My 13th All Saints 2015

All Saints Day 2015 Reflection

All Saints Church

Thomas E Wilson, Rector

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9        Psalm 24    Revelation 21:1-6a      John 11:32-44

My 13^th All Saints 2015

In Rome there is this early 2^nd Century building called the Pantheon. It was a memorial to be a place of reverence of all the Gods, known and unknown. It was not a Temple where Gods were worshipped, but it was used as a memorial to a man who had served as a Consul for three times and had been a friend and ally of Caesar Augustus. It has this huge dome to give the sense of the heavens in which all the Gods dwell. Walking into this building took my breath away for it was constructed to remind all that come into this place that there is a dimension of this life that is greater than our imagination; there is a power greater than ourselves. At the top of the dome there is an oculus, a hole where the natural sunlight shines through to move around the inside of the building like a reverse sundial. The Divine light shines into all the corners of the room, much as the Divine light shines in all parts of our lives. In 609-610 the Pantheon was given to the church and Pope Boniface IV consecrated it as a church with a service in which he urged that there be a service every year in every place to celebrate all those, known and unknown, living or dead, who acknowledge that God’s light shines on them and through them. Out of that developed the Feast of All Saints. 

 

Today is All Saints’ Day, the Patronal Festival of this church, and when we say All Saints, we mean all who come here in life or imagination or memory who have an awareness of God in their life. Notice I don’t say people who are good, but All - all of us schmucks who know that we cannot make it through the day without connecting with God. The day after All Saints’ Day is called All Souls Day when, since the 10^th Century starting in the Benedictine Monasteries and then spreading out to all the churches, there were held Masses for all the Faithfully Departed who had died in the previous year. What we tend to do is conflate the two days into one day, and we remember all those who have died as a way of honoring the presence of God in our life and in our death. 

We take death seriously and do not separate the dead from our lives so easily. We acknowledge that the dead have formed our lives and their spirits are still seemingly alive in our lives. Every time I walk into this building, my soul is flooded with the memory and spiritual presence of those I have known in this place. And not just people I have known in this place, but the people I bring in with me, just underneath the surface of my conscious, and all it takes is a moment when a word or an action reminds me of that person and they are with me over the miles or years that separate us. Every Eucharist I am part of and in which I am open to God’s spirit, I am aware of the fact that my spirit and the spirit of each person here, all those we bring here in prayer and each person past and present are open to Communion, to be in union with one another. Every time I begin the service by striking the bowl, I am announcing that we are entering into intentional holy space and time and inviting all of us to enter into that holy space and time, asking, like Jesus in the Gospel lesson for today, for the spirits of the dead - dead in life or dead in spirit - to come out of their tombs and join us in living fully into God. 

From John Donne’s Meditation XVII:  

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

My 13^th All Saints 2015 (poem) 

Air between rafters adjusting to a new spirit breathing.  

Stragglers come, seeing each other after weekly break,  

as noise ebb and flow waiting for bowl struck echoing  

call to stand filling seats as to room for others do make.  

The Bowl is struck, the lines form, and the procession  

begins like being led by a waiter to the Thanksgiving  

banquet foretaste as we head to the table to refreshen  

hopes plus strengths for some new kind of life living.   

Place already filling with invisibles adjoining silently   

with us corporeal beings. Those are ones whose spirits  

join times of worship. I see the ones for whom I litany  

had for said when they were buried as loving parents,  

solid friends, loved child, or glancing strangers; they  

are all here in communion on table's other side. At first  

were moved away John and Dick; leaves us then to pray  

sadly to unexpected news. Hopes avoiding more, burst   

with Butch on a hard January. Weeks of burden weigh  

remembering oh too short days of Wally and Elizabeth.  

Then followed in heart rending loss of Bob, Frank, Bill,   

Virginia, Ruthie, Cleo, Ron, Kit, Pastor Bob, Larry, Flo,   

Eileen, Emma, Lillian, Virginia, Rebecca, Annette, Dan,  

Francis, Gertrude, Charlotte, Anne, Tommy, Eloise, Lizzie,   

Jennifer, Katherine, Geoff, Fred, Doug, Gwen, Alex, David,  

Jack, Joan, Tom, Juliette, Marge, Al, Dick, Jane, Judy, Doug,   

Nick, Martha, Bob, Jerry, Mavis, Eva, Jim, Sam, Kim, Bob,   

Milt, Gilberta, Rhea, and last, quickly giving peace to Janet.   

Then were on other sites I helped replace hope for moan.  

