Distant Temple Bell

Whose Woods These Are*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 11:32:00 +0000

My dog, Wilbur, and I had been for a walk after supper.

I opened the gate, stepping into the back yard. It was a dark night and quiet. And I heard the call: who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? It was a Barred Owl in woods nearby. Wilbur and I stood still and listened. Eventually it moved off, the call more faint, then gone.

The Barred Owl is a non-migratory species, preferring old woodland habitat near water. Nesting, they lay their eggs in the cavities of standing trees.[i]

I rarely hear them. Far more, lying in bed at night in February or early March—if I happen to be awake—I hear the breeding call of the Great Horned Owl, the classic hoot owl of children’s storybooks.

For the last twenty-three years, Sukie and I have lived in Cumberland Foreside, in what had been an old summer colony, now a year round community.

Three years ago, we installed functioning central heating in our drafty cottage built in 1920. Our neighborhood, Wildwood, adjoins the Payson estate of one hundred acres of woods and fields and waterfront along Broad Cove.

A thousand years ago and more, the land, like much of the land and islands in Casco Bay, was frequented by the ancestors of the Wabanaki tribe, leaving their tell-tales signs of seasonal migrations in the shell middens and other artifacts they left behind.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Town of Cumberland built a poor farm on what is now the Payson estate, where indigent residents would make oakum, a loose fiber obtained by untwisting old rope, and used in caulking the wooden ships built in the Spear’s Shipyard nearby.[ii]

Phillips Payson bought the land in 1936 from property then owned by his wife’s parents. In 1938, he built the estate house overlooking the bay beyond.

When we moved to Cumberland, the matriarch, Mrs. Marion Payson, then in her nineties, was generous toward the Wildwood children, allowing them to tramp through the forest and sled down a long hill through the snowy woods into a field below.

For many years, I’ve keep notes in our family calendar that hangs in the kitchen, writing down when the migratory birds return to the Payson woods, their telltale songs delighting us anew every spring.

Warblers abound—Black-throated green, Chesnut-sided, Yellow-rumped, Ovenbird and many others. The Hermit Thrush sings its wild sweet strains from woods beside vernal pools, where the peepers hold forth on spring evenings. And year round the cackling call of the Pileated Woodpecker, the massive bird that sometimes visits the suet feeder hanging from the white pine in my backyard.

Mrs. Payson died many years ago, leaving the property to her daughter, who in turn passed it on to her children. The grand house on the bluff overlooking the cove stood empty more often than not, too expensive to maintain, the property taxes prohibitive. The caretaker was let go by the family, and inevitably, the estate was put up for sale and was bought by a local developer last spring.

Plans have been drawn up for seven building lots for high-end homes on a parcel of the property. The Town of Cumberland hopes to purchase the remainder of the land from the developer, making available walking trails and waterfront access for town residents. The Paysons donated a conservation easement to the local land trust, although the interpretation of that easement is presently in dispute.

Whatever the outcome, the land will inevitably change. And with that change will come loss.

The house lots alone will mean the degradation of acres of prime woodland habitat. Many of the bird species I mentioned may disappear—far fewer warblers may nest there, the numbers of owls and Pileated woodpeckers, depending on stands of dead timber for nesting, will surely diminish. The Hermit Thrush may pass through on its way to forests further north, but it will no longer dwell in the woods.

If Cumberland does purchase the remainder of the property, it will be a mixed blessing—town residents, while obtaining waterfront access, will enjoy only a fraction of the land’s former glory.

While the story of the Payson property is unique, throughout the country land is threatened by unrelenting pressure from development and large-scale agriculture. By far the greatest threat to bird species is the loss and degradation of habitat. The ongoing loss of our intimate connection to the earth and its creatures, sustaining of the human soul from time immemorial, is itself incalculable.

For we are not only the stewards of God’s creation—tenders of the earth’s garden—we are part and parcel of the fabric of life itself, in which we, and all creatures, live and move and have our being.

In an article entitled Saving our Birds in the New York Times last month, the director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, John Fitzpatrick, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the death of the last passenger pigeon, Martha, writes of the passing of an entire species:

Possibly the most abundant bird ever to have existed, he says, this gregarious pigeon once migrated in giant flocks that sometimes exceeded three billion, darkening the skies over eastern North America for days at a time...100 years ago this week, the very last pigeon of her kind died in a cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha, and her passing merits our close attention today.

Mercilessly slaughtered by the tens of millions at breeding colonies in the North and at huge wintertime roosts in the South during the post-Civil War era, passenger pigeons were shipped by trainloads to dinner tables in homes and restaurants across the East. Their population fell from biblical numbers at mid-century to tiny, aimless flocks in 1890. By around 1900 the few birds that remained were all in captivity. The last male died in 1910, leaving Martha as a barren relic of past abundance.

We need to imagine Martha asking us, “Have you learned anything from my passing?”[iii]

Fitzpatrick cites the 2014 State of the Birds report, a periodic assessment of the health of our nation’s bird populations compiled by leading bird conservationists, that notes 230 species on a watch list of birds that are currently in danger of extinction or at risk of becoming so without significant conservation efforts.

But then he goes on to remark on the pioneering conservation work of many, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, and the huge difference that such initiatives have made. We need to redouble our commitment and investment even now, Fitzpatrick asserts, insuring that our great-grandchildren will continue to hear the birds calling from the woods, just as I have heard the owl and thrush from my own backyard.

Aldo Leopold, the author of the great conservation classic, A Sand County Almanac, wrote: We only grieve for what we know.

Leopold was commenting on the increasing rarity of a once abundant species of prairie wildflower in his home state of Wisconsin. How could this beautiful plant have come so dangerously close to extinction, he wondered? Why did its impending disappearance from the world not provoke a stronger response?[iv]

Leopold would suggest that our ability to mourn the loss of species and entire ecosystems is itself a reflection of the ties of kinship that bind us to the lives of other beings. We only grieve for what we know.

I grieve for the impending loss of nearby woods and the banishment of birds that have enriched my life, and that of my children, for years.

Our grief at the degrading of the natural world, though, is a sure sign of our affection and tenderness toward all creation, and of an underlying joyous affirmation of life.

It is the doorway to renewed action and the healing of the world.

And in that, we take hope and even greater consolation. AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough; First Sunday of Creation Season; September 14, 2014

Photo: Farm owned by Maria Dalton, worked by the Cram family, late 19th cent., on land that became the Payson estate. Courtesy of Thomas Bennett, Prince Memorial Library, Cumberland, ME.

[i] Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/barred_owl/id

[ii] see Bennett, Thomas Maine’s Pauper Laws and the Cumberland Overseers of the Poor http://cny.mainememory.net/page/2019/display.html

[iii] Fitzpatrick, John Saving the Birds New York Times August 31, 2014

[iv] Christie, Douglas E. The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology Oxford University Press 2013

Generous Love Lavished Upon All*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 11:54:00 +0000

This sermon wants to be painted with vibrant colors—red, green, yellow, purple, orange and blue, pink, then black like a blackbird.

Because, according to an ancient folktale from Zambia, the blackbird is the most beautiful bird in the forest because his feathers gleam all colors in the sun.

These words want to be made with seaglass and papier-mache, like the new windows that adorn the island church.

These words want to be a puppet—made with seashells and seal bones and lobster claws and bits of old cloth and driftwood shiny smooth and silver from wave upon wave upon the shore.

These words want be a poem recited out loud, with all the island school children gathered round rapt with wonder.

This sermon wants to invite everyone—all colors and races and kinds—into the infinite circle of God’s embracing love because God’s generous love is lavished on all.

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, writes Paul; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.

We paint, we write poetry and we express ourselves out of our desire to bring people together in a way that goes beyond who we are as individuals. So says Ashley Bryan, the ninety-one year old African-American painter, poet, puppet maker, and illustrator of over fifty children’s books.[i]

Ashley lives on Little Cranberry Island, a vibrant year round lobstering community downeast that welcomes artisans of every stripe.

This summer, the Islesford Historical Museum on Little Cranberry is hosting an exhibition celebrating Bryan’s 70-year career as an artist. When the exhibition opened, crowds gathered outside the red brick museum by the harbor to cheer him.

Two years ago, the island grade school was renamed after him. At the bar at the Islesford Dock Restaurant, when the rum ran short, the bartender saved the best for last for Ashley’s favorite cocktail, a Dark and Stormy.

The island folk love Ashley because he loves them, they who welcomed this black man from the Bronx when he first came ashore in the forties of the last century.

His unconditional regard extends to all, especially children. All who come within the sphere of his embracing love—a love that feels true and deep as the sea that cradles this island—are made to feel special.

Every morning is a whole new day of discovery, Ashley says. The one thing I have in common with any adult I meet is childhood. Every person has survived childhood. The most tragic experience you can have in life is the death of a child.

That’s why I say, ‘Never let the child within you die.’[ii]

Sukie and I visited Ashley at his humble home, partially hidden by overgrown gardens that are the subject of many of his paintings, last summer. His door is always open and he invites anyone all who wish to visit him. He only asks that those who visit yell loud enough so that he can hear them in his studio.

Every inch of his home is filled with toys and knick-knacks and books and puppets and mobiles hanging from the ceiling. Stacks of canvases lean up against the wall. Seaglass, collected on his ramblings along the rocky island beaches, is spread out on his workbench. Bowls of snacks and candies for those who drop by array his kitchen table.

Heaps of driftwood are stacked and stored away. Odd bits of things that the sea throws up on the shore—wire and old netting and non-biodegradable refuse—is stashed here and there, all of it eventually transformed into winsome objects that delight the eye and lift the spirit.

In an article in the Maine Sunday Telegram last week, Bob Keyes writes that growing up in the Bronx during the Depression, Bryan and his siblings collected scraps of colored paper and fabric in the streets that his mother would twist into flowers to decorate their tenement apartment.

In the segregated Army during World War 2, the man who would go on to become a widely celebrated author and illustrator of children’s books drew pictures of the scenes he witnessed on toilet paper that he hid in his gas mask.[iii]

Wholly embracing the beauty and artistry and folkways of his own African-American heritage, Ashley moves through that to make of his life an unveiling of the beauty inherent in creation and in every human being blessed and loved by God.

Ashley’s life is a testimony to the life of faith of which Paul speaks in this morning’s epistle.

By faith, writes scholar David Clendenin, we accept God's free gifts. By faith we get precisely what we don't deserve, and even more.

Faith believes that God isn't a Divine Accountant or Probation Officer.

[God is] an indulgent father who throws a party for his indigent son.

[God is] like an employer who pays employees a full day's wage even though they only worked for an hour.

[God is] like a lavish wedding host who provides copious amounts of the best wine...

For Paul, Jews are no closer to God and Gentiles are no further from God. We're all equidistant to the heart of God's love.

[God] includes those whom I'd exclude, and embraces the people I would shun.

This good news, [Paul] says, is for "all" people and for "everyone."

No one is excepted.[iv]

Like Ashley Bryan, gratefully greeting each day with wonder, we all alike are artists of God’s love—God’s lavish gifts—making with the odd bits of our lives, beautiful creations. AMEN

*A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, ME; August 10, 2014; Proper 15, Year A; Revised Common Lectionary

Photo: Bill McGuinness

[i] Keyes, Bob Author and Illustrator Ashley Bryan Comes of Age Maine Sunday Telegram August 6, 2014

[ii] Ibid.;

[iii] Ibid.;

[iv] Clendenin, David Listening for God’s Love: What I Did This Summer Journey with Jesus Online Webzine August 4, 2014 http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20140804JJ.shtml

Lean In And Listen*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 11:29:00 +0000

I saw them out of the corner of my eye on my desk—some flowers in a small ceramic vase. I thought: “How nice. Sukie must have made a bouquet for my birthday.”

And then I went on in my head with whatever pressing issues preoccupied me at the time, passing i

nto forgetfulness.

I didn’t notice them again until three days later. They were still there. They hadn’t moved. I just happened to see them—different kinds of flowers.

One I recognized as a nasturtium--deep, rich yellow petals with orange and blood red accents radiating outward from the stamen.

And then others alongside— more yellow flowers, flowers with shades of purple and blue and tiny pointed buds. Getting closer, I noticed one of them smelled minty. And there was another, with a delicate soft white flower...

I finally thanked Sukie and asked what they were. Nasturtiums, she said, and lemon gem marigolds. And some lavender. And catmint. And white flox. All from our garden.

I almost missed them. Another day or two, and they would have been wilted beyond recognition.

And truly seeing them, my life was, in that moment, touched, even changed. My awareness heightened, sharpened; my spoken gratitude consummating that kind gift.

