SpiritMatters Monthly August 2011

To love another person is to see the face of God...

In the book of Genesis, God states that: “It is not good for man to be alone.” God neglected, however, to elaborate on just how hard it would be for people to live together. In the biblical story, it didn’t take very long at all for Adam and Eve’s relationship to encounter serious trouble, and THEY were living in the Garden of Eden. It should come as no surprise to us then that relationships continue to be the central struggle of most of our lives. Whether it is with a significant other, a family member, a friend, a co-worker or a stranger on the street, the relationships we have with the other people in our life can be a blessing or a challenge and frequently they can be both at the same time. They are the source of our greatest joy, and of our greatest pain.

We all want to be loved. There is something deeply affirming and gratifying about having people in your life that want to be close to you either emotionally or physically. It gives us hope that the universe may not be as cold and lonely as we otherwise might imagine. None of us is perfect. We all have moments when we don’t feel loveable: a bad hair day, a bad mood day, or just a bad day period. We all have things about ourselves that we would like to change. It is important to have people in your life that can see past your flaws even when you can’t. The people in your life that truly love you know about all the skeletons in your closet and don’t care. They are the people who have seen you without your make-up or your game-face. They are the people who know who you truly are and not just the image that you project to the rest of the world. True love can really only happen when you truly know someone. It is amazing how many supposedly serious relationships are based upon false pretenses. The world can be a very difficult place in which to live, and we cannot be vulnerable to everyone all the time, but we all need at least one or two people in our lives to whom we can reveal our truest self.

On August 6^th, many Christian churches observe the Feast of the Transfiguration, which memorializes an event mentioned in the gospels where Jesus takes three of his disciples to the top of a mountain to reveal to them who he truly is. We know from the gospel accounts that Jesus was closer to some of his disciples than he was to others. It was only to Peter, James and John that Jesus felt comfortable revealing his innermost self. Perhaps in that moment of transfiguration, when Jesus revealed his true nature to the three disciples on the mountain, his desire was to be known and loved for who he truly was, and not just for what others wanted him to be. It is a desire that I believe most of us share. There is an iconic image of Christ holding open his chest to reveal his heart. It is meant to convey just how vulnerable God is willing to be in order to be loved by us. To open your heart to someone and reveal your innermost thoughts and feelings is an extreme act of vulnerability, but it is really the only way to be truly loved. If life were simply about survival of the fittest we would probably never allow anyone else to truly know who we are; it would simply be too risky. Luckily life appears to be about more than just survival and we each have the opportunity to be known and loved by others in a way that helps us overcome our own humanity. Perhaps the desire to be loved for who we are and not just for what others want us to be is a trait that humans have in common with God. Maybe that desire to be known and loved is a part of the divine image in which the book of Genesis claims we were created.

Who knows you? Who are the people in your life that know all your baggage and don’t care? Who can you be completely and totally honest with? Pay attention to the people in your life that pay attention to you. Hold on to the people that want to know what makes you tick; the people that know your foibles; the people that can anticipate your thoughts and actions. Those are the people that want to know and love you for who you truly are, and aren’t just looking to cast you into a role that they have already written.

As the story goes, immediately after Adam and Eve took the bite of that forbidden fruit, their first inclination was to try to cover themselves up and conceal themselves from God. Our reality as humans living in a broken world is that we aren’t able to reveal ourselves completely to every person we come across. Not every relationship in our life is meant to be deep and meaningful, and they aren’t all meant to be life-long. But pay attention when someone opens their heart to you. It is in those knowing and loving relationships that we experience how it feels to see another person with open eyes and a vulnerable heart. It might just be the way that God looks at us.

SpiritMatters Monthly May 2011

Get up, stand up...

Standing is a sign of respect. When I was in primary school my class was taught to stand whenever an adult entered the room. Soldiers are taught to stand at attention in the presence of a superior officer. When a priest enters the church at the beginning of the service the congregation stands; they do the same for the bride at a wedding. Gentlemen used to stand whenever a lady entered the room. In royal protocol, it is customary to stand whenever a king or queen enters the room, or to stand whenever a king or queen stands.

