Who is Your Soul Friend?

Who is Your Soul Friend?

“If you love me you will keep my commandments”

~John 14:15

Last Sunday I was finishing up a week of prayer and fellowship with a new relatively new order of nuns and monks within the Episcopal Church. Yes my friends, there are nuns and monks in the Episcopal Church. Our Bishop is a monk; a member of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist. The monastery is located on the banks of the Charles in Cambridge just off Harvard Square. Every Tuesday they have a wonderful celebration of the Holy Eucharist for the Harvard University Community. They’ve been doing this for more than thirty five years now, and the services are always full of inquiring and discerning hearts seeking more from life, seeking something from God.

The Sisters of Saint Margaret have a community in Duxbury and my son David loves “The Margarets” as he calls them. In fact Cindy and I like to attend the special services of Evensong they hold near the High and Holy Days of the Church year. Now you know where I came up with the idea of Evensong for the feast day of the Ascension which we will hold this coming Thursday evening. I do hope you will make a special effort to attend. The churches of the Merrimack Collaborative, their clergy and people have been invited to attend and many have already accepted the invitation. It would be wonderful if St. Paul’s were to put our best foot forward as a sign of our heartfelt warmth, affection and hospitality for our brother and sister Christians in our neck of the woods.

Heartfelt warmth,  affection and hospitality for our Christian brothers and sisters and others in the world; this is our spirituality. The word “Anamchara” is a Celtic word that means “soul friend”.

I remember shortly after Bishop Shaw was elected. He spoke of his image of the Episcopacy. He saw it as an evening with a good friend, gathered in the warm glow of the fireplace with a Golden Retriever curled up between them, and on and on they’d talk until the wee small hours of the morning. They would talk of what matters most to us and to God. As the embers died down in the hearth the heart’s embers grew warmer with the knowledge and love of God.

And so it was that last week I gathered with the Anamchara Fellowship. It is a growing order. In fact it is growing faster than any other order within the Episcopal Church. As of the end of last week there were 21 professed, 8 novices, 7 aspirants, 2 seekers, and 36 companions. 

It is a dispersed order and not a cloistered one. A cloistered order is one where one enters a monastery or a convent and takes vows of chastity, poverty and obedience and stays there. A dispersed order is one where you live out your Christian life where you are as married or single, working, retired or otherwise. One takes vows of simplicity, faithfulness and obedience and lives out one’s life wherever you are. There is an annual gathering of the fellowship where you spend a week praying, learning, sharing and celebrating together. There is a daily rhythm of prayer: Morning Prayer at 7:30am, Noonday Prayers , Evening Prayer at 5pm, and at 9 o’clock for Compline. We eat together, and share our learnings together during the mornings. The afternoons are free for conversations, walks, reading, or rest. There is always a “field trip” to Graeter's Ice Cream shop for some monastic fun and frolic. After all, Episcopalians love a good time even if they are vowed to a religious order.

There is also a Quiet Day. I was there to lead it, believe it or not. And yes I do know how to be quiet, although you may find that hard to believe. Sometimes it is important to return to quiet and silence to give our spirits a rest and listen to the our breath and to the beat of the human heart. The root meaning of the word “spirit” means to breathe. “Inspire” means to breathe in “expire” means to breathe out or to die; that moment when the “spirit” leaves the body. 

Thus our spirituality involves something as fundamental and central to life as to live and breathe and to have our being. We take time to be with ourselves and with God and discover what it is that arises within us needing attention. A noisy world distracts us from these things and we are much the poorer for it. A distracted world is not a spiritually healthy world. Such a world becomes anxious and depressed and without checks and balances becomes violent to the self and to the other. Without a sense of our spirituality we will certainly loose our moral compass and our spiritual center.

Thus Jesus tells us; “If you love me you will keep my commandments”.

You will love God.

You will love one another.

You will love your neighbor as you do yourself.

You will learn to do to others as you would have them do to you.

The essential simplicity of the commandments of God especially as they are personified in Jesus in flesh as blood are an invitation and moreover a commandment to live out our lives this way.

