Lenten Dilemma

The death of Antonin Scalia last Saturday almost immediately spawned a political argument about his replacement. The clichéd phrase of his not being cold before the vultures arrived is, like many clichés, exactly apt. During their debate the Republican candidates universally agreed that President Obama ought to forego putting a name before ‘their’ Senate for consideration, that doing so would mean a long delay until after the November election at least.

But Scalia’s death also instigated debates between the views that he was after all a human being, worthy of respect and dignity, the “Love your enemy” faction, against the “By their fruits, you shall know them” group who outlined Scalia’s rather nasty history of arguing against civil rights for gay people. Facebook filled with opinions on Scalia’s legacy, and whichever side you join, his life and death present something of a dilemma for Christians entering the season of Lent.

Every service from Ash Wednesday forward points us toward introspection, self-evaluation, repentance for what we have done and left undone, and a determination to lead a more godly life. Left in the spiritual realm and the sacred spaces of church, all of those activities move relatively smoothly, leaving us with an air of sanctity, of having communed not only with our own souls, but with God whose direction we prayed for all the while.

It’s outside the church walls that things sometimes unravel, and we’ve been through this before with bishops (not the current one) of this diocese whose legacy, like Scalia’s, is apt to lead us toward a deep-seated hatred for all they did to us or failed to do for us. Such feelings move us away from what’s called a Holy Lent, identified by the search for righteousness and forgiveness. Those emotions bring up the question of how much we are to forgive (Jesus had a lot to say about this amount), and how much we can forget about the hurtful slings and deadly arrows aimed at us.

No, we cannot ever forget. Doing so ushers in the possibility of the return of those days of repression and marginalization. To not remember past abuse is to allow its repetition. Forgetting breeds complacency and the smug notion that nothing like the past could ever happen again. “Tis a bright day that brings forth the adder, and that craves wary walking,” Shakespeare tells us. Vigilance depends on memory, of a vivid recollection of the past and a resolve never to let bigotry rise to destroy the rights we have wrested from the benighted beliefs held by the likes of Antonin Scalia.

Forgiveness is nevertheless more than possible; it’s required. In the quid pro quo of asking and receiving forgiveness, we have no choice if we profess to be Christians. It’s a hard thing to do sometimes, forgiving people like Scalia who could have championed gay rights in his long career. But doing so makes us emerge much stronger in faith from the refiner’s fire, better tempered like fine steel for the next time we must forgive until forgiveness becomes automatic, and doesn’t require us to decide whether the other person is worthy of our forgiveness. Forgiving humbles us and ennobles us at the same time. It is the essence of love that endures all things and forgives all things.

So we may send Justice Scalia to God with our forgiveness with the sure and certain knowledge of God’s mercy. For us to do less within the covenant of our baptism would be a betrayal and most certainly would interfere with our symbolic journey toward Jerusalem this Lenten season.

Robert Heylmun
February 15, 2016

In the Bleak Midwinter

Robert Heylmun shares this essay from 2006.

 It isn’t mid-winter actually. In fact winter only began yesterday but already the nation is up to its uh… self in snow or rain water or fog or a combination of these. Even here in San Diego we awoke to leaden skies and rain in parts of the county and it has to be said that rain in San Diego is nearly as dangerous as black ice can be in say, Chicago. San Diegans are so unused to rainy freeways that they believe the best tactic is to ignore the weather and drive as if it didn’t exist. One overturned camper this morning on one of the approaches to Interstate 5, so far.

The Christmas carol “In the Bleak Mid-winter”, words by Cristina Rossetti, music by Gustav Holst, romanticizes the season that leads to Christmas. It’s a beautiful tune accompanying a lovely poem, not all that well known perhaps, but welcome and warming nevertheless. That’s a lot to say for Holst in particular, I think, since some of his music (most often heard was something from “The Planets”) was once used merely to announce newscasts and has now generally fallen into the ignominious graveyard of discarded and rarely heard musical works. But this tune of his survives well, preserved in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982, and resurrected at Christmas.

We got a real taste of bleak mid-winter last Sunday at St. Paul’s Cathedral when a fire was reported burning in the basement during the morning Eucharist. We were directed to leave the church as quietly and quickly as possible, and since we didn’t see any smoke which might have panicked the congregation, all 300 or so of us got out right away. Eucharist was distributed outside to those who wanted it. We learned later that the fire was intentionally set in a waste basket. I think that news more than the fire itself made us feel very bleak indeed.

St. Paul’s Cathedral sits beside Balboa Park in the center of the city and because the park attracts a wide variety of people who make it their home, the church has born the brunt of some of the more disturbed among the park dwellers. Once some years ago, a crazy person hurled a brick through one of the stained glass windows. No particular reason except that the church was there. Well, no particular reason that anyone could easily get to, I suppose.

It cannot be denied that the Church (note the capital) represents some very negative things to some very disgruntled people, especially during this time of the year. The Episcopal Church in particular often symbolizes wealth and privilege to the down and out, and a building like St. Paul’s becomes a presence that contrasts those perceived differences in social and economic status. This perception is, of course, mistaken. A quick look at the cathedral’s budget and income would reveal how it always is in need of funds, has very little beyond its immediate income, and is probably no richer than anyone else passing by.

As distressing as the fire was on Sunday morning, things went on with the kind of dignity and certainty that describes the attitude of the congregation of St. Paul’s. We left puzzled naturally, but we left knowing that all would be well. That evening when I returned for Lessons and Carols, the church building was dark and I was handed a candle as I went in. The fire had somehow made the electrical system unsafe and we would have this service in the comparative dark. No organ, no lights except for candles and a few small battery lights for the musicians. In we went, found our seats, and the service began. “Once in Royal David’s City” sounded even more ethereal in the dark as a solo choir boy sang the first verse. The procession came up the main aisle, singing its way to the chancel. On it went, undaunted and unafraid, without hesitation, lighting the way, bidding us all to join in on the last verses.

For those who think we do not have bleak mid-winters in San Diego, let me assure you that we do but we don’t let them get us down. As sad as it was to think that someone would want to harm this beautiful church and perhaps the people in it, a conquering joy supplanted that sadness last Sunday night in the candlelit nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

At present, nothing could look brighter than this season of expectation and joy. If I haven’t already done so, let me wish you at least an equal share of that joy now and in your future days, and most immediately, a very merry Christmas.

(Dean Richardson quoted the bold text in his Christmas Day sermon, 2006.)

