Yesterday I added three new photographs to illustrate my last sermon, “Learning to Pray in Glorious Technicolor,” which was delivered at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Edina, Minnesota, on the morning of our baptisms in the blessed water of Minnehaha Creek. That water flows over beautiful Minnehaha Falls and into the Mississippi River. It flows, like the love of Christ, throughout God’s creation.
Thanks to the photography of Dan Akins, a member of the congregation, below are a few more scenes from the morning we “went down in the river to pray.” Continue reading →
Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist and author of the best-selling parenting book “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” (Penguin), says that society today is awash in irony and cynicism. Couple that with a world that seems to be melting down around us, and parents without organized religion face a deeper challenge.
“We have gloom and doom, a cynical, mocking culture,” she says, “and that will be your family’s religion if parents don’t actively balance that by showing examples and other counter-cultural ways. That means not being cynical, not being apathetic, and not being extremely prejudiced in your beliefs.”
That also means letting kids see your values: how you treat others, what your priorities are, how you spend your time.
“Children, absolutely, from birth are theologians and philosophers,” she says. If we’re not careful, she says, “we can kind of burn it out of them.”
There are endless opportunities to instill spirituality. Start with meals. Mogel points to the Jewish tradition of the leisurely meal of Shabbat, and says the idea works for any family, any religion . . .
“It’s an opportunity to slow down our speedy lives and appreciate what we’ve been given rather than what we want to go shopping for tomorrow,” she says.
My wife absolutely loved Mogel’s book, and a glance at the chapter titles quickly reveals that I should read it, too. The final chapter, for example, is called “The Blessing of Faith and Tradition: Losing Your Fear of the G Word and Introducing Your Child to Spirituality.” Hmmm . . . that would make a nice series of posts!
It’s not only the parents of young children with lots of activities who wrestle with the relationship between time spent at their workplaces and time that’s needed to honor commitments in the rest of their lives. Individuals whose elderly parents are experiencing major health issues and couples in need of marriage counseling wrestle with that relationship, too. When you get right down to it, all of us do.
That’s the point of Hannah Seligson’s article “When the Work-Life Scales Are Unequal” in today’s New York Times. Here’s a quote from it that comes after a description of one woman’s feeling that her need to care for sick grandparents wasn’t valued as much as the need of her colleagues to tend to their kids:
On this Labor Day weekend, when we celebrate the American worker, or at least the last unofficial days of summer, Ms. Azevedo is giving voice to what many people feel in their bones: the pursuit of “work-life balance,” which sounds so wholesome and reasonable, can be a zero-sum game in the office.
In theory, flextime seems like an everyone-wins proposition. But one person’s work-life balance can be another’s work-life overload. Someone, after all, has to make that meeting or hit that deadline.
As a result, many Americans who work for companies that embrace flexible hours are confronting a sort of office class warfare. Some employees have come to expect that the demands of their children, in particular, will be accommodated — and not all of their colleagues are happy about it.
These tensions are hardly new. But at a time when many Americans are struggling to find or keep jobs — and when many of us are being asked to do more with less — the issue has come to the fore.
Child care has long been the third rail in this conversation, and it is receiving renewed attention . . .
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Edina, Minnesota
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 16, August 26, 2012
“Pray in the Spirit at all times . . . and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.” (Ephesians 6:18)
I love to come into this church when the sunlight is streaming through these windows and bathing every thing and every person in the colors of the stained glass. It’s the vivid red and blue colors that capture my attention. But you’ll notice that it’s mostly the blue stained glass that dominates these scenes. That’s what makes them come alive. [Click the photographs below to enlarge them.]
