This morning I sat on my balcony looking at the apartments and Safeway across the way. Drinking coffee and saying Morning Prayer. In the background from within my apartment hymns were playing on Mac. Hymns are one way I persist and stay grounded. I know that tears come more easily as we age. At least that’s true for me.
And when the fight is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
I welled up.
Earlier I had read the story of a Haitian immigrant. Gerald Timothee delivers groceries in New York City. When he heard the news of the pandemic and how the city was going to shut down he called his family back home in Port-au-Prince. “I told them I was going to die. I thought my life was over. I didn't know how I could work with this. … It's all about us right now. We are holding this city together. I feel like a hero.”
In the comment section of that article there was one person who saw another aspect of the truth.
I don't think Timothee is a hero. He is brave and willing to do what ever is needed to survive. I think he is exploited as a modern working slave.
Obviously there's some truth in that. All societies have exploited, and if we Christians are correct about sin and human limitation, that will always be true and something to fight. However, the tone of the comment made Mr. Timothee a victim and was offered in an angry self righteous fashion. Mr. Timothee had decided to see himself and his work differently.
Perceiving is a choice. It’s one part not turning my head away into oblivion, sentimentality or cynicism. It’s another part making choices about the lens through which I see.
I don’t have a clue ... I’ll figure it out
I’m a Professed Member of the Order of the Ascension. It’s a dispersed religious order in the Episcopal Church. We take a Benedictine Promise and live a Benedictine spirituality. Over the past 37 years we’ve developed ways of living our life. Ways of prayer and discernment and formation. The Rule says we are to be at the Eucharist this Thursday, Ascension Day. That would normally be in our home parishes. But not this year. This year we didn’t gather for retreat and chapter. And we’re guessing we won’t gather next year either. This year on Ascension Day we will for the first-time worship together on the feast day—saying the Office on Zoom. This year we elected our Presiding Sister by Survey Monkey and email. This year we will find new ways to stay connected, live the Promise and Charism, and do the novitiate.
I don’t have a clue. But I and you will find ways to improvise, adapt, and overcome. At least that’s my hope. I hope we will do more than survive; though survival would be a worthy achievement.
The Order’s journey is the church’s journey. In the wilderness again. Incompetent again. In the dark again. Yet, with the whole church we know what Charles Williams knew—we live by an energy not our own. The phrase is from Charles Williams’ He Came Down from Heaven. Williams wrote, “The Church (it was early decided) was not an organization of sinless men but of sinful, not a union of adepts but of less than neophytes, not illuminati but of those that sat in darkness. Nevertheless, it carried within it an energy not its own, and it knew what it believed about that energy.”
An energy not its own
That’s what we have. And it does matter that we know and trust what we have. Come Thursday, on the feast day, we will pray, “Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages.” Even in the pandemic. Even when the foundations are shaken. Even when we feel alone and fearful, clumsy and ineffectual, myopic and bleak.
The Latin root percipere means "to receive, understand," from the prefix per- "thoroughly" plus capere "to seize, take."
In the Order of the Ascension we seek to receive and understand the ancient wisdom of faith and practice and the contemporary wisdom of the behavioral sciences. Because our charism has to do with shaping healthy parishes, we seek to discern the Body, to see and understand the inner life of parish churches.
In the end it’s all so we might “remember Jesus Christ.” So we might “perceive that he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages.”
rag+
Postings on the inner life and the virus
You know, and they know, that they are offering their lives
God's not indifferent to our pain
Becoming an Associate of a Religious Order
Spiritual vitality and authenticity
Faith to perceive: In your great compassion
Turn everything that happens to account
Postings on Parish Development during the Virus
Power from the center pervades the whole
To everything there is a season