And for those who are alone

That’s part of the Prayers of the People that the Intercessor bids us remember as we observe ourselves as community and pray for everyone in it.

We then leave it to God to take care of “those who are alone”, our duty done by mentioning them in the morning’s prayers, giving rise to our satisfaction that we have consigned ‘those who are alone’ to God’s care. Nothing more that we have to do.

Oh, but there is. Many of us live alone either by choice or by chance, but alone we are. When we gather on Sunday morning with our fellow parishioners, we seem less alone, and for the time it takes for the service and coffee afterwards, we aren’t. We therefore add to the prevailing notion that God is doing God’s job in taking care of us ‘who are alone’, leaving everyone else to go about their lives without a second thought about us ‘who are alone.”

Friday nights and Saturday nights are another thing entirely for ‘those who are alone.’ I wondered today how many of us phoned up Deedra Hardman, who lived alone, to see if she might want to come over for supper or take in a film or go out to a concert. I didn’t, and perhaps that was part of my feelings of grief as I sat there at her funeral, more than conscious of the lost opportunities that I took for granted and put off. The Cathedral nave was filled with friends there to mourn her death and to celebrate her life among us, but how alone was she?

Then a look around the Nave as I got into the pulpit to read. Many of us count among ‘those who are alone,’ and a different sadness swept over me as I regained my seat. Not time for an exact count, but quite a number of us ‘who are alone” who would leave the service and reception to follow and return to aloneness.

I don’t mean this writing to be a diatribe nor a lament per se, but instead, a reminder that we are God’s hands in this life and those hands are meant to do God’s work. While we pray for ‘those who are alone’ and hope for their security and health, we can do a great deal toward their happiness. Phone up someone who lives alone and ask him or her over for a hamburger sometime. If you don’t phone (so old-fashioned, huh?), then maybe a text message or an email to invite one of ‘those who are alone’ out for a drink or a movie. In short, let’s be in touch, and not wait around to show our regard for our friends who are alone until we gather to watch their ashes being carried up the Cathedral’s central aisle.

Robert Heylmun

Cannery Row Revisited

John Steinbeck opens his novel by telling us that Cannery Row in Monterey, California, is “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

By the time I first saw it in 1964, Cannery Row had retained much of Steinbeck’s attributes, if that’s what they are, and the qualities that he’d recorded two or three decades earlier when sardines still filled Monterey Bay and supplied the town with employment (for those who wanted it) and pumped economic life into the Row.

Some things had disappeared since his day, of course, and others rose to take their places. The Palace Flophouse that became almost central to his narrative had gone, but the Palace Bar, while not precisely in the same spot, gave the impression of having always been there. It stood beside the Steinbeck Theater, erected and named for the great man whose books made the Row famous, and those of us who found ourselves on the Row knew at once that we had walked through a looking glass and into a legendary land.

Time seemed to have stood still there. Decaying, rusting and abandoned canneries, some waving loose corrugated tin sheets thanks to the sea breeze, lined the bay side of the Row. True to Steinbeck’s description, rusting boilers and machinery parts lay around in empty lots. No fish smell by now, but iodine from the bay wafted over us. At least two markets claimed to be the fabled Lee Chong’s, its exact location not mattering. I can’t remember that we looked for Doc’s laboratory in particular since we weren’t on any sort of historical tour. Nope, we were headed for the Palace Bar for cold beer (50 cents a bottle), good music (folks songs, mostly), and just hanging out in the ambiance of the Row that Steinbeck created, one that yet survived, that now embraced us.

Lots of people who showed up at the Palace Bar were either interesting, or famous, or wanted to be. And we sang. Sang the songs of our day. Sang along with the juke box—Kingston Trio, Four Freshmen, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez.

Joan Baez! Out of the night she arrived one time with her partner of indeterminate gender, guitar in hand. The Jukebox was stilled and she sang for an hour or so, then left as quickly and silently as she had arrived. And somehow we felt finer than ever that the world was ours and that we understood it. There’s no making sense of that feeling except to say that a contentment settled in as if we were a part of a larger and even mystical sphere of being.

The songs defined who we were, imparted an awareness and belonging to that place, as well as an indifference to the imminent passage of time and change. The great void took form and shape, showed us a world that we put off seeing as fantasy, and we were happy not to “look at clouds from both sides”. Gloomier ideas melted in the warmth of our good times and fifty-cent beers. We cared for nothing except that we were on the Cannery Row that defied time, and we lived among its rusting loveliness, never once thinking that other, more unnatural forces were already eyeing its solemn and majestic sense of place.

The slightest notice of its history would have jolted us into the reality that the Row had only been in existence since the turn of the century and was therefore fairly new even in Steinbeck’s time. We gave it a timelessness and romance that arose from the novel, both qualities the author used to paint a world, not for the place itself, but for the people who populated it.

He uses the Row as a backdrop, the only one possible for the “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches”, or as he also calls them, “saints and angels and martyrs and holy men”, the denizens whom he brings to life. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is a place without much in the way of official authority—police appear only in dire situations—a place that is left to itself to keep what goes for order, decency, and regard toward others, within an odd but universally acknowledged moral order. Apart from all but occasional and brief intrusions by the church-going moral crusaders from the town, the Row governs itself with the sort of wisdom and liberality that hinges on the accepted knowledge of how people are likely to behave in any given situation. Charity in its truest sense prevails, often in unconventional ways, and intentions whether or not they may come to planned results, receive credit and currency as the coin of the realm.

You’d want to live there back then, to know and live with Steinbeck’s people. I certainly did as I read his poetic novel, and as I walked into Cannery Row, that lost world and the ethical compass needle pointed to compassion and understanding, unveiling a better Eden than anything Genesis has to offer.

Modern Cannery Row now lines up with other lost worlds, the callowness of youth, the pleasant naiveté of not acknowledging the passage of time. Many of its derelict canneries have either been transformed into tourist shops and trendy restaurants, or have been taken down altogether with only the eroding cement of their foundations showing up through the weeds on their vacant lots. Steinbeck would scarcely recognize the Row apart from its location beside the bay.

Not all change is lamentable, however. Probably the world’s best aquarium sits at the end of Cannery Row and is dedicated to the restoration of Monterey Bay while endless lines of visitors view the antics of otters, the life of starfish, and myriad other sea creatures in their natural habitat.