Some moved to other places to cross the shore there away;  

Skip, Margie, Ryland, Helen. Others to me name unknown   

but loved, for some in life this place never known did sway  

our souls, and bring shared mother, brothers, fathers, sown  

as cousins joyfully coming, joining us on All Saints to pray  

here; hear and see, thin places where All Saints are shown. 

Tattoo of the Heart

A Reflection and Poem for Reformation Sunday                              October 25, 2015

Emmanuel Lutheran and All Saints’ Episcopal                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Preacher

Jeremiah 31:31-34                   Romans 3: 19-28                     John 8:31-36

Tattoo of the Heart

I was on the road driving to a meeting and I was listening to an interview with John Hood, a conservative writer who had just come out with a book called Catalyst about the governor of North Carolina from 1985 to 1993, Jim Martin, and the Rise of the Republican Party in our state. In the interest of full disclosure (1) I was not in North Carolina during that time and have no first-hand experience of that administration. (2) In my own politics, I consider Bernie Sanders much too conservative.

In the interview Martin said that there two stages in the rise of the Republicans: the first stage was to be a wedge of opposition and to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and the electorate - which he said was what Jesse Helms was able to do. The second stage was to be a magnet and draw people to the Republicans party by showing that they can govern for the good of all the people - which Martin and Hood posit was what Martin had done.

Today we have a Luther-palian service, where All Saints’ Episcopal and Emmanuel Lutheran Churches come together to remember Reformation Sunday. Last year I presided over the Communion Liturgy and Pastor Keith preached and this year I preach and Keith presides, and what I want to suggest to us is that we are, in the spirit of Luther, called to put away our wedges and become magnets, drawing people to God instead of any particular denominations.

Today we remember that day on October 31, 1517 when Luther is reputed to have nailed the 95 theses on the Wittenberg Door to lay out the abuses of the Church and how they had wandered far away from the ideas of Jesus. Listen to the beginning of the wedge he posts on the door as an invitation to a new kind of party:

"The revenues of all Christendom are being sucked into this insatiable basilica. The Germans laugh at calling this the common treasure of Christendom. Before long, all the churches, palaces, walls and bridges of Rome will be built out of our money. First of all, we should rear living temples, not local churches, and only last of all St. Peter's, which is not necessary for us. We Germans cannot attend St. Peter's. Better that it should never be built than that our parochial churches should be despoiled. ...

Why doesn't the pope build the basilica of St. Peter's out of his own money? He is richer than Croesus. He would do better to sell St. Peter's and give the money to the poor folk who are being fleeced by the hawkers of indulgences."

Strong language, but then he was a college Professor used to making all sorts of bold statements to challenge undergraduates to think. He suggested that the sale of indulgences had no Biblical warrant and therefore the Pope was exceeding his authority, and that the sale of indulgences undermined the salvation of people by encouraging them to place their trust in works instead of God. Luther was calling for a German Council to stand up against the Italian Pope. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, wanted to dismiss it as a squabble among Monks that had nothing to do with everyday faith and order. However, the church in Rome saw a threat to its authority, responded with its full power, and overplayed their already ham-fisted hand in order to keep control. They responded with wedges of their own and tried to place a wedge between Luther and fellow worshipers by declaring him a heretic. Most of our difficulties as institutions come as we pull out wedges to divide when we want to keep control. If the church had been wise, they would have had an academic conference rather than a trial which made Luther a martyr to his conscience; instead they were obsessed with their power. They condemned him and it backfired and helped turn his protest into a movement.  Luther could have taken his place among the great theologians and routinely quoted by preachers of the church. 

The arrogance of the church caused it to boil into a full scale challenge, and the times were ripe for the dissatisfaction of some of the German princes with having so much of their tax money go down to Rome. So both sides in the name of the Prince of Peace started slaughtering each other and whoever else, especially the peasants, who always happen to get caught between the opposing forces. As the character, Sancho Panza, says in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, “Whether the Pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it goes ill for the pitcher. As for the pitcher or the stone even a blind man can see that.”

After all the bodies are buried and institutions get different names and different styles comes the hard part of building magnets of trust. However, after that first series of wedges between Luther and the church, a pattern of wedge-driving continued as further wedges were employed by both sides with further splits between different factions in the Reformation. Every side claimed that they were right, and the song of the Gospel got drowned out by the noise of doctrine. Four hundred and ninety eight years later, by this service we make an outward and visible sign of the rebuilding of magnets of trust, and this is the work that continues and in which both All Saints and Emmanuel are involved in on the Outer Banks. This year is the 20^th Year of All Saints’ Church, which started meeting in Kitty Hawk School and struggled to find its ministry just as Emmanuel Lutheran has been struggling for 8 years. Our struggles are not over, and on this side of the grave they will never be over. We are different institutions, but the call to ministry is the same.

