Feast of Julian of Norwich, Contemplative

Lord God, who in your compassion granted to the Lady Julian many revelations of your nurturing and sustaining love: Move our hearts, like hers, to seek you above all things, for in giving us yourself you give us all; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today is the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, one of my most favourite spiritual writers and saints. She celebrated God and Nature. If you don't know much about her, why don't you read a bit.

Her book is a tender meditation on God's eternal and all-embracing love, as expressed to us in the Passion of Christ.

She describes seeing God holding a tiny thing in his hand, like a small brown nut, which seemed so fragile and insignificant that she wondered why it did not crumble before her eyes. She understood that the thing was the entire created universe, which is as nothing compared to its Creator, and she was told, "God made it, God loves it, God keeps it."

She was concerned that sometimes when we are faced wiith a difficult moral decision, it seems that no matter which way we decide, we will have acted from motives that are less then completely pure, so that neither decision is defensible. She finally wrote: "It is enough to be sure of the deed. Our courteous Lord will deign to redeem the motive."

A matter that greatly troubled her was the fate of those who through no fault of their own had never heard the Gospel. She never received a direct answer to her questions about them, except to be told that whatever God does is done in Love, and therefore "that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

And you can read more about her here!

The Triduum

Kelvin Holdsworth, Provost of St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow, writing about the challenges of the Triduum,

The Stripping of the Altar was particularly brutal this year. Furniture dragged around, lots of noise and lots of unease. Many servers and clergy involved and a choir ready to pitch in and shift the altar and platform as well as their own stalls. The inadequate lighting which we currently have (to be fixed next week) simply added to what was happening.

I was struck when it was all going on that such a rabbling is in our DNA as a congregtation. More than once, a mob descended on the Episcopalians and ripped up their meeting house and ran them out of town.

One of the ways I often think about Holy Week is to think it through in terms of the fickle mob. That mob seemed very real as everything lovely was taken from the altar of the Lord.

There was much to think about as we gathered in a lovely garden of repose at the end to keep watch until late into the night.

Thus it was that we gathered in a bare, stark space today for what worship we could muster. God is gone. The font is closed. There will be no sacraments now.

This morning, we venerated the cross. A touch, a kiss, a look.

Transformed: A soldier who became a man of peace

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, guide the nations of the world Into the way of justice and truth, and establish among them that peace which is the fruit of righteousness, that they may become the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Today is the Feast of St Martin, Bishop of Tours, 397.

"The Feast of Martin, a soldier who fought bravely and faithfully in the service of an earthly sovereign, and then enlisted in the service of Christ, is also the day of the Armistice which marked the end of the First World War. On it we remember those who have risked or lost their lives in what they perceived as the pursuit of justice and peace."

Icon by the hand of Br. Leon Liddament, St. Seraphim's Studio, Walsingham, England. View more icons of St Martin here.

"In olden days in England, St. Martin was an extremely popular Saint, and his feast ushered in the great fast before Nativity. When St. Augustine of Canterbury arrived in Kent, he found in Canterbury a Christian church, ancient even then, dedicated to St. Martin. The location can still be seen in modern-day Canterbury."

See St Martin's Church, Canterbury, the oldest church in England still in use - here.

Collect for today:

Lord God of hosts, who clothed your servant Martin the soldier With the spirit of sacrifice, and set him as a bishop in your Church to be a defender of the catholic faith: Give us grace to follow in his holy steps, that at the last we may be found clothed with righteousness in the dwellings of peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

"For the saints of God are just folk like me, And I mean to be one too."

From a sermon for the Feast of All Saints preached by the Rev'd Jonathan Haggar (aka MadPriest), Rector of the Church of St Francis, High Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. This is an excerpt, but the whole sermon is worth the read.

Who we refer to as saints is down to us. Your are well within your rights to refer to the old lady who lives next door, who will agree to babysit your kids at a moments notice so that you can go out, a living saint. Why not? And the churches are free to choose who they want to, officially, call saints. The conferring of sainthood on earth is a human thing and is completely different to the sainthood that God bestows on God's people.

