Checking the Mail

It used to be that I checked my mailbox religiously every day.

But now, I admit, I sometimes go days without even thinking of the mail.

With email and even my bills being sent electronically, there just doesn’t seem much of reason to walk down the stairs and across the parking lot to pop open a mailbox that will probably be empty.

So the other night I was pleasantly surprised when I checked my mail and found two surprises: a gift from my mom and a letter from a friend.

I can’t even tell you the last time I received a handwritten letter from someone, but this letter in particular meant a lot to me knowing the care and thought that had gone into it. I hope that friend knows how special she is to me.

The gift from my mom was also special. This past Christmas she had sent me a beautiful rosary and even as I thanked her for it, I also made mention that there existed an Anglican version of the prayer beads. My mom immediately went to work trying to locate one for me.

With online shopping like amazon.com, locating an Anglican rosary should have been an easy task, but my mom took a different route.

My mom doesn’t have a lot of money and she can’t just slap down a credit card so, instead she found this woman online who makes Anglican rosaries and called her up.

She explained to the woman my story and the woman offered to make an Anglican rosary (to my mom’s specifications) and send it to my mom. If my mom liked it, she could send the woman a check, otherwise no worries.

A few weeks later, the rosary arrived and my mom sent it on to me.

The rosary the woman made was beautiful. I started to cry as I held it. My mom had chosen picture jasper for the beads. Each bead crisscrossed with tiny lines seemed to represent worlds in a universe I had yet to explore. The cross my mom had chosen was the Canterbury cross.

I cried not because I was moved by its beauty, but because I was touched, profoundly touched, by the efforts my mom had put into getting it for me.

One thing I have learned since joining Hope, since becoming an Episcopalian, since deciding to explore this calling to the priesthood is that it’s not the journey itself that is so important, it’s the people who travel with us on the journey.

In Ruth 1:16-17, Ruth tells Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die and there I will be buried.”

The level of commitment Ruth makes to Naomi is astounding and I think reflective of the relationships God wishes us to have with each other.

We are all on the journey together. We leave jobs. We retire. We move away. We leave churches. We move on, but every one of us impacts every other one of us on this journey and our commitment to each other can never waiver even if we go months or years or lifetimes without seeing each other.

It’s the people. It’s human connection.

It is one reason to check the mailbox every day.

Explorers

Some years ago now, I was standing in front of my class reading to them an article. It was a few days after the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy and as I read to my students about the astronauts on board the Columbia, I found myself suddenly choked up, tears on the verge of streaming down my face.

Soon every girl in the class was crying silent tears in sympathy with me. When I could talk again, I explained to them why I was so upset.

As a child I had always wanted to be an astronaut.

I don’t think I’m alone in that. Of all the fantastical things we dream of as children, I think being an astronaut is the most unique because it is the only thing of fantasy that might one day be real for us.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster that claimed the lives of seven astronauts including teacher Christa McAuliffe. To children today, the Challenger must seem as foreign and distant as the Kennedy assassination seemed to me when I was a child.

But as the end of the space shuttle program grows near, we must never forget Columbia and Challenger. We must remember them not for their tragic ends, but for the dream they stood for.

Human beings are unique in their need to always explore the unknown. We have a great capacity for imagination and a great need to test the limits of our own understanding. From the very first explorers who pushed out over the Atlantic to the settlers here in America who pushed west over the Great Plains, we are always pushing the boundaries of our world.

When Ronald Reagan spoke of the Challenger, he quoted a poem by John McGee. Reagan said, “We shall never forget them nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their mission and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth … to touch the face of God.’”

That quote still brings tears to my eyes.

“To touch the face of God.”

Imagination, exploration … it is all irrevocably linked to faith.

At the heart of it all, our need to “see what’s out there” is also a need to know God.

God bless the space program.

God bless all who serve.

And God bless all who dream.

Restless

I grew up in Upstate New York. We lived in a small town and sometimes my mom would get restless and ask my dad to take us for a drive. We would make a loop around town that my mom called “The Grand Tour.” If we were especially daring, we would make a counter-clockwise loop instead, known as “The Reverse Grand Tour.”

There are times when I think I’ve inherited my mom’s restlessness. There are times I get in the car and just drive with no plan in mind. In fact, some years ago I was living a few doors down from a friend. She knew I was no social butterfly, so when she started to notice my car was frequently gone, she asked me, “Where do you go?”

When I think back on the times in my life that I have felt restless, all those times seem to have one thing in common.

It was during those restless times that I felt very strongly that I was supposed to be doing something else with my life.

As I’ve learned over the past year, those restless times have something else in common too. Those were the times when I followed my own path, when I was either ignoring God or had gotten so used to ignoring Him that I could no longer hear Him.

All that remained was this restlessness, this prickly, somewhat maddening, sensation to do something different with my life.

But what?

Not once during those restless times did I ask God what He wanted me to do.