And so I was invited to the Anamchara Fellowship and the topic was storytelling. As you all must know by now, I love to tell stories. Thus as I prepared for my presentations I settled on three stories; the one that involves the death of my father and my call to priesthood. I’ve told that one here before, in fact I told it to you on Christmas Eve. How I lost my dad at Christmas time when I was eight years old, but then how I received in my heart a sense that there was room in God’s heart for my dad. That sense has been at the heart of my faith ever since that day, and it has been at the heart of the Gospel I share with all who need to hear of God’s victory over all sin and all death. There is room in God’s heart for all. It was because of all this that I became a priest. That was my first story.

My second story spoke of my professional struggles with all the controversies that have embroiled the church ever since I even began my days in seminary. It all began with the struggle for civil rights and even one of my classmates, Jonathan Daniels, two years earlier than my matriculation, was murdered in Mississippi working in a voting rights effort. The struggle to make the Book of Common Prayer more accessible to a contemporary audience was and continues to be an issue among us. Gender equality in the church and the ordination of women was and continues to be an issue. The consecration of Barbara Harris was yet another brouhaha. But the granddaddy of them all was the consecration of Gene Robinson. 

As a parish priest of course there was one conflict after another but the one about Gene Robinson hit close to home. My uncle, the man who brought me up after my father’s death and the fact that two of my kids were gay raised up within me a great deal of inner conflict. As some of you know I wrote a book on the subject to try and work out the particulars in terms of biblical theology, and in the process I experienced a faith crisis and a mental breakdown. I was diagnosed with bi-polar affective disorder. No wonder with all the ups and downs of parish ministry and with the conflicted nature of all of its complex relationships, I lived out the inner conflicts within my own soul. I recovered and still take my meds and my psychiatrist and I keep and eye on things. But I did write my book. And it has led to the salvation of any number of young people who had considered suicide. Image. Just imagine. Being gay for instance in West Virginia. Not accepted at home, not accepted at school, and of course at church you are told you will be going to hell. You can see how the whole business of controversy played tricks with my sanity but this is the church I love. This is the family I love and by God I will love you all until my dying breath. That was my second story. It was a difficult story to tell. But there are many who go through such struggles. And willingness to tell the story gave others the courage to share their stories with me. It was hard work. But this is the work of God for the people of God. After that story I heard several confessions. 

The third story I told was of the building of a homeless shelter in the City of Saint Albans, West Virginia. It began with the death of three homeless veterans under the bridge across the Kanawha River. Because the soup kitchen was housed at St. Mark’s Church in Saint Albans, we knew the ones who died in the fire. I took up the struggle to find housing for the homeless. After a long battle with the city fathers, neighborhood resistance and a court battle, we were finally able to build a homeless shelter housing 28 men and women who suffered from chronic mental illness and substance abuse. The day we opened the shelter was one of the happiest days of my life. For me it was an affirmation of the power of God in the midst of a rather bleak prospect for the poor.

The opposition to the shelter was ferocious from time to time. Somewhere in the course of all the battles for a homeless shelter someone called the house and my wife answered the phone. The exchange was priceless;

"We're going to kill your husband."
"Take a numbah" she said in her flawless Boston accent; "I want to kill him too sometimes"
Needless to say I did not die then.

I told these three stories to my new friends of the Anamchara Fellowship. In preparing these stories, I began to realize that each of the stories was a resurrection story. In the first case we began with the death of my father, we ended with a call to priesthood which has now borne fruit for almost 42 years. In the second story we dealt with a lifelong struggle for justice in the midst of controversy. I suffered with an inner struggle for spiritual and emotional sanity and came through it quite well thank you very much. And then of course there was that book I finally wrote. I had never pictured myself becoming an author, but with God’s grace and God’s power all things become possible through the One who gives us the strength to do all things. In the third story we begin with the death of three homeless under a bridge in a fire during a dreadful winter storm. We concluded with the building of a shelter that gives far more than just a roof over the heads of the homeless. There is a whole constellation of supports for health care, job training community support. 