My Sermon for Baptisms in Minnehaha Creek/Photograph by Dan Akins
Several weeks ago I learned something about that color in particular that I’m still trying to comprehend. It turns out that “seeing” blue in the world — thinking about it and talking about it — is something that I take for granted, and so do you. As language evolves in a culture and moves beyond words for black and white, red is without exception the first prismatic color to be named and added to the vocabulary. It’s not only the color of blood but also the easiest color for human beings to create artificially and, therefore, to use in art and design. Not so with blue. It’s added much later, if at all, as a language grows and expands. It’s also rare in nature and very difficult to produce.
These insights come from Guy Deutscher’s Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. One of the fascinating stories in that book is about William Gladstone in 1858, at the age of forty-nine, a decade before he would become the prime minister of Great Britain. That’s when his more than seventeen hundred page, three volume study of the poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey was published. Gladstone was a man of deep faith for whom the words of Homer, the famous poet of ancient Greece, were the next best thing to the words of the Bible. At the end of his last volume, there’s an odd chapter called “Homer’s perception and use of color.” There Gladstone notes the curious fact that Homer, who was only blind according to legends, refers to the wine-dark sea and violet wool and green honey. But here’s the strangest part. Gladstone also notes that something is missing. Continue reading →
I call this photograph “Counting Ducks” because that is, in fact, the simple joy and fleeting moment that it captured. Life itself is complex, but recognizing it as a gift isn’t. So I hope that you will also delight in that fleeting moment by looking at this photograph and by praying these words from The Book of Common Prayer:
We give you thanks, most gracious God, for the beauty of earth and sky and sea; for the richness of mountains, plains, and rivers; for the songs of birds and the loveliness of flowers. We praise you for these good gifts, and pray that we may safeguard them for our posterity. Grant that we may continue to grow in our grateful enjoyment of your abundant creation, to the honor and glory of your Name, now and for ever. Amen.
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Edina, Minnesota
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 14, August 12, 2012
“Taste and see that the Lord is good . . .” (Psalm 34:8, BCP)
The psalms, both said and sung, are a treasured part of common prayer and worship in the Anglican tradition. Yet most Christians, including most Episcopalians, neglect these heartfelt words that have so much to say about the life of faith — a life of faith not as we wish it to be but as it really is. Aside from the 23rd Psalm and a few phrases here and there, these words are too often forgotten.
We sang one of those phrases a few minutes ago from Psalm 34: “Taste and see that the Lord is good . . .”[1] However, it’s not language that’s merely poetic or sentimental. That summary of life with God is more than a lovely turn of phrase, and that’s what I want us to think about together this morning.
There are different kinds of psalms in the Bible. There are psalms of lament, for example, in which a real person in the midst of a real problem cries out to God. Those who say or sing these prayers usually promise to praise the name of Lord if they’re delivered from their distress. Now you might never have prayed like that, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night. But there’s a 100% chance that the person sitting next to you has. I’ll let you think about that for a moment. It’s true, we’ve all been there.
Psalm 34 is not a lament. It’s a psalm of thanksgiving. It’s that prayer that you promised to pray after going through hell and living to tell the story:
I sought the Lord, and he answered me
and delivered me out of all my terror.[2]
That’s the testimony of the psalmist, his witness to the mighty acts of God that, as one commentator puts it, “enlarges the circle of those who revere the Lord.”[3] I love that image of the expansion of the boundaries of faith through the telling of the story, a story with God at the center of it. We all have those kinds of stories — stories that aren’t meant to be kept to ourselves.
Psalm 34 goes beyond a piety that’s merely private or a faith that remains only in the personal realm. The person who prays this psalm tells others of what the Lord has done for her. She does more than that, however. Her beautiful words of praise and her testimony to the people around her are transformed into a concrete act of love. Continue reading →
Recently, my wife and I have been reading one chapter each night at bedtime to our oldest son, four years old, from the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. Tonight it was my turn to read, and there was a passage that really caught my attention. As an Episcopal priest, I’ve met a lot of people like Mrs. Arable:
“Have you heard about the words that appeared in the spider’s web?” asked Mrs. Arable nervously.
“Yes,” replied the doctor.
