I love you: September 11

Reflections on September 11: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world

I love you

“A San Francisco husband slept through his wife’s call from the World Trade Centre. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again. 

We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you.

She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers,” - Ian McEwan, reporting on the September 11 attacks.

The love of Christ

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

Anger and Justice

Yesterday, during the Pathways of Grace retreat on Zoom a woman raised a question that to me seems to be at the heart of what so many of us struggle with. And there was something in her tone of voice that said to me that she too was struggling with it; and experiencing some anguish around it. I can't remember the exact words. What I heard was something like this, “how are we to pursue justice without our anger?”  Or maybe it was more, “isn't our anger necessary if we are to sustain our efforts for a just society?”

Her idea has stayed with me. A question I need to answer. I have answered it to myself in the past but here it is again. Anger and justice. I'm thankful for her question.

The awful grace of God

At the time my answer was to hold up a book. Father Dennis Campbell had sent me John Meacham's, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope. I had started to read it as my spiritual reading, a few paragraphs each day. I'm rather Catholic in my spirituality.  A part of that is the saints; they not only pray with me; they speak to me. And what John Lewis says to me is that love is the strongest force in the universe and that God's love is the ultimate reality of the universe. And that is the ground of all our courage and persistence.

In today’s reading Meacham quotes Lewis, “Redemption—redemption is everything … It is what we pray for. It is what we march for.” John Lewis wrote an “afterword’ in the book. It included this, 

The journey begins with faith—faith in the dignity and worth of every human being. That is an idea with roots in scripture and in the canon of America, in Genesis and in the Declaration of Independence. The journey is sustained by persistence—persistence in the pressing of the justice of the cause. And the journey is informed by hope—hope that someday, in some way, our restless souls will bring heaven and earth together, and God will wipe away every tear.

That doesn't answer the question of anger and justice directly. But for me it puts it in perspective. Lord knows I have been angry many times in my life about acts of injustice, toward the poor, toward immigrants. Angry on 9/11. Angry when the Pulse nightclub was attacked. Angry when George Floyd was killed.  I've been angry on my own behalf, though it seems a lesser anger—when bishops have tried to suppress writings that make people uncomfortable and when I experience the inevitable ignoring of the old man in the room.

The best I can come up with is that the anger will be there. I need to accept it. Accept it and know that there is another force within the anger. It is a process that Henri Nouwen sees as moving from hostility to hospitality. In the end I think I need to allow the work of the Holy Spirit to turn my anger into love and courage and persistence.

This is a paragraph inserted in the posting a couple of days later. It's another facet of the matter from another participant in the Zoom meeting. -- "I remember something that caught my attention from a book by C. Fitzsimmons Allison. (my paraphrase from a book from the 1960's, I think -- "Guilt, Anger & God") 

'We see in scripture that anger is one of the characteristics of God. Anger is the appropriate emotion whenever something or someone you love is threatened. Anger helps motivate us to action on behalf of our loves. But it is not an excuse for wrong action.'"  

This morning I listened to Bobby Kennedy's speaking to a mostly Black crowd in Indianapolis on the day Martin Luther King was killed.[i] He quotes the poet Aeschylus –

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

Lewis and Kennedy tug at some deep cord within. I keep coming back to it. I love God and I love this country. I love God who didn’t arrange things as I think they should be. And I love America with its heart of fairness and justice even as it fails again and again.

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[i] Robert Kennedy’s speech in Indianapolis, April 4, 1968 – The Text   Film   The same speech with the pictures of Kennedy’s funeral train taking his body to Washington. 

Remembering 9/11

At the National Museum of African American History and Culture - I include this because it includes John Lewis, Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton and Joe Biden singing the National Anthem (at 2:09 in the video)

Constance and her Companions: the Martyrs of Memphis

This is from a website on saints in the Anglo Catholic tradition of the church. I offer it on this their feast day during another time of illness and death, courage and hope.    

              ----------------------------------------------------

Hymn - from St. Mary's Cathedral, Memphis

Before the Icon

V. I will guard them to the utmost

R. But they know, and you know, that they are offering their lives

A Reading - From a letter on the death of Sister Ruth. She was 26 years old and had been professed only one year –

 "You have probably already heard to-day's heavy tidings that God has taken home to himself our dear Sister Ruth. Her short life has closed, as her Sister's life began, in devotion to God's poor and suffering. Only a year ago, in July, she was professed; but in this one year she has brought comfort to many suffering ones, and helped to lead back those who had strayed far out of the way. Many of the poor speak of her as the ‘Sunbeam’ that came to brighten their lives. Her last words, as she went off, were, ‘You will be good to my people;' and her first letter repeated the same message. Yet she was ready to leave her favorite work when God called. The same brave, single-hearted sense of duty breathes out in all her letters. I have the last one here, if you have not seen it. We can easily say, in this sad world, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; but it is very, very hard to say, when those who, we thought, would do Him such service are taken, Thy will be done."