If you have ever been to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, then you are likely to have noticed that audiences frequently stand during the Halleluiah Chorus. Why? When Handel’s Messiah was first premiered in London, the performance was attended by King George II. When the choir began to sing the Halleluiah Chorus the king stood up, and because the king was standing everyone else in the audience had to stand as well and thus began a tradition that lasts to this day. But why did King George stand at that precise moment? The answer lies in the text of the chorus itself:

Halleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth…

King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Because Christ was being hailed as “King of Kings” by the choir, King George stood as a sign of respect to a greater king than himself. George’s very simple gesture sent a very powerful message: even he was subject to a higher power.

We often overlook or undervalue just how powerful physical language can be, but it can convey messages much more efficiently than our mouths can. It is trite, but true: actions speak louder than words. Regardless of what we say with our lips, or body language or our gestures will almost always give away our true thoughts or feelings. Countless books have been written to coach people on how to use body language effectively in the workplace and how to be aware of the non-verbal cues that we send others and that they in turn send us.

Physical language has just as much power in our faith lives as well. How we behave around holy objects or in our houses of worship says much more about what we actually think about God than what we profess with our lips. It is for this reason that the Church has at times paid close attention to the ritual actions and postures that people have during worship. One of the proclamations made by the First Council of Nicaea in 325AD was that Christians should stand during the service on Sundays and throughout Easter. It was felt that kneeling was too penitential and focused too much upon the sinfulness of the individual worshiper and not enough upon the dignity and respect owed to God. To this day many Christian traditions still stand during the Holy Eucharist.

Opinions and customs and postures have changed over the years, but the need to ensure that what we say is consistent with what we do has not. Much of what our mother’s taught us in the way of manners were not arbitrary rules of behavior, but guidelines to keep us from unintentionally offending others by not paying attention to our actions or our physical language. Having good manners is not about making yourself feel superior, it is about monitoring your actions in order to make the people around you feel comfortable.

The idea of standing as a sign of respect when a king, queen or someone of superior rank enters the room may seem antiquated to us today. Our society has shown a preference for familiarity over formality in recent decades and many of the symbols of honor and dignity that we once employed have fallen into disuse. The problem is that when our signs and symbols of respect fade away, very frequently the respect does as well. Paying attention to manners and body language and gestures may take a little extra effort, but the respect that it brings to us and gives to others make it worthwhile. Of course it takes more effort to stand during the Halleluiah Chorus rather than just sit there, but then showing respect to others is usually worth the extra effort. King George certainly thought so.

SpiritMatters Monthly April 2011

If you want a trail to stay alive, walk on it.

The ultimate test of a road is not whether or not it is bumpy or smooth, or narrow or wide, or long or short. The ultimate test of a road is whether or not it can take you where you want to go. A road is only as good as its destination; without a destination, a road is simply useless concrete. With a destination, a road can be a crucial means to get where we need to go. On my recent trip to the Middle East I had the opportunity to travel on two very ancient roads: the Via Maris and the King’s Highway. Both of these routes have been used by travelers and traders for thousands of years, and they are as heavily traveled now as they ever were for one very important reason: they still get people where they need to go. The pavement may have changed over the years, but the basic route hasn’t.

When we talk about religion in our modern world we often talk about someone’s beliefs or belief system or theology. We don’t often refer to religion as someone’s road or path, but that may in fact be a better way of thinking about it. Christianity was first referred to as “the Way” and its adherents were called “Followers of the Way.” The first Christian communities had some definite beliefs, but they were not organized around dogma, they were organized around a way of life. The Christians had a goal or destination to which they were headed: they wanted to be saved by their God; to be one with him and to be freed from lives that simply ended in death and meaninglessness. They found in Jesus of Nazareth their way or their road to an eternal promised land, just as the Children of Israel generations before had found in Moses their route to freedom.