My time fifty years ago on Cannery Row sits among the brightest of memories, and the novel that it inspired remains one of American literature’s monuments to “a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia”. More than that, it is a testimonial to compassion and understanding, showing us the folly of judging people based on anything except how they regard each other. My more recent visit to the Row brought back those memories and those precepts, well worth a stroll through its changed, but also changeless world.

Robert Heylmun
 September 2015

The Use of Contemplation

The Fall

“Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil…’”
- Genesis 3:22

It began with an act of disobedience. The man, now no longer innocent, knows the difference between good and evil and can exalt his ego by an exercise of will, by making a choice which before had been reserved to God alone. The man chooses the pleasures of gratifying his own will and separation from God – gazing into a mirror and adoring his own reflection as a substitute for the face of God until one day, the man can’t tell the difference anymore, even though the face of God is still there, just on the other side of the mirror.

Now fully blind to God, we fight our fellows for power, for fame and treasure, in desperate fear of death…for an illusion of immortality through control bought at the cost of a now barely-remembered time when we lived in abundant life and communion with God.
We now utterly dominate the world and its creatures. Still… something seems wrong. It’s not enough somehow. Utter domination of the world and its creatures STILL isn’t enough. God is missing. We think God is gone, if he ever was in the first place, and we are alone and in pain. But God is not gone and we are not alone even if we don’t know it right now.

“For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’” - Acts 17:28

And because that is so, because we are, all unawares, actually of God, in God, and with God, there must be hope for our reconciliation with God.

Our Hope

“If the distortion of perception that is caused by the choice to see reality in man’s image instead of God’s is the problem, the solution must be the sacrifice of ego. To reconnect with reality, the false version of man must dissolve. The will must give itself up. The correct application of free will is to use it to annul itself. In Adam’s original test, he was not asked to do something; he was asked not to do. The real test of will is in its control; the ordeal is to give it back to God.”
- Rabbi Akiva Tatz, Will, Freedom and Destiny: Free Will in Judaism

Tools to flip ego on its head, to make use of the will to see past itself and through the mirror of our ego identity, revealing the face of God behind, have been discovered and refined in multiple traditions. From the Zazen of Buddhism, through the ritual dance of the Dervish, Pranayama and Mandalic contemplation in Hinduism, Visio Divina and Lectio Divina in the Christian tradition, and ritual chant everywhere we look, all the way to the modern Mindfulness movement, each tool seeks in one way or another to quiet the mind, because, we are told:

“Be still, and know that I am God!”
- Psalm 46:10

For a quiet mind in contemplation is finally open to the “still small voice” of the Holy Spirit and…

“…the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
- John 14:26

Our Salvation

Just as water wears away the hardest stone drop by drop and the touch of a million million hands imperceptibly smooths a coin and obliterates the human image impressed on its face, regular contemplative practice establishes and enhances awareness of the ever-present voice of the Holy Spirit, slowly rubbing away the silver of the mirror of our ego until we see, instead of our own reflection, the face of God, whose will we now can serve instead of our own.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
- 1 Corinthians 13:12

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

And here, then, lies our salvation – in conversion of life. Such conversion, from dedication to service of the ego to service of God’s will, can at last restore our communion with God and allow us to live more fully into our baptismal covenant – which is nothing less than a solemn vow made before God and in the presence of the Body of Christ binding us to the work of bringing the kingdom of God on Earth:

Celebrant Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
People I will, with God’s help.

Celebrant Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
People I will, with God’s help.

His Promise

But can we be sure? We have been disappointed so often by placing faith in our human-created reality. How do we know that if we open our hearts to the Lord, he will respond? We have his promise:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
- Matthew 7:7-8

“A new heart I will give you and a new spirit put within you. I will take the stone heart from your chest and give you a heart of flesh. I will help you walk in my laws and cherish my commandments and do them. You shall be my people, and I will be your God.”
- Ezekiel 36:26-28

And, of course, you can try it for yourself, and see.


 Harold Slatore p/OSB

California Drizzle

  I’ve lived in California for most of my life, having arrived here in 1965 thanks to the random wisdom of the US Navy. First Monterey then San Diego then Laguna Beach and back to San Diego. But it’s mornings like this one—drizzling, overcast, a bit chilly, calling for a jacket—ones that often dawned in Monterey, that gratify and fortify my love of living here. Odd? Perhaps, since most people come to California for the sun and the beach. Not me. I like sunny days, but not as well as these rare mornings.

We used to call it morning fog; in fact, that’s how the ‘marine layer’ (rather ugly term somehow) shows up in “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”. Morning fog, not marine layer. Just try to sing it along with Tony Bennett using ‘marine layer’ and you’ll see what I mean. The morning fog, then, came to settle over downtown Monterey, and we at the school I attended were high enough in the Presidio to watch its cottony down caress the harbor and Cannery Row with only the spires of a few churches peeking through. Often we got drizzle from it, and like a newborn duckling who, right out of the shell, imprints the image of whoever it sees first, I remember those foggy mornings with childlike love.

Walking along West University on such a morning as this brings pieces of poetry to mind. Hopkins: “There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things…” or Wordsworth: “… at once I saw a crowd, A host of daffodils …” Well, I don’t see daffodils, but in the canyon at what would be Front Street if it came this far, is a hillside covered in nasturtiums. They are in full bloom just now, and dependent on whatever rainfall they can get, their stay is short. But while they’re here, they rival Wordsworth’s daffodils, blooming among the other wildness of the landscape. This morning, drinking up the light rain, showing their brilliant faces, and like the daffodils, they are “Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

Of course, another Wordsworth poem intrudes. Already the inexorable drier days impinge on the current greenness of the canyon with brown decay and temporary death for the nasturtiums. Part of Splendour in the Grass:

We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death, …”

There is another line that I’ve forgotten and am too lazy to look up, but the gist of the poem seems apt to the fate of the nasturtiums and by extension, of me.

Mornings like this boost the soul, particularly here in Southern California where it is often too easy to speed along in the sunlit life we take for granted. I don’t mean this reflection to usher in sadness or gloom; rather the reverse, with the secure knowledge that like Hopkins, we can commune with that ‘dearest freshness deep down things’, and celebrate with him:

Oh morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

One other thing. I have to thank Miss Kirk for getting her kids to memorize poetry. Much of it sticks in my memory after all these years, providing ongoing songs that serve to beautify as well as clarify in better language than mine, mornings like this one.

                 Robert Heylmun                    April 24, 2015

Reflection on Transfiguration Sunday 2015

Today’s liturgy felt transformational. Celebrating Holy Baptism and Holy Eucharist together, listening to the witness of our partners in mission from St. Luke’s, renewing baptismal vows – Wow!

