Easter Reflection 2016

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen, indeed! Alleluia!

From the time that I was a young child, I can remember that my mom loved to announce the rising at Christ at Easter. Even during the years when I could have cared less what was happening in the church on Easter morning, my mother would be on the other end of the phone, gleefully and joyfully proclaiming, "He is risen!" Clearly, Easter was a favorite holiday for her, and spoke to her in a meaningful way. It only seemed appropriate, then, that the recessional hymn at her funeral at Christ Church in Exeter would have to be "Jesus Christ is risen today."  And what a good, and right, and joyful thing it was that the assembled congregation belted out that hymn with full gusto. A real tribute to my mom's delight in the resurrection...both in her earthly life and what I imagine is her life with the Communion of Saints.

Singing of the risen Christ in full-throated voice is precisely what one should do today if one believes in this incredible and crazy story. Nothing can be more amazing then the thought that not even death could trample down Love. No tomb can keep it contained. No locks can keep it hidden away. Absolutely nothing stops the power and beauty and radiance of Love. 

It would be easy to simply keep this resurrection tale on the pages of the Gospel and say, "Well that all happened then." But I believe the reason my mom used to call me every Easter to remind me that Christ is risen is because that tale isn't just one for the books of the Bible; it is a truth that speaks to us today, and is needed in our lives today. Not a physical raising from the dead; but the metaphorical coming to life that must happen in our lives if we are to keep on going in a world that desperately needs people to be alive with Love in their hearts and singing songs of joy on their lips. As our country's political landscape grows more hostile and divided, now...more than ever...do we need people to tap into that root of Jesus' message: we are to love one another as God has loved us.

If Jesus Christ is to rise, we must also rise with him and in him to be the force of Love and change this world needs. Alleluia!

The Core of This Night is Love

Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of what is essentially one long, three-day worship service that will culminate in the celebration of the resurrection at Easter. And as I’ve told many people, “You can’t have Easter without Good Friday…” Well…you don’t experience Good Friday without first preparing with Maundy Thursday. Tonight, we will participate in three rituals, each which carry a particular meaning and each which offers an opportunity to enter more closely into this most holy, vulnerable, and ultimately, triumphant time for Jesus and for us.

In a few moments, we will re-enact Jesus getting up from the dinner with the disciples, and washing the feet of Peter. This is another time in which Jesus turns convention upside down. In the First Century Palestinian culture of his day, it was the job of a slave to wash a person’s feet as a way of showing hospitality. But Jesus wants to teach his disciples a new way—one in which the person who is a person of privilege and power—removes the outer garment, takes up a towel, and washes the feet of the lowly servant. 

Jesus is baptizing them into the ministry to carry on his mission of a new commandment: “To love one another as I have loved you.” We, too, through taking part in this ritual are also being invited to remember that we are capable of loving one another because God so completely and deeply loved us. It is because of this love that we can carry out the many ministries of this church…from the school…to the Saturday Lunch program and Clothes Closet…and Oak Street Mission…Halcyon Home…A.A. meetings…Kairos…the list goes on and on. And those are just the ministries springing forth from St. Thomas, and don’t account for how any one of us is working every day to live into the words of our Baptismal Covenant: to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. Without love as our starting point for these actions, we won’t be able to succeed.

This brings me to our second ritual of tonight, the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Sunday after Sunday, we come together, shoulder-to-shoulder around the Lord’s Table to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. John’s Gospel places the institution of the words of the last supper elsewhere in his narrative, but the other evangelists make Jesus’ declaration of the bread and the wine as symbolic of his body and blood part of the events immediately preceding his arrest and execution. Again, the disciples must have wondered what crazy thing Jesus was doing declaring bread and wine his body and blood as the blessing over these elements…breaking and distributing in the same way that he did with the feeding of the five thousand. Puzzled as they might have been they all participated in this ritual of the New Covenant…even Judas Iscariot who would betray him and Peter who would deny him and all the others who scattered at his arrest. Flawed, bewildered, and sinful, they were all bound to one another by him, and with him, and in him, through eating and drinking this common bread and single cup. 