God may give us the destination, and God may give us the road to get there, but we are the ones who must have the will to move. As anyone in New Jersey can tell you, even the best road to the greatest destination is still pretty useless if your car is not moving. From the earliest records we have, people of great faith have been people on the move: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad and the list goes on. All of these individuals had an active faith and not just a passive belief system. They did not look at religion as simply another way to categorize themselves; for them, religion was their road or path to a relationship with God. They had the destination, they had the road to get there, AND they had the will to walk down it. Too often people think that they can just stand out in the middle of the road and wait for God to come by and pick them up, but in the Biblical story of the Exodus, God may protect the Children of Israel and guide them along the way, but ultimately they are the ones who must move, not God.

I have a friend who insists to me all the time that faith is a gift and you either have it or you don’t. I think that that idea is absurd. It is like saying that an athlete is born with big muscles or just develops them over night. We know that our bodies require constant work to stay healthy, so why do we imagine that it is any different with our souls? Our muscles are built over time and depend upon both the food that we eat and the exercise that we do. Faith is built in a similar fashion: it relies upon both the material with which we feed it (what we read, what we watch, and what we listen to) and the work we do to exercise it. The longer we walk along the road the stronger our faith will get. Not that there aren’t stumbling blocks, potholes and detours along the way, there always will be, but ultimately the journey is ours to make or not make. If we fall we can decide to lay there and stop moving or we can get up and keep going. We can trip over others who are sitting in our path, or we can simply go around them, never allowing anyone to prevent us from reaching our destination.

We can think of religion as specific customs, rituals, beliefs, and dogmas that separate us from each other, or we can think of religion as different roads with the common destination of God. The ultimate test of these roads is not how bumpy they are or how hard they are to travel; the ultimate test is whether or not they eventually bring us to God. My religion, or my path, is thousands of years old. Countless millions have walked this way before me, and many continue to walk this way today. I like to imagine that my tradition is like the Via Maris or the King’s Highway: ancient, but still in use because it still gets people where they want to go. But where the road is headed is really only one part of the equation; we also have to ask ourselves how willing we are to actually do the work, walk the path and practice the faith, because in the end, if we aren’t willing to move, any road can take us nowhere.

SpiritMatters Monthly March 2011

And whenever you fast, do not look dismal…’

It never ceases to amaze me.

Americans will latch on to any fad diet with an almost religious zeal. The rules can be strict or relaxed, obvious or obscure. Give up dairy and meat? No problem. Give up carbs and caffeine? Easy. Cut out wheat, butter, sugar, fat or almost anything else and people are still with you, but suggest that someone might want to give up one of these items for a spiritual reason, and not merely a physical one, and you’ve lost them completely! “Why would I want to do that?” “I don’t want a religion that tells me what I can and can’t eat.” “Why would God care if I eat ________ (fill in the blank)?” The idea that the physical body and the spiritual body are linked can still seem odd and foreign, even to people of faith, despite the fact that most major religions incorporate some type of fasting in their spiritual practice. The Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics and many Episcopalians refrain from eating certain foods during Lent, particularly on Fridays and on the High Holy Days of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Jews typically fast on Yom Kippur and also refrain from eating leavened foods during Passover. Muslims fast during the daylight hours during the month of Ramadan. The rules vary from one religion to the next but the principle is the same: we are called periodically to remind ourselves not to put our bodies ahead of our souls.

We all make sacrifices everyday. We refrain from buying the little things that we want, so that we may buy the big things that we want. We avoid foods that we like so that we can be a certain size or look a certain way. We spend more or less time at work so that we can spend more or less time doing the other things of importance in our lives. Life forces us to make choices all the time and many times those choices are made without a great deal of thought. We all get into routines and patterns that are actually taking us further and further away from our ultimate goals, and not closer to them. Sometimes it is good to stop and take a look at our choices and see what end they are actually serving. Which God do we make the most sacrifices to? Work? Vanity? Money? Entertainment? Secular people often scoff at the sacrifices that people of faith make, but at least faith calls you to be intentional about the sacrifices you make, and not to serve the Gods of this world by default.