Thank God for the verdant-green-vested priests and deacons whose palpable depth of conviction and strength of presence reminded me of grass and the vitality of earth, humus keeping me grounded, else I might drift away in a daydream carried by a cloud of light at the mountain-top with Jesus.

Sitting in choir, I wondered about resonances between Baptism and Eucharist, theophanies of the Baptism and the Transfiguration, Epiphany and light, green and white, Ordinary and Extra-ordinary …

This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Matthew 3:17, Baptism of Jesus

… you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise … your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life. BCP pp. 308, Holy Baptism

let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijiah. Mark 9:5

And on the way to church, I wondered about the Elijiah and Elisha story:

… the water was parted to the one side and to the other, until the two of them crossed on dry ground. When they had crossed, Elijiah said to Elisha, ‘Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.” Elisha said, “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” from 2 Kings 2:1-12

There’s a passing of the torch that reminds me of the transition from the Dean search to Penny accepting our call. There’s a receiving of this time and this world as gift, as our inheritance today – we are stewards. There’s a receiving of the tradition and the sacraments as our inheritance today – future church is here.

We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood. BCP, pp. 308, Holy Baptism

What made the liturgy powerful? Was it the quality of the silence before the Gospel proclamation? Katherine’s witness? the text of the anthems? I don’t have the answer, and that’s part of why coming together for liturgy is so wonderful.

For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 2 Corinthians 4:6

Maybe the veil of God’s mystery momentarily lifted in a variety of ways?

Because in the mystery of the Word made flesh, you have caused a new light to shine in our hearts, to give the knowledge of your glory in the face of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. BCP pp. 378, Preface for Epiphany

Can we change in time?

Cathedral member Jonathan Widener writes, 

My minister in Chicago just posted the words to this little-known hymn as they sang it in a march tonight in Chicago. She mentioned how she wept as her parishioners all held hands, walking for peace and justice. As my friends in Chicago and New York converge on streets and parks joining one another to peacefully march, I sit in my home in San Diego and think of each of them.

I remember my grandfather’s last words in the third dream over a year ago, “Civil unrest is coming, son, war within our nation. Prepare. I love you. We are watching.” He repeated those words three times, hugged me tightly and I awoke with a tear-stained face. It would be the last time I would see him in my dreams. I literally ran to my church that early Monday morning in the rain, it would be the last rain I would see in Chicago. My minister was there to listen to the entire three dreams and comfort me.

Tears cascade again tonight as I think now upon those words and the souls that live in fear of their very lives. Be it minorities in America or across the seas in other lands, the ground is shaking beneath our feet. Can we change in time?

Namaste.

“William Gay, in a 1969 Christmas letter to friends wrote the hymn entitled, “Each Winter As the Year Grows Older.” William’s wife Annabeth composed a tune for the words, and the pairing now appears in several hymnals. 1969 was a year to be remembered as mounting protests against war and violence and riots filled the streets and change was in the air. Chicago seeing the worst of it as blood filled Lake Shore Drive and Lincoln Park as protesters lined outside of the Drake Hotel. Tonight as the news unfolds around the US as people become frightened of what more is to come, these lyrics ring true.

Each winter as the year grows older
we each grow older, too.
The chill sets in a little colder;
the verities we knew seem shaken and untrue.

When race and class cry out for treason,
when sirens call for war,
they overshout the voice of reason
and scream til we ignore all we held dear before.

Yet I believe beyond believing
that life can spring from death,
that growth can flower from our grieving,
that we can catch our breath and turn transfixed by faith.

So even as the sun is turning
to journey to the north,
the living flame, in secret burning,
can kindle on the earth and bring God’s love to birth.

O Child of ecstasy and sorrows,
O Prince of peace and pain,
brighten today’s world by tomorrow’s,
renew our lives again; Lord Jesus come and reign!

Love Is All There Is

There's no way to avoid it. This Sunday, our Gospel reading proclaims the Greatest Commandment, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind," followed by a second commandment which is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." This is the compass by which Christians navigate our spiritual journeys. This Sunday we are invited to reflect on this way of love.

Interestingly, biblical commentaries haven't been too helpful this week. There isn't much to note besides the Jewish origins (no surprise, since Jesus was a devout Jew!) of these two ethical positions. The first is taken from the Shema (Deut. 6:4-5), the verse that is recited by Jews to this day before worship. The second is from the Holiness Code of Leviticus (Lev. 19:18). Jesus may have been the first to tie these two commands together and privilege their importance among the 613 mandates of the Torah.

This gospel is a gem. It is good news, indeed: it reminds us with the clarity that only divine commandments can that living out our call to love is simplyall that God desires of us. Oh God, if only this simple call were easy!

What keeps us from loving God? What holds us back from loving neighbor?

The Rev. Colin Mathewson

Loneliness and Aloneness

 There aren’t many times in my life when I feel lonely; at least, that’s what I tell myself more than I once did. Since I live alone without even so much as a renting roommate, I’ve become acquainted with being alone a lot of the time.

But loneliness is another issue. It often happens on weekends when you find yourself with no one to go out to have a drink with, to go to a movie with, to have dinner with. Couples have those events built into their lives. Single people don’t. You have to arrange things, call or text to see if you can find someone to do something with, often with negative results. So you find yourself alone. And lonely.

The other part of the problem is that people forget about you or don’t think about you in the first place. It’s not intentional neglect, exactly. They are, after all, busy with their own lives, full of business and fun and things to do, and they rightly aren’t thinking that you might be alone and craving their company. They assume that you’re ‘just fine’ since you’ve elected to live alone in the first place, that you have plenty of other people who will let them off the hook and will fill the void of loneliness that very often no one is replacing with human contact.

What they don’t suspect is how much a lonely person would love to hear from them, have a phone call, a casual invitation to go out for a pizza or to a movie. Or to share dinner, no matter how simple or impromptu even if it’s leftovers.

I suspect that loneliness will become more of a matter for concern as I age, and that brings up that third aspect, age. It’s hard to figure out sometimes whether people include you into their lives because they like you or because you are something of a relic, somebody who’s been around a long time, and who from time to time, they feel as if they should impart some time. That last may sound cynical but it’s a thought that crosses my mind.