Now, of course, I would say this, but I think the Anglican churches have got the best system when it comes to choosing its saints. Our church always waits for fifty years after a prospective saint dies before it considers making that person a saint officially, unless a person dies a martyrs death, in which case they can be fast tracked through without having to wait half a century. In other words, we like to make sure nothing embarrassing is going to turn up, concerning a person's life before we start handing out the honours. But we do not insist that the candidate performs any miracles after leaving this mortal coil. In other words, sainthood in the Anglican churches is about what a person does on earth, while they are alive. And I think that is a very important thing to remember. Anglican sainthood is about flesh and blood, living human beings. That means that, ontologically speaking, a saint is no different to any of us. To put it into non-academic terms, they are made of the same stuff and they have the same potential to do good or to bad as all of us. And the flipside of that coin is that we are exactly the same in being and potential as those who end up having their names commemorated in our church calendar.

The Venerable Bede, Priest, and Monk of Jarrow, 735

A reading for May 25.

TimesOnline

Roderick Strange - Credo: More than a brief flight through warmth and light

Bede once compared human life without faith to a sparrow flying through a banqueting hall in winter

An old monk lay dying but still he had work to complete. He dictated to a scribe the last lines of a book he had been writing on St John’s Gospel and distributed what few small treasures he possessed to his fellow monks. He gave glory to God, singing, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit”, and then he died. It was the morning of Ascension Day.

These events are not recent. Far from it. They took place in 735. The monk was Bede, known as the Venerable. He is the only English Doctor of the Church and his feast is celebrated in the coming week.

We may respect him, but we may also wonder what to make of him. He lived so long ago.

Bede was born in Sunderland in 673 and brought up in a monastery at Wearmouth from the age of 7, before becoming a monk himself at Jarrow and living there for the rest of his life. It seems probable he never left northeast England. How could so isolated a life be significant for us? Yet that very isolation may itself be the clue.

Most of us too have times when we feel fairly isolated and we wonder what difference our lives make or what value they have. However long we may live, in fact our time is short. Bede once compared human life without faith to a sparrow flying through a banqueting hall in winter, where, as he wrote, “the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging”. Then “a sparrow flies swiftly though the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other . . . So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all.”

The image may chill us. It may seem all too likely. However, Bede was using the image to suggest that there is more to life than that brief flight through warmth and light from darkness to darkness. And his own life was devoted to exploring that deeper possibility.

In his monastery he gave himself up to scholarship. He has declared that he loved to learn, to teach, and to write. And he was fortunate that at that very time great monastic libraries were being assembled, placing at his disposal the resources he needed. So among his many writings there were commentaries on Scripture, lives of the saints, and in particular that Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which many regard as his greatest work because of the new standards it set: its sense of time, its instinct for a good story, its mastery of readable Latin, and the start it even made in using sources critically. And those three strands of writing can be seen as linked. What is brought out by contemplating and studying Scripture is made real in the lives of holy men and women, the people who come to be recognised as saints. And the saints themselves are not to be viewed simply as individuals; their lives are a part of the Church’s life, its complex, sometimes blemished, history.

Contemplation can shape who we are, and who we are has its influence on others. Prayer and study, identity and action are not separate. They need to be integrated and made coherent.

Although he lived a hidden, scholarly life long ago, Bede is not forgotten. He is, for example, patron of this college where I am rector, where men are prepared for ordained ministry in the English-speaking world, and where the integration of prayer and study, identity and action, is fundamental. It gives meaning to a sparrow’s flight beyond the banqueting hall.

Next month men from here who later will be ordained as priests, will become deacons, for Malaysia, Zimbabwe and America, for Australia and for England. All five continents will be represented. Bede’s imagination, if he could ever have imagined it, would have reeled at the prospect of his influence spreading in such a way. And how can we calculate the impact of our own lives and actions?