For many Christians, Lent, which begins this month, is a season of self-sacrifice, reflection and renewal. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not intended to be some punishment or atonement for the sins that we have committed the rest of the year, nor is it meant to be a drudgery. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Lent does not begin on Ash Wednesday as it does in the West, but on Clean Monday and many refer to the first week of Lent as Clean Week. It is a tradition in Greece and in other Orthodox countries for people to clean their entire house either during or before the first week in Lent. This spiritual and physical house cleaning is celebrated with parties and festivities. The season is seen as a gift and not as a burden. Likewise in the West, many Christians are warned on Ash Wednesday not to use their fasting to seek the attention of others, but rather to direct their own attention towards God.

Fasting is not meant to be a weight loss technique. It is not meant to help us fit into our swimsuits in time for Memorial Day. But fasting can, in its own way, help us to reduce some of the weight that we carry around on a daily basis. How much energy and effort do I spend on a daily basis focusing on the food that I put in my body? What if I simplified my diet and spent that time and energy focusing on feeding my soul: praying, reading, meditating, or spending time in nature? What if I spent a little less time worrying about all the other “gods” in my life and spent more focusing on the one that really matters? Fasting may not sound as sexy as the Atkins, the South Beach, the Zone, the Paleo or the 24 hour Celebrity Juice diets, but it has been practiced by people of different faiths for over 5,000 years with sometimes tremendous degrees of success. Now that is anything but a fad.

SpiritMatters Monthly February 2011

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,

according to thy word;

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

which thou hast prepared before the face of all people,

To be a light to lighten the Gentiles,

and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

The world has a long history of favoring those that come first. First born sons, in particular, have held positions of great power in the world. If you are a first born son you stand to inherit not only your father’s name, but also your father’s estate and title. A first born son was also a prized possession, because it gave father’s stability and a legacy. We only need to look to King Henry the 8^th to see the lengths to which a man will go in order to have a first born son. If you were a first born son you were the heir apparent to whatever worldly power your ancestors had attained. I say worldly power, because a brief skim through the characters of the Bible should remind us that God’s favor is not always on those who come in first. Cain was the first born son of Adam and Eve and we know that he didn’t fair very well. Abraham was asked to sacrifice Sarah’s first son Issac (we can save what happened to his first actual son Ishmael till another time). Esau sold his birthright to his younger brother Jacob and then was even cheated out of his father’s blessing, and of Jacob’s sons, it was the youngest, Joseph, who was favored of God. Further along in history we will remember that it was David, the youngest son of Jesse, that God had anointed to be king over Israel. When Samuel was looking over the son’s of Jesse and saw Eliah, the eldest, he thought “surely this must be the Lord’s anointed.” But the Lord said to him “No. I do not see the way you do. You look for the oldest, the tallest and the strongest or the most beautiful. I am not looking on the outward appearance; I am looking on the heart.” God knows our tendency to judge things. God knows that we have a habit of putting our faith and our resources into what we can see and judge, rather than on what he has revealed to us. God tested Abraham’s resolve to put God first, before his love for anything worldly, including his first born son. When God sought to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, his last and greatest plague struck the Egyptians where it would hurt the most: the first born. God slaughtered the first born of all Egypt, and instructed the Israelites that they were to remember perpetually how they had been spared by God. This, of course, is the beginning of the Passover tradition, but an additional part of the tradition was God’s claim that even though Israel’s first born had been spared, they still belonged to God. Not just those that survived the exodus, but all future first borns too. So there develops this tradition, of not only sacrificing the first born livestock to God, but also ritually or ceremonially sacrificing the first born male children to God. All of those that are first born are consecrated to God as a solemn reminder that God always comes first. It is partially in the context of this ceremonial sacrifice that Jesus is brought to the temple in a passage from the gospel of Luke. He is a first born son and therefore Mary and Joseph had to acknowledge that he belonged first and foremost to God, not to them. Joseph offered to the priest Simeon the prescribed sacrificial animals to be offered to God in exchange for the life of this baby boy. This was the law of Moses and we are told that Joseph and Mary did everything in accordance with the law.