Yesterday was Saturday and I spent the day at home. Didn’t even go check to see if I had mail, didn’t go to the market across the street, and in the evening when I had thoughts of walking into Hillcrest to have a drink sometime around 8PM, I did nothing but sit at home, alternating reading a novel and checking on what might be interesting on public television. At 10:30 I went to bed. At the risk of this running on into the realm of self-pity, I merely want to explain what it’s like, this living alone.

I imagine that finally people like me move into assisted living facilities, partly for the nearby health care, but also to mitigate loneliness. Such places provide easy access to other humans who would otherwise be alone as well. Is it any worse a warehouse than the one we manufacture for ourselves and by ourselves?

Opening bidding for Prayers of the People today: In peace, we pray to you, Lord God. For all people in their daily life and work; For our families, friends, and neighbors, and for those who are alone. Nice sentiment, but not many people, I think, give that last word much importance, at least until they are among the alone folks.

Are there remedies? Probably not. People will do what they are going to do regardless of any sense of Christian duty, avowed friendship, or even the slightest idea of bringing you to mind. An acceptance of those facts, while not mitigating loneliness, serves to explain how things are. It’s cold comfort, but time passes and so does the feeling of being shelved and isolated. The next day dawns with renewed but wary optimism.

 27 July 2014

Robert Heylmun

Reflections: Agape

Sunday's sermon follows a series by our new Dean, Penny Bridges, and continues as an example of her excellent preaching style. As she goes up to the pulpit, all eyes turn her way in expectation of another of her fine homilies, and the congregation rightly listens to what she says with attention and in total accord. I’m not polishing the apple; I’m simply stating facts. But praise of Penny, although she warrants it, is not the topic here.

She talked about love, specifically the kind of love that we are commanded to have and exhibit for each other if we love God. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out the distinctions we as humans make between that commandment to love and our emotional penchant to like (or dislike) someone. The distinctions must nevertheless be drawn and recognized; otherwise, we find ourselves in spiritual quagmires.

One of the best descriptions of agape or the kind of love that Jesus commanded, comes from Dr. Martin Luther King’s essay called “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”. The penultimate paragraph:

In the final analysis, agape means recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. For example, white men often refuse federal aid to education in order to avoid giving the Negro his rights; but because all men are brothers they cannot deny Negro children without harming their own. They end, all efforts to the contrary, by hurting themselves. Why is this? Because men are brothers. If you harm me, you harm yourself.

You will forgive the non-pc, 1950s language as you glean what Dr. King is saying here. Liking someone or what they do (or don’t do), or the way they act, is not a basis for the love that Jesus commanded. He had in mind community, and as another part of Dr. King’s essay points out, agape is “love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it.” Dean Penny brought this very message to us quite strongly this morning.

High sounding words, but again sometimes difficult to put into action when we find ourselves at odds with someone, have had our feelings hurt, have been insulted of slighted or neglected. We sometimes find hot spots throughout the church community where slights or bad feelings supersede our baptismal vows to respect the dignity of every person whether they ‘deserve’ it or not. People sometimes leave the congregation for what they consider might be more hospitable pastures when things don’t go their way. Sometimes they don’t leave and instead snipe from the sidelines in an effort to see if they can get even somehow. Oh, we are often not very nice people, and despite our baptismal resolve to live in the example of Jesus, we fail, putting our own will and spite and anger at the head of an army of self-serving follies.

The truth is that we aren’t commanded to ‘like’ anyone. Strange, isn’t it? We tend to think that ‘liking’ comes before ‘loving’ and in the romantic world of love, it probably does. But Jesus didn’t command us to ‘like’; he commanded us to engage our will, what John Donne called “your (God’s) viceroy in me” because agape is an act of the will, a determination to come to our better self, to ask the Holy Spirit to “breathe through the heat of our desire thy coolness and thy balm” (Hymn 652).

It isn’t easy. Taking up the cross is not easy. It takes more than we can do by ourselves. It takes patience, practicing forbearance, waiting to think before a reply, being willing to extend love when none comes back, wanting to restore community regardless of cost to our ego, remembering, again from Dr. King, that “The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community.” We can do it. Jesus promises that we can do it with God’s help.

Thank you, Dean Bridges, for bringing us closer to Jesus and the eternal promises of God, for reminding us that regardless of what we’ve done to each other, we are worthy of forgiveness if we but love each other as Christ loved us.

Robert Heylmun

Reflecting on the Celebration of a New Ministry with the Welcoming of a New Dean

18 May 2014

Yesterday's magnificent liturgy manifested Communion in many ways - seen and unseen.

What is your experience of our liturgy? Does it move your living and being?

Today I rifled around in the choir room recycle bin to fish out several of yesterday's bulletins to send to folks inside and outside of the Episcopal church. I believe that they will be encouraged and strengthened by Who we embody in our worship. lex orandi lex credendi

I see extra-ordinary grace flowing through the ordinary at St. Paul's.

A little over a year ago, then-Dean Rebecca McClain asked staff and Chapter members to prepare for Chapter retreat by writing one page - what would you share about St. Paul's with your new Dean?

I ruminated on scriptures, changing my prayer diet to Pauline writings anticipating a whiff from the Spirit in the weeks before. Surely as St. Paul's Cathedral, there is some part there that is a tasty morsel to share with a new Dean?

My appetite was met with a surprise - I woke up the morning of the retreat clearly with a different taste in my mouth. And this is what it was - Jacob's dream at Bethel.

Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and he lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord God stood beside him and said, "... Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever I go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you." Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place - and I did not know it!" And he was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." Genesis 28: 11, 12, 15 - 17.

In the days before that retreat, I had a dream, and in that dream one of the things I heard was, "People choose, as they are chosen, for Communion."

Every time we gather and celebrate Communion, I am moved and transformed by experience. May God's dreams come true here at St. Paul's!


Blessings,

Helena Chan
Obl. OSB Cam.

A lenten look at homelessness

Homelessness is a growing phenomenon in America.

It takes many forms:

There are bankruptcies, foreclosures and short-sales.
Banks collect homes when the unemployed default on their mortgage payments.
Some people are homeless because of natural disasters like Haiti and Japan.
Some are homeless and without kin, who are called orphans.
Others are homeless due to revolutions and wars...the Palestinians and Libyans come to mind.

I don't know too many people by name who are homeless, (although one was on our couch recently for two weeks. ) What is growing, is my list of the near homeless. friends who once lived securely, but now are unsure of their future.