And here we are, two thousand-plus years later, equally flawed characters, and striving to follow God, also receiving Christ’s body and blood into our own bodies. This bread and this wine becomes the fuel that feeds our ability to love the world…even when the world may not seem to want to love us back.  That’s our mission…and we do it no matter what…because God loved us first…with no exceptions or conditions… so that we could pass that love on to others.  And God expressed that love through his Son…who said “Take. Eat” and “Drink this all of you.” “Do this in remembrance of me.”  Jesus is saying: “Every time you receive this communion, this common meal, remember: this was a sacrifice so that you could be liberated through me to love one another as I have loved you.”

Which leads me to our third and final ritual tonight: the stripping of the altar: the final act carried out by our altar guild. Everyone on the team knows their role. They know how to reverently and carefully remove, fold, and put away all of the linens and cushions and brass, leaving behind…an empty table. The first time I was here at St. Thomas, I was struck more by this ritual than I’d ever been before because it was done with all of us staring in silence during the symbolic action of stripping away all signs of God…in the same way Jesus was stripped down to his naked self to be killed. The ripping sounds of the Velcro on altar hangings were a chilling reminder of the brutality Jesus faced from his persecutors and the Roman authorities. If it was difficult for me as an observer to watch, I wonder what it must be for the altar guild as they do that tearing and taking away.

This empty, bare table is the image we’ll be left with for this evening, and it is an unsettling and disturbing one. It raises the idea that to face death…in hopes of the resurrection…all manner of “things” must be stripped away. That’s certainly true of physical death. You can’t pack a bag of your favorite things and take it with you to the Communion of Saints. It is also true of the small deaths we face every day. The loss of a job, for example, not only means the loss of income and maybe health insurance; for many, it can mean the loss of a huge part of their identity. How many of us make small talk with strangers about what we “do” for a living as a way of saying, “This is who I am.” We become the work that we do, and find our self-worth caught up in titles, and various degrees, that when the day comes when we are no longer “doing our job,” we are at a loss about how to “be our selves” without title to set us apart.   How do our various labels and identities…and the meanings layered upon them…actually interfere with us fulfilling our mission to truly love ourselves and love one another as God has loved us?  What beliefs are we clinging to about ourselves that might be hindering us from entering fully into relationship with God and blocking us from loving people in this fear-filled world?

Whatever impedes us from getting down to that single truth—that we are beloved children of God here to love and be loved—tonight is the time of reckoning and to strip those things away.

The Sin of Ungratefulness

Heading into Sunday, I knew I was wanting to pick something from the Gospel of Luke as the launching pad for our Education for Ministry group to use as the starting point for a theological reflection. Year Two had just finished reading the Gospel according to Luke, and Years One and Three would not be totally unfamiliar with the contents. My week had been so busy and hectic that I didn't have time to see what the lectionary had in store for Sunday. So, how fortuitous that the Gospel lesson just happened to be the parable of the prodigal son.

Separate from my group, I did my own theological reflection as I listened with my very lesbian ears to the oh, so familiar parable. It started with the criticism of Jesus for eating with--ahem--sinners. The unclean. The outsiders. The untouchables. These were all the type of company Jesus liked to keep, and the holier-than-thous of his day were aghast. This is actually what prompts Jesus to tell a series of parables about various lost and founds, but our lectionary diviners decided to spare the deacons a longer passage than what the prodigal already provided. As many times as I have heard the story (we even used it at my dad's funeral), I found myself deeply moved by the narrative of a son who goes off, blows all of his inheritance, ends up lost and lowly when he decides the only thing to be done is to return home to his father, and beg to be treated as a hired hand instead of a son. The father, upon seeing his younger son and without hesitation, runs to greet him and insists on having a huge party to celebrate this lost one. Meanwhile, the older and loyal son who never once did anything to disgrace his father hears all the hub bub and asks, 'What's all this then?' When he hears that the younger son returned and that everyone is celebrating this particular sinner, he fumes. The father goes out to meet him and the older son rails and complains about the party. The father, unfazed, listens intently and lovingly reminds the older son that he hasn't forgotten all that the older has been and done. But--c'mon, son--let's celebrate the return of our lost one. The story ends there. We don't know if the older son ever comes around to seeing the joy in the face of his father.