According to tradition Simeon was an old priest. He had been doing this very same service of claiming first born sons as belonging to God for years, perhaps hundreds of times. Simeon had been told by the Holy Spirit that this work he was doing would not be in vain, but that it eventually would lead him to see the messiah, the child that would actually be God’s very own. The first born, not just of one man and woman, but of all creation. And here at last he was in his arms. The beacon of light that he had waited his entire life to see and the one child that would give all of that waiting and working meaning. When Simeon utters the Nunc Dimittis, which is the prayer that begins: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…” he does it for all of us who spend our lives working and waiting for God’s glory to be realized and seen. It is fitting that this prayer is traditionally said at the end of the day, because it is often only those brief glimpses of God’s kingdom that give us the strength and courage and peace that we need to go forward into another day.

Mary and Joseph were astounded at what Simeon and Anna said, not because they didn’t believe it, but because it confirmed what they already knew and could see. What a joy it is to have your faith confirmed by others; to have an experience that you thought only you had, be shared by someone else. How important it is to have that confirmation that other people see the light of God where you see the light of God. That is the beauty of fellowship: to be able to stand together with others and say hat we have seen God here. Part of the reason people of faith gather in communities, I hope, is that it is a way that we can claim those places and those ways in which we believe we can encounter God. For Christians, the Feast of Candlemas, which celebrates Christ’s presentation in the temple, can be a hard sell to get people to come to church sometimes. It doesn’t have any of the penitential lament of Ash Wednesday or Good Friday; it doesn’t have any of the joy or frivolity of Christmas Day or Epiphany. Its popular customs are largely forgotten and have mostly to do with this being the end of the Christmas and Epiphany season. It doesn’t stir us up and excite us, and maybe for that very reason it might have the most to say to us about our daily lives as people of faith. The Purification of the Blessed Virgin and the Presentation of our Lord were done not out of desperation or delight, but out of devotion. They were done because God asked for them to be done and the people that did them had the will and the patience and the faith to keep listening to God, to keep observing his commands, and to keep working for his kingdom until by God’s light and grace they were allowed to see it. May we too be so lucky to serve God, to see his salvation, and to depart in peace.

SpiritMatters Monthly December 2010

Of the things that are, that have been,

And that future years shall see,

Ever more and ever more!

Contrary to popular belief,

Christmas Trees are not an ancient tradition. If you asked the average person on the street where the tradition of Christmas Trees came from, he or she would probably tell you that it was an ancient pagan custom that Christians adopted. Unfortunately, there isn’t any evidence to support this theory. While it is known that ancient pagans brought branches of evergreen and mistletoe into their homes during the winter season, the earliest evidence we have of anything even resembling a Christmas Tree dates from around the mid 1400s, and even then the practice was restricted to a few places in Estonia and Northern Germany. The modern popularity of Christmas Trees, particularly among English-speaking Christians, can largely and reliably be dated to one event:

In December of 1848 a drawing was printed in the Illustrated London News that depicted Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert standing around a decorated fir tree with the royal family (Prince Albert was German and therefore familiar with the Christmas Tree traditions of his homeland). The English nobility immediately latched on to the tradition and by the end of the 19^th century having a Christmas Tree was quite common, both in England and America. While it is true that we don’t know the exact date of Christ’s birth, we do know that Christians have been celebrating the event on December 25^th since before the year 355AD. That’s at least 1,655 Christmases! Over all those years the traditions surrounding the holiday have changed and developed as each new generation of Christians brings to the observance their own customs, rituals and beliefs. Some customs were brought by pagan converts (mistletoe), some were brought by ethnic groups (German Christmas Trees) and other we can trace to specific individuals (St. Francis of Assisi is responsible for creating the first Nativity Scene or Crèche).

