The Cost of Living

When you go to cast your vote this November, I want you to play this song and think.

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

40 Days Beneath the Veil: Day 7

Today was a bit of a challenge. When I made the decision to veil for Lent this year, I was expecting the typical Lenten weather. You know... cold, rainy, dreary, miserable. I never expected it to be clear, sunny, and warm like today. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that today isn't just warm, it's HOT! I spent a considerable amount of time outside today walking from my car to the hospital and back, then from my car to the other hospital and back again. Not only was I uncomfortably warm, to say the least, but I really wanted to feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my skin. It sounds terrible, but I really kinda want the crappy, end-of-winter weather to come back for just a little while longer. 

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

40 Days Beneath the Veil: Day 6

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

The Lotus Link Sequence

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

40 Days Beneath the Veil: Day 5

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

40 Days Beneath the Veil: First Sunday of Lent

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

40 Days Beneath the Veil: Day 3

Clinical Day

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

40 Days Beneath the Veil: Day 2

Taking my little man cub to day care so I can to to a Baccalaureate Curriculum Committee meeting. 

It was actually a very good morning. Two of the caregivers in John's day care room are Catholic and asked me about my scarves. I explained to them that it was something I was trying out for Lent. One of them told me that an older woman in her church always wears lace mantillas to Mass and how she's always admired them and wants one of her own. When I told her I would bring her a list of websites where she can order some beautiful mantillas in a variety of colors, lengths, and shapes her face lit right up. 

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

40 Days Beneath the Veil: Day 1

Lent is the 40-day period between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. It is a liturgical season during which we are called to repentance and self-reflection by way of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The purpose is to remind us of our dependence on God for all things, to draw us closer to God, and to prepare us for the Great Feast of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Many people observe Lent by giving something up (ex, meat, alcohol, chocolate, Facebook) as an act of self-denial or self-sacrifice. This can be, in a way, a type of fasting depending on what you choose to give up and why. It can help us in our effort to draw closer to God if the things we give up are keeping us from God. In the last few years, I have noticed many people choosing to give up TV and social media during Lent because they view it as an unnecessary distraction in their daily lives. Others observe Lent by taking something on, such as daily prayer, scriptural study, and attending mid-week services. This can help to refocus our attention on our spiritual development by giving it a more central role in our daily lives. Some Lenten disciplines are more challenging than others, but we all have our own unique experiences... our own crosses to bear.

Personally, I've chosen to do something a little different this year. In the past, I've given up foods that I viewed as overly indulgent and which I enjoyed with gluttonous delight. I also usually commit to attending at least one mid-week service at church. Many churches offer a Lenten soup supper with evening prayer as an opportunity for members to come together in community for fellowship and corporate prayer. This year, in addition to attending a mid-week pray and study group, and reading evening prayer with James at home after dinner, I am going to wear a headcovering. Originally I had planned to veil only when going to church, but after giving it a lot of thought and prayer I have decided to veil full time until Easter. I can't say exactly why I've chosen to veil. I don't really have a precise, deliberate, or logical reason. It's just something that I feel called to do, something I feel drawn to.

A very dear friend of mine veils when she attends Mass and occasionally veils full-time, too. We have not talked about veiling very much, more in recent weeks than ever before, but she has blogged extensively about her experience with veiling.

I think, for me, it is primarily an act of humility and a gesture of penance for my vanity. People say that blondes have more fun, but my experience is that red heads get a lot more attention. My hair has been blonde, brunette, red, curly, straight, long and short. Red hair, by far, gets the most attention. During my mental health rotation, patients always remembered me from week to week as "that red-headed nurse." I'm still not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but it is what it is. And when I have John, people make an even bigger fuss about it because his hair is red, too. I get all the classics. "Oh just look at that red hair!" "Look at the red-headed little baby! He looks just like his mama!" "No denying that boy. I can see where he gets his hair." This is, of course, totally ironic because 1) John is adopted and 2) my hair color comes from the salon. But whatever. The point is that I think it would be good for my ego to take a little break from all the gratuitous, but well meaning flattery.

It is a common practice among Eastern Orthodox Christians and many Roman Catholics to veil during prayer, when entering a church, and when in the presence of the Eucharist. The scriptural reference comes from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians when he says, "Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ. Any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head disgraces his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head....Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering" (1 Corinthians 11: 3-5, 13-15). It is important to note that Paul describes a woman's hair as her "glory." One rationale for veiling, particularly which at church, is to cover our glory so that others may focus their attention on the glory of God. In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul says to "pray without ceasing....for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you" (1 Thessalonians 5:17-18).