Monsignor Roderick Strange is Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome

Words from Thomas Merton

The source of life

Daily Reading for May 14

The union of the Christian with Christ is not just a similarity of inclination and feeling, a mutual consent of minds and wills. It has a more radical, more mysterious and supernatural quality: it is a mystical union in which Christ Himself becomes the source and principle of divine life in me. Christ Himself, to use a metaphor based on Scripture, “breathes” in me divinely in giving me His Spirit. The ever renewed mission of the Spirit to the soul that is in the grace of Christ is to be understood by the analogy of the natural breath that keeps renewing, from moment to moment, our bodily life. The mystery of the Spirit is the mystery of selfless love. We receive Him in the “inspiration” of secret love, and we give Him to others in the outgoing of our own charity. Our life in Christ is then a life both of receiving and of giving. We receive from God, in the Spirit, and in the same Spirit we return our love to God through our brothers [and sisters].

From New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Books, 1961).

[via Speaking to the Soul]

Mothering Relationships

Normally, I don't get caught up in the cheap sentimentality and commercialism surrounding today, Mother's Day. (My wise mother used to say to my father, my twin brothers and me, "Every day is mother's day," and she served that role in our lives indeed!) Motheramelia, whose blog I discovered at Mad Priest, has written a very nice mother's day sermon. She's an Episcopal priest in Maine, where the legislature in that state voted this week for marriage equality. You can read the whole sermon here. Here are the parts that struck me deeply.

For some people though, it is difficult to appreciate and to honour their mothers, and even more difficult to love them. Not all parents act in a loving and sacrificial way At such times it is hard to celebrate a day like today - - hard because anger and pain and hurt get in our way - hard because we do not understand how it is that someone who is supposed to love us has left us behind. If they’ve been fortunate, they’ve found someone else, some other woman, or even a man, who has given them the love and support that mothers are supposed to give to help them grow into a healthy adult.

Another important event happened this week. The Governor signed a bill passed by the Maine Legislature allowing same sex marriage here in Maine. Governor Baldacci said he had changed his mind because he felt it was a matter of justice. I want to read to you some of the testimony Bishop Lane wrote for a hearing on the bill:

The Episcopal Church, long ago, concluded and publicly proclaimed through its own legislative body that gay and lesbian persons are children of God and, by baptism, full members of the church. We have also concluded that sexual orientation, in and of itself, is no bar to holding any office or ministry in the church, as long as the particular requirements of that office or ministry are met. And we have repeatedly affirmed our support for the human and civil rights of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered persons. In many of our congregations, both here in Maine and around the country, faithful same sex couples and their families are participating in the life of the church and sharing in the work of ministry and service to their communities.

If we, as Mainers, believe that faithful, lifelong monogamous relationships are among the building blocks of a healthy and stable society, then it is in our interest to extend the rights and obligations of civil marriage to all Maine citizens. To deny those rights to certain persons on the basis of sexual orientation is to create two classes of citizens and to deny one group what we believe is best for them and for society.

The Episcopal Church continues its conversations about doctrine in relation to same sex marriage and the blessing of same sex relationships, and there is yet no consensus. We continue to search for ways to honor the varied viewpoints of all our members and to provide a place of dignity and respect for each of them.

The bishop went on to say that no clergy would be required to act against his or her conscience and be required to perform marriages for gays and lesbians. I’ve been questioning for years why clergy act as agents of the state in marrying people. I’ve thought that that function should be the responsibility of civil authorities and the church’s responsibility is about blessing relationships. I have decided that I will not perform the function of the state.
I hear people say. “I support Civil Unions, but not gay marriage.” I hear others say “I support equal rights for gays and lesbians, but not gay marriage.” And I hear others ask “why do gays and lesbians want marriage so much when they can have civil unions? “ When most people marry, they do it because they love one another and are committed to each other. But marriage is also a legal contract, with rights and responsibilities. Even though each state has its own laws around marriage, if someone is married in one state and moves to another, their marriage is legally recognized. This is not so with Civil Unions. Civil Unions are only recognized in the state in which they are done and the way people in our society move about, this can be problematic.