That experience of truly seeing the flowers reminded me of a favorite scene from a movie.

The film stars Robin Williams as John Keating, an English teacher at an exclusive boys boarding school. Dead Poets Society was filmed at an Episcopal prep school—St. Andrew’s in Middletown, Delaware, established in 1929 by a member of the DuPont family.

The scene I recall takes place in the foyer of one of the buildings, with school banners adorning the walls. There are glass trophy cases containing memorabilia and old photographs of athletic teams. The room has the feel of a chapel, the sacred precincts of sports and boys long since gone.

Keating instructs one of the students gathered round to read from the school hymnal. It’s a poem entitled To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by the 17^th century Anglican priest and poet Robert Herrick.

The student reads aloud: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a-flying, And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

Keating says to the students: ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.’ The Latin word for that sentiment is Carpe Diem. Now who knows what that means? A boy answers: Carpe Diem. Seize the day.

Keating responds: Why does the writer use these words?

Because we are food for worms, lads. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.

Now I would like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. Keating moves them over to the trophy case and huddles them close, turning their gaze upon the uniformed schoolboys in the old photographs.

You've walked past them many times, he says. I don't think you've really looked at them.

They're not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you.

Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils.

But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. Do you hear it? And behind them, Keating whispers in a gruff voice: Carpe. Hear it? Carpe. Carpe Diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

How fitting these lines, as we grieve the loss of this genius, this gifted comedic and improvisational genius so tragically imprisoned within by dark forces from which he felt himself unable to escape, except by taking his own life.

And yet his Keating teaches us even now:

Carpe Diem. Seize the day.

Wake up. Pay attention. Of the schoolboys in those old photographs, long since deceased, he remarks: You’ve walked past them many times. I don’t think you’ve really looked at them.

So we might ask ourselves: what or whom do we walk past everyday without looking, without really noticing or truly seeing?

The disciples can’t imagine that a Canaanite woman could be real, says Sara Miles, a priest on the staff of St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco, as she comments on this morning’s gospel reading.

Jewish scripture was full of these horror stories about the Canaanites who occupied the promised land and who had disgusting religious practices like worshipping idols and cross breeding with people of different faiths, among other abominations.[i]

The Canaanite woman is a heathen. So when she accosts Jesus pleading, ‘Lord, have mercy,’ she has no standing to do it and moreover she’s acting completely shamelessly, just waving her hand around in the air begging for recognition and insisting that Jesus should heal her daughter, something that she’s unqualified to even ask for.

And the disciples believe that they should keep non-persons like the Canaanite from raising their hands and demanding God’s attention.

They see themselves as keepers of the holy traditions. They’re protectors of the true people of God.

And they’re supposed to stay on guard, so that God won’t waste any precious mercy on the unpedigreed, on some stray mutt yelping around the flock.

And it seems that, at least according to Matthew’s gospel, even Jesus sees it this way. He tells the Canaanite woman to shut up and go away. I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, he says.

Not truly seeing her, he dismisses her.

And then, as Miles asserts, this becomes a healing story, a story first and foremost about the healing of Jesus.

Something happened.

Jesus is challenged by this woman’s back talk, by her pushy insistence that she needs and wants him. This [woman] breaks Jesus open with her faith that God recognizes her too, that God calls her by name and that salvation is for everyone without exception.

And then Jesus knows— [he sees] suddenly—that he’s not just here for the chosen people...he’s here for us all, that salvation is for everyone without exception.

It’s a rough moment and it teaches us, the way that everything Jesus does in his human life teaches us how to be human...Jesus has to undergo the fully human pain of conversion.

He has to be broken and humbled and changed by the realization that someone who he has written off and insulted has consciousness—[is real]—and it hurts.

But it’s healing and like so many of God’s healing acts, the good news is that it happens in unexpected ways...

In my work as a hospice chaplain, I expect everyday to be broken open and humbled and changed. Because to really pay attention, to really see the person sitting in front of us as real—which is to say, to listen attentively and with care—will transform us.

Everyday, I walk away a new person, my universe expanded by listening carefully to the words of another or at last seeing the flowers on my desk for what they truly are.

That conversion—that change of heart—is the challenge and the gift of being human, something we all share, whoever we are, whatever our work.

So lean in and listen. Do you hear it? It’s uttered every moment if you have the ears to hear and the hearts to respond.

Carpe. Carpe diem.

This is the only day. This is the only moment. Take hold of it gently. And let it change your life. AMEN

*A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, ME ; August 17, 2014;

Proper 16, Year A; Revised Common Lectionary

[i] Miles, The Rev. Sara Food for Dogs August 14, 2011 St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco, CA.

Come and See*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 22:03:00 +0000

The Rev. John Buehrens, a former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, married to an Episcopal priest, tells the story of his daughters, Erica and Mary, being exposed to both traditions.

At a certain point he writes they were told, “This year you can go to either Sunday school. You choose, but you can’t stay home.” ...When Erica was two and a half, we found her one day with a towel draped down her back like a vestment, holding a hymnal (upside down), and marching around the couch singing “The Hokie Pokie.” Obviously, an Episcopalian!

...Mary, on the other hand, goes to All Soul’s, [UU]. She loved her Sunday school class this year, which studied stories from Genesis and Exodus—putting Jacob and Rachel on trial in the matter of Esua’s birthright, and conducting a protest march against Moses and Aaron, with signs reading “Meat, not Manna!” “Impeach Moses!” and “back to Egypt.” When she grows up, Mary says, she might like to be Jewish. [Clearly, the Unitarian!][i]

My dear friend, James Ford, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, Rhode Island, when I told him of the UU Folk Ensemble visiting with us this morning, quipped in a Facebook message that Episcopalians are just Unitarians with a sense of style.

Though it may be dangerous to say so—thankfully, the Bishop is on sabbatical in the Midwest somewhere—I largely agree. I have great sympathy with Unitarian Universalists, having attended the Allen Avenue UU Church (the other UU church in Portland, affectionately know as A2U2) briefly after taking leave of parish ministry in 2006. My wife, Sukie, comes from a long line of venerable Boston Unitarians dating back to the Nineteenth century.

It goes without saying that Unitarian Universalism represents liberal religion in its broadest, most comprehensive and all-embracing sense. But I would also argue that the Episcopal Church (and by extension, Anglicanism)—within the larger rubric of the Christian Church—is, at its heart, a liberal tradition.

I was raised in the Congregational Church and became an Episcopalian in college. While I valued my religious upbringing, the Episcopal Church attracted me by its liturgy and rootedness in an age-old tradition rich in history and with a global reach. I understood that the Anglican Communion’s common prayer was its guide to theology and practice and that tests of orthodoxy, and censorship of thought, were anathema to its essentially liberal spirit.

Most importantly, I was advised early on not to leave my intellect and my reason at the door when I entered the church, but to bring it—along with my heart—and honor it as an important means of seeking the truth.

I share this with you this morning as we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. There are some today, particularly among my daughter’s generation, who are unaware that King was a Christian minister. King came from a long line of orthodox Baptist ministers—his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great grandfather, only brother, and uncle were all clergy. “I didn’t have much choice, I guess” he said as an aside in his great sermon “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool.” Throughout his life as a great civil rights activist, King served as pastor of Baptist congregations.

But his faith was essentially liberal and it was that liberal faith that inspired his prophetic witness, including his civil rights leadership, his commitment to non-violence and pacifism, and his advocacy for the poor of all ethnic and racial backgrounds across America and indeed around the world. Some have even argued that King’s was a Unitarian Christianity.

Be that as it may, Robert Scofield, in his essay entitled King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Martin Luther King, Jr.. says that despite being raised in a lineage of orthodox Baptist ministers, King at a young age demonstrated skepticism of the irrational claims of religion, and embarrassment at the emotionalism of his father's preaching.

King carried these suspicions with him when he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at the age of fifteen. He had originally planned on being a doctor or lawyer. At Morehouse, under the guidance of [the President of the college] and [a] professor [of religion and philosophy], he began to believe that religion could be both "intellectually respectful and emotionally satisfying."

Scofield writes that the purpose of the church for King is not to create dogma, theology, or creeds but rather "to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience," and to commit to action. From a young age, King understood the importance of combining his religion with social justice.

From this perspective King viewed the church's role as promoting a way of life rather than a belief system, saying, "Jesus always recognized that there is a danger of having a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.” He stated that Christ is more concerned with how we treat our neighbors, our attitudes toward racial justice, and living a high ethical life than he is with long processionals, knowledge of creeds, or the beautiful architecture of a church.[ii]

So much for the Anglican Church!

But at the very heart of King’s faith was his experience of God, a God whom he knew as a personal presence, transcendent yet immanent; that is, a God of love and whose Spirit is synonymous with seeking justice. King tells us in his own words that, God is not a process projected somewhere in the lofty blue. God is not a divine hermit hiding himself in a cosmic cave. …God is forever present with us.

In 1955, as a young pastor, King’s life was transformed, his vision of the religious life unalterably deepened and clarified, by a profound encounter with God at his kitchen table in Montgomery, Alabama. Albert Raboteau, a professor of religion at Princeton University writes: That encounter was precipitated by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott which King had neither started nor suggested, but which irrevocably changed him from the successful pastor of a moderately comfortable church to the leader of a national movement for racial justice...[iii]

As spokesman for the boycott, King was overwhelmed with a load of back-breaking responsibilities and frightened by serious threats against his life and his family's safety. Reaching the end of his endurance, King sat at his kitchen table one night over a cup of coffee, trying to figure out how to get out of the movement without appearing a coward.

Of that experience, King later preached:

But I never will forget one night very late. It was around midnight. And you can have strange experiences at midnight. I had been out with the steering committee all that night. And I came home, and my wife was in bed and I immediately crawled into bed to get some rest...

And immediately the telephone started ringing and I picked it uup. On the other end was an ugly voice. That voice said to me, in substance, “[N-word], we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow your house up your house.”

I’d heard these things before, but for some reason that night it got to me. I turned over and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep. I was frustrated, bewildered. And then I got up and went back to the kitchen and I started warming some coffee, thinking that coffee would give me a little relief...

Something said to me, you can’t call on Daddy now, he’s up in Atlanta a hundred and seventy-five miles away. You can’t even call on Mama now. You’ve got to call on that something...that your Daddy used to tell you about. That power than can make a way out of no way.

And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it.... I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage they will begin to get weak.”

And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world." ...I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.[iv]

And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me.

In the reading from John’s gospel, two disciples were standing with John the Baptist. And turning, Jesus addresses them, saying: What are you looking for? One of them responds: Rabbi, where are you staying? Jesus replies: Come and see. Just that. Come and see.

As if to say, see for yourself. Experience God for yourself, here and now. Experience first hand that inmost connection with the divine, that inmost connection with all people everywhere and all creation; that larger life that embraces you and sustains you and calls you to works of justice and compassion. Come and see.

My friend the UU minister, James Ford, in a sermon preached three years ago on the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday, and reflective of King’s own experience that night in 1955 at his kitchen table, states that his own understanding of God is our direct knowing that we are not alone. What UUs call that interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.

God, he says, is that knowing of our connections down to our bones and marrow. Not just a head knowing, but a body knowing, a heart knowing, a knowing that permeates the very fiber of our being.

It is the sustaining experience that allows us to continue the endless work of feeding the hungry, of seeking compassion and justice for all, [of] trying to help transform our own lives and the life of this country in an ever more generous, open hearted direction.[v]

We are not alone. No never alone.

Come and see. AMEN

*A Sermon by the Rev. David S. Heald

St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough

January 19, 2014

Second Sunday after the Epiphany: Year A

Isaiah 49:1-7; Ps. 40:1-12; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

[i] Buehrens, John A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism Beacon Press, 1998

[ii] Scofield, Robert James “Be” King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Martin Luther King, Jr. Tikkun Magazine http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/nov_dec_09_scofield

[iii] Raboteau, Robert J. A Hidden Wholeness: Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/884057raboteau.html

[iv] King, Jr., Martin Luther Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/why_jesus_called_a_man_a_fool/

[v] Ford, The Rev. James Martin Luther King’s Liberal God: A Meditation on the Soul’s Longing http://www.firstunitarianprov.org/sermons/110116.shtml

Wading in the Waters*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 22:05:00 +0000

In the measure of one short week, from the Second Sunday after Christmas Day to the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we have been catapulted from the birthplace of Jesus to the banks of the Jordan River; from the wise men bearing gifts to the sweltering throng wading into the muddy waters; from a new-born babe to the baptism of Jesus at the hands of John.

It all leaves me feeling breathless and not altogether prepared. Perhaps it’s because I was abroad in England for Christmas. It seems as if the tree was just put up, the lights strung, the decorations unveiled from their year-long captivity in the battered cardboard box where they had been stored away.

