmation and support of those in the church, where are they going to experience that love? I found it in a choir, and in people doing liturgy together in a way that said to me, we know the love of God and want to share it. Others find it in other ways in the church.

And once we have found it, we accept our baptismal mission: to be the body of Christ, to be Christ in the world.

So instead of succumbing to the temptation to think that God sent his only son for the sake of the church, we might paraphrase John 3.16-17 this way: “God so loved the world that he sent the church into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world, through his body, might be saved.” God loved the world so much that he sent you and you and you and me to be Christ’s body, to bring that amazing grace of God’s free love to the world God created.
May God bless each of you as you journey through Lent toward Easter. May God give you the grace to share the suffering of his world that you might also be an instrument of resurrection life in his world

Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, 22 March, 2009
Sr. Constance Joanna, SSJD

Sisterhood of St. John the Divine
A religious community within the Anglican Church of Canada
www.ssjd.ca

Lenten Musings: The Third Sunday in Lent, 2009

Wind blows in billows
around vast thrones
of limestone,
etching patterns
into a surface that
seems impervious,
impenetrable;
yet, over eons
hollows form, then caves and
arches,
and the rock echoes
in silence.

Rain falls in ribbons
upon vast thrones
of limestone,
infiltrating
infinitesimal
pores between
molecules of the
rock, emerges
years and yards
below
and the rock weeps
in loveliness.

 

Spirit pours invisible
around vast thrones
of limestone,
emanating
from bare essence
of earth, skeletal
universe set out for those
with inner eyes to see
what God has wrought in
desert,
and the rock shouts
in exultation.

A poem by Sr. Sue, SSJD

The Third Sunday in Lent - 15 March, 2009

Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, Toronto - website »