There is a whole long list of benefits and protections for heterosexual couples (more than 1000) that ranges from federal benefits, such as Social Security survivor benefits, sick leave to care for ailing partner, tax breaks, veterans benefits and insurance breaks. The list includes things like family discounts, getting family insurance through employers, visiting spouses in the hospital and making medical decisions if your partner is unable to. Some of these benefits can be had through Civil Unions, but not all of them and to get many of them the assistance of a lawyer is needed. Yet for a married couple a marriage license is all that is necessary. I agree with the governor and our bishop that marriage should be available to any couple. That doesn't mean that any couple should get married. The divorce rate is high enough.

Same sex marriage is about relationship. Mother’s Day is about relationship. God is about relationship. Being a Christian is about relationship. Thursday, Tobias Haller a Brother of St. Gregory gave an address to the Province II Synod in which this wonderful paragraph stands out about our relationships with God and one another:

In the long run, there is no such thing as a solitary Christian. There is no Christian without the church, no church without Christ, no Christ without God. For as we believe that God is love, there can be no love without relationship. This love divine, all loves excelling, is the ultimate compassion — feeling-with — the love that embraces the other, that gives itself for the life of the other, that becomes itself in losing itself, saving its life in losing it. This is the embodied love of the Incarnation, the love that died on the Cross, the love that rose again from the dead, and in whom we will one day be raised: love that becomes so united with the beloved that the old categories that ruled the world — Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female — are overshadowed by the love which passes all understanding, yet shelters our hearts and minds under the shadow of everlasting wings.[Tobias Haller BSG, Address to Provincial Synod II, May 7, 2009]

To love someone else as God loves us doesn’t require that we understand them. It doesn’t require that we approve of their actions or their lifestyle or their decisions. And it most certainly does not require that they love us, though it is always very nice when they do. To become a branch of the vine that bears fruit means we need pruning. And vine branches need pruning every year. So those ideas and attitudes that used to bear fruit in the past will only bear abundant fruit with pruning. In that way the love that overshadows all helps us to grow into the fullness of our potential. The love that gives life to all of love's children will help remove outworn categories. The love that we feel as a mother's love is a love with arms wide open to embrace and shelter all of love’s children.

Sunday Morning Music: Ben Harper - Picture of Jesus

Ben Harper (with Ladysmith) - Picture of Jesus - video shows back streets of Brazil.



Lyrics:

It hangs above my altar
Like they hung him from a cross
I keep one in my wallet

For the times I feel lost
In a wooden frame with splinters
Where my family kneels to pray
And if you listen close
You'll hear the words he used to say
Ive got a picture of Jesus
In his arms so many prayers rest
We've got a picture of Jesus
And with him we shall be forever blessed

It has been spoken
He would come again
But would we recognize
This king among men
There was a man in our time
His words shine bright like the sun
He tried to lift the masses
And was crucified by gun

He was a picture of Jesus
With him so many prayers rest
He is a picture of Jesus
In his arms so many prayers rest
With him we shall be forever blessed

Some days have no beginning
And some days have no end
Some roads are straight and narrow
And some roads only bend
So let us say a prayer
For every living thing
Walking towards a light
From the cross of a king

We long to be a picture of Jesus
In his arms so many prayers rest
I long to be a picture of Jesus
With him we shall be forever blessed

HOLY WEEK

Anglicans Online

The holiest week of the Christian year is here. We have come to think of it as something of a roodscreen built into the church calendar. The events of Holy Week are tender, violent, confusing, inspiring, devastating and utterly necessary. Without them, we will not reach Easter, and without Easter, our religion is less than a sham. So to reach the resurrection, we will gladly and seriously gaze through whatever is on the way to it: crucifixion of the innocent Lord of Love, a full week of church ceremonies whose intricacies boggle the mind, a persistent disappointment that this all must happen again each year, and screens with the holy rood mounted above them. The church year, and our church building, give us these truths over and over again. The message seems to be that our desire for immediate knowledge and gratification must be tempered from time to time, whether it is by a built-in delay or a slight hiding of what it is we want to see.