Which isn’t to say that God didn’t reach out to me during those times. I was in college when I first dreamed of God’s plan for me. In my dream, I was running through campus, crying and when someone stopped me to ask why I was so upset, I replied, “Because God has called me to the ministry.”

I wasn’t foolish enough to ignore such a plainspoken dream, but after analyzing my options (again without consultation of God), I moved to Florida instead and got a job teaching.

Over the past few years, God has also tried the more subtle approach, leading me in Barnes and Noble to a display of Barbara Brown Taylor books, Barbara Brown Taylor being an incredible author and oh … an Episcopal Priest.

But when God led me to Hope, He left the subtlety of bookstore trips and dreams behind. When I walked into Hope, God said “Here is your church and oh remember that thing, that really, really important thing I’ve been wanting you to do, that priest thing, now’s the time. You’ve had more than enough time to wander your path and can you honestly say it has made you happy?”

Today’s gospel reading from Matthew 4:12-23 detailed Jesus’ call of Peter and Andrew, James and John. “Come follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” Peter never looks at Andrew and says “Who is this guy?” James never asks John “Should we?”

All four dropped what they were doing without a word, without hesitation, and followed Jesus.

It’s funny how easy and hard a thing that is to do. It’s hard because it requires complete surrender, giving over control of your life to God, but it’s easy too, because once I made the commitment when I walked into Hope last Easter to do whatever it is that God asks me to do, all that restlessness faded away.

Now my restlessness serves as a good barometer. Whenever I feel restless now, I know that I am not on the path that God intends for me. Whenever I feel restless now, I know to go to God and ask Him what it is He wants me to do.

And I think back to my confirmation, when Bishop Hugo asked me if I was happy and when I declared that I was, he warned me, “If you turn your back on God, you will never be happy again.”

"I know," I answered him.

Spiritual Recharging

One of my favorite superheroes is the Green Lantern. I’m also partial to the Green Arrow and the Green Hornet, so maybe I need my superheroes/crime fighters smartly dressed in green.

What I think I loved most about the Green Lantern when I was a kid was his power ring, this green ring that could create just about anything the Green Lantern needed to defeat the powers of evil.

As an adult, I think what I love the most about the Green Lantern is how human he seems compared to the likes of Superman. You see, unlike Superman and Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern doesn’t have unlimited power. His power comes from the ring and if he overextends himself, the ring’s power is drained and the Green Lantern is left defenseless.

We may not have power rings like the Green Lantern, but we are at frequent risk of overextending ourselves and draining ourselves to such a point it’s sometimes difficult to get up in the morning.

Like the Green Lantern, we either have to watch carefully to make sure we don’t burn out, or if we do, we have to find a way to recharge ourselves spiritually and emotionally.

In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers writes, “He saved and sanctified you to exhaust you. Be exhausted for God, but remember that He is your supply.”

Lately, I have felt exhausted and weary and even though I was praying to God every day for strength, I realized the other day that I had forgotten the very thing that Chambers says is so important.

God is my strength. When I am in need, I have to do more than just pray. I have to surround myself with God and reminders of who I am in His eyes.

Last Sunday, a friend of mine gave me a gift card to Barnes and Noble. She wanted me to buy a specific book. I found it pretty easily in the Christian section of the store, and after I found it, I could have just taken the book up to the counter, paid for it and left, but I had money left over on the card and I decided to linger in the Christian books a little longer.

And the longer I stayed there, the more I wanted to stay there. The more books I looked at, the more I realized how hungry I was, how starving I was, for spiritual food. As I read, I could feel God inside of me, beginning to work on repairs, knitting me back together again.

That is who God is. In Psalm 139, in verses 13 and 15, God is referred to as a weaver. He knits us together. We are “woven” by His hands.

God is the creator. And we are works in progress. But we have to turn to Him, especially in times of trial, to let Him finish, to let Him continue what He has started.

No power rings are necessary.

Just surrender and long, deep breaths.

Things that Bring Me Peace

In C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, the boy Shasta is alone among the Tombs at night. He’s afraid and cold, but then out of the darkness appears a cat, a lone cat in the midst of a place of sorrow.

Lewis writes, “Shasta lay down beside it with his back against the cat and his face toward the Tombs, because if one is nervous there’s nothing like having your face toward the danger and having something warm and solid at your back.”

Later Shasta learns that the cat who provided him comfort that night was none other than the great lion, Aslan.

My own cat brings me a great deal of comfort. Sometimes when it’s cold and I’m lying on my side, he sneaks up behind me and curls up in the crook of my legs providing that warmth at my back.

Even though I know he’s no Aslan in disguise, I have little doubt that God has provided me and all of us with pets for the soul/sole purpose of reminding us of unconditional love.

When my cat sits on my lap and purrs this rumbling, throaty purr, I feel this peace, this inner peace and I relax and find myself smiling.

It has been a trying few weeks for me and sometimes I feel a lot like Shasta alone in the Tombs with night fast approaching.