Our lives are full of resurrection stories. We all die little deaths from time to time. We are all given new life as well as we rise again out of the pain and sorrow we all know from time to time.

These are the stories we tell one another over coffee and tea. These are the stories we tell our soul friends and. This is how we nurture our families and our friends. We all profit from the telling and the hearing of such stories. They are born within our prayers as we consider well within our hearts; “what is God doing within my life? What is Jesus doing for me? How am I being obedient to God’s commandment to love one another, to love and care for myself and to treat others as I myself wish to be treated.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses as the great All Saints Day collect put it. These witnesses are our soul friends; our Anamchara. May God grant that we learn how to make and keep such friends recognizing that the greatest friend we will ever have is

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Fr Paul

The Easter Reason to be Alive

The Reason We Are Here

In the Passover meal that Jesus had with his disciples, in the Passover meal all Jews have with their families and friends, the evening begins with the four questions; “Why is this night different from all other nights”? Then the Papa, tells the story; “The Liturgy of the Haggadah”; that is to say the “telling” of the mighty acts by which God delivered the Children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the Promised Land. The Christian year now comes to Easter Day. We’ve had a remarkable Lenten journey tracing the Eucharist historically through time, a liturgy that find its roots in the Passover meal itself.

Why then is this day different from all other days for us? On this day we sing of Jesus’ Resurrection and his power over sin and death.

Do we understand and believe what such songs sing?

Will we really live again?

Has Jesus really delivered us from the power of evil?

Why is this day so different from all other days?

Our souls come to rest on how we answer such questions. 

That Jesus has such power as to rise from sin and death is not really so difficult to comprehend. After all if we believe he was indeed the “sinless one” and if he really was the Son of God, then the power he has over life and death would be self evident. His resurrection is really not so much of a stretch.

But why would he want to share this victory with each of us? Why would he love us so? In fact why did he go to the bother of making us in the first place? Why the fall into sin, only to redeem us back again? That seems like a set of imponderables to me.

I often wonder about the business of being alive. The very notion of being carries a mystery with it if we take a moment to ponder from time to time. The Mystery and the Majesty of life itself; Its purpose?

Then I wonder why we make it so difficult on ourselves and others. 

Why the sin?

Why the hate?

White supremacists? Jews? Arabs? Blacks? Whites? Republicans and Democrats?

Men and women can get into it and the nature of those conflicted relationships can baffle the best.

The whole business of sexual orientation has gotten to the point that the Church in Uganda has supported capital punishment for folks just for being who they are. Then they turn around and accuse us of being Biblically unsound because of our compassion and inclusivity. Talk about baffling!

In the midst of it all we have the Russian Army on the Eastern Front of the Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula already annexed. Putin has it in mind that the great tragedy of the last few decades was the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and oh wouldn’t he like to be able to put that broken egg back together again. On the other hand there is the army of the Ukraine. And we have more or less thrown ourselves into the conflict on the side of Kiev. NATO forces are now mobilizing on the Western front of the Ukraine. Oh my aching head!

Kids and drugs, unemployment, crime…I could go on.

None of this is new.

The world Jesus was born into was occupied by the Roman legions, and the “Herods” ruled in brutal succession. It is interesting that of all the places on earth to select for birth, God choose the most conflicted place in history. There were wars, rumors of wars, insurrections and a whole lot of bloodshed.

And don’t forget the poor, the lame, the outcast, the lepers, the tax collectors, the prostitutes and sinners of all sorts. You name it, Jesus loved them all. Jesus loved us all even in the very center of our sins.

It was his idea to love us whoever we were. This offended the religious authorities who had a strict set of rules about who could come to the Temple and who could not, in order to offer sacrifices to God. Jesus, on the other hand loved those folks who had been marginalized and excluded. And the idea caught on with the early Christian Community. 