Like the shepherds whose words begin the gospel story, we say to one another 'Let us go and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.' We want to see the miracle God has promised, the miracle we have seen afresh each Easter Even, and for which forty days of Lent have now sharpened our vision. We will see it in the near term, but not without passing through and under the Rood. This is as it should be, as it must be, and as it will be.

See you next week, on the other side of the screen.

Photo: Anglicans Online

THE LOVING HEART

How appropriate - on the day after the Vermont House voted in favour of marriage equality - to see in Speaking to the Soul, the reading and prayer - a mantra I used in my spiritual meditation - for the feast day of Richard, Bishop of Chichester, which is commemorated today.

Day by day, dear Lord, of you three things I pray: to see you more clearly, love you more dearly, follow you more nearly, day by day.

With love as the centerpiece, the eyes of faith may move back and forth from knowing the Lord more clearly and to following more nearly by and through loving more dearly. Love is the heart of the relationship. Without love, as Paul put it, all other skills and talents make one but “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1), for “the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). Love, reaching out beyond self, is enabled to see and follow more nearly. And here, at the heart of knowing and following, the soul of our human awareness finds at least a measure of contentment in recognizing its deepest desire. It rests in the love and loving of the beloved. It knows that there is no other way of knowing and wishes to follow in the way that there is no other way of going.

HUMBLE MARY

Speaking to the Soul - Daily Reading for March 25 • The Annunciation

Humble Mary

A humble person is one who, like the humble Mary, says, “The Powerful One has done great things in me.” Each of us has an individual greatness. God would not be our author if we were something worthless. You and I and all of us are worth very much, because we are creatures of God, and God has prodigally given his wonderful gifts to every person. And so the church values human beings and contends for their rights, for their freedom, for their dignity. That is an authentic church endeavor. While human rights are violated, while there are arbitrary arrests, while there are tortures, the church considers itself persecuted, it feels troubled, because the church values human beings and cannot tolerate that an image of God be trampled by persons that become brutalized by trampling on others. The church wants to make that image beautiful. . . .

Faith consists in accepting God
without asking him to account for things
according to our standard.
Faith consists in reacting before God as Mary did:
I don’t understand it, Lord,
but let it be done in me according to your word.

From The Violence of Love by Oscar Romero, Copyright 2007 by Plough Publishing House. An e-book found at http://www.plough.com/ebooks/pdfs/ViolenceOfLove.pdf

Photo courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: Annunciation, c. 1480 by Tilman Riemenschneider

A POEM FOR SPRING, 2009

On this second day of Spring, 2009, I offer a poem written by my most favourite 20th century poet, Denise Levertov, whom I discovered when I was in high school.

Beginners

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
—so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
—we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

BE OF ONE MIND

Daily Reading for March 20 • Feast of St Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, 687

Always keep God’s peace and love among you, and when you have to seek guidance about your affairs, take great care to be of one mind. Live in mutual good-will also with Christ’s other servants, and do not despise Christians who come to you for hospitality, but see that you welcome them, give them accommodation, and send them on their way with friendship and kindness.

Cuthbert’s last words, quoted in A Holy Island Prayer Book: Morning, Midday, and Evening Prayer by Ray Simpson. Copyright © 2002 Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

(From Speaking to the Soul.)

I would change St Cuthbert's words slightly to read, "and do not despise any persons who come to you for hospitality..."

Photo: St Cuthbert on Holy Island, by Powell of Whitefriars, St Cuthbert's Church, Great Salkeld, Cumbria.