Now I'm no biblical scholar, but if we are to veil ourselves when we pray, and we are to pray without ceasing, then it stands to reason that we are also called to veil without ceasing. That's what I'm going to attempt to do throughout Lent this year. AND... though taming my vanity is also an objective, I intend to prove to women who are interested in veiling that you can cover your head without looking like a complete weirdo. In fact, I'm going to show that you can look rather lovely.

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

For Lenten Beginners

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

The Earth Sequence

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

The Half Moon Sequence

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

Girls in the Clubhouse

The following sermon was written by the Reverend Scott Walters of Christ Episcopal Church and is published here with his permission.

Places become sacred in a variety of ways. Sometimes we mark the site of a remarkable event. Countless plaques in Virginia towns mark the places where George Washington slept. Jacob placed a stone at the spot where the door of heaven opened and a staircase dropped down to the earth.

Housing something special—the bones of a saint or a splinter of the true cross or of Joe DiMaggio’s bat—might sanctify a place. Building with lots of gold and ivory and jewels and rare, precious things also seems to do the trick. Or sometimes we mark a place as holy simply by what we decide to do there—how we decide to interact.

For instance, the clubhouse in our backyard didn’t seem to have any intrinsic value. Dad built it not from the finest of building materials and the rarest of woods, but from a couple of cast off Hammond organ crates he got from his friend, A.P. Vohs, who owned a music store in Fayetteville. Fastening the crates together, back to back, made for a fine little house with a gambrel shaped roof like a barn.

So the clubhouse wasn’t built on the site of a miracle, it housed no relics, and it wasn’t made of anything special. We sanctified it by meeting there to discuss gravely important neighborhood matters. Matters like whether or under what circumstances a girl might be allowed to enter the clubhouse. The great councils in charge of sacred places are always debating such things. Because once it’s agreed that a place is holy, defilement is a real and present danger. Hence the perennial worry about women.

But leave it to Jesus to complicate things. We thought we had a pretty good handle on how places are made holy and how to protect them from desecration. Then Jesus turns the definition of holiness almost completely inside out.

It’s not hard to imagine curio shops and little shrines, maybe chapels built from organ crates still marking all the places where Jesus stopped and did something miraculous just in the first chapter of Mark. He’s been baptized by John at the Jordan River and tempted by the devil in the wilderness. He’s cast out an unclean spirit in the Capernaum synagogue and healed Andrew’s mother in law of a fever in Andrew’s house. Now he’s healed a man of leprosy and headed out to the countryside.

But Jesus doesn’t seem to be interested in marking places where something special happened. Nor does he preserve holiness by protecting it. In fact, strange as it sounds, Jesus seems to have a habit of sanctifying places as he defiles them. Holiness and defilement don’t seem to be opposites to Jesus. They seem to be in the most intimate sort of relationship.

Since few of us have much interaction with lepers these days, a detail from our gospel reading that would be obvious to first century folks might be lost on us. Jesus touched a leper. That is, in the process of making one man clean, Jesus becomes unclean himself. And while the story suggests that he was forced out into the country by those adoring crowds, there’s another reason why Jesus would have had to leave town. He was effectively a leper himself now. So he would be forced to inhabit the places where the impure and the unclean had been banished. Which means that holiness was moving, not away from defiling things. It was moving, with Jesus, from synagogue, to home, to town, to the fields where the diseased and the unclean people lived. Holiness, as Jesus lived it, seemed to be in pursuit of the defiled.

Keeping what’s holy, keeping what’s precious to us safe from risk and contamination it is natural. We do so with regard to our food and our children and even our towns and our architecture. We don’t keep food in the bathroom. We don’t send our 4 year olds to the mall on public transit. We don’t build strip clubs next to schools. We also don’t build houses in which the front door opens into a bedroom. Holiness codes are related to all these very natural actions and impulses. If something is holy, protect it, be careful with it, keep it safe and pure.

Something similar is reflected in the architecture of this building. It’s no coincidence that the doors to the street are on the west side, and the altar and sanctuary are at the far other end to the east. The fact that the pulpit is up here rather than back there is telling too. We understand this arrangement intuitively. Precious things are supposed to be further inside.

