No Longer New

This morning I was sitting in church listening to Pastor Debbie’s sermon and thinking how bright it was inside the sanctuary.  Hope is blessed with floor to ceiling windows on two sides of the church and between those windows and the overhead lights, it was almost too bright.

In either the second or third Kid’s Talk I gave I told the kids how I was afraid of the dark, how I keep an abundance of flashlights nearby just in case the power goes out.  Light is so important to me, especially natural light.  I almost didn’t buy the condo I’m currently living in because it faced north and didn’t give me the lighting that I needed.

When I think of all the reasons I stayed at Hope, I sometimes wonder if subconsciously I stayed because of the light.  Every other Episcopal church I’ve been to has been dark and cave-like.  At those churches I tend to feel hemmed in and sad.  But at Hope, the light was a beacon calling me home.

In a little over two months, I will be celebrating my second anniversary at Hope.  I can’t believe it’s been two years.  I can’t believe how long and short that seems.  My life has changed in so many wonderful ways, ways I began cataloguing in this blog in May, 2010.

I called my blog New to Hope, meaning that both in a literal and figurative way.

Two weeks ago, I sat in the Diocesan Convention and heard Bishop-Elect Greg Brewer give his first address.  He quoted Vaclav Havel in regards to hope and much like Pastor Debbie, whenever I hear that word these days, I immediately perk up.

I like just about everything Havel says about hope, but this particular line sticks with me.  Havel says: “[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

That is the hope I have been given, the certainty that everything in life has meaning, has purpose, and that God will use everything great or small, good or bad, in furtherance of His will and His will is always glorious and wonderful and beautiful.

Hope, Havel says, “is an orientation of the spirit.”  Hope does not reside within us.  Instead, we live inside hope.

This blog has chronicled my journey to hope.  And I am both pleased and saddened to say this part of the journey is over.  I am no longer new to hope.  I’ve been living it.  And so, after much prayer, I’ve decided it’s time to end this blog.

When I was in fourth grade, I wrote my first poem and all through fifth and sixth grade, I wrote poems like a mad woman.  Ironically, poetry kept me sane when the world around me began to crumble, when the death of a friend and the illness of a parent threatened to pull me far, far away from hope.

Eventually, I healed and the flow of poetry slowed.  But I never stopped writing.  I turned to playwriting next and then more poetry in college and then novel writing as a young adult and blogging most recently.  Whenever I stopped writing one thing, something else was waiting to take its place.  Interestingly enough, I think my photography has taken the place of my poetry.  Whatever I felt writing poetry, I feel now when I snap a good picture.

Regardless, what I’m trying to say is that even as I bring this blog to a close, I will not stop writing.  I may even start another blog.  And if and when I do, you’ll be the first one to know.  In the meantime, God has called me to write other things.  And as I’ve discovered with my call to the priesthood, when God calls us to do something, we can only ignore Him for so long.

I thank each and every one of you who has read this blog.  As a character in the movie Shadowlands said, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

You are not alone.

And thanks to you, neither am I.

God Bless.

See you soon.

Power Windows

When I was a teenager, my mom had a car with a horn that would randomly go off sometimes while we were cruising down the highway and sometimes while it was sitting in the driveway in the middle of the night.  I’m not sure which was more embarrassing, waving to people on the highway and giving them a quick shrug of the shoulders as an apology or waking up at two in the morning to this distant whine, like a drone of a mosquito that can’t be swatted away, and realizing it’s not a mosquito at all, but the car, some Stephen King she-devil.

My own car these days is picking up some quirks.  It’s the power windows most recently.  A month ago, I rolled down the driver side window to drop a letter in the mailbox and then couldn’t get the window back up.  I was sitting at a stoplight, pushing the up button with one hand and physically manhandling the window with the other.  Finally, it came up.  But since I never know when the window’s going to work, most recently, I’ve not used it at all.  It’s a pain.  Who knew I rolled down the window so much?