Perhaps I am reluctant to let go of Christmas because it is for me the most beloved liturgical season of the Church year. All the seasonal uproar that surrounds it aside, it is simple and direct. It is a season of contemplation and adoration. It speaks to the heart.

It reawakens in me that longing and desire—as I quoted the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams last week—for the sheer presence and accessibility of God, that bare fact of the child in the manger, the life in Galilee, the mystery laid open.

Perhaps because in a fifteenth century chapel in Cambridge, England—with my family by my side—I experienced that sheer presence anew and my heart is still laid open to the mystery. And being laid open, it is tender and vulnerable.

Yes, I am reluctant to let go of Christmas.

Yet, here we all are, at the muddy banks of the River Jordan, propelled over the thirty years or so that it took for Jesus to meet his destiny—and ours.

I said last week that it is my conviction that our most powerful moments are profoundly simple even prosaic, like that of the barefoot shepherds in the carol: our day’s work done, sharing our love, our hopes, ourselves, giving all to the child.

And this precisely because our lives are so complicated, we live so much in our heads and not in our hearts, trying to figure our lives out, get it right; in short, striving to be good, competent, fulfilled people.

It then it happens.

We lay that heavy burden down and we find ourselves welcomed and loved and embraced, wholly and completely, through no merit of our own, but by sheer gift.

Just that.

And when I’ve had that experience, it’s enough, and I’ve felt that if it were my time to depart this earth, so be it. I would go in peace.

I wonder if, in a sense, that was Jesus’ experience in the muddy waters, with that swarming mass of ordinary, struggling men and women swirling around him: the descent of the Spirit like a dove, the voice from heaven saying “You are my Son, the Beloved.”

But here’s the thing: Jesus was not at the end of his ministry but at its beginning. He was not at the conclusion of his life but at its commencement; and the life he would live would be for the life of the world, for all those women and men with whom he waded into the waters.

Through the power of the Spirit, this Son of God was embraced by God’s unconditional love for the sake of all people everywhere. The same may be said of us as well: we are the sons and daughters of God, we are loved by God, and through the Spirit bestowed in baptism, the life we have been given is for the life of the world.

William Sloane Coffin, for many years chaplain of Yale University then senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City, once observed that Yale students were much taken by the Descartian assertion cogito, ergo sum—I think therefore I am—whereas, Coffin felt, it should be amo, ergo sum—I love therefore I am.

I love therefore I am, which is to say: the life we live is for the healing of the world. As with Jesus, baptism sets us on our journey. We have a calling to be heeded, a purpose to be realized, a destiny to be upheld.

At Christmas, the mystery was laid open. It is now ours to show forth for all to see. AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; First Sunday after the Epiphany; January 12, 2014

Late Arrivals and Cold Comings*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 18:09:00 +0000

What can we say about the wise men? Well, they were not kings and there were not three of them, at least, that is, according to Matthew. We may presume that they were not historical figures but characters in a parable. Matthew imagined them to be magi, a word from which we get magician.

But they were not magicians in any sense in which we understand that term. Rather, according to the New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, they were quasi-religious figures. Some have suggested that they were astrologers, although to think of them primarily as such is misleading.[i]

They came from the East, presumably Mesopotamia, but more from a mythical geography, following the star. They were Gentiles and not Jews, drawn to Jesus as one who was the “light of the nations.” I imagine that these wise men were clever, complicated, with mixed motives, and even, as we are fond of saying these days, more spiritual than religious.

And they were late arrivals. The simple barefoot shepherds were at the manger long before, even the cattle.

They may even remind us of ourselves.

I trust that you all had a delightful Christmas Eve, as I have been assured you did. London was crazy. Half the globe, it seemed, was on Christmas vacation in London. One of you said to me recently, having been on a trip spanning the continents, that traveling is for young people not for us oldsters. I tend to agree.

However, amidst the crowds and chaos, we had a great time; except, that is, when I got trapped beside a desiccated mummy at the British Museum. Unable to move due to the press of hundreds of people, I was barely able to breath...

If you ask me what the “high” point of my trip was, I can tell you precisely. Not surprisingly, it was not in London but in Cambridge on Christmas Eve, at a Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel.

Standing in queue with six hundred for six hours from before dawn with a brisk wind blowing out of the west, though not the high point, was delightful. All were in good Christmas cheer and we met friends with whom we hope to stay in touch with for years to come.

But the service itself, in that glorious space of soaring fan vault and stained glass as the sun slowly set in the western sky, was sublime. Because the acoustics are so fine, there is no need of sound amplification in a sanctuary vastly more spacious than this, just the sweet voices of the choristers accompanied at times by the organ.

We heard for the first time a piece for unaccompanied choir by Bob Chilcott, a modern British composer who, in earlier years, was a chorister at King’s. It’s titled Shepherd’s Carol, a tune set to words by an anonymous author.

In it the shepherd’s address Mary at the manger, reflecting on their epiphany in the hills on a calm winter’s evening, watching the frosted meadows that winter had won, and a star shone in the night, the silence more lovely than music.

They heard a voice from the sky...telling of God being born in the world of men. And so we have come, they say, our day’s work done, Our love, our hopes, ourselves, We give to your son. It’s a lovely, meditative piece that exudes calm and transcendent peace.

Of course, there is now no way to recreate the sound or the mood, the melody repeating and enhancing, weaving a beautiful web of music in that candlelit space. Nor is there any way to convey my experience in that moment though, I found later, Sukie was equally touched. That it brought tears to our eyes hints at its gracious power to move us.

But I’ll try, in the hopes that you too have had a similar experience, though perhaps in a different setting.

It is my conviction that our most powerful moments are profoundly simple even prosaic, like some barefoot shepherds, our day’s work done, sharing our love, our hopes, ourselves, giving all to the child.

It then it happens.

We lay that heavy burden down and find ourselves welcomed and loved and embraced, wholly and completely, through no merit of our own, but by sheer gift.

Just that.

On the plane back home, while being entertained by 40 teenage Irish school boys on their way to a skiing holiday in New Hampshire, I happened to be reading Choose Life, a collection of Christmas and Easter sermons by the now former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It seemed to me that he captured something of my experience at King’s. In his Christmas sermon The Kingdom of the Simple, he talks about the wise men coming to the manger.[ii]

He reflects on the wise men, like us clever, resourceful, complicated people, who manage to screw things up more often than not, late-comers to the manger. And so I close by sharing a few excerpts from that sermon.

He says: Yet—here is the miracle—the three wise men are welcome. You might expect that a faith which begins in such blinding simplicities, the child, the cattle, the barefoot shepherds, would have no place for the wise men...

Coming to the Christ child isn’t always simple. It just is the case that people come by roundabout routes, with complex histories, sin and muddle and false perceptions and false starts. It’s no good saying to them,’You must become simple and wholehearted’, as if this could be done just by wishing it.

The real question is, ‘Can you take all your complicated history with you on a journey towards the manger? Can you at least refuse to settle down in a hall of mirrors, and go on asking where the truth really lies? Can you stop hanging on to the complex and...recognize where the map of the heavens points?’

So: don’t deny the tangle and the talents, the varied web of what has made you who you are. Every step is part of the journey; on this journey, even the false starts are part of the journey, experience that moves you toward the truth.

We know how much we long for that sheer presence and accessibility of God, that bare fact of the child in the manger, the life in Galilee, the mystery laid open. But we come as we are; room is made for us, healing is promised for us, even usefulness given to us if we are ready to make an offering of what W.H Auden called our crooked heart.

In the straw of the stable, the humble and complicated are able to kneel together. If God is there in the simplicity of the baby in the straw...that means he is there in the naked simplicity for the sophisticated and troubled as well, those who have had long and tortuous journeys, cold comings, to the stable.

The childlike response of longing and delight can come even from a heart that has grown old and tired...let no-one think they are too compromised, to entangled to be welcome.

AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, ME; The Second Sunday after Christmas Day;

January 5, 2014

[i] Borg, Marcus; Crossan, John Dominic The First Christmas Harper Collins, 2007

[ii] Williams, Rowan Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral eBook

Staying Awake*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Sun, 08 Dec 2013 01:29:00 +0000

I didn’t expect to be ordained. Formal religion made me feel claustrophobic, like I couldn’t get enough air. Institutional maintenance was not work that I felt called to or competent to perform, yet I knew that it was a big part of any priest’s job.Yet my spiritual director at that time—now the Bishop of Massachusetts—said that I had a vocation to the priesthood. Who was I to protest?

The framed certificate in my study says that I was consecrated to the Sacred Order of Priests in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and in accordance with the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church on the third of December, 1983—thirty years ago this Tuesday. It was signed by Frederick Barton Wolf, the Bishop of Maine. So it must be true.

Shortly after my ordination, I attended the annual clergy conference in Massachusetts, where I was serving as associate Rector of the church in Wellesley at that time. The retreat facilitator was from the Alban Institute in Washington, D.C, a kind of congregational think tank. He had all the clergy—and there were well over a hundred of us—break up into small groups by years of ordination.

I was in the 1-5 year group. Then there was the 5-10, 10-15, and so on up to the thirty and over group, which was the end of the line. The facilitator had us look around the room. The thirty and overs were venerable to be sure—many were Rectors of the large cardinal parishes in the diocese, one or two went on to become Bishops—but they looked a little rumpled and out of shape. Bunch of old farts, I thought.

Well, here I am—thirty years and counting. Mind you, I didn’t expect to be ordained.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says: Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. Who was this Son of Man of whom Jesus speaks?

The phrase has several meanings. In the Hebrew scriptures—the Old Testament—it means simply, son of a human being, which is to say, the fully human one. It also signifies the one who will appear in history to usher in God’s judgment, not unlike its context in today’s reading from Matthew. Finally, in Matthew’s gospel and elsewhere, it refers to the centerpiece of the whole narrative—that is, the one who will suffer, die, and be raised again by God in glory.

Furthermore, the Son of Man, as God’s judge, is an agent of the apocalypse—the end times—when, minding our own business as in the days of Noah, we will all be swept away, or one taken and the other left, at an unexpected hour. So we need to stay awake and be vigilant. These are hard sayings and the preacher could spend entire sermons explaining them. I’ve done so exhaustively over my thirty years as a priest. And, frankly, I’m not sure that it helps much.

Let’s just say that apocalyptic literature was woven into the fabric of ancient times. Whether the historical Jesus himself actually adopted the apocalyptic worldview is a matter of debate even among scholars today. But the dominant dynamic of the reading is relevant never the less—that is, the unexpectedness of the events of which Jesus speaks.

No one knows, Jesus says in today’s passage – neither angels nor even himself – no one knows when this will take place except the Father. And it’s this element of the uncertainty, even unpredictable-ness of life, which offers a point of entry into this otherwise bizarre passage.

I didn’t expect to be ordained but once I was, I found that my priesthood was all about learning to live with the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the uncertain. Priests are specialists in being present to the unpredictable, which is to say, to the impermanent, precarious nature of our lives, of showing up at emergency departments and deathbeds and heaven knows where.

Or we aren’t, and become specialists instead in avoiding or denying the unpredictable and painfully precarious, numbing ourselves with all manner of substance abuse or sexual misconduct. In that sense, we are not alone, but quite at home with the rest of humanity, even leading the way.

But there’s another side to the story as well and that’s about staying awake. You know what time it is, Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.

Staying awake to the unpredictable and precarious brings the promise of life’s preciousness, of indescribable moments of grace and heartbreaking beauty that bring tears to our eyes. We won’t catch those moments if we’re numbed out and asleep. Such moments are all about salvation, about becoming whole and fully human, sons and daughters of God.

As a life-long student of world religions, it has always struck me as fortuitous—which is to say, very cool—that the beginning of Advent coincides with the anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment. In Zen, the Buddhist tradition with which I am most familiar, it is called in Japanese rohatsu, meaning simply the eighth day of the twelfth month. In most Zen communities, there is a rohatsu sesshin—an intensive retreat leading up to the anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment or awakening on December 8^th.

There’s a story that when the Buddha started to wander around northern India shortly after his enlightenment, he encountered several people who recognized him to be an extraordinary being. They asked him: Are you a god? No, he replied. Are you a wizard then? No, he replied. Well, are you a man? No, he replied again. Becoming very perplexed, they asked: So what are you? Buddha replied simply: I am awake.

Awake to what, you might ask? Awake to the reality that everything is impermanent, everything changes. Awake, too, to the reality that everything is interrelated, what the celebrated Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls InterBeing. Interbeing describes that luminous web of life where all is intimately connected and reflects everything else, where all is precious and irreplaceable.