We are now in the midst of the holiday season, a time of the year when for most of us tradition plays a larger role than during most of the rest of the year. Tradition is a funny thing: it shapes us while we shape it. Tradition is a living thing, and like most living things, it evolves and changes over time. We live in relationship with tradition, much like we live in relationship with other people in our lives: healthy relationships involve give and take; they involve listening and challenging; most importantly they involve mutual respect and not coercion. We may not always understand a tradition, but that is no reason to dismiss it. Healthy traditions allow us to be uniquely who we are, while at the same time challenging us to be a part of something larger, older and greater.

Tradition has a way of forcing us to encounter people that we would otherwise have no hope of meeting in our daily lives. It is through tradition that we encounter individuals that died hundreds, even thousands of years before us. By observing the same (or similar) rituals and practices, we are in a sense linked to our ancestors and they speak to us through the tradition. Our observance of different traditions connects us to people in far off foreign lands, at different times and in different places. It is also by tradition that we leave a legacy to those who will come after us. Tradition is that bizarre place where past, present, and future come together.

The Victorians adopted a tradition that was not their own (the German Christmas Trees), because in it they saw something of great beauty and value that enhanced their own celebration of Christmas, and by adopting the practice, they in turn have shaped our tradition. I love the fact that our modern holiday celebrations are such a hodgepodge of different traditions from different cultures. For me, the fact that our traditions are continuing to grow and develop are proof that God isn’t done with us yet.

SpiritMatters Monthly November 2010

So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.

 

-G.K. Chesterton

 

I often say that New York is the biggest small town you will ever live in. In a city of roughly 8 million people you would think that the chances of randomly running into someone you know would be pretty unlikely, and yet it’s the sort of thing that happens to me all the time. I step on a subway train and there stands a friend that I haven’t seen in months; Walking down the street I often run into acquaintances from other parts of town, other cities and even other states. You can call it coincidence, you can call it serendipity, but to me it feels more like a plot. Why on earth with all the millions of possibilities out there should I regularly find myself in the right place at the right time? I know that I often think about the world as if it were ruled by complete chance, and yet my experience frequently proves otherwise.

 

Many of us have probably asked the question: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” but I wonder how many of us ask “Why do good things happen to good people?” If the universe were ruled by the laws of chance and probability then one outcome would seem just as likely as the other, but if we really look closely at life we will probably find that the good things happen more frequently. Why is it then that we spend so much time talking about the bad things in life? Maybe the bad things are so noticeable to us precisely because they are a departure from the norm. Good things happen with such regularity that eventually we begin to overlook them. I’m not talking about big miracles like winning the lottery or having a baby. I’m talking about the little everyday things that we take for granted: having enough food to eat, having friends that love and care for us, or getting over the flu. These things happen so regularly that we fail to notice them until they don’t happen. If we stopped focusing on the bad things in our life, or on the things that we don’t have and instead looked to the multitude of blessings that we often ignore, how much happier would our lives be?

 

We are headed into the holiday season and already advertisers are bombarding us with messages reminding us of what we don’t have or trying to convince us that we need precisely what they are trying to sell. This may be a burden of the holiday season that we have to live with, but we don’t have to accept it uncritically. Thanksgiving is a perfect time to remind ourselves, on the day before the madness of the holiday rush begins, of the ways in which we are already blessed. We can give thanks, not just for the food before us, but for the many good things which we regularly overlook. We just might discover that we already have more than we need. The giving that comes as a part of the holiday season can be a true joy if the gifts are our response to the abundance of blessings in our lives and not just another chore that we “need” to do. If you look at your life closely you may just discover a multitude of little blessings, graces or “coincidences” that individually can be explained away or ignored, but collectively are far more significant. I am always intrigued when watching artists at work. Some brush strokes seem totally bizarre and pointless until the painting is finished and you realize how important that one splash of red or dot of white is to the overall painting. May we prepare for this holiday season by taking the time to give thanks for all the little good things in our lives: those little moments of grace which by the laws of chance and probability didn’t have to happen, but did anyways. Let us give thanks for all those little brush strokes that remind us, even for a moment, that there is an artist at work.

 Blessings,

Fr. Kevin