This morning I woke up with vertigo, my first bout of it in more than three years.  It was depressing and I was angry and it was a horrible way to start the morning.  Though the spinning only lasts as long as I have my head in a certain position (in this case lying down on my left side), I’m left feeling woozy for hours after.  I had every excuse to not move from my condo today.  I had every excuse to sit in this darkened cave and feel sorry for myself.  And I actually did that for about an hour or so.

But then, motivated by an article in the newspaper, I headed out to the Viera Wetlands (yes, I was well enough to drive, no worries) to take pictures of the birds that had migrated there for the winter.  I had been to the Viera Wetlands before, but it had been awhile and I had a new camera to try out.

As I drove around the park, sometimes I stopped and got out and snapped a few pictures, but sometimes, I was just too tired to get out.  And so I took a risk, and rolled down the window, smiling as it came down smoothly and holding my breath each time it stuttered and struggled to come back up again.

But it was a risk worth taking.  God let me capture some of the most beautiful photos I have ever taken including the eyes and nostrils of an alligator sitting just above the surface of the water as concentric circles expand out and around and then later, the body and head of the same gator as he moved through weeds.  A great blue heron actually flew to me and posed twenty feet from the car.  Another bird—I’m not sure what type, I haven’t looked it up yet—stood in the sunlight in such a way the light seemed create a halo around its head.  And I wondered if angels sometimes appear as birds.

Life is so short.  This is the lesson I have learned over the past few months.  It is so short.  And even on the days when I wake up with vertigo, even on the days following the nasty fevers that have plagued me for the past two years, even when I wake up in pain, I know I am blessed.  If I can get up out of bed, if I can walk, if I can drive my car out into nature to take photos, then I know I am blessed.

I am blessed with life.

Today Gabby Giffords resigned from Congress.  A year after a gunman’s bullet nearly took her life, she is still recovering.  She still needs help to walk.  She still hasn’t regained her ability to speak with any of the fluency she once was capable of.  But she gets up out of bed every morning and she strives for something.  She strives to be strong.  She strives to hope.  She strives to live.

And I’m sure she would agree that she is blessed.

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring us.  We don’t know if that power window will come back up once we have rolled it down, but we take the risk anyway.

We get up.

We walk out into the world.

And we live.

Silence

When I was in college my choice of major became a running joke between my dentist and me.  Every six months he would try and make conversation and ask me about my major and seemingly every six months, I would have changed my major to something else.

I started out majoring in Social Studies Education, followed then by Linguistics, then Journalism, before finally settling on a double major of Creative Writing and Literature.  The outlier among these majors would seem to be Social Studies Education, but in truth it fits perfectly with what I love.  I wanted to be a social studies teacher because I loved history.  I loved telling the stories of what happened to us in the past.

I love stories.  It’s as simple as that.  Perhaps I could even take it down to another level and say simply that I love words.

I love language.  I love the beauty of the words.  I love how rich and wonderful words can be.  I love how words make me feel, how they warm my heart, or excite my soul.  I love how sometimes when I read, I get so moved I have to close the book or turn off the Kindle and take a breath.

One of my favorite episodes of Friends has Joey revealing that when he read The Shining, he was so scared he had to hide the book in the freezer.  When he and Rachel trade books—he gives her The Shining and she gives him Little Women, he is so moved by Little Women that too winds up in the freezer. 

In Journalism class, we learned how to weight a sentence.  Especially in journalism, when writing a news story, you want the most important facts to appear in the beginning of the sentence.  So for example, you wouldn’t want to reveal the murderer’s name at the end of the sentence or the end of the paragraph or the end of the story.  It's called burying the lead (or lede).

But even outside journalism, how we weight words is very important.

I was reminded of this when I was reading today’s psalm in church.  Psalm 62:5 reads in the NRSV: “For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him.”  It is a beautiful line, in and of itself, and far be it from me to criticize word placement, but I think (and I’ve blogged about this before) that the meaning, the impact, of this sentence changes if you flip three words.