No one can know for sure when the Son of Man will come, Jesus says, but in the meantime we can stay awake. Even in the midst of the precarious, unpredictable nature of life, we can welcome God’s advent: surprising moments of grace and beauty, of healing and wholeness, of light in the dark, all manifest in every precious human life.

And lest I be accused of clerical despotism, staying awake is rightfully the work of every Christian, not merely the ordained, even an unexpected old hand like me. AMEN

A Sermon by the Rev. David S. Heald

St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough

December 1, 2013

First Sunday of Advent: Year A

Isaiah 2:1-5; Ps. 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24: 36-44

Unfinished Work*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 21:30:00 +0000

I’ve been told that one of my clergy predecessors here at St. Nick’s, the inimitable Gil Birney, was often given to beginning his sermons with a film review. I have no idea whether he morphed his review into the overall sermon topic or whether it was meant simply to warm folks up, but apparently it was his common practice.

So following Gil’s lead, I begin this morning with a film review, except it’s a movie that you probably don’t want to see. You see, it’s a painful movie to watch. It’s not fun. It’s not even especially entertaining, in the sense that it provides neither pleasure nor amusement. But it is a masterpiece. And, I’m willing to wager, if you can stomach it, it will be among the most important movies you’ll ever see. In fact, I would go so far as to make the very un-American assertion that every American should see it.

12 Years a Slave is adapted from the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup, who had been a free black man in Saratoga, New York. A husband and father, he was a literate, working man, who also made money as a fiddler. In 1841, after being lured to Washington, D.C. with the promise of several days' lucrative work fiddling with the circus, he was kidnapped into slavery. Over the next 12 years before finally winning his freedom, he became the property of a series of plantation owners, one of whom was a drunken, randomly violent, Bible-based fanatic.

In a film with many striking images, one stands out above the rest: Northup, manacled and in chains, stands up and stumbles to the barred window in his cellar cell in a slave pen in Washington, DC. From a close up of his face in the window as he shouts for help, the camera zooms out and follows the red brick wall up and over the rooftop, where the city skyline is revealed before our eyes with the unfinished dome of the Capitol building in the distance. And therein is revealed in miniature the whole story of racism in this country.

In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, the British director Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the now deceased American actor), speaks of his films as being about various “elephants in the room,” not least of all slavery. He speaks about the lingering effects of slavery as being all around us:

All you've got to do is walk down the street [in any city], he says, and you see the evidence of slavery in everyday life. But there's a huge silence about it. It's a deafening silence... You know, why [is] the prison population of black males so huge? Why is poverty in that community so huge? Why is mental health, why is education so poor, why? When you ask yourself that question, it all leads down to what happened in slavery...

In the end, says McQueen, 12 Years a Slave is about love. It’s about the depth of a man’s spirit, a spirit that is somehow—gently—unbreakable. It’s a film about human dignity, a dignity that endures and survives the most unspeakable horrors. In that sense, it is a profoundly redemptive work.

And for all of us the work is ongoing: Brothers and sisters, says Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians, never tire in doing right or, in another translation, do not grow weary of doing good. The work of doing right—the work of compassion and justice--is as yet unfinished and incomplete and it is ours, and future generations, to accomplish.

This Tuesday, November 19^th, marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, delivered just ten years after Solomon Northup wrote his memoir 12 Years a Slave. In his new documentary film The Address, set to be premiered in the spring, Ken Burns tells the story of a tiny school in Putney, Vermont, the Greenwood School, where every November the students are asked to memorize, then publicly recite around the time of Lincoln’s birthday, the Gettysburg Address.

A task requiring significant effort for us, such memorization and public recital is even more challenging for the fifty boys with learning disabilities who make up the school’s student body. Burns says that the heroic challenge to recite these most stirring words ever spoken enable the boys to find the inner strength and courage to push through and achieve their goal. The results, he says, are inspiring and deeply moving.

Burns has extended the challenge to memorize and recite the Gettysburg Address to all Americans—from paupers to Presidents—by making a video and uploading it to his website. He says that the words of the Gettysburg Address, as they were medicine for the souls of so many at the time of the Civil War, may be medicine for us today.

The world will little note, said Lincoln, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. That unfinished work was for Lincoln the work of justice, as a war for Union alone became as well a war of emancipation for an oppressed people.

That memorable image of the unfinished dome of the Capitol building has become for me a metaphor of our own as yet unfinished soul work, as a people and as a nation; the unfinished work of healing our hearts and the heart of this world. For we need only look deep within ourselves to find the roots of what ails us, and then beyond, to a divine wellspring of healing and hope.

The prophet Isaiah holds out a vision of the end of such work. Call it the dream of God. Call it our help in ages past and our hope for years to come. Call it, with Martin Luther King, Jr., the long moral arc of the universe that bends toward justice. Call it God’s kingdom, that kingdom that Jesus initiates and inaugurates, unfolding in our midst even now.

I am about to create a new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.

May it be so, now and forever. AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Year C; November 17, 2013

Unafraid of Grace and Beauty*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 21:17:00 +0000

On a bright autumn day, I stood with my father at the college war memorial—an open space at the crest of the hill overlooking the athletic fields below and the Mount Holyoke Range beyond. Three Marine helicopters circled the campus and landed on the fields. On the roof of the nearby gym building stood a man wearing a dark suit and holding a rifle with a telescopic sight.

It was October 26, 1963. President Kennedy had come to Amherst College, my father’s alma mater and much later mine, to attend the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library and to receive an honorary degree. I was eight years old.

Later on, among an outdoor crowd of 10,000, I struggled to see the President speak on the wooden platform erected for the occasion. My father hoisted me up onto his shoulders, so that I’d have a better view.

Less than a month later, I was standing in the hall of my grade school when it was announced that President Kennedy had been shot and killed. A teacher was crying. We all went home early that day.

But the memory that has remained with me over the years—much sharper in relief—was of those helicopters and of that dark-suited secret service man with the rifle and of sitting up high on my father’s shoulders straining to see the President of the United States speak.

Many years later, in her application to Amherst, my daughter Anna was asked to write a brief essay on a theme from Kennedy’s address that day in 1963. He said: What good is a private college or university unless it is serving a great national purpose? It seems to me incumbent upon this and other school’s graduates to recognize their responsibility to the public interest...unless the graduates of this college...are willing to put back into our society those talents, the broad sympathy, the understanding, the compassion...then obviously the presuppositions upon which our democracy are based are bound to be fallible.

Anna wrote about that day I sat atop my father’s shoulders, about her grandfather’s service to his country as a Naval officer in World War 2, about my work as a hospice chaplain and as a minister, and about her desire to serve her country—to put her gifts back into society--fiercely and bravely, as she wrote—and with broad sympathy, with understanding, and with compassion.

Kennedy spoke that day about the responsibility of college graduates to serve the greater good of the society. And he spoke, reflecting a theme from Robert Frost’s inaugural poem, about the right uses of power, this just one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and in the midst of an ever expanding nuclear arms race.

At bottom, Kennedy said, [Frost] held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that [he]coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Then he said, in a quote now carved on the wall of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington: I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

In the calendar of the church year, this is the Last Sunday after Pentecost, sometimes referred to as Christ the King. Odd name, you might say, for one who was a Palestinian peasant Jew crucified by the Roman authorities. Odd, indeed.

Today the language of kingship is largely outmoded. We no longer live under kings, so the meaning of the term is largely lost on us. The reign of kings was anything but benign, their massive power and wealth often amassed by means of exploitation and violence.

The inscription over the crucified Jesus read: This is the King of the Jews. With this mockery of Jesus and the Jews, Pilate wrote much more than he could have ever known or imagined.[1]

What is this power of Christ the crucified King?

It’s the power of the wisdom from before time and forever. It’s the power of self-giving love, whose purpose is for healing old wounds. It’s a power unafraid of grace and beauty, revealed even at the darkest of times.

Today we support the life of St. Nick’s not only with our financial pledges, but with the power and purpose of our love. We pledge to use our gifts, fiercely and bravely, for the sake, not only of this place, but of the wider world; forever offering our broad sympathy, our understanding, and our compassion.

AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King; November 24, 2013

[1] See Clendenin, Daniel B. Journey with Jesus 18 November, 2013 http://www.journeywithjesus.net/

Glories of the Great Spirit*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 19:24:00 +0000

Last Sunday, I shared with you a personal narrative of a forty-year friendship and a hike to the windy summit of Doubletop Mountain in Baxter State Park. That friend was Nat Bowditch, who passed away in 2008.

While I was editing my story, I was in touch with Stan Tag, a professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Stan wrote his Ph.D thesis on Henry David Throeau and the 19^th century Maine woods narrative tradition. Thinking that he might enjoy my narrative, I emailed him a copy.

When Stan saw the name that was the subject of my memorial tribute, he was startled. He thought that I had written about another Nathaniel Bowditch who, with his father, and three of his cousins, had climbed Katahdin as a sixteen year old in 1856. That Nat Bowditch later died of battle wounds at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia in 1863, having served as a Lieutenant with the First Massachusetts Cavalry.

Nathaniel’s father was Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, a prominent Boston physician, abolitionist, and an avid outdoorsman. As a physician, he pioneered the use of the stethoscope in the US, promoted a public health system in Massachusetts, wrote a pamphlet advocating an ambulance system to care for the wounded in the Civil War, and with Julia Ward Howe and others, came before the state legislature year after year to urge suffrage for women, refuting the idea that they were physiologically unfit to vote.

He wrote a narrative of his 1856 ascent of Katahdin, published in 1958 and 1959 in two issues of Appalachia, the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club.

Henry Bowditch was my friend Nat’s great-great grandfather. In all the years that Nat and I hiked in Baxter State Park, and the three occasions that we climbed to the summit of the great mountain, we were unaware that his ancestor had been one of the first to climb Katahdin and write about it. Some years before, Henry David Thoreau had famously written about his September, 1846 ascent of the mountain, an account of which was later published in his book The Maine Woods.

Henry Bowditch was a Christian, though his theological views were progressive and ecumenically broad. While studying medicine in France and England in the 1830’s, he was profoundly influenced by the writings of the Anglican William Wiberforce—whose feast day is commemorated in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church—a single-minded crusader for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Bowditch came home a militant abolitionist. He was proud to count among his friends, the escaped slave, memoirist, and great orator, Frederic Douglass.

Years before, when Henry was ten, his mother Mary gave him her Bible on her deathbed, which he carried on all his many journeys abroad and at home, even during his fourteen day expedition through the wilds of Maine, an enduring emblem of his piety and faith in God.

Stan Tag writes that, at a time in the 19^th century when many adhered to the strict observance of the Sabbath—even, if not especially, the several clergy and their companions who climbed Katahdin—for Bowditch, the religious experience of being in the natural world, in the wild realm of God’s creation, was more important than keeping any particular day holy...Bowditch believed in making each day as much a sacrament as any other day.[i]

On Monday, August 11, his camping party saw Katahdin from afar, and Bowditch exclaimed, foretelling the praise of present day travelers who approach the mountain in awe: To the East arose in solemn silence, with his head veiled in clouds, the glorious Katahdin! I would that I could express in words one tithe of the emotions that arose within me, or give even a faint idea of the combined loveliness and grandeur of the scene.

Suffice it to say that here I enjoyed one of those rich communings with Nature & with men. Such as are not often felt... In silence I worshipped the Great Spirit, the Father of all, who watches over the Red and White Men and blesses all alike who seek [God] in reverential step amid the magnificence of his works.[ii]

Tag writes: Bowditch traveled through the Maine woods “with [a] reverential step”of his own, believing that the rivers, mountains, and trees expressed the glories of the Great Spirit. [His]narrative combines a wealth of details and observations about the expedition...as well as a deeply felt religious awareness of his place in nature and his relationship to God.[iii]

Bowditch realizes that his deepest experiences in the Maine woods come not in keeping the Sabbath holy, but in recognizing that it is God who keeps us, and the world we live in, holy. For [him] traveling into the Maine woods is as much a journey of the spirit as of the body. Katahdin and the Penobscot River become sacred ground and holy water, places to commune with, and be baptized in, by the spirit of God.[iv]

I wonder: are we fast losing that felt sense of nature as being sacred ground and holy water, places to commune with, and be baptized in, by the spirit of God?

The Maine author, Henry Beston, thought so, though he might have phrased it differently. Do we really see as Beston saw, with a keen awareness and focused attention? Or what Bowditch so reverently observed in his many trips to Maine and the Adirondack Mountains? Have we lost the art of insight into the mystery of God’s creation? Has God’s creation become merely a backdrop to our mental machinations and increasingly fragmented lives?