“Well, do you understand it?” asked Mrs. Arable.
“Understand what?”
“Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”
“What’s miraculous about a spider’s web?” said Mrs. Arable. “I don’t see why you say a web is a miracle — it’s just a web.”
“Ever try to spin one?” asked Dr. Dorian.
Mrs. Arable shifted uneasily in her chair. “No,” she replied. “But I can crochet a doily and I can knit a sock.”
“Sure,” said the doctor. ”But somebody taught you, didn’t they?”
“My mother taught me.”
“Well, who taught a spider? A young spider knows how to spin a web without any instructions from anybody. Don’t you regard that as a miracle?”
“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Arable. “I’ve never looked at it that way before. Still, I don’t understand how those words got into the web. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like what I can’t understand.”
“None of us do,” said Dr. Dorian, sighing. “I’m a doctor. Doctors are supposed to understand everything. But I don’t understand everything, and I don’t intend to let it worry me.”
Lots of people are familiar with the popular phrase “six degrees of separation,” which refers to the idea that every individual on this earth is about six steps away, by way of introduction, from anyone else on the planet. I don’t know if it’s true, but that idea became popularized through a trivia game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in which players try to make connections — as few as possible — between someone and the actor Kevin Bacon.
So what does any of that have to do with Andy Griffith, who died earlier this week at the age of 86? Well, the honest-to-God truth is that I really do have only one degree of separation from him. That’s because the pastor during my childhood at Union Cross Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was the Rev. Edward T. Mickey, Jr., who later became a bishop of the Unitas Fratrum.
Photo Credit: NCSU Libraries’ Digital Collections: Rare and Unique Materials
Mr. Mickey, as we called him, wasn’t only an ordained minister but also a very good musician. His grandfather, in fact, had been the leader of the 26th North Carolina Regimental Band during the Civil War. It was from Mr. Mickey that I learned that liturgy isn’t a meaningless repetition of words but a beautiful act of prayer. He also directed the children’s choir in which I sang at Union Cross.
One of my first memories of Mr. Mickey is of him asking us if we knew what “the music of the spheres” was. He explained that it referred to the harmony of the movement of the planets, which were created by God. Perhaps that marked the beginning of my interest in astronomy, which this recent post highlighted.
Mr. Mickey had once served as the pastor of Grace Moravian Church in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. There a teenager named Andy Griffith came to visit him, wanting to learn how to play the trombone. Here’s how that teenager later remembered it in The Player: A Profile of an Art, a 1962 collection of reflections by actors:
For three years, he gave me a free lesson once a week. Ed Mickey taught me to sing and to read music and to play every brass instrument there was in the [church] band, and the guitar and the banjo besides. I was best at playing the E-flat alto horn.
When I was sixteen, I joined the church, together with my mother and daddy. We had been Baptists, but it was all Protestant anyhow, so it didn’t make any difference. I was very happy with the Moravians. All the other band members accepted me. They didn’t ever make fun of me. When Ed Mickey had a call to serve another Moravian church, somewhere else in the state, I became the leader of the band until the church could bring in a new preacher. A lot of the people used to point to me and say, “There’s our next preacher.” I was beginning to get that idea myself. The preacher was the cultural leader of the whole town.
Mr. Mickey recommended Andy Griffith for a scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he began his college studies with the intention of becoming an ordained minister in the Moravian Church. He changed his major to music, however, becoming a teacher instead and spending his summers as an actor in “The Lost Colony” outdoor drama on Roanoke Island.
From sea to shining sea, children play a fun and almost-but-not-quite-universal game called “Duck, Duck, Goose.” Most people, however, are shocked to learn that little ones in Minnesota don’t experience this with the rest of America.