We are to be part of God’s Magnetic field of Christ’s work reconciling the world to God’s self. We are involved in what Luther called us to do - “to rear living Temples, not local churches”. We start that by allowing ourselves to be open to God’s Holy Spirit to write the Law of God in our hearts as Jeremiah writes in the first lesson. The law of God that is spiritually tattooed on our hearts is that we are loved. If we comprehend that we are loved by God from before we were born, then we can love ourselves without waiting to prove that we have deserved that love. If we love ourselves without seeing it as a reward, then we can love others without necessarily granting approval. If we can dispense with the sale of love for approval, then we can love our enemies. It all begins with God’s unmerited love.

I don’t think that God really cares about our liturgies, our doctrines, our habits, our structure, or our budgets. I think that we are called to love. Love does not begin at home; it begins before we come into this earthly home, and it grows there and continues to grow outside the walls of our homes and churches. Neither Emmanuel nor All Saints is where we are called to be for we often fall short in our love of God, ourselves, and others, but remember this is not a contest. Luther reminds us that we are still on our paths:

“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”

Tattoo of the Heart

Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat

Ruarch, Pneuma, Breath, Come breathe with me

Come into my lungs and through the capillaries

to my heart where stenciled on aorta is the word

“YOU”. Then starting on left and then right atrium

tattooed the present, not conditional, verb of being,

by Being very self “ARE “. Then continuing across

left and right ventricles is placed word “LOVED!”.

Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat

“YOU ARE LOVED!” the tattoo beating into life

with ever spirit breath. At least 60 beat per minute

the tattoo shutters that message to every body cell

from toe to brain.

                                    It does not matter when the blood

meets the beat and word is first to start; for YOU is

never only singular but always is plural connecting

for “you” means all of you, even meaning shadows

and neighbor and enemy: “YOU ARE LOVED”:

Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat 

“ARE YOU LOVED! is not question but in awe

an exclamation! “LOVED YOU ARE!” is plainly

fact not tenuous hope.

                                    I’m not aware of every beat

and hear 60 times per minute for I have all those

things which draw me from being aware of God’s

living breath. But, suppose I stopped once in sixty

saying “YOU ARE LOVED!” out loud what every

cell already knows in every minute.

                                                            What if I remind

my self not every minute but every hour, 24 times a

day?

            Or only once each day?

                                                Or once each week? Or

once each month?

                                    Or once each year? It won’t change

the beat, or the message, or tattoo which remains true?

Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat     Beat

Come breathe with me and hear the drumming tattoo.

Hearing but also saying that tattoo with one another as

new shepherd, “Come breathe with me and be my love.”

Memories of Service; Reflection and Poem for 18 October 2015

A Reflection for XXI Pentecost (Proper 24)              All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC October 18, 2015                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Job 38:1-7, (34-41)      Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b                  Hebrews 5:1-10           Mark 10:35-45

Memories of Service

This week began with a confrontation with myself. An older (older than me) male member of the parish came in to drop off a file cabinet. I was sitting in my office trying to figure out what I could possibly say about the Gospel lesson from Mark for today. Judy was going over options with him and she suggested that, since I did not need another filing cabinet in my office, she could help him unload the cabinet and place it in the choir room. The older male member announced, “No”, he would try to handle it, and if not able to do it alone, he would come back and ask her help. At that moment, I had this vision of my Grandmother looking at me sitting down at my desk while an older person and a woman were moving heavy objects. I could hear her say, “Mister Tom, you were reared better than this - to sit idly by while a lady and an elderly gentleman are forced to do physical labor. You ignore your upbringing! Get up NOW sir!” I wanted to reply to her that I am an old man now as well, and besides - I believe in the equality of the sexes and for me to offer to help would betray the fact that I am a male chauvinist pig. However, I got up and helped him because I “knew” that my Grandmother would have slapped me for what she would have seen as a breach of manners. 

My grandmother died decades ago and I do not remember a time she would have ever, or had ever, slapped me. She was a very good woman, but I knew that she always wanted me to be better than I was. My own self-doubt and self-loathing I projected onto her, and that projection is alive in the core of my being.   My projection onto her still knows how to disapprove. Our projections onto people, either positive or negative, usually tell us more about us rather than the person on whom we place our projections. The only way we are ever to be in a real relationship is when we are able to withdraw our projections.

Let me give you an example. Two people fall “in love” with each other. However, what they have actually done is to develop a romance with the projections of the kind of person their egos want the other to be and place those projections on each other. It is only when they face hard times together that they might be tempted to withdraw their projections and accept the other person as a full human being. The phrase, “He is not the man I married!”, is true because he never was.

