Appreciate Each Moment

This summer I have been moving books.  I just gave twelve boxes to the St. James book sale (starts 9/22) and find that I still have nine more boxes.  It’s been an act of discernment.  Amid all the sorting, I came across a small book I read over a decade ago: Abandonment to the Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a Roman Catholic priest living in the 17th Century.

This short book has been such a consolation and corrective in these confusing and contentious times.  When we look at the trials and tragedies of this world, it’s so easy to despair or shut down.  It’s so easy to romanticize the past or hope for some idealized future.

What de Caussade writes however is to root ourselves in this moment.  “For what God creates at each moment is a divine thought which is expressed by a thing, and so all these things are so many names and words through which [God] makes known [God’s] wishes.”  Elsewhere he writes: “Every moment reveals God to us. Faith is our light in this life….Faith unlocks God’s treasury….it is by faith that God makes [God’s ] presence plain everywhere.  Faith tears aside the veil so that we can see the everlasting truth.”

That is, at some point it’s a waste of time simply to lament the state of this world and long for some other time with more noble leaders or more pervasive peace, justice, and mercy.  We become like Miniver Cheevy (in the E. A. Robinson poem) who spent his time longing for the times of knights while he failed to notice the glory around him.

Yes, let’s be engaged with the issues of the day. Yes, let’s demand more of our leaders and work for a better world. However, we can work for peace and justice and still attend to the presence of the Holy One in every moment of our lives.  “Today is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  We do that by paying attention.  

My vow is to spend less time planning my life or wishing I had a different life and instead living the one I have. I want to talk less about God and pay more attention to God here and now.  I am sure that Iona and Assisi are places where I could experience God’s presence, but since I live at 44 Ravenwood Dr. Fletcher, I am looking for God in my backyard.

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Olympic Reflection

Like many of you, I am focused on the Olympics—not all of them, but certainly Katie Ledecky and the USA women soccer team.  I hope this is less about any jingoism and more a fascination with the focus, the dedication, the discipline of these men and women.  It’s amazing to see how they have trained their bodies to perform these specific skills.  

I have been thinking about them and how scattered my life often is.  The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “The purity of the heart is to will one thing.”  He went on to write about heroes of the faith, like Abraham, who heard God calling them and dedicated their lives to following that one thing regardless of the cost.

Life in this century is so rich and diverse.  Our ability to have information literally at our finger tips is a great blessing, but like everything there’s a downside. Instead of doing one thing well, too often we do one hundred things adequately.  We are pulled in so many directions, we just get through the day by checking things off our list.

What if like Katie Ledecky, we were to dedicate our lives but instead of swimming to knowing God and to radiate that knowledge and love and grace by our presence and our actions?  What if that became the event we focused on?   What if the prayer we lived out were: “Day by day, Oh dear Lord three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly. Day by day”?

Discipline is what makes disciples. May we ponder the skills the Lord is asking us to refine not so that we might win any medals, but so that God might use us to change the world.

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Take time for God

I am attending the Shalem Institute’s training on Spiritual Direction or Spiritual Guidance.  I have found we often talk about having a prayer life, but we as a Church are seldom very specific about how to do that, and once you actually begin a discipline of prayer, how to negotiate that journey.

A year ago our diocese asked Elaine Heath, now the Dean of Duke Divinity School, to be the presenter at our clergy retreat. She said that the Christian journey has three phases: Go deep, go out, go together.  I don’t think there’s necessarily an order to these, but all three are necessary and my belief is that the first is the one we often overlook.

To go deep is to make time in your day to become aware of God’s presence in your life.  Sometimes we make prayer too complicated. It’s not about having a sacred word or the right technique or having read the right book or having gone to the right retreat. It’s simply being still and knowing that God is God. It’s making a space to be present to God who is always present for us.  To pray is to shut off the constant noise in our lives and to rest in God’s presence.  We are asked in our baptismal covenant “Will you continue in the prayers?” because it’s one of the ways we come to know what being a Christian means.

Amid all the confusion in our world and our country, take time to remember that God is God.   Make some time at your day’s beginning and end to give thanks for this gift of life.  Stop the noise in your head; be still and know that God is God.  Prayer is not only a gift to the one who prays, but it’s one of the ways the world gets healed.

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Remember the Past and Future

This weekend St. Matthias Episcopal Church will celebrate its 150th Anniversary.  Their beginning was humble—“The Freedmen’s Church” began meeting at Trinity Church right after the Civil War.  In a few years, a school was also started at Trinity because since 1835 North Carolina passed laws making it illegal to teach African Americans to read or write.

I think about what life must have been like in 1865: a country divided, massive distrust of government, haunted by a past of violence, little infrastructure.  Yet in this time of turmoil, men and women-black and white—had a vision and they dared to act upon it.  Bishop Thomas Atkinson, bishop of North Carolina, wanted to develop and ordain a local African American priest for this congregation which became St. Matthias. But when the Standing Committee refused its approval, he brought in an African American priest from the North.  