Apparently, while Paul Bunyan walked through this state, creating 10,000 lakes, he also used his giant axe to kill the goose of that beloved children’s game and threw its carcass across the border into the Dakotas, never to be seen or heard from again. It’s the only reasonable explanation of the fact that children here are forced to use a grey duck in the place of a goose to play this game. That’s right. Here it’s “Duck, Duck, Grey Duck.” My wife recently commented on this cultural oddity with these words on her Facebook page:
Dear Minnesota, You know I love you, but I cannot be a party to your duck-duck-grey duck nonsense.
Today we discovered that the indoctrination starts at a young age. After dropping off our four-year-old son for a summer program at a local park, I noticed that the schedule of activities had been written on a white board and took a picture of it:
So there you have it. This is the dark — or, more properly, grey — side of life in Minnesota. To paraphrase the words of King Henry II, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome grey duck?” Think of the children. I weep for their future . . .
"Preparing God's Acre for the Moravian Easter Sunrise Service, 1974" Courtesy of the Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection
More than a year ago, I was looking through random photographs from Forsyth County, North Carolina, and found this one. Immediately I thought that it nicely captured a moment in time that represents so much of my childhood. Taken in 1974, it shows a family cleaning a headstone and decorating a grave in God’s Acre – the term for a cemetery in the Moravian Church – to prepare for Easter Day.
I figured out that the photograph of these three individuals, representing three generations, was taken on Good Friday. And I imagined that the headstone – plain, flat, square, and marble like the rest, symbolizing equality before God – probably marked the grave of the older woman’s husband (which was true).
Two days later these three individuals would surely return with the rest of their family to attend the Moravian Easter Sunrise Service. There they would join the members of their congregation and process to the sound of brass bands playing antiphonal chorales from the church to God’s Acre, where they would joyfully proclaim their resurrection faith. I could see and hear all of it in my mind.
I learned, serendipitously, that I actually know the man in the photograph. He is the Rt. Rev. Graham Rights, who once sent me a handwritten note that I still have somewhere because of the encouragement that it gave to me as a young person.
Bishop Rights’ son, the younger brother of the girl in the photograph, is the same age as I am. We attended junior high school together and could do pretty good imitations during those years of televangelists from the 1980s. Now he’s an ordained minister in the Moravian Church like his father and his grandfather.
As I wait in the silence of this holy Sabbath, when the body of Jesus rested in the tomb, I’m grateful for these memories of a childhood that nurtured my faith.
Earlier this week my wife Carrie had the opportunity to listen to Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies and other books, at Barnes & Noble in Edina. Carrie recorded a short video of that conversation, which included this wonderful story:
From the flea market . . . I could hear this music wafting out of this ramshackled church with this one cruddy, “Waiting for Godot,” tree in front of it. And, you know, there’s an acronym for God that it’s the gift of desperation. And because I had no more good ideas, I hear this music, and it was like in the cartoons when the wife . . . bakes a cherry pie and puts it on the sill, and then [the] . . . aromatic cherry pie smell comes around, walking, walking, walking, and it taps [the husband] on the chest, right? And then he wakes up, and he follows it, and then he eats it, and then he gets in trouble, very comical, the angry wife, right? So that was how Jesus brought me. It was like a smell, an aroma of something baking that I could smell. And I got up and kind of walked, walked over. And I sat down in this church . . .
And then I started going. And then, as I wrote about in Traveling Mercies, I just felt like Jesus – I just felt like he was going to get me . . .
I got sober, and then I got baptized . . .
So that’s my church and that’s my Jesus.
The most exciting part of that day, however, came in the morning, when Anne Lamott was interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio’s Kerri Miller and Carrie called to ask a question about Sam, Lamott’s son, and Jax, Lamott’s grandson. You can read that exchange below or listen to it here (beginning at 22:33):
[Kerri Miller:] To the phones, to Carrie in St. Louis Park. . . .