A pastor friend of mine, David Leaper Moss, of Methodist morals, took on homelessness in his hometown of Sacramento. You can read about homelessness in this month's Harper's Magazine where David is mentioned.

Notice the response of Christians in this article to the dispossessed, disconnected and homeless.

What would Jesus do? What might his followers do?

Doreen Potter wrote a new hymn verse in 1975...

Help us accept each other as Christ accepted us;
Teach us as sister, brother, each person to embrace.
Be present Lord, among us, and bring us to believe
We are ourselves accepted and meant to love and live.

Teach us O Lord, your lessons, as in our daily life
We struggle to be human and search for hope and faith.
Teach us to care for people, for all, not just for some,
To love them as we find them or as they may become.

Let your acceptance change us, so that we may be moved
In living situations to do the truth in love.
To practice your acceptance until we know by heart,
The table of forgiveness and laughter's healing art.

Lord, for today's encounters with all who are in need,
Who hunger for acceptance, for righteousness and bread,
We need new eyes for seeing, new hands for holding on:
Renew us with Your spirit; Lord, free us, make us one!

A Prayer for the Homeless

O God, who would not that any should live without comfort and hope,
have compassion on the multitudes in our day who have no homes,
or who are overcrowded in wretched dwellings. Shelter those whose
homes and livelihood have been ruined by Nature's wrath.
Bless and inspire those who are laboring for their good.
Stir the conscience of the whole world and especially the Church.

O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in perfect love for mankind chose to live as one who had nowhere to lay his head:
We pray for all who are homeless, all refugees, all who must live in exile or in a strange land; grant them human friendship in their need and loneliness, the chance of a new beginning, and courage to take it, and, above all, an abiding faith in your love and care; Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen!


Prayer requests for....Japan, Palestine, Libya, Tunisia, Congo, Sudan, San Diego, India, and Haiti.

There are also five siblings, age 4 through 15 years of age, three girls and two boys, whose parents have died and would like to be adopted into the same family. Would you pray for these children that their prayer might be answered? You might pray for the 18 orphanages in Tijuana that hundreds of children call home. And then there are the ministries of the Inter-faith Shelter, Father Joe's Village, the Union Rescue Mission, and the Old Folks Home. Selah!

-Ronn Garton

Rilke's Unicorn - A January Remembrance of Steven Schaber

John Sanford, a former rector at St. Paul's, once wrote a book titled "The Kingdom Within." It was based on a text from the 17th Chapter of St. Luke, in which Jesus says "The Kingdom of God is Within You."

Many of the parables Jesus told were about spiritual growth,
like the story of the mustard seed.

The Kingdom of God is not physical or material but spiritual. When we attempt to make it physical or literal we run into stone walls. The most powerful forces in our human lives are spiritual ones. All great reality rises from spiritual foundations. If I have a healthy spiritual life I will be an effective person. If I am not in touch with my spirituality I go nowhere. It starts with belief.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a poem about belief and the spiritual life, using the metaphor of the Unicorn. He wrote,

O this is the animal that does not exist,
But they didn't know that, and dared nevertheless
To love it...and Because they loved it, it came to
be a...pure creature.
They always left a space for it,
and in that space, clear and set aside,
it lightly raised its head, and hardly needed to be.

The late professor Steven Schaber worshipped at St. Paul's and was a member of Integrity. He was also an Associate of the Society of St. Paul and sadly died in January of 1993. Stephen wrote me something shortly before his death I've always remembered . "Rilke's idea is powerful: belief can create reality. What we believe, exists by virtue of that belief. And a thing believed has more power even than a thing of fact, if that fact is not empowered by meaning for us."

Jesus went about empowering belief so that like the parable of the seed it points to the kingdom and its growth as the work of God. God plants, another waters until the harvest is ready. The work of the church is to bring in the harvest. The seed, its growth and reality is not dependent upon the harvesters. It grows and develops in spite of us.

As John Sanford wrote " The kingdom of heaven begins in a person's life as something seemingly small and insignificant but through a process of growth becomes a mighty power. The image of the tree is rooted in the earth but reaches up to heaven, so our growth includes both our earthly and spiritual natures."

Because the kingdom is associated with the inner growth of the individual, it is very much a here and now experience. In January I always think of Stephen and Rilke's Unicorn.


The Rev. Canon Andrew Rank

A death in Orange County

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne, Meditation XVII

A man died last week on the rail line near Anaheim CA. He stepped into a crossing in front of a Metrolink commuter train around 6am, stretched out his arms and waited for the train to hit him. The horrified engineer couldn't stop in time.

Nearly 100 miles away, I was getting on the first northbound Amtrak of the day, and read a message crawling across the information sign that the first southbound service was delayed due to a "passenger train trespassing incident". I didn't really think much about it; it wasn't my train, it was miles away. Maybe someone had gotten obstreperous with the conductor, or someone had been seen along the track. It didn't even cross my mind that those words were railway code for a fatality.

But as we left Oceanside at 7am, the man behind me got a call on his cellphone. "Well, then I'm screwed," he said, sounding annoyed. Then I got a call from a colleague who takes Metrolink from Irvine, the midway point. He told me what had happened, and that both lines, southbound and northbound, were blocked north of Anaheim. He went home to telecommute. I had meetings in LA, and even if I chose to turn around and head for home, there were no southbound trains getting through for me to take. So I sat it out, and my train kept going north.

The lines reopened after about 3 hours, after the business of death swarmed around the tracks: policemen with yellow tape, railway workers in hard hats, the cleanup crew with bins and tarps. Once north of Anaheim, my train inched its way along with frequent long, sighing stops. Even so, we got to LA with only a 45 minute delay, cushioned by the distance we had to travel. Most passengers had no idea what had happened, and grumbled that we were late again.

This is the second death that I know of on the LA-San Diego corridor this summer; in June, a man was killed by an overnight freight train near San Clemente under rather creepy circumstances (at 2 am, it appears that a group of teenagers watched him get hit). Other lines in the region have also had a number of recent deaths; sometimes suicide, sometimes stupidity (like walking on the tracks, or trying to beat the gates). Deaths by train are depressingly common.

And I found it odd that despite the grimly public way of taking their lives, these victims are mostly invisible. Unless their travel is affected by the tragedy, most people probably never hear of this happening. It's a sentence on the evening news, or a tiny paragraph in the paper, gone in an instant.

I sorrow for the victim who suffered such despair, and for his family. I cannot fathom how anyone could choose such a horrible way to die. And I feel for the engineer, at the controls of his massive machine, who was made an unwilling accomplice and saw it all, and the conductor, whose harrowing responsibility it was to get off the train and inspect the aftermath. I hope they have help for the trauma of the experience.