But here and there are God things … always in the midst of the darkness.

Twice this week, I have walked back through the woods at church and stood on the recently built bridge that overlooks the creek bed. Even though that space in the woods is maybe fifty feet at most from civilization, there are enough trees to buffer the sound and block out the buildings that sit on the horizon. Out there by the bridge, it feels like a whole different world.

Out there, I watch the tall, swaying pines and smile at the shadows that dance across the leaf strewn ground. The sunlight plays in the palm fronds, here one second, gone the next, nature’s version of hide and seek.

And for a moment I know why people once believed in magic, why people once believed in fairies, because there is something mystical and completely beyond human understanding out there in the trees.

But what’s out there is not the stuff of fantasy and fairytales … it is something real and grand. It is God. It is God’s creation. It is a glimpse of what the world really is stripped bare of noise and clutter and hardship.

It is more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.

And it brings me peace.

It gives me comfort.

Matthew 11:28 reads, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

And whenever my life seems overburdened, I know that I can find God out there by the bridge or in the purring of my cat. He is everywhere and sometimes in places we tend to overlook.

But God is there and He will bring us peace.

The Songs of Hope

I was a teenager when I first started reading the Book of Psalms.

I was going through a particularly hard time and I found the Psalms to be filled with raw emotion, deep despair, and in the midst of all that … hope and unflinching faith.

Psalm 71:20-21 reads: “Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up. You will increase my honor and comfort me once again.”

And in that same Psalm a few verses earlier: “But as for me, I will always have hope.”

It is one of the things that I love most about the Bible. That even though it tells of events that happened thousands of years ago, the true essence of faith carries through the millennia.

Though separated by hundreds or thousands of generations, we can still understand the trials of Job, of David, of Isaiah and Jeremiah. It makes their faith more real that they suffered too.

There is not a person in the Bible, from Adam to Jesus, who does not suffer, who does not at some point cry out or feel grief settle into their soul.

But through that all, their faith is constant, through that all, they never cease believing in God even though, like in the case of Job, they may question His actions.

The Psalms are the poetry of faith. They are the songs of hope. Even in the midst of unending pain and suffering, there is always a light, there is always a way home, and there is always hope.

The poet Alfred Tennyson wrote a long, extended poem entitled “In Memoriam,” after the death of his best friend. In the poem Tennyson questions God, questions his faith, questions others perceptions of his faith and of his friend. Even though Tennyson’s grief is intense, he ends the poem with a declaration of faith.

He writes: “That God, which ever lives and loves/One God, one law, one element/And one far-off divine event/To which the whole creation moves.”

It is an acknowledgement of God’s unending love and a suggestion that no matter what we do in this life, we are forever moving toward Him and He is moving to us.

My guess is that Tennyson was a reader of the Psalms too.

Life will always be a struggle. And there will be times when that struggle may feel more than we can bear. And it is those times that I will turn to the Psalms to be reminded that I am not the first to have suffered and that those who suffered far greater things I stayed strong in faith and believed always in hope.

The Lamppost

Our library now has a lamppost.

It has a wardrobe and trees still covered in snow, but just beginning to bud.

There is even a lion that seems to move around the church on its own even though it is only made of stuffing and cloth.

The library at Hope needed a lamppost though to really make the scene complete and now, thanks to a donation, we have one and it’s beautiful.

Though the first of the published Narnia books is titled The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one could argue that it is the lamppost that appears in this novel and in others that carries with it enough symbolism to warrant at least a mention in the title.

It is the lamppost that is waiting for Lucy on the other side of the wardrobe doors.

Years later, it is the lamppost that leads Lucy and her brothers and sister from Narnia back to our world.

When Lucy first enters Narnia, she arrives at night. It is winter in Narnia. It is cold and sad and dark, but Lucy is charmed rather than afraid. Here in these magical woods, here in these foreign lands is something completely familiar and yet so out of place … a lamppost.

It is the only source of light in this new world she has entered.

It is a light that has been burning for centuries.

The origin of the lamppost goes back to the creation of Narnia itself, when the soil was so rich and alive that anything planted grew … even a lamppost.

In The Magician’s Nephew, it’s revealed that Jadis (who will eventually become known as the White Witch) had once been to our world. Stripped of her powers here, she tore off the arm of a lamppost to use as a weapon. But soon she is whisked away with Digory and Polly to witness the birth of Narnia.

Jadis is so disturbed by the mysterious lion (Aslan) who is singing the world into being that she throws the arm of the lamppost at him. It bounces off, harmlessly, and sinks into the ground where it later grows into a new lamppost.

This brand new fledgling arrives into the world already lit and casting light, and it stays that way through to the end of Narnia itself.

And what a message C.S. Lewis sends with this little lamppost. That a thing once used as a weapon could grow to be a light in the darkness, a comfort to a small girl visiting a strange new world for the first time.

It is testament to the power of all things good.

I will be reminded of that now every time I walk into the library at Hope and see our new light.