STARTING OVER
Suddenly everything falls apart. The life we knew is over. Where do we find the hope to go on? X2 Have you ever felt like that? Do you feel that now? We all will. The 13th chapter of Mark’s Gospel is often called the “little apocalypse”. Every year this happens, we start […]
CHAPTERS
The 20th of July 1915 -dash- the 11th of November 2006. A birth, a death, and between a whole life signified by that little line , a dash between two dates. There are so many chapters in a life like Helena’s, in any of our lives really. The chapters of the outer life, and the […]
Salt and Light
An empty life. Empty. We try to fill it with distractions, sometimes oblivion, sometimes violence. An empty life. Then we meet somebody. Somebody who carries fullness, a fullness that spills over into our lives, the fullness that is love, the fullness that is God. And that empty life starts to fill up. We meet […]
LET ME SEE
I here by convene the weekly meeting of the Grace Church God Spy society! How would that sound as a way to start off Church on Sunday mornings? Because that is what we are about. We are not leisurely admirers of God. We have a fulltime job, eternity hinges on our diligence, on our unswerving […]
PLACE OF HONOR
Have you ever suddenly realized that you have no idea what’s going on? That you thought the world worked in a certain way and then suddenly see that you were wrong and that the way the world really works is something utterly foreign and unknown, a different language? Have you ever had one of those […]
POSESSED
There was once a man who loved to go hunting. One year he bought a new shot gun to go duck hunting. When he was out hunting with his new gun he fell out of his boat. He didn’t want the gun to get wet so he kept trying to hold it over his head […]
BREAKFAST IN HELL
Did you know that I have actually eaten breakfast in hell? It was almost twenty years ago. I was in Israel, in Jerusalem. I got up early each morning and went for a run all the way around the walls of the old city. One day I bought a sesame bagel on my way back […]
TRUE SEEING
Every Sunday I read the funny pages of the newspaper, like lots of other people. The past few years I’ve noticed that other things have been added to the funnies that aren’t comics. I guess they can be described as “interesting stuff.” There is one thing in particular that I always look at, it involves […]
Belief
Five years ago I was walking into Church, thinking that things had seemed unusually calm, not much had happened lately and it felt kind of strange and being who I am I started worrying about that. I opened the door, the parish secretary was running down the hall in tears, saying two jet planes had […]
HOME
Early on, when the Church was young, there was a man, a pilgrim who traveled to Rome, on pilgrimage. When he arrived he was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in one small room, never going out. Skeptical about her way of life-for he himself was a great wanderer-the man called […]
BE OPENED
“For he shatters the doors of bronze and breaks in two the iron bars.” Psalm 107:16 All he has is a spoon. Carefully, secretly he sharpens the edges into a spike. The real work then begins. Thick prison walls. He has to get through them to the other side. Carefully, secretly he begins scraping […]
FOOD OF WISDOM
Food. There is good food and bad food. Food that is good for us and bad for us. There are whole diets and life styles and cultures that revolve around food. And appropriately so, because food is what keeps us alive, life revolves around food. Food says a great deal about a person, how, what, […]
GOD’S PLAYGROUND
“And I will raise them up on the last day.” Imagine all the lives that go through a church over the years, the decades, the centuries. Imagine all the lives that go through a playground. The play ground changes, gets old, gets fixed up, gets old… on and on. But that one spot of land […]
DOG DAYS OF GLORY
If you have a dog or live on a street with lots of dogs you might have noticed that things have been quiet lately. My little dog has dug a hole at the foundation of our house and lies there all day long, stretched out with her belly up against the cool bricks. When she […]
FEED ON HIM
You’re in the check out line of the grocery store and the headlines of the National Inquirer jump out, “Five loaves of bread and two fish feed five thousand people in the wilderness!” Under the headline you can see the subtitle, “Experts disagree: is it just a metaphor for sharing or did something really happen?” […]
A CODE TO LIVE BY
“You who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.” That is the opening line of a 1970 song by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Not that I remember back that far. It was 20 years later that I heard it and started wondering about a code to live by, […]
MANTLE OF PRAISE
I am the trash man. In our home I’m the one who most frequently empties all the trash cans and carries it all out to the big trash can beside the house. At our old house the trash can sat hidden in a row of althea shrubs, what is sometimes called Rose of Sharon. In […]
THE EARTH PRODUCES OF ITSELF
I planted my first garden when I was in the fourth grade, I ruined my brothers set of children’s gardening tools. I went around the neighborhood with my rusty wagon trying to sell the produce. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I had my own dirt that I could start cultivating again. A […]
Acolyte Training Review
Crucifer will be responsible for lighting and extinguishing the candles. Candles should be lit by 10:15 am (or 15 min. before the start of any service). All Acolytes will line up for the processional in the Cloister area and move into the Narthex when the Priest is ready to begin the service. No […]
BELIEVING
Guns and Bibles. They are both dangerous. We have to be careful with them, treated with respect, because in the hands of the wrong people they become pure poison, they become a plague, instruments of death and fear. That is something I learned early on growing up here in South Carolina. I learned to […]
GOD HAS GONE UP WITH A SHOUT!
The gas jets ignite and explode, shooting hot flames into the silken envelope, inflating an acre of flat flowing fabric into a jelly fish like behemoth, a hot air balloon! The bright rainbow of colors fills the sky, brilliant, effervescent. Then in silence the cord is dropped, like an umbilical cord being cut, and the […]
OUT OF HIS ABUNDANCE
Have you ever been around people who really loved one another? A married couple or a family? A special friendship? Or a group of friends? Perhaps a larger fellowship, like a Church or a community, a neighborhood, a town? Have you ever been around people who really loved one another? Not the kind of […]
HAUNTED
One of the interesting things about living in the city is that people are always dumping things on the street for the city to come pick up, junk, tree branches lawn clippings. In fact I routinely patrol my street for the lawn clippings from particular houses, the houses with fresh green grass with few weeds. […]
MORE THAN COMFORT
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want.” Or how about this one, the King James, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Then there is this one from the King’s Bible, the English Translation from before the King James Bible, “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore I lack nothing.” […]