 We give you thanks and praise, O God of compassion, for the heroic witness of Constance and her companions, who, in a time of plague and pestilence, were steadfast in their care for the sick and the dying, and loved not their own lives, even unto death. Inspire in us a like love and commitment to those in need, following the example of our Savior Jesus Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever.

Blessed Constance, Frances, Ruth, Thecla, Charles and Louis, servants of the dying, pray for us.

 Icon writer: Suzanne Schleck Web

A reflection by Sister Hannah, CSM

A reflection - CSM Associate Susan Nelson on the martyrs and today's pandemic

About the Martyrs of Memphis

From “Memphis: The City Magazine”

From Project Canterbury - The Sisters of St. Mary at Memphis: with the Acts and Sufferings of the Priests and Others Who Were There with Them during the Yellow Fever Season of 1878.

The website - The Anglo Catholics 

The Community of Saint Mary

Solitude: just begin

Solitude, as a spiritual practice, is being alone with God. It requires setting aside distractions. It may be just a few minutes in the morning or several days in a monastic house on retreat. Solitude allows us to see more clearly. In solitude we may see things as they are in themselves and also with the eyes of God.

A challenge in solitude is that among the things we, both see as they are and with the eyes of God, is ourself. It opens up a process of self-discovery which can both enliven and frighten us.

Prayer must involve the unifying of the personality, the integration of mind and heart into one center…Without self-discovery there can be no further progress. ‘In order to find God whom we can only find in and through the depths of our own soul, we must first find ourselves.’ Without self-knowledge our love remains superficial. -Ken Leech, Soul Friend

In solitude we also come to know God—Mercy and Compassion, Awe and Mystery—all beyond our thinking, imagining, and planning. Knowing God will change us.

It is the mystical which gives warmth and humanity and tolerance, and without which religions can grow hard, inflexible, and cruel. It is the mystical element which integrates theology, action, and prayer. -Ken Leech, “The Sky Is Red: Discerning the Signs of the Times”

Just begin

For most of us the way to begin—is to begin. No grand plans. No weeks of reading and research—"Oh my, what is the best way to be in solitude?”

Just begin. Take a few minutes now. Step away from the computer. Leave the phone on a table. Go out onto your balcony or porch. Take a short walk around the block. Say a brief prayer. Maybe a paraphrase of something from scripture—I like “Come away to a place by yourself and rest a while.” (from Mark 6:31-32)

It doesn’t work to say, “I’ll do this after all my work is done, after we plan our vacation, after I clean the kitchen.” The many demands of life are always upon us. It’s what Jesus and the disciples faced—“[they]didn’t even have time to eat.” Taking on a spiritual discipline is done by taking it on. Adding it to all the other things that press upon us. Calling on the Spirit to make us steadfast, give us the gift of perseverance.

Stephen Covey said, “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” So, put solitude on your schedule. If only 5 minutes each day. The same time each day. Take your coffee out onto the balcony and be still and silent—listen.

Parish development

The parish can nurture solitude. It can also nurture noise and distraction. It's a choice.

If we’re to nurture solitude, we need to do enough that a climate is created. So, think five years not five months. Maybe practices like these:

• In the Eucharist and the Office – brief periods of silence, after readings, at the Breaking of the Bread.
• Shape the period before each Sunday Eucharist so it is not busy and rushed but calm and centering.
• Schedule quiet days during Advent and Lent; a weekend retreat away each year.
• Offering modules in the Adult Foundations Course on solitude, spiritual reading, reflection and contemplation.

And because you know about how quiet days and retreats nurture and build the apostolic core, set aside your “numbers anxiety” and focus on the spiritual dynamics of the parish church. Accept that there being relatively few participants is exactly as it should be. These are opportunities to feed the Apostolic and progressing, to allow those of experimenting faith to experience something new, and to slowly nurture a climate of calmness and reflection.

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From loneliness to solitude

The conventional and dictionary understandings of solitude often emphasize being alone, even being lonely. Possibly being apart from society.

In the Christian spiritual life, solitude has its own meaning. Really two meanings. It is used to describe an inner state of harmony and grace. And we also speak of it as a way to move toward that state; practices often involving reflection, silence and stillness.

A time with God, and only God. God brings us into solitude so the Holy Spirit may be our spiritual guide; may form us into maturity.

An important dimension of solitude is its relationship with loneliness.

Solitude as a faithful way out of our loneliness

For the Christian solitude is the way out of loneliness.

Alice Koller wrote two books on solitude in the 80s and 90s from a humanist and feminist perspective. Her thinking aligns with what we see in writings on the spiritual life.  She once said that “the process of becoming a human being begins with confronting aloneness.” And “Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement. ““My urgent need was to find out what I believed and wanted and felt independently of what anyone else believed or felt or wanted me to believe or feel.”

In his little booklet, “From Loneliness to Solitude, Roland Walls offers an interesting definition of loneliness, “It’s being on your own and disliking it.” He’s take on it rises from his own experience of a period in his lifewhen he was spending a lot of time on his own. He also took note of how loneliness was a significant personal problem for many people in the cities. An observation supported by research and by all accounts worse now, 20 years after his writing the booklet.

“I believe that loneliness can be turned into a marvelous thing called solitude.” In his thinking that’s because, “We are built around an empty space.” “We are made for infinite possibility.” “We are literally made for God.” He quotes St. Augustine of Hippo, “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till we rest in you.” 

Henri Nouwen wrote, “It is in solitude that we discover that being is more important than having and that we are worth more than the results of our efforts. In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended but a gift to be shared.” (“You are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living”) In Reaching Out he noted that solitude wasn’t just about aloneness, “The solitude that really counts is the solitude of heart; it is an inner quality or attitude that does not depend on physical isolation…It seems more important than ever to stress that solitude is one of the human capacities that can exist, be maintained and developed in the center of a big city, in the middle of a large crowd and in the context of a very active and productive life. A man or woman who has developed this solitude of heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner center.

The pathway from loneliness to solitude has a variety of possible roads

For Alice Koller it wasn’t a religious quest though it had some of the same experiences known to practitioners. Penelope Green writing an obituary in the New York Times, “as her life was reduced to small essential tasks—making coffee, walking on the beach and caring for her puppy—she found that they were enough to sustain her.” She quotes Koller, “I know who I am a little bit more each day." Reminds me of  John Keble’s poem, 

The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves; a road
To bring us, daily, nearer God.

Fr. Walls wrote of allowing ourselves to “experience the painfulness of the empty nothing deep down in all our lives, sometimes waking at three in the morning, sometimes at the first anticipation of death or disease. I suppose everyone does at the moment of death, unless we have made the discovery that ‘underneath are the everlasting arms.’ “ He thought that the change from loneliness to solitude was possible for everyone. “I believe, from experience, that this change can happen to the most complaining, self preoccupied, frustrated person. I believe that if anyone faces up to the negative nonsense that forced isolation can bring, he or she can make the discovery that the ‘Kingdom of God is within’, that God's own solitude can be met, in fact, just where the pain is, in the empty aching.

Walls saw spiritual reading as a useful method, “Take one of those unfilled 15 minutes, half an hour, fill the room, your heart, with expectancy and read slowly a page of any Gospel--Slowly, as if it was all addressed to you. Let each word sink into the depth of your heart. You will find, perhaps for the first time, that you have heard them where they were meant to be heard, in the silence and the void, the waste and void where God is waiting to enter, where the Spirit hovers over the waters of the well of loneliness.”

For Henri Nouwen the way required some grit and daring, “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”

“The contemporary society in which we find ourselves makes us acutely aware of our loneliness. We become increasingly aware that we are living in a world where even the most intimate relationships have become part of competition and rivalry. …When our loneliness drives us away from ourselves into the arms of our companions in life, we are, in fact, driving ourselves into excruciating relationships, tiring friendships and suffocating embraces. To wait for moments or places where no pain exists, no separation is felt and where all human restlessness has turned into inner peace is waiting for a dreamworld. No friend or lover, no husband or wife, no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness.”

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Through prayer

Moral action only flows from doctrinal truth by grace and faith, that is through prayer.                Martin Thornton

The Word of God

In the Zoom mass at Saint Clements Church we have a shared homily. The rector begins with a few thoughts and then anyone can offer their ideas. It’s a grace filled time as people work to connect themselves to the Gospel. Today we heard Romans and Matthew.

 So, the People of God engaged the Word of God; or more truly, the Word of God engaged the People of God.

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good ... Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all ... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

In many ways the best of Anglican theology. Pragmatic, Biblical, and open minded.

What are we to do with our anger and feelings of judgment? People without masks. Racial injustice. Police shootings. Looting and violence.

We shared ways of faithfulness—getting perspective, managing our feelings, challenging evil, accepting the limits of our influence, doing what we are able to do, knowing when to step aside and when to say something. It was the Body of Christ preparing to receive the Body of Christ.

Later I found myself recalling the Community of Julian of Norwich in Trenton where we had a shared homily each Sunday. Face-to-face was easier than Zoom! Yet, also much the same—courteous, present to one another, direct, listening with “the ear of our heart.” How are we to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

Lord, I love the house in which you dwell *
and the place where your glory abides.

Anglican Ascetical Theology

I also found myself recalling the Anglican basics.

One is from the Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference in 1978. They spoke of a pattern of life: "This inextricable fusion of worship, of doctrine, and of action constitutes the distinctive contribution the churches of the Anglican Communion desire to make to the Universal Church of God in Jesus Christ."

Worship-Doctrine-Action was for the bishops a synthesis. Together they formed a whole. And it was necessary that they remain together because that allowed for the messiness and complexity of life.

Another is from Father Martin Thornton, "Moral action only flows from doctrinal truth by grace and faith, that is through prayer"

He was challenging what he saw as a mistaken Protestant inclination to believe that the person and the church could move from doctrinal truth directly to action. In the language of my youth it was, “Get your head on straight and you’ll act correctly.” Right thinking would bring right action. Thornton was recognizing that it wasn't so. That God’s action within and upon us, “grace and faith, through prayer”, was what allowed for truly moral action. It’s pretty basic stuff. Really the same thing Evelyn Underhill says in other words, “One’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe and only one’s third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and all other countless human creatures evolved upon the surface of this planet were created. We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your...life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good.“

"Christian action is participation by the People of God in the work of God. This is a process of being drawn into a deeper relationship with God, into service to others, and into responsible participation in the care and ordering of the creation. To be a Christian is to be a servant, evangelist and steward. This is most properly understood as a way of being rather than as a list of things to do. Those shaped over the years by participation in the life and ministry of Christ's Body, nurtured by Word and Sacrament, grasped again and again by Mercy and Glory, become his light and salt and leaven. Martin Thornton touches on this in Spiritual Direction: 'Aquinas got it right: prayer is 'loving God in act so that the divine life can communicate itself to us and through us to the world.' Christian action is not action of which Jesus approves but action that he performs through his incorporated, and therefore prayerful, disciples.' "[i]

This is something that Fr. Kevin frequently points out when he stresses our life in community. Thornton put it this way: “The prayer and life of each member is wholly dependent on the health of the total organism.”

Through prayer

Recently I’ve found a particular method of prayer helpful as I struggle with my anxiety and occasional hostility. The spiritual map of Contemplation-Intercession-Action has come to mind and offered me a pathway from my feelings and thoughts into Grace.

One woman’s thinking brought it to mind. She spoke of how she read news sources other than those she easily identifies with. I gather it’s a way she broadens her thinking and gains a more comprehensive perspective on issues and events.  It was nice to hear. It’s something I try to do each day. I’ll read the more conservative local news source and the National Review. It’s not just that it helps to know what your “enemies” are thinking, which it is helpful to do, but sometimes they add facts into the picture that your own normal sources of information avoid offering. By this point I assume most of us have figured out that it’s all too common for journalists on all sides, to leave out facts, and stress a narrative that advances their side of things.

All of which reminded me that contemplation begins with doing your best to see things, people, and events as they are in themselves. And after doing your best with that--to seek to look upon them as God might. Contemplation includes doing our best to grasp the situation before us, to see effects, to have a more complete picture; knowing that we are called to take responsible action even though we will never have all the facts. 

That combined with the call to intercess for others has helped me let go of the impulses of hostility and judgment. I find it hard to hold another on my heart before God and continue judging them.

I do have a message in my head that I shouldn’t add to the world’s hostility and that I need to focus on ways in which my influence can best be used.  And yet, the message in itself doesn’t take me to right action. I have to move there through prayer, in this case contemplation and intercession. 

Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

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[i] From Fill All Things: The Spiritual Dynamics of the Parish Church, Robert Gallagher, 2008, Ascension Press.