AN INVITATION

This Sunday, 1 March, 10:00 a.m. St Paul's Cathedral Adult Forum will show excerpts from “The Power of Forgiveness,” a documentary by Martin Doblmeir that explores recent research into the psychological and physical effects of forgiveness on individuals and within relationships under a variety of conditions. This will introduce us to different ways of thinking about how we as individuals and as a church deal with transgression, pain, forgiveness, and healing. The documentary is based on the book of the same name by Kenneth Briggs.

THE END OF ALONE

The Internet and social network sites (c.f. Facebook) are just tools and don't replace the one-on-one real time interactions with real people, which I prefer.

Even in the hustle of my current life in Burlington, Vermont, I may be lonely (who, me?!?), but I am never frightened by being alone. As a student at The Mountain School I discovered the joys of reflection and meditation - whether among my friends at daily silent morning meetings or feeding the pigs! I continue to practice that transcending discipline in meditation, doing yoga in my house, walking a dog in my neighborhood, kayaking out on the lake, biking on the trail along the waterfront to the causeway, or hiking in Lamoille County up from the Mountain Road to Sterling Pond and Spruce Peak. Do I make sense?

Neil Swidely in The Boston Globe Magazine:

I'm sitting in a pew near the back of St. Anne's Church in Fall River, a soaring structure of Vermont blue marble that could rival a lesser European cathedral. It was built in the late 1800s, when the southeastern Massachusetts mill city's French Canadian community was big enough to warrant a church able to seat 2,000. On this blustery afternoon, the crowd is more like a tenth of that. The priest is talking, but the lousy PA system makes it hard to hear what he's saying. So I'm doing what I've done before in this situation: trying to keep my young daughters occupied by whispering for them to study their surroundings -- the exquisitely carved red-oak woodwork near the high ceiling, the enormous pipe organ in the rear balcony, the colorful stained-glass windows on every wall. With its combination of architectural grandeur and crumbling-plaster fatigue, the place is like Venice in the unforgiving light of morning, rather than the soft-lit romanticism of night. It's honest and beautiful.

Then I hear an odd chirping. My eyes follow my ears to a pew to my left and behind me, where a guy with slicked black hair and dark glasses is sitting. He's chewing gum and wearing one of those Bluetooth cellphone attachments in his ear.

Hey, man, I'm bored, too. But, c'mon, take that infernal thing out of your ear. Say a prayer. Collect your thoughts. Or just do what my 4-year-old is doing and stare at the ceiling.

Did I mention it was Christmas Day Mass?

Not long ago, I was sitting in the "quiet study" section of my local public library when a middle-aged woman wearing an annoyed expression plopped down in the green upholstered chair next to my table, her teenage daughter in tow. She flipped open her cellphone and dialed her daughter's therapist. After giving the therapist's secretary her full name and slowly spelling her daughter's -- loud enough for every soul in that wing of the library to hear -- she said, "We have an appointment for next week, but I want to know if he has any availability before that. She is really not doing well."

I looked up from my laptop, incredulous that a mother could be so blase about violating her daughter's privacy, not to mention library decorum -- and convinced that the therapist and the daughter must have no time to discuss anything besides mother issues.

Now, I know what you're going to say. There have always been boors blabbing in places where they should be quiet, blithely ignoring the shushes from librarians or the stares from fellow elevator passengers while behaving as though they're the only ones whose problems matter. Bad manners are bad manners, irrespective of technology, right?

Yes, only technology has vastly expanded this bad behavior, eroding much of society's stigma against it, and making it everybody's problem. But here's the real point: It is dulling our very capacity to ever be alone, or alone in our thoughts.

What's fueling this? Neil Swidely goes on to explain,

"We've gone from an American ethic that championed the lone guy on a horseback to an ethic of managing multiple data streams," says Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and author of the new book Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. "It's very hard for people to unplug and be alone -- and be with the one data stream of their mind."