I mentioned that my lesbian ears were hearing this story, and unlike previous times, I found myself connecting the introduction of what inspired Jesus to tell this parable (the complaining people about him eating with sinners) to the response of the older son to the party his dad threw for his wayward younger sibiling. The "How dare you?!" response is one that felt very much like what is happening in the Anglican Communion at the moment with the insistence that The Episcopal Church be punished for having the audacity to love those whom the world despises namely it's LGBTQ members. The protest and posturing against my particular kind and my church has been painful to witness, and the lengths to which some have gone, with reports and covenants and any way possible to turn a religion of love and welcome into one of law and "right thinking only" has left me puzzled. Much in the same way I think the father in this parable must have felt initially at his oldest son's pouting. And the father reminds the oldest son that by celebrating the youngest doesn't mean that the father loves the oldest any less; in fact, how much more could he love him since he knows that the oldest has been with him the whole time? And, as the father notes, we have reason to rejoice because the one who left has come back and our family has been restored to its threesome. Similarly, at a time when the skepticism about religion in general and Christianity specifically is on a meteoric climb, we should rejoice and be glad in those moments when the lost and those who had rejected the church or felt unwelcomed and excluded dare to cross the threshold of the red doors to come in on a Sunday morning. To complain that this has somehow demeans God or the Anglican Communion is churlish. And I think that's what Jesus was driving at with his nattering naysaying audience. To criticize him for hanging with "the wrong kind" of people was the type of mean-spirited and judgmental behavior that would guarantee that the love of God would not be spread, and definitely would not reach those who could stand to come into its embrace.

While the younger brother may have sinned by demanding his inheritance and then squandering it on living the high-life, the older brother is committing a sin of failing to see the blessing his father had already bestowed by loving him and giving him all that he had year-in and year-out. Celebrating the return and reconciliation of the lost one should be a joyous occasion. And it's that joy manifested in us that will spread the love of God to the people who are still searching to find their way home.

Calming the Raging Storm

Jesus Stilling the Tempest by James Tissot

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

 He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!”Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” --Mark 4:35-41

I had a profound and important experience of this Gospel passage Sunday morning. 

Sunday, I would be meeting again with the Convocational Discernment Committee in Albany, Georgia. These meetings are not comfortable places for me to be. As I described in the previous post, it feels as though I'm being taken out into the wilderness. There are no sign posts, no markings, no place for me to be sure of where I'm going as I field questions and attempt--repeatedly--to explain myself and why I'm feeling called to ordained ministry. The metaphors that have cropped on these trips are just way too rich and plentiful: my phone's GPS doesn't work at different key moments of finding my way through the south Georgia countryside. And, on the way home from my first meeting, I was re-directed along a road that was totally unfamiliar and took me six miles out of the way of where I was trying to go and left me wondering if I was destined to drive in circles all night. 

This is when the God came crashing, as it were, into my early morning dreams. In this one, I found myself recalling the Mark Gospel lesson from a few days ago when Jesus is asleep in the boat and the storm kicks up and the disciples are in a panic as the waves are crashing and rocking them in their sea vessel. They rush to Jesus and demand that he wakes up.

"Jesus!!!" they were screaming. "Jesus, get up!! Save us!! We're all gonna die!"

Weary and sleepy Jesus gets up, goes to the front of the boat, raises his hands and calls for the stormy seas to "knock it off!" And they did. And Jesus looks at the disciples, still rubbing his eyes, and says, "Where's your faith? You know, I got this!" and goes back to bed, leaving them all awe struck. 

As I was dreaming about this lesson, I kept mulling it over and attempting to figure out, "Who needs to know 'Don't panic. Relax. Jesus has got this.'" What group of people in our society need to know this simple message?

I woke up, still letting this dream work through me. Waves crashing over the boat must have felt unsettling. They must not have known that the storm was coming when they set sail, and so this might have come on suddenly and caught them off guard. I likened this feeling to what happens in life when we are faced with numerous challenges and strife. 