Listen again to Beston’s exquisite paean of praise to a winter night sky at his farm in Nobleboro: The sky was less a sky of earth than interstellar space itself revealed in its pure and overarching height, an abyss timeless and remote and sown with an immense glittering of stars in their luminous rivers and pale mists, in their solitary and unneighbored splendors, in their ordered figures, and dark, half-empty fields.

It was the middle of the evening and in the north over a lonely farm, a great darkness of the forest, and one distant light, the Dipper, stood on its handle, each star radiant in the blue and empty space about the pole.

On Friday, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its fifth report. The report serves as yet another warning that without dramatic and rapid cuts in emissions of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily emissions of carbon dioxide, the consequences of climate change could be disastrous in many parts of the world.

The report states that it is now extremely likely (extremely being a very precise word, meaning a 95% certainty) that the rise in global temperatures over the last sixty years is due to human activity. It further notes that projected sea level rise is 50% higher then last reported by the panel in 2007. Finally, it states unequivocally that the window of opportunity to do something about it—to overt potentially catastrophic results—is closing rapidly.

All this, yet we do little, as the “greatest” nation on earth, to avert what is perhaps the moral issue facing us today. Instead, we fritter away our days squabbling in Congress.

I wonder what Henry Bowditch would have us do? A spirited, resolute, and intelligent activist, a devout man of faith with a keen awareness of the sacredness of human life and of creation that translated daily into practical acts of healing, compassion, and justice, I think he would have been appalled at our indifference and inertia.

Learn to listen to the still voice of Nature as it speaks to our hearts, he would say. Pay attention. Give thanks. Act.

Under no circumstances have I heard that voice sound so solemnly or so sweetly as during this voyage down the Penobscot, he wrote in his diary, as his 1856 trip to Katahdin came to a close. It comes up before me now like the cadences of a great choral hymn.[v]

AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church; The Third Sunday of Creation Season; September 29, 2013

[i] Tag, Stan “Growing Outward into the World: Henry David Thoreau and the Maine Woods Narrative Tradition, 1804-1886”; 1994 Dissertation (University of Iowa); pg. 45

[ii] Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll, “A Trip to Katahdin in 1856,” Appalachia, 1958, 1959, pg. 337

[iii] Tag, Stan; pg. 46

[iv] Ibid.; pg. 49

[v] Bowditch, “A Trip to Katahdin,” pg. 348

Love Only is Eternal*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 19:52:00 +0000

It had rained the night before. We were soaked up to our thighs as we pushed through the wet underbrush and bushes that crowded in on either side of the trail. The day, however, was clearing and a warming mid-summer sun promised to dry us out when we reached the north peak.

This was our third trip to Baxter State Park in northern Maine. On our first two excursions, we had scaled Katahdin and stood triumphant and exhilarated on Baxter Peak. This year – it was 1991 – we began a series of explorations of the surrounding mountains and so spent the night in a lean-to at Nesowadnehunk Campground, setting out early the next morning for the summit of Doubletop Mountain.

Doubletop is a gem among the mountains of Baxter, its symmetrical shape and steep cliffs strikingly evident from Nesowadnehunk valley where the tote road wends its bumpy and rutted way around the park. The views from its twin peaks rival those from Katahdin, with green forests as far as the eye can see and the surface of blue lakes and ponds and streams sparkling down below. And to the southeast, mile-high Katahdin—the great mountain—rises up from the valleys and plains between the east and west branches of the Penobscot River.

My hiking companion, Nat, had been my dearest friend since childhood. These trips were our means of reconnecting; an open space apart from our increasingly busy lives. Three or four summer days in the wilderness rekindled the flame of our friendship. Quiet talks by the campfire, tramps through the woods and strenuous hikes up steep mountainsides, paddling in the ponds of the park and, at the end of the day, invigorating swims in any number of ice-cold mountain streams strengthened the bonds of love and affection that drew us together.

Nat and I saw no other hikers on our way up the slopes and shoulder of Doubletop. We had the mountain to ourselves. On that fine day, the crowds, no doubt, were amassing atop Katahdin, making cell phone calls to friends down below, huddled away from the wind. We reached the north peak in two hours time and ate our simple fare of cheese, bread and fruit, content to take off our boots, stretch out our legs and linger in the sun, enjoying the whole world spread out before us.

A favorite photograph of that day shows us standing arm and arm on the summit – that expanse of green forest and blue lakes in the background beyond us. Nat had a thick two-day growth of dark beard and a navy blue cap perched on his head.

But there was more to our ascent of Doubletop that July—a discovery that would intrigue and fascinate us for years to come. For as I traversed the mountain from the south to the north peak, I saw a gray rectangular plaque affixed to a large granite boulder just off the side of the trail.

A six-pointed star with rays extending outward crowned the inscription. Beneath the words was a sculpted oil lamp, the eternal flame clearly evident. The plaque faced south, and the sun, having risen high in the morning sky, illumined its face, throwing the letters into sharp relief. It read:

KEPPELE HALL

JUNE 10, 1872--APRIL 25, 1926

HIS ASHES WERE GIVEN TO THE WINDS

AT THIS PLACE AUGUST 20, 1926, AT

SUNSET, BY HIS WIFE.

And beneath this the words:

LOVE ONLY IS ETERNAL

I called Nat over and we gazed at the memorial, wondering who this man was and, even more so, who the remarkable woman was who scattered her husband’s ashes to the winds as the sun set over the mountaintops and daylight began to fade.

Many years later, I began to unfold the story of their lives.

Keppele Hall was a Princeton graduate who became a successful electrical engineer. He married Fanny Hay in 1896 in Trenton, New Jersey. The Halls lived briefly in Maine – where they retained ties over the years—before moving to Ohio, eventually settling in Cleveland.

Fanny Hay Hall was a community organizer, a peace activist, and a progressive and liberal woman of faith. She was a member of the Ohio delegation that marched in the 1912 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. She was the first American woman to serve as foreman of a grand jury.

The Halls moved to New York City in 1926 where Keppele died during a flu epidemic. He was fifty-three years old. Fanny continued her activism until late in life, turning her attention to women’s prison reform. She died in Brattleboro, Vermont, in June, 1968, at the age of ninety-four.

In 1926, the year of her husband’s death and the scattering of his ashes on that windy mountain summit in Maine, Fanny was fifty-four. The trail to the south summit of Doubletop from the Kidney Pond Camps—the camps then being privately owned—is just over four miles. The lower part of the route, due to the occasional confluence of stream and trail, is often wet and muddy. Higher up, the trail climbs a steep, timbered slope to the summit.

The Appalachian Mountain Club estimates that the hiking time from pond to summit via this trail—somewhat different than the one Fanny would have used—is three hours, twenty minutes. Even with today’s lightweight, high-tech clothing and gear, that’s a moderately challenging climb for a fifty-four year old.

But imagine walking the trail in 1926, carrying your loved one’s ashes in your rucksack. We may wonder: was she alone? If not, who accompanied her? And what was said as she gave her husband’s ashes to the winds? Or was the call of a raven cruising the mountain slopes, and the rushing of the wind on the summit, sound enough for such a solemn occasion as this? We’ll never know.

The long walk down the mountain and back to the camps was through the woods at dusk, in the fast waning light; perhaps a Swainson’s or Hermit thrush serenaded her on the way. Cabin lamplight in the dark, and a sumptuous dinner—such as only the old wilderness camps could have provided—would have welcomed her on her arrival back at the pond.

On that strikingly beautiful July day in 1991, Nat and I lingered on the mountain. After lunch, we made our leisurely way back down the north side of Doubletop to our lean-to at Nesowadnehunk Campground. Libations liberally dispensed followed and a meal, perhaps not as splendid as that which awaited Fanny at Kidney Pond Camps, but delicious nonetheless.

For the native Americans of the Penobscot tribe, the Katahdin wilderness is a sacred place where the Spirit roams freely and powerfully and where mother earth reaches out toward the sky. Dennis Kostyk, in his film Wabanaki: A New Dawn tells us: “To be with the mountain is to make a commitment to participate fully in life itself, to encounter the forces of life and to be in balance with them.”

For all people, mountains embody a mystery beyond our control, just out of reach. Edwin Bernbaum, in his book Sacred Mountains of the World, writes: “Floating above the clouds, materializing out of the mist, mountains appear to belong to a world utterly different from the one we know…Mountains have a special power to evoke the sacred as the unknown. Their deep valleys and high places conceal what lies hidden within and beyond them, luring us to venture ever deeper into a realm of enticing mystery. Mountains seem to beckon us, holding out the promise of something on the ineffable edge of awareness.”

A woman stands on a mountain summit at sunset, as if at the edge of a great mystery, and gives her beloved’s ashes to the winds.

On the same mountain, two friends stand arm in arm in the warming sun, smiling at you and me. A raven cries as it rides the gusts along the ridges and then veers off, out into the vast open sky.

The author of the book of Job interrogates us: Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts and makes its nest on high?

Creation humbles us, makes us feel that we are but one strand in the web of life, and brings us to awe-filled wonder and silence.

In the 19^th century, there was a common phrase among the devout about going from Nature to Nature’s God. Which is to say, meeting Creation face to face—communing with the spirit of wild places—we encounter the Holy Mystery at the heart of Creation.[1]

Nat died in September of 2008 from complications due to multiple myeloma. Ironically, he was fifty-three, as was Keppele Hall.

I returned to Doubletop later that Fall, seventeen years after we climbed the mountain in 1991. Sukie and I stayed at the Kidney Pond Camps. She remained behind to paint on the shores of the pond.

I climbed the mountain alone and was feeling my age as I scaled the steep, timbered slope to the summit. In the fifties down below, it was cold on top, with a strong wind blowing from the south. But it was a cloudless day and the sun shone brightly and I was cozy under a few layers of fleece and a windbreaker. I found the flat expanse of granite where Nat and I stood arm in arm for our photo.

A Mourning Cloak, a large dark butterfly with bright yellow fringes on its wings, flitted across the ledge and was gone. After lingering for an hour or so, I put my pack on and reluctantly headed down the mountainside. Turning once to gaze back up at the south summit, I bid a fond farewell to my unseen yet ever-present friend, Nat.

Further on, walking along an old logging road down into the lowlands, the trail was littered with fallen yellow birch leaves and, here and there, a red maple leaf. The autumnal equinox was just hours away and the turning of the seasons was everywhere evident. Mother loons had been out on the pond that week. In preparation for their coming flight to the coastal waters for the winter, they were busy feeding minnows to their now almost full grown chicks.

Just before 4 o’clock, Sukie greeted me with a hug back at the cabin. It was time for a hot cup of tea. AMEN

* A Sermon by the Rev. David S. Heald; St Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; September 22, 2013

[1] Tag, Stan; see his 1994 Dissertation: “Growing Outward into the World: Henry David Thoreau and the Maine Woods Narrative Tradition, 1804-1886” (University of Iowa)

Bear Blessing*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 13:56:00 +0000

Matt Dyer was glad to be back home. Recovering at his home in Turner from life-threatening injuries, he recently told the Portland Press Herald: I’m glad the bear got away and didn’t get shot. I’d have felt terrible if that bear got killed because I was there. Dyer was mauled by a polar bear in July, at Nachvak Fjord in the Torngat Mountains National Park in northern Labrador. I know the place. I was there in the summer of 2010 on the second of two summer trips to the park.[1]

Last September, in my sermon on the First Sunday in Creation Season, I spoke about being awakened in the middle of the night by my friend Steve, his form silhouetted against a night sky alive with stars. He was gazing upwards. The aurora he whispered. Pale yellowish green, blue, and violet lights hung like curtains and flowed like a river across the sky. We had been sleeping onboard the deck of a long-liner—a sixty-foot fishing boat—anchored in Nachvak, a fjord carved out by glaciers millions of years ago, with the dark mountains rising up around us on every side in that vast wilderness.

Matt Dyer had been on a two-week trip with the Sierra Club when the incident occurred. Delayed by inclement weather, they were at last transported to the fjord by float plane and the group set up camp ashore. As a safety precaution, they encircled the site with an electric fence. Whether inoperative or merely a trifling annoyance to the bear, it failed to deter him. Dyer was attacked in the middle of the night and dragged from his tent. Flares set off by his fellow hikers frightened the bear and saved his life. A physician in the group did what he could to stabilize Dyer until rescue came at dawn.

On my first trip to Torngat in 2009, my group camped south of Nachvak, at another fjord, Saglek. Having spent the night on the long-liner our first night, our gear was brought to shore in a launch the next morning. As we were setting up camp onshore, the captain of the long-liner shouted: Bear in the water!