What's fueling this? Conley says it's anxiety borne out of a deep-seated fear that we're being left out of something, somewhere, and that we may lose out on advancement in our work, social, or family lives if we truly check out. "The anxiety of being alone drives this behavior to constantly respond and Twitter and text, but the very act of doing it creates the anxiety."

This is particularly true among young people, mainly because they don't know life when it wasn't like this.

H/T to The Lead for alerting me to the Globe essay.

"HOW DO THE WHITE MEMBERS OF YOUR CONGREGATION CLAP?"

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ADVENT CALENDAR

ON THE SIDEBAR IS AN ADVENT CALENDAR>>>>>>>

From Episcopal Café:

The Diocese of Washington's fifth annual online Advent Calendar supports the Bokamoso Youth Program of Winterveld, South Africa. Each day from December 1 through Christmas, visitors can open one of the calendar’s windows to find links to a daily meditation, the daily office and a videotaped interview with one of the scores of young people who have benefited from Bokamoso’s work.

SIGNS OF ENDINGS ALL AROUND US

Today, the First Sunday of Advent, at St Paul's Cathedral we prayed for all sorts and conditions close-by and far away. Then we sang this hymn

Take our fears, then, Lord
and turn them into hopes for life anew:
Fading light and dying season
sing their Glorias to you.

Speak, O God, your Word among us.
Barren lives your presence fill.
Swell our hearts with songs of gladness,
terrors calm, forebodings still.

Let your promised realm of justice
blossom now throughout the earth;
your dominion bring now near us;
we await the saving birth.

Words Dean W. Nelson (b. 1944) * Music TON-Y-BOTEL, Thomas John Williams (1869-1944)

A THANKSGIVING LITANY

Daily Reading for November 27 • Thanksgiving Day

Give thanks to the Lord who is good.
God’s love is everlasting.

Come, let us praise God joyfully.
Let us come to God with thanksgiving.

For the good world; for things great and small, beautiful and awesome; for seen and unseen splendors:
Thank you, God.

For human life; for talking and moving and thinking together; for common hopes and hardship shared from birth until our dying:
Thank you, God.

For work to do and strength to work; for the comradeship of labor; for exchanges of good humor and encouragement:
Thank you, God.

For marriage; for the mystery and joy of flesh made one; for mutual forgiveness and burdens shared; for secrets kept in love:
Thank you, God.

For family; for living together and eating together; for family amusements and family pleasures:
Thank you, God.

For children; for their energy and curiosity; for their brave play and their startling frankness; for their sudden sympathies:
Thank you, God.

For the young; for their high hopes; for their irreverence toward worn-out values; for their search for freedom; for their solemn vows:
Thank you, God.

For growing up and growing old; for wisdom deepened by experience; for rest in leisure; and for time made precious by its passing:
Thank you, God.

For your help in times of doubt and sorrow; for healing our diseases; for preserving us in temptation and danger:
Thank you, God.

For the church into which we have been called; for the good news we received by Word and Sacrament; for our life together in the Lord:
We praise you, God.

For your Holy Spirit, who guides our steps and brings us gifts of faith and love; who prays in us and prompts our grateful worship:
We praise you, God.

Above all, O God, for your Son Jesus Christ, who lived and died and lives again for our salvation; for our hope in him; and for the joy of serving him:
We thank and praise you, Eternal God, for all your goodness to us.

Give thanks to the Lord who is good.
God’s love is everlasting. Amen.

“Litany of Thanksgiving” from the Book of Common Worship (1993), quoted in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised and updated edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery Rowthorn with W. Alfred Tisdale. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY.

(This litany was posted today on Episcopal Café's Speaking to the Soul. Many thanks.)

XENOPHILIA

The lavish hospitality of God is radically different from Martha Stewart's. As ludicrous as that sounds, it all boils down to imitating the table manners of Jesus.

Today is the Last Sunday after Pentecost, also known as Christ the King Sunday or Stir-Up Sunday.