“My soul waits in silence.”

As it is written, “my soul” is given the most weight, followed by “waits,” and ended with “in silence.”

The fact that we are waiting is given primary importance here.

But what if we flip some words?

What if we said: my soul in silence waits.

Now the importance shifts from the waiting to how we wait.

Such a minor thing, but do you see the difference?

We wait for God … in silence.  The silent part is very important and easily forgotten when slipped in at the end there.

How do we wait?  In silence.

We wait for Him at rest, calm like the sea on a windless day. 

We wait for Him—in silence—in stillness, not wanting even to breathe and remembering 1 Kings 19:12: “And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”

“A still small voice.”

The reason we wait in silence is so that we might hear that still small voice.

Two words—in silence.  Pay them close attention.  They may be all that stands between you and God.

All Natural

The Bible is filled with human beings.

That’s stating the obvious right?

But how often do we look at the humanness of the people in the Bible?  How often do we focus on their sainthood instead?  We put Old Testament heroes like Moses and Joshua and Solomon and New Testament heroes like Paul and Peter on pedestals and we think how can we ever achieve a fraction of what they achieved?  How can we ever experience the closeness and richness of their relationship to God? 

When we think like that we create a barrier between ourselves and them.  They cease being people and become characters and legends.  They are simply people who have lived so long ago they might as well not have lived at all.  They become stories.

Which is why I found two of today’s readings so refreshing because of the humanness of Samuel’s response to God and because of the perfectly natural response of Nathanael’s when told the savior had been found.

In 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Samuel is lying down minding his own business when he hears someone call his name.  Thinking it is Eli, Samuel rushes to him only to be told that no, Eli had not called him.  Samuel lays down again and again hears someone call his name.  Again he rushes to Eli and again is told that Eli did not call him.  But Eli guesses that maybe it’s God calling to Samuel and tells Samuel to go back and address the voice should it speak to him again.

A third time, someone calls Samuel’s name and Samuel responds, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

And God speaks.

And Samuel’s time as prophet begins.

But for a while there, Samuel was just like us.  Someone was calling his name and he couldn’t figure out who was calling him or why.  Have you ever woken up to a strange sound in the middle of the night?  Have you ever gotten up to investigate that sound and then, having found nothing, gone back to bed only to be woken up again by the same noise?

For me, that’s usually the smoke alarm battery going, but for Samuel, that noise was the voice of God and for more than a few minutes, I’m sure Samuel was irritated and frustrated at not being able to recognize the voice.

We are all like Samuel and just like Pastor Debbie said in her Kid’s Talk today, God doesn’t always speak to us audibly, but He does speak.  He stirs something within us, something that cannot be ignored no matter how hard we try.  Something that will not go away until we address it.

It was exactly how I feel with my calling to the priesthood.

Today’s Gospel reading was from John 1:43-51.  Jesus goes to Galilee and is in the process of calling his disciples to him.  As always when Jesus calls, in this case, Phillip, Phillip drops everything and follows him.

Phillip’s blind faith to a man he’s never seen before is a hard thing for any of us to live up to.  How can we possibly do as Phillip did and just go, just leave everything behind and follow?  The amount of faith that takes seems extreme.

But then in the same passage we are given Nathanael.  Nathanael represents all of us.  When Phillip comes to him excited and thrilled to have found Jesus, all Nathanael can do is say, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

And here I thought cynicism and sarcasm were creations of my generation, Generation X.

Nathanael is a skeptic.  And it is Nathanael we should most identify with because the reality is that we are more like Nathanael than we are Phillip and that’s okay because Nathanael doesn’t walk away.  He doesn’t brush Jesus aside.

Like Samuel, Nathanael doesn’t know who’s calling him, but he’s curious and so he sticks around and listens.  And like Samuel, Nathanael meets his Lord when he decides to listen.