That's when it hit me: who needs to know to be still and know that God has got this? Me.

I realized that I had been thrashing. My first meeting with the CDC had left me rattled and I needed this assurance that Jesus would calm the storms.

I did need that. As I waited for the committee to call me into the room with them, I could feel the anxiety rising up inside me.

"What are they saying? What more do they need to know? What curve balls will be thrown at me?"

I tapped back into the dream...and breathed slowly and deeply. I envisioned Jesus standing before me and commanding the anxiety in my head and heart to cease. 

"Be still. Be still and know that I am with you." 

This helped. It kept me grounded, and prepared me for Round Two with the CDC. I think it even helped to give me the ability to have a better conversation with the committee. I started the meeting with various acknowledgments of things I had thought and prayed about after I left them the last time. I included in that prayerful consideration the realization of being able to trust and let go. 

Thank you, Jesus. 

Discernment and Deserts

Tomorrow is my birthday, and like the past two birthdays in a row, I will be spending it in a decidedly un-birthday fashion. Instead of coming home and having a party or lounging and having people lavish me with gifts, or peeling me grapes, or whatever, I will be going to my first meeting with my discernment committee in the continuing long, strange, trip that I've been on with God. 

My spouse and I were talking today about what I may or may not encounter when I talk to this group of mostly totally unknown people. I'm as foreign to them as they are to me. We're supposed to talk about Christian ministry, and what I, and they, understand that to be. I was describing the different types of Christian ministers (laity and ordained) as being a little like boxers and their coaches. The laity are the ones sent out into the ring to do battle with the world all week. The bell rings, and they go to their corner (the church building) where the coach (the priest) gives them water and towels them off and talks strategy for dealing with the next round, and then they are sent back out into the ring again. She kept staring at me.

"And how are you going to do ministry?" she asked.  Now I was staring at her.  "You haven't told me how you're going to do your ministry. I hear that question and I think in terms of whether you see yourself in a parish, or are you some kind of itinerant priest, or campus ministry, or prison chaplain."

"I don't know," I said, a bit exasperated. "I don't know where I'm going to be. I don't think it will be in a parish, but where it will be, I don't know." 

As irritated as I was that she couldn't understand my metaphor, I also was very grateful for the challenge. I may not know the people on this committee, but I have experienced people in the church and I am pretty sure I will have some people there who don't like metaphor and don't like boxing (I don't really care for it much either, but it's a great metaphor!) and just want me to get to the point. So, her challenge was a valid one. And I will have an 80-minute drive from Thomasville to Albany tomorrow to contemplate how I'd answer these questions in a more concrete way.

There just seems to be a perfect timing on all of this. It's the First Sunday in Lent, which this year is also my birthday, and the very sweet day of Valentine's. The Gospel lesson assigned for this Sunday is the events, as told by Luke, of what happens to Jesus upon his immersion in the waters of baptism. The story is that the Heaven's opened and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove with a voice saying, "This is my Son with whom I am well pleased." But before Jesus can embark on his ultimate mission which will lead to the cross on Good Friday, he must be refined and tested and faced with the very things that threaten all those whom he is attempting to reach with the saving grace of God. And so, after his baptism, he is driven out into the desert where he will contend with the temptations that the world has to offer: immediate gratification, possessions and power, and recklessness. Satan, who in the Jewish tradition is like a prosecutor, attempts to attract Jesus by laying out all that the world could offer to him if he'd use his God-given power working in him to a self-serving ministry.  "Make that rock into a loaf of bread" "How 'bout all these nations and kingdoms you could possess and rule?" "Go ahead and throw yourself from a tall height. You won't die." In Luke's telling of the story, Jesus withstands all this with seeming ease and self-confidence, and we in the Episcopal Church are reminded every week that Jesus was like us in every way, "but without sin." I believe that to be true. And I also want to believe that Jesus faced these temptations and withstood them, but did so not so easily. I want to believe that Jesus saw what this prosecutor was attempting to do; lay a snare to grab him at the ankle with an "A-ha! Gotcha!" I want to believe that Jesus, who is without sin, nonetheless could see and feel and understand the great temptations that we, who are so often sorely hindered by our sins, face as a regular challenge. Who doesn't want instant gratification, right? If we weren't susceptible to that, then there would be no need for Powerball! When I consider Jesus in this scene out in the desert, I picture him somewhat bedraggled and tired and thirsty and hungry. He is physically feeling the weakness of his human body. What better time for Satan to show up and offer him lots of bright, shiny objects, right? And what an opportune time for God to be the alchemist who uses these temptations as an opportunity to refine his Son to resist what we find so irresistable. 