[Carrie Willard:] Thank you, thank you. I’m a huge fan, and I loved Traveling Mercies, and I loved Operating Instructions. And one of my favorite, favorite parts of your books is when you’re talking about taking Sam to church, I think in Traveling Mercies. And I especially appreciate that now. I have two young kids, and my husband’s an Episcopal priest. And so I’m wrestling with these kids in the pews all by myself every Sunday morning, and I think about you all the time. And I’m wondering how that relationship changed as Sam grew up and how you plan to introduce Jax to your faith community, if you do.
[Anne Lamott:] That’s a good question. Thank you. I made Sam come to church till he turned 15, which was longer than the children of most priests and ministers – Episcopal priests and ministers – made their kids go. I felt that – in this world of video games and 24/7 information overload – that there were worse things you could do as a parent than to ask your kid . . . to come and sit with the revered tribal elders and to practice being quiet and to practice being polite and to practice getting out of yourself to become a person for others and to learn that there is something bigger and lovelier that you can hook into when you come to a community. . . . I bring Jax to church with me every single Sunday. . . . Jax has three little colleagues. I call them the colleagues. They’re all three years old – Cooper, Isaiah, and Zeke – and Jax loves it.
Last night my wife and I watched The Amish, a documentary by AMERICAN EXPERIENCE that was broadcast on PBS. At one point it looked back to the tragedy that unfolded inside a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006, when ten Amish girls were shot, killing five of them.
Because there was enough time between that Monday and my sermon the next Sunday at Bruton Parish Episcopal Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, I was able to reflect deeply on that event. So I didn’t merely allude to it but focused on it.
Here are the concluding thoughts of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his New Year message for 2012:
One of the unique things in the Christian faith, one of its great contributions to our moral vision, is the way it has spoken about children and young people. Whether it’s Jesus blessing children, or St. Paul encouraging a young church leader, saying, ‘Don’t let people look down on you because you’re young,’ or St. Benedict in his rule for monks saying that you need to pay attention to the youngest as well as the oldest – Christian faith has underlined the essential importance of giving young people the respect they deserve.
Of course they’re not infallible; of course they have a lot to learn. So do we all. But being grown-up doesn’t mean forgetting about the young. And a good New Year’s Resolution might be to think what you can do locally to support facilities for young people, to support opportunities for counselling and learning and enjoyment in a safe environment. And above all, perhaps we should just be asking how we make friends with our younger fellow citizens – for the sake of our happiness as well as theirs. A very happy and blessed New Year to you all.
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Edina, Minnesota
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Christmas Eve, December 24, 2011
Loosen a little our grip, O Lord, on our words and our ways, our fears and our fretfulness, that finding ourselves found in you, we may venture from the safety of the shore and launch afresh into the waters of grace with Jesus, “the bright morning star,”[1] as our guide. Amen.
When I was in college, I remember attending Christmas Eve services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina. One of the head ushers always stood out on that holy night. He could be seen marching up and down the aisles in some of the most wonderfully outrageous Christmas trousers you’ve ever seen. It was surely the only time of the year that he would’ve dared to wear such clothing in that church. Of course, he wasn’t alone. There was lots of other playful attire in the pews on people who would normally be dressed rather conservatively, to say the least.
My former boss, now the Bishop of Southern Virginia, has a similar, fond memory of a guy who would wear the same socks to his church every Christmas Eve and would show them off at the door as he greeted the clergy. The socks were green and had little silver bells all over them, so he would jingle as he walked around. Christmas brought out something playful in him, something of the joy and wonder that we see in children.
More than a few of you here tonight understand that sense of playfulness. I’m sure that Len Slade’s famous red hat is in the building. I’m also sure that there are candy cane neckties, bow ties with lights, Santa pins that play music, and red and green sparkling earrings out there in the darkness, waiting to be noticed with a little grin and a wink.
For some people, all of this is a kind of false religion, a form of escape from sadness, sickness, disappointment, and the darkness of the world. For the rest of us, however, it’s a reminder that true joy can be found in the midst of those harsh realities and that, as Isaiah declared, “on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” Continue reading →
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