So forget about the heroes of the Bible for a minute and focus on the little guys, like Nathanael.  Focus on Samuel, who actually turned out to be one of the big guys of the Bible, but for a moment was just as confused as any of us. 

And learn from them.

Miracles

The other night at church we discussed Joseph, Jesus and Mary’s flight to Egypt.  Herod had ordered the murder of every child two and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding area and an angel had appeared to Joseph saying, “’Get up … take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him’” (Matthew 2:13).

I can only imagine what was going through Joseph’s head.  Yes, there was apparently a large colony of Jews in Egypt at the time, but Egypt really?  Nobody has that short a memory.  Of all the places to send His son, God chose Egypt, a place where the Jews had once been enslaved, a place that needed 10 plagues set upon it in order to bend it to God’s will.

Egypt.

And not only that, but the angel gives no timeline to Joseph.  Go, leave your home, leave all that is familiar and go to this foreign place and “stay.”

Just stay.

What must Joseph have been thinking?  We don’t know.  What we do know is that he was a man of deep faith for he did as the angel told him.

When we think of Jesus and his life, we think of miracles.  We think of how he healed the sick.  We think of that first miracle in John, the turning of the water into wine.  But for me, I think that miracles surrounded Jesus from the moment he was conceived.

That Mary, a child, a teenager would accept God’s calling, that Joseph would take Mary as his wife despite her pregnancy, that they would find shelter in a manger, that the shepherds and the wise men would find them, one group guided by angels, the other by a star.  That Joseph would agree to take his family to Egypt … all of these things done by faith.

In my last post, I wrote about my new favorite Broadway star, Sutton Foster.  At the Kennedy Center Honors a few months ago, she sang “Everybody Says Don’t,” a song from the musical Anyone Can Whistle as a tribute to Barbara Cook.

Anyone Can Whistle is a musical about miracles, about one miracle in particular that is faked in order to bring tourists to a dying town.

At the close of the second act, Hapgood sings to the town’s skeptic, Fay, the song “Everybody Says Don’t.”

Here are a few of the lyrics:

“I insist in miracles if you do them/miracles they might come true/Then I say/Don’t be afraid.”

It’s a song about the dangers of sitting back and waiting for things to happen.  It’s about living and searching and longing.  It’s about being afraid of failing and then going ahead and trying anyway.  And it’s about miracles.

I love the use of the word “insist,” in the lines above.  I insist on miracles.

Joseph and Mary did not practice passive parenting.  They had no idea what awaited them in Egypt, but they went anyway. 

They had faith.

And I do believe at every step of their journey they too insisted on miracles.

And were rewarded with such.

Insist on miracles.

The Things We Loved

When I was 13 and bought the Broadway cast recording of Anything Goes, I didn’t do so because I loved the musical.  I had no idea what the musical was about except that it seemed to take place on a ship.  I bought the tape not because of the musical but because of the lead actress Patti Lupone. 

West Side Story was the first movie/musical that I, as a too-cool-to-cry-teenager, allowed a few tears for.  Grand Hotel was the first musical I saw on Broadway.  But Evita, starring Patti Lupone, was the first musical I fell in love with.  I read and reread the libretto sometime in the car by street light while my mom was out running errands.  I bought books on Eva Peron.  I bought other Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love.  I even saw original phantom, Michael Crawford, in concert.  I was a Broadway nerd.

And though I listened to other recordings of Evita, starring Elaine Paige, no one could top Patti Lupone.  She was a classic Broadway belter.  When she sang, you could feel her voice, not just hear it, but feel it rumbling and bouncing around inside your chest. 

And so I bought Anything Goes just so I could hear more of Patti Lupone.

Recently, I’ve rediscovered Anything Goes.  I can’t even remember now what I was searching for on YouTube at the time, but there was Anything Goes, the newest version starring Tony Award winner Sutton Foster.  Now Sutton Foster is not Patti Lupone or even Ethel Merman who originated the role of Reno Sweeney, but what I like about Sutton Foster is the tenderness and vulnerability she brings to the role, something neither Lupone nor Merman have/had in their repertoire. 