I met some of the passengers from the train that struck the man, on the trip home that night. They cushioned themselves from the event with dark humor, or anger at the hurt done to the engineer and crew, whom they know by name. Those on other trains that were delayed complained about the timing. They didn't really address the event or the human life behind it--a natural defense mechanism, but still, jarring.

One of my other commute friends told me that in the 4 or 5 years she's been doing the trip, her train has killed 6 people, most of them suicides. The railway seems to draw the despairing, the way the Golden Gate Bridge does. I know that statistically, it is inevitable that one day I too will be an accomplice of sorts, a few hundred feet away from death, a passenger on a train that kills a person. It is a disturbing thought.

Susan Forsburg

Photo: The tracks reopen. Orange County Register

For the Victims of Fear, Injustice, and Oppression

As we said the Prayers of the People last Sunday (Form VI in the Book of Common Prayer), I realized that one of the petitions directly pertains to me, as well as many of my friends. As I spoke the response, “For the victims of hunger, fear, injustice, and oppression”, I realized that I am a victim of three out of four of those problems mentioned.

Every day, I am subjected to the fear of those who do not, and do not wish to understand me; the injustice of those who would use the legal system to block my right to equality; and the oppression, at many levels, who would suppress who I am. It actually took me a very long time to understand who I am, myself, because my upbringing taught me that a lot of this fear, injustice, and oppression were all the right things to believe. Thankfully, I grew out of such thinking and learned to think for myself.

Fear
Being a victim of fear does not necessarily mean you are the one who is afraid. Rather, it can be that others’ fear is being imposed on you. Fear has been and is being used to fuel the opposition to equal rights for gay and lesbian people in our nation. In my humble opinion, it was fear and outright lies that won Proposition 8. It was fear that the defendants in the Prop 8 trial used. Each time fear is used to promote a belief, there is something wrong either with the belief, or the state of mind of the people promoting the belief. Unfortunately, we often exploit our children to get our way. If people think children will be in danger, they will vote the “danger” away. This is one of the tactics used continuously in the fight against LGBT equality. If you must use fear and/or lies to get your point across, or to win your campaign, that means you cannot win your case on its merits. Inequality equals injustice.

Injustice
I pay taxes and I work hard. I volunteer in the community and I support charitable organizations. I worship our God through the Christian faith as I understand it. I am an open-minded person who understands that people have differing points of view. As a pluralistic society, we must take a step back and realize that our own beliefs are not necessarily our neighbors’ beliefs. However, that does not mean we can ignore the Great Commandments of loving the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength; and loving our neighbors as ourselves. Where was it that Jesus said to love only those who agree with you?

When you use your own ideology or your own belief system to impose your way life on society, or even just a segment of society – indeed, even a single person – you ignore the true meaning of justice. When a segment of society is relegated to the world of injustice, those people become the victims of oppression.

Oppression
When you are told you will not be afforded the same rights as everyone else based on your nationality, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, maybe your accent, or your religion – among other possible attributes – then you are the victim of oppression. There are those who tell me that I should not be able to adopt children. There are even those who believe I present a clear danger to children and should not even be able to work with them! I have been told, in not so many words, that my seven years of service in the United States Navy was not actually honorable (I was not a victim of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; but right wingers have implied my service should not count based on my sexual orientation).

For seven years I was part of an organization that forced me to remain silent about who I was – that is the epitome of oppression. Still today, service men and women must continue to serve in silence. Many states in the Union still deny LGBT people protection from discrimination. In other words, you can legally lose your job for being gay in some states. Many people never want to see the day where everyone in this great nation is able to marry the person whom they choose to marry – the person that they love. I am not saying that people do not have the right to feel that homosexuality is wrong – we all have the right to feel whatever we feel. I am saying that trying to force people to live life according to your personal set of morals is not acceptable.

All of these issues are protested against, taken to court, and the activists never give up. They never give up because they recognize the oppressive nature of all of this. Straight people standing up for gay people, Citizens standing up for non-Citizens, the rich standing up for the poor – there are so many examples of how different groups try every day to fight oppression.

Prayer and Prayerful Actions
Two of the ways we, as the Church battle oppression is through prayer and prayerful actions. Prayer is a powerful thing and should not be dismissed. Through corporate worship, we unite our many voices and send our prayers up to God as one voice. Just as the seraphim continually sing God’s praises in one great chorus, so do we pray to him as one Christian voice. We do this through the Mass, the Daily Office and other services of worship.

Fear, injustice and oppression are also fought through our actions; we show people love and support and recognize their dignity while making sure we show them respect, regardless of who they are or what they look like. We proclaim to the world that we welcome you and love you, simply because you are you. We pray for those who hate us and offer them the same support and love, even when they refuse to accept it from us. We do this because our Savior commands us to do it. We lift up our voices and join the community in protests – prayerfully and peacefully; we stand up for what we believe is in the best keeping of our faith. We do what we believe our Lord himself would do.

Joy, Justice, Liberation
When we pray for the victims of fear, injustice, and oppression, we must remember that we, as followers of Christ, must do our best to change fear into joy; injustice into justice; and oppression into liberation. We have succeeded in the past and we are gaining ground now. I am confident that through prayer and prayerful action we will continue to make huge strides in bringing God’s people together while we share this planet.

Don Mitchell

A Benedictine Retreat

Dear Friends at St. Paul's,

I just came back from a retreat in Healdsburg, CA - a Benedictine Experience! Thought I'd tell a story about it ...

Visiting my spiritual director last year, I scampered around her bookshelves, peering at titles of tomes. A small, slender volume squeaked from the shelf, its title faded, "Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict" by Esther de Waal. Nudging it out of its hiding place, revealed a sort of cheesy 80's-style cover, but it passed the skinny-ness test.
"Not too long for my attention span, and not too heavy to lug back to San Diego!" I thought.

But more enticing were the purple and yellow highlighted passages in the book.
"Well, if she digested it - there must be something nourishing in there, and then there are Cliff's notes!" I chuckled to myself.

This book promised to shed light on another book that I had read and frankly, hadn't digested: The Rule of St. Benedict.

"Oh the Benedictines? They were before the split." my spiritual director said. Okay, I guess that meant PG-13 reading then.