I have often quoted a British theologian: “the Church is like a swimming pool. All the noise comes from the shallow end.” So it is with politics.  Amid all the clamor this week and next week from the Republican and Democratic conventions, let us not be distracted from our callings.  Our times are not as confusing as 1865 and our task are not as hard. We, therefore, must embrace the examples of those men and women who had a vision for a new church and a new beginning for all God’s children.  It’s too easy to focus on what’s wrong, especially when there is so much that could be right.  

Let us not see the world in terms of what divides us because division is always the shallow end.  Let us dive into the deep waters and remember our calling is to be agents for God’s mission to make the world new.  Let’s remember God’s vision for this world, this country, this part of North Carolina and then take one step towards that so that, 150 years from now, the faithful people of WNC will remember us and be inspired to do what God calls for them to do in their day.

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Pray for Peace

It’s time.  As a nation we have been stuck long enough.  The old arguments have gone on so long we know each other’s lines and no longer hear one another.  The recent tragedies in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Minnesota must bring us to our senses and to our knees. It’s time for everyone to leave their carefully constructed positions and come to center where we kiss the cross, weep together, and find a way to walk hand in hand into the future. It’s time.

Our Presiding Bishop has called on our Church to be agents of resurrection in the face of division and violence.  To that end, he has called us to prayer and I join his call.  Pray for peace. Pray for communion. Pray for a new way to open. Pray for our leaders to lead. Pray for the common love of humanity to open the hearts of all people. Most of all, pray for hope.  (You might begin with the prayer “For the Human Family” on page 815 of the Book of Common Prayer.) It’s too easy to despair and make our worlds smaller to protect ourselves from the pain.  There’s a reason so few people stayed at the cross, yet we proclaim it is the door to resurrection.

I ask you to do two things. First, believe that change can begin where you are and have a ripple effect. There is little we can do about race relations or the perception people have about the police in Dallas, but we can do something about our common bonds where we live.  We can take a hard look at the divisions that exist in our communities around race and class and national origin and politics and gender and sexual orientation. Second we must move to the center.  We must be agents of hope and resurrection.  If we begin with honesty and prayer and conversation, God will show us a way and we must have the courage to follow where the Lord leads.  It’s not whether the world can change; it’s whether we believe we can be agents of that change.

To that end, our province of the Episcopal Church, Province IV, has put for a challenge for our dioceses to think of “bold ideas” to “make life better for all God’s children” and has set aside $20,000 in 2017 (see the link below). We are invited to write grants and collaborate with other dioceses.  If you have an idea about a grant or a proposal, send them to my office (bishop@diocesewnc.org).  

It’s time. Let us mourn and pray and come together to act for God’s reign of peace, justice, and mercy.

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Welcoming José McLoughlin

A week and a half ago we as the diocese elected José McLoughlin as the 7th bishop of the Diocese of WNC.  Elections are always filled with mixed emotions.   The nominees have spent many months contemplating a new future and then only one person is chosen to incarnate it as the bishop. Of course, nothing is wasted, but there is an emotional toll for such a public event. I ask, therefore, that we as a diocese continue to hold Cyndi, Hannah and Thomas in our prayers and to give thanks for their willingness to participate in this process.  All of them are and will be part of us.

When José is ordained October 1, he will be asked many questions but those attending will be asked two: “Is it your will that we ordain José as your bishop?” and “Will you uphold José as bishop?”  These are crucial questions in this time in our context.  At best our culture has an ambivalent relation to our leaders. In this election season we already are deluged with the negative ads about candidates. In addition, the trust given to our Congress and State Legislature is at a historical low. We like to believe that as the Church we are immune from these projections and perceptions, but of course we are part of the sea in which we swim.

To uphold José McLoughlin as the 7th Bishop is to remember what he is and is not ordained to do and to be aware that there are still only twenty-four hours in a day and seven days in a week. To uphold him is to recall that he could be the bishop for many years and, therefore, if your favorite program/project doesn’t have his immediate attention now, cultivate patience and do the work given to you anyway. He will be here a long time.  Most of all, to uphold him is to live out your baptismal vows with intention and prayer. The bishop is an important person in the Church but is only one person.  The postcommunion prayer says, “Grant that we, with him, may serve you now and always rejoice in your glory” because the Church is the whole body.

I look forward to October 1 not because I am resigning but because José McLoughlin will bring new gifts to the diocese and because I have seen the collegiality of this diocese and know that you will do great things together.

José, Laurel, and their children, Alexander and Alyson, will move here at the end of the summer. He and I will have the month of September working together.  Please welcome them and come to the Kimmel  Arena at UNC-A at 11:00 on October 1 for the ordination.

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