Discernment for the priesthood, or at least mine up to this point, has felt like many trips out into the desert. It is a time to test and probe and see what is happening with me and God and a call on my life. I have attempted to avoid going forward with pursuing a call to become a priest. This wasn't something that I've "always wanted to do"; on the contrary, I left the church in 1991 and stayed away until late 2007, and didn't have particularly warm and fuzzy feelings toward clergy people during those years that I was in exile. I found most Episcopal priests to be awkward and incapable of being with people in their places of hurt and woundedness. I wanted no part of any of that. And then my father died, and God fired up a jukebox in my head of Episcopal hymns, and the rest--as they say--is history. The more I got involved, and the more I believed in the power of Christ working with me and in me, and through me, the more I was hearing from other people: "Are you a priest?" "Are you going to become a priest?" "VTS or Sewanee?" I am someone people continuously are coming to for counsel and support. And even those conversations are beginning to end with, "I think you'd be a great priest." The time for running away has stopped.

Pray for me as you might pray for all the people who, like Jesus  in the desert, are discerning and listening for God to guide them at this time when the temptations of the world are set in contrast to the call on their lives. Pray for us to listen. Pray for us to speak our truth. Pray that we may be one in the same way Jesus and God are one.  

Getting Connected Again

I don't think there's a season in the church year that has a more profound presence in my life than Lent. No matter what state of mind I might be in as the season approaches, no matter how late or how early it comes, there is something about this season, and how I enter it that always seems to be a little unexpected, and definitely chock full of what we called in massage school, "Learning Experiences." This time is no different.

In my previous entry, I put up the Trinity icon by Rublev. The word that comes to my mind when staring into that image is "connection." The more I contemplated that "connection" and the interconnectedness of the Trinitarian nature of our God as captured in that image, the more I began to think about the relationships I have with family, friends, clients, church members, well...everyone. I realized that, lately, I have felt at times walled off from having a connection to people, and I think that has caused me to suffer. 

I began to mitigate for this disconnect with Shrove Tuesday. I made the trip to my church in Thomasville, dealing with the frustrations of stop-and-go traffic for several miles up 319 to spend the time with my church family. When I got there, most of the tables were already filled, but there was still space at the one with a couple of adults and five very rambunctious children. Anyone who knows me is aware that my decision to not have children is intentional. It's not that I don't like kids; I just don't want the responsibility of trying to raise them. Children always seem generally afraid of me. I figure I must look ominous or strange to them because I am a very tall woman with very short hair and broad shoulders. Adults often times can't discern that I'm biologically a woman because I dress and appear more masculine, so kids being bewildered is something I have just come to expect and don't take personally. These children, with the exception of the baby, were up and down and all-around throughout the dinner, keeping their great-grandmother on the move as well. When it was time to go, great-grandmom discovered she'd locked herself out of her truck. Now what? The kids were squirming, and she had to wait for another family member to come to the rescue.

I may not be the best with kids, but I am an aunt, and I greatly enjoyed the years my niece and nephew were young children because I could invent all kinds of scenarios with them and basically do improv. I noticed the three boys of this quintet had toy trucks and cars. Their great grandmother had told them to stay in their seats, something I thought was never going to happen given all that I had seen happening. So, "crazy Aunt Sue" decided to make an appearance. I got one of the boys to give up a truck to me. 

"OK, guys, here's the game: I'm going to send this truck across the table, and you have to stop it before it goes off the table. And the rule is: You can't get outta your seat!" The boys grinned and nodded. 