Out on the fjord we could see the white head of a polar bear, leaving a long wake as it paddled toward shore. Warning shots were fired from the boat but to no avail. The bear emerged from the water just below our camp. A flare was thrown in its path. But on it came and climbed the steep bluff above which our campsite was situated on a grassy plateau.

Those of us ashore, just beyond the sight of the polar bear, ran into a stand of low-lying willow shrubs. John Merkuratsuk, our Inuit guide and bear monitor, stood his ground and fired further warning shots, all without effect. On it came. His gun jammed. Calmly kneeling down, he pried loose the cartridge with his hunting knife and, taking careful aim, fired again. Several shots later the bear fell.

After being mauled by a polar bear, Dyer said: I’d have felt terrible if that bear got killed because I was there.

Our group emerged from its encounter with the bear safe and unscathed. But a bear had been killed. That it was terrible only touches the thin surface—the veneer—of how it felt. Gathered around the bear moments later, we were dumbstruck and in shock. But there was much more

—grief, humility, reverence, deep silence. Each of us took turns in touching the head of the still warm bear, as if in blessing.

Our experience cannot compare to that of Matt Dyer. Although it may seem so from this narrative, these occurrences are rare. Since the park opened in 2005, Dyer is the only person who has been attacked and injured by a polar bear. The prior incident with my group was the first such occurrence of its kind.

The Inuit at base camp dissected the bear later that day. It was a female. Her stomach was empty save for some tapeworms. There was no meat on her bones and her fur fell out in hunks. She was starving. This may have been mere happenstance but ominous signs are beginning to suggest otherwise.

Although the polar bear population at Torngat is otherwise healthy, the bear population across the greater Arctic is stressed and endangered. Climate change is wreaking havoc. As it melts, bear have to hunt further and further from the ice pack. Several have drowned, swimming huge distances to reach the withdrawing ice. They depend on it to hunt ringed seal, their primary prey.

But along with the bears a whole people, an entire culture, is endangered—the Inuit. The Inuit depend on the cold and on the ice to sustain their traditional hunting culture. John Merkuratsuk’s Labrador village, Nain, has one of the highest suicide rates in Canada.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier an Inuit rights activist who was a visiting scholar at Bowdoin College a few years back, says that her people are a climate change barometer. The Inuit, she says, are like the mercury in that barometer; their hunters are sentinels for the rest of the planet. As the temperatures warm and sea levels rise and ever more destructive storms devastate, we are all affected.[2]

Watt-Cloutier says that in Inuktitut—the language of the Inuit—there’s a single word that encompasses the whole of Inuit cosmology—sila. Strikingly akin to our biblical word spirit, it means air or wind or breath. And like our spirit it means more: Sila is the breath that circulates into and out of every living thing; it is the raw life force that hovers over the entire land. It can be felt as air, sensed in the sky as wind, and lives within us as breath. It is the fundamental principle underlying creation. It connects every person with the rhythm of the universe.

Interdependent in the web of all life, knowing in some deep way that we are more than merely skin-encapsulated egos, we grieve the loss and degradation of our natural environment. Ancient wisdom across traditions suggests that grieving this loss is the beginning of healing, that without it real and sustainable ecological restoration is impossible.

The poet Mary Oliver, in a recent interview with National Public Radio and whose poetry I read last Sunday at the beach, acknowledges this.[3] Her poems are steeped in the wonder and beauty and mystery of the natural world, and yet she says:

The concern I have for the natural world is a sorrowful business...because we’re not doing what we should do to preserve the world. The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that I most recently walked are not gone but full of... trails. The world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state, it is itself [a spiritual act]. The world did not have to be beautiful to work, but it is...

Or Henry Beston, who sensed the beginning of a disturbing change even living on his farm in rural Nobleboro, wrote this heartfelt plea: The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are of nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonor to the earth lest you dishonor the spirit of [humankind]....To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives her strength.

Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all...[4]

I can’t tell you how laying hands on that bear changed my life but it did. The experience haunts me even now and has taken on its own life deep in my soul, forever beckoning.

But I do know this: God’s creation is itself a holy mystery, and to those who approach with reverence and awe and wonder, she gives strength and boundless blessing. AMEN

Photo: John Merkuratsuk in the Torngat Mountain National Park

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, Maine; First Sunday of Creation Season; September 15, 2013

[1] Portland Press Herald; September 3, 2013

[2] Sheila Watt-Cloutier on Climate Change and Human Rights; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlSh4XeoLBA

[3] http://www.npr.org/2012/10/14/162785079/a-thousand-mornings-with-poet-mary-oliver

[4] Beston, Henry; The Outermost House; Henry Holt and Co.; New York

Acorns

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 10:28:00 +0000

The acorns began dropping from the red oaks around our house in mid-August. Squirrels, high in the trees, shake the branches and the nuts fall to the ground. But they also fall on other surfaces—house rooftops, metal grills, car roofs, hot tubs, patio furniture, bird feeders, and...heads. I note the array of sounds they make: thwack, whack, and whap; ding and ping; bang and clang. Some are startling, sharp reports, like a rifle shot. Venturing out, I wear a cotton cap to cover my bald head, though a crash helmet would better suit the occasion.

My neighbor is very tidy. Every autumn I see her outside with a white plastic bucket, down on hands and knees, picking up acorns from her manicured lawn, one by one. When the bucket is full, she dumps it in the woods at the edge of her property. She has cut down most of her trees because they’re messy. Yet she cannot escape the acorns: they fall from our oaks onto her yard. It annoys her no end.

The Farmer’s Almanac reports that a heavy acorn drop foretells a snowy, hard winter. The jury is out, as it is still early in the season. And yet, even as a write, I hear them falling. Another neighbor walks gingerly across her driveway; acorns like ball bearings make her footing unsure. A nuisance to us, this harvest provides food for the squirrels and other creatures as they hunker down during leaner months. In the meantime, I look forward to cooler autumn days.

Embracing the Passing Show*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 19:37:00 +0000

It hit me with the force of revelation. It was my junior year of college. I had just broken up with my girlfriend—actually, truth be told, she had just broken up with me—and I was talking with my father on the telephone. He said: God never promised that life would be a bowl of cherries.

Really? Wow. God never promised that life would be a bowl of cherries. That obvious fact had somehow escaped me. The scales fell from my eyes. I would never again see my life the same way.

If not life will be a bowl of cherries, what does God promise? It strikes me now as an odd concept. On a human level, promises sound great but are not always kept. We are skeptical about their delivery on the other end.

And yet the notion of God’s promise occurs often in the letter to the Hebrews and elsewhere in the scriptures. The word promise and its derivatives occur at least ten times in chapters ten and eleven in Hebrews.

The reading today catalogues various exemplars of faith, some who had obtained the promises and some who did not, living, as last week’s reading said, in the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Here's how Hebrews describes that second category of unnamed saints: Others were tortured… some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated — the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised.

We need not look far for modern exemplars. Martin Luther King Jr. comes readily to mind.

But our ancestor in faith, Abraham, is the most important example of how believing isn’t necessarily seeing. Abraham journeyed from a present clarity to a future of profound ignorance, one commentator wrote. He journeyed from what he had to what he did not have, from the known to the unknown, from everything that was familiar to all things strange. Abraham died, as Hebrews says, “without having received the promise.”[1]

Apparently, God’s promise, whatever it is, is often delayed, or not realized at all, or maybe not even kept. In the meantime, all we know is that life isn’t a bowl of cherries. And not being a bowl of cherries, our default response is to feel anxious about it.

Earlier this summer, there was an article in the New York Times by the author and journalist Daniel Smith entitled Nothing to Do But Embrace the Dread. Smith has recently written a book entitled Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, on which the Times article is based. In it he documents his experiences with a kind of anxiety that results in panic attacks, bouts of insomnia and thoughts of what he calls "existential ruin."[2]

It’s estimated that 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders of some kind and, whether disabling or not, all of us experience anxiety. So I found his article compelling, even enlightening, having something of the same effect as my father’s bit of wisdom from thirty-five years ago.

We all want to get rid of anxiety, Smith says, like we’d want to be rid of emphysema or eczema. And if you suffer from anxiety, he writes, you will wish for a mind that does not spin every slightest situation into catastrophe—a mind that approaches everyday life with poise, reason and equanimity.

But there are two glitches with wanting to be rid of anxiety, he says. The first is that it is an emotion universally felt and necessary for survival, not to mention for a full experience of human life. Toss aside the bath water of anxiety, he writes, and you will also be tossing aside excitement, motivation, vigilance, ambition, exuberance and inspiration...

The second glitch, he says, is more complex, having to do with the nature of anxiety itself. For all its attendant discomforts and daily horrors [anxiety] has at its heart a vital truth, even a transcendent wisdom. This truth...is of the essential uncertainty and perilousness of human life. Its fragility and evanescence.

Anxiety emphasizes these aspects of existence with an almost evangelical fervor... “Anything can happen at any time,” anxiety says, “There is no sure thing. Everything you hold dear is at risk, everything is vulnerable. It can all slip through your fingers.”...And of course, Smith says, this is right.

The solution, he says, is to embrace the dread. Fighting it only makes it worse, the harder you fight, the further you fall....The value and necessity of anxiety mean that it will persist until the last breath. It is impossible to extinguish, no matter the level at which it affects you....you might just be able to find relief, and even redemption, in this very impossibility.

For what is the message that everything is fluid but its own solid fact? What is the relentlessness of uncertainty but something about which you can always be certain? And what other choice do you have? The wisdom is already ringing in your ears. You might as well listen. It won’t get you out, but it will without doubt get you through.

Life isn’t a bowl of cherries, my father said. So what the hell, you might as well embrace it. Or, as the poet Mary Oliver has written:

to live in this world

you must be able

to do three things

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.[3]

Which is to say, embrace the passing show, with all its attendant anxiety, grief, and exquisite moments of joy. Love it all, as if your life depends on it.

And maybe—finally—this is God’s promise: at the heart of the passing show, of everything that is mortal, is love, transfiguring it from within, and from which we can never be separated.

And letting go into that, you’ll find a measure of peace. Maybe even enough to get you through. AMEN

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church; Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost; August 18, 2013; Hebrews 11:29-12:2

[1] Clendenin, Daniel B. “The Journey with Jesus-Notes to Myself” August 18, 2013 http://www.journeywithjesus.net/

[2] Smith, Daniel “Nothing to Do but Embrace the Dread” New York Times, July 14, 2013

[3] Oliver, Mary From “In Blackwater Woods” New and Selccted Poems Vol. 1

Backyard Bird Triptych

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 10:43:00 +0000

Scene One

These days there is a proliferation of goldfinches in the backyard. They are affectionately known as “goldies” at our house. When a squirrel is not hugging the nyger feeder, hanging upside down and inhaling the seed through the tiny portholes, these frisky yellow birds vie for a perch. As autumn approaches and the daylight wanes, these bright presences bring cheer. Lying on the hammock Sunday afternoon, I gazed up at the sky. A flock of goldies bounded and flashed across that blue expanse, singing all the way—“potato chips, potato chips, potato chips!”

Scene Two

The gray feathers and bits of down are strewn across the ground underneath the bird feeder—the remains of a Mourning Dove. Years ago, I watched from the window as a sharp-shinned hawk perched stock still on the back fence. A mourning dove, foraging on the ground, flew off in a whistling whirr of wings. A split second later, the dove disappeared in a cloud of feathers falling to earth. Unwitnessed, I suspect this bird met the same fate. The backyard is its own cosmos, life and death unfolding everyday.

Scene Three

There’s a Blue Jay in our backyard that thinks he’s a hawk. He announces his arrival with the downward slurred keer-r-r of a Red-tailed hawk. I was fooled the first few times. I know now that, when I look out the window, I’ll see a crested blue bird bounding among the feeders and not a raptor. Peterson calls the jay a showy, noisy bird and Sibley an expert mimic. Perhaps that’s the point. Other birds scram when he cries out hawk-like, descending to the roof of the shed. The feast is spread out before him. He can dine alone.

Returning to Where We Already Are*

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 20:30:00 +0000

They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.

Hebrews 11: 13b-16b

Some years ago, I discovered an old faded and yellowed photograph found among others that had come from my grandmother. From previous research done on my father’s family, I recognized the scene.

Outside a farmhouse a group had gathered on the front lawn. In the shadow cast by the house, seven formally dressed venerable looking folk sat in chairs in the front row. The men bearded and bow-tied, the women in long dark dresses.

Behind them stood twenty-five others, the women on one side, the men on the other. A gentleman sat in a horse drawn carriage off to the far right, at the edge of the gathering. And on the horizon, one can just make out the form of a distant mountain.