But Jesus was always disrupting the way people understood their place in the world. He was always disrupting notions of family and religion, of violence and justice, of wealth and poverty, and today, of holiness and defilement. Holiness and defilement are interwoven concepts rather than opposites, in Jesus’ mind. In fact, if we’re paying attention to his story, we may decide that the only real reason, or the only Christian reason, for setting a place or a person apart as holy is to invite excluded people across the boundary we’ve just created. Because there is a great and sacred power at such boundaries.

Think again of this building. You probably know that it’s a longstanding tradition to leave the doors of Christ Church unlocked and often wide open during the week. It’s a simple act of hospitality. Someone might need a place to pray.

But they keep the doors open to Target and Cregeen’s Pub and the State Capitol all day too. What’s the difference?

There’s a triangle, a little patch in the veneer of the prayer desk right below this pulpit. I often sit there, you might have noticed. And every time I see that repair, I remember being told of a man who went berserk in here one day years ago, throwing things around, beating up the pulpit, carrying out the flags. I’m not sure whether it actually is, but in my mind, that careful triangular repair is a mark of that rampage. A sacred sign, perhaps.

It’s unsettling just to describe the event. Lots of us love this place. We’ve seen marriages and baptisms and funerals here, and for more than 170 years people have been saying their prayers here Sunday after Sunday. So you don’t have to be too fussy about housekeeping to feel a little horror at the idea of someone throwing candlesticks and knocking down crosses. It’s more than just bad manners. It’s a desecration.

But it happened, of course, because the doors were unlocked. I happened because this is sacred space consciously put at risk. And there is a peculiar sort of power in a sacred place that stands intentionally, even defiantly unprotected. It is always, then, a boundary between the sacred and the profane, a place on the brink of defilement.

How in the world do we get from Jesus healing a leper to the dangers of open church doors? Well, time after time, Jesus challenged not only our assumptions about what makes a place holy, but our whole relationship with holiness. Jesus reordered life in the temple, in a home, in the nearby villages, even in the countryside. True holiness happened one time when Jesus exposed himself to the leper’s disease, transcending a sacred boundary, even transforming a field where the unclean ones were forced to wander into holy ground.

Leaving church doors open is not one of the most costly or profound acts of Christian discipleship. Granting girls entrance to the clubhouse might have been. But we need clear reminders that Jesus’ relationship with holiness wasn’t just relevant to the first century Jewish community with all those curious dietary laws and holiness codes.

Jesus’ touch of a leprous man is a challenge to us. It marks out the holy places of our lives not as those most protected, but as those boundaries where what’s most precious to us is vulnerable to those who are strange to us. Jesus spent so much time at these boundaries, don’t you think he was calling us to do the same in our own time and place.

Which begs the question, Who are the ones beyond the pale in our lives? Who are the unclean, the untouchable, the unthinkable? And it might not matter most whether we think poor people or bankers or the mentally ill or fundamentalists or gay people are the unclean ones. Jesus just says, “Go there. Go to that dangerous boundary between your conception of the sacred and the profane. You’ll find that the ground there is charged with holiness. People are changed, even healed, by the grace of God in such places.”

An unclean spirit in a Capernaum synagogue, a woman’s persistent fever in a home, leprosy in the streets of a nearby town, the countryside where the unclean ones roamed. Jesus sought out those places where the holy and the defiled were frighteningly close. And he marked those places as the truly sacred ones in our world, places of great transformative power.

So where do you think Jesus is calling you? Where do you think he’s calling us? Where do you think the space between the sacred and the unclean in our lives is most powerfully and most beautifully thin? Wherever it is, shall we go there together, like the crowds outside Capernaum, to be changed? Amen.

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.

The Dancing Sun Sequence

From Namaste Yoga's Practice page: 

Beginners: This sequence will build confidence and improve flexibility in the tight muscles of the back, hamstrings, and calves. Make sure your bent knees never over reach your ankle in any of the positions and really stretch your arms and lengthening your upper body in each pose. The heart opening breath body link will help develop strength in muscles we do not typically use. Be sure to keep your feet parallel to one another. On the inhale focus on the expansion of the chest. On the exhale focus on the contraction, your chin tucked in slightly to elongate your spine.

Advanced: This is an inspiring practice that restores balance and energy to the body. Focus on lengthening all points of the body, like the rays of the sun stretching endlessly into space. Keep your chest open and spine aligned as you move through the poses. The breath body link is called heart opening link. Once you are comfortable opening and closing your arms with breath, begin to focus on your energy. When you inhale extend energy out from your core, releasing tension. When you exhale return your hands to heart's center with fresh energy. Feel revitalized and ready to begin the sequence.

And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.