The first great controversy in the church, and yes, we’ve been embroiled in one controversy after another ever since, that first controversy was over whether you had to be Jewish first in order to be a Christian. After all, up until this first council in the Acts of the Apostles, from which we read today, everyone in the church was a Jew. Therefore all future Christians should be be Jews, correct? Peter and Paul in the meantime began to hear what Jesus had said about going into all the world and preaching this Gospel message of Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Love and likewise the Power of God over all sin and death. So then in today’s reading from Acts Peter says; "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” 

Please note how fundamental this idea is to our faith. Anyone means anyone. Everyone means everyone. There are no exceptions. Even when Phillip the Evangelist baptized the Ethiopian Eunuch along the Gaza strip; I can well imagine the reaction back at headquarters; “You baptized a what?” We know that Paul had broken down the dividing walls between Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, male and female, now the dividing wall means even the Ethiopian Eunuch! Where will it end? Thanks be to God, it doesn’t. This is Easter at its heart. This Gospel message applies to all of you, no exceptions! The ever widening and inclusive embrace of Christ continues even unto this day.

The Gospel had become universal, in other words it had become “catholic” in its original sense. The church had become One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. The Good news now came to all, and covered as we might say a multitude of sins.

And if that wasn’t enough, Mary went to the tomb early on that first great Easter Day, not expecting much of anything except for the exquisite sadness of yet another death, but she found that the stone had been rolled away. Grave robbers! That was her first thought and she told the gardener so. But the gardener was somebody she had already known quite well. Interestingly enough she did not recognize him at first. Easter is, after all, a total surprise. No matter how many times Jesus told them that he must suffer, die and rise again, these people were not ready for that moment when it happened. He turned to Mary. He was not the gardener after all. He was Jesus. He was then and is now the Risen Christ.

“Mary”, he said to her. 

It wasn’t until that moment that she recognized him. “I have seen the Lord!”

That is how it will be with us too. All our lives long we hear the church tell us about our forgiveness. We hear about the resurrection. But we’re not really going to believe it until that moment comes when Jesus says to me; “Paul”. You won’t believe it until he calls you each by name.

So why are we here?

What is the purpose of my life?

You are here to bring good news to the poor.

To comfort those who mourn

To lift up the meek and the lowly

To satisfy those who hunger and thirst for righteousnesses

To be merciful and to obtain mercy

To be pure in heart and to see God

To be peacemakers, because this is what the children of God do.

And indeed to be persecuted for the sake of God, as you shall discover when you stand up for the poor, the meek and those who mourn and all the vulnerable of the earth.

The Wolves of Wall Street will seek to devour you. Greed, power and voracious sin is alive and well. There are all kinds of forces out there and in here that seek to devour and destroy the creatures of God. Make no mistake about that. That’s why we need to have our wits about us and become intentional about our discipleship.

We have a reason and a purpose to be here. We have been redeemed in order that we may participate in God's work of redemption for all. God wants to salvage whatever is possible of our lives and the lives of others. God wants us to be sure we know we are forgiven, and to make sure others do as well. God wants us all to be reconciled. We have put to death all our sins and nailed them to the cross of Christ. Thus as we die with him we are now raised with him in his glorious resurrection. Jesus Christ is Risen today!

Happy Easter my friends! Thank God at least we know why we’re here!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Fr Paul

Want to Know God?

Listen to the Silence

It really is that simple. If you want to know God, listen to the Silence.

Not preachers.

Not televangelists.

Not even the local parish priest.

But listen to your own heart

In silence

Before you fall asleep

Perfectly still

Listen

I learned this as a boy. 

When my father died at Christmas. I was merely 8 years old. And when I cried myself to sleep at night; night after night; all I heard was silence. This went on for 18 months when one bright sunny summer day on the way home from church, I picked a solitary leaf off from behind a chain link fence, a single solitary leaf from off a city hedge.

As I pressed my thumbnail into the leaf and the life blood of that leaf left its green chlorophyl there for me to see, that's when I heard something in my heart that said; "Don't you know there's a special place in my heart for your dad?"

There were no voices. No sounds. Still there was but a profound silence.

But now I was able to give voice to the Silence.

Notice there that I have capitalized the word "Silence".