Further investigation revealed that the photo was taken on July 4^th, 1902. The occasion was the Heald family reunion at Sumner Hill, in the foothills of the western mountains. It was a celebration loosely held in conjunction with Old Home Week, the actual date having been set in August by the then Governor of Maine, John Fremont Hill.

Old Home Week was first established in 1899 in New Hampshire, when former residents of the state were invited back to visit their hometowns. Maine adopted the practice a year later. Marked by parades, processions, picnics, bonfires, fireworks and all manner of festivities, it was intended to promote tourism, historic preservation, and economic development.

The later half of 19^th century in New England had been witness to a westward emigration on a massive scale and many rural communities were in decline. In a rapidly changing America, Old Home Week was meant to call home the wayward and solidify a sense of rootedness in place and community.

The Heald family was a case in point. Of the eight surviving offspring of Hiram and Sophronia Heald, six left Maine in search of opportunity elsewhere. Two settled in Massachusetts—among them my great-great grandfather—two went out to Wyoming, one to Kansas, and another set off for California.

On that July 4^th, all but one sibling returned to the old homestead. All around them were gathered cousins, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And up the road, on the summit of the hill opening out to views of the White Mountains to the west, was the family cemetery, where two brothers who had died in the Civil War were buried, and other ancestors had been laid to rest.

For those living in New England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the meaning and sense of home had taken on a new social, economic and indeed spiritual urgency.

In the face of an ever increasingly mobile population and the attendant degradation of the environment and natural landscape, the meaning of home is no less important today than it was one hundred and thirteen years ago, perhaps even more so.

In the letter to the Hebrews, the unknown author speaks of our spiritual forebear Abraham departing from his native land to set out in faith for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.

And, in accordance with the promise, his descendents became as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains on the seashore. And yet they confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, seeking a homeland, desiring a better country, that is, a heavenly one.

They were seeking a homeland.

Unlike most interpretations of Hebrews that point to an other-worldly realm—and in spite of the author’s own intentions—I don’t believe that this homeland is far away but rather right here, now. It is the air we breathe. It is the earth beneath our feet. It is the ground upon which we stand.

We set out, not to a better land, but to this one, now seen anew with fresh eyes. Old Home Week is every week, when we return to where we already are.

Seven years ago I set out, not knowing where I was going. I resigned from my congregation in Yarmouth and left behind my work of twenty-three years. I refused job opportunities in the Midwest and Northwest. I had no idea what I was doing next, having let go of what I had already done. I ventured forth by intentionally staying put. I set out on a journey of faith to parts unknown.

The twelfth-century Dominican mystic, Meister Eckhart, used the image of the grunde or ground to express the deepest realm of the soul where we dwell with the Divine. He wrote: God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground. Walking in faith, we are awake to this ground of the soul that stands at the center of everything that exists. And for me, this spiritual ground has everything to do with the tangible ground—the earth—on which I stand.[1]

In his book Staying Put, the novelist and essayist Scott Sanders, offers a bioregional reading of this ancient spiritual ideal. He writes: The likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it. I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one...If our interior journeys are cut loose entirely from...place, then both we and the neighborhood will suffer.[2]

Sanders couldn’t have offered a better advertisement for Old Home Week.

These days, my spiritual practice is very simple. It’s about staying put. It’s about staying put with eyes wide open, which is to say with eyes of faith, seeing God alive in the local, not far off but close at hand. We’ve lived in the same neighborhood, on the same bit of land, for over twenty years. And I’m just now coming to know it.

Friday morning I awoke in the dark to the sound of thunder.

A sudden downpour. Then the storm passed off to the east, out over the water. A light breeze stirred the leaves. Water dripped from the eaves outside my study window as I sat sipping tea. And out of predawn gloom, I heard the cardinal’s chip call, then cheer, cheer, cheer! Just that.

And those people we meet everyday and the strangers in our midst. Or old familiar faces emerging from a yellowed and worn photograph. We are all seeking a homeland, solid ground on which to stand. By God’s grace, we rejoice that we’re already here, in this very place and not another.

Concluding his article, a reporter from the Lewiston Sun Times wrote of the Sumner Hill reunion: A fine display of fireworks on the evening of the fourth, to which the public was invited, marked the close of a red-letter day... AMEN

Photo: Heald Homestead, Sumner Hill, Maine

* A Sermon Preached at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church, Scarborough, ME; August 11, 2013

[1] Christie, Douglas E. The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology ; Oxford University Press, pg. 26

[2] Ibid.; pg. 27

Old Home Week

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 12:00:00 +0000

The old photograph is badly faded, the forms ghostlike. They are gathered in the dooryard of the family homestead on Sumner Hill in the foothills of the western mountains of Maine, seven of the eight surviving siblings seated in the shadow of the farmhouse.

At first glance, they are a dour lot. The men with nary a smile, bow-tied with vests and jackets; the women with long dark dresses, even on this warm summer afternoon. A little girl wearing white with a bow in her hair is seated still in her grandfather’s lap as she gazes at the camera. A gentleman holds the reins of a horse drawn carriage at the edge of the gathering. And beyond him, on the horizon, one can make out the form of a distant mountain.

Behind the assembled siblings stand their cousins, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, the men on one side, the women on the other. On July 4, 1902, they have come together from near and far for a Heald family reunion. It was a celebration loosely held in conjunction with Old Home Week, the actual date having been set a month later by the then Governor of Maine, John Fremont Hill.

Old Home Week was conceived of by Governor Frank W. Robbins of New Hampshire in 1899, when former residents of the state were invited back to visit their hometowns. Maine adopted the practice a year later. Marked by parades, processions, picnics, bonfires, fireworks and all manner of festivities, it was intended to promote tourism, historic preservation, and economic development.

The later half of 19^th century in New England had been witness to a westward emigration on a massive scale and many rural communities were in decline. The population of Sumner fell from a high of 1269 in 1840 to 802 in 1900. In a rapidly changing America, Old Home Week was meant to call home the wayward and solidify a sense of rootedness in place and community.

The Heald family was a case in point. Of the eight surviving offspring of Hiram and Sophronia Heald, six left Maine in search of opportunity elsewhere. My great-great grandfather, Lysander Heald, settled in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, where he was a leather cutter for the booming shoe business. Hiram moved to Sandwich, Massachusetts, where he was a principal owner of the Norway Tack Co. and was engaged in cranberry raising. Abel emigrated to Sheridan, Wyoming, where he operated several cattle ranches; he was followed by his sister Emogene sometime later. Althea moved to Cawker City, Kansas, with her husband. The youngest, Oscar, raised fruit in Pasadena, California. Only two siblings remained at home, Marcella and Stephen.

On that July 4^th, all but Oscar returned to the old homestead. And up the road, on the summit of the hill opening out to views of the White Mountains to the west, was the family cemetery, where two brothers, James and Frank, having died in the Civil War, were buried. Here too, the sibling’s parents and grandparents were laid to rest.

A reporter for the Lewiston Sun Times wrote about the festivities: A traveler passing along the road over Sumner Hill any time within the past week, would have seen a group of tents just a little on the north side of the summit, and a few rods above the residence of James H. Heald...

It was near this spot that Benjamin Heald, one of the pioneer settlers of Sumner located, at the age of twenty years; made a clearing in the midst of the forest, and established a home which has never been owned outside the name and is now occupied by his descendents of the third and fourth generation...

From Benjamin, the farm passed first to his son Hiram Heald, whose children from both near and distant states have during the past week been sheltered by the parental roof, while his grandchildren and great-grandchildren have been enjoying a happy gypsy life with the little group of snow-white tents for their temporary home....

The exercises were mostly informal. Dinner was served in the shade of the maples on the green, after which an hour was spent in brief speech making, story telling and reminiscences...An interesting letter of regret was read from Oscar F. Heald, the brother who was unable to be present...

A fine display of fireworks on the evening of the fourth, to which the public was invited, marked the close of a red-letter day in the Heald family.

Living Worth Dying For

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 16:13:00 +0000

There was a rich person who had a great deal of money. He said, ‘I shall invest my money so that I may sow, reap, plant, and fill my storehouses with produce, that I may lack nothing.’ These were the things he was thinking in his heart, but that very night he died.

Gospel of Thomas 63: 1-3

One of my daughters recently voiced her concern that I’m going to “drop-dead” any day. Citing my occasional noontime consumption of processed bread with peanut butter, she stated: “Your diet is horrible.” In fact, my diet is largely vegetarian. Furthermore, this summer, she has cooked most of the meals herself, using fresh, local, unprocessed ingredients.

As to my imbibing alcoholic beverages, she stated: “Beer is bad for you.” I replied: “Actually, in moderation, I don’t think so. I further pointed out that I workout at the gym several times a week, a fact that failed to impress her.

In fairness, her anxiety may stem from having been out of the country when I had a cardiac “non-event” (my word) last winter. Granted, I have an underlying cardiac congenital condition but it’s being closely monitored.

Sure, my grandfather and great-grandfather died of heart disease. And, yes, on Sukie’s side, there’s a similar issue with high cholesterol and cardiac disease.

But I sense that my daughter’s anxiety comes from a deeper place, an inevitable place if you will, for those who pay attention and listen carefully to our lives. I have a hunch that she’s beginning to sense how vulnerable she is—how vulnerable we all are—in the face of life’s fragility.

No longer just an idea, the feeling of impermanence may be taking up residence in her soul. Not surprising that this is occurring even as she is seeking her own way of living wholeheartedly and authentically in the world. What some might call finding a spiritual path.

And I believe, in the end, that’s what the reading from Luke’s gospel is all about.

The parable tells the story of a rich farmer who, on the very day he is savoring his prospects for a long and comfortable life, comes to life’s end. Some scholars have pointed out that this story is indistinguishable from the typical moral instruction of the wisdom tradition of Jesus’ day; therefore, they concluded, it’s not unique to Jesus but reflects more the manner and tone of the gospel’s author.[i]

But there’s another version of the parable.

It’s from the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of Jesus’ sayings discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, dating from the first century. Many scholars feel it may more accurately reflect Jesus’ voice and style. It’s simpler and avoids the moralizing tone of Luke’s story.[ii] The rich man is here not a farmer but an investor, seeking such a high return that he will lack nothing:

In Luke’s version, the farmer’s folly is emphasized. Here the stark incongruity between the rich man’s thoughts and his abrupt end is highlighted.

Jesus’ was not here condemning setting aside enough to secure a comfortable retirement. That was outside his immediate frame of reference. That we should be responsible stewards of our resources, for ourselves, and future generations, there can be no doubt.

But in this parable, Jesus was talking about greed, not good stewardship; greed being an inordinate desire to possess more than we need. Which is to say, in the end, he was talking about the quality of our attention, what we attend to, what’s of ultimate meaning and importance to us. Or to put it another way: what’s worth dying for?

Forrest Church, for over thirty years the Senior Minister of All Soul’s Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City until his death in 2009, delivered some one thousand sermons in the course of his ministry. One way or another, he said, they always circled back to a single theme.

Time and again, he would return to the abiding theme of love and death. Variations on that theme, he wrote, sound from my heartstrings. It was central to his definition of religion: Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die...

Knowing that we must die, we question what life means. The answers we arrive at may not be religious answers, but the questions death forces us to ask are, at heart, religious questions: Where did I come from? Who am I? Where am I going? What is life’s purpose? What does it all signify?

Death is not life’s goal, he wrote, but it’s terminus. The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for. This is where loves comes into the picture. The one thing that can’t be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.[iii]

Knowing that we must one day die, we attend to that which is most important, which is love.

In June, I shared with you that I had learned that a dear childhood friend, Margie, had early onset Alzheimer’s; that she was in the late stages of the disease; and that I hoped to visit with her soon. Last week, after church, I drove down to Massachusetts to visit with her and her husband, Matt.

Matt greeted me at the door and said that a caregiver was feeding Margie her lunch, could he and I sit out on the porch and talk? And so he talked about the journey he had traveled with Margie since her diagnosis some years ago. About how he was committed to caring for her at home. About how challenging it had been.

And then he laughed and said: It’s been an absolute nightmare and, you know, it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Stuff I used to worry about, I don’t worry about anymore. I know now what’s most important.

He didn’t say, but he could have, that he had already achieved his goal, that he had lived in such a way that his life—and Margie’s—was worth dying for.

My daughter, Bekah—the one who thinks that I’m going to drop-dead at any moment—is heading to England in just a few weeks, where she will be studying for her master’s degree at the University of London. She’s asked that Sukie and Anna and I join her for Christmas. The wardens have graciously given me leave (Roy Partridge will be with you on Christmas Eve), so we’re going.