"Vroom! Vroom!" I started with rolling the truck back and forth as if it was winding up to go into action. The boys focused intently on the truck, and as it rolled across the plastic table top, they took their respective vehicles and smashed it with much glee. Then they sent it back across, and I snagged it before it could leave the table. Their older sister decided she wanted in on this and announced that she and I were a team. And we played this way for about 15 to 20 minutes, allowing great grandmom the chance to keep her eyes out on the two youngest and their rescuer. By the end of the evening, I could tell that these kids who had always looked at me with a vague suspicion now were seeing me as "one of them." A barrier had come down to let the light of Christ shine between us.

Unfortunately, playing with the children meant that I had missed my EfM member who was waiting for me to deliver her books to her. I looked up her address, which wasn't far from the church, and drove over to knock on the door. She was delighted to have the personal service and asked if I wanted to stay a moment and have some tea. Normally, the introverted person that I am, I would have come up with a reason why I couldn't possibly stay. Given that Tallahassee is about a 50-minute drive to the south it wouldn't have been unreasonable for me to want to get home. But I thought I had no real rush to get back, and this was such a hospitable offer, that I could make the time. And so I did. We enjoyed some orange-spiced tea and conversation which ranged over shared stories of church experiences and our respective family lives. By the end of the evening visit, we remarked that while both of us had been together and sitting with each other in choir neither of us really knew the other very well. As I drove home, I considered how good and energized I was feeling from having had the time with a member of this church family that I'm part of in Georgia, and playing with children in the parish hall. And a little piece (or maybe a big piece) of my Lenten discipline came into focus. 

I needed to cut back on the time I spend on the social media time suck called Facebook. I had become programmed to tune into FB almost from the instant my eyes opened in the morning to when I put my head down at night. It's become the crutch for how I connect with people...without really connecting with them. No eye contact. No silences. And no way to discern body language, especially if the person's profile picture is of their dog. Hitting "like" on a post had replaced actually conversing about a topic. It's just so much easier to click a "like" than to actually go experience what the person is advertising or discuss it any further. 

Lately, with the presidential political season heating up, I have found myself not having conversations but arguments with people. (Are Americans memories so short? Do they really always believe the hype without looking for the substance?) Such encounters online were leaving me bitter. And my conversational skills were suffering. I attended Ash Wednesday, received the mark of the smudgy cross on my forehead, and, upon exiting the church, I removed the Facebook app from my iPhone and later my iPad. I can still get on FB from a laptop or through the web, but that takes more work and effort. I am not pledging not to go on and lurk and post, but I am curtailing my activity and the absence of ease of having the app is so far working. 

I hope this leads to improving my relationships. And to those who miss my many posts, I'll be back, but perhaps with a new appreciation for how much I prefer your personal connection rather than the virtual. 

Icons and Idols

Children protesting against the League of the South's pro-Confederate flag demonstration in Tallahassee, Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend.

It's been awhile since I've posted here, and not because I haven't been thinking, pondering, praying, and wanting to post. I simply don't have a lot of time to sit and organize coherent thoughts into a blog. My prayer life lately has involved some deep and amazing dips into the pool of the vast waters of God. And perhaps that has kept me from writing as well. So here goes nothing as I attempt to explain this title of "Icons and Idols."

A few weeks ago, over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, the League of the South, some of them donning black shirts with white supremacist logos, were out in front of the Florida Capitol building waving their Stars and Bars flags. Apparently, there is legislation to ban the flag from being flown over public buildings. If you are from outside the United States, or simply have managed not to hear any of the history of this controversy, the so-called "Confederate Flag" has been held up as a symbol of Southern heritage; however this particular design of the flag really came into vogue when "Southern heritage" meant fighting against desegregation in the 1950s and 60s. This was not their battle flag used during the Civil War when the South rebelled against the United States from 1861-65. The people who seem to be the most attached to this flag also seem to be the most anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-Jew...basically "anti" anything that isn't considered part of "white" culture. 