So, I legitimately borrowed and lugged the book down to San Diego and read it over the next few months. Wow, the book was slender, but rich and dense - picture slice after slice of flourless dark chocolate torte. Delicious and lots of calories. It was a lesson in moderation; I had to learn to ration the intake, or suffer spiritual indigestion from snarfing too much in one go - in one end and out the other - the choice between nourishment or nada.

Listening with the ear of the heart, prayer and work, hospitality ...

What about the actual Way itself? Lucky for me, I got a call from my friend the spiritual director early this year, "There is this Benedictine Experience retreat - I think you would like it."

And so I went on this spiritual time-share - a week with a bunch of strangers seeking to live Benedictine spirituality at a retreat center called The Bishop's Ranch. As a scientist, this would be an interesting experiment indeed.

My first retreat ever, was last year and that was with a women's monastic community in Augusta, GA. That was like dropping into another world. During that retreat, I remember becoming acutely aware as the week went on and I could listen better, of the baggage and mess that I brought to the monastic liturgy. The sisters' hospitality shared their presence in space and time with the chaos that I brought. I brought myself as fully and consciously as I could. There was nothing I could do to lessen the ripples of unresolved spiritual mess that perturbed the chanting. Only God's grace could begin to heal the unresolved garbage of a lifetime for a person who had never been on a retreat to listen to God. It was a very intense experience, and meaningful, intentional, gifted silence was a door the opened for me there.

A key question for me in this Benedictine Experience retreat was, if I could intuit the effect of chaos in the monastic liturgy with a bunch of monastics, how would chaos bear out in a temporary intentional community where each one of us brought a diversity of chaos? I was like the woman who touched Jesus' cloak, looking for healing to happen, hiding in the crowd. Something would be healed, but what and how?

At times, we did fall off the trolley in the liturgy. Wow, we really did have a lot of chaos after all.

As this week went on, I began to love these strangers and their voices in a way that was beyond knowing anything about their story, their worldly accomplishments, or their ministries. I began to feel a deep gratitude for them, as they were, and their honest hard work at showing up every day to pray. And I could also begin to see and appreciate a part of me in them.

I experienced a change of heart. I started the week looking for chaos and a resolution which I had defined to be lack of chaos, as if chaos were somehow a "bad germ" and needed going away forever. I started the week thinking that the Way was about reaching a destination and then not needing to do any more work. The Holy Spirit colon cleanse was going to come through and fix everything once and for all. But as the week ended I realized that as I live, I need to continue to eat, and need to continue to be cleansed.

It's a lot of hard work to show up and be present to myself and those around me every day wherever I am. I can say that my experience of Benedictine spirituality with other seekers of God, was to experience the ordinary. And in the conscious, intentional experience of the ordinary in God, I can glimpse some of the extra-ordinary depth of meaning in God’s creation.

There’s nothing special in Benedictine spirituality, in the sense that there’s nothing apart or beyond following Jesus and living the Gospel. There's no absolute standard for how to live, who to be, or how to express piety - nothing to accomplish and be done with, and no static definition of enlightenment or perfection.

There ARE tools and examples of how to keep working hard at cultivating a life of being receptive to God's transforming action in my life.

There IS practice, discipline, and concentrated effort to bring as much of me and my messy life, in faith, to be in the Presence of God's community over and over again, where the Holy Spirit refines.

As the week came to a close, I became convinced that the time and space, whether together and apart, that we shared: in prayer, fellowship, study, meditation, silence, visioning the connection of the physical and the spiritual, chanting, singing, eating, sleeping- every aspect of life- could be a door to experience more and more the expansiveness, totality, and intimacy of God's love.

The choice is to be made over and over again, to be in relationship, to try to be receptive to the Presence and keep still instead of screaming and running away.
There is great encouragement, wisdom, and love flowing from other seekers who show up over and over again too.

"So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you." (Luke 11:9)

There is the great Gift of Love that asks and waits for me to receive Love, as ordinary as I am, so that the extra-ordinary can be revealed to all of Creation.

Thanks be to God!

Helena Chan

A reflection on anniversaries and thanksgiving

I'll preach at St. Paul's Cathedral, San Diego on June 6, 2010, sixty-seven years to the day of my confirmation by Bishop Bertrand Stevens when we were still part of the Los Angeles Diocese. That was June 6, 1943, and the war was a heavy reality. D-Day on the Normandy beaches was a year away.

Also in June of this year I will equal in my retirement years the number of years I served as Rector, then Dean of that same St. Paul's Cathedral. Sixteen years before official retirement--sixteen years since. I wasn't sure what I expected after I retired. I only knew that I was tired of the church merry-go-round, and was determined to keep up my handball game and return to serious piano playing.

Some energy returned when the Bishop asked me to do temporary duty in a troubled parish, which I did. And the outcome of that was wonderful, life-long friends. Then there followed, for the next five years, interim duty at four congregations, plus several months at the Cathedral when my successor, John Chane, became Bishop of Washington.

I imagine I'm the only retired member of the clergy whose post-retirement equaled the activity of their last cure. What has kept me lively and interested, in spite of the inevitable health issues that come with aging, is the frequent obligation to be a Minister of Word and Sacrament, primarily at the Cathedral as well as our neighborhood parish church. Pastoral care is an ongoing activity in both congregations, partly because I'm the primary pastoral figure of communicants who were at St. Paul's when I became Rector in 1978.

I remember Matthew Fox saying, in a seminar on contemporary spirituality which he offered so many years ago in Chicago, that travel was good for one's prayer life. So Lanita and I did our share, leading a couple of tours before retirement, then really getting into it after retirement: the U.K. Ireland, Italy, Israel, a marvelous sweep through Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany; Russia; and then Ireland once again.

This anniversary month includes my birthday on the 2nd (81), fifty-six years in the diaconate on June 29, and fifty-five years in the priesthood on the same June 29. The Bishop of Olympia who ordained me, Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., did not shrink the one-year diaconate to six months, as so many do now!

Members of St. Paul's Cathedral who read this, as well as many stalwarts of All Souls Parish, Point Loma, know quite well my presence and pleasure to be a part of their lives.

June of 2010 has been a unique time for me to pause and reflect...with thanksgiving.

The Rev James E. Carroll, Dean Emeritus

This year is also marks the 25th Anniversary of St. Paul's becoming a Cathedral. If you have memories or reflections on the journey from St. Paul's parish to San Diego's "Cathedral for the City" send them on, we've love to post them throughout the year. Email your posts to: stpaulblog@gmail.com