On Christmas Eve, we hope to attend A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the fifteenth century King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. This year, we’ll all be together in that hallowed space, and it will be our care and delight to prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the angels as the sun sets and evening comes to Cambridge.

That simple message: the holy presence at the heart of all—all that’s most fragile, most vulnerable; that holy presence, like love itself, worth living and dying for. AMEN

[i] Funk, Robert W; Hoover, Roy W.; The Five Gospels Macmillan Publishing Company; pg. 339

[ii] Ibid.; pg. 339

[iii] Church, Forrest; Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow; pg. x

Candle In The Dark

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 20:01:00 +0000

One of my daughters (she shall remain nameless) recently voiced her concern that I’m going to “drop-dead” any day. Citing my occasional noontime consumption of Pepperidge Farm oat bread (processed!) with my peanut butter, she stated: “Your diet is horrible.” In fact, my diet is largely vegetarian and she prepares much of what I eat.

As to imbibing alcoholic beverages, she stated: “Beer is bad for you.” I replied: “Actually, in moderation, I don’t believe it is. In fact, hell will freeze over before I stop drinking beer!” I further pointed out that I workout at the gym several times a week. It failed to impress her.

In fairness, her anxiety may stem from having been out of the country when I had a cardiac “non-event” (my word) last winter. Granted, I have underlying bicuspid aortic valve disease (a congenital condition) but it’s being closely monitored. Sure, my grandfather and great-grandfather died of heart disease, the former while watching TV with a neighbor “the [Fire] department men being unsuccessful in their attempt to revive the stricken man.” And, yes, on her maternal side, there’s a similar issue with high cholesterol and cardiac disease.

Perhaps she’s beginning to sense how vulnerable she is—how vulnerable we all are—in the face of life’s fragility. No longer just an idea, the feeling of impermanence may be taking up residence in her soul. Not surprising that this is occurring even as she is seeking her own way of living wholeheartedly and authentically in the world. What some might call finding a spiritual path.

We’ve just made plans to join her in England for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, we hope to attend A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at the fifteenth century King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. She’s never known a Christmas without listening to the live broadcast. This year, we’ll all be together in that hallowed space, and it will be our care and delight to prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the angels. That simple message: the holy presence at the heart of all—all that’s most fragile, most vulnerable—like a candle in the dark.

Clocks in My Genes

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 22:54:00 +0000

Looking through some old family papers the other day, I came across a business receipt: THE CLOCK SHOP (W.H Heald) ANTIQUE TIME PIECES—GRANDFATHER, BANJO, SHELF, ETC. Also MODERN CLOCKS OF ALL MAKES Repairing in all its branches SOUTH WEYMOUTH, MASS.

By all accounts, William Hersey Heald was my great-great grandfather’s nephew. Born in Sandwich in 1857, he had moved to South Weymouth by 1900. I can’t account for his movements after that, though he resurfaces in the 1930 census, aged 73, a boarder. By that time, his wife had either died or flown the coop. I vaguely recall that his name was mentioned when I was a child—“Uncle Will,” if I’m not mistaken. Possibly an oddball. Maybe even a nutcase.

But I’m delighted to know that clocks are in my genes.

The Seth Thomas “Parma” over on my study bureau. The contemporary Robert Newton Curly Maple Tall Clock in our entryway. The French Carriage Clock I inherited from my mother. The Chelsea “Ship’s Bell” Clock that belonged to Sukie’s father. The Chelsea “Boston” Shipstrike that Sukie and I bought in 1987 as a wedding gift for ourselves. The Seth Thomas Schoolhouse Clock that hung in the Stetson Shoe Company in South Weymouth one hundred or more years ago and now hangs in our living room, a clock that Uncle Will undoubtedly knew. The several pocket watches belonging to my various forebears in my desk drawer.

I can’t get enough clocks. I say to Sukie, “I need another clock.” She responds, “No you don’t; we’ll all be driven mad by the striking,” she says. And on it goes.

And just now the Parma strikes five o’clock. I’m mesmerized by the tic-tock, the rhythm, the haunting sense that this same clock ticked and struck back in the day, heard by ancestors long since gone.

Ah, yes, and then there’s my iPhone Grandfather Clock app...

A Prayer For All The World and All The Earth

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 12:21:00 +0000

St. Nicholas Episcopal Church

Scarborough, Maine

July 28, 2013

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” He said to hem, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come...’” Luke 11:1-13

In the first chapter of his book The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer, the historical Jesus scholar, John Dominic Crossan, talks about his near weekly visits to airports as he wings his way all over the United States and Canada, lecturing at different churches.

As he waits for his flights, he is always in search of electrical outlets for his MacBook Pro; an incredibly powerful computer, he says, but absolutely dependent on getting its battery regularly charged.

And therein he has found his metaphor for prayer. In that metaphor he says we are all laptops, and prayer is about empowerment by participation in and collaboration with God.

This God-as-Electricity is always there, whether discovered or not. Even when found, my human freedom allows me to connect or not to connect. It never forces itself upon me...

Furthermore, God-as-Electricity is equally available to all comers. You do not have to merit it by your action or deserve it by your character. You can be rich or poor, young or old, gay or straight, female or male, or anything else you can imagine.

God-as-Electricity works just as well for game and movie players, cell phones, and digital assistants; it even works equally well for Apples and PC’s. All we laptops have to do is find an outlet and plug ourselves in; empowerment is the free gift of God-as electricity.[i]

Well, I might prefer a more warm-blooded metaphor for prayer, but it works well enough.

Crossan then goes on to argue that God-as-Electricity—that is, prayer as empowerment by participation in and collaboration with God—is a biblical notion, found especially in the Hebrew prophets, and later in Paul and the earliest strand of teachings in the New Testament.

He says he sees an evolution of what prayer is understood to be in the biblical literature, a kind of flow from one way of praying to the other. The mysterious secret of prayer he writes is that—like all other human matters—it must mature over time and through practice. And, of course, immaturity is as possible in prayer as anywhere else in our lives. But there is a path forward...

A path forward or, as I have described it, a flow: from prayers of request, to prayers of gratitude, to prayers of empowerment. Request—Gratitude—Empowerment. Kind of like, but not quite, Anne Lamott’s three essential prayers: Help, Thanks, Wow, which I preached about earlier this year.

There is nothing wrong with prayers of request, writes Crossan. There is everything right with taking our hopes and fears under the shadow of transcendence. Neither is there anything wrong—but rather everything right—with prayers of gratitude for the mystery of existence, the challenge of life, and the glory of creation.

But it is an immature view of prayer that addresses a Supreme Being radically apart from us who thinks and wills, knows and hears, grants and refuses more or less as we do, but with infinite broadband.[ii]

Crossan argues that at its heart, the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer of empowerment; and, if the metaphor works for you, a God-as-Electricity prayer, a prayer that we plug ourselves into every week.

So, in the Lord’s Prayer, when Jesus prays Abba, Father! it is the Spirit praying within and through him. It is a prayer of mutuality and reciprocity, an interaction between the divine and the human or, in Matthew’s version, as in heaven so on earth or on earth as it is in heaven. And so it is for us who pray this prayer week after week, throughout the year.

To call God Abba, Father is a mode of address that is undeniably rooted in a male-oriented, patriarchal culture and is increasingly problematic for many of us. And yet, Crossan argues, the term Father was used as a metaphor that had a particular meaning. He notes: Despite its male-oriented prejudice, the biblical term “father” is often simply a shorthand term for ‘father and mother.’

Which is to say, it’s an inclusive term. And it indicates not just fathers and mothers of children, but a householder in charge of a home and extended family—it contains brothers and sisters, male and female slaves, animals, land, and tools.

As in biblical times, we all know what a well-run household looks like, says Crossan. We know what a good householder looks like. Walk in and look around, he says. Are the fields well prepared and the livestock well provisioned? Do dependents have adequate food, clothing, and shelter. Does a sick child [or elder] get special care? Does a pregnant or nursing mother get special concern?...Does everyone have enough?[iii]

So to call God Father in heaven is to call God Householder of earth. By participation and collaboration with God, we are householders of earth, caregivers of one another and of the whole creation.

And so Crossan dares to call the Lord’s Prayer the greatest prayer; a uniquely Christian prayer, yes, but a prayer for all the world and for all the earth.

As Christians, we have a particular responsibility to be God’s blessing and healing for all who suffer; by our manner of life, we are a prayer for all the world and for all the earth. We claim grace for one another.

Steve Charleston, the former Bishop of Alaska, and citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, addressed us all in his morning Facebook reflection. He wrote:

I am not so proud that I think I know what you need, or that I could give it to you even if I did. But I am so faithful that I know God is aware of your need, and so certain of grace that I claim it for you.

I do not know how many times I have needed a breakthrough, a turning point, a moment of deep change. How lonely the vigil at that crossroads.

But each time I was discovered by grace, helped by grace, given a path forward to follow. I claim that for you too. I pray it with an assurance that only comes from knowing the broken times.

AMEN

[i] Crossan, John Dominic The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer ; HarperOne, pg. 9

[ii]Ibid.; pg. 27ff

[iii]Ibid.; pg. 40

Being Alive and Having to Die

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 18:13:00 +0000

“Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die” wrote Forrest Church, the former senior minister of All Soul’s Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City. Having studied religion for over thirty years, it’s as good a definition as I’ve heard. It sharpens my core values of offering blessing and healing and living, as I am able, with loving care and attention. Just that. Everything else is commentary.

My barometer for how well I’m doing is washing the dishes after supper. With Bekah and Anna around, washing up after meals has become a big deal. Yes, I could ask them to clean up—and I do from time to time—but Bekah has become our primary chef, with Sukie or Anna as her assistant. Sukie cooks when nobody else wants to, which is much of the time. So by default, I clean up.

The louder it gets, the less well I’m doing. Aggressive cleaning. Banging pots and pans, throwing dishes and glasses into the dishwasher, splashing water, sponging violently. Cats scurrying in every direction. Complaining aloud that it’s not Thanksgiving, so what’s up with the frigging mess?

The other barometer is how placidly (or not) I leave the house in the morning. Rushing around with my head cut off. Cursing while I slap peanut butter and honey on two pieces of bread. Shoving items into my gym bag. Forgetting to kiss Sukie goodbye. Slamming the door as I leave. Not good.

Being blessing and healing for others. Living with loving care and attention. Slow down. Take a breath. Realizing that this life, this moment, is all I have. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Thanks, Forrest.

Carrie

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 21:59:00 +0000

My grandmother insisted that her father’s people were Scottish, not Irish; Protestant not (God forbid) Catholic. Was it MacBride or McBride? It appears that her grandfather came from Ireland, her grandmother from Scotland. They lived in Brooklyn. He was a carpenter, she a housekeeper.

Their youngest son, Edwin, my grandmother’s father, moved north when he was young, was apparently raised by an Episcopal priest, and changed his name to MacBride. He married Carrie Thayer in 1891. In 1896, he died of typhoid fever, aged twenty-eight.

My grandmother said her mother was a saint, raising her and her brother alone; said she was very clever and lovely and lady-like.

I found a photograph of Carrie when she was a girl, with long curly tresses, looking ever so confident, delightfully full of herself.

Dispatches from the Cabin: Part Nine

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 20:46:00 +0000

We're back home from Islesford. Back to my 10' by 7' study--the "Treehouse"--looking out to the yard and across Birch Lane to the woods beyond.

On the wall to the left of my desk, there are two watercolors by Nat. Both are of Islesford. One pictures the row of boathouses on Sandy Beach at Hadlock Cove. The other is a view from the cabin on Bayberry Point, looking through the garden gate down to the shore and across to Cadillac Mountain. It was made on September 6, 2000.

The trees have since grown up and obscure the view. They'll be thinned out this winter and next summer the scene will be more akin to Nat's watercolor.

Meanwhile, the island--and Nat--will be with me through the intervening months. Photo: Nat Bowditch watercolor, Cranberry point, Islesford.

Dispatches from the Cabin: Part Eight

noreply@blogger.com (David Heald) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 10:00:00 +0000

"Will be leaving tomorrow, though don't want to think of it," Nat wrote in January, 1976. And in September, 1994: "It's so peaceful, we never want to leave."

We're catching the 12 o'clock ferry to Southwest Harbor. Nat's brother, Steve, will be picking us up at the cabin in his island vehicle, an old Dodge pickup.

It feels like we've just settled into the quiet rhythm of this place. Hate to leave. And yet...

Steve said Rick Alley will come this winter and open up the view down to the point, thinning out the trees, gathering the brush in piles to burn. We plan to be back next summer. Photo: Fog Rainbow, Hadlock Cove, Islesford.