I find myself listening to the lyrics now, more than twenty years later and I find myself wonderfully amused by the story.  The main character Reno Sweeney is described as an evangelist turned night club singer.  I love that.  Normally a story would have that as the reverse.  Normally Reno Sweeney would be a reformed night club singer, but no, here she was an evangelist and now is singing for money.

It gives new meaning to me in the song Blow, Gabriel, Blow.  Obviously, I always knew the lyrics had biblical connections, but now when I listen to the music, I can hear and understand that it has all the flavor of an under the big tent revival.

There is no question that we outgrow many of the things we loved as children, but I think what we loved as children says so much about who we are today and we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss those things.  It’s okay to revisit them, not just to be reminded of better times, but to see things with new eyes and incorporate them into who we are now.

The Message of the Dove

When I got home from church this morning I sent Pastor Debbie a text saying that for the first time in probably six months, I made it through a church service with no back pain.  For a whole hour this morning, I stood up and sat down and stood up and sat down and didn’t even have a twinge of pain.  It was beautiful.

As I sit here writing though I can feel the pain returning.  And that’s okay.  I know I still have work to do to get healthy, but, again, for an hour this morning, life was blissfully normal.

The other day I was walking the labyrinth.  It was a warm and sunny December afternoon.  And as I walked all I could think about was how I wished it was summer already.  And then I laughed.  Summer was only six months away.  Where had the last six months gone?  Why did 2011 feel like it had flown by?  And why was I praying to God for something momentous to happen in my life in 2012?  Was finishing the discernment process, becoming a postulant, entering seminary, finishing my first seminary class, having to take an extended sick leave from work not momentous enough for me in 2011?

There is a scene in the movie Total Recall where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character Douglas Quaid has just arrived on Mars.  He’s being hunted by government officials and when his disguise goes wrong, said officials open fire on him, taking out a window and causing the facility to depressurize.  One soldier is sucked out into the uninviting and unlivable Martian air.  Everyone else hangs on for dear life as suction threatens to tear them from whatever it is they are clinging to.

Even burly Arnold is barely hanging on.

That was how my life felt back in August and September and October this past year, like I was barely hanging on, like the forces of nature were conspiring against me to rip me away from the journey I had undertaken.

Bitter became my favorite word.  I was angry, so angry and hurt that after being given a glimpse of the life God had planned for me, I couldn’t head directly to my destination.  Instead I was seemingly trapped by my health and by my job, kept from the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world, which was to fully devote myself to seminary and a life of following Christ.

I’ve had a lot of time the last few months to reflect on that.

And I’m pleased to say that the bitterness and anger has faded and been replaced by contentment.  For a while there I resented teaching because I thought it was keeping me away from my journey to the priesthood, but since I’ve been away from it, I find I miss it more than ever, that teaching is part of the journey.  It’s not a roadblock or a detour, it is something that completes me and fills a place in my heart.  Even when I become a priest, teaching will always be a part of what I do.

I find that I’m slowing down, that I’m comfortable with God taking the wheel, that it’s easier sometimes to let someone else drive as long as you can promise not to become a backseat driver.

Some months ago, I wrote about God speaking through the messages in the Dove chocolate bar wrappers.  And just yesterday this is what I unwrapped … “You are exactly where you are supposed to be.”

That is sometimes a hard, but necessary lesson to learn.

That God has you exactly where you are supposed to be.

And maybe that means you’re like Douglas Quaid in Total Recall, hanging on for dear life, but doing so with a purpose.  Later in the movie, it is Doug, who by just putting his hand on an alien reactor, causes a chain reaction that terraforms Mars, bringing oxygen and life to a dead planet.

As long as we continue the journey God has set before us, even when we have no idea of timelines or even destinations, we are exactly where we are supposed to be … with God—trusting Him.

May you hold strong in your faith in 2012.