My grandmother projection is a symbol in what I would call a much larger “Mother” archetype, a universal figure in the collective unconscious which all humans share in their different religious and mythic concepts. All beings have a memory of “Mother” and it is multidimensional - from Goddess, to Mother Earth, to Earth Mother, to Virgin Mother,  to Monstrous Mother threatening to devour her young, to Lot’s wife frozen into salt looking away into the past - powerful imagery as we come to make sense of the whole birth and separation experiences we all have. My Grandmother is one part of my many complexes, or constellations of emotionally charged feelings and ideas centered on an archetypal figure in my personal unconscious. All of us, all of God’s chilluns, got complexes; we walk around with all sorts of unconscious complexes built around our experiences in life. Part of the healing of the soul is to be aware of those times as we walk on the Swiss cheese-like floor of our conscious life and suddenly fall through into a complex which dictates our behavior without thinking. If we are not aware of them, they come up and bite us, or Jung has said, “What we do not bring to the light of consciousness we tend to see as fate”.

James and John in the Gospel lesson seem to be operating under a Father complex in the personal unconscious around a much larger Father archetype in the Collective Unconscious. Remember the story of James and John who are working under their father Zebedee as fishermen, and when Jesus calls them to follow him, they leave their father Zebedee in the boat and follow Jesus. They may have left Zebedee in the boat, but they shift the Father Complex constellation to the person of Jesus. Just as they were used to be the “owners in waiting” on the fishing boats, now they become “high officials in waiting” in the glory of the Kingdom that they hope Jesus is going to establish. In their understanding, the archetype of Father is the one filled with power over others, and they project this onto Jesus.

Interestingly enough, when Matthew remembers this story in his Gospel, he projects the request onto the mother of James and John, and she is the one whom asks for her sons’ sakes. Mothers are always easy to blame for one’s own complexes. Part of the ministry of Jesus is to redefine the “Father” archetype to move from being an imperious ruler, a tyrant over others, to being a servant of all. Instead of building oneself up, one empties oneself out. To be a servant was not to be at another’s beck and call to fulfill their wants and desires, but to do what is best for all. Jesus, who calls God “Father”, sees his life as a redefinition of the God archetype, away from Father Controller of life, to one who is Giver of Self and is the ground, the energy, of all life. The suggestion is that if we are in the image of God, then we too are to be givers of self, participating in the divine energy of life.

The phrase “Public Service” used to be popular, and people said something like, “I offer myself to serve as your town councilperson, your county commissioner, your representative, your senator, your governor, your president.” We are entering into an election cycle, and part of our task is to ask if the proposed “servant’ is meaning to be a servant of help to bring about what is best for all or, instead, if they see themselves as controllers of all for the benefit of the candidate’s ego or agenda or core supporters. What we seen so far in the debates of both parties are not presentations of willing servants, but of projections on steroids - projections which say more about them than they may realize.

Being a “servant” is a challenge for the church as well. I am called to serve in this church, but my title, “Rector”, a term which suggests the “Father” Archetype, comes from the Latin meaning “Ruler”, a word that in English means both a King or something that measures and sets straight lines. When I am at my best, I serve with you for the benefit of all, giving myself while participating with you in the divine energy of life.  But there are moments when my personal unconscious interferes and I want to promote my own agenda and set you straight or rule over you. I am not here to drop a load of guilt on you about what you should do, or what can be called “Should-ing all over you”. Somedays I do better than others.  But I am here to share the love I know, not the compulsions of my shadows. As Jung said:

 “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being” . . .” That is the meaning of divine service, of the service which we [sic “man”] can render to God, that light can emerge from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of the Creator’s [sic “His”] creation, and we [sic man] conscious of ourselves [sic himself].

We are in the Stewardship season and the question for this season, and indeed for all seasons, is not “what is the budget?” or “do we satisfy your projections” but “who or what or how do we serve?”

Poem: Memories of Service

Like Dowson’s Cynara; she hides and waits

unannounced claiming  moments victorious

whenever a guard leaves unlocked the gates

holding back the floods of a guilt inglorious.

Shame rises not only for the mere deed itself

but the self whose hands, or ways of thought

didst fall so short of expectation of magic elf

who should of joys and wonders had brought,

but failed earned approval but only tolerance.

Her body has left our earth but ghostly linger

in spirit prisons by stingy rationed sufferance.

Yet there are moments when her soft fingers

caress my face with love; her only son’s son,

one of three. My memories of her, truly false

for me to hold. She never did lower to a shun,

remaining my partner in this, a one last waltz.