January 22, 2025
“Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body–Jews or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 12:12)
Our Ministry Fair last Sunday was an outward and visible sign of the Spirit at work in our beloved Holy Family. A deep bow of gratitude for Parish Life, and all those who contributed to the success of this gathering. Thank you! We were indeed one in the same Spirit of grace, hospitality, excellence, and compassionate outreach.
Our search process now nears the penultimate stage, and we give thanks for our nominating committee consisting of co-chairs Martha Power and Steve Franzen, and the faithful committee members Scott Armentrout, Cammie Cox, Allan DeNiro, Winship Durrett, Jeannine Krenson, and Ric Sanchez. This is a difficult and sacred process, and we thank you, each of you!
And thanks to all those who completed the Congregational Assessment Tool (CAT) Survey taken by some 140 parishioners in May. Applications for our new Rector have now been received for consideration by the nominating committee, and they will go on to the vestry to complete the search process. We are getting close to the next chapter in the life of Holy Family thanks to all of you!
As I looked around the room at our Ministry Fair, and wandered throughout the parish, I was reminded that relationships—their invitation to each of us—calls us out of our self-serving agendas. They require that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. They ask us to acknowledge our humility in the face of forces greater than we are. We are “called out” of what our agenda would be if we had not come across, for example, the woman in need at the nursing home, or those on the margins in such cold winter weather as we have experienced, those in need of a visit and a prayer, and so on…all the ways we give ourselves away as the Body of Christ in the world. We are “called out” of what our agenda would be if, for example, many years ago we had not recognized the need for increased visitation for sick and shut-in parishioners. We began a Lay Pastoral Care class, and this gave birth to our pastoral care committee.
So why go to church? What do you tell your friends or perhaps your own children who no longer go but who wonder why you do? Why participate in the ritual of baptism again and again by recalling your baptismal vows? Why commit ourselves to an irrevocable covenant to a group of flawed fellow human beings and agree to journey with them for the rest of our lives?
At my ordination at the cathedral many years ago, Thee Smith and I heard the Gospel of John read—you know the story: Jesus asks Simon Peter three times if he loves him. Three times Peter says that he does. Jesus tells Peter to tend and feed his sheep. He then says, “when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you, and take you where you do not wish to go.” Indeed. Such is the binding together we observed on Sunday. Why go to church? Because as theologian Ron Rolheiser suggests, it is not good that we should be alone, and ecclesiology—being the church in the world, in action—is walking with God in community. And because we must take our rightful place, humbly, within the family of humanity. And because the Holy Spirit calls us there—because to deal with Christ is to deal with the church. And because we need community to dispel our sometimes unrealistic and self-serving fantasies about ourselves…and in the presence of people who share life with us regularly we cannot lie and delude ourselves into thinking we are more generous and noble than we are. And because ten thousand saints have told us that God wants us to walk the spiritual journey with others, and not alone. And because we need to dream with others—and hope and pray together for justice and peace, especially in times such as these.
And we go to church because we need to practice for heaven here and now, and for the pure joy of it. So let us take one last glance back toward Christmas now. Let us recall the journey of the Magi, whose agendas were radically altered by news of the birth of a child. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “Just the worst time of the year for a journey and such a long journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter…and the night fires going out, and the lack of shelters, and the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly and the villages dirty and charging high prices. A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches, with the voices ringing in our ears, saying this was all folly.” These three sojourners must have been, as Eliot suggests, haunted by the uncertainty.
Yet like them, we come to know that gifts only have life and meaning when they are taken, blessed, broken and shared with others. And Baptism is the sign of our identification with them and with Christ—a visible, tangible affirmation that binds us together and calls us out as we discover a spark of transcendence beyond our former selves or, as Eliot said so well of the Magi, who returned to their former land “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensations, with an alien people clutching their gods.” Indeed. We ought to be rightly suspicious when we are called only to joy. But Baptism is, ultimately, about the joy that was sealed and consecrated at the Jordan, in which, through the Holy Spirit, He gives His own to share.
This is what I saw last Sunday at the Ministry Fair…the joy of gathering in the Spirit, to be so much more together than we are alone! Thank you!
Bill+
January 15, 2025
Grace and peace to each of you on this chilly Wednesday in Epiphany! I hope everyone is emerging safely from the icy chrysalis of the past few days. I missed seeing you all at church on Sunday. I was able to get out on the trails a few times, and finally made my way to the counseling center to see after my patients on Monday. With a full moon riding high in the sky, I was entranced by the beauty of the ice on a cold January night, a moment to be treasured, and a luminous gift.
In the quiet stillness of the woods in winter, I am reminded of this lovely poem:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once,
January 8, 2025
On a cold Epiphany winter night at Holy Family, we joined in the Episcopal tradition of the Burning of the Greens. The Christian holy day Epiphany, on Jan. 6, is also known as the “Feast of Lights,” and some Episcopal congregations celebrate this feast quite literally, by burning Christmas trees and greens in recognition of Jesus as a light to the world.
The light from a Christmas tree fire invokes symbolism rooted in the origins of Epiphany as an alternative to pagan festivals that were held on the winter solstice – the darkest day of the year. Also known as Three Kings Day, Epiphany traditionally commemorates the day the Magi were introduced to the infant Jesus. Light also is a familiar motif in contemporary lectionary readings for Epiphany, such as Isaiah 60:1-6: “Arise, shine; for your light has come.”
Another tradition, closely associated with the winter solstice, is the burning of a Yule log in a bonfire, symbolizing the return of the sun during the darkest time of year, particularly prevalent in ancient Scandinavian cultures; people would often save a small part of the log to light the next year’s fire, signifying continuity and the cycle of life. The Germanic, Scandinavian, Norse, and Celtic peoples celebrated Yule on the winter solstice. Anciently, Yule was a celebration that, in some cases, lasted for 2 months! Norse people would celebrate Yule with evergreens, holly, wreaths, a Yule log, and bells.
In ancient customs, burning the Yule log was believed to signal the return of the sun and usher in the beginning of spring.
January 1, 2025
I am a collector and connoisseur of light. I hold memories of these experiences of light deep within my soul, and they sustain and enliven and enrich my experience of being alive. On a remarkable day recently, I was running on the local trails, and I was rendered speechless by the slant of light and the beauty of the day. As Emily Dickinson said,
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
And on Christmas morning I arrived early and sat in the chapel as the light streamed into that sacred space, soon to be filled with those gathered for the quiet Eucharist….
In one of his poems Gerard Manly Hopkins has written,
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;”
In my mind’s eye, I have a collection of such days of remarkable light. They each involve a transformation of perspectives of some kind, perhaps even a transcendence of the ordinary, even if just for a moment. Each experience involves liminal, transitional space, where light seems to symbolize the passage to a new perspective, a surprising way of looking at the world. I recall the remarkable quality of light on a day in Maine, leaving Stonington Harbor in a kayak, looking back at the town as the sunlight, filtered through a dissipating fog, cast a beautiful glow on Penobscot Bay and reflected off the slick head of a harbor seal,