I spoke out loud what the Silence spoke to my heart; "Don't you know there's a special place in my heart for your dad?"

When he died there were some uncharitable words for my dad. There had been a divorce. Distant cousins who were "Christian" said my dad couldn't go to heaven because my dad did not go to church.

Thankfully, my family wasn't particularly religious, so they told me not to pay attention to them. Still, it was tough to discover that my dad was never coming home again. Tougher still to wonder if I'd even get to see him in the life to come. I began to think that "Christians" could be mean. 

They still can be.

So then I ran home to my grandmother to ask her;

"Ma, is there a God?"

"Yes," she said, "of course there is".

"Ma, is there a heaven?"

Somewhat irritated, after all there were mouths to be fed and mealtime was hardly a good time for theology. But still, she answered; "Yes, of course there is".

So now I pressed my luck. With a note of authority, I asked her;

"Ma, is my daddy there?"

I knew what she thought of my dad. More than once she said it was the Irish that ruined Boston. Furthermore, the thought of an Englishwoman spending an eternity with an Irishman must have given her pause, but then she did the unforgettable one act that changed my life; she knelt down and she folded my head into the nape of her neck and it is as though I can still smell her hair as I write this story and she said; 

"Of course he is".

My heart leapt for joy now at night as I poured out my soul to the Silence.

Now the Silence became a Presence I could talk to.

I learned that the Presence had a name;

God.

I learned that the Presence had a Holy Name;

Jesus

I learned that the Presence filled me with the Holy Wisdom from on High and was called;

The Holy Spirit

God came to life for me in the Silence, where I still meet God night after night and day after day.

And so it was that I gave my life to the Holy Trinity.

Not a doctrine but a living dynamic within the Silence I have come to know and love as the Living God.

It was then that I decided to become a Parish Priest so that I could share this message with all who yearned to hear it and many who didn't. 

Gay or straight, black or white, male or female, rich or poor....we are ALL ONE IN CHRIST!

So if you want to know God, listen to the Silence. 

Listen closely to the profound Silence.

In the Silence God will speak to you and say;

"Don't you know there's a special place in my heart for You!"

Fr. Paul

Holy Innocents in Connecticut

Keep Today as a Holy Day

Holy Innocents! Is is a very holy day in the Church Calendar and comes only three days after Christmas. This year Holy Innocents came early to folks in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. The day marks the time when Herod called for the death of the children. Herod suffered from paranoia. He feared that Jesus would become King of the Jews. So he ordered the murder of all the male children in Judea under the age of two.

Mental illness struck again just yesterday in Sandy Hook in an elementary school, and left 20 children, 7 adults and the killer all dead. 

"How can anyone take away our angels?" A Lament is raised to heaven. We join with those who refuse to be consoled.

Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: 

‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
   wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
   she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’

~Jeremiah 31:15

There is plenty of time to debate the next steps to bring this madness under some kind of control

But for now, we weep. Weeping and loud lamentation to God and to our countrymen. 

And we keep this day as a Holy Day for our children.

There is no consolation for those whose tears drench their homes.

Christmas! 

Holy Innocents!

There is only this. God knows what it is like to loose a Child. 

He was born in a Manger in Bethlehem. 

He brought us hope, healing, forgiveness and eternal life.

But of course he died.

Again the Powers and Principalities of this present evil did their work.

The Holy Innocent was put up on the cross for all of us to see. 

He changed our lives and so shall these sweet ones.

Is there any comfort for us?

There is only this. God knows what it is like to loose a Child.

Mary takes him in her arms.

Drop, drop slow tears.

We shall weep, wail and lament.

But we shall not despair.

These Holy Innocents shall not have died in vain.

We will be back soon.

And when we return, we shall require an answer!

There is eternal life and we shall continue our work.

In the meantime let there be a blessing of protection on the Children we love. 

And may God take the angels into his arms and wipe the tears from their faces.

And may God take us too in his arms and be with us in our sorrow.

And let us all keep Holy Day for these Holy Innocents.

Fr. Paul