A young woman in Tallahassee got wind of their demonstration and in 48-hours gathered a bunch of us to be counter demonstrators. She had asked that we American flags to our rally. This was interesting because the people gathered in our group were not your typical "rah rah" America types. We took up a position on the opposite side of the busy intersection of Monroe and Apalachee Parkway, each side competing to see who would get the attention of drivers passing by. It was all pretty tame as protests go. Our group of 25 people couldn't get it together to sing any of the old standard Civil Rights songs to save our lives, but we smiled and waved and held our two fingers up in the peace sign. Then the guy from the League of the South dared to taunt us by calling out the presence of the American flag in our group.

"When I see that Yankee rag, I see prison bars!" he bellowed.

I couldn't believe what I'd just heard. "Yankee rag"? Seriously?! For the first time in my life, every patriotic mitochondria in my body started firing up as I shouted back across the road:

"I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!"

And our group of counter demonstrating social justice activists fell into the familiar grade school cadence of the pledge:

"AND TO THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS...ONE NATION...UNDER GOD...INDIVISIBLE...WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!!" 

Had we really just said the pledge with that much gusto and true feeling? Do we really feel that much deep attachment to a flag? And what is up with the hanging on so tightly by so many to the Stars and Bars? The Civil War was over 150 years ago. How can anyone still be saying the United States is an occupier of the southeastern United States?

I know that the pledge rings hollow for those who still are feeling like the left behind and the disenfranchised in this country. That was me, too, not that long ago. When I was in junior high and we had to stand each morning to recite the pledge, I would respectfully stand, and say nothing. I didn't understand pledging allegiance to a flag. Shouldn't we pledge allegiance to something a little more than sewn fabric? Later, as I came out, I felt that pledge was like another broken promise. "Liberty and justice" was for some, but definitely wasn't available to all. 

But when faced with such hatred of the symbol of this flawed and imperfect union, even I was willing to rally in defense of what I believe this nation yearns to be: a place where people are able to gather on street corners in support and dissent of the country and have that freedom without the need to resort to bombing each other. I can hope the four bloody years of our ancestors killing each other during the Civil War might have taught us not to know war between each other that way again. And yet, there are some who press on as if we are still at war. Sigh.

Perhaps it was that experience of reciting the pledge with patriotic fervor that has also helped to take my prayer life in a further move toward God. Because even while I was shouting at the League of the South, my burning passion was for the words of the pledge and I was longing for them to lay down their sesquicentennial grudge, and realize that the war is over. 

In so many ways, I think, this is part of what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry is encouraging us to see in the words and actions of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus longed for his fellow Jews of his day to see that the way to eternal life was through loving more, paying attention to their neighbors more, putting God first more and not making idols of rituals that had become more important than the actual thing for which the ritual was intended to celebrate. 

And even Jesus seems to desire that we not get fixated on him, the human being, but to see through him the way to that Eternal which gives life. This is really the purpose of icons, such as The Trinity by Andrei Rublev. The Russian monk and iconographer designed this as a means by which people may gaze and see God through the art and enter into prayer, which is our line to the One. I happened on this image as I prepped for the 12:10 service at St. John's last Friday. As I looked into those heads all bent in each other's direction and their blue tunic connection, my mind went back to verse from John's gospel:

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.--John 5:19

These words had been part of Morning Prayer the Wednesday before and as I heard them, I had a revelation of the "both/and" nature of this statement. When we hear the phrase "Son of Man" (or, in this case, it was "Son of God") this is both about Jesus and humanity. Humanity has the chance, especially through following in the footsteps of Jesus, to be at one with God, who is the source of life. This "life" goes beyond the day-to-day arguments over flags, and asks us to tap into our interconnectedness with all things and people. My own belief and placing my own life in the stream of this Great Consciousness is, I think, the reason that while I shouted the Pledge of Allegiance with conviction, it wasn't out of pure anger, but out of a place of sorrow and frustration for the breakdown that leads someone to cling desperately to a past that is no longer the future. That, to my mind, is the path toward death and not life. 

I don't hate those who hate me. My work with the Prayer for Our Enemies has been about teaching me to see the anger and rage that is within me and aimed at me, and deflect it without letting it become the thing that penetrates my heart. This is how I bend my head, and knee, to Jesus. This is how the power of God working in me can help me--like Jesus--do infinitely more than I can ask or imagine.