Category Archives: Gratitude

Holy Saturday: One Photograph and Many Memories

"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.

It’s a Boy! Another Promoted to Big Brother!

Three years ago, my father died on the eve of Palm Sunday. I’ve reflected on that experience previously here and here. The days before the beginning of this year’s Holy Week, however, brought with them a very different kind of experience for my wife and me – the birth of a baby. This is our second child and second son, who will turn one week old tomorrow. Needless to say, throughout Holy Week, I’ll be thinking a lot about birth, death, and the lives that are given to us as a gift between those events. Here’s a prayer and  a couple of photos from day one:

God our creator, we thank you for the gift of this child, entrusted to our care. May we be patient and understanding, ready to guide and to forgive, so that through our love he may come to know your love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

All Things Come from You, O Lord

This past summer, our family participated in a community supported agriculture program (CSA) through Driftless Organics in Southwestern Wisconsin. We picked up a box each week in Minneapolis that was packed with seasonal produce and that had been delivered straight from the farm. My wife loved the challenge of trying to figure out how to use this bounty, some of which is described in her blog, The Contessa-Curessa Project.

Box from Driftless OrganicsTaking time to understand where our food comes from and what goes into making the wonderful things we enjoy at the dinner table makes a person more grateful, I think, for these gifts that come from God and that we share with our family and friends. This notion has taken root, quite literally, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Bethesda, Maryland, as reported in this short video by PBS’s Religion & Ethics News Weekly. In the midst of the economic recession, they’ve been inspired to rejoice in God’s creation and to share their harvest with those in need.

Have the circumstances of the past year caused you to rejoice in something and to share it with others? If not, perhaps today is a good day to start making those kinds of investments – in food, in friendships, in a generosity of the heart that embraces the people and the world around you. If you’re interested in this subject, you might enjoy listening to The Ethics of Eating, Krista Tippet’s Speaking of Faith interview with Barbara Kingsolver, a novelist and author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I’ll let Kingsolver have the last word:

When we changed our thinking and started every meal with the question, ‘What do we have? What’s in season? What do we have plenty of?’ – it became